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Lord Stowell LORD STOWELL LORD STOWELL HIS LIFE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH PRIZE LAW BY E. S. ROSCOE REGISTRAR OF THE PRIZE COURT OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND " EDITOR OF 4i ENGLISH PRIZE CASES BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1916 Printed in Great Britain. PEEFATORY NOTE ONE result of the Great War has been a renewed interest in Lord Stowell's personality and in his judicial work. But his biography in Townsend's Twelve Eminent Judges, and the combined biography of the two Scotts in Surtees' short Lives of Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, were published in 1848 and are now out of print. The reader therefore who desires to become acquainted with Stowell's career is left for a modern biography to a slight sketch in a work called Great Jurists of the World, and to the brief, though, from its authorship, important article in the Dictionary of National Biography. The first aim, therefore, of the following pages is to present an impression of Stowell as a man, from which, supplemented by the tabular statement at the commencement of the book, a clear view can be obtained of the course of his life. The second aim is to enable a reader to realize Stowell's judicial work, to collect and to formulate thoughts and criticisms 372344 vi LORD STOWELL which a perusal of his decisions arouses, and to define the achievements of a judge and a jurist whose influence on one branch of British jurisprudence of international as well as of national value was individual, important, and permanent. Two portraits of Lord Stowell may be seen at Oxford one painted in 1807 by Hoppner, is at University College; another painted in 1827 by T. Phillips, is at Corpus Christi College. In the Library of University College is a statue on the same pediment as one of Lord Eldon. A third portrait by Phillips is in the Council Chamber, Town Hall, Newcastle- upon-Tyne. CONTENTS PAGE CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE ix CHAPTER I BIOGRAPHICAL : 1745-1780 OXFORD THE JOHNSON CIRCLE .... ] CHAPTER II BIOGRAPHICAL : 1780-1836 ADVOCATE JUDGE . 16 CHAPTER III THE PRIZE COURT AND PRIZE LAW 28 CHAPTER IV STOWELL'S JUDICIAL WORK AND ITS RESULTS 40 CHAPTER V SOME ILLUSTRATIVE JUDGMENTS . 53 CHAPTER VI THE STOWELL CASE LAW AND THE DECLARATION OF LONDON ....... 70 vii viii LORD STOWELL CHAPTER VII PAGE THE STOWELL CASE LAW IN THE GREAT WAR . 80 CHAPTER VIII STOWELL AS JUDGE OF THE HIGH COURT OF ADMIRALTY 94 APPENDICES I. REPORTS WHICH CONTAIN LORD STOWELL'S JUDG- MENTS, AND NOTE ON SOME MS. NOTES BY HIM . 103 II. CONTRABAND AND BLOCKADE . .105 III. LIST OF LORD STOWELL'S PRINCIPAL PRIZE DECISIONS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER . 110 IV. DOCTORS' COMMONS IN 1598 . 113 INDEX 115 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 1745 October 17 Born at Heworth, County Durham. Eldest son of William Scott of Newcastle-upon- Tyne, one of the Guild of ' ' Hoastmen," shipbroker, and merchant, who died in 1776, and of Jane, daughter of Henry Atkinson of Newcastle, merchant ; she died 18th July 1800. 1761 February 24 Elected a Durham Scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, after education at New- castle Grammar School. 1761 March 3 Matriculated. 1762 June 24 Student of Middle Temple. 1764 November 20 B.A. 1764 December 13 Probationary Fellow of University College. Resigned Fellowship April 7, 1782. 1765 June 14 Actual Fellow, and Tutor till 1776. 1767 June 17 M.A. 1772 May 30 B.C.L. of Ancient 1774 Elected Camden Reader History ; resigned 1785. 1777 Took chambers and lived at 3 King's Bench Walk, Temple, and began to keep Terms, but did not leave Oxford finally till 1780. 1779 June 23 D.C.L. 1779 November 5 Enrolled as an Advocate of the College of Doctors at Law exercent in the Ecclesi- astical and Admiralty Courts. 1780 February 11 Called to the Bar, Middle Temple. 1781 April 7 Marriage to Maria Anne, eldest daughter and co-heiress of John Baguall, Esq., 1 of Erleigh Court, Reading, who pur- it in she died on chased 1766 ; September 4, 1809. The Scotts lived at 5 College Square, Doctors' Commons. 1782 May 21 Appointed Advocate of the Admiralty. 1783 Appointed Registrar of the Court of Faculties. 1 See Erleigh Court and its Owners, by E. W. Dormer, Poynder, Reading, 1912. ix x LORD STOWELL 1784 ... Elected M.P. for Downtou, Wiltshire, but was unseated on petition. 1788 August 30 Appointed Judge of the Consistory Court of the Diocese of London ; resigned 1821. 1788 3 Advocate. September' Appointed King's 1788 ... Knighted. 1788 September 24 Appointed Vicar-General of the Province of Canterbury. 1790 ... Elected M.P. for Downton, through the influence of Lord Radnor who had been his pupil at Oxford. 