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 a Sheriff of Midlothian and Baron of the Court of Exchequer. He was schooled at the Royal High School of Edinburgh, went up to the University of Edinburgh at thirteen to read law under Dugald Stewart, and was admitted advocate in 1800 at twenty-one.

The next thirty-four years were the career at the Scottish bar. Edinburgh was then the Tory post-Dundas establishment; Cockburn was a Whig, of the circle of Francis Jeffrey and the younger Edinburgh-Whig advocates, and the Whig position was the opposition one, on the defence of political cases and the long constitutional argument for Scottish parliamentary reform.

He appeared in the major political and criminal trials of the period, taking the defence brief in the Glasgow sedition cases of 1820 and securing the only acquittal among the accused in the Burke and Hare prosecution of 1828, a case whose medico-legal lessons produced the Anatomy Act 1832 that he himself sponsored. He was, through the 1820s, the leading defence advocate of the Scottish bar.

The Reform Bill crisis brought the political reward. The Earl Grey Whig administration of 1830 was pledged to franchise reform; Cockburn drafted, in the working detail, the Scottish Reform Act 1832, which extended the Scottish franchise from about four and a half thousand voters to about sixty-five thousand. He served as Solicitor General for Scotland from 1830 to 1834 and was elevated to the bench of the Court of Session as Lord Cockburn in 1834, sitting as a judge for the next twenty years.

The two books for which he is remembered were written for his family and friends and published after his death. Memorials of His Time (1856) and the Journal (1874) are, between them, the foundational personal-record document of late-Georgian and early-Victorian Edinburgh life; Robert Louis Stevenson called Memorials the personal history of the city. He died at his Bonaly house under the Pentland Hills on 26 April 1854, seventy-four years old, and is buried at the Dean Cemetery under an epitaph of his own composition: Henricus Cockburn, juris consultus, vir bonus. The Cockburn name, the Borders locative of the cock-stream, he carried from an Edinburgh judicial household into the foundational personal-memoir record of late-Enlightenment and post-Reform Scottish public life.