which the serjeants resented as an infringement of their monopoly. The farce of the Dumb Day is well described by Roger North. The submission of the serjeants was complete when the chief justice showed that he was not to be outwitted. On being raised to the bench North for some years ‘rode the western circuit,’ and was extremely popular among the Devonshire gentlemen, who were chiefly cavaliers and royalists. Latterly he changed to the northern circuit, and the account of his intercourse with the local magnates and of the state of society in the north at this period is one of the most curious and amusing episodes in the narrative of his life drawn up long afterwards by his brother Roger.
When Lord Halifax in 1679 made the experiment of putting the government of the country into the hands of a council of thirty, who were in effect to represent the administration pretty much as the privy council had represented it in Queen Elizabeth's reign, Sir Francis was included among the thirty; and when this council was dissolved he was admitted into the cabinet. When in the December of this year the king resolved to issue a proclamation against ‘tumultuous petitions,’ Sir Cresswell Levinz [q. v.], as attorney-general, was ordered to draft it. He hesitated to make himself responsible for such a document, and consented only on the condition that the chief justice of the common pleas should dictate the substance. The result was that the new parliament ordered an impeachment against North to be prepared; but the house was dissolved in the following January, and nothing more was heard of it. During the popular madness of the ‘popish plot’ the attitude of the chief justice was that of most men who believed Titus Oates and his associates to be a band of scoundrels, and the plot a villainous fabrication, but who saw that the lower and middle classes were too violently frenzied to be safely reasoned with or controlled. When things took a new turn, and Stephen College [q. v.], the protestant joiner, was put upon his trial for treason at Oxford in August 1681, and Titus Oates and some of his strongest adherents were found to give conflicting evidence, the chief justice took a strong part against College, and the man was hanged with the usual horrors, mainly in consequence of the bias which the judges had exhibited at the trial. This is the one blot on North's career, for which little or no excuse can be found.
The chancellor, Lord Nottingham (Heneage Finch), died on 18 Dec. 1682. Chief-justice North had frequently taken his place as speaker at the House of Lords during his long illness, and two days after his death succeeded him as keeper of the great seal. Though he had thus attained the highest position in the realm after the sovereign, the lord keeper found little happiness in his exalted position, and there is little doubt that he spoke no more than the truth when he more than once assured his brother Roger that he was never a happy man after he had the seal entrusted to him. The notorious Jeffreys had succeeded him as chief justice, and did his best to irritate and worry him on every occasion that offered itself. North was raised to the peerage as Baron Guilford on 27 Sept. 1683. His health seems already to have begun to fail, though he continued to discharge the duties of his high position with exemplary diligence and zeal, and to the end was a faithful and unwavering servant and friend to Charles II, who appears to have leant upon him more and more as his own end approached. But North lived in evil days, and perhaps never in our annals was there such rancorous animosity among placemen; never were party spirit and political rivalry so fierce and sordid.
Charles II died on 6 Feb. 1685. At this time the lord keeper was very ill, but he took a leading part in the coronation of James II on 23 April. After this he became worse, and proposed to resign the seal, as he had talked of doing more than once before; but in this he was overruled. During the summer term he continued to sit in Westminster Hall; but it was evident that he was a dying man. Permission was given him to retire to his seat at Wroxton, Oxfordshire, taking the seal with him, and attended by the officers of the court. Here he kept up great state and profuse hospitality, his brothers Dudley and Roger being always at his side, and present at his death-bed.
At the end of August he made his will, and he died in his forty-eighth year on 5 Sept. 1685. The next day his brothers, who were the executors, accompanied by the officials, rode to Windsor, and delivered up the great seal into the hands of James II, who straightway entrusted it to Jeffreys, with the style of lord high chancellor of England.
The lord keeper was buried at Wroxton on 9 Sept. beside his wife, who had died nearly seven years before him (15 Nov. 1678). By the death of her mother, the Countess of Downe, her ladyship had inherited the Wroxton estate, which passed to her husband and his descendants. She had borne him five children, of whom three survived their father. Francis, the elder son, succeeded to the peerage as second Baron Guilford, and was father of Francis, first earl of Guilford [q. v.] Charles, the other son, and a daughter Anne appear to have been always sickly and of
