The Honourable Roger North, 1651–1734

On Life, Morality, Law and Tradition

Jamie C. Kassler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754658863
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317028598
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Roger North is known today as a biographer and writer on music, architecture and estate management. Yet his writings, including thousands of pages still in manuscript, also contain critical reflections about intellectual and social changes taking place in England. This feature is little recognised, because North's reputation as an author was formed between 1740 and 1890, when seven of his manuscripts were published in editions that drastically altered his original texts, and when the reception of these works was influenced by 'Whig' criticism. Although some of North's writings were later edited according to more rigorous standards, many critics still utilise the discredited editions and continue to repeat 'Whig' stereotypes of North. Eschewing such stereotypes, Jamie C. Kassler provides the first interpretation of North's philosophy by retrieving what is consistent in his pattern of thought and by analysing some of his practices and purposes as a writer. By these methods, she shows that North, a common lawyer by profession, combined the moral scepticism of Montaigne with the legal philosophy of Coke, Selden and Hale. The result was a sceptical philosophy that accounts for North's critical reflections on the dogmatism of natural-law doctrine, both in its medieval intellectualist version and in its voluntarist reformulation that began with Grotius and was developed by Hobbes, Pufendorf and Locke. Kassler bases her interpretation on a wide range of North's writings, even those in which one might least expect to find a philosophy. In addition, one of his manuscripts, which is edited here for the first time, includes an exposition of his jurisprudence, as well as his attempt to bring England's past into the legal tradition. These features form part of North's broader argument that language, including the language of law, is the invention of humans and a representation of their changing history and habits, an argument that he later extended to musical 'language' in his more finished essay, 'The Musicall Grammarian' (1728).

PART I

An Interpretation of Roger North (1651–1734)

Figure 3 Portrait of Roger North, aged about thirty, engraved in 1824 by Wainwright after the painting in oil by Peter Lely (A:Nk)

1

OUTLINES OF A LIFE

1.1. SEEKING HONOURABLE FREEDOM

Roger North was born at Tostock, Suffolk, on 3 September 1651, the fourteenth and last child of Sir Dudley and Anne (née Montagu). For some years he lived intermittently at Kirtling, Cambridgeshire, in the house of his grandfather, the third baron North, who had dissipated the family fortune. As a consequence, he had required that North’s parents reside with him, extracting from them more than a fair cost for lodging, even after they had purchased their own residence in 1638.¹ For from that date the couple divided their time between the two residences until the old lord died in 1667 and Sir Dudley succeeded to the peerage. Not long afterwards, he published a small octavo on the management of a great house,² his model being Kirtling itself, where, of ‘Countrey delights’, reading (‘study’) deserved the first place, then music.³

The old lord himself had been a lover of music and had employed several resident musicians in the household,⁴ so that early in life North and his siblings, both male and female, were taught music ‘of some sort’.⁵ And thus began one of North’s lifelong pleasures, for, as he explains,

…musick was not onely the exercise of my youth, and that very early, and imprest by the continuall use of it, in the family of my education, but hath ever since bin my companion, and delight in all my solitudes as well as societys; … therefore I may be alowed to have no small esteem for it; as a man of honour loves his freind as such tho not esteemed by others.⁶

Susceptibility to illness meant that other parts of North’s education were somewhat irregular. Initially, he was taught by a private tutor, then at the free school of Bury St. Edmunds, where he fell ill and returned home until 1663, when he and his brother Montagu were sent to the free school at Thetford.⁷ There, he learned Latin and busied himself ‘with squibbs, crackers, … melting mettals, turning joynery, and such like exercises as the severity of our orders afforded time, and the place opportunity’.⁸ These exercises laid the ground for applied mathematics,⁹ another of North’s lifelong pleasures.¹⁰

In 1666 he prepared for university at home by reading logic with his father. He also studied the principles of music and composition with one of his childhood teachers, John Jenkins; and in his spare time he conceived ‘a designe of making an organ out of my owne invention, a senceless but daring project’.¹¹ On 30 October 1667 he entered Jesus College, Cambridge, where he pursued his own course of study—‘a little phisicks, mathematicks, the peacable side of logick, some musick, and no conversation were my cursus at the university’—although his brother John, who ‘lent his name, as tutor, to enable my admission’, encouraged him to read some of the writings of René Descartes.¹² Then, in 1668 his education was again interrupted by an illness, so he spent an interval at home until his admission, on 21 April 1669, to the Middle Temple, London.

