daughter of Sir Samuel Holled, a London merchant. The date and place of Cowper's birth are unknown. After spending some years at a private school in St. Albans, he entered the Middle Temple on 8 March 1681–1682. A circumstantial statement is made in the ‘Biographia Britannica’ (Kippis, iv. 389 note), to the effect that he seduced a certain Miss Elizabeth Culling of Hertingfordbury Park, Hertfordshire, and it is suggested that he did so by means of a sham marriage ceremony, and had two children by her. This story, which may have originated in mere local gossip, is probably the foundation of the novelette of ‘Hernando and Louisa’ in Mrs. Manley's ‘Secret Memoirs from the New Atalantis’ (1709), and of the charge of bigamy insinuated by Swift in the ‘Examiner’ (Nos. 17 and 22), and retailed as matter of common notoriety by Voltaire (Dict. Phil. art. ‘Femme Polygamie’), with the substantial addition that Cowper was the author of a treatise in favour of polygamy. Shortly before his call to the bar, which took place on 25 May 1688, Cowper married Judith, daughter of Sir Robert Booth, a London merchant. He attached himself to the home circuit, and soon obtained considerable practice. On the landing of the Prince of Orange in November, he rode with a company of about thirty volunteers from London to Wallingford, near Oxford, where he joined the prince's forces, with which he returned to London. In 1694 he was appointed king's counsel, and about the same time recorder of Colchester. The following year, and again in 1698, he was returned to parliament as junior member for Hertford. The obituary notice in the ‘Chronological Diary’ states that ‘the very first day he sat in the House of Commons he had occasion to speak three times, and came off with universal applause,’ and Burnet (Own Time, orig. ed., ii. 426) observes, under date 1705, that ‘he had for many years been considered as the man who spoke the best of any in the House of Commons.’ In 1695–6 he played a subordinate part in the prosecution of the conspirators against the life of the king, and of the nonjuring clergymen who gave them absolution on the scaffold. In the same year he was also engaged in a piracy case, and in the prosecution of Captain Vaughan for levying war against the king on the high seas, and took an active part in the parliamentary proceedings which issued in the attainder of Sir John Fenwick, speaking more than once, and giving his reasons for voting in favour of that judicial murder at considerable length. He was appointed king's counsel 8 March 1698–9. In 1699 he appeared for the prosecution at the trial of Lord Mohun for the murder of Richard Coote, killed in an affair of honour by the Earl of Warwick, and in a forgery case, and in the following year he successfully resisted an application for a new trial of his brother, Spencer Cowper [q. v.] In 1700–1 he was returned to parliament as junior member for Beeralston in Devonshire. He spoke against the motion for the impeachment of Lord Somers in 1701. On the accession of Anne in the following year his patent of counsel to the crown was renewed. In 1704 the celebrated case of Ashby v. White, in which an elector sued the returning officer for the borough of Aylesbury for damages for having refused to receive his vote at the general election of 1700, occasioned a serious conflict between the two houses of parliament. The House of Peers having overruled a judgment of the queen's bench to the effect that no such action lay, the matter was forthwith made a question of privilege by the House of Commons. Cowper argued elaborately but unsuccessfully that the jurisdiction of the house did not extend to the restraining of the action, but as he admitted that the house was the sole judge of the validity of election returns, and of the right of the elector to vote, it is difficult to understand his position. In the summer of this year (1704) an information was laid by the attorney-general, by order of the House of Commons, against Lord Halifax for neglecting, as auditor of the exchequer, to transmit the imprest rolls half-yearly to the king's remembrancer, pursuant to the statute 8 & 9 Will. III, c. 28, s. 8, and Cowper was one of the counsel retained for the defence.
The prosecution broke down owing to a piece of bad Latin in the information. The house (18 Nov.) censured Cowper for the part he had taken in the matter. On 11 Oct. 1705 he succeeded Sir Nathan Wright as lord keeper, the appointment being, in part at least, due to the influence of the Duchess of Marlborough. He would not, however, accept office except upon the understanding that he should have 2,000l. equipage money, a salary of 4,000l., and be raised to the peerage at the next promotion. Evelyn's statement that he bargained for a pension of 2,000l. per annum on dismissal is not confirmed by Cowper's ‘Diary.’ He was sworn of the privy council the same day, and took his seat on the woolsack on the 25th. His first public act of importance was to announce his intention of declining the new year's gifts which his predecessors had been in the habit of receiving from the officials attached to and the counsel practising in the court of chancery. Not being taken at his word, he refused admittance to all such as presented them
