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Charles Yorke

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Charles Yorke
Portrait by Thomas Hudson
Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain
In office
17 January 1770 – 20 January 1770
MonarchGeorge III
Prime MinisterThe Duke of Grafton
Preceded byThe Lord Camden
Succeeded byIn Commission
Personal details
Born(1722-12-30)30 December 1722
London, England
Died20 January 1770(1770-01-20) (aged 47)
London, England
Alma materCorpus Christi College, Cambridge

Charles Yorke PC (30 December 1722 – 20 January 1770) was a British politician who briefly served as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain.[1] His father was also Lord Chancellor, and he began his career as a Member of Parliament. He served successively as Solicitor-General and Attorney-General for several governments, during which he was best known for writing what became the Quebec Act. He was appointed Lord Chancellor over his objections, but he committed suicide only three days after taking the post.

Life

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The second son of Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke, he was born in London, and was educated at Newcome's School in Hackney and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.[2] His literary abilities were shown at an early age by his collaboration with his brother Philip in the Athenian Letters. In 1745 he published an able treatise on the law of forfeiture for high treason, in defence of the severe sentences his father had given to the Scottish Jacobite peers following the Battle of Culloden. In the following year he was called to the bar.[3]

His father being at this time Lord Chancellor, Yorke obtained a sinecure appointment in the Court of Chancery in 1747, and entered Parliament as member for Reigate, a seat which he afterwards exchanged for that for the University of Cambridge. He quickly made his mark in the House of Commons, one of his earliest speeches being in favour of his father's reform of the marriage law[3] that led to the Marriage Act 1753. In 1750 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.[4]

In 1751 he became counsel to the East India Company, and in 1756 he was appointed Solicitor-General, a place which he retained in the administration of the elder Pitt, of whose foreign policy he was a powerful defender.[3]

He resigned with Pitt in 1761, but in 1762 became Attorney-General under Lord Bute. He continued to hold this office when George Grenville became Prime Minister (April 1763), and advised the government on the question raised by John Wilkes's The North Briton. Yorke refused to describe the libel as treasonable, while pronouncing it a high misdemeanour. In the following November he resigned office. Resisting Pitt's attempt to draw him into alliance against the ministry he had quit, Yorke maintained, in a speech that prompted the highest eulogy from Horace Walpole, that parliamentary privilege did not extend to cases of libel; though he agreed with Pitt in condemning the principle of general warrants. Yorke, henceforward a member of the Rockingham party, was elected recorder of Dover in 1764, and in 1765 he again became Attorney-General in the Rockingham administration, whose policy he did much to shape. He supported the repeal of the Stamp Act, while urging the simultaneous passing of the Declaratory Act. His most important measure was the constitution which he drew up for the province of Quebec, and which after his resignation of office became the Quebec Act of 1774.[3]

On the accession to power of Chatham and Grafton in 1766, Yorke resigned office, and took little part in the debates in parliament during the next four years. In 1770 he was invited by the Duke of Grafton, when Camden was dismissed from the Chancellorship, to take his seat on the woolsack. He had, however, explicitly pledged himself to Rockingham and his party not to take office with Grafton. The King exerted all his personal influence to overcome Yorke's scruples, warning him finally that the Great Seal if now refused would never again be within his grasp. Yorke yielded to the King's entreaty,[3] and he was appointed Lord Chancellor and sworn of the Privy Council on 17 January 1770.[1] The story has been told that he went to his brother's house, where he met the leaders of the Opposition, and feeling at once overwhelmed with shame, fled to his own house, where three days later he committed suicide (20 January 1770). The patent raising him to the peerage as Baron Morden had been made out, but his last act was to refuse his sanction to the sealing of the document.[3] More recent scholarship questions this account, noting that he had been in poor health for some time and recently written to his brother of his fatigue. On his wife's account he ate excessively, as he had been doing of late, and complaining of sickness and indigestion was heard retching until his family became concerned and had him carried to bed having broken a blood vessel in his sickness.[5] On this account neither was his death a suicide, nor did he refuse to seal the patent for his peerage. Though remaining unsealed, the patent expired with its peer-designate.

Family

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Tyttenhanger House in 1840

Charles Yorke was twice married:[3]

First, on 19 May 1755 to Katherine Blount Freeman, with one son:

  • Philip Yorke, (31 May 1757 – 18 November 1834) became 3rd Earl of Hardwicke

Second, on 30 December 1762 to Agneta Johnson, with children:

Agneta Yorke, mezzotint by John Boydell after Francis Coates, 1768

His wife was heiress to Tyttenhanger House, near St Albans, Hertfordshire.

Agneta (1740 – 30 December 1820) exhibited works in pastels at the Society of Artists between 1771 and 1775.[6] She corresponded with William Gilpin, who instructed her and her three children in their art,[7] and she also rendered some of Gilpin's works, including a view of Netley Abbey, as etchings.[8][9]

She died in 1820. There is a monument to her at St Andrew's Parish Church, Wimpole, Cambridgeshire.[10]

References

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  1. ^ a b "Privy Council of 17 Jan 1770" (PDF). The London Gazette (11010): 1. Retrieved 15 May 2015.
  2. ^ "Yorke, Charles (YRK739C)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domainChisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Yorke, Charles". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 28 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 930.
  4. ^ "Fellows details". Royal Society. Retrieved 20 February 2018.
  5. ^ Cannon, John (2004). "Yorke, Charles (1722–1770)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/30237. Retrieved 1 December 2024. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  6. ^ Jeffares, Neil. "Yorke, Mrs Charles, née Agneta Johnston" (PDF). Dictionary of Pastellists Before 1800.
  7. ^ Sloan, Kim (1986). The Teaching of Non-Professional Artists in Eighteenth Century England (PhD thesis). pp. 128, 140.
  8. ^ "Agneta Yorke". British Museum. Retrieved 18 January 2024.
  9. ^ Alken, Samuel; Yorke, Agneta (5 May 1804). Views of Lymington, Totnes, Ivybridge, and Netley Abbey. John P. Thompson.
  10. ^ "Monument Inscriptions from Monuments in Wimpole Parish Church". Wimpole Past. Retrieved 18 January 2024.

Bibliography

[edit]
Parliament of Great Britain
Preceded by Member for Reigate
1747–1768
Succeeded by
Preceded by Member for Cambridge University
1768–1770
with Thomas Townshend
Succeeded by
Legal offices
Preceded by Solicitor General
1756–1762
Succeeded by
Preceded by Attorney General
1762–1763
Succeeded by
Preceded by Attorney General
1765–1766
Succeeded by
Political offices
Preceded by Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain
1770
In commission
Title next held by
The Earl Bathurst