appointed Secretary of State. The latter office he held until his death, which occurred in 1763. He built one of the finest of the houses in Henrietta-street, now known as No. 9, as his town residence, and had also a seat in the county Meath. A mezzotint of him, which is here reproduced, is preserved in the Irish National Gallery.1

There were in 1739 three Common Law Courts, the King's Bench, the Common Pleas, and the Exchequer; and in each of these there were three judges, a chief and two puisnes. The chiefship of the King's Bench was a place of much labour; and as the salary was only about £1300 a year, Primate Boulter despaired of getting an Englishman to accept it. It was held at the time of which I write by the Right Hon. John Rogerson. He was the son of Sir John Rogerson, sometime Lord Mayor and M.P. for the city of Dublin, whose memory is preserved in the quay called by his name, and through the marriage of his eldest daughter to the first peer of the house of Crichton is a direct ancestor of the present Earl of Erne. His wife was a grandniece of Edmund Ludlow, the regicide, and was also aunt to the first Earl Ludlow. Rogerson, who was returned to the last Parliament in the reign of Queen Anne, as member, like his father, for the city of Dublin, was, on the accession of George I., appointed Solicitor-General, and six years later, in 1720, promoted to be Attorney-General. When a vacancy in the Chancellorship was imminent, owing to Lord Midleton's resignation in 1725, Rogerson sought that position. He went to London to see the English Ministers, and was recommended to them by Lord Carteret, who was then Lord Lieutenant, as a person who had served the Crown with great ability and integrity, and who had a universal good character as well as considerable influence in Dublin as Recorder-an office which he held together with the law-officerships. In making this recommendation, Lord Carteret had apparently not consulted Primate Boulter, who, although he acknowledges that the only objection to Rogerson was his nationality, speaks of the rumour that he was to be given the custody of the Great Seal as an idle one. By the time Wyndham was appointed to the woolsack, Primate Boulter's influence was too strong to allow the elevation of an Irishman to that office to be even mentioned; and Rogerson, although reluctant to do so, was obliged to accept the chiefship of the King's Bench, from which Chief Justice Whitshed, the subject of Swift's invective, was transferred to Wyndham's place in the Common Pleas. To press his claims Rogerson had gone to London; and he was still in

1 Burke's "Landed Gentry," under "Carter of Shaen Manor"; "Letters written by Hugh Boulter, D.D.," vol. i., pp. 17, 56; "Liber Munerum"; The Irish Builder for 1893, p. 149; Letters from Coghill to Southwell, British Muesum MS. 21,122, ff. 29, 31, 91, 97; 21,123; ff. 20, 24, 32, 41, 62, 64; Pue's Occurrences, Aug. 11, 1739.

In Lodge's "Irish Peerage" (edition edited by Mervyn Archdall, vol. iii., p. 7) it is stated that Chief Justice Rogerson left a son; but in his will he mentions that he had no male issue.

3 See the Journal, vol. xxx., p. 115.

England when Whitshed, who only survived his transfer a few months, died. Rogerson then urged that the precedent established in Whitshed's case should be followed, and that he should be transferred to the chiefship of the Common Pleas, which was little more than a sinecure; but Primate Boulter opposed his claim, saying that the cases were entirely different, Whitshed having worn himself out in the King's Bench, while Rogerson had never sat a day in it; and the Primate was successful in his opposition. The circuits which at that period afforded the best accommodation for the judges were the Leinster and the Munster; and one or other of these Rogerson usually selected. The arrival of the judges was made. the occasion for much hospitality and gaiety in the county towns. When Rogerson was on the Leinster circuit in the summer of 1732, we read that at Wicklow two gentlemen of the grand jury gave a ball, which lasted until four o'clock in the morning, and that at Carlow, where magnificent preparations for a ball were also made, the sheriff and gentlemen of the county, after the courts rose, refreshed themselves in the taverns, and, having obtained drums and trumpets, diverted themselves in serenading the ladies until five o'clock in the morning. Rogerson's death took place in 1741, soon after the summer circuit, in his house in Henry-street, and he was interred privately but decently, as the newspapers of that day record, in the family burial-place in St. Werburgh's Church.'

The puisne judges of the King's Bench were Michael Ward and Henry Rose. Michael Ward, whose son was created Viscount Bangor, and who was a direct ancestor of the present holder of that title, was a man of good family, and became related by marriage to the noble house of the Mordaunts, Earls of Peterborough. As in the present day, a seat in Parliament was a desirable preliminary-so far as those promoted from the Irish Bar were concerned-to a seat on the Judicial Bench of this country, and Ward had represented the County Down in Parliament for fourteen years before he became a judge. He retained his seat on the Bench for twenty-two years until his death; but in the closing years of his life only went circuit when he could go the North-East, near his own home; and for the last two years he did not go circuit at all. In the announcement of his death, which took place at Castle Ward in February, 1759, when he was in his seventy-seventh year, it is stated that he filled his judicial position with the greatest probity and attention to business. Henry Rose, who was a collateral

2

1 "The Law Officers of Ireland," by Constantine J. Smyth; "Letters of Hugh Boulter, D.D.,' ,"vol. i., pp. 18, 92, 156-160; vol. ii., p. 94; Circuit Returns and Prerogative Wills in Public Record Office of Ireland; Newcastle Correspondence, British Museum MS. 32,687, f. 69; Dublin Weekly Journal, August 26, 1727; Dublin Evening Post, July 22-25, and July 29-August 1, 1732; Dublin Gazette, August 30, 1741.

