XLII. Unsound mind means incapacity. The Com CHAP. attempt to set it aside must make a Judge to whom the application was made well consider the consequences that might attend it. If the words unsound mind must have a legal signification, the inquisition having returned Lord Ely of sound mind, to send the matter to a further enquiry would be a departure from the legal import of the expression, and to give room for the construction contended for; that by unsound mind was not meant a deprivation of the faculties of reason, but a degree of weakness. If that came to be the question a new scene would be opened. If the Crown, by right of the prerogative, could issue Commissions to try whether the party was of sufficient understanding to manage himself and his affairs, it would be very vague and uncertain, and an opening would be given to invade the liberty of the subject and the rights of property. That in this sense "unsound mind" did not relate to a degree of weakness, but incapacity. It was never known that there was an application for such a Commission on account of the interest the petitioner had, which might be affected, but the application the benefit was always on behalf of the person, and he thought if there was not this restriction upon the exercise of the prerogative, the whole economy of the law would be overturned. The law had wisely provided against fraud, imposition, and deceit of all kinds, and against those acts that might draw in weak persons to dissipate their property, but it had relation to particular acts, that must stand or fall by their circumstances, and did not proceed on the general principle of prerogative. Every day's observation presented persons in the possession of property, who might be clearly said not to have a capacity to manage, but that they were a prey for art and fraud, and yet the remedy was not by application to the prerogative, nor did our law know what the civil law admitted of curators, which might do very well in a constitution formed like the Roman, calculated for war and grandeur, not for commerce and the changes necessary for a commercial state. The consideration of the interest mission for of the person, not one merely interested in his property. No Curators known to our law. XLII. gestions of weakness will not of the person in remainder after an estate tail had CHAP. very little weight with him. He would be sorry to take from an unhappy subject the benefit of that part of the prerogative which was certainly originally calculated for the subject's benefit; but he would be much more sorry to extend the prerogative to other objects than the law had extended it. He must consider the subjects of these kingdoms in a strange light if suggestions of weakness were a foundation for the King to take the person and property of the subject into his hands. He did not know who was to be trusted with the power of issuing Mere sugsuch a Commission, nor where the jury, or set of men were, of abilities and properties necessary to determine questions of such a nature-an honest, conscientious man issuing a would be frightened at it. Dominion over his own pro- sion of perty was the blessing and happiness of a man living in Lunacy. free societies. The law allows alienation by people extremely weak, who are not capable of reasoning, but on a particular thing happening to be then before them, as in case of a man making his will in extremis, and as incapable of reading two skins of parchment as an Hebrew Bible, but if he knows the consequence of that act will be a disposing to one he likes, and from one he does not like, that will could not be overturned, and yet there was the greatest incapacity.' His Lordship refused to make any Petition order, and dismissed the Petition. Perhaps had I whole volumes to select from, I could not have produced a better sample of argumentative reasoning, mingled with noble sentiments and apt illustration, than this solitary specimen of Lord Chancellor Bowes' judgments. authorise Commis. dismissed. Lord This judgment was appealed from, and brought before Order of the House of Lords in Westminster on February 29, 1768. Chancellor It was argued for the appellant Rochfort by Charles appealed Yorke and A. Forrester, and resisted by F. Norton and A. Wedderburne,2 on the ground that an application for a 1 Afterwards Lord Chancellor of England. against. between findings for and СНАР. new Commission or melius inquirendum was without preXLII. cedent. The verdict upon inquisitions taken for the Distinction Crown, if the writ or Commission be regular, and the finding perfect, is by law traversable by the party, where the finding is for the Crown, but if the finding be against the Crown it is final; because, otherwise, such enquiries might be infinite, and productive of contradiction and uncertainty, and therefore no new Commission could in this case issue. against the Crown. Appeal dismissed. The Lords ordered and adjudged the Appeal should be dismissed.1 Rochfort v. Earl of Ely. 1 Brown Par. Cases, p. 450. CHAPTER XLIII. LIFE OF LORD LIFFORD, LORD CHANCELLOR, FROM HIS BIRTH TO THE СНАР. XLIII. Birth of James Hewitt. Mayor of Coventry. TRULY may the biographer of JAMES HEWITT say, 'As the man is universally esteemed more praiseworthy who ennobles himself by a series of brilliant actions, than he whose title devolves from a long race of ancestry, without ever by any action of his own deserving it;' we may respect such a man, and behold such an instance of commendation in Lord Lifford, who, from an attorney's apprentice, rose to the station of Lord Chancellor of Ireland. James Hewitt was born in Coventry, in the year 1709. His father, William Hewitt, Mercer and Draper, was unquestionably a man who stood high in the estimation His father of his fellow-citizens, for he was elected Mayor of the borough. It was no small feather in one's cap to be the Mayor of Coventry, the ancient city famous through the courage of the Lady Godiva; and in later days for the wealth of its manufacturers of silk and velvet, of which articles of commerce William Hewitt, the Mayor, had great store. He was a worthy successor of Thomas Bond, Successor Mayor of Coventry in 1506, whose thoughtful countenance Bond, is to be seen in a portrait, set in a richly-carved frame, founder of placed as it surely ought, within the Institution for ten Charity. men, bachelors or widowers, and a matron, residents of Coventry, which embalms his name in association with the most ennobling of all virtues-' Bond's Charity.' It was something for a youth of James Hewitt's intelligence, and love of relics of the past, to feast his eyes, and have his imagination quickened by the sights and scenes around his childhood's home. Even in our more prosaic days few can traverse the narrow streets of this old historic of Thomas Bond's CHAP. town without acting in some measure the part of Peeping Tom, and gazing on beauty-but a beauty of the past— beauty in lime and stone-not living, breathing, moving, animated flesh and blood. The young mind of James Hewitt must have expanded as he gazed on the glorious Church of Church of St. Michael and All Angels, the mellow tints of St. Michael the stone giving to the pile in the sunlight a halo of anti and All Angels. Antiquity of the Coventry churches. of a pro quity. Then, as he grew older, and could appreciate more fully the beautiful in architecture, he passed much of his time admiring the mighty tower and spire, as it points heavenward, marking the effects of time in softening the angles, shading the hard outlines, and lending a sense of the respect due to age, in the creations of man's art, as in humanity itself. Some of the old churches of Hewitt's native town have a wonderful longevity. There is the Church of St. Michael's, dating from A.D. 1133, and Trinity from 1269, restored often, of course, but still preserving many of the old lineaments; though, as has been shrewdly remarked, the mind at once seizes the point of distinction between these clever and suitable designs-done to order, and done on a pattern-and the fantastic, eloquent carvings in which each man's hand wrought out the fancy, the moral, the satire, or the aspiration which arose in his own soul.' This makes the difference between the old Catholic churches, preserved in their integrity, and those altered to suit the Reformed faith. The former in their stateliness and beauty typify the faith of the founders, where every object is symbolic and suggestive, preaching, as far as sculpture, or painting, or carving may, of man's littleness, his brief time here, and the eternity and immensity of the great Being in whose name, and for whose worship, the Temple was reared. Education, Young Hewitt was early and carefully instructed in and choice the usual branches of education, and then the Mayor of Coventry desired his son to make choice of some profession which would afford him employment, and, if it pleased God to bless his labours, subsistence in life. Well aware fession. |