Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/460

 , with Lord Hatherley, for settling the claims of the church lessees; and when parliament reconstituted the ecclesiastical commission, he became the unpaid church estates commissioner. Later in the same year he successfully adjusted certain disputes as to pecuniary claims between the New Zealand Company and the colonial office. In 1851 he served with Lord Macaulay and others on the inquiry into the Indian civil service, which resulted in the adoption of open competition. In 1853 he served on the commission of inquiry into the inns of court and legal education.

In 1855 Shaw-Lefevre succeeded Sir [q. v.] as clerk of the parliaments, and in the same year he and Sir [q. v.] became the first two civil service commissioners, performing the functions which were afterwards vested in a paid commission. Although his multifarious duties told upon his health, it was only in 1862 that he resigned the office of civil service commissioner and the vice-chancellorship of the London University. He further served, with other specialists, as a member of the commissions on the digest of law (1866–70), restored standards (1868–70), and endowed schools (1869–71). As a member of the digest of law commission he took a share in the work of the ‘Revised Edition of the Statutes’ and the ‘Analytical Index to the Statutes Revised.’ He prepared an analysis of the standing orders of the House of Lords. He retired from office, on a pension, on 6 March 1875, and died on 20 Aug. 1879.

Shaw-Lefevre became F.R.S. in 1820, a K.C.B. in 1857, and D.C.L. of Oxford in 1858. In 1850 he was elected a bencher of the Inner Temple. He was one of the founders of the Athenæum and Political Economy clubs. In 1871 he presided over the education department of the social science congress at Dublin.

He had a passion for acquiring languages, reading easily fourteen in all, including Hebrew. He began Russian after he was sixty-five. He translated and published ‘The Burgomaster's Family’ (1873) from the Dutch; other translations into verse from different languages have not been published. In this, as in his official work, his patience in inquiry and quickness of insight were conspicuous.

Shaw-Lefevre married, in 1824, Rachel Emily, daughter of Ichabod Wright of Mapperley, Nottingham. His only son, the Right Hon. George John Shaw-Lefevre, was created Baron Eversley in 1906.

 SHAWE. [See .]  SHAXTON, NICHOLAS (1485?–1556), bishop of Salisbury, born probably about 1485, was a native of the diocese of Norwich. He may have been a younger brother of one Thomas Shaxton of Batheley (or Bale) in Norfolk who, according to one pedigree (Add. MS. 5533, f. 195, Brit. Mus.), died in April 1537. Nicholas studied at Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1506. Soon after he was elected a fellow of Gonville Hall, and commenced M.A. in 1510. In 1520 he was appointed a university preacher, and next year proceeded B.D. He is mentioned among those propagators of new views who used to frequent the ‘White Horse’ (, Parker, p. 12). He was president of Physick's Hostel, which was attached to Gonville Hall, 1512–3.

In February 1530 he was one of the committee of divines at Cambridge to whom, at Gardiner's instigation, the question of the king's marriage with Catherine of Arragon was referred by the university, and his name was marked by Gardiner as favourable to the king's views. In May following he was one of the twelve Cambridge divines appointed to serve on a joint committee with twelve of Oxford in examining English books likely to disturb the faith of the people. But his own orthodoxy was called in question not long afterwards; and in May next year, when he was admitted inceptor in divinity, though one of the regents wrote asking [q. v.], bishop of Norwich, to give him a license to preach in his diocese, the bishop was not so easily satisfied. From inquiries made at Cambridge he learned that the vice-chancellor had censured two points in a sermon which Shaxton had preached ad clerum on Ash Wednesday: first, that it was wrong to assert publicly that there was no purgatory, but not damnable to think so; and, secondly, that no man could be chaste by prayers or fasting unless God made him so. He had also confessed that he had prayed at mass that the clergy might be relieved of celibacy. These points he had been persuaded to give up so as to avoid open abjuration; but the vice-chancellor had compelled him and others who proceeded that year in divinity to take a special oath to renounce the errors of Wiclif, Huss, and Luther. The bishop, however, still insisted on a formal act of abjuration, because he had purchased heretical books and conveyed them into his diocese. And when Bilney was burned shortly afterwards at Norwich, recanting at the stake heresies much the same as Shaxton's, the bishop is reported to have said,