The Man of Law in Eighteenth-Century Biography: The Life of Francis North

Abstract

The Man of Law in Eighteenth-Century Biography: The Life of Francis North HAMILTON E. COCHRANE In his essay "Fictional Representations of the Law in the Eighteenth Century," David Punter studies how novelists of the period "repre­ sent the law, legal characters, and legal processes" in order "to un­ cover a set of attitudes" about the law, crime, and the English legal system.1 It is important to remember, however, that imaginative repre­ sentations of legal characters may be found in factual as well as fic­ tional narratives, in biography as well as the novel. One such repre­ sentation is Roger North's Life of Francis North (1742), the biography of his elder brother, a lawyer, judge, and finally, Lord Chancellor.2 Roger North is not only one of the earliest and most important theorists of biography, he is also one of its most accomplished practitioners, skilled in characterization, the art of presenting a convincing and rounded portrait of a personality through the judicious selection and arrangement of detail. North's version of Francis North's life is of inter­ est not only as history—it documents the life of a Restoration lawyer with enough minute details to satisfy even Samuel Johnson—but also as literature; it is an artful narrative and character sketch in which one may discover a set of attitudes toward a legal character and the law. The biography celebrates a certain kind of hero—the rational and le­ galistic man. At the same time, North's portrait is complete and com­ plex enough to suggest, implicitly at least, the limitations of this brand of heroism. 139 140 / COCHRANE I Just as Johnson realized that the "gradations" of an author's life are from book to book and organized his literary biographies ac­ cordingly,3 Roger North emphasizes the gradations of a seventeenthcentury lawyer's life—from case to case and from preferment to pre­ ferment. Early in the Life Roger explains his organizational method: "It will be hard to lead a thread in good order of time, through his lordship's whole life ... I shall therefore, for distinction sake, break the course of his lordship's life into four stages."4 These four stages are Francis North's youth and study of the law, his practice after being ad­ mitted to the bar, his career as a judge, and his term as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Francis North realized early in life that "his family was not in pos­ ture to sustain any of the brothers" and that it therefore "concerned him in the last degree to make the best of his profession" (1:18). He showed no special interest in the law; he was simply "designed" for the profession by his father. He did not find the study of the law pleas­ ant. "I have heard him say more than once," Roger writes, "that, if he had been sure of a hundred pounds a year to live on, he had never been a lawyer" (1:18). Yet he applied himself diligently, knowing that if he were to succeed in the world, it would have to be by his own labors. Roger tells little about his brother's early schooling, but one an­ ecdote is revealing: "Before he went to Cambridge, the master em­ ployed him to make an alphabetical index of all the verbs neuter; and he did it so completely, that the doctor had it printed with Lilly's gram­ mar, for the proper use of his own school. This, however easy to be done, (being only transcribing out of the dictionary) was commend­ able; because boys ordinarily have not a steady application, and, being required, seldom perform, industriously and neatly, such a task as that" (1:12). This performance, demonstrating diligence rather than brilliance, anticipates the way in which Francis studied the law after being admitted to the Middle Temple. He commonplaced all the right books, observed proceedings at the King's Bench and Common Pleas, notebook and pen in hand, and spent evenings with friends discuss­ ing what he had learned. Studying the law may have been no more agreeable than alphabetizing and transcribing neuter verbs, but Francis worked "industriously...