Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I LAYING DOWN THE LAW: 600–1500
- PART II CONFLICT OF LAWS: 1500–1766
- PART III THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE LAW
- 18 The Purity of England's Air
- 19 The Menace of the Mob
- 20 The Fear of the Felon
- 21 Garrow's Law?
- 22 The Tongue of Cicero: Thomas Erskine
- 23 The Drum Major of Liberty: Henry Brougham
- 24 The Bonfire of the Inanities: Peel, Public Protection and the Police
- 25 Lunacy and the Law
- 26 Necessity Knows No Law
- 27 The Apollo of the Bar: Edward Marshall Hall
- PART IV THE RULE OF LAW: 1907–2014
- Bibliography
- Index
22 - The Tongue of Cicero: Thomas Erskine
from PART III - THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE LAW
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I LAYING DOWN THE LAW: 600–1500
- PART II CONFLICT OF LAWS: 1500–1766
- PART III THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE LAW
- 18 The Purity of England's Air
- 19 The Menace of the Mob
- 20 The Fear of the Felon
- 21 Garrow's Law?
- 22 The Tongue of Cicero: Thomas Erskine
- 23 The Drum Major of Liberty: Henry Brougham
- 24 The Bonfire of the Inanities: Peel, Public Protection and the Police
- 25 Lunacy and the Law
- 26 Necessity Knows No Law
- 27 The Apollo of the Bar: Edward Marshall Hall
- PART IV THE RULE OF LAW: 1907–2014
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It was reserved for the genius of Erskine to pour a new light upon the courts, to refine, elevate, and electrify his audience. He coerced the sympathies of jurors by some potent spell, and in answer to his impassioned appeal, ‘Give me your hearts!’ they surrendered them at discretion to the great magician.
William Townsend, Modern State TrialsBoth Garrow and Thomas Erskine were of Scottish origin, both were called to the Bar by Lincoln's Inn, and both rose to prominence in London in the period in between the American and French Revolutions. Charismatic and with a superb analytical mind, the latter was in tune with the new chords of political thought of the eighteenth century. Whereas Garrow appears to have been driven largely by ambition, and to have been deeply conservative by nature if not always in action, Erskine throughout his long career deployed his considerable talents selflessly in the defence of wider Enlightenment values and of liberty. His younger contemporary, Henry Brougham, wrote an adulatory essay on him. Lord John Russell was no less effusive, attributing to Erskine ‘the tongue of Cicero and the soul of Hampden’. To a modern jurist, he was ‘the very greatest advocate who ever practised at the English Bar’, and could hold his own with the titans of antiquity. Even Lord Campbell, parsimonious of magnanimity, who in his biographies of the Lord Chancellors was held to have ‘added a new terror to death’, repeatedly extolled his virtues: ‘many generations may pass away before his equal is presented to the admiration of mankind.… As an advocate in the forum, I hold him to be without an equal in ancient or modern times.’ Those generations have passed and have thrown up many a fine advocate, but none that has surpassed him. If English law has a hero it is the Scot, Tom Erskine.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Law, Liberty and the ConstitutionA Brief History of the Common Law, pp. 206 - 217Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015