Mansfield, William Murray, 1st earl

Mansfield, William Murray, 1st earl of

(born March 2, 1705, Scone, Perthshire, Scot.—died March 20, 1793, London, Eng.) British jurist. Called to the bar in 1730, he gained a wide reputation in 1737 when he eloquently supported before the House of Commons a merchants' petition to stop Spanish assaults on their ships. As chief justice of the King's Bench (1756–88), he conducted several scrupulously fair trials of persons accused of treason and seditious libel. He reduced an unwieldy mass of outmoded commercial law to a coherent body of rules, refined the law of contracts, and made major contributions to maritime law. He was a member of the cabinet three times, entrusting the great seal of his office to a committee so that he could retain the chief justiceship and still exert political power. In 1783 he declined cabinet office, preferring to serve as speaker of the House of Lords. Thomas B. Macaulay called him the father of modern Toryism.