Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 19.djvu/16

Finch On the dismissal of Shaftesbury, Finch became lord keeper of the seals, 9 Nov. 1673, and as such was made on 4 Jan. 1674 the unconscious mouthpiece of the first direct lie which Charles had ventured openly to tell his parliament (ib.) On 10 Jan. he was raised to the peerage as Baron Finch of Daventry, from the manor in Northamptonshire of which he was owner (, Peerage). On 19 Dec. he surrendered the seals, to receive them again immediately with the higher title of lord chancellor, the office carrying with it apparently a salary of 4,000l. a year (Autobiography of Roger North, p. 165). In the same year he was made lord-lieutenant of Somersetshire. In 1675 he was, according to Burnet, one of the chief arguers for the non-resisting test (Own Time, i. 383). As lord chancellor he had at the beginning of each session to supply an elaboration of the king's speech, and this he did, 'spoiling what the king had said so well by overstraining to do it better'. In this year he conducted the case of the lords in the great Fagg controversy. In 1677 he presided as lord high steward of England on the trial of the Earl of Pembroke for manslaughter (, Athenæ Oxon.) A signal instance of the adroitness, joined, it should be said, with unimpeached probity, by which, almost alone among his contemporaries, he managed to secure at once permanence in office and freedom from parliamentary attack, occurred in the matter of Danby's impeachment. Charles, to the great anger of the commons, had given Danby a pardon in bar of the impeachment. The house appointed a committee, who demanded from Finch an explanation of the fact that the pardon bore the great seal. Finch's statement was that he neither advised, drew, nor altered it ; that the king commanded him to bring the seal from Whitehall, and being there he laid it upon the table ; thereupon his majesty commanded the seal to be taken out of the bag, which it was not in his power to hinder ; and the king wrote his name on the top of the parchment, and then directed to have it sealed, whereupon the person who usually carried the purse affixed the seal to it. He added that at the time he did not regard himself as having the custody of the seal (Parl. Hist. iv. 1114). When the case of Danby was before the lords he argued for the right of bishops to vote in trials for treason, and carried his view as to preliminaries though not as to final judgment ( Own Time;, Peerage). There is among Sir Charles Bunbury's manuscripts at Bury, Suffolk, a treatise on the king's power of granting pardons, ascribed with most probability to Finch (Hist. MSS. Comm. 3rd Rep. 241 a). Some autograph notes, certainly his, on the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 belong to Alfred Morrison, esq. (ib. 9th Rep. 457 a). He conducted the examination before the privy council of the 'party' lords who came from Scotland in 1678 to complain of Lauderdale, and, though evidently holding a brief for the duke, was unable to shake their position (, Own Time, i. 420). That Finch was not above using the ordinary jargon of court flattery appears in his exclamation, when Charles tried the experiment of a newly modelled privy council, 'It looked like a thing from heaven fallen into his master's breast.' During the popish terror Finch appears to have given no offence to either side. He presided, however, as lord high steward at the trial of Lord Stafford, and his conduct formed a pleasing contrast to that which so often disgraced the courts in the latter years of Charles's reign. He showed personal courtesy to the prisoner, provided him with all proper means of defence, and pronounced sentence in a speech greatly admired at the time, 'one of the best he had ever made' (, Own Time, i. 492). He, however, gave his own vote against Stafford, and complied so far with the prevailing fashion as to assume the whole truth of the 'plot,' and even to father the absurd cry that London had been burned by the papists (ib. i. 492; State Trials). Burnet accounts for his patronage of the plot as the result of fear of parliamentary attack in consequence of his conduct in the matter of Danby's pardon (ib. ii. 261). Only one slip does Finch appear to have made in his discreet avoidance of giving offence. In 1679, on receiving Gregory, the new speaker of the house, he allowed himself to declare that the king 'always supports the creatures of his power.' Shaftesbury at once fastened on the expression; Finch was compelled to apologise, and a resolution was carried not to enter it upon the minutes of the house (, Hist. England, iv. 77). In the great question of the succession, Finch was of course against exclusion. But by Charles's command he proposed the middle and entirely impracticable scheme of 'limitations' (ib. iv. 80). On 12 May 1681 he was created Earl of Nottingham, and died 18 Dec. 1682, in the sixty-first year of his age, after a life spent in unremitting official and professional toil. He was buried at Ravenstone, near Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire, of which place he was the owner and benefactor (, Peerage). He married Elizabeth Harvey, daughter of Daniel Harvey, merchant of London (probably one of the members for Surrey in