did not lead to the simplicity and clarity hoped for, and Lushington was often called upon to clarify issues.
The Privy Council
As a judge of the Admiralty Court, Lushington became a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council which was established as the final court of appeal from the civilian courts. He was sworn in as a member of Queen Victoria’s Privy Council in November 1838. This was, and still is, a formal body of advisers to the Sovereign whose members mainly comprises senior politicians, who are current or former members of either the House of Commons or the House of Lords.
Queen Victoria recorded in her Journal that she and her beloved Lord Melbourne had, “Talked of Dr Lushington who has got 10 children; He is a very good man, a clever man; I hardly ever saw such an honest man,’ said Lord Melbourne; but a little violent and eager.”23 Once sworn in, Lushington was often in the company of the Queen and, in May 1845, she wrote, “Dr Lushington, a singular, eager man, who is of the opinion, that nothing would do such good, as to cement the union between England & France at the same time ensuring the abolition of the Slave Trade.” Lushington remained an active member of the Privy Council for twenty-nine years.
The Church
Lushington’s appointment as Dean of Arches in 1858 made him the most senior judge in the ecclesiastical courts. This was a joint appointment by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, subject to Crown approval. Lushington’s appointment coincided with a period of high controversy in the Church of England, and he found was at the center of several major disputes in which he often found himself pulled in two opposing directions. One of the most politically controversial questions was that of church rates, which were taxes levied to support the fabric of the parish church. These were opposed by those who dissented from the Church of England. Personally, Lushington had great sympathy with the dissenters but, as an ecclesiastical judge, he had a duty to enforce the law.
In 1860 Lushington was called upon to pass judgement on one of the most important publications of the mid-nineteenth century, Essays and Reviews, a broad-church volume of seven essays on Christianity. The writers were six clergymen and one layman, all associated with a liberal view of theology and with the Broad-Church. They included Frederick Temple who later became Archbishop of Canterbury, and Lushington’s friend Benjamin Jowett, later the Master of Balliol College, Oxford. The topics covered the biblical research of the German critics, the evidence for Christianity, religious thought in England, and the cosmology of Genesis. In essence, it summed up a three-quarter century-long challenge to biblical history and prehistory.
Publication of Essays and Reviews was seen as an attack on the fundamental truths of the Christian religion. It caused a great outcry in more conservative and evangelical church circles contributing to a period of religious doubt in which two of Lushington’s sons were caught up. In 1862, Lushington wrote:
The argument in Essays and Review is concluded, having occupied nearly 10 days. The counsel very handsomely returned thanks to me for my so patiently hearing the case. This is consoling but alas my trials now commence for I have to write my judgement.24
As such, Lushington found it necessary to condemn two of the essayists. Although his decision was later overturned, it was an action with which Lushington, whose personal views inclined to those of the more liberal Broad-Church party, privately agreed.
F. D. Maurice, who had been driven from his Chair at King’s College, London, on the issue of eternal judgment, considered resigning his benefice in consequence of the original judgment and wrote to Charles Kingsley:
I know well that my dear and honoured friend Dr Lushington, who I love as much as almost any man of his age that I know, has no purpose of working this mischief to the Church or to mankind. He will be a worker of good, as he ought to be, if his simple blunders lead to the result I have supposed.25
In 1867, Lushington suffered what might a been a slight stroke and resigned his judicial offices but retained the administrative office of Master of the Faculties until his death, still hearing disputed cases at his house in his ninety-first year. He spent his remaining years at Ockham surrounded and supported by his adoring family. He continued equestrian pursuits and, on his ninetieth birthday, his sons presented him the gift of a new horse.
In December 1872, after travelling to Oxford to vote for Dean Stanley as Select Preacher for the University, he became ill and suffered a bad bout of bronchitis from which he did not recover. He died on 18 January 1873. Lord Justice James wrote to Vernon Lushington:
Your father’s last public act may have accelerated his death—but it will always be an agreeable memory for his family and his friends that it was an act of great pubic duty, well closing his life in vindication of those great principles of liberty to which throughout that long life he had shown so zealous and unswerving attachment.26
Lushington was buried in the churchyard of Ockham parish church where he had worshipped for many years. Dean Stanley traveled from London to officiate at the funeral and later, preaching at the University Church in Cambridge, paid a fitting tribute to his old friend describing him as:
A venerable judge whose career . . . was fired from first to last by a generous sympathy with human suffering, by noble indignation against wrong, by a firm persuasion of the indissoluble bond between what was highest in religion and what was greatest in morality.27
NOTES
1. S.M. Waddams, Law, Politics and the Church of England. The Career of Stephen Lushington 1782–1873 (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
2. “Forty-shilling freeholders” were people who had the parliamentary franchise to vote by possessing freehold property of an annual rent of at least forty shillings (i.e., £2), clear of all charges.
3. Richard M. Bacon, A Memoir of the Life of Edward, Third Baron Suffield (Norwich, 1838), p. 28.
4. Ibid.
5. Lushington was appointed as one of the guardians of Lord Suffield’s children. Suffield clearly held Lushington in high regard as, when considering, his children’s education, he wrote “his judgement on the matter will decide my course in the dilemma for such I must consider it. I am grateful to Jane Weare for this and other information regarding the relationship of the Suffields and Lushington.”
6. House of Commons Debate February 23, 1807.
7. Obituary of Stephen Lushington in Guy’s Hospital Gazette 1873.
8. Mirror of Parliament, June 12, 1839.
9. Stephen Lushington, www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume1790-1820.
10. Lushington later represented the constituencies of Tregony, Winchelsea, and Tower Hamlets.
11. Henry Lushington to Stephen Lushington, May 7, 1832. SHC 7854/1/2/1a-b.
12. George Stephen, Anti-Slavery Recollections (Thomas Hatchard, 1854), pp. 67–68.
13. Charles Buxton (ed.) The Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton (John Murray, 1849).
14. Stephen, Anti-Slavery Recollections, pp. 66–67.
15. Frank J. Kingberg, “The Lady Mico Charity Schools in the British West Indies, 1835–1842,” Journal of Negro
