by Paula Byrne
In 1715, when William was in his tenth year, the recently formed political union between Scotland and England was shaken by the first ‘Jacobite’ rising, otherwise known as the ‘Fifteen’. This was an attempt, led from Scotland, to overthrow the newly installed Hanoverian King George I and restore the Stuart monarchical line that had come to an ignominious end with the deposition of King James II in 1688. Perceived to be returning the country to Catholicism, James was deposed and exiled when a group of powerful Protestant aristocrats invited William of Orange to come to England with an army. The Dutch invasion came to be known by Parliament as the ‘Glorious Revolution’; among its consequences were a strengthening of Protestantism, Whig supremacy and a limitation of royal powers. The Jacobites took their name from the Latinised form of ‘James’, and their ambition was to bring back ‘the king over the water’, James II’s eldest son, James Francis Edward Stuart, who became known as ‘the Old Pretender’. His son, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ or ‘the Young Pretender’, would lead another, more substantial, Jacobite rising thirty years later, in 1745. Both would end in military defeat. Scottish nationalistic resentment over the union and English suspicion of Jacobite tendencies were unavoidable contexts for the lives of families such as the Murrays, which had to make a choice between Scotland and England, Edinburgh and London.
On 15 March 1718, young William Murray set off for London on horseback to take up a place at Westminster School, where he hoped to win a scholarship. He was just thirteen. He stopped at Gretna Green for an overnight stay, then continued south despite problems with his horse, which fell lame in the first leg of the journey, meaning he had to walk part of the way. The distance from Perth to London by road is over four hundred miles. To have completed this trip was a mark of Murray’s tenacity and determination, and a testament to his great energy, which would be remarked upon throughout his life.
He never saw Scotland again.2 It was apropos Murray, by then Lord Mansfield, that Dr Johnson remarked to James Boswell, ‘Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.’3 Not a single letter survives from Murray to his parents, and it seems unlikely that he kept in contact with any of his siblings.4 For some of his critics, he was distancing himself from unsavoury Jacobite connections. His father openly supported James Stuart, as did several of his siblings, including his brother James, who was secretary of the Old Pretender’s court in exile in France.
Murray adored Westminster School, and made lifelong friends while he was there. In order to be made a King’s Scholar he had to take part in a strenuous oral test known as ‘the Challenge’, which lasted for several days. It took place in the presence of the head of the school and the heads of Christ Church, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge – the colleges most closely connected to Westminster. Murray was successful. As one of the special King’s Scholars he became part of a group of forty boys who lived together and were given an allowance. The King’s Scholars put on a Latin play every year, a tradition that began in the time of Queen Elizabeth I and continues today. In 1722 William Murray recited the Prologue to Terence’s Eunuchus (The Eunuch). In later life, when he was rich and successful, he gave a dinner on the second night of the play each year. His later remarkable achievements would not have been possible without the connections he made at school, where he was considered ‘one of the finest scholars’.5
The school stood in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, which served as its chapel, and students were permitted to listen to the debates in the nearby Houses of Parliament whenever they liked.6 William visited the courts at Westminster Hall to hear the lawyers and the judges, and Westminster would remain at the centre of his life. He was for a time a highly successful Member of Parliament, and as Lord Chief Justice he would preside over the King’s Bench in the splendour of Westminster Hall. After being made an Earl, he would become a member of the House of Lords. And in his will he specified that he should be buried at Westminster. The middle passage and Westminster: the two principal characters in our story could hardly have emerged from more different environments.
