go to Tunbridge Wells. His annual income at this time appears to have amounted to 15,000l., and on 18 Aug. 1789 he was created Viscount Clonmell.
Early, however, in this year he committed the one great blunder of his official career. John Magee [q. v.], the spirited proprietor and editor of the ‘Dublin Evening Post,’ had been sued for libel by Francis Higgins (1746–1802) [q. v.], called the ‘Sham Squire,’ a friend of Scott's in his convivial hours. The chief justice, influenced by personal and political motives, caused a capias ad respondendum marked 4,000l. to issue against Magee. It was a tyrannical act, but in the state of the law perfectly legal, and would, as Scott intended it should, have utterly ruined Magee had not the matter been brought before parliament by George Ponsonby [q. v.] in March 1790. A motion censuring such practices was adroitly got rid of by government, and a similar motion in the following year met a like fate. But in consequence of the severe comments made on his conduct in parliament and by the press (cf. Scott to Auckland, Auckland MS. 34429, f. 451), an act was passed, directed specially against him, regulating the law of fiats. The discussion greatly damaged his judicial character, and Magee, during his temporary release in September 1789, revenged himself by hiring a plot of land which he appropriately called Fiat Hill, adjoining Temple Hill, the residence of the lord justice, and inviting the rabble of Dublin to partake of some amusements, terminating with a ‘grand Olympic pig-hunt.’ Much damage was done to Scott's grounds. The ‘detested administration,’ as Scott with reason called it, of Lord Westmorland came to an end on 5 May 1791, and his successor, sympathising with his sufferings, advanced him to the dignity of Earl of Clonmell on 20 Dec. 1793. If subserviency ever merited reward, Scott certainly deserved his. But his arrogant manner on the bench was sometimes resented by the bar, and, in consequence of his gross rudeness to a barrister of the name of Hackett, it was resolved ‘that until the chief justice publicly apologised no barrister would hold a brief, appear in the king's bench, or sign any pleadings in court.’ He was compelled to submit, and published a very ample apology in the newspapers, which, with much tact, he antedated as though it had been written voluntarily and without the censure of the bar. Nevertheless Scott was not deficient in ability, and could, when he liked, behave with great dignity on the bench. His summing up in Archibald Hamilton Rowan's case was as admirable as his behaviour to the publisher of the trial, Byrne, was the reverse. Although his tendency was to make his position subservient to government and his own advancement, he ‘never indulged in attacks on his country,’ and never sought ‘to raise himself by depressing her.’ His reluctance to support the arbitrary measures that marked the course of Earl Camden's administration caused him to lose favour at the castle, and as time went on his opinion was less consulted and considered. ‘I think,’ he wrote, in his diary on 13 Feb. 1798, ‘my best game is to play the invalid and be silent; the government hate me, and are driving things to extremities; the country is disaffected and savage, the parliament corrupt and despised.’
He died on the very day the rebellion broke out, 23 May 1798. He left no surviving issue by his first wife, Catherine Anne Maria Mathew, the sister of Francis, first earl of Llandaff, who died in 1771; but by his second wife, Margaret, daughter and heiress of Patrick Lawless of Dublin, whom he married on 23 June 1779, he had a son Thomas (1783–1858), who succeeded him, and a daughter Charlotte, who married, in 1814, John Reginald, earl of Beauchamp. Scott has been treated with scant justice by his biographers. His diary (published by Fitzpatrick in his ‘Ireland before the Union’), which ought to have been destroyed with his other papers, and was surely not intended for public or indiscriminate inspection, has been treated too seriously, and used mainly to emphasise his weaknesses and indiscretions. It is true that he was unscrupulous, passionate, and greedy, that his language was vulgar and his manner overbearing; but his chief offence in the eyes of whig aristocrats like Charlemont and the Ponsonbys was that he was a novus homo or upstart. His letters, on the other hand, reveal him as a man of considerable education and independent views, which he supported with no little ability.
[Burke's Peerage; Gent. Mag. 1798, i. 538, ii. 622, 651; Fitzpatrick's Ireland before the Union; Grattan's Life of Henry Grattan, ii. 141–7, iii. 112, iv. 349; Wills's Irish Nation, iii. 669–79; Official Returns of Members of Parliament; Flood's Memoirs of Henry Flood, p. 135; Auckland Corresp.; Beresford Corresp.; M'Dougall's Sketches of Political Characters, p. 13; Phillips's Curran and his Contemporaries, pp. 35–9; Barrington's Personal Recollections, i. 171, 222; O'Regan's Memoirs of the Life of Curran, pp. 57–9; Hardy's Life of Charlemont, i. 268–71; Seward's Collectanea Politica; Parl. Register, i. 243, 344, 351, ii. 14, 15, 207, 208; Sheil's Sketches, Legal and Political; Rutland MSS. iii. passim; Charlemont MSS. ii. 178; Hist. MSS.
