SCROGGS, SIR WILLIAM (c. 1623-1683), lord chief justice of England, was the son of a butcher of sufficient means to give his son a university education. Scroggs went to Oriel college, and later to Pembroke college, Oxford. There is some evidence that he fought on the royalist side during the Civil War. He was called to the bar in 1653, was appointed a judge of the common pleas in 1676, and two years later was promoted to be lord chief justice. As lord chief justice Scroggs presided at the trial of the persons denounced by Titus Oates for com plicity in the "popish plot," and he treated these prisoners with characteristic violence and brutality, overwhelming them with indecent sarcasm and abuse while on their trial, and taunting them with savage mockery when sentencing them to death. He may at first have been a sincere believer in the existence of a plot; at all events he did nothing to test the credibility of such perjured witnesses as Oates, Bedloe, and Dangerfield. At the trial in Feb. 1679 of the prisoners accused of the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey he gave a characteristic exhibition of his methods, including a tirade against the Roman Catholic religion. But Oates' next move, accusing the queen's physician, Wakeman, seemed to be going too far, and in the succeeding trials Scroggs impugned the testimony of Bedloe and Oates, thereby incurring great unpopularity in the country. Oates and Bedloe now ar raigned him (168o) before the privy council for misconduct of the Wakeman case, but he was acquitted. The same year he
discharged the grand jury to save the duke of York from trial as a popish recusant. In Jan. 1681 he was impeached; dissolution saved him, but he was removed from the bench. He died on Oct. 25, 1683.
Scroggs was perhaps the worst of the judges who disgraced the English bench at a period when it had sunk to the lowest degradation; and although his infamy is less notorious than that of Jeffreys, his character exhibited fewer redeeming features. Scroggs was ,the author of a work on the Practice of Courts-Leet and Courts-Baron (London, 1701), and he edited reports of the State trials over which he presided. He was the subject of many contemporary satires.
See W. Cobbett, Complete Collection of State Trials (vols. of State Trials, 33 vols., London, 1809) ; • Roger North, Life of Lord Guilford, etc., edit. by A. Jessopp (3 vols., London, 1890), and Examen (London, 1740) ; Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Relation of State Affairs, (6 vols., Oxford, 1857) ; Anthony a Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, edited by P. Bliss (4 vols., London, ; Correspondence of the Family of Hatton, edit. by E. M. Thompson (2 vols., Camden Soc. 22, 23, London, 1878) ; Lord Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices of England (3 vols., London, ; Edward Foss, The Judges of England (9 vols., London, ; Sir J. F. Stephen, History of the Criminal Law of England (3 vols., London, 1883) ; Henry B. Irving, Life of Judge Jeffreys (London, 1898).