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John Somers, 1st Baron Somers, PC, FRS (4 March 1651 – 26 April 1716) was an English Whig jurist and statesman. Somers first came to national attention in the trial of the Seven Bishops where he was on the their defence counsel. He published tracts on political topics such as the succession to the crown, where he elaborated his Whig principles in support of the Exclusionists. He played a leading part in shaping the Revolution settlement. He was Lord High Chancellor of England under King William III and was a chief architect of the union between England and Scotland achieved in 1707 and the Protestant succession achieved in 1714. He was a leading Whig during the twenty-five years after 1688. He was born at Claines, near Worcester, the eldest son of John Somers, an attorney in large practice in that town, who had formerly fought on the side of the Parliament, and of Catherine Ceaverne of Shropshire. After being at school at Queen Mary's Grammar School, Walsall, and Worcester he was entered as a 'gentleman commoner' at Trinity College, Oxford, and afterwards studied law under Sir Francis Winnington, who became solicitor-general, and joined the Middle Temple. He soon became intimate with the leaders of the country party especially with Lord Essex, William Russell, and Algernon Sidney but never entered into their plans so far as to commit himself beyond recall. He was the author of a pamphlet supporting the Exclusion Bill, A Brief History of the Succession, Collected out of the Records and the Most Authentical Historians (1680). Somers showed that Parliament had for centuries regulated the succession of the English crown against the arguments of those who believed that Parliament had no right to alter the succession. Before the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the Anglo-Saxon kings had been elected, and even after it Parliament had deposed kings and kings in turn had confirmed their title by Act of Parliament. Somers concluded:
He was reputed to have written the Just and Modest Vindication of the Two Last Parliaments, which was published in April 1681 as the answer to Charles II's famous declaration of his reasons for dissolving them. The authorship of this has been disputed. According to Bishop Burnet it was "first penned by Sidney; but a new draught was made by Somers, and corrected by Jones". Lord Hardwicke saw a copy in Somers's handwriting amongst his manuscripts before they were destroyed by fire in 1752. In 1681 Lord Shaftesbury was sent to the Tower of London without bail or recourse to a trial. In November he was charged at the Old Bailey for high treason, specifically for intending to levy war against the king. However the grand jury of Middlesex threw out the bill against Lord Shaftesbury, and were vehemently attacked for so doing by government supporters. Somers published anonymously The Security of Englishmen's Lives, or, The Trust, Power, and Duty of the Grand Juries of England in 1681. Somers acknowledged that judges may advise but juries "are bound by their Oaths to present the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth, to the best of their own, not the Judges, Knowledge". The monarch must ensure that justice is carried out:
Somers went on to argue that the monarch should hold the protection of the innocent above the punishment of the guilty:
In 1683 he was counsel for the sheriffs Pilkington and Shute before the court of King’s Bench, and secured a reputation which continually increased until the trial of the Seven Bishops, in which he was junior counsel. One of the bishop's objected that "too young and obscure a Man" should be retained on the defence counsel but Sir Henry Pollexfen refused to participate in the trial without him, saying that Somers was "the Man who would take most Pains, and go deepest into all that depended on Precedents and Records". In Macaulay's words: "Somers rose last. He spoke little more than five minutes: but every word was full of weighty matter; and when he sate down his reputation as an orator and a constitutional lawyer was established". In his speech Somers cited the case of Thomas v. Sorrel (1674) whereby it was ruled that no Act of Parliament could be abrogated except through Parliament. The bishops' petition had been described as a false, malicious and seditious libel. In his peroration Somers answered this charge:
In the secret councils of those who were planning the Glorious Revolution Somers took a leading part, and in the Convention Parliament was elected a member for his native city. He was immediately appointed one
of the managers for the Commons in the conferences between the houses,
and in arguing the questions whether James II had
left the throne vacant by abdication and whether the acts of the
Convention Parliament were legal — that parliament having been summoned
without the usual writs — he displayed great learning and legal subtlety. In his maiden speech on
28 January 1689, Somers argued that James II had forfeited his claim to
the allegiance of the English by casting himself into the hands of Louis XIV of France and conspiring "to subject the Nation to the Pope, as much as to a foreign prince". On
6 February Somers advocated the word "abdicate" rather than "desert"
(which the House of Lords favoured) to describe James' flight to
France. He concluded by stating that James' actions were a prime
example of the act of abdicating: That
King James II, by going about to subvert the constitution, and by
breaking the original contract between king and people, and by
violating the fundamental laws, and withdrawing himself out of the
kingdom, hath thereby renounced to be a king according to the
constitution, by avowing to govern by a despotic power, unknown to the
constitution, and inconsistent with it; he hath renounced to be a king
according to the law, such a king as he swore to be at his coronation,
such a king to whom the allegiance of an English subject is due. Challenged
by the Lords to produce a precedent whereby England had been without a
monarch, Somers referred to a parliamentary roll from 1399 that stated
that the throne had been unoccupied between the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV.