1790 April3 Appointed Master of the Faculties. 1798 October 26 Appointed Judge of the High Court of Admiralty. 1801 March 23 Elected M. P. for the University of Oxford. 1813 April 10 Second marriage to Louisa Catherine, Dowager Marchioness of Sligo, and youngest daughter of Richard, first Earl Howe ; she died at Amsterdam on the 20th August 1817. On this marriage Lord Stowell removed to 11 Grafton Street. He had lived at 47 Leicester Square from 1807 to 1809, and then at 16 Grafton Street. Subsequently Lord Stowell lived at 16 Cleveland Row, after Lady Sligo's death at 11 Grafton Street. 1821 July 17 Created Baron Stowell of Stowell Park, County Gloucester. 1827 December 27 Resigned Judgeship of High Court of Admiralty. 1836 January 28 Died at Erleigh Court and was buried on February 3 at St. Andrew's Church, Sonning, Berks, leaving an only daughter surviving him (his only son William died on November 26, 1835, aged 42), Maria Anne Viscountess Sidmouth, who died 26th April 1842, when Lord Stowell's lauded property descended to his nephew, Viscount Encombe, son of the Earl of Eldon. Lord Stowell's estate was sworn under 250,000. At Sonning there is a memorial brass in the South Aisle and a mural monument over the doorway of the North Aisle. In the Temple Church is a tablet to the memory of Lords Stowell and Eldon, erected by the Society of the Middle ( ' Temple to the memory of these highly distinguished brothers." CHAPTER I BIOGRAPHICAL 1745-1780 OXFORD THE JOHNSON CIRCLE ON the 17th of October 1745, and again on June 4, 1751, a son was born to William " Scott hoastman," coal merchant, broker and shipowner of Newcastle - upon - Tyne. William, the elder of these two boys, be- came Lord Stowell, the creator of a definite and reasoned body of prize law in Great Britain and in the United States. John, the younger, afterwards Lord Eldon, was for many years Lord Chancellor of England. William Scott in his own generation achieved repute as a civil lawyer for his knowledge of ecclesiastical, of Admiralty and of prize law was remarkable, but he certainly was not then regarded as more noteworthy than other successful lawyers of his time, and when, in 1805, there were rumours at Westminster that he was about to receive a peerage it was i B 2 LORD STOWELL not as we should have expected looked on as an approaching reward for high judicial services, but for his silent votes in Parliament. " " 1 hope," wrote Fox to Windham, that our friend Sir William will not have his peerage, and that his close attendance and voting through thick and thin will not avail him." He was considered by his contemporaries a clever useful and agreeable person ; "a very " ingenious man was a description of him " when he was a tutor at Oxford ; one of the pleasantest men I ever knew," was Sir Walter Scott's estimate of him in later life. But not one of Scott's contemporaries foresaw that from an able Oxford tutor and a success- ful lawyer he would become a famous jurist, and as the names of the eminent judges of the later part of the eighteenth and of the beginning of the nineteenth centuries became more and more obscured by the enveloping mists of time, that of Stowell would continue to emerge, till it stands among those of the great jurists of the world, and as of one who has attained a positive and unique fame on both sides of the Atlantic as the creator of the modern prize law of England and America. William Scott was elected to a scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in February left 1761 ; he finally the University in 1780, when he was thirty-five. He had then been an THE JOHNSON CIRCLE 3 actual Fellow and a tutor of University College since 1765, and a University professor Cam- den Reader of Ancient History since 1773. In fact he did not resign the Readership till 1785, and thus continued in academic connection with his University after he had embarked on an active professional career in London. In the eighteenth century it was largely a matter of temperament whether a tutor at Oxford or Cambridge was sluggardly or active, " for he was left to his own devices, and com- paratively little help was given to the learner." Colleges were filled with Fellows, middle-aged " and old, who were like drone bees," and the younger and more energetic, who were probably in a quiet way less inactive than is often supposed, were lost in the supine crowd which was the easy butt of every University satirist. Scott, as his whole life showed, though not ambitious in the popular acceptation of the word, had a high sense of public duty and an unobtrusive energy which urged him to achieve- ment, and he became, without pressure, an efficient and conscientious teacher.
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