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 committee, drafted the Reform Bill, he defended its legal details on 2 and 22 March, and spoke (19 April) on Gascoigne's motion against diminishing the number of members for England and Wales. Beaten on this by 299 to 291, the ministry dissolved on 22 April. Denman's re-election was not opposed. In the new parliament, in the midst of his official duties and private practice, he fought the battle of the bill all through the discussions on the schedules, speaking forty times in committee between 12 July and 7 Sept. On 28 Sept. Brougham's Bankruptcy Bill was sent down from the House of Lords, and Denman took charge of it. Unfamiliar, however, with details of chancery practice or bankruptcy procedure, and opposed by Wetherell and Sugden, he was not particularly successful. Althorp said of his speech on 30 Sept., ‘It was ill-opened, both as to the plan of the speech and its execution.’ The bill passed 18 Oct. At the special commission at Bristol in January 1832 he conducted the prosecution of the persons engaged in the riots which followed the rejection of the bill by the House of Lords; 24 were indicted, 21 convicted, and 4 executed. The crisis which followed the defeat of the ministry on Lyndhurst's motion to postpone the consideration of the first part of the bill to that of the disfranchising clauses was a serious one for Denman. To take office he had resigned his circuit practice and his common serjeantship; to lose office would make him a poor man. There was some suggestion of making him speaker, but to that and to a judgeship he was averse. Perhaps this anxiety and the judicial example of Brougham excuse, if they do not account for, what he himself calls his ‘horribly undignified’ conduct in making sneers and allusions to Lyndhurst's alleged change of political adherence, in a case in which he was counsel and Lyndhurst sitting on the bench. He was hard at work, too, during this period upon questions connected with the Russian Dutch loan, defending the government's conduct in continuing to pay interest under the treaty of 1815, after Belgium had been separated from the kingdom of the Netherlands. During the remainder of the session he carried through the commons a bill abolishing the punishment of death for forgery, had charge of Brougham's bill for the abolition of sinecures in the court of chancery, and supported Ewart's proposal to abolish the punishment of death for horse-stealing, and Warburton's for holding coroner's inquests in public. For the vacation he retired to Stony Middleton in Derbyshire, which since 1830 he had been planting and improving. He found himself so unpopular in Nottingham through the official part he had played in the government prosecutions that his constituents mobbed him, and accordingly he thought of accepting the requisition which was presented to him to stand for Derbyshire at the approaching general election. He decided, however, to try his fortune in Nottingham, but his prospects were poor indeed, for on 27 Oct. 1832 the trial came on at the bar of the king's bench of the mayor of Bristol for neglect of duty during the riots, and he as attorney-general led for the crown.

On 3 Nov. Lord Tenterden, chief justice of the king's bench, died. Brougham at once urged Grey to propose Denman's name to the king, who ‘after a short struggle’ assented. Denman was sworn of the privy council as lord chief justice on 9 Nov. 1832 (, 1st ser. ii. 329;, Memoirs, iii. 220). The salary of the office was then 10,000l., which had been fixed by the act of 1825. A committee of the House of Commons had, however, in 1830 reported in favour of its reduction, and Denman accepted the office on the understanding that it should be reduced to 8,000l. Brougham, however, omitted to introduce a bill for that purpose, but Denman never during his tenure drew more than 8,000l., though parliament was annually voting 10,000l. The salary was not reduced by statute till 1851. Although not erudite in case-law, he was a good criminal lawyer, and had had much judicial experience, and his appointment was popular. The common pleas being then a closed court, and the exchequer only beginning to recover prestige under Lyndhurst, Parke, and Alderson, the king's bench was the busiest common law court, and the cause-lists were much in arrear. By severe efforts Denman reduced the arrears. In 1834 Brougham, who stood in need of legal assistance in the House of Lords, procured him a peerage, and he was gazetted Baron Denman of Dovedale 22 March. He now removed to 38 Portland Place; but he had no fortune, and his family was large. He never had made a large income at the bar, and it was thought that it would have been better to terminate in his person the custom of raising chief justices to the peerage (, 1st ser. iii. 74). As chief justice he held the great seal from 28 Nov. to 10 Dec. 1834, between the dismissal of Melbourne and the return of Peel, and during the session of 1835, while the great seal was in commission, he was speaker of the House of Lords. On 27 Aug. Lord Lyndhurst made a speech censuring as corrupt some of the appointments of commissioners upon municipalities, and Denman in reply twitted him se-