The Reminiscences of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) Part 47

Alas! Campbell died that night suddenly, and by a singular interposition of Providence, Scarlett died suddenly the next day, Sunday. They met no more in this world.

In the course of my life I have suffered, like many others, from nameless afflictions--nameless because they do not exist. No one can localize this strange infirmity or realize it. You only know you have a sensation of depression. In every other respect I was perfectly well, yet I thought it was necessary to see a doctor. So it was, if I wished to be ill.

Being in this unhappy condition, I consulted Sir James Paget, then in the zenith of his fame.

It did not take him very long to test me. I think he did it with a smile, for I felt a good deal better after it.

"Just tell me," said he, "do you ever drink any water?"

"Now it's coming," I thought; "he's going to knock me off my wine." I thought, however, I would be equal to the occasion, and said,--

"I know what you are driving at: you want to know if I ever mix a little water in my wine."

"No, no, I don't," said he; "you are quite wrong, for if your water is good and your wine bad, you spoil your water; and if your wine is good and your water bad, you spoil your wine."

I took his advice--which was certainly worth the fee--and never mixed my wine with water after that, although I have some doubt as to whether I had ever done so before.

I came away in good heart, because I was so delighted that there was not a vestige of anything the matter with me.

With a view to enable me to give each case due consideration before fixing the poor wretch's doom after conviction, I invariably ordered the prisoner to stand down until all were tried.

I then spent a night in going through my notes in each case, so that if there were any circ.u.mstances that I could lay hold of by way of mitigation of the sentence, I did so.

I do not mean to say that I did this in trifling cases, such as a magistrate could dispose of, but in all cases of magnitude possibly involving penal servitude.

Once, however, I had made up my mind as to what was, in accordance with my judgment, the sentence to be pa.s.sed, I took care never to alter it upon any plea in mitigation whatever.

For this line of conduct I had the example of Sir Thomas Wilde, when, as Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, he travelled the Home Circuit. He was a marvellous and powerful judge in dealing with the facts of a case. He had tried a prisoner for larceny in stealing from a house a sack of peas. The prisoner's counsel had made for him a very poor and absurd defence, in which, over and over again, he had reiterated that one pea was very like another pea, and that he would be a bold man who would swear to the ident.i.ty of two peas.

This miserable defence made the Lord Chief Justice angry, and he summed up the case tersely but crus.h.i.+ngly to this effect: "Gentlemen, you have been told by the learned counsel very truly that one pea is very like another pea, and if the only evidence in this case had been that one pea had been taken from the house of the prosecutor, and a similar pea had been found in the prisoners house, I for one should have said it would have been insufficient evidence to justify the accusation that the prisoner had taken it.

"But such are _not_ the facts of this case; and when you find, as was the fact here, that on March 30 a sack appears in a particular place, marked with the prosecutor's initials, safe in his house at night, where it ought to have been but was not, on the morning of the 31st; and when you find that on that morning a sack of peas of precisely similar character was in the house of the prisoner in a precisely similar sack behind the door, the question very naturally arises, _How came_ those peas in that man's house? He says he found them; do you believe him? Did it ever occur to you, gentlemen, to find a similar sack of peas in the dead of the night on any road on which you chanced to be travelling?

"The prosecutor says the prisoner stole them, and that is the question I ask you to answer. Did he or not, in your opinion, steal them?"

I need not say what the verdict was. The man was _put back for sentence_. That is the point I am upon.

On the following morning the Lord Chief Justice, still a bit angry with the prisoner's counsel for the miserable imposture he had attempted upon the jury, said,--

"G.o.d forbid, prisoner at the bar, that the defence attempted by your counsel yesterday should aggravate the punishment which I am about to inflict upon you; and with a view to dispel from my mind all that was then urged on your behalf, I have taken the night to consider what sentence I ought to p.r.o.nounce."

Having said thus much about the speech for the defence, he gave a very moderate sentence of two or three months' imprisonment. Every sentence that this Chief Justice pa.s.sed had been well thought out and considered, and was the result of anxious deliberation--that is to say, in the serious cases that demanded it. Of course, I do not claim for my adopted system an infallibility which belongs to no human device, but only that during some years, by patiently following it, I was enabled the better to determine how I could combine justice with leniency.

CHAPTER XLV.

HOW I CROSS-EXAMINED PRINCE LOUIS NAPOLEON.

