[14] Mr. Foss observes: "In 1350, William de Thrope, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, was convicted on his own confession of receiving bribes to stay justice; but though his property was forfeited to the Crown on his condemnation, the king appears to have relented, and to have made him second Baron of the Exchequer in May, 1352, unless I am mistaken in supposing the latter to have been the same person."
By degrees the public ceased to make presents to the principal judges of the kingdom; but long after the Chancellor and the three Chiefs had taken the last offerings of general society, they continued to receive yearly presents from the subordinate judges, placemen, and barristers of their respective courts. Lord Cowper deserves honor for being the holder of the seals who, by refusing to pocket these customary donations, put an end to a very objectionable system, so far as the Court of Chancery was concerned.
On being made Lord Keeper, he resolved to depart from the custom of his predecessors for many generations, who on the first day of each new year had invariably entertained at breakfast the persons from whom tribute was looked for. Very droll were these receptions in the old time. The repast at an end, the guests forthwith disburdened themselves of their gold--the payers approaching the holder of the seals in order of rank, and laying on his table purses of money, which the noble payee accepted with his own hands. Sometimes his lordship was embarrassed by a ceremony that required him to pick gold from the fingers of men, several of whom he knew to be in indigent circumstances. In Charles II.'s time it was observed that the silver-tongued Lord Nottingham on such occasions always endeavored to hide his confusion under a succession of nervous smiles and exclamations--"Oh, Tyrant Cuthtom!--Oh, Tyrant Cuthtom!"
It is noteworthy that in relinquishing the benefit of these exactions, the Lord Keeper feared unfriendly criticism much more than he anticipated public commendation. In his diary, under date December 30, Cowper wrote:--"I acquainted my Lord Treasurer with my design to refuse New Year's Gifts, if he had no objection against it, as spoiling, in some measure, a place of which he had the conferring. He answered it was not expected of me, but that I might do as my predecessors had done; but if I refused, he thought nobody could blame me for it." Anxious about the consequences of his innovation, the new Lord Keeper gave notice that on January 1, 1705-6, he would receive no gifts; but notwithstanding this proclamation, several officers of Chancery and counsellors came to his house with tribute, and were refused admittance. "New Year's Gifts turned back," he wrote in his diary at the close of the eventful day, "and pray God it doth me more credit and good than hurt, by making secret enemies _in fæce Romuli_." His fears were in a slight degree fulfilled. The Chiefs of the three Common Law Courts were greatly displeased with an innovation which they had no wish to adopt; and their warm expressions of dissatisfaction induced the Lord Keeper to cover his disinterestedness with a harmless fiction. To pacify the indignant Chiefs and the many persons who sympathized with them, he pretended that though he had declined intentionally the gifts of the Chancery barristers, he had not designed to exercise the same self-denial with regard to the gifts of Chancery officers.[15]
