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JUDGE JEFFREYS: TOWARDS A REAPPRAISAL LAWYERS have always been a little uneasy in remembering the career of 'Judge Jeffreys'. To them, he has seemed a warning of the depths to which a member of their profession, whose high abilities were not associated with any moral scruples, could descend. He has lived in the history of the seventeenth century as the very worst of a collection of venal and tyrannical judges who distorted the Common Law in the interests of the arbitrary authority of Charles II and James II; and whilst there have been numerous historians who have found both those monarchs less culpable than has been generally supposed, few have sought to rehabilitate the judges who held office under them, and fewer still have had anything to say in extenuation of Jeffreys. He lives in the general estimation as a kind of judicial monster. At the beginning of his biography of William Blake, Gilbert Chesterton remarks that all the most important events in the poet's life occurred before he was born. It might similarly be said of George Jeffreys that all the most important events in his life occurred after his death. Jeffreys is, in reality, one of those persons whose true career and character have been replaced by legend, and it is only in the present century that the Jeffreys myth has been in part exploded. This is not, perhaps, remarkable. The Whig interpretation of the constitutional struggle of the seventeenth century has long passed, not only for orthodox constitutional doctrine, but for historical truth. Its arch-priest was Macaulay, and there is an unforgettable character-sketch of Jeffreys in his History. Some parts of it are demonstrably untrue, as, for example, his description of Jeffreys' physical appearance, presumably in the last phase of his career. If this is tested by the portraits of Jeffreys (there are those, for example, by Kneller), it will be found that Macaulay has drawn upon his imagination. Nevertheless, Macaulay's denunciation of Jeffreys passed for sober judgment for most of the nineteenth century, and it was reinforced by Campbell's fuller account of Jeffreys' career, both as a lawyer and as a politician, in his Lives of the Chancellors. Of Campbell's Lives, it has been said that as far as eminent lawyers were concerned, they added a new terror to dying. They are inaccurate, slip-shod, and full of personal bias, which has again passed for sober judgment. Campbell (a Scotsman) was himself a Whig, and later a Liberal, who became a Liberal Lord Chancellor,