ERSKINE, THOMAS ERSKINE, 1ST BARON (1750 1823), lord chancellor of England, was the third son of the loth earl of Buchan, and was born in Edinburgh on Jan. ro, 175o. He was educated at the high school of Edinburgh and the grammar school at St. Andrews, and in 1764 became a midshipman. In 1768 he left the navy and bought a commission in the 1st Royals, but promotion here was no better; he married in 177o, the daughter of Mr. Moore, M. P. for Marlow. A chance interview with Lord Mansfield decided him to try the law, and he entered Lincoln's Inn in 1775. He read with Buller and Wood, and was called to the bar in 1778. He made an instant success, getting a brief at once, owing to the chance of his having been a sailor, for Baillie, accused of libel in a pamphlet on the management of Greenwich hospital. Erskine was the junior of five counsel; and it was his good fortune that the prolixity of his leaders con sumed the whole of the first day, thereby giving the advantage of starting afresh next morning. He made use of this opportunity to deliver a speech of wonderful eloquence, skill and courage, which captivated both the audience and the court. The rule was discharged, and Erskine's fortune was made. He received, it is said, 3o retainers before he left the court. In 1781 he delivered another remarkable speech, in defence of Lord George Gordon— a speech which gave the death-blow to the doctrine of constructive treason.
In 1783, when the Coalition ministry came into power, he was returned to parliament as member for Portsmouth. He and Eldon made their maiden speeches together on Fox's India bill, and both were failures; Erskine was never a success in parliament. He be came a K.C. in '783, four and one-half years from his call, and was the first counsel to give up his circuit and only take special retain ers. In 1783 he received a patent of precedence. His first special retainer was in defence of Dr. W. D. Shipley, dean of St. Asaph, who was tried in 1784 at Shrewsbury for seditious libel—a defence to which was due the passing of the Libel Act 1792, laying down the principle for which Erskine here unsuccessfully contended, that it is for the jury, and not for the judge to decide the question whether or no a publication is a libel. In 1789 he was counsel for John Stockdale, a bookseller, who was charged with seditious libel in publishing a pamphlet in favour of Warren Hastings, whose trial was then proceeding; and his speech on this occasion, prob ably his greatest effort, is a consummate specimen of the art of ad dressing a jury. Three years afterwards he brought down the opposition alike of friends and foes by defending Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man—holding that an advocate has no right, by refusing a brief, to convert himself into a judge. As a consequence he lost the office of attorney-general to the prince of Wales, to which he had been appointed in 1786; the prince, how ever, subsequently made amends by making him his chancellor.
In 1794 he conducted the defence in the Parliamentary Reform cases; he secured the acquittal in turn of Hardy, by a magnificent speech, of Home, Horne Tooke and Thelwall. The attorney-general then gave it up, and the other prisoners were discharged. This gained Erskine enormous popularity. In 18o6 he was made lord chancellor in Grenville's ministry, for which he was totally un fitted. The rest of his life was unhappy; he never received office again, and he made his financial position worse by an imprudent second marriage. But in the defence of Queen Caroline he re turned to his old eminence. On this he made his last speech in the House of Lords, and for his last few years he was again the popular idol. He died at Almondell, Linlithgowshire, on Nov. 17, 1823, of pneumonia, caught on the voyage to Scotland.
Erskine's great forensic reputation was, to a certain extent, a concomitant of the numerous political trials of the day, but it was also due to his impassioned eloquence and undaunted courage, which so often carried audience and jury and even the court along with him. As a judge he did not succeed; and it has been ques tioned whether under any circumstances he could have succeeded. For the office of chancellor he was plainly unfit. As a lawyer he was well read, but by no means profound. His strength lay in the keenness of his reasoning faculty, in his dexterity and the ability with Which he disentangled complicated masses of evidence, and above all in his unrivalled power of fixing and commanding the attention of juries. He was probably the greatest advocate the English bar has ever seen.