the Windham lunacy case in 1861, and in the action of Saurin v.
Starr in 1869. In 1865 he argued in ex parte Chavasse before
Lord Westbury, L.C., and soon afterwards was honoured by him
with the offer of a county court judgeship.
In 1872 Russell took “silk,” and from that date for some time he divided the best leading work of the circuit with Holker, Herschell and Pope. In 1874 Holker became solicitor-general in the Conservative administration. In 1880 Herschell accepted the same office in a Liberal ministry, and about the same time Pope practically left the circuit, to become in a short time one of the most successful advocates at the parliamentary bar. Russell’s success as a Q.C. during this period of his career was prodigious. He excelled in the conduct alike of commercial cases and of those involving, as he used to say, “a human interest,” although undoubtedly it was the latter which more attracted him. He was seen to the least advantage in cases which involved technical or scientific detail. If his advocacy suffered a defeat, however, it was never an inglorious defeat. Those who were on the Northern Circuit at the time will not easily forget the case of Dixon v. Plimsoll—a libel action brought by a Liverpool shipowner against Mr S. Plimsoll—tried before Baron Amphlett and a Liverpool special jury, in which Holker won a notable victory for the defendant; or Nuttall v. Wilde, a breach of promise action, in which Pope led brilliantly for the successful plaintiff, and Russell’s speech for the defence was one of the finest in point of passion and pathos that was ever heard upon the Northern Circuit. At the same time, with all his fighting power, Russell was eminently a sagacious adviser. No barrister knew better how and when to settle a case, where the client’s true interest called for a settlement.
In 1880 a new phase of Russell’s arduous life began. He was returned to parliament as an independent Liberal member for Dundalk, a constituency which he had twice before unsuccessfully contested. From that time forward until his appointment to a lordship of appeal in succession to Lord Bowen in 1894, he sat in the House of Commons: for Dundalk until 1885, and afterwards for South Hackney, where he was returned as the Liberal member on four successive occasions—once in 1885, twice in 1886, and again in 1892. The entrance into parliament laid upon Russell’s time and labour a heavy additional tax. His was a nature which could not, in work or even in pleasure, be content to do anything lightly or by halves. He was essentially a man of action; intensity—at times almost fierce intensity—both of purpose and of devotion to its fulfilment characterized everything he did. Upon such a man parliamentary life between 1880 and 1894 necessarily entailed a severe strain. During the whole of this epoch, in home affairs, Irish business almost monopolized the political stage; and Russell was Irish to the core. From 1880 to 1886, as a private member, and as the attorney-general in Mr Gladstone’s administrations of 1886 and 1892, he worked in and out of parliament for the Liberal policy in regard to the treatment of Ireland as few men except Russell could or would work. He never spared himself. After a long day in the turmoil of the courts, he cheerfully gave a long evening to a distant and often, from the standpoint of personal notoriety, an obscure, platform. His position throughout was clear and consistent. Before 1886 on several occasions he supported the action of the Irish Nationalist party. He opposed coercion, voted for compensation for disturbance, advocated the release of political prisoners and voted for the Maamtrasna inquiry. He wrote to the Daily Telegraph a series of letters on the Irish land question, which were afterwards published (1889) in a collected form. But he never became a member of the Irish Home Rule or of the Parnellite party; he was elected at Dundalk as an independent Liberal, and such he remained. He was proud of the kingdom in whose might and glory Ireland could claim so large a part; and when, as attorney-general in the Gladstone administration, he warmly advocated the establishment of a subordinate parliament in Ireland, he did so because he sought the amelioration and not the destruction of Ireland’s relations with the rest of that kingdom. “I am absolutely opposed,” he said (The Life of Lord Russell of Killowen, p. 194) to the South Hackney voters, “to separation; but, reserving imperial control on all imperial questions, I think Irishmen on Irish soil should have the power of dealing in the way which seems best to them with all questions that concern them.” It is impossible to say that Russell’s success in the House of Commons, considerable as it was, was comparable to his success as an advocate in the courts of justice. He was listened to, always with respect and often with admiration, but he was not made for a debater; and the position of a law officer has generally not proved favourable to the attainment of parliamentary eminence. In great public affairs the law officer advises and supports, but not for him is the glory of initiating public policy.
Russell’s parliamentary duties, fully as he discharged them, first as a private member and afterwards as attorney-general, were not allowed by him to obstruct his professional career. He rapidly became in London what he was already in Lancashire, the favourite leader in nisi prius actions. The list of causes célèbres in the period 1880–94 is really a record of Russell’s cases, and, for a great part, of Russell’s victories. The best known of the exceptions from the latter category was the libel action Belt v. Lawes in 1882, which, after a trial before Baron Huddleston and a special jury lasting more than forty days, resulted in a verdict for the plaintiff, for whom Sir Hardinge Giffard (afterwards Lord Chancellor Halsbury) appeared as leading counsel. The triumph of his client in the Colin Campbell divorce suit in 1886 afforded perhaps the most brilliant instance of Russell’s forensic capacity in private litigation. His fees in 1885, the year before he became attorney-general, amounted to nearly £17,000. More important, however, as well as more famous, than any of his successes in the ordinary courts of law during this period were his performances as an advocate in two public transactions of mark in British history. The first of these in point of date was the Parnell Commission of 1888–90, in which Sir Charles Russell appeared as leading counsel for Mr Parnell. The commission held its first sitting on the 22nd of October 1888, and presented its report in February 1890. In April 1889, after 63 sittings of the commission, in the course of which 340 witnesses had been examined, Sir Charles Russell, who had already destroyed the chief personal charge against Mr Parnell by a brilliant cross-examination, in which he proved it to have been based upon a forgery, made his great opening speech for the defence. It lasted several days, and concluded on the 12th of April. This speech, besides its merit as a wonderful piece of advocacy, possesses permanent value as an historical survey of the Irish question during the last century, from the point of view of an Irish Liberal. It was in the same year published after careful revision by its author (1889). The second public transaction was the Bering Sea Arbitration, held in Paris in 1893. Sir Charles Russell, then attorney-general, with Sir Richard Webster (afterwards Lord Alverstone, L.C.J.), was the leading counsel for Great Britain. Russell, in the course of his very powerful argument before the tribunal, maintained the proposition, which he again handled in his Saratoga address to the American Bar Association in 1896, that “international law is neither more nor less than what civilized nations have agreed shall be binding on one another as international law.” The award was, substantially, in favour of Great Britain. In recognition of their distinguished services, the queen bestowed upon both the leading representatives of Great Britain the honour of the grand cross of St Michael and St George.
In 1894 Russell’s career as an advocate ended. A judgeship, if he had wished it, had been within his reach twelve years before. In 1894, on the death of Lord Bowen, he accepted the position of a lord of appeal. A month later he was appointed lord chief justice of England in succession to Lord Coleridge, to whose memory he devoted in the following September a paper in the North American Review. To the discharge of his functions as a judge Russell brought with him all the qualities of intellect and character which had made him so eminent as an advocate, and their greatness was not less conspicuous in his
