Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 30.djvu/178

 same year was appointed chief justice of the king's bench in Ireland, in succession to Sir John Dutton, transferred to the English court of exchequer (see edition of  Works, vii. 263), and while the Irish chancellorship was vacant he was a commissioner of the great seal. In 1620 he resigned his judgeship, and returned to the English bar. His name occurs in his own and in Croke's ‘Reports’ from Michaelmas 1620 to Michaelmas 1621. On 25 Sept. 1621 he was appointed a judge of the common pleas, and on 20 March 1622 was selected as a member of a commission to go to Ireland and inquire into the state of that kingdom. He complained to Lord Cranfield that the commissioners refused to recognise him as a judge, or entitled to any precedence on the commission, and that he was placed junior on it (Hist. MSS. Comm. 4th Rep. App. p. 305). While in Ireland, upon the complaint of the general body of suitors, he revised the scale of costs in the Dublin courts (see and  Cal. State Papers, Ireland, 1615–25). He remained a member of the Irish commission at any rate till November 1623 (Hist. MSS. Comm. 4th Rep. App. p. 316). On 6 Aug. 1623 he was appointed a member of the council of Wales, in January of the following year was a member of another Irish commission, and on 17 Oct. 1624 was transferred from the common pleas to the king's bench. As a member of the Star-chamber he appears to have been in favour of leniency, at least in the cases of Lord Morley and Sir Henry Mayne; but in 1627 he was one of the judges who refused to admit Eliot and his companions to bail (28 Nov.) He was one of the judges who tried Eliot, Holles, and Valentine in 1630, and he delivered the judgment of the court. In 1636 he actually signed an opinion in favour of ship-money (Remembrancia, p. 469; Hist. MSS. Comm. 9th Rep. pp. 2, 497 a), and in 1638 he gave judgment for its legality. He died at his house in Holborn on 9 Dec. 1640, and was buried in Lincoln's Inn Chapel. Sir [q. v.] succeeded him. Hearne, in his ‘Curious Discourses,’ ii. 448, prints a paper by Jones on the early Britons read before the Antiquaries' Society in Elizabeth's reign, and calls him ‘a person of admirable learning, particularly in the municipal laws and British antiquities.’ Jones's ‘Reports of Cases from 18 James I to 15 Charles I’ appeared in 1675, fol. He married in 1587 Margaret, eldest daughter of Griffith ap John Griffith of Kevenamulch, Carnarvonshire, by whom he had one son, Charles, reader at Lincoln's Inn in 1640; and secondly, Catherine, daughter of Thomas Powys of Abingdon, Oxfordshire, widow of Dr. [q. v.] An engraved portrait of Jones by Sherwin is prefixed to his ‘Reports.’



JONES, WILLIAM (1631–1682), lawyer, son of Richard Jones, of Stowey, Somerset, M.P. for Somerset in 1654, was entered at Gray's Inn 6 May 1647 (, Admissions, p. 244); was called to the bar, and soon acquired a 'capital practice' in the court of king's bench (, Lives, i. 47). The Duke of Buckingham befriended him, and he was knighted and made a king's counsel in 1671. He was solicitor-general from 11 Nov. 1673 till 25 June 1675, when he was appointed attorney-general. He directed the prosecution of the victims of Titus Oates's plot in 1678, but growing, it is said, disgusted with that work, he resigned the attorney-generalship in November 1679, and became a pronounced enemy of the court. He was returned to the House of Commons as member for Plymouth at a bye-election on 3 Nov.1680, and entered parliament with 'the fame of being the greatest lawyer in England and a very wise man' (, Debates, vii. 451). He was a manager for the commons at Stafford's trial (30 Nov.), and to his strenuous efforts the passage of the Exclusion Bill through the commons was generally ascribed (cf. Hist. MSS. Comm. 12th Rep. ix. 99 sq.; Parl. Hist. iv. 1208). His action was severely satirised by the court wits (see State Poems, iii. 138, 157), and Dryden introduced him as 'Bull-faced Jonas' into 'Absalom and Achitophel' (1681). He was re-elected for Plymouth to the abortive parliament summoned to Oxford in March 1681. The king's declaration of 8 April 1681, justifying his dissolution of parliament, was answered by Jones in his exhaustive 'Just and Modest Vindication of the Proceedings of the last two parliaments' (London, 1681, 4to. anon.) The tract was reissued in 1689 as 'The Design of Enslaving England Discovered,' and reappeared in 'State Tracts,' 1693, i. 105, and in Cobbett's 'Parl. Hist.' iv. App. cxxxiv sq. After its publication Jones appeared little in public life, owing, it was reported, to dislike of Shaftesbury. He was on intimate terms with Lord William Russell. His friend Burnet describes him as 'honest and wise' although sour-tempered (Own Times, i.396). He died on 2 May 1682, either at his house in South-