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 heritable jurisdictions superseded by a regular impartial administration of justice upon the English model. As draftsman of the Regency Act passed on the death of the Prince of Wales (1751), he gave great offence to Cumberland [see ], which he increased by stifling the investigation of the charges of jacobitism brought against the prince's entourage [see, first ]. He supported Lord Chesterfield's reform of the calendar (1751) and carried a reform of the marriage law (1753). The latter measure relieved England and Wales from the scandal of clandestine marriages (members of the royal family, the Jewish and quaker communities alone excepted); but by requiring solemnisation according to the law and ritual of the church of England in churches or chapels already used for the purpose, and invalidating infants' marriages by license without consent of parents or guardians, it produced a crop of grievances which were only gradually removed by amending acts. In 1823 it was finally superseded by the measure which forms the basis of the present law.

On the death of Henry Pelham (6 March 1754) Hardwicke managed the negotiation which placed Newcastle at the treasury. Hardwicke himself retained the great seal, and was rewarded (2 April) for his long and eminent services by the titles of Earl of Hardwicke and Viscount Royston. He successfully defended the Hanoverian subsidiary treaties [see GEORGE II] and defeated the militia bill of 1756. In the crisis which followed the loss of Minorca he resigned office shortly after Newcastle (19 Nov. 1756). His opposition to the proposed release of Byng's judges from their oath of secrecy wore a harsh and sinister appearance, of which the worst is made by his inveterate enemy, Horace Walpole. Of Byng's guilt, however, Hardwicke had no shadow of doubt; and by his intimate relations with Lord Anson he was exceptionally qualified to form a judgment. ‘Byng,’ he wrote to Newcastle, 5 Feb. 1757, ‘would not sail down upon Galissonnière in the only way in which he was attackable because there would be risk. Not an officer or a soldier was to be landed at Port Mahon because there would be danger in it.’ There can be little doubt that these words are an echo of what he had heard from Anson, and they imply that Byng's conduct, whatever its motive, was so excessively cautious as to be tantamount to desertion in the face of the enemy. In any case, the release of a court-martial from their oath would have been a precedent of dangerous and incalculable consequence which no constitutional lawyer could be expected to approve.

On the resignation of Devonshire, Hardwicke played the part of honest broker between Newcastle and Pitt, but did not resume office. To Pitt's foreign policy he gave a general support, but on the fall of Quebec became solicitous for peace.

He was resworn of the privy council on the accession of George III, whose first speech he drafted (minus the passage in which the king gloried in the name of Briton). He approved of Bute's appointment to the northern seals (25 March 1761), and joined in the revolt against Pitt on the Spanish war question, but declined Bute's subsequent offer of the privy seal (16 Nov.). He followed Newcastle into opposition (May 1762), and took a prominent part against the government in the debates on the peace of Paris (9 Dec. 1762) and the cider tax (28 March 1763). In the Wilkes affair he was against the government on the question of general warrants, and with them on the question of privilege, but was precluded by ill-health from making any public pronouncement on either question. On both questions his view ultimately prevailed. With Wilkes personally he had no sort of sympathy. ‘North Briton’ No. 45 he held to be a seditious libel. He also held the high legal doctrine which restricted the jury in libel cases to the determination of bare questions of fact, and how far he was prepared to go in restraining the liberty of the press he had shown in the earlier case of Paul Whitehead [q. v.] by moving the standing order prohibiting the unauthorised publication of lives of peers, which was only vacated on the eve of the publication of Lord Campbell's ‘Lives of the Chancellors’ (22 July 1845).

Hardwicke died, after a lingering illness, at his house in Grosvenor Square on 6 March 1764. His remains were removed to his seat at Wimpole, Cambridgeshire, and interred (15 March) in the family vault adjoining the church. Within the church is his monument in Siena marble by Scheemakers.

Hardwicke figures as solicitor-general in Ferrers's historical picture of the court of chancery, now in the National Portrait Gallery, where is also a sketch of him as lord chancellor by an unknown hand. A copy of his portrait by Ramsay is at Lincoln's Inn. Engravings from portraits by Dahl, Hudson, and Hoare are in the British Museum (cf. his Life by cited infra, and, British Cabinet, No. 48; Cat. Second Loan Exhib. Nos. 268, 331, 788).