Somers could not point to the interregnum of 1649 – 1660 because by law
the reign of Charles II had started after the execution of Charles I.
The Lords replied by pointing to a roll from the first year of the
reign of Edward IV which showed that the roll of 1399 had been annulled. Sir George Treby supported Somers by producing the roll of the first year of the reign of Henry VII which repealed Edward IV's roll. Eventually
the Lords accepted the abdication clause and that the throne was vacant
at the behest of William, and passed a resolution affirming William and
Mary's right to the crown. Although
some historians such as Macaulay have claimed Somers was made chairman
of the committee which drew up the Declaration of Right, the
committee's report was delivered to the Commons by Sir George Treby
(the chairman always delivered the report to the House). However
Somers did play a leading part in drawing up the Declaration, which
would be passed in Parliament and become known as the Bill of Rights 1689. Although
later generations exaggerated Somers role as architect of the Bill of
Rights, his biographer asserts that no one else can have a better claim
to that title. Somers published anonymously A Vindication of the Proceedings of the Late Parliament of England in 1690. Here, Somers justified the war against France and Bill of Rights: The
proceedings of the late parliament were so fair, so prudent, so
necessary, and so advantageous to the nation, to the protestant
interest in general, and in particular to the church of England, that
all true Englishmen must needs acknowledge they owe to the then
representatives of the nation, their privileges, their liberties, their
lives, their religion, their present and future security from popery,
slavery, and arbitrary power, had they done nothing else but enacted
the rights and liberties of the subject, and settling the succession of
the crown. Somers
went on to place the abolishing of the dispensing power of sovereigns
first, then the parliamentary control of taxation, the outlawing of standing armies in time of peace unless Parliament decided otherwise, and the royal succession. Somers argued for the vital importance of the rule of law: Our
happiness then consists in this, that our princes are tied up to the
law as well as we, and upon an especial account obliged to keep it up
in full force, because if they destroyed the law, they destroyed at the
same time themselves, by overthrowing the very foundation of their
kingly grandeur and regal power. So that our government not being
arbitrary, but legal, not absolute but political, our princes can never
become arbitrary, absolute, or tyrants, without forfeiting at the same
time their royal character, by the breach of the essential conditions
of their regal power, which are to act according to the ancient customs
and standing laws of the nation. In May 1689 Somers was made solicitor-general. He now became William III's
most confidential adviser. In the controversy which arose between the
Houses on the question of the legality of the decision of the court of
King's Bench regarding Titus Oates,
and of the action of the Lords in sustaining this decision, Somers was
again the leading manager for the Commons, and has left a clear and
interesting account of the debates. He was next employed in January
1690 as chairman of the select committee of the House of Commons on the Corporation Bill,
by which those corporations which had surrendered their charters to the
Crown during the last two reigns were restored to their rights; but he
refused to associate himself with the violent measures of retaliation
which the Whigs on that occasion endeavoured to include in the bill. In
April a speech by him carried through the lower house, without
opposition, the bill which declared all the laws passed by the
Convention Parliament to be valid. As solicitor-general he had to
conduct the prosecution of Preston and Asbton in 1691, and did so with
a moderation and humanity which were in marked contrast to the customs
of the former reigns. He was soon after appointed attorney-general, and
in that capacity strongly opposed the bill for the regulation of trials
in cases of high treason. In December 1692 Somers introduced into the
commons a Bill "for the preservation of their Majesties' persons and
government". The two main provisions of the Bill were severe penalties
for anyone who spoke or printed asserted or implied that William and
Mary were monarchs only "in fact" and not "of right", and a new oath
for all who held offices of profit under the Crown in which they had to
swear to defend the government against the exiled king James and his
adherents. However the Bill was defeated by 200 to 175. On
23 March 1693, the great seal having meanwhile been in commission,
Somers was appointed Lord-Keeper, with a pension of £2000 a year
from the day on which he should quit his office, and at the same time
was made a privy councillor. He had previously been knighted. Somers
now became the most prominent member of the Whig Junto,
the small council which comprised the chief members of the Whig party.
When William left in May 1695 to take command of the army in the Netherlands,
Somers was made one of the seven lords-justices to whom the
administration of the kingdom during his absence was entrusted; and he
was instrumental in bringing about a reconciliation between William and
the Princess Anne.