"Historical Anecdotes of the Families of the Boleyns, Carys, Mordaunts, Hamiltons, and Jocelyns," by Emily Georgina Susanna Reilly (published 1839), p. 71; Circuit Returns; Pue's Occurrences, February 24-27, 1759.

ancestor of the Roses of Ahabeg and Foxhall, and was related by marriage to the Crosbies of Ardfert, was also a man of good family, and was educated at Oxford University. Like Ward, he made his way to the Bench as a member of the House of Commons, in which he occupied a seat for thirty-one years as a representative of the borough of Ardfert. As a judge he managed generally to go the Munster circuit; and while at Cork in the summer of 1738, with Chief Justice Reynolds, he was one of the principal guests at a series of entertainments given in honour of Henry Boyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, who visited that city at the same time. His death took place suddenly-he was found dead in his bed-in 1743; and his excellent virtues, which, we are told, were evidenced in his great abilities, application, and care as a judge, caused him to be much lamented. He was buried in St. Mary's Church, Dublin, where his wife had been interred a few years before.1

The chiefship of the Common Pleas was in 1739 held by the Right Hon. James Reynolds, an Englishman who had been sent over to this country in 1727 to fill that place on the death of Chief Justice Whitshed, Lord Wyndham's successor, and who had, like all the chief judges, been sworn a member of the Privy Council. The salary was not more than that of the chiefship of the King's Bench; but, as I have said, the duties were extremely light, and for this reason it was a more attractive position. Reynolds, who had acted as secretary to Sir Robert Walpole, and whose name had been mentioned some years before in connexion with a vacancy on the Irish Bench, belonged to a Cambridgeshire family of distinction, of which he proved to be the last representative, and while he was in Ireland an uncle and namesake of his occupied a seat on the English Judicial Bench as Chief Baron of the Exchequer. Primate Boulter, although suggesting, with that political finesse for which he was remarkable, that the announcement of the appointment should be delayed until the Irish Parliament, which was then sitting, rose, hailed the advent of Reynolds with delight, believing from the character which he had received of him that he would be a great strength to the prosecution of the policy that no Irish need apply. To some extent these expectations were doomed to disappointment, as Reynolds became the sworn friend of Lord Wyndham, and supported the Chancellor in his more liberal views; but notwithstanding, when Lord Wyndham's retirement took place, the Primate hurried up from the country, where he was holding his triennial visitation, and wrote off to England strongly advising the appointment of Reynolds, to whom his friend, Lord Wyndham, had just confided the information that he had tendered his resignation of the Great Seal. It was actually announced in the Dublin press that Reynolds was to be Lord Wyndham's successor; but Robert 1 Burke's "Landed Gentry," under Rose of Ahabeg and Foxhall"; Foster's "Alumni Oxonienses;" Circuit Returns; Dublin Evening Post, August 8-12, 1738; l'ue's Occurrences, May 6-10, 1740, and January 11-15, 1742-3.

Jocelyn, the Attorney-General, who had a powerful friend in Lord Hardwicke, the Chancellor of England, proved a successful rival. Reynolds was doubtless much chagrined, and in the following year obtained a transfer to the English Bench as a Baron of the Exchequer. That position, during his tenure of which he received the honour of knighthood, he held for some years until his death in 1747, as is recorded on a monument in the Church of Castle Camp in Cambridgeshire, near which he had a country seat, and where he was interred. A mezzotint of him, which is here reproduced, is preserved in the Irish National Gallery.

Reynolds usually chose one or other of the Northern Circuits, but occasionally went the Munster or Leinster. While on the North-East Circuit in the spring of 1729, Captain Lambert Peppard was tried before him at Trim for the murder of Mr. Henry Hayes in a duel which took place near Drogheda, and which is described in a broad-sheet of his time entitled, "A Full and True Account of a Bloody Duel fought between Henry Haze & Peper, Esqs., at Drogheda, on Saturday, the 22nd of this inst. Feb., 1728-9, in which Reencounter the former was shot thro' the Body." As the evidence, we are told in the report of the trial, tended to clear the action and character of Peppard, and to prove the passionate and unruly temper of Hayes, particularly in his strange and violent proceedings at the time of his death, Peppard was acquitted of the murder, and found guilty of manslaughter only. In the summer of the same year, Reynolds had the misfortune to go the Munster Circuit, where fever, which carried off Counsellor Dee at Cork after three days' illness, and Counsellor Maynard at Limerick, was then raging. But perhaps the most remarkable scene in which he played a part in Ireland took place while he was on the Munster Circuit in the spring of 1732, when he formed the central figure in a great demonstration organized in honour of the judges of assize, by one of the Fitz Maurices, who was then serving as High Sheriff of the County Kerry. This demonstration took the form of a most elaborate procession, which met the judges on their arrival at the border of that county, and in which appeared in succession, attired in the most gorgeous apparel, running footmen, grooms with led horses richly caparisoned, the High Sheriff magnificently mounted and preceded by a page bearing his wand, trumpeters, livery-men on black steeds, the Earl of Kerry's gentleman of the horse, steward, waiting gentlemen, and other domestics to the number of thirty-five, the gentlemen of the county, twenty led horses with field-cloths, and finally the judges. The day was most unpropitious, and all "this pomp and gallantry of equipage" had to march under a downpour of rain, which made the roads so heavy that

1 The same year saw the death of one of the officers of Chief Justice Reynolds' Court, who, judging from the following paragraph, was a remarkable character. "On Thursday last died Mr. Richard Roch (commonly called Beau Roch), Tipstaff and Crier of the Common Pleas."-Dublin Gazette, December 2-6, 1729.