Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/118

 1788 he was knighted, and from the same day ran his appointment as king's advocate-general, in succession to Sir William Wynne, promoted to be dean of arches, though the patent was dated 28 Oct. On 24 Sept. 1788 the archbishop of Canterbury appointed him vicar-general for the province of Canterbury; and he was also commissary of the city and diocese of Canterbury, and chancellor of the diocese of London. On the death of Halifax, bishop of St. Asaph, he became master of the faculties on 3 April 1790, and was elected a bencher of his inn on 5 July 1794, serving as treasurer in 1807, and finally, on 26 Oct. 1798, he was appointed judge of the high court of admiralty, and was sworn of the privy council.

Scott had not been long at the bar before he sought to enter parliament. As early as 1779 he wrote to his brother that he wanted to find a seat. When Sir Roger Newdigate retired from the representation of the university of Oxford in 1780, Scott and Sir William Jones both came forward, but, as their friends saw, with little chance of success (Johnson to Mrs. Thrale, 9 May and 6 June 1780). Sir William Dolben was returned. In 1784 Scott was elected for the close borough of Downton, but was unseated on petition; he stood again in 1790 and won and kept the seat. At last, on Sir William Dolben's death in March 1801, he was elected for Oxford University, and continued to represent it till his elevation to the House of Lords. During his first six years in the House of Commons he spoke only once, on 2 June 1795, when, having been mentioned by Dundas as the legal adviser of ministers with regard to the instructions sent to Sir Charles Grey and Sir John Jervis in the West Indies, he was compelled to rise and take part in the debate. Afterwards he made occasional speeches and brought in bills on ecclesiastical and legal questions. He proposed Abbot, his fellow university member, upon his re-election as speaker on 16 Nov. 1802. ‘Nothing could be more appropriate than his language,’ writes Wilberforce (Life, iii. 73). In 1803 he brought in the Curates Bill, which was thrown out in the House of Lords at the end of the session (, Diary, i. 575). With his Clergy Residence Bill he was more successful. Under the sanction of the government he introduced it on 6 April, and it received the royal assent on 7 July (, Life of Lord Sidmouth, ii. 189). In 1804 he reintroduced the Curates Bill, but too late to pass it, and in 1805 feared to bring it in again, as he thought his university hostile to it. Subsequently it passed as an ‘Act to amend the 21 Henry VIII as to Pluralities of Livings,’ and was the basis of the broader act passed by Lord Harrowby. But in the main Scott was a steady opponent of reform. On 25 May 1810 he declared himself opposed to any concession to the claims of the Roman catholics (Hansard, xvii. 183). On 23 Jan. 1812 there was a long debate on excommunications by process from the ecclesiastical court, in which his speech in their favour was so strenuously and successfully replied to by Romilly and others that he was obliged to promise to bring in a bill for their abolition, a promise which he fulfilled in July 1813, but ‘very reluctantly, for he had little taste for reform’ (, Memoirs, iii. 6); the bill passed as 53 George III, c. 127. Martin's bill for regulating the office of registrar in admiralty was so altered by his amendments that its supporters would have preferred that it should not pass at all. He opposed the Chapel Exemptions Bill in 1815 as being a relief of dissenters, and in 1817 and 1818 resisted Curwen's Tithes Bill. ‘Scott,’ writes Romilly (Memoirs, iii. 330), ‘who, as member for the university of Oxford, conceives himself bound to watch with great jealousy every innovation with respect to ecclesiastical property, expressed great doubt about the bill.’ His last prominent appearance in the House of Commons was at the opening of the session of 1820, when he moved the speaker, Manners-Sutton, into the chair. Though his friends had long expected a peerage for him, it was not till 1821 that he received it; when, on the occasion of the coronation of George IV, and by patent dated 17 July 1821, he was created a baron with the title of Stowell of Stowell Park, an estate which he had bought in Gloucestershire. He took his seat on 5 Feb. 1822. His appearances in the House of Lords after his elevation to the peerage were rare, though on ecclesiastical questions his opinion was much deferred to. In 1823 he moved for a committee to inquire into the state of the marriage laws, but hardly appears otherwise to have taken part in debate.

On 14 Aug. 1820 he resigned his office in the consistorial court. His last decision in that court was Ruding v. Smith (2, Consistory Reports, 371); but he clung tenaciously to his judgeship in the admiralty court, though he had been tempted to resign it in 1808, when, on Sir William Wynne's retirement, he received, and, on Eldon's advice, refused, the offer of the more dignified but less lucrative office of dean of the arches. His faculties had begun to fail, more perhaps outwardly than in reality. Loss of sight and weakness of voice obliged him to em-