Henry, Lord Cockburn(1779–1854)

Henry Thomas Cockburn was born at the family house of Cockpen on the western outskirts of Edinburgh on 26 October 1779, third son of Archibald Cockburn, the Sheriff of Midlothian and a Baron of the Court of Exchequer in Scotland, and Janet Rannie. The Cockburns were an old Borders-Lothian legal-and-landed family that had held the small estate of Cockpen since the late seventeenth century; his father's senior judicial position gave the household the entrée to the late-eighteenth-century Edinburgh legal-and-intellectual establishment that the boy was raised at the centre of. He was schooled at the Royal High School of Edinburgh from eight, went up to the University of Edinburgh at thirteen in 1793 to read law under the Edinburgh-Whig professor Dugald Stewart, and was admitted advocate at the Faculty of Advocates on 21 December 1800 at the age of twenty-one.

The next thirty-four years were the career at the Scottish bar. The Edinburgh of the 1800s and 1810s was the Tory-and-judicial post-Dundas establishment: Henry Dundas the first Viscount Melville had run Scotland for William Pitt as effective political viceroy through the 1790s and the political and judicial system of Edinburgh was, on the death of Melville the elder in 1811 and the succession of his son the second Viscount, still the Tory machine of his father. Cockburn was a Whig, on the working principle of his Dugald-Stewart Edinburgh-University training and the friendship with the Lord Henry Brougham and the circle of younger Edinburgh-Whig advocates of the same generation (Francis Jeffrey, Henry Erskine, Francis Horner, Andrew Rutherfurd). The Whig position at the Scottish bar across the 1810s and 1820s was the opposition position; the senior judges and the law-officers' posts were uniformly Tory and the Whig practice was on the defence of political cases, the libel-and-sedition prosecutions, and the long-running constitutional argument about Scottish parliamentary-burgh reform.

He defended the Whig position in three of the major political-trial cases of the period. The Glasgow sedition trials of 1820, after the Radical War of the same spring (the west-of-Scotland Chartist-precursor uprising that produced the Battle of Bonnymuir of 5 April 1820 and the executions of John Baird, Andrew Hardie and James Wilson the same summer), saw him appear as junior counsel for the defence in eight of the sedition prosecutions before Lord Justice-Clerk Boyle. The 1822 Burke and Hare body-snatching prosecution at the High Court of Justiciary, the forensic-medical scandal of the post-Knox decade, gave him the principal-defence brief for Helen MacDougal (he secured her acquittal on a not-proven verdict, the only one of the four accused to escape the gallows; the medico-legal arrangements of the period produced the long subsequent reform of the Anatomy Act 1832 that he sponsored as Solicitor General). The 1830 Mary Smith trial, the foundational late-Georgian English-Scottish poisoning case, gave him the defence brief in a case that the Scottish public memory of the next two decades treated as one of the test cases of circumstantial-evidence procedure in Scottish criminal law.

The Reform Bill crisis of 1830-32 produced the political reward. The new Earl Grey Whig administration of November 1830 had pledged on the platform of Scottish-burgh and English-county franchise reform; the Scottish Reform Act 1832 (drafted, in the substantial working detail, by Cockburn at the Solicitor General's chambers in Whitehall) extended the Scottish franchise from a four thousand five hundred voters in the entire country to about sixty-five thousand and reformed the burgh-elective system. Cockburn served as Solicitor General for Scotland under Grey, Melbourne and Russell from December 1830 to 1834, was elevated to the bench of the Court of Session as a Senator of the College of Justice with the judicial title Lord Cockburn in April 1834, and sat as a Lord of Session through the next twenty years to his death. The judicial dignity gave him the small estate at Bonaly under the Pentland Hills (which he had bought in 1811 from his advocate's earnings) as the summer retreat, and the Charlotte Square house at the New Town as the winter judicial residence.

The two books for which he is now remembered were both written for his own family and his circle of close friends, and were not published in his lifetime. *Memorials of His Time* (the volume of small biographical-and-political-and-social essays on the Edinburgh figures and institutions he had known through the 1780s, 1790s and early 1800s) was finished in 1842 and published, by his executor and son-in-law Andrew Rutherfurd, two years after his death in 1856. *Journal* (the day-by-day record of his Edinburgh life and the Scottish-legal-and-cultural events of his witnessing across 1831 to 1854) was published in two volumes in 1874. The two books, between them, are the foundational personal-record document of late-Georgian and early-Victorian Edinburgh life. Robert Louis Stevenson, who came across them at sixteen at his Heriot Row Edinburgh family library, called *Memorials* in his 1882 *Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh* the personal-history of the city. He died at the Bonaly house on 26 April 1854, seventy-four years old, and is buried at the Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh under a Roman-vault inscription in his own composition: *Henricus Cockburn, juris consultus, vir bonus*. The Cockburn name in the Scottish-side catalogue is the Borders locative compound *Cock-burn* (the cock-stream, possibly the Henlow water below Carfraemill); he carried it from a Edinburgh judicial household into the foundational working personal-memoir record of late-Enlightenment and post-Reform Scottish public life.