Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Jekyll, Joseph (1663-1738)
JEKYLL, Sir JOSEPH (1663–1738), master of the rolls, born in 1663, was son of John Jekyll of London, by Tryphena his wife, relict of Richard Hill. He entered the Middle Temple in 1680, and was called to the bar in 1687. While a student he came under the influence of Somers [q. v.], afterwards lord chancellor, and Gilbert Burnet [q. v.], afterwards bishop of Salisbury, then chaplain at the rolls. In 1697 he was appointed chief justice of Chester; on 6 Nov. 1700 he was called to the degree of serjeant-at-law, and appointed king's serjeant; and on 12 Dec. he was knighted. On the death of William III he refused to resign his patent of chief justice of Chester, though threatened with a prosecution by the tories if he did not, and succeeded in retaining the place until his appointment to the mastership of the rolls in 1717 (Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 319, 604, 702; Wynne, Serjeant-at-Law). In parliament he sat for Eye, Suffolk, between 1697 and 1713, then for Lymington, Hampshire, until 1722, and during the rest of his life for Reigate, acting consistently with the whigs throughout. He was a friend to the poorer clergy, and in 1704 moved, by way of amendment to the royal message proposing to appropriate a part of the revenue from first-fruits and tenths to their relief, that the entire tax should be removed and a fund formed for the augmentation of small livings. About the same time he delivered a weighty but ineffectual speech on the great constitutional question raised by the action of the House of Commons in regard to the case of Ashby v. White, Jekyll urging with much learning and sense that the franchise was a right incident by common law to an estate of freehold, and that by consequence an elector disfranchised by the arbitrary act of a returning officer must have a right of action in the courts of common law [cf. Holt, Sir John]. While this was pending Jekyll accepted a brief for the defence of Lord Halifax on his trial for breach of duty as auditor of the imprests. As the prosecution had been ordered by the House of Commons this was resented as a breach of privilege, and Jekyll was publicly censured. On the impeachment of Sacheverell in 1710, Jekyll opened the articles against him in a speech full of energy and zeal, and so strongly did he feel on the matter that he went the length of ordering the indictment of a clergyman who preached before him against the impeachment while he was on circuit in Wales. The grand jury, however, threw out the bill (Parl. Hist. vi. 271, 327; Burnet, Own Time, fol., pp. 369–70; Luttrell, Relation of State Affairs, v. 486, 563; Howell, State Trials, xv. 95). Jekyll was one of the managers of the impeachment of the Jacobite rebel, the Earl of Wintoun, in March 1715–16, and opened the case against the Jew, Francis Francia, on his trial at the Old Bailey for treasonable correspondence with the friends of the Pretender (22 Jan. 1716–17). Though, as one of the committee of secrecy appointed to investigate the cases of Bolingbroke and Oxford, he had expressed himself adverse to the prosecution of the latter, he nevertheless acted as one of the managers of his impeachment in June 1717. He was rewarded on 13 July following with the post of master of the rolls, and sworn of the privy council on the 31st (Howell, State Trials, xiv. 830, 898, 1164; Parl. Hist. vii. 473; Boyer, Polit. State of Great Britain, xiv. 78, 204; Hardy, Cat. of Lords Chancellors, &c. p. 80). The rolls house having fallen into decay Jekyll rebuilt it, the king contributing 5,000l. towards the expenses (Hist. Reg. Chron. Reg. p. 39). He still continued to speak occasionally in parliament. Thus he supported the war with Spain in 1718, and took a leading part in exposing the corrupt practices of the directors of the South Sea Company in 1720. He was chief commissioner of the great seal between the resignation of the Earl of Macclesfield (7 Jan. 1725) and its delivery to his successor Lord King (1 June). In parliament he gave a steady support to Walpole, speaking in favour of the Excise Bill in March 1732–3 and against the augmentation of the land forces on the outbreak of the war of the Polish election. He was, however, more of a whig than of a courtier, and gave great offence to the queen by inopportunely raising a point of law which the law officers could not answer on occasion of the Marlborough election petition in March 1734–5, in consequence of which the decision of the committee went against the court party. Hence Pope's allusion in the ‘Epilogue to the Satires,’ Dialogue I. 38–40, to
Jekyll, or some odd old whig,
Who never changed his principle or wig.
(Parl. Hist. vii. 582, 689 et seq., 796 et seq., viii. 675, 681, 1295; Hervey, Mem. i. 472–3; Comm. Journ. xxii. 435, 437). Jekyll was also opposed to state lotteries and stage plays, and incurred much popular odium by introducing in 1736 a measure for laying a tax of 20s. per gallon on the retailing of spirituous liquors, popularly known as the ‘gin act.’ A guard of sixty soldiers was placed at the rolls to protect him from the violence of the mob (28 Sept.) Jekyll was also the author of the Mortmain Act of this year, a singularly ill-drawn measure, now superseded by the Mortmain and Charitable Uses Act, 1888 (Parl. Hist. ix. 70, 74, 944, 1033–5, 1059 et seq., 1110 et seq.; Gent. Mag. 1736, p. 551; Hervey, Mem. ii. 139; Coxe, Sir Robert Walpole, i. 475). In 1738 he was elected one of the governors of the Charterhouse. He died at his seat, Brookmans, North Mimms, Hertfordshire, of mortification of the bowels, on 19 Aug. of the same year, and was interred in the Rolls Chapel on 1 Sept. Jekyll married Elizabeth, second sister of John, lord Somers, by whom he had no issue. She survived him, dying on 29 Sept. 1745. By his will he bequeathed 20,000l. East India Stock, after his wife's death, to the commissioners of the national debt, to be applied as a sinking fund; upon which Lord Mansfield remarked that ‘he might as well have attempted to stop the middle arch of Blackfriars Bridge with his full-bottomed wig.’ A portion of the fund was restored to his residuary legatees by act of parliament in 1747. Part of his estate he left to Lord-chancellor Hardwicke, who had married his wife's niece; other property in trusts for the benefit of the dissenting interest. Jekyll appears to have been an ungraceful speaker and somewhat puzzle-headed, yet we have it on Lord Hervey's authority that ‘he spoke with more general weight though with less particular approbation’ than any of his contemporaries in the House of Commons (Hervey, Mem. i. 474).
As to the authorship of ‘A Discourse of the Judicial Authority belonging to the Office of Master of the Rolls in the High Court of Chancery,’ which has been erroneously attributed to Jekyll, see Yorke, Philip, first Earl of Hardwicke, 1690–1764.
[Foss's Judges of England; Baker's Northamptonshire, i. 132; Gent. Mag. 1738, pp. 381, 436; Burnet's Own Time; Gent. Mag. 1738 pp. 381, 436, 489, 1745 p. 558, 1747 p. 274; Cussans's Hertfordshire, ‘Hundred of Dacorum,’ p. 286; Legal Observer, ii. 96; Noble's Continuation of Granger's Biographical History of England, iii. 205–6; Harris's Life of Lord Hardwicke, i. 415.]