JEFFREYS, George Jeffreys, Lord (c. 1648-1689), lord chancellor of England, was born probably in 1648 at Acton in Denbighshire, of a respectable but not rich family. He was smitten with the desire of becoming a lawyer by seeing, when a boy at St Paul’s school in London, the magnificent procession of the judges to the cathedral; and, although his family was hard put to it by the expense, he spent some time at Westminster school before entering the Inner Temple as a student at sixteen. The allowance he received from home was quite unequal to the demands of the dissolute habits into which he quickly fell, but it is said that the promise of future eminence, afforded by the fits of studiousness which divided his orgies, procured for the dissipated student both long credit and presents of money. He was exceedingly popular as a table companion, especially with the inferior attorneys and attorneys’ clerks with whom, then as afterwards, he preferred to drink; and in the low practice which he began at Old Bailey and the London Sessions immediately on being called to the bar in November 1668, he found his boon companions very useful in procuring him briefs. Voluble, unscrupulous, and overbearing, he rapidly developed in his constant dealings w ith the most degraded criminals the coarse bullying manner which disgraced him throughout his whole career. He sought every means of ingratiating himself with the city aidermen, and in 1671, at the singularly early age of twenty-three, became their common seιjeant, and in 1678 recorder of London. He had by that time pushed his way into the higher courts, where his marvellous address in speaking and cross-examination made up for, if it did not conceal, his shallow legal knowledge. Jeffreys had hitherto nominally belonged to the ...