mous
satirical tract, "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters." Harcourt threw
himself into the prosecution with the fervor and the bitterness of a
sectary and a partisan. He made a most vehement and envenomed speech
against Defoe; he endeavored to stir up every religious prejudice and
passion in favor of the prosecution. Coke had scarcely shown more of the
animosity of a partisan in prosecuting Raleigh than Simon Harcourt did in
prosecuting Defoe. In 1709-10 Harcourt was the leading counsel for
Sacheverell, and received the Great Seal in 1710, becoming, as the phrase
then was, "Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of Great Britain." A whole
year, wanting only a few days, passed before he was raised to the peerage
as Lord Harcourt. He acted as Speaker of the House of Lords before he
became a peer and a member of the House, and even had on one occasion to
express on behalf of the Peers their thanks to Lord Peterborough for his
services in Spain. In 1713 he became Lord Chancellor of England. During
all this time he had been a most devoted adherent of the Stuarts, and
during the later period he was an open and avowed Jacobite. He had
opposed strongly the oaths of abjuration which now, as Lord Chief
Justice, he had both taken and administered. Almost his first
conspicuous act as a member of Parliament was to protest against the Bill
which required the oath Of abjuration of James and his descendants, and
he maintained consistently the same principles and the same policy till
the death of Queen Anne. There can be no doubt that if just then any
movement had been made on behalf of the Stuarts, with the slightest
chance of success, Lord Chancellor Harcourt would have thrown himself
into it heart and soul. Nevertheless, he took the oath of allegiance and
the oath of abjuration; he professed to be a loyal subject of the King,
{51} whose person and principles he despised and detested, and he swore
to abjure forever all adhesion to that dynasty which with all his heart
he would have striven, if he could, to restore to the throne of England.
Lord Campbell, in his "Lives of the Lord Chancellors," says of Harcourt,
"I do not consider his efforts to restore the exiled Stuarts morally
inconsistent with the engagements into which he had entered to the
existing Government; and although there were loud complaints against him
for at last sending in his adhesion to the House of Hanover, it should be
recollected that the cause of the Stuarts