William Murray was admitted to Christ Church, the largest and grandest of the Oxford colleges, as a commoner in June 1723. The college archive records him as coming from Bath rather than Perth, allegedly because when he matriculated his thick Scottish accent was not understood. Though little is known of his Oxford years, at university he would certainly have honed his debating and oratorical skills. He also made a lifelong enemy in William Pitt the elder, whom he vanquished in a university poetry competition.7
At Christ Church, Murray read the works of the philo-sopher John Locke, a former student of the college and another Westminster boy. Despite his own personal involvement in the Royal Africa Company, which traded and gathered slaves on the west coast of Africa, Locke was an opponent of slavery. He began his First Treatise of Government (1690) with a powerful denunciation that was to have an impact on Murray in his famous ruling of 1772: ‘Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that ’tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for’t.’8
Murray was originally destined for the Church, but his family decided that he would be better suited to a career in the law. However, qualifying for the English Bar was extremely expensive, and it was only possible for Murray through the patronage of Thomas Foley, the father of a schoolfriend, who gave him £200 a year to live on. His most recent biographer, Norman Poser, describes ‘his extraordinary ability to cultivate people who could further his career’ – the father of another schoolfriend later bequeathed him an estate of five hundred acres in the Midlands, worth around £10,000.9 The young William Murray clearly made a great impression, with his intelligence, conversation and appetite for hard graft.
He was called to the Bar on 23 November 1730, taking a set of chambers at 5 King’s Bench Walk. He was introduced to the poet Alexander Pope around this time. The poet helped him with his oratory, making him practise gestures and phrases in front of a mirror. He became a father figure to the aspiring lawyer, and dubbed him ‘silver-tongued Murray’.10 Pope compared the young Murray to the Roman poet Ovid, and later celebrated him in one of the less elegant rhyming couplets in his ‘Imitations of Horace’ (1737): ‘Grac’d as thou art with all the power of words/So known, so honour’d, at the House of Lords’.
Pope came from a humble background. His family was Roman Catholic. He suffered from almost constant ill-health. He was derided by his enemies in the literary establishment. And he was only four and a half feet tall. It was a friendship that gave Mansfield a lifelong sympathy for the underdog and the outsider, and they would remain friends until Pope’s death in 1744. Pope wrote to Jonathan Swift that he valued the friendship of young people because they were more likely to be honest, and praised Murray as a man ‘I would never fear to hold out against all the corruption in the world’.11
Murray fell in love with a beautiful young woman called Clara, whom he may have met at Pope’s house in Twickenham. But his uncertain prospects outweighed his persuasive tongue, and despite her favourable interest in him, her parents prevented the match. Pope consoled him with more verses: ‘To number five direct your doves,/There spread round Murray all your blooming loves’ (number five was the address of Murray’s chambers).
Pope’s words soon came true, as Murray quickly bounced back from his rejection and married Lady Elizabeth Finch, the daughter of Daniel Finch, seventh Earl of Winchilsea and second Earl of Nottingham, at Raby Castle in Durham in 1738. A portrait of Murray by Jean-Baptiste van Loo painted at this time, probably to celebrate the nuptials, shows a lively and expressive face with bright brown eyes and long auburn hair. The match was seen by some as a politically advantageous piece of self-advancement, but it is clear that theirs was a happy marriage. Murray wrote from Raby Castle: ‘I am sure I shall be happy and nothing in my power shall be wanting to make Lady Betty so,’12 and he was as good as his word for the rest o
f his life.
