SPEECH

FOR THE

HON. RICHARD BINGHAM,

NOW EARL OF LUCAN.

THE following Speech, like the former, requires na Preface. It was delivered by Mr. Erskine in the Court of King's Bench, on Monday, February 24, 1794, as Counsel for the present Lord Lucan, in an action brought against him by Bernard Edward Howard, Esq. presumptive heir of the Duke of Norfolk, for adultery with his wife. The circumstances, under which the damages were sought to be mitigated, in opposition to the severe principle regarding them, insisted upon in the Speech for Mr. Markham, appear fully in the Speech itself.

The Jury found only Five Hundred Pounds da

mages,

MR. ERSKINE.

GENTLEMEN of the Jury-My Learned Friend, as Counsel for the Plaintiff, has bespoke an address from me, as Counsel for the Defendant, which you must not, I assure you, expect to hear. He has thought it right (partly in courtesy to me, as I am willing to believe), and in part for the purposes of his cause, that you should suppose you are to be addressed with eloquence which I never possessed, and which if I did, I should be incapable at this moment of exerting; because the most eloquent man, in order to exert his eloquence, must have his mind free from embarrassment on the occasion on which he is to speak :-I am not in that condition. My Learned Friend has expressed himself as the friend of the Plaintiff's family :-He does not regard that family more than I do; and I stand in the same predicament towards my own honourable Client and his relations; I know him and them, and because I know them, I regard them also: my embarrassment, however, only arises at being obliged to discuss this question in a public Court of Justice, because, could it have been the subject of private reference, I should have felt none at all in being called upon to settle it.

Gentlemen, my embarrassment is abundantly increased, when I see present a noble person, high, very high in rank in this kingdom, but not higher

in rank than he is in my estimation :-I speak of the Noble Duke of Norfolk, who most undoubtedly must feel not a little, at being obliged to come here as a witness for the Defendant, in the cause of a Plaintiff so nearly allied to himself: I am persuaded no man can have so little sensibility, as not to feel that a person in my situation, must be greatly embarrassed in discussing a question of this nature before such an audience, and between such parties as I have described.

Gentlemen, my Learned Friend desired you would take care not to suffer argument, or observation, or eloquence, to be called into the field, to detach your attention from the evidence in the Cause, upon which alone you ought to decide: I wish my Learned Friend, at the moment he gave you that caution, had not himself given testimony of a fact, to which he stood the solitary witness: I wish he had not introduced his own evidence, without the ordinary ceremony of being sworn.-I will not follow his example.-I will not tell you, what I know from the conversation of my Client, nor give evidence of what I know myself:-my Learned V Friend tells you, that nothing can exceed the agony of mind his Client has suffered, and that no words can describe his adoration of the lady he has lost : these most material points of the Cause rest, however, altogether on the single, unsupported, unsworn evidence of the COUNSEL for the Plaintiff.-NO RELATION: has been called upon to confirm them, though we

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are told, that the whole house of Fauconberg, Beilasyse, and Norfolk, are in the avenues of the Court, ready, it seems, to be called at my discretion :-and yet my Learned Friend is himself the only witness; though the facts (and most material facts indeed, they would have been) might have been proved by so many illustrious persons.

Now, to show you how little disposed I am to work upon you by any thing, but by proof; to convince you, how little desirous I am to practise the arts of speech as my only artillery in this Cause; I will begin with a few plain dates, and, as you have pens in your hands, I will thank you to write them down.

I shall begin with stating to you, what my Cause is, and shall then prove it; not by myself, but by wit

nesses.

The parties were married on the 24th of April 1789.-The child that has been spoken of, and in terms which gave me great satisfaction, as the admitted son of the Plaintiff, blessed with the affec tion of his parent, and whom the noble person to whom he may become heir, can look upon without any unpleasant reflection: that child was born on the 12th of August 1791; take that date, and my Learned Friend's admission, that this child must have been the child of Mr. Howard; an admission which could not have been rationally or consistently made, but upon the implied admission, that no illicit connexion had existed previously, by which its ex

istence might have been referred to the Defendant. -On this subject, therefore, the Plaintiff must be silent; he cannot say the parental mind has been wrung he cannot say hereafter, "NO SON OF

MINE SUCCEEDING ;" he can say none of these things. This child was born on the 12th of August 1791, and, as Mr. Howard is admitted to be the author of its existence (which he must have been, if at all, in 1790), I have a right to say, that, during all that interval, this gentleman could not have had the least reasonable cause of complaint against Mr. Bingham: his jealousy must, of course, have begun after that period; for, had there been grounds for it before, there could be no sense in the admission of his Counsel, nor any foundation for that parental consolation which was brought forward in the very front of the Cause.

The next dry date is, therefore, the 24th of July 1793; and I put it to his Lordship, that there is no manner of evidence which can be pressed into this Cause previous to that time. Let me next disembarrass the Cause from another assertion of my Learned Friend, namely, that a divorce cannot take place before the birth of this child; and that, if the child happens to be a son, which is one contingency; and if the child so born does not die, which is another contingency, and if the Noble Duke dies without issue, which is a third contingency, then this child might inherit the honours of the House of Norfolk that I deny.-My recent experience tells