stone. He was now leader of his circuit, received a silk gown on 30 June 1780, and was the same year appointed chief justice of Chester, a post which he much coveted and prized. On the trial of Lord George Gordon (5 Feb. 1781) he was briefed with Erskine, and, though the latter had been called only two years, Kenyon yielded to him, as the first orator at the bar, the lead in the case, and supplied him with learning and experience. He opened the defence in a speech which Lord Campbell calls ‘very honest but very inefficient,’ and cross-examined most of the witnesses, but left to Erskine the reply (see State Trials, vol. xxi.) At the general election of 1780 he was returned, through Thurlow's influence, for the borough of Hindon in Wiltshire, and took his seat on 31 Oct. He acted with the opposition, but until Lord North's fall only spoke once, on a motion to expedite the hearing of an election petition. He was, in fact, a very bad speaker, thick and hurried in his utterance, awkward in delivery, obscure in expression, and irritable under opposition or interruption. With some hesitation, and acting as usual upon the advice of Dunning and Thurlow, he accepted the offer of the attorney-generalship which Lord Rockingham made him on taking office (23 April 1782). He set himself, against the wish of his colleagues, to remedy the abuse which permitted the receivers of the funds in the different government offices to retain balances in their hands for long periods together without accounting for them, and proposed resolutions calling on Rigby, late paymaster-general, and Welbore Ellis, late treasurer of the navy, to file statements of the balances, said to amount to 1,100,000l., which were in their hands on quitting office. His resolutions were rejected, but he pressed the matter till a subsequent ministry introduced a bill to pay exchequer auditors and tellers by salary and not by fees. When Lord Shelburne came in, Kenyon adhered to him, and, quitting office with him, resigned on 15 April 1783. He resumed it reluctantly under Pitt (26 Dec. 1783), for he disliked both the business of his office and the duties of parliament. His health was impaired, and accordingly, upon the death of Sewell, master of the rolls, shortly before parliament was dissolved, he yielded to the pressure of Pitt and Shelburne, resigned his chief-justiceship of Chester, accepted the mastership of the rolls, small as its emoluments were, was sworn in on 30 March 1784, became a member of the privy council 2 April 1784, and was knighted. As master of the rolls, and sitting often for the lord chancellor, he was one of the most expeditious judges who ever sat in chancery, and cleared off many arrears of causes. He avoided enunciating principles, and was content to decide each case barely on its merits. Retaining his right to sit in parliament, and being returned for Tregoney in Cornwall, he was entrusted by Pitt with the task of justifying the conduct of the high bailiff in the case of the Westminster scrutiny, and in the result the previous question was carried by 233 votes to 136. During the debates upon the motion for the impeachment of Warren Hastings he was a constant speaker in his defence, and especially (May 1786) resisted the motion for production of Hastings's correspondence with Middleton, minister at Lucknow, upon the ground that in a quasi-criminal proceeding discovery of documents ought not to be ordered. His best speech was made in defence of his old friend Sir Elijah Impey [q. v.] On 28 July 1784 he was created a baronet, and was already understood to be designated as Lord Mansfield's successor; but Lord Mansfield, who wished Buller to have the chief-justiceship, clung to office until 1788, when on 9 June Kenyon was sworn in as chief justice, with the title of Baron Kenyon of Gredington, and was installed in November. The appointment was not popular. His manners were rough, blunt, and somewhat boorish. ‘Little conversant with the manners of polite life,’ says Wraxall (Memoirs, 1st ser. p. 165), ‘he retained all the original coarse homeliness of his early habits. Irascible, destitute of all refinement, parsimonious even in a degree approaching to avarice,’ he was the subject of innumerable jests and stories. It was said of him by Lord Ellenborough that the words on his tomb, ‘mors janua vita,’ were not the result of a blunder, but of an attempt at thrift by sparing the expense of a diphthong. But his life was, and had been from youth, strict and temperate, and his integrity was as undoubted as his learning, quickness, and industry were great.
He was much consulted by Pitt and Thurlow upon the regency question during the king's illness in 1788, and was even summoned to attend cabinet councils. His principal trials were Rex v. Stockdale (State Trials, xxii. 253), in which he ruled in favour of making the question of libel or no libel a question for the jury, a view which he tenaciously opposed in the subsequent debates on Fox's Libel Act in 1792; the trials of Frost and of the publishers of the ‘Morning Chronicle’ for seditious libels in 1794, in which he pressed somewhat hardly upon the prisoners, though in the year following he voted with Thurlow against the Treasonable Attempts and the Seditious Meetings Bills; the trial of Reeves
