Henry Brougham

“ BROUGHAM, HENRY (1665–1698) , divine, was one of the twelve children of Henry Brougham of Scales Hall, Cumberland, sheriff for the county in the 6th of William III, by his marriage with 'fair Miss Slee, daughter of Mr. Slee of Carlisle, a jovial gentleman,' who was a merchant in that city. In Midsummer term, 1681, when sixteen years old, Henry Brougham 'became a poor serving-child of Queen's College,' Oxford. ”

“ Sometimes he would crouch in his chair, muffled in his wig and robes, like a man asleep ; at other times he would burst into restless activity, writing letters, working problems, interrupting counsel, Mortal offence he gave to Sugden, then the leader of the Equity bar, who detested his person and despised his law. But upon the whole Brougham was a just and able judge ”

“ We shall not attempt in this notice of his life to follow the innumerable incidents of his long and varied career, or to enumerate the speeches and writings which he threw off like sparks on every imaginable occasion. Our object is rather to convey to the reader a just impression of the man, as he appeared to those who knew him as he was, and who still recall the transcendent effects of his energy. Lord Brougham has been unfortunate in his biographers. ”

“ This victory over the court and the ministry raised Henry Brougham at once to the pinnacle of fame. He shared the triumph of the queen. His portrait was in every shop window. A piece of plate was presented to him, paid for by a penny subscription of peasants and mechanics. With his wonted disinterestedness in money matters, he refused to accept a sum of 4000 which the queen herself placed at his disposal. He took no more than the usual fees of counsel, while his salary as Her Majesty s attorney-general re mained unpaid, arid was discharged by the Treasury after her death. ”

“ Brougham allied himself to the leaders of this movement, and he remained through life not only faithful, but passionately attached to the cause. He combated, in and out of Parliament, every attempt to elude the restrictions on the trade in man. One of the first measures he carried in the House of Commons was a bill to make the slave-trade felony. He laboured incessantly to induce foreign countries to abolish the abhorred traffic, and he had at length the happiness, as Chancellor of England, to take a part in the final measure of negro emancipation throughout the British colonies. ”

“ BROUGHAM, Henry, first Lord Brougham and Vaux, man of letters, man of science, advocate, orator, statesman, and Lord High Chancellor of England, was born at Edinburgh on the 19th September 1778, and died at Cannes in France on the 7th May 18G8. During a great portion of a life extended to the unwonted term of ninety years, but espe cially in the third and fourth decades of the present century, from 1820 to 1840, no Englishman in any civil career played so conspicuous a part in public affairs or enjoyed so wide a fame as Henry Brougham. ”

“ At the bar there were greater and better advocates ; on the bench there were more sure and learned judges ; in science he made no real discoveries ; in letters, notwithstanding the prodigious activity of his pen, he has left no work of lasting celebrity ; and although as an orator he was in his best days unequalled, he himself outlived the evanescent glories of his eloquence. Hence it has come to pass, that within fifty years of his most brilliant period, and within ten years of his death, the figure of Lord Brougham has already become somewhat indistinct. ”

“ Then Morven sighed heavily.
“To me only the word was given. Summon instantly, O councilors of the king! summon the armed men, and all the youth of the tribe, and let them take the sword and the spear, and follow thy servant. For lo! the star hath announced to him that the foe shall fall into our hands as the wild beast of the forests.”
The son of Osslah spoke with the voice of command, and the elders were amazed.
“Why, pause ye?” he cried. “Do the gods of the night lie? On my head rest the peril if I deceive ye.” ”

“ So would the displeasure of the gods of night perchance be incurred. Suffer that the lesser door of the palace be unbarred, so that at the night hour, when the moon is midway in the heavens, I may steal unseen into thy chamber, and mix the liquid with thy wine.”
“So be it,” said the king. “Thou art wise though thy limbs are crooked and curt; and the stars might have chosen a taller man.”
Then the king laughed again; and Morven laughed too, but there was danger in the mirth of the son of Osslah. ”