At the age of thirty-three when she first met Murray, Lady Betty would have been considered by Georgian standards to be on the shelf. Other wealthy, aristocratic men had expressed a romantic interest in her, but by yoking herself to this ambitious young lawyer, she showed a certain spirit and independence. One of her friends, the society beauty Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, commented that the marriage had caused eyebrows to be raised: ‘People are divided in their opinion … on the prudence of her choice. I am amongst those who think … she has happily disposed of her person.’13
Lady Betty’s circle of friends included the famous ‘blue-stocking’ Mary Delaney, her close friend the Duchess of Portland, Margaret Bentinck, and Henrietta Howard. She clearly felt great pride in her husband’s achievements, and supported his ambitions, becoming his chief ally and confidante. The letters that survive show that she also took an interest in politics. In 1757 she wrote: ‘The present administration seems in a tottering condition. Shou’d it continue as it now is three months longer, I shall think the time I have employ’d in studying Politicks was all thrown away.’ She ended the letter: ‘I’m now at the end of paper as well as the end of my Politicks.’ Other letters describe a change of government and appointments to Cabinet posts, and rumours of William Pitt combining forces with the Duke of Newcastle – ‘half a loaf is better than no bread’, she added wryly.14
Short in stature but full of energy, Murray set to work raising himself to a status (and a degree of financial prosperity) appropriate to an earl’s son-in-law. The Murrays made their first home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, near the Inns of Court. Lady Betty and Murray were very sociable, and held regular Sunday-evening parties, at which they made important contacts. James Boswell was a friend, and left a vivid description of Murray: ‘He himself sat with his tye wig, his coat buttoned, his legs pushed much before him, and his heels off the ground, and knocking frequently but not hard against each other, and he talked neatly and with great vivacity.’15 Boswell, however, also noted that there was another side to Murray: ‘his cold reserve and sharpness were still too much for me. It was like being cut with a very, very cold instrument.’16
In the year of his marriage, Murray’s career reached a turning point when he was involved in a cause célèbre. He was junior counsel for a young man called William Sloper in a lawsuit involving the actor, playwright and poet Theophilus Cibber. Theophilus was the son of the far more famous Colley Cibber. Poet Laureate, manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, a fixture of the social scene at all the spa resorts, still acting in cameo comic parts though he was nearly seventy years old, Colley Cibber was arguably the greatest celebrity of the age. His name was never out of the newspapers and the pamphlet wars. He was a hard act to follow, and poor Theophilus was always in his shadow, and always short of money. For some time he and his wife Susannah Maria (a much-fêted actress and singer) lived in a ménage à trois in Kensington with William Sloper. In return for access to Susannah Maria’s bed, Sloper paid the rent and the household expenses. But when Theophilus slipped away to France to escape his creditors, Susannah Maria wrote to say that she was leaving him for Sloper. Cibber responded by suing Sloper for ‘criminal conversation’, or adultery. A country squire of not insubstantial means, Sloper was able to hire a powerful legal team, but it was the junior, William Murray, who made the most memorable summing-up of the defendant’s case:
The Plaintiff tells the servants the Defendant is a romp, and a good-natured boy; and he makes a boy of him. He takes his money, lets him maintain his family, resigns his wife to him, and then comes to a Court of Justice and to a Jury of gentlemen for reparation in damages … it would be of the utmost ill-consequence if it should once come to be understood in the world that two artful people, being husband and wife, might lay a snare for the affections of an unwary young gentleman, take a sum of money from him, and when he would part with no more, then come for a second sum to a Court of Justice.
Murray went on to make careful distinction between the moral and the legal issues of the case. He explained that he by no means desired to be regarded as an advocate for the immoral actions of Sloper, ‘but this is not a prosecution for the public, or to punish the immorality, this is only a question whether the Defendant has injured the Plaintiff; and certainly the Plaintiff cannot be injured if he has not only consented but has even taken a price’. The scrupulous separation of the enactment of justice according to the law from the larger questions of public morality would later be of great importance in Mansfield’s dealings with the slave trade. In conclusion he suggested, with wit and panache, that ‘if it should be thought requisite to find a verdict for the Plaintiff, we had not a denomination of coin small enough to be given him in damages’.17 The judge responded by granting Cibber a paltry £10 in damages.
