In the legal circle of Charles the Second's London, Lady King was notable as a virago whose shrill tongue disturbed her husband's peace of mind by day, and broke his rest at night. Earning a larger income than any other barrister of his time, he had little leisure for domestic society; but the few hours which he could have spent with his wife and children, he usually preferred to spend in a tavern, beyond the reach of his lady's sharp querulousness. "All his misfortune," says Roger North, "lay at home, in perverse consort, who always, after his day-labor done, entertained him with all the chagrin and peevishness imaginable; so that he went home as to his prison, or worse; and when the time came, rather than go home, he chose commonly to get a friend to go and sit in a free chat at the tavern, over a single bottle, till twelve or one at night, and then to work again at five in the morning. His fatigue in business, which, as I said, was more than ordinary to him, and his no comfort, or rather, discomfort at home, and taking his refreshment by excising his sleep, soon pulled him down; so that, after a short illness, he died." On his death-bed, however, he forgave the weeping woman, who, more through physical irritability than wicked design, had caused him so much undeserved discomfort; and by his last will and testament he made liberal provision for her wants. Having made his will, "he said, I am glad it is done," runs the memoir of Sir John King, written by his father, "and after took leave of his wife, who was full of tears; seeing it is the will of God, let us part quietly in friendship, with submissiveness to his will, as we came together in friendship by His will."
A complete history of the loves of lawyers would notice many scandalous intrigues and disreputable alliances, and would comprise a good deal of literature for which the student would vainly look in the works of our best authors. From the days of Wolsey, whose amours were notorious, and whose illegitimate son became Dean of Wells, down to the present time of brighter though not unimpeachable morality, the domestic lives of our eminent judges and advocates have too frequently invited satire and justified regret. In the eighteenth century judges, without any loss of _caste_ or popular regard, openly maintained establishments that in these more decorous and actually better days would cover their keepers with obloquy. Attention could be directed to more than one legal family in which the descent must be traced through a succession of illegitimate births. Not only did eminent lawyers live openly with women who were not their wives, and with children whom the law declined to recognize as their offspring; but these women and children moved in good society, apparently indifferent to shame that brought upon them but few inconveniences. In Great Ormond Street, where a mistress and several illegitimate children formed his family circle, Lord Thurlow was visited by bishops and deans; and it is said that in 1806, when Sir James Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, was invited to the woolsack and the peerage, he was induced to decline the offer more by consideration for his illegitimate children than by fears for the stability of the new administration.