“ The Peel ministry, prematurely and rashly summoned to power, was of no long duration, and Brougham naturally took an active part in overthrowing it. Lord Melbourne was called upon in April 1835 to reconstruct the Whig Govern ment with his former colleagues. But, formidable as he might be as an opponent, the Whigs had learned by ex perience that Brougham was even more dangerous to them as an ally, and with one accord they resolved that he should not hold the great seal or any other office. ”

“ In 1825 the first steps were taken, under the auspices of Brougham, for the establishment of a university in London, absolutely free from all religious or sectarian distinctions, a scheme which has grown and ripened in half a century into no unworthy rival of the other universities of northern and southern Britain. In 1827 Brougham contributed to found the " Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," an S. D. U. K. association which gave an immense impulsion to sound popular literature. Its first publication was an essay on the " Pleasures and Advantages of Science," written by himself. ”

“ Although till 1808 Brougham had no practice at the English bar, he had argued some Scotch appeals in the House of Lords and some prize cases at the " Cock-pit." He had acquired some knowledge of international law, and some experience of the prize courts. This circumstance probably led to his being retained as counsel for the Liverpool merchants who had petitioned both Houses of Parliament against the Orders in Council, framed in retalia- tion for the Berlin and Milan decrees. ”

“ Here we find him figuring in turn as an English Lord Chancellor, a German student, a French subject, a French National Guard, an American citizen, a Bedouin Arab, a Carmelite monk, a Chinese mandarin, an Osmanli, a red Indian, a Scottish shepherd, and by the unmistakable nose and self-complacent smirk on his countenance, it is clear that in each and every character Henry Lord Brougham feels himself thoroughly at home. The Sleeping Beauty is a clever composition. ”

“ But if you are living abroad, surrounded by the base spies and tools who will always be planted about you, ready to invent and swear as they may be directed, who can pretend to say what may happen ? I declare, I do not see how a proposition hostile to your Royal Highness s marriage could be resisted if you continued living abroad." How completely these predictions were fulfilled is sufficiently known. Brougham appears to have had but little correspondence with the princess during her residence in Italy. ”

“ Brougham's Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, 3 vols., must be read with caution, and its statements compared with other authorities; it is chiefly valuable for the letters it contains; for notices of some curious misstatements in these volumes, besides those mentioned in the above article, see the Times for 12 Jan. 1871, and Notes and Queries, 4th ser. vii. 277; Brougham's Speeches, 4 vols.; Brougham's Letters to W. Forsyth, privately printed; Lord Campbell's Life of Brougham, in Lives of the Chancellors, viii. ”

“ Wexford 1798; made his first appearance on the stage in Sussex 1818; acted at Haymarket theatre London 3 years; first appeared in America at Park theatre New York 4 Sep. 1835; made his début in Philadelphia 18 Jany. 1836, at Chestnut st. theatre as Cedric in opera of The Maid of Judith. d. while on his passage to England 21 May 1867. bur. in Brooklyn cemetery New York Feb. 1868.
426BROUGHAM, Henry Peter Brougham, 1 Baron (eld. son of Henry Brougham of Brougham near Penrith 1742–1810) . b. 19 St. Andrew’s sq. Edin. 19 Sep. 1778; ed. at high sch. and univ. Edin.; admitted advocate 10 June 1800 ”

“ On the day following the resigna tion of the Government, he reluctantly consented, in low and angry tones, to postpone for one week his motion on parliamentary reform. The attorney-generalship was offered to him by Lord Grey ; it was indignantly rejected. Brougham himself affirms that he desired to be master of the rolls, which would have secured him a large income for life, and left him free to sit in the House of Commons. ”

“ Therefore his own ideas must have been the communication of happiness to the creature. He could only desire to exercise his attributes without, or eternally to himself, which before creating other beings he could not do. But this could only gratify his nature, which wants nothing, being perfect in itself, by communicating his goodness and providing for the happiness of other sentient beings created by him for this purpose. Therefore, says King, “it manifestly follows that the world is as well as it could be made by infinite power and goodness ”