‘Henceforth,’ Murray recalled, ‘business poured in upon me from all quarters, and from a few hundred pounds a year, I fortunately found myself in receipt of thousands.’18 Old Colley Cibber was not pleased at his son’s humiliation. Long an enemy of Pope – who would immortalise him in The Dunciad as the ‘King of Dunces’ – he responded by parodying the couplet about Murray being graced ‘with all the power of words’: ‘Persuasion tips his tongue whene’er he talks’ is followed by the bathos of ‘And he has chambers in the King’s Bench Walks’.19
Four years later Murray was made Solicitor General – deputy to the Attorney General, who was the chief legal adviser to the government and the Crown. He also entered Parliament. He became a bencher (senior member) at Lincoln’s Inn, and the government came to rely on him more and more for decisions on litigation, answers to questions on technicalities of both domestic and international law, and the drafting of legislation. In 1753, however, he was involved in an accusation that nearly ended his career. It was a reminder to Murray of the dangers of slander. He was accused by a former schoolfriend of being a dangerous Jacobite, who as a boy had made a toast to the Old Pretender. Also supposedly involved had been Murray’s great friend Andrew Stone, who had gone on to become a tutor to the Prince of Wales. The King dismissed the matter as mere gossip, but it was formally investigated by the Cabinet. Murray gave a moving and powerful denunciation of the charges against him, emphasising his loyalty to the Crown, and the fact that he had taken an oath of allegiance at Oxford.
In his speech, described by Horace Walpole as ‘an incomparable oration’, Murray said: ‘My great ambition is to go through life with the character of an honest man. I am not afraid of calumny. I had rather be the object than the author of it.’20 Despite these stout words, the case made him aware of the power of whispers around Court, Parliament and Chambers. Murray was found innocent of any wrongdoing, but the rumours that he was a Jacobite continued to dog him – despite the fact that he had been involved in the prosecution of the leaders of the uprising of 1745. Fear of Jacobite associations was probably one of the reasons he never returned to Scotland. Coming from north of the border, and having been subject to smears and false allegations, had given him an understanding of the position of the outsider and the victim. This made him all the more determined to listen to both points of view, and not to prejudge a case.
Murray’s most recent biographer, Norman Poser, provides strong evidence that casts doubt on his supposed rejection of Jacobitism. As a young man, Murray wrote two letters offering his support and loyalty to the Old Pretender, whom he called ‘the King’. By doing so, Murray, usually so careful and cautious, had made himself extremely vulnerable. Those letters were a time bomb, and could have put an end to his career if they ever came to light. Poser attests to an important contradiction in Murray’s character: ‘his inclination to present a persona to the outside world that was not necessarily consistent with his real thoughts’.21
Nevertheless, his name officially cleared, in 1754 he was elevated to the position of Attorney General. He and Lady Betty had moved from Lincoln’s Inn Fields to Bloomsbury Square, but now he needed a residence worthy of his new status – somewhere close to Westm
inster, but sufficiently rural for him to relax and live the life of a country gentleman.
He found the perfect place, on the edge of Hampstead Heath: Kenwood House. It would be Murray’s country retreat, a glittering symbol of his success and how far he had come. Bloomsbury Square was convenient enough when Parliament and the law courts were sitting, but Kenwood would be his home. It was a gleaming white villa, sitting high on a hill in 112 acres of lush parklands surrounded by an ancient wood. Across the Heath one could glimpse the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. As a young man, Murray had walked with Pope on Hampstead Heath, and had seen and coveted Kenwood, little imagining that one day it would be his.22
In 1756 Murray reached the pinnacle of the legal profession, becoming Lord Chief Justice, which made him the head of the judiciary and President of the Courts of England and Wales. He was created Lord Mansfield, Baron of Mansfield.* As befitted his newly elevated status, he commissioned the Scottish Adam brothers, the foremost architects of the day, to expand and remodel Kenwood. They added a third storey, and stuccoed the entire façade. An Ionic portico was added to the house’s entrance, to make it suitably classical. Entrance hall, staircase and ante-room were all created with supreme elegance. Robert Adam also remodelled the south front rooms, Lord Mansfield’s dressing room, the breakfast room, Lady Mansfield’s dressing room and the housekeeper’s room. In the 1770s he published an account of his work at Kenwood in a series of eight lavish engravings with accompanying texts. He wrote that Mansfield ‘gave full scope’ to his ideas, and that his brief was to preserve a similitude between the old and the new.23