In April 1697 Somers was made Lord Chancellor, and was created a peer by the title of Baron Somers,
of Evesham. When the discussion arose on the question of disbanding the
army, he summed up the case against disbanding, in answer to Trenchard
in a remarkable pamphlet called The Balancing Letter. In August 1698 he went to Tunbridge Wells for
his health. While there he received the king’s letter announcing the
first Partition Treaty, and at once replied with a memorandum
representing the necessity in the state of feeling in England of
avoiding further war. When the king, on the occasion of the Disbanding
Bill, expressed his determination to leave the country, Somers boldly
remonstrated, while he dearly expressed in a speech in the Lords the
danger of the course that was being taken. Hitherto Somers's character
had kept him free from attack at the hands of political opponents; but
his connection in 1699 with the notorious Captain William Kidd,
to the cost of whose expedition Somers had given £1,000, afforded
an opportunity; the vote of censure, however, proposed upon him in the
House of Commons for giving Kidd a commission under the great seal was
rejected by 199 to 131. The attack was renewed shortly on the ground of
his having accepted grants of Crown property to the amount of
£1600 a year, but was again defeated. On the subject of the Irish
forfeitures a third attack was made in 1700, a motion being brought
forward to request the king to remove Somers from his counsels and
presence for ever; but this again was rejected by a large majority. In
consequence, however, of the incessant agitation William now requested
Somers to resign; this he refused to do, but gave up the seals to
William's messenger. In 1701 he was impeached by the Commons on account
of the part he had taken in the negotiations relating to the Partition
Treaty in 1698, and defended himself most ably before the house,
answering the charges seriatim.
The impeachment was voted and sent up to the Lords, but was there
dismissed. On the death of the King, Somers retired almost entirely
into private life. He was President of the Royal Society from 1698 to 1703. He was, however, active in 1702 in opposing the Occasional Conformity Bill, and in 1706 was one of the managers of the union with Scotland. In the same year he carried a bill regulating and improving the proceedings of the law courts. He was made Lord President of the Council in 1708 upon the return of the Whigs to power, and retained the office until their downfall in 1710. He spent his later years at Brookmans Park in Hertfordshire. Somers died on the day the Septennial Bill — which
extended the maximum life of parliaments from three years to
seven — passed the Commons. A story, possibly apocryphal, goes that Charles Townshend visited Somers during his last illness, with Somers saying to Townshend on his death bed: I
have just heard of the work in which you are engaged, and [I]
congratulate you upon it. I never approved the Triennial Bill, and
always considered it, in effect, the reverse of what it was intended.
You have my hearty approbation of this business, and I think it will be
the greatest support possible to the liberty of the country. Somers
was never married, but left two sisters, of whom the eldest, Mary,
married Charles Cocks, whose grandson, Sir Charles Cocks, bart., became
the second Lord Somers in 1784, the title subsequently descending in
this line. In
the eighteenth century Somers was hailed as the chief constitutional
architect of the Protestant succession. The achievements of Somers and
other Whig lawyers defined Whiggism for those living in the reigns of
King George I and George II. William Pitt the Elder stated in 1761 that "he learnt his maxims and principles" from "the greatest
lawyers, generals and patriots of King William's days: named Lord
Somers". For the later eighteenth century Whig politician, Edmund Burke, Somers was of the "Old Whigs" whom he admired against the New Whigs who supported the French Revolution. Burke wrote that: "I never desire to be thought a better whig than Lord Somers". The Whig historian Thomas Macaulay, writing in the nineteenth century, held Somers in high esteem: ...the
greatest man among the members of the Junto, and in some respects, the
greatest man of that age, was the Lord Keeper Somers. He was equally
eminent as a jurist and as a politician, as an orator, and as a writer.
His speeches have perished; but his State papers remain, and are models
of terse, luminous, and dignified eloquence. He had left a great
reputation in the House of Commons, where he had, for four years, been
always heard with delight; and the Whig members still looked up to him
as their leader, and still held their meetings under his roof. ... In
truth, he united all the qualities of a great judge, an intellect
comprehensive, quick and acute, diligence, integrity, patience,
suavity. In council, the calm wisdom, which he possessed in a measure
rarely found among men of parts so quick and of opinions so decided as
his, acquired for him the authority of an oracle. ... From the
beginning to the end of his public life he was a steady Whig. A
fire at the law offices of Charles Yorke in Lincoln's Inn Square on 27
January 1752 destroyed a large amount of Somers' surviving private papers. |