Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine(1750–1823)

Thomas Erskine was born at St Andrew Square in Edinburgh on the tenth of January 1750, third son of Henry David Erskine, 10th Earl of Buchan, and Agnes Steuart. The family was of ancient Scottish noble descent but of straitened modern circumstances; Thomas was sent at fourteen as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, served four years in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, transferred to the army in 1768 and served with the 1st Royal Regiment of Foot, sold his commission in 1774 in his twenty-fifth year, and took up the law as a working profession at Lincoln's Inn in London. He was called to the bar in 1778.

He took the leading constitutional and political cases of the next twenty-five years and was within a decade the foremost advocate in the English-speaking world. He defended Lord George Gordon at his treason trial of 1781 (Gordon was acquitted on Erskine's argument that the Gordon Riots had not amounted to constructive levying of war against the King). He defended in 1784 the Dean of St Asaph's case (the seditious libel charge against William Davies Shipley over the publication of Sir William Jones's pamphlet The Principles of Government) and through his argument secured Charles James Fox's Libel Act of 1792, the statute that gave the jury (rather than the judge alone) the right to decide both the fact and the law of libel.

His central work came at the Treason Trials of 1794. The William Pitt the Younger government had charged Thomas Hardy, the Secretary of the London Corresponding Society, John Horne Tooke, the philologist and reformer, and John Thelwall, the radical lecturer, with constructive treason on the strength of their parliamentary reform petitions. Erskine, leading for the defence at the Old Bailey, conducted across the nine days of Hardy's trial in October 1794, the eight days of Tooke's trial in November and the four days of Thelwall's trial in December the most-sustained constitutional defence of political speech in the history of the English bar. All three were acquitted by the jury. The Treason Trials of 1794 stand at the foundation of the modern English-language law of freedom of speech and political association.

He sat as Whig MP for Portsmouth from 1783 to 1784 and again from 1790 to 1806, was made Lord Chancellor of Great Britain in the Ministry of All the Talents under Grenville in February 1806 in his fifty-sixth year, was created Baron Erskine of Restormel Castle on the same day, and held the Great Seal for a year to March 1807. He drafted the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1809 (the first English-language statute against cruelty to animals, the foundational legislation of the modern animal-welfare movement), continued in the House of Lords for the next sixteen years as an active reform-Whig, and died at Almondell House in West Lothian on the seventeenth of November 1823 in his seventy-fourth year. The Erskine name in modern English-language legal history carries the weight of the 1794 Treason Trials defences.