Stephen
Lushington generally known
as Dr Lushington (14 January 1782 – 19 January 1873) was a
British judge, Member of Parliament and a radical for the abolition of slavery
and capital punishment. He served as Judge of the High Court of Admiralty from 1838 to 1867. Lushington
was the second son of Sir Stephen
Lushington, 1st Baronet (1744–1807), a member of parliament and
Chairman of the British East India Company.
He was educated at Eton College and Christ
Church, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1797 at age 15. He was then elected a fellow of All Souls in 1802.
An amateur who made three known appearances in first-class cricket matches
in 1799, Lushington was mainly associated with Surrey.
In 1806, Lushington entered Parliament as Whig member for Great
Yarmouth, and spoke in the Commons in favour of the bill to abolish the slave trade in
February 1807.
Re-elected in 1808, Lushington lost the confidence of his patron Harbord
Harbord, 1st Baron Suffield. He was a supporter of Catholic emancipation, at
the time an unpopular cause. A few months into the new session, he resigned his
seat.[4] It came after the defeat of a motion he had
proposed to castigate the behaviour of Sir Home Popham. Lushington in 1818 supported a bill intended
to regulate climbing boys.[5] He returned to Parliament as the MP for Ilchester in
1820, and subsequently also represented Tregony, Winchelsea and Tower
Hamlets.[2] An account of one of his speeches published in
1828 in the Mirror of
Parliament involved Lushington in a libel case, for
which John Dickens and John Henry Barrow, the father and uncle of Charles Dickens, were respectively witness and defendant.
As a radical, Lushington proposed or attempted to propose motions to
recognise the independence of South America from Spain (1820) and spoke in
favour of repealing the civil disabilities which
applied to Jews. He proposed to abolish capital punishment (1840),
and later served on the 1864 Royal Commission on the issue. He was also a
supporter of moderate Parliamentary reform, and advocated triennial parliaments
and the secret ballot. Lushington has also been described as a
"Whig legal placeman". He had political links to Henry
Brougham, and particularly to Lord John Russell.
In 1841 Lushington left Parliament, which he had to do in consequence of
the Admiralty Court Act 1840 and his position as judge. Lushington
joined the Inner Temple in 1801,
and was called to the bar in
1806. After giving up his seat in Parliament, he concentrated on his legal
practice, in 1808 taking the degree of Doctor of Civil Law and being admitted to Doctors' Commons. In 1816 Lushington became legal advisor
to Lady Byron, not long after she had become effectively
separated from her husband, Lord Byron.[12] He saw first Judith Lady Noel, her mother, who
applied to Lushington on the advice of Sir Samuel Romilly, and
with an introduction through Samuel Heywood;
she brought Lady Byron's statement to London. The outcome of this first
meeting, on 24 January 1816, was a draft of a letter for Sir Ralph Noel, 6th
Baronet, Lady Byron's father, to send to Lord Byron, which was done four days
later. Legal steps began as Lushington representing Lady Byron and John
Hanson representing Lord Byron met Sir Ralph Noel on 21 February at Mivart's Hotel.
The case was settled, with arbitration by Sir Samuel Shepherd, in
March 1816, Lady Byron retaining custody of her daughter Ada Lovelace, and reaching a property settlement. Lushington
is considered to have let scandalous rumours about Byron proceed, by keeping
back details of the points in his client's case, as a tactic. Five years later,
he married a close friend of Lady Byron, who kept him as her lawyer. In 1820 Lushington was one of the counsel
retained by Queen Caroline, and spoke
in her defence during her trial before the House of Lords.
He was brought onto the legal team, with Nicholas Conyngham Tindal, Thomas Wilde and John Williams, by Henry
Brougham and Thomas Denman,
the Queen's law officers. They were instructed by William Vizard, her solicitor. Lushington gave advice as
a civil law jurist, and
with Denman summarised the defence on 23 October 1820. In 1828 he was appointed judge of the Consistory Court of London. In 1838 he was made a Privy Counsellor and
became judge of the High Court of Admiralty, in which post he continued until
1867. Lushington was also Dean of
Arches from 1858 to 1867, when he retired from all his posts
due to ill health. His personal religious views have been described as latitudinarian. he Gorham case, pitting George Cornelius Gorham against
his bishop in the diocese of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts, came on appeal to the Judicial Committee of
the Privy Council. Lushington was centrally involved in the proceedings there. He was the only committee member with relevant
legal experience, and influenced the outcome, which overturned the verdict of
the Court of Arches, given by Herbert Jenner-Fust,
finding in favour of Gorham.
Lushington argued in terms of process and expediency: Phillpotts was
intending Gorham to fail his examination, itself unusual, before moving to a
new living, and the precedent was dangerous for the Church. The copious
theological arguments brought were put on one side. On the other hand, Waddams
considers that Lushington's own views were in play. The Privy Council
judgement was given on 8 March 1850, and over the summer of that year Gorham
moved into his new living of Brampford
Speke, a clear victory of evangelicals over the High churchmen of the
Church of England. Lushington was a lifelong advocate of the anti-slavery
cause. He committed much time to it, and had significant influence in the
British abolitionist movement.
His brother Sir Henry Lushington, 2nd Baronet was a joint owner in
1817 of the Greenwood estate in Jamaica. He was married to Frances Maria Lewis,
daughter of Matthew Lewis who owned estates in Jamaica and worked in Boldero
& Lushington, a bank founded by his maternal grandfather John Boldero and
offering mortgages on West Indian plantations. Other family members were also
slave owners or beneficiaries. Those include William
Lushington MP (1747–1823), Stephen Lushington's uncle and
another brother, Charles Lushington
(1785–1866), with his wife Sarah Gascoyne a beneficiary of the
Jamaica Clarendon Seven Plantations estates. On his return to
Parliament in 1821, Lushington supported William Wilberforce's call
on the government to put pressure on countries still allowing the slave trade,
and opposed relief for West Indian sugar estates. He succeeded in having a
Slave Trade Acts consolidation bill passed, as the Slave Trade Act 1824. It
included legislation classifying the slave traffic as piracy, and saw the end of trading in slaves between the
colonies of the British Empire. Around this time he began to work closely with
the abolitionist leader Thomas Foxwell Buxton. In
1824–5, Lushington championed the cause of Louis Celeste Lecesne.
Lecesne and John Escoffery were free people of colour expelled
from Jamaica, and subsequently involved in a libel suit with George Wilson Bridges. Lushington argued in the House of Commons in
an 1824 speech that they had been subject to discrimination
based on skin colour detrimental to their constitutional
rights. Lecesne and Escoffery were both slave-owners, a fact that Lushington
took as establishing their social position. In March 1827, Lushington spoke in Parliament
about a sermon given by Bridges in St Ann
Parish, Jamaica against missionaries, and an attack on a mission
house there. With Buxton, William Allen, Thomas Hodgkin and Richard King, Lushington
was one of the leaders of the Aborigines' Protection
Society. When Hodgkin clashed at Guy's Hospital with the administrator Benjamin
Harrison at Guy's Hospital, Lushington took his side, as did Ebenezer
Pye-Smith of the staff. Lushington and his daughters were part of
the group of abolitionists who supported the education of the fugitives Ellen and William Craft in
the early 1850s. It took place in the school at Ockham founded by Lady Byron.