chancellorship in the following administration, and he resisted
the proposal to indemnify witnesses against Walpole in one of
his finest speeches in May 1742. He exercised a leading influence
in the Wilmington Cabinet; and when Wilmington died in
August 1743, it was Hardwicke who put forward Henry Pelham
for the vacant office against the claims of Pulteney. For many
years from this time he was the controlling power in the government.
During the king’s absences on the continent Hardwicke
was left at the head of the council of regency; it thus fell to
him to concert measures for dealing with the Jacobite rising
in 1745. He took a just view of the crisis, and his policy for
meeting it was on the whole statesmanlike. After Culloden he
presided at the trial of the Scottish Jacobite peers, his conduct
of which, though judicially impartial, was neither dignified
nor generous; and he must be held partly responsible for the
unnecessary severity meted out to the rebels, and especially
for the cruel, though not illegal, executions on obsolete attainders
of Charles Radcliffe and (in 1753) of Archibald Cameron. He
carried, however, a great reform in 1746, of incalculable benefit
to Scotland, which swept away the grave abuses of feudal power
surviving in that country in the form of private heritable jurisdictions
in the hands of the landed gentry. On the other hand
his legislation in 1748 for disarming the Highlanders and prohibiting
the use of the tartan in their dress was vexatious without
being effective. Hardwicke supported Chesterfield’s reform of
the calendar in 1751; in 1753 his bill for legalizing the naturalization
of Jews in England had to be dropped on account of the
popular clamour it excited; but he successfully carried a
salutary reform of the marriage law, which became the basis of
all subsequent legislation on the subject.
On the death of Pelham in 1754 Hardwicke obtained for Newcastle the post of prime minister, and for reward was created earl of Hardwicke and Viscount Royston; and when in November 1756 the weakness of the ministry and the threatening aspect of foreign affairs compelled Newcastle to resign, Hardwicke retired with him. He played an important and disinterested part in negotiating the coalition between Newcastle and Pitt in 1757, when he accepted a seat in Pitt’s cabinet without returning to the woolsack. After the accession of George III. Hardwicke opposed the ministry of Lord Bute on the peace with France in 1762, and on the cider tax in the following year. In the Wilkes case Hardwicke condemned general warrants, and also the doctrine that seditious libels published by members of parliament were protected by parliamentary privilege. He died in London on the 6th of March 1764.
Although for a lengthy period Hardwicke was an influential minister, he was not a statesman of the first rank. On the other hand he was one of the greatest judges who ever sat on the English bench. He did not, indeed, by his three years’ tenure of the chief-justiceship of the king’s bench leave any impress on the common law; but Lord Campbell pronounces him “the most consummate judge who ever sat in the court of chancery, being distinguished not only for his rapid and satisfactory decision of the causes which came before him, but for the profound and enlightened principles which he laid down, and for perfecting English equity into a systematic science.” He held the office of lord chancellor longer than any of his predecessors, with a single exception; and the same high authority quoted above asserts that as an equity judge Lord Hardwicke’s fame “has not been exceeded by that of any man in ancient or modern times. His decisions have been, and ever will continue to be, appealed to as fixing the limits and establishing the principles of the great juridical system called Equity, which now not only in this country and in our colonies, but over the whole extent of the United States of America, regulates property and personal rights more than the ancient common law.”[1] Hardwicke had prepared himself for this great and enduring service to English jurisprudence by study of the historical foundations of the chancellor’s equitable jurisdiction, combined with profound insight into legal principle, and a thorough knowledge of the Roman civil law, the principles of which he scientifically incorporated into his administration of English equity in the absence of precedents bearing on the causes submitted to his judgment. His decisions on particular points in dispute were based on general principles, which were neither so wide as to prove inapplicable to future circumstances, nor too restricted to serve as the foundation for a coherent and scientific system. His recorded judgments—which, as Lord Campbell observes, “certainly do come up to every idea we can form of judicial excellence”—combine luminous method of arrangement with elegance and lucidity of language.
Nor was the creation of modern English equity Lord Hardwicke’s only service to the administration of justice. Born within two years of the death of Judge Jeffreys his influence was powerful in obliterating the evil traditions of the judicial bench under the Stuart monarchy, and in establishing the modern conception of the duties and demeanour of English judges. While still at the bar Lord Chesterfield praised his conduct of crown prosecutions as a contrast to the former “bloodhounds of the crown”; and he described Sir Philip Yorke as “naturally humane, moderate and decent.” On the bench he had complete control over his temper; he was always urbane and decorous and usually dignified. His exercise of legal patronage deserves unmixed praise. As a public man he was upright and, in comparison with most of his contemporaries, consistent. His domestic life was happy and virtuous. His chief fault was avarice, which perhaps makes it the more creditable that, though a colleague of Walpole, he was never suspected of corruption. But he had a keen and steady eye to his own advantage, and he was said to be jealous of all who might become his rivals for power. His manners, too, were arrogant. Lord Waldegrave said of Hardwicke that “he might have been thought a great man had he been less avaricious, less proud, less unlike a gentleman.” Although in his youth he contributed to the Spectator over the signature “Philip Homebred,” he seems early to have abandoned all care for literature, and he has been reproached by Lord Campbell and others with his neglect of art and letters. He married, on the 16th of May 1719, Margaret, daughter of Charles Cocks (by his wife Mary, sister of Lord Chancellor Somers), and widow of John Lygon, by whom he had five sons and two daughters. His eldest daughter, Elizabeth, married Lord Anson; and the second, Margaret, married Sir Gilbert Heathcote. Three of his younger sons attained some distinction. Charles Yorke (q.v.), the second son, became like his father lord chancellor; the third, Joseph, was a diplomatist, and was created Lord Dover; while James, the fifth son, became bishop of Ely.
Hardwicke was succeeded in the earldom by his eldest son, Philip Yorke (1720–1795), 2nd earl of Hardwicke, born on the 19th of March 1720, and educated at Cambridge. In 1741 he became a fellow of the Royal Society. With his brother, Charles Yorke, he was one of the chief contributors to Athenian Letters; or the Epistolary Correspondence of an agent of the King of Persia residing at Athens during the Peloponnesian War (4 vols., London, 1741), a work that for many years had a considerable vogue and went through several editions. He sat in the House of Commons as member for Reigate (1741–1747), and afterwards for Cambridgeshire; and he kept notes of the debates which were afterwards embodied in Cobbett’s Parliamentary History. He was styled Viscount Royston from 1754 till 1764, when he succeeded to the earldom. In politics he supported the Rockingham Whigs. He held the office of teller of the exchequer, and was lord-lieutenant of Cambridgeshire and high steward of Cambridge University. He edited a quantity of miscellaneous state papers and correspondence, to be found in MSS. collections in the British Museum. He died in London, on the 16th of May 1790. He married Jemima Campbell, only daughter of John, 3rd earl of Breadalbane, and granddaughter and heiress of Henry de Grey, duke of Kent, who became in her own right marchioness de Grey.
In default of sons, the title devolved on his nephew, Philip
- ↑ Lord Campbell, Lives of the Lord Chancellors, v. 43 (London, 1846).