I have been often questioned in an indirect manner as to the amount of my income and the number of my briefs. I do not mean by the Income Tax Commissioners, but by private "authorities." I was often _told_ how much I must be making. Sometimes it was said, "Oh, the a.s.sociates'

Office verdict books show this and that." "Why, Hawkins, you must be making thirty thousand a year if you are making a penny. What a hard-working man you are! How _do_ you manage to get through it?"

Well, I had no answer. It is a curious inquisitiveness which it would do no one any good to gratify. I did not think it necessary to the happiness of my friends that they should know, and if it would afford _me_ any satisfaction, it was far better that they should name the amount than I. They could exaggerate it; I had no wish to do so. It is true enough in common language I worked hard, but working by system made it easy. Slovenly work is always hard work; you never get through it satisfactorily. It was by working easily that I got through so much. "Never fret" and "_toujours pret_" were my mottoes, as I told the chaplain; I hope he remembers them to this day. If they would not help him to a bishopric, nothing would. But I will say seriously that nothing is so great a help in our daily struggles as _good temper_, and with that observation I leave my friends still to wonder how I got through so much.

Judges often talk over their experiences at the Bar. Sometimes I talked of mine, and on one occasion told the following curious incident in my long career.

I mention this circ.u.mstance as a curiosity only so far as the incident is concerned, but as more than a curiosity so far as the legality of evading the substance of the law by a technicality is concerned.

All men are not privileged to cross-examine royalty, and especially future emperors.

On July 1, 1847, which was not very long after my call to the Bar, Prince Louis Napoleon, who afterwards became Emperor of the French, was residing in England.

Of course, in looking back upon a man who afterwards became an Emperor, the proportions seem to have altered, and he looks greater than his figure actually was. He is more important in one's eyes, and therefore from this point of view the event seems to be of greater magnitude than the mere police-court business that it was. When a man becomes great, the smallest details of his career increase in value and importance.

The Prince had given a man of the name of Charles Pollard into custody for stealing and obtaining by fraud two bills of exchange for 1,000 each.

I was instructed by one Saul (not of Tarsus) to defend, and old Saul thought it would be judicious to cross-examine the Prince into a c.o.c.ked hat, little dreaming what kind of a c.o.c.ked hat our opponent would one day wear.

But Saul, not content with this ordinary drum-beating kind of Old Bailey performance, in which there is much more alarm than harm, instructed me to make a few inquiries as to the Prince's private life, and so _show him up_ in public. Saul loved that kind of persecution.

To him the witness-box was a pillory, notwithstanding there was more mud attaching to the throwers than to the mere object of their attention.

Young as I was in my profession, I had sense enough to know that to dip into a prosecutor's private history, and the history of his father and grandfather, and a succession of grandmothers and aunts, was hardly the way to show that the prisoner had not stolen that gentleman's property, but was a good way to prevent the Prince from recommending him to mercy.

I therefore, in my simplicity, asked old Saul what the uncle of the Prince and his voyage in the _Bellerophon_, etc., had to do with this man's stealing these two bills of exchange.

"Never mind, Mr. Hawkins, you do it; it has a great deal to do with it."

However, I made up my own mind as to the course I should pursue, and having carefully read my "instructions," found that the man had been unjustly accused by this Napoleon--there never was a man so trampled on--and every word of the whole accusation was false. _So_ did some solicitors instruct young counsel in those days.

I started my business of cross-examination, accordingly, with a few tentative questions, testing whether the ice would bear before I took the other foot off dry land. It did not seem to be very strong, I thought. Some of them were a little bewildering, perhaps, but that, doubtless, was their only fault, which the Prince was desirous of amending, and he graciously appealed to me in a very sensible manner by suggesting that if I would put a question that he _could_ answer, he would do so.

I thought it a fair offer, even from a Prince, if I could only trust him. I kept my bargain, and definitely shaped my examination so that "Yes" and "No" should be all that would be necessary.

We got on very well indeed for some little time, his answers coming with great readiness and truth. He was perfectly straightforward, and so was I.

"Yes, sir," "No, sir;" that was all.

As I have said, at this time I had not had much experience in cross-examination, but I had some intuitive knowledge of the art waiting to be developed. Napoleon gave me my first lesson in that department.

"I am afraid, sir," said his Highness, "you have been sadly misinstructed in this case."

"I am afraid, sir, I have," said I. "One or the other of us must be wrong, and I am much inclined to think it's my solicitor."

It was a nice little bull, which the Prince liked apparently, for he laughed good-humouredly, and especially when I found, as I quickly did, that my strength was to sit still, which I also did.