lowing spring, but abandoned on the recovery of the king [see George].
On the meeting of the new parliament Scott incurred some unmerited suspicion of corruption by maintaining (23 Dec. 1790) the then not unconstitutional doctrine that the impeachment of Warren Hastings had abated by the recent dissolution. Holding Lord Mansfield's view of the respective functions of judge and jury in cases of libel, he so amended the measure introduced by Fox in 1791 as materially to modify its effect (31 May). In the debates on the government measures for the partial relief of Irish and Scottish catholics, passed in 1791 and 1793, he took no part. On Thurlow's dismissal, on 15 June 1792, he tendered Pitt his resignation, but eventually withdrew it at Thurlow's instance, and on 13 Feb. 1793 succeeded Sir Archibald Macdonald as attorney-general. Being thus identified with the vigorous and rigorous policy pursued by the government during the next few years, he became for the time the best hated man in England. The Traitorous Correspondence Act of 1793 (which virtually suspended mercantile relations with France), the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of the following year, the Treasonable Practices and Seditious Meetings Acts of 1795, and the Newspaper Proprietors' Registration Act of 1798 were his handiwork. At the same time he made liberal use of the procedure by ex-officio information for libel, and strained the law of constructive treason to the breaking-point. In the actual conduct of the prosecutions, even so severe a critic as Lord Campbell finds nothing to censure [see Frost, John, (1750–1842); Hardy, Thomas, (1752–1832); Tooke, John Horne; Erskine, Thomas, Lord].
On 19 July 1799 Scott succeeded Sir James Eyre (1734–1799) [q. v.] as lord chief justice of the common pleas, having during the three preceding days been sworn serjeant-at-law and of the privy council and board of trade, and created Baron Eldon of Eldon, in the county of Durham, where in 1792 he had bought a fine estate. On 24 Sept. following he took his seat, and on 27 Feb. 1800 he made his first reported speech in the House of Lords, in support of a bill to continue the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. He also supported (4 April) Lord Auckland's bill prohibiting the marriage of a divorced adulteress with her paramour, which passed the House of Lords, but was thrown out in the commons. In the debates on the union with Ireland he was conspicuous by his silence. The measure itself he probably disapproved, and to the emancipation of the catholic population he was as adverse as the king, though he was too sound a lawyer to countenance the king's strange delusion as to the effect of the coronation oath (Kenyon, Life of Lord Kenyon, p. 320). On Pitt's retirement he consented, not without demur, to succeed Lord Loughborough on the woolsack, and, if his notebook may be trusted, only in pursuance of a prior pledge to the king, and on the understanding that he was to be the king's chancellor, not the minister's. He believed that Addington had purposely kept him in ignorance of the true state of the king's health, and, though he received the great seal from the king in council on 14 April 1801, he regarded his tenure of it as conditional upon his recovery, and retained the chief-justiceship until 21 May, when he was succeeded by Lord Alvanley [Arden, Richard Pepper]. On three occasions during this interval, viz. on 18 April, 30 April, and 21 May, he procured the king's signature to a commission for passing bills. On the first and last of these occasions the king was unquestionably lucid; whether he was strictly competent to transact business on 30 April admits of some doubt (Colchester, Diary, i. 264–8; Rose, Diaries, i. 344–52).
In the common pleas Eldon gave proof, not only of a thorough mastery of law, but of a capacity for prompt decision which contrasts curiously with the habitual dilatoriness which he afterwards displayed in chancery. On the other hand he was too apt to confound the jury by the extreme subtlety with which he summed up. His judgments are reported by Bosanquet and Puller. As chancellor he made his first appearance in debate in support of a bill, also favoured by Thurlow, for granting divorce to a wife whose husband had committed adultery with her sister (20 May 1801). He also supported the measure introduced to exclude Horne Tooke, by which clergymen were disqualified for sitting in the House of Commons (15 June 1801); the convention with Russia which dissolved the armed neutrality (13 Nov. 1801); and, though by no means warmly, the peace of Amiens (3 Nov. 1801 and 13 May 1802). In the spring of 1804 the administration was hampered, while its existence, then almost at the mercy of Pitt, was prolonged by the lunacy of the king, which lasted, with hardly a day's intermission, from 12 Feb. to 23 April. On 1 March, in answer to a question in the House of Lords, Eldon stated that there was ‘no suspension of the royal functions.’ On 4 March and the next day he saw the king, and obtained his verbal consent to the Duke of York's estate bill. On 9 March, and again on 23 March, he affixed the great seal to a commission which
