Mr. Erskine’s course was as rapid as it was brilliant. In the following term, Captain Baillie, Lieutenant-Governor of Greenwich Hospital, was prosecuted for an alleged libel on other officers of that establishment, contained in a pamphlet written to expose the abuses which existed there, and bearing heavily on the character of the Earl of Sandwich, then First Lord of the Admiralty. It is believed that on this occasion Mr. Erskine made his first appearance in court. His speech was characterized by great warmth and eloquence, and a most fearless assertion of matters not likely to be palatable either to the Court or the Government. And this is the more worthy of notice, because it shows that the boldness which he afterwards displayed in causes more nearly connected with the liberties of England, was not the safe boldness of a man strong in professional reputation, and confident in his experience and past success, but the result of a fixed determination to perform, at all hazards, his whole duty to his client. The best testimony to the effect of this speech is to be found in the anecdote, that thirty briefs were presented to him by attorneys before he left the court.
We must hasten very briefly through the events of Mr. Erskine’s life to make room for speaking at somewhat more length of a very few of his most remarkable performances. He rose at once into first rate junior business in the Court of King’s Bench, and received a patent of precedence in May 1783, having practised only for the short space of five years. He belonged to the Home Circuit in the early part of his professional life; but soon ceased to attend it, or any other, except on special retainers, of which it is said that he received more than any man in his time or since.
In his political life he was a firm adherent of Mr. Fox: but his success in Parliament, which he entered in 1783 as member for Portsmouth, was not commensurate with the expectations which had been raised upon the brilliant powers of oratory which he had displayed at the bar. On attaining his majority in 1783, the Prince of Wales appointed Mr. Erskine, with whom he lived in habits of intimacy, to be his Attorney-General. This office he was called on to resign in 1792, in consequence of his refusing to abandon the defence of Paine, when he was prosecuted for a libel, as author of the ‘Rights of Man:’ and his removal, though not a solitary, is fortunately a rare instance in modern times, of an advocate being punished for the honest discharge of his professional duties. Five years afterwards he conducted the prosecution of the ‘Age of Reason;’ and in 1802 he was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Cornwall. On the formation of the Grenville administration, in 1806, he was appointed Chancellor of Great Britain, and raised to the peerage, by the title of Baron Erskine, of Restormel Castle in Cornwall. The short period during which he presided in the Court of Chancery, makes it difficult to estimate how far his extraordinary powers of mind, and in particular the eminently legal understanding which he possessed, would have enabled him to overcome the difficulties of so new a situation. But his judgments have, generally speaking, stood the test of subsequent investigation; and his admirable conduct in the impeachment of 1806, over which he presided as Lord High Steward, uniting the greatest acuteness and readiness with singular firmness of purpose, and all that urbanity which neither in public nor in private life ever quitted him for an instant, may be said to have restored to life a mode of trial essential to our constitution, though discredited by the vexatious procrastination which had characterized the last instance of its use.