antagonist, Sir Edward Coke. The chancellor’s court of equity had originated in the necessity for a tribunal to decide cases not served by the common law, and to relax and correct the rigidity and insufficiency of the latter’s procedure. The two jurisdictions had remained bitter rivals, the common-law bar complaining of the arbitrary and unrestricted powers of the chancellor, and the equity lawyers censuring and ridiculing the failures of justice in the courts of common law. The disputes between the courts, concerning which the king had already in 1615 remonstrated with the chancellor and Sir Edward Coke,[1] the lord chief justice, came to a crisis in 1616, when the court of chancery granted relief against judgments at common law in the cases of Heath v. Rydley and Courtney v. Granvil. This relief was declared by Coke and other judges sitting with him to be illegal, and a counter-attack was made by a praemunire, brought against the parties concerned in the suit in chancery. The grand jury, however, refused to bring in a true bill against them, in spite of Coke’s threats and assurances that the chancellor was dead, and the dispute was referred to the king himself, who after consulting his counsel and on Bacon’s advice decided in favour of equity. The chancellor’s triumph was a great one, and from this time the equitable jurisdiction of the court of chancery was unquestioned. In June 1616 he supported the king in his dispute with and dismissal of Coke in the case of the commendams, agreeing with Bacon that it was the judge’s duty to communicate with the king, before giving judgments in which his interests were concerned, and in November warned the new lord chief justice against imitating the errors of his predecessor and especially his love of “popularity.”[2] Writing in 1609 to Salisbury, the chancellor had described Coke (who had long been a thorn in his flesh) as a “frantic, turbulent and idle broken brayned fellow,” apologizing for so often troubling Salisbury on this subject, “no fit exercise for a chancellor and a treasurer.”[3] He now summoned Coke before him and communicated to him the king’s dissatisfaction with his Reports, desiring, however, to be spared further service in his disgracing. After several petitions for leave to retire through failing health, he at last, on the 3rd of March 1617, delivered up to James the great seal, which he had held continuously for the unprecedented term of nearly twenty-one years. On the 7th of November 1616 he had been created Viscount Brackley, and his death took place on the 15th of March 1617. Half an hour before his decease James sent Bacon, then his successor as lord keeper, with the gift of an earldom, and the presidentship of the council with a pension of £3000 a year, which the dying man declined as earthly vanities with which he had no more concern. He was buried at Dodleston in Cheshire.
As Lord Chancellor Ellesmere he is a striking figure in the long line of illustrious English judges. No instance of excessive or improper use of his jurisdiction is recorded, and the famous case which precipitated the contest between the courts was a clear travesty of justice, undoubtedly fit for the chancellor’s intervention. He refused to answer any communications from suitors in his court,[4] and it was doubtless to Ellesmere (as weeding out the “enormous sin” of judicial corruption)[5] that John Donne, who was his secretary, addressed his fifth satire. He gained Camden’s admiration, who records an anagram on his name, “Gestat Honorem.” Bacon, whose merit he had early recognized, and whose claims to the office of solicitor-general he had unavailingly supported both in 1594 and 1606, calls him “a true sage, a salvia in the garden of the state,” and speaks with gratitude of his “fatherly kindness.” Ben Jonson, among the poets, extolled in an epigram his “wing’d judgements,” “purest hands,” and constancy. Though endowed with considerable oratorical gifts he followed the true judicial tradition and affected to despise eloquence as “not decorum for judges, that ought to respect the Matter and not the Humours of the Hearers.”[6] Like others of his day he hoped to see a codification of the laws,[7] and appears to have had greater faith in judge-made law than in statutes of the realm, advising the parliament (October 27, 1601) “that laws in force might be revised and explained and no new laws made,” and describing the Statute of Wills passed in Henry VIII.’s reign as the “ruin of ancient families” and “the nurse of forgeries.” In the thirty-eighth year of Elizabeth he drew up rules for procedure in the Star Chamber,[8] restricting the fees, and in the eighth of James I. ordinances for remedying abuses in the court of chancery. In 1609 he published his judgment in the case of the Post Nati, which appears to be the only certain work of his authorship. The following have been ascribed to him:—The Privileges and Prerogatives of the High Court of Chancery (1641); Certain Observations concerning the Office of the Lord Chancellor (1651)—denied by Lord Chancellor Hardwicke in A Discourse of the Judicial Authority of the Master of the Rolls (1728) to be Lord Ellesmere’s work; Observations on Lord Coke’s Reports, ed. by G. Paul (about 1710), the only evidence of his authorship being apparently that the MS. was in his handwriting; four MSS., bequeathed to his chaplain, Bishop Williams, viz. The Prerogative Royal, Privileges of Parliament, Proceedings in Chancery and The Power of the Star Chamber; Notes and Observations on Magna Charta, &c., Sept. 1615 (Harl. 4265, f. 35), and An Abridgment of Lord Coke’s Reports (see MS. note by F. Hargrave in his copy of Certain Observations concerning the Office of Lord Chancellor, Brit. Mus. 510 a 5, also Life of Egerton, p. 80, note T, catalogue of Harleian collection, and Walpole’s Royal and Noble Authors, 1806, ii. 170).
