Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 36.djvu/114

Manwood letters of Manwood, from which it appears that he was arraigned before the privy council in April 1592, refused to recognise its jurisdiction in a contemptuous letter containing the words 'fugiunt ad potentes,' was thereupon confined in his own house in Great St. Bartholomew's by order of the council, and only regained his liberty by apologising for the obnoxious letter, and making humble submission (14 May). His disgrace, however, did not prevent his offering Burghley five hundred marks for the chief justiceship of the queen's bench, vacant by the death of Sir Christopher Wray [q. v.] The bribe was not taken, and on 14 Dec. 1592 Manwood died. The letters above referred to will be found in Lansdowne MS. 71, arts. 5, 6, 7, and 68; Harleian MS. 6995, art. 62; and Strype, 'Annals ' (fol.), iv. 119-28. Other of Manwood's letters are preserved in Egerton MS. 2713, f. 193, Additional MS. 12507, f. 130, Lansdowne MS. arts. 24 and 31, and the 'Manwood Papers' in the Inner Temple Library. His hand is one of the least legible ever written. A note of some of the charges against him in Burghley's handwriting is in Lansdowne MS. 104, art. 32 (see also Lansd. MSS. 24 art. 39, 26 art. 7). Some eulogistic Latin hexameters on his death are ascribed to Marlowe (cf. Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Dyce, iii. 308).

Manwood was buried beneath a splendid marble monument, erected during his lifetime, in the south transept of St. Stephen's Church, near Canterbury. Coke calls him a 'reverend judge of great and excellent knowledge in the law, and accompanied with a ready invention and good elocution.' Of the four high courts of justice he wittily said: 'In the common pleas there is all law and no conscience, in the queen's bench both law and conscience, in the chancery all conscience and no law, and in the exchequer neither law nor conscience.' His opinion 'as touching corporations, that they were invisible, immortal, and that they had no soul, and therefore no subpoena lieth against them, because they have no conscience nor soul,' is recorded by Bulstrode, 'Reports,' pt. ii. p. 233.

If an unscrupulous judge, Manwood was a munificent benefactor to his native county. Besides his school, he built a house of correction in Westgate, Canterbury, gave St. Stephen's Church a new peal of bells and a new transept—that under which he was buried—and procured in 1588 a substantial augmentation of the living. He also built seven almshouses in the vicinity of the church, and by his will left money to provide work and wages for the able-bodied poor of Hackington and the adjoining parishes in bad times.

Manwood married twice, in both cases a widow. By his first wife, Dorothy, daughter of John Theobald of Sheppey, he had issue three sons and two daughters; by his second wife, Elizabeth, daughter of John Copinger, of Allhallows, near Rochester, he had no issue. Of his sons one only survived him, Peter [q. v.] His posterity died out in the male line during the seventeenth century. Both Manwood's daughters married: Margaret, the elder, Sir John Leveson of Home, Kent; Ann, the younger, Sir Percival Hart of Lillingston. Fuller (Worthies, 'Kent') erroneously ascribes to the judge a treatise on 'Forrest Law' [see ]. A portrait of Manwood by an unknown hand is in the National Portrait Gallery; it is a sketch in water-colours from an ancient picture. 