A HIGH SHERIFF IN CONTEMPT.
Another " scene " occurred at Guildford Assizes. Mr. Evelyn, the High Sheriff, posted on the outside of the court in which Mr. Justice Blackburn sits the following placard-
" To the Freeholdere and Inhabitants of the County of Surrey. " Gentlemen-On Friday, the 3d of August, Mr. Justice Blackburn, in my pre-, sence, but without addressing himself to me, ordered that part of the court which is appropriated to the public to be cleared, at a time when perfect quietness pre- smiled among the pubhc, who were there present according to custom. From that time the public have been barred out from the court where Mr. Justice Blackburn presides, and the prisoners have been tried and causes heard without the possibility of the law being fulfilled, which requires that • so many as will or can ' shall ' come so near as to hear.' As your Sheriff, and feeling that the general dissatisfaction is well-grounded, it is my duty to record my protest against this unlawful proceeding; and I have given directions that the court shall be opened again to the public, ask cording to the custom and the law. All persons, so long as they conduct them- selves with decorum, have a lawful right to be present in court ; and I hereby pro-. hibit my officers from aiding and abetting any attempt to bar out the public front free access to the court.
" I am, gentlemen, your faithful servant,
" WriAusi Joan EVELYN, sheriff."
On Tuesday, the High Sheriff appeared before the Judges in obedienoe to their summons, and made an exculpatory speech, in which he declared he had no personal feeling against Mr. Justice Blackburn, but he denied the right of the learned Judge to exclude the public from any part of the court. Their Lordships having briefly consulted. The Lord Chief Justice, amid breath- less silence, said that the Court had heard with anxiety and sorrow the statement which the High Sheriff had addressed to them, amounting, as it did, to an entire justification of what their Lordships, as Her Majesty's Judges of Assize, sitting as the representatives of the Sovereign, felt to be a most improper, unlawful, and un- seemly, contempt of their office and of the administration of justice. The High Sheriff had most unquestionably mistaken the law to the utmost, and he (the Lord Chief Justice) now declared that the power and authority of her Majesty's Judges, acting in pursuance of her Majesty's commission, were perfectly well defined and established, and that the course taken by his learned brother was one uhich he had the most undoubted right to adopt. His Lordship said that he at once conceded that English courts of justice were open to the public in the fullest sense, and he trusted they ever would remain so; but it was going far beyond either law or neces- sity to avow, as the High Sheriff had done, that there was no power reposed in the presiding judge to order such modifications of the arrangements of the court as were indispensable to that which it was the office of a judge to carry out-viz., the effi- cient administration of justice. His Lordship then adverted to the great structural inconvenience of the courts in which the judges had presided, and to the fact that his learned brother had ordered the lower part of the court, open to the street, and not the other parts of the court, to be cleared, because the examination of witnesses in criminal cases, when prisoners were standing on their trial, was inaudible to the Court and Jury, and this was surely it transparent necessity for the order which his learned brother had conveyed to the officers of the High Sheriff. His Lordship then observed that the High Sheriff had not made the least complaint or remonstrance' before he left the assize town, and stated that the Court were nevertheless perfectly assured that the High Sheriff, who was an honourable English gentleman. neither had intended nor was capable of offering any personal indignity to her Majesty's Judges ; brit the coarse the High Sheriff had pureued was clearly a painfully contu- macious contempt of the Court as such, and a most serious reflection upon the au- thority of the Judges' commission, which emanated from the Throne, and demanded, especially from the High Sheriff, as one of her Majesty's important officers of jure. lice, obedient and respectful observance. The Lord Chief Justice then fined the High Sheriff 5001., and the fine was immediately recorded. Mr. Evelyn writes to the 7Tme8- " Whatever view may be entertained of the good taste or discretion of my pro- ceedings, 1 must reiterate that on the 3d of August, at the Crown Court at Guild- ford, the whole space appropriated to the public was entirely cleared, aud from that date to Monday, August 13, when I interfered, that space was empty. The only entrances left open were, first, the entrance for counsel, witnesses,4urors, and offi- cials ; and, secondly, the Judges' entrance ; and numerous complaints were made to me on the subject.
"I cannot but maintain that I was substantially right in the course taken. It was with apparent reluctance that the learned Judges felt it their duty to inflict so severe a sentence, and it is a satisfaction to me to believe that both the Lord Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Blackburn gave me credit for acting from a sense of duty."
"A Templar" furnishes the Etna with a precedent for Mr. Evelynit conduct, curiously enough both historically and genealogically aprors, for it happened in the Evelyn family, the following passage, taken (with the exception of a few words) verbatim from Erelyn's Memoirs. John Evelyn, relates (vol. i., p. 9, of the Eivo, edition) as follows— My father was appointed Sheriff for Surrey. lie had 116 servants in livery.: every one liveryd in greene sattiri doublets, divers gentlemen and persons of quality waited on him in the same garb and habit, which at that time, when thirty or forty was the usual retinue of the High Sheriff, was esteemed a great matter. Nor was this out of the least vanity that may father exceeded, but because he could not re- fuse the civility of his friends and relations, who voluntarily came themselves or sent their servants. But my father was most unjustly and spitefully molested by
that jeering judge, Richardson But out of this he emerged with as much honour as trouble."
Into the merits of the ease between Judge Richardson and Richard Eve- lyn, the lineal ancestor of the present High Sheriff for Surrey, or of the ease between Judge Blackburn and the High Sheriff, I do not propose to enter. For this purpose, we have merely to consider the passage I have copied as the representation by the dutiful son of his view of the case, and to think how the High Sheriff or his dutiful son could represent recent events' and it must be said that the coincidence is very remarkable. It has been said that history never reproduces itself. This may apply to great events, but it would seem that it is not equally applicable to small ones."
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