He was thrice married. By his first wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Ravenscroft of Bretton, Flintshire, he had two sons and a daughter. The elder son, Thomas, predeceased him, leaving three daughters. The younger, John, succeeded his father as 2nd Viscount Brackley, was created earl of Bridgewater, and, marrying Lady Frances Stanley (daughter of his father’s third wife, widow of the 5th earl of Derby), was the ancestor of the earls and dukes of Bridgewater (q.v.), whose male line became extinct in 1829. In 1846 the titles of Ellesmere and Brackley were revived in the person of the 1st earl of Ellesmere (q.v.), descended from Lady Louisa Egerton, daughter and co-heir of the 1st duke of Bridgewater.
No adequate life of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere has been written, for which, however, materials exist in the Bridgewater MSS., very scantily calendared in Hist. MSS. Comm. 11th Rep. p. 24, and app. pt. vii. p. 126. A small selection, with the omission, however, of personal and family matters intended for a separate projected Life which was never published, was edited by J. P. Collier for the Camden Society in 1840.
BRACKLEY, a market town and municipal borough in the
southern parliamentary division of Northamptonshire, England,
59 m. N.W. by W. from London by the Great Central railway;
served also by a branch of the London & North-Western railway.
Pop. (1901) 2467. The church of St Peter, the body of which
is Decorated and Perpendicular, has a beautiful Early English
tower. Magdalen College school was founded in 1447 by William
of Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, bearing the name of his
great college at Oxford. Of a previous foundation of the 12th
century, called the Hospital of St John, the transitional Norman
and Early English chapel remains. Brewing is carried on.
The borough is under a mayor, 4 aldermen and 12 councillors.
Area, 3489 acres.
Brackley (Brachelai, Brackele) was held in 1086 by Earl Alberie, from whom it passed to the earl of Leicester and thence to the families of De Quinci and Holand. Brilliant tournaments were held in 1249 and 1267, and others were prohibited in 1222 and 1244. The market, formerly held on Sunday, was changed in 1218 to Wednesday, and in answer to a writ of Quo Warranto Maud de Holand claimed in 1330 that her family had held a fair on St Andrew’s day from time immemorial. In 1553 Mary granted two fairs to the earl of Derby. By charter of 1686
- ↑ Cal. St. Pap., Dom., 1611–1618, p. 381.
- ↑ Cal. St. Pap., Dom., 1611–1618, p. 407.
- ↑ Lansdowne MS. 91, f. 41.
- ↑ Hist. MSS. Comm. app. pt. vii. p. 156.
- ↑ Life of Donne, by E. Gosse, i. 43.
- ↑ Judgment on the Post Nati.
- ↑ Speech to the parliament, 24th of October 1597.
- ↑ Harleian MS. 2310, f. i.; Gardiner’s Hist. of England, ix. 56.
