Songs for two Voices,’ transcribed from Dean Aldrich's collection. (4) Motets for three voices, by Richard Dering and George Jeffreys, in separate parts, two-voice parts, and bassus continuus. In the British Museum Addit. MS. 10338 is an autograph collection of Jeffreys's compositions, dating from 1630 to 1669. It contains scores of fantasies, part-songs, a morning hymn, composed ‘at Mr. Peter Gunnings's motion,’ May 1652; scenes from masques, songs made for some comedies; ‘Have pity, grief,’ for a comedy sung before the king and queen at Cambridge, 1631; ‘Lord, who for our sins,’ ‘made in the time of my sickness,’ October 1657.
Jeffreys's son, Christopher (d. 1693), was elected as a king's scholar of Westminster to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1659, and was, according to his friend Wood, ‘excellent at the organ and virginalls or harpsichord.’ He proceeded B.A. in 1663 and M.A. in 1666. He afterwards journeyed in Spain, and his father made vain efforts to obtain him a post in the suite of an ambassador, thinking that ‘the little music he hath’ might prove a recommendation. Christopher and his wife Anna continued to live in his father's house at Little Weldon, Northamptonshire, up to the latter's death in July 1685. Christopher died in 1693. His son George is separately noticed. A sister was privately married in 1669 to Henry Goode, rector of Weldon in 1684.
[Hawkins's Hist. of Music, ii. 582, 584, 680; Wood's Life, p. xxxv; Grove's Dict. of Music, ii. 33; Cat. Sacred Harmonic Society's Library; Brit. Mus. Addit. MSS. 29550–62; P. C. C. Administration Act-Book, July 1695.]
JEFFREYS, GEORGE, first Baron Jeffreys of Wem (1648–1689), judge, born in 1648 at Acton, near Wrexham, Denbighshire, was sixth son of John Jeffreys, by his wife Margaret, daughter of Sir Thomas Ireland, knt., of Beausay, near Warrington, Lancashire. The family name has been spelled in eight different ways; in the patent of his peerage it appears as ‘Jeffreys,’ a form of spelling which he always used afterwards.
His father lived to a great age. Pennant saw his portrait at Acton House, taken in 1690, in the eighty-second year of his age (Pennant, Tours in Wales, i. 385). Jeffreys had six brothers, the eldest of whom, John, was high sheriff of Denbighshire in 1680. His third brother, Thomas, was knighted at Windsor Castle on 11 July 1686; was a knight of Alcantara, and lived the greater part of his life in Spain as English consul at Alicant and Madrid. His youngest brother, James, became a prebendary of Canterbury in 1682, and, dying on 4 Sept. 1689, was buried in Canterbury Cathedral. This James was the grandfather of the Rev. John Jeffreys, D.D., prebendary of St. Paul's, who died on 20 Nov. 1798, in the eighty-first year of his age (Gent. Mag. 1798, vol. lxviii. pt. ii. p. 1001).
While very young Jeffreys was sent to the free school at Shrewsbury, whence he was removed to St. Paul's School about 1659. There ‘he applied himself with considerable diligence to Greek and Latin’ (Gardiner, Admission Registers of St. Paul's School, 1884, p. 51). In 1661 he was admitted to Westminster School, then under the rule of Dr. Busby, whom he afterwards cited as a grammatical authority in Rosewell's trial (Cobbett, State Trials, x. 299). Jeffreys was an ambitious boy, and resolved that he would become a great lawyer. His father, however, is said to have had a presentiment that his son would come to a violent end, and was anxious that he should enter a quiet and respectable trade. Having at length overcome his father's opposition, and being aided with pecuniary assistance from his maternal grandmother, Jeffreys was admitted a pensioner of Trinity College, Cambridge, on 15 March 1662. Leaving Cambridge without a degree he was admitted to the Inner Temple on 19 May 1663. During his student's days Jeffreys was more often at the tavern than in the Temple, though while indulging in dissipation he kept a keen eye to his own interest, and took especial care to cultivate the acquaintance of the young attorneys and their clerks, whom he amused with his songs and jokes. The story that Jeffreys practised at the Kingston assizes during the time of the plague may be dismissed as apocryphal. He was called to the bar on 22 Nov. 1668, and at first confined himself to practising at the Old Bailey and at the Middlesex sessions at Hicks's Hall, where, with the aid of the ‘companions of his vulgar excesses,’ his powerful voice and boldness of address soon gained him a large business. His legal learning was small, but his talent in cross-examination was great, and his language, though always colloquial and frequently coarse, was both forcible and perspicuous. He lost no opportunity of ingratiating himself with the members of the corporation, and, through the influence of a namesake, one John Jeffreys, alderman of Bread Street ward, who was no relation, he was appointed common serjeant of the city of London on 17 March 1671. Jeffreys now commenced practice in Westminster Hall, and, seeing little prospect of further advancement from
