John Lee, KC (6 March 1733 – 5 August 1793), was an English lawyer, politician, and law officer of the Crown. He assisted in the early days of Unitarianism in England.
Early life
Born in Leeds, Yorkshire, on 6 March 1733, he was one of eight sons and ten children of cloth merchant Thomas Lee and his wife, Mary (née Reveley). After his father died in 1736 he was mainly brought up by his mother, a Dissenter and friend of Thomas Secker, later Archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 1750.
Legal career
Lee was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn and joined the Northern Circuit, where eventually he gained an equal share with James Wallace of the leadership. He was a king's attorney and serjeant for the County Palatine of Lancaster from 1782 until his death.
In April 1769 Lee appeared before the House of Commons with John Glynn as counsel for John Wilkes and the petitioners against the return of Colonel Henry Luttrell for Middlesex; the petition failed. The government offered him a seat in the house and the K.C. in 1769, and in 1770 K.C. with the appointment of solicitor-general to the queen, but he refused both offers on political grounds. On 18 September 1769 he became, however, recorder of Doncaster. The appointment was through the influence of Lord Rockingham, whom Lee knew through the law, and signalled Lee's arrival as legal adviser to the Rockingham Whigs. In the Wilkite agitation of that year around the Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights, Rockingham brought Lee and Alexander Wedderburn to Wentworth, to steer a moderate course, and in mid-September they found a precedent from 1701 for a petition to the Crown to dissolve parliament.
In 1779 Lee was one of the counsel for Admiral Augustus Keppel, 1st Viscount Keppel when he was tried by court-martial for his conduct in the Battle of Ushant. The trial in Portsmouth was politicised, Keppel being a Whig, and his second-in-command, Sir Hugh Palliser, a Tory, acting for the prosecution. When Keppel's name was cleared, Lee took no fee, but Keppel gave him his own portrait, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1780 Lee became a king's counsel. Known at the bar as "honest Jack Lee", he was distinguished for his integrity, and amassed a large fortune.
In politics
In the second administration of Lord Rockingham, Lee was appointed Solicitor General for England and Wales, and sat in parliament for Clitheroe. It was a pocket borough, controlled by Thomas Lister and the Curzon family. Lister was a Whig, Assheton Curzon a Tory ministerialist, and when the two came to an agreement in 1790 to share the double-member seat, Lee lost out. It meant he had no seat in the 1790 British general election. Later that year, he was brought in for Higham Ferrers by the Whig magnate William Fitzwilliam, 4th Earl Fitzwilliam at a by-election, Viscount Duncannon preferring . He then sat for that constituency till he died.
Lee resigned office on Rockingham's death, but returned to it under the Duke of Portland, and on the death of Wallace at the end of 1783, he was promoted to be Attorney General for England and Wales, and held the office till the Duke of Portland was dismissed. In politics he was a thoroughgoing party man. One of his maxims was "Never speak well of a political enemy". John Wilkes spoke of him as having been in the House of Commons "a most impudent dog"; Nathaniel Wraxall called him coarse and abusive, though he acknowledged his intelligence: "a man of strong intellectual parts, though of very coarse manners".
Death and family
Lee died from cancer on 5 August 1793, having suffered from ill health and played little part in politics at the end of his life. He was buried at Staindrop Church, County Durham. The monument there, by Joseph Nollekens, was paid for by Earl Fitzwilliam. A bust of Lee by Nollekens had already appeared in The Rockingham Mausoleum.
Lee had married in 1769 Mary Hutchinson (1734–1812), daughter of William Hutchinson of Staindrop, and obtained a house and estate there. They had a daughter, Mary Tabitha (1777–1851). His father-in-law was agent to Henry Vane, 2nd Earl of Darlington.
Associations
Joseph Priestley and Richard Price were among Lee's friends, and he associated with pro-Americans and radicals.
"Honest Whig" and pro-American
Lee knew Benjamin Franklin through the Whig coffee-house club — Franklin's "club of Honest Whigs" of his first mission in London (1757–1762) — which he frequented with Priestley, Price and Andrew Kippis, and introduced Priestley to Edmund Burke. On a later Franklin visit, that of 1773–5, Lee was one of those who met in Ludgate Hill, at the London Coffee House. It was the so-called "fortnight club".