“ The supposition that he made them as happy as he could, and that not being able to make them less miserable, he yet perceived that upon the whole their existence would occasion more happiness than if they never had any being at all, will just account for the phenomena as well as the Manichean theory, and will as little as that theory assume any malevolence in the power which created and preserved the universe. ”

“ The activity of Lord Brougham s pen was only second to the volubility of his tongue. He carried on a vast and incessant correspondence of incredible extent. For thirty years he contributed largely to the Edinburgh JRevieiv, and lie continued to write in that journal even after he held the great seal. The best of his writings, entitled " Sketches of the Statesmen of the time of George III., "first appeared in the Review. These were followed by the " Lives of Men of Letters and Science " of the same period. ”

“ On the 22d November 1830 the great seal was delivered to him by the king, and he took his seat on the Woolsack that evening as speaker of the House of Lords, being still a commoner. On the following day, after he had sat to hear a Scotch appeal, the patent of his peerage as Baron Brougham and Vaux was brought down. The Lord chancellor then quitted the woolsack, robed, and was introduced as a baron by the Marquis Wellesley and Lord Durham.
The mind of man can conceive nothing more vivid and more various than the chancellorship of Lord Brougham. ”

“ The death of Lord Castlereagh in 1822, and the advance ment of Canning to the office of Foreign Secretary, materi ally changed the character of Lord Liverpool s Govern ment. Canning and Brougham sat on opposite benches the one a follower of Pitt, the other of Fox ; and they were constantly pitted against each other. Sometimes their rhetorical conflicts assumed an intense violence, as when Brougham accused the minister of " the most monstrous truckling for the purpose of obtaining office that the whole history of political tergiversation could furnish." ”

“ The least calm of these men who debated upon what we were worth, and just what should become of us, was Brougham. Like most who love to torment, he himself was easily tormented. How does this champion of liberty look as he rises to condemn the policy on the Canadian question as “vacillating, imbecile, and indolent;” as he puts his awkward questions to those whom he calls his “noble friends” or “the noble lords,” all looking marvellously uncomfortable when their names are in that merciless mouth. ”

“ Old as he now was, and notwithstanding the position he had achieved and the good work he had done, his constant thirst for admiration led him 'to desire to flourish away among silly and dissolute people of fashion.' Ever anxious to impress others with a sense of his superior ability, 'he had no idea how to converse or live at ease' (Greville Memoirs, 2nd ser. ii. 235) . When the French provisional government of 1848 summoned the National Assembly, Brougham was seized with a desire to be returned as a deputy, and applied to the minister of justice for a certificate of naturalisation. ”

“ When poor Edmund Kean was acting in barns to country bumpkins, and barely rinding bread for his wife and child, he was just as great a genius as when he was crowding Drury Lane. When Brougham presided in the House of Lords, he was not a bit better or greater than when he had hung about in the Parliament House at Edinburgh, a briefless and suspected junior barrister. When all London crowded to see the hippopotamus, he was just the animal that he was a couple of years later, when no one took the trouble of looking at him. ”

“ These words apply, with a painful degree of exactness, to the career of Lord Brougham. Few men have been more richly endowed by nature. Few men have exhibited a greater plasticity of intellect, a greater affluence of mental resources. He was a fine orator, a clear thinker, a ready writer. It is seldom that a man who sways immense audiences by the power of his eloquence attains also to a high position in the ranks of literature. Yet Brougham did this; while, as a lawyer, he gained the most splendid prize of his profession, the Lord Chancellorship of England ”

“ Without doubt his harangues fatigue him as much as they do those who listen to him; he does not spare himself, bawling and gesticulating without any regard to his own person; he bends and twists himself like a posture master; he dances and leaps with his words; he perspires and grows heated, but he leaves the hearer cold; his is not the eloquence which inflames the blood.
I would censure Lord Brougham more severely as a writer than as a speaker; for Lord Brougham is also a writer, and a good deal too much of one. ”