retired from the mastership of the rolls in 1873. He did much to remove the restrictions which had long hampered research among the public records and state papers. Lord Romilly died in .London on the 23rd of December 1874.
ROMILLY, SIR SAMUEL (1757–1818), English legal reformer,
was the second son of Peter Romilly, a watchmaker and jeweller
in London, whose father had emigrated from Montpellier after
the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and who had married
Margaret Garnault, a Huguenot refugee like himself, but of a
far wealthier family. Samuel Romilly was born in Frith
Street, Soho, on the 1st of March 1757. He served for a time
in his father's shop; but his education was not neglected, and
he became a good classical scholar and particularly conversant
with French literature. A legacy of £2000 from one of his
mother's relations led to his being articled to a solicitor and
clerk in chancery with the idea of qualifying himself to purchase
the office of one of the six clerks in chancery. In 1778,
however, he determined to go to the bar, and entered himself
at Gray's Inn. He went to Geneva in 1781, where he made
the acquaintance of the chief democratic leaders, including
Etienne Dumont. Called to the bar in 1783, he went the midland
circuit, but was chiefly occupied with chancery practice.
On the publication of Madan's Thoughts on Executive Justice,
advocating the increase of capital punishments, he at once wrote
and published in 1786 Observations on Madan's book. Of more
general interest is his intimacy with the great Mirabeau, to
whom he was introduced in 1784. Mirabeau saw him daily
for a long time and introduced him to Lord Lansdowne, who
highly appreciated him, and, when Mirabeau became a political
leader, it was to Romilly that he applied for an account of the
procedure used in the English House of Commons. He visited
Paris in 1789, and studied the course of the Revolution there;
and in 1790 he published his Thoughts on the Probable Influence
of the Late Revolution in France upon Great Britain, a work
of great power. His practice at the chancery bar continued
largely to increase, and in 1800 he was made a K.C. In 1798
he married Anne, daughter of Francis Garbett of Knill Court,
Herefordshire; and in 1805 he was appointed chancellor of
the county palatine of Durham. His great abilities were
thoroughly recognized by the Whig party, to which he attached
himself; and in 1806, on the accession of the ministry of “ All
the Talents ” to office, he was offered the post of solicitor general,
although he had never sat in the House of Commons.
He accepted the office, and was knighted and brought into parliament
for Queenborough. He went out of office with the
government, but remained in the House of Commons, sitting
successively for Horsham, Wareham and Arundel. It was now
that Sir Samuel Romilly commenced the greatest labour of his
life, his attempt to reform the criminal law of England, then
at once cruel and illogical. By statute law innumerable offences
were punished by death, but, as such wholesale executions
would be impossible, the larger number of those convicted and
sentenced to death at every assizes were respited, after having
heard the sentence of death solemnly passed upon them. This
led to many acts of injustice, as the lives of the convicts depended
on the caprice of the judges, while at the same time it
made the whole system of punishments and of the criminal law
ridiculous. Romilly saw this, and in 1808 he managed to repeal
the Elizabethan statute, which made it a capital offence to steal
from the person. This success, however, raised opposition, and in
the following year three bills repealing equally sanguinary statutes
were thrown out by the House of Lords under the influence of
Lord Ellenborough. Year after year the same influence prevailed,
and Romilly saw his bills rejected; but his patient efforts and
his eloquence ensured victory eventually for his cause by opening
the eyes of Englishmen to the barbarity of their criminal
law. The only success he had was in securing the repeal, in
1812, of a statute of Elizabeth making it a capital offence for
a soldier or a mariner to beg without a pass from a magistrate
or his commanding officer. Sir Samuel Romilly's efforts made
his name famous not only in England but all over Europe, and
in 1818 he had the honour of being returned at the head of the
poll for the city of Westminster. He did not long survive his
triumph. On the 29th of October 1818 Lady Romilly died in
the Isle of Wight. Her husband's grief was intense, and he
committed suicide in a fit of temporary insanity on the 2nd of
November. No man of his time was more loved than Sir
Samuel Romilly; his singularly sweet nature, his upright manliness,
his eloquence and his great efforts on behalf of humanity
secured him permanent fame.
See the Memoirs of the Life of Sir Samuel Romilly written by himself, with a selection from his Correspondence, edited by his Sons (3 vols., 1840); The Speeches of Sir Samuel Romilly in the House of Commons (2 vols., 1820); “Life and Work of Sir Samuel Romilly,” by Sir W. J. Collins, in Trans. of the Huguenot Society (1908).
ROMILLY-SUR-SEINE, a town of north-central France, in
the department of Aube, a mile from the left bank of the Seine
and 24 m. N.W. of Troyes, on the Paris-Belfort line. Pop.
(1906) 9777.
Romilly is an important industrial town, with extensive manufactures of cotton and woollen hosiery, and of the special machinery and appliances required for the industry. The Eastern Railway Company has large workshops here.
ROMINTEN, a village of Germany, in the province of East
Prussia, 12 m. N.E. from Goldap, situated in the Rominter
Heide, a fine tract of heath and forest country, Q0 sq. m. in
extent, well stocked with game and affording excellent sport.
Here is a favourite hunting-box of the German emperor, with a
church adjacent, both in the Norwegian style. Pop. 1200.
See K. E. Schmidt, Die Rominter Heide (Danzig, 1898).
ROMNEY, GEORGE (1734-1802), English historical and
portrait painter, was born at Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire,
on the 26th of December 1734. His father was a builder and
cabinet-maker of the place, and the son, having manifested a
turn for mechanics, was instructed in the latter craft, showing
considerable dexterity with his lingers, executing carvings
of figures in wood, and constructing a violin, which he spent
much time in playing. He was also busy with his pencil;
and some of his sketches of the neighbouring rustics having
attracted attention, his father was at length induced to
apprentice the boy, at the age of nineteen, to an itinerant
painter of portraits and domestic subjects named Steele, an
artist who had studied in Paris under Vanloo; but the erratic
habits of his instructor prevented Romney from making great
progress in his art. In 1756 he impulsively married a young
woman who had nursed him through a fever, and started as a
portrait painter on his own account, travelling through the
northern counties, executing likenesses at a couple of guineas,
and producing a series of some twenty figure compositions,
which were exhibited in Kendal, and afterwards disposed of
by means of a lottery.
Having, at the age of twenty-seven, saved about £100, he left a portion of the sum with his wife and family, and started to seek his fortune in London, never returning, except for brief visits, till he came, a broken-down and aged man, to die. Credit must, however, be given him 'for recognizing to some extent his family responsibilities. He did not allow his wife and children to fall into poverty, and he gave help to his brothers, who seem to have resembled him in a kind of shiftlessness of temperament. In London he rapidly rose into popular favour. His “Death of General Wolfe” was judged worthy of the second prize at the Society of Arts, but a word from Reynolds in praise of Mortimer's “ Edward the Confessor ” led to the premium being awarded to that painter, while Romney had to content himself with a donation of, £50, an incident which led to the subsequent coldness between him and the president which prevented him from exhibiting at the Academy or presenting himself for its honours.
In 1764 he paid a brief visit to Paris, where She was befriended by Joseph Vernet; and his portrait of Sir Joseph Yates, painted on his return, bears distinct traces of his study of the works of Rubens then in the Luxembourg Gallery. In 1766 he became a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists, and three years later he seems to have studied in their schools.