JEFFREYS, GEORGE JEFFREYS, 1ST BARON (1648 1689), lord chancellor of England, son of John Jeffreys, a Welsh country gentleman, was born at Acton Park, in Denbighshire, in 1648. He was educated at Shrewsbury, St. Paul's and Westminster schools, and at Trinity college, Cambridge, and entered the Inner Temple in 1663. Within three years of his call to the bar in 1668, he was elected common serjeant of the City of London. Jeffreys had remarkable aptitude for the profession of an advo cate—quick intelligence, caustic humour, copious eloquence. His powers of cross-examination were masterly; and if he was insuffi ciently grounded in legal principles to become a profound lawyer, nothing but greater application was needed in the opinion of so hostile a critic as Lord Campbell, to have made him the rival of Nottingham and Hale. While holding the office of common serjeant, he pursued his practice at the bar. With a view to fur ther preferment he now sought to ingratiate himself with the court party, to which he obtained an introduction possibly through William Chiffinch, the notorious keeper of the king's closet. He at once attached himself to the king's mistress, the duchess of Portsmouth; and as early as 1672 he was employed in confidential business by the court. He was knighted in 1677, became solicitor general to James Duke of York, and recorder of London in 1678.
In the previous month Titus Oates had made his first revela tions of the alleged popish plot, and from this time forward Jeffreys was prominently identified, either as advocate or judge, with the memorable state trials by which the political conflict between the crown and the people was waged during the remainder of the 17th century. Jeffreys threw in his lot with the court, displaying his zeal by initiating the movement of the "abhorrers" (q.v.) against the "petitioners" who were giving voice to the popular demand for the summoning of parliament. He was re warded with the office of chief justice of Chester in 168o ; but when parliament met in October a hostile resolution induced him to resign his recordership, a piece of pusillanimity that drew from the king the remark that Jeffreys was "not parliament-proof." In 1683 the first of the Rye House conspirators were brought to trial. Jeffreys was briefed for the crown in the prosecution of Lord William Howard ; and, having been raised to the bench as lord chief justice of the king's bench, he presided at the trials of Algernon Sidney in 1683 and of Sir Thomas Armstrong in the following year. In 1685 he passed sentence on Titus Oates for perjury in the plot trials; and about the same time James II. rewarded his zeal with a peerage as Baron Jeffreys of Wem, an honour never before conferred on a chief justice during his tenure of office. Jeffreys had been suffering from stone, and the malady probably was in some degree the cause of the unmeasured fury he displayed at the trial of Richard Baxter (q.v.) for seditious libel—if the unofficial ex parte report of the trial, which alone exists, is to be accepted as trustworthy.
In 1685 Jeffreys opened at Winchester the "bloody assizes," his conduct of which has branded his name with infamy. The num ber of persons sentenced to death at these assizes for complicity in the duke of Monmouth's insurrection is uncertain. The official return of those actually executed was 32o ; many hundreds more were transported and sold into slavery in the West Indies. In all probability the majority of those condemned were in fact concerned in the rising, but the trials were in many cases a mockery of justice. Numbers were cajoled into pleading guilty; the case for the prisoners seldom obtained a hearing. The merci less severity of the chief justice did not however exceed the wishes of James II. ; for on his return to London Jeffreys received from the king the great seal with the title of lord chancellor. For the next two years he was a strenuous upholder of prerogative, though he was less abjectly pliant than has sometimes been represented. He even withstood James on occasion, when the latter pushed his Catholic zeal to extremes. But while he watched with mis giving the king's preferment of Roman Catholics, he made him self the masterful instrument of unconstitutional prerogative in coercing the authorities of Cambridge university, who in 1687 refused to confer degrees on a Benedictine monk, and the fellows of Magdalen college, Oxford, who declined to elect as their presi dent a disreputable nominee of the king.
Being thus conspicuously identified with the most tyrannical measures of James II., Jeffreys was in a desperate plight when the king fled from the country on the approach of William of Orange. The lord chancellor also attempted to escape; but in spite of his disguise as a common seaman he was recognized in a tavern at Wapping and was arrested and conveyed to the Tower.
The malady from which he had long suffered had recently made fatal progress, and he died in the Tower on April 18, 1689.
It is impossible to determine precisely with what justice tradi tion has made the name of "Judge Jeffreys" a byword of infamy. The Revolution, which brought about his fall, handed over his reputation to the mercy of his bitterest enemies. They alone have recorded his actions and appraised his motives and character, and their lampoons, while they fanned the undiscriminating hatred of contemporaries who remembered the judge's severities. and per petuated that hatred in tradition, have not been sufficiently dis counted even by historians like Macaulay and Lord Campbell. The name of Jeffreys has therefore been handed down as that of a coarse, ignorant, dissolute bully, who prostituted the seat of justice. That there was ground for the execration is not to be gainsaid. But the portrait has nevertheless been blackened over much. An occasional significant admission in his favour may be gleaned even from the writings of his enemies. Roger North and Jekyll have both admitted that in matters where the inter ests of the court were not concerned, he was as good a judge as they had seen. His conduct to prisoners was a failing so common to the age that not even Hale was exempt from it.
Some of his actions that haye incurred the sternest reprobation were otherwise estimated by the best of his contemporaries. His trial of Algernon Sidney, decribed by Macaulay and Lord Camp bell as one of the most heinous of his iniquities, was warmly commended by Dr. William Lloyd, one of the seven bishops (see letter from the bishop of St. Asaph in H. B. Irving's Life of Judge Jeffreys, p. 184). Nor was the habitual illegality of his procedure so unquestionable as frequently assumed. Sir James Stephen inclined to the opinion that no actual abuse of law tainted the trials of the Rye House conspirators, or that of Alice Lisle, the most prominent victim of the "bloody assizes." The conduct of the judges in Russell's trial was, he thinks, "moderate and fair in general"; and the trial of Sidney "much resembled that of Russell." If Jeffreys judged political offenders with cruel severity, he also crushed some glaring abuses; conspicuous ex amples of which were the frauds of attorneys who infested West minster hall, and the systematic kidnapping practised by the municipal authorities of Bristol. Even though the popular notion requires to be modified, it remains incontestable that Jeffreys was probably on the whole the worst example of a period when the administration of justice in England had sunk to the lowest degradation, and the judicial bench had become the too willing tool of an unconstitutional and unscrupulous executive.