Chapter XX
Stories of the Judges—Lord Eskgrove—His Appearance—The Trials for Sedition—Anecdotes of Circuit Dinners—‘Esky’ and the Harangue—The Soldier’s Breeches—Esky and the Veiled Witness—Henderson and the Fine—The Luss Robbers—Death of Eskgrove.
Stories about one or other of the judges were apparently the leading feature of conversation in Edinburgh society at the end of the eighteenth century. Lord Eskgrove, who, almost in his dotage at the age of seventy-six, was appointed to succeed Braxfield as head of the Criminal Court, was about the most ludicrous and childishly eccentric of the race. For a time it seemed the whole occupation of the wits to relate anecdotes about old Eskgrove. To give these anecdotes with a recognisable mimicry of his voice and manner was, in Cockburn’s phrase, ‘a sort of fortune in society.’ And Scott, he adds, in those days was famous for this particularly. It was not the wit or the humour of Eskgrove which amused. He seems to have had neither. It was simply his personal oddity, and the utter incongruity of such an incredible creature elevated to a position such as his. His face is described as varying from a scurfy red to a scurfy blue. His nose was prodigious: the under lip enormous, and supported on a huge clumsy chin, which moved like the jaw of a Dutch toy. He walked with a slow, stealthy step—something between a walk and a hirple, and helped himself on by short movements of his elbows, backwards and forwards, like fins. His voice was low and mumbling. His pronunciation seems to have been fantastic in the extreme, especially in the way of cutting even short words into two. The following anecdotes from Cockburn, who knew him, ‘when he was in the zenith of his absurdity,’ bring ‘Esky’ very vividly before us.
At the trial of Fysche Palmer for sedition, he made one of the very few remarks he ever made which had some little merit of their own. It was a retort to Mr. John Haggart, one of the prisoner’s counsel, who, in defending his client against the charge of disrespect to the king, quoted Burke’s statement that kings are naturally lovers of low company. “Then, sir, that says very little for you or your client! for if kinggs be lovers of low company, low company ought to be lovers of kinggs!”
‘Nothing disturbed him so much as the expense of the public dinner for which the judge on the circuit has a fixed allowance, and out of which the less he spends the more he gains. His devices for economy were often very diverting. His servant had strict orders to check the bottles of wine by laying aside the corks. Once at Stirling his lordship went behind a screen, while the company was still at table, and seeing an alarming row of corks, got into a warm altercation, which everybody heard, with John; maintaining it to be “impossibill” that they could have drunk so much. On being assured that they had, and were still going on—“Well, then, John, I must just protect myself!” On which he put a handful of the corks into his pocket, and resumed his seat.
‘Like the poor man in the story, Lord Eskgrove was “sair hauden doon by yon turkey cock.” The plague of his life for more than a year was Henry Brougham. In revenge the judge used to sneer at Brougham’s eloquence by styling it or him the Harangue. “Well, gentle-men, what did the Harangue say next? Why, it said this” (mis-stating it); “but here, gentle-men, the Harangue was most plainly wrong, and not intelligibill.”
‘Everything was connected by his terror with republican horrors. I heard him, in condemning a tailor to death for murdering a soldier by stabbing him, aggravate the offence thus: “And not only did you murder him, whereby he was bereaved of his life, but you did thrust, or push, or pierce, or project, or propell, the le-thall weapon through the belly-band of his regimen-tal breeches, which were his Majes-ty’s!”
‘In the trial of Glengarry for murder in a duel, a lady of great beauty was called as a witness. She came into court veiled. But before administering the oath Eskgrove gave her this exposition of her duty—“Young woman! you will now consider yourself as in the presence of Almighty God and of this High Court. Lift up your veil; throw off all modesty, and look me in the face.”
‘Sir John Henderson of Fordell, a zealous Whig, once came before the court, their lordships having to fix the amount of some discretionary penalty which he had incurred. Eskgrove began to give his opinion in a very low voice, but loud enough to be heard by those next him, to the effect that the fine ought to be £50; when Sir John, with his usual imprudence, interrupted him and begged him to raise his voice, adding that if judges did not speak so as to be heard, they might as well not speak at all. Eskgrove, who never could endure any imputation of bodily infirmity, asked his neighbour, “What does the fellow say?” “He says that, if you don’t speak out, you may as well hold your tongue.” “Oh, is that what he says? My lords, what I was sayingg was very simpell. I was only sayingg that in my humbell opinyon, this fine could not be less than two hundred and fifty pounds sterlingg”—this sum being roared out as loudly as his old angry voice could launch it.
‘His tediousness in charging juries was most dreadful, and he was the only judge who insisted on the old custom of making juries stand during the judge’s address. Often have I gone back to the court at midnight, and found him, whom I had left mumbling hours before, still going on, with the smoky unsnuffed tallow candles in greasy tin candlesticks, and the poor despairing jurymen, most of the audience having retired or being asleep; the wagging of his lordship’s nose and chin being the chief signs that he was still char-ging.
‘A very common arrangement of his logic to juries was this:—“And so, gentle-men, having shown you that the pannell’s argument is utterly impossibill, I shall now proceed for to show you that it is extremely improbabill.”
‘He rarely failed to signalise himself in pronouncing sentences of death. It was almost a matter of style with him to console the prisoner by assuring him that, “whatever your religi-ous persua-shon may be, or even if, as I suppose, you be of no persua-shon at all, there are plenty of rever-end gentle-men who will be most happy for to show you the way to yeternal life.”
‘He had to condemn two or three persons to die who had broken into a house at Luss, and assaulted Sir James Colquhoun and others, and robbed them of a large sum of money. He first, as was his almost constant practice, explained the nature of the various crimes, assault, robbery, and hamesucken—of which last he gave them the etymology; and he then reminded them that they attacked the house and the persons within it, and robbed them, and then came to this climax—“All this you did; and God preserve us! joost when they were sitten doon to their denner!’”
In concluding his reminiscences of Eskgrove Lord Cockburn says: ‘He was the staple of the public conversation; and so long as his old age lasted, he nearly drove Napoleon out of the Edinburgh world.... A story of Eskgrove is still preferred to all other stories. Only, the things that he did and said every day are beginning to be incredible to this correct and fiat age.’ Lord Eskgrove died in 1804, at the age of eighty.