Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott

Résumé du livre

James Robert Hope-Scott (1812-1873) was an English barrister and Tractarian. Born at Great Marlow, Berkshire and christened James Robert Hope, in 1847 he married Charlotte Harriet Jane Lockhart, daughter of John Gibson Lockhart and granddaughter of Sir Walter Scott, and, on her coming into possession of Abbotsford House six years later, he assumed the surname of Hope-Scott. As an established ecclesiastical lawyer, he was much involved in the Ecclesiastical Courts Bill in 1843 and the same year he took the DCL degree at Oxford. By the end of 1845 he stood at the head of the parliamentary bar but his objections to taking the Oath of Supremacy deterred him from accepting the professional honour of Queen's Counsel. In 1849, he therefore asked Lord Chancellor Charles Pepys, 1st Earl of Cottenham for, and was granted, a patent of precedence conferring equal status. He retired from the bar in 1870 and spent the rest of his life in charitable and literary work, in particular an abridgment of his father in law's seven volume biography of Scott with a preface dedicated to Gladstone.