By the mid-seventeenth century the Inns of Court had declined as professional law schools,¹³ and this is the reason for North’s lament that of ‘all the professions in the world, that pretend to book-learning, none is so destitute of institution as that of the common law’, the profession of which, ‘comprehending the whole in due order, refers to 1. Reading; 2. Common-placing; 3. Conversing; 4. Reporting; 5. Practising’.¹⁴ Fortunately, however, North’s writings contain valuable information about his student exercises, as well as the course of reading he devised for himself and later recommended to others.¹⁵ According to his own admission, he was not ‘a regular student, to proceed in order, and take in all the year books’. But he read ‘the more moderne reports’, and he ‘digested them well by comon place’, which was

…a good foundation and preparative for me to build upon, what I afterwards learnt in practice. And I must owne to that [common placing], more of my skill in the law, then from hard reading. But without a competency of the latter, the other would not have done, no more then bare reading without practice, which pedantiseth a student, but never makes him a clever lawyer.¹⁶

Preliminary to being called to the bar, a student was to spend seven years in an Inn of Court and then some additional years as a barrister before being allowed to practise in open court.¹⁷ During the seven years of probation, students were required to participate in moots or mock actions and arguments upon legal points. These moots took place before readers (i.e., lecturers) selected by the Inns of Court, the students reciting the pleadings, and the case then being formally argued by the barristers and benchers—the principal officers of the Inns of Court.¹⁸ Although it has been supposed that the readings ceased by the middle of the seventeenth century,¹⁹ this supposition is called into question by North’s statement that at the time of his admission, his brother Francis, then a bencher, ‘kept his publique reading in the Middle Temple Hall’ and that those ‘exercises, when they were in use, were very benificiall’, because they gave ‘councell upon new statutes’.²⁰

Nevertheless, during North’s student years, self-help was the principal method of legal education, and this included attending some of the superior courts in term time so as to learn legal method. About his own attendance at Westminster Hall, he records that

I have known the Court of King’s Bench sitting every day from eight till twelve, and the Lord Chief Justice Hales [i.e., Hale] managing matters of law to all imaginable advantage to the students, and in that he took a pleasure or rather pride; he encouraged arguing when it was to the purpose, and used to debate with the counsel so as the court might have been taken for an academy of Sciences as well as the seat of Justice.²¹

In addition, and because of the straitened circumstances of his parents, North added to his small allowance by ‘court-keeping’, that is, by presiding as the steward who transacts legal and financial business at the manor courts of his father and others.²² And being continually with his brother Francis,²³ he observed the routines of legal practice, at the same time gathering his law from books either borrowed or bought. Then, by the influence of that brother, who was already well established in the legal profession, he was called to the bar ex gratia on 29 May 1674,²⁴ before the requisite seven-year probation had passed.

Over the next few years he seems to have found time for various diversions. One involved seeking out performances of music, then called ‘music meetings’; and this led to his joining the weekly meetings of the Gentleman’s Society, a mixture of professional musicians and cultivated amateurs.²⁵ Another diversion was encouraged by his friend John Windham of Lincoln’s Inn, who gave him ‘a present of a yacht, built by himself, whence sailing became a particular pleasure. For the experience of it seemed more nearly ‘a perfection of life … then I was ever sensible of otherwise’.²⁶ But sailing also became one of North’s ‘mathematicall enterteinements, for the working of a vessell, its rigging, and position of the sayles, doe exercise as much of mechanicks, as all the other arts of the world’.²⁷

On 26 January 1679 a fire swept through the Temple;²⁸ and George Jeffreys, then solicitor-general to the duke of York, ordered gunpowder and directed the destruction of a group of buildings before the flames engulfed the Temple Church and moved into Fleet Street.²⁹ Losing thereby his chamber in the Middle Temple, North found temporary accommodation at the residence of his brother Francis, who was then living in Chancery Lane near Serjeant’s Inn.³⁰ For the next several years he involved himself in plans for rebuilding the Temple,³¹ designing the new gateway that leads to it³² and, with Christopher Wren, supervising the schedule of payments to the gateway workmen.³³ On 27 October 1682 he became a bencher and on 26 October 1683, treasurer of the Middle Temple.³⁴ Then, on 23 January 1685, as a reward for his efforts in the rebuilding, it was his fortune ‘to comute, a ground interest’ for a chamber over the gateway that proved ‘the best in the society’.³⁵ For a period of time this chamber provided a venue for the Sunday evening meetings of some of North’s siblings.³⁶

The rebuilding of the Temple had at least two further consequences. First, North was able to develop his interest in what he called ‘building’ and we call ‘architecture’, an interest he returned to later in life, when he recalled that his ‘inclination hath bin too hard for prudence; and made me robb my profession, for pleasure, which was ever to me very great in the speculation, as well as the practise of mechanicks; and the consummate use of [both of] them is had by building’.³⁷ Second, because he was called upon to solve the problem of a new organ for the Temple Church, he was able to satisfy his youthful curiosity about the mechanics of organs and, later, to provide the first adequate description of the initiation of vibrations in flue pipes.³⁸ The problem of the new organ began in November 1684, when, as treasurer, North was asked to speak to Bernard Smith, then organ maker to the king.³⁹ But a decision about a new organ required approval by officers of both Middle and Inner Temples. And at some point the latter Temple put forward the name of their own candidate, Renatus Harris, and thus began ‘a competition’.⁴⁰

From 1669 Francis North had acted as his brother’s mentor and patron, on the one hand, assisting him to improve his knowledge and skill in the profession, and, on the other hand, sending him a considerable amount of business.⁴¹ As a consequence, Roger North, being dependent on his brother, ‘feared nothing so much, as being precarious and servile, for necessity’, so that he had ‘an ambition to honourable freedome’.⁴² Unf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. An Interpretation of Roger North (1651-1734)
• Part II. An Edition of Roger North’s ‘Of Etimology’ (C.1706-C.1715)
• Appendices
• References
• Indices