Law’s father, the learned bishop of Carlisle, used to say to his sons: ‘What you have to expect from me is a good education, and afterwards half-a-crown to begin the world with—and then you must shift for yourselves’. Two became bishops, one lord chief justice and a peer, and the two others made fortunes in India and America.
He could have had a seat in Parliament, for Westbury on Lord Abingdon’s interest, but his brother Ewan took it instead. Although Law intended to occupy it when Hastings’s trial was over, he did not do so. Instead he acquired a lucrative London practice, his reputation now being second only to Thomas Erskine’s. He parted with the Whigs, whose club he had joined in 1785, over the French revolution, and in November 1793 accepted legal office. He was counsel for the crown in the treason trials of Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke and William Stone and also went to Lancaster to prosecute Thomas Walker (April 1794), at once consenting to an acquittal, and to York to prosecute Henry Redhead (July 1795). In the trial of Lord Thanet and others for conspiring to rescue the prisoner Arthur O’Connor (1799), it was his cross-examination of Sheridan that secured the verdict for the crown. He acquired a reputation as a remorseless cross-examiner and his hectoring, overbearing manner, his Cumbrian accent and his prejudices were remarked on.
On Addington’s advent to power, Law accepted with alacrity his offer of becoming attorney-general without ever having been solicitor-general. A ‘bold man was wanted in that post’. A seat in Parliament was found for him, Sir Richard Worsley’s at Newtown, for which he contributed £500 to the Treasury fund. When he was knighted, George III, having ascertained that he had never been in Parliament, said: ‘That is right: my attorney-general ought not to have been in Parliament, for then, you know, he is not obliged to eat his own words’.
Soon afterwards, on the death of his enemy Lord Kenyon, he became lord chief justice, with a barony. Farington was told that, when appointed, ‘he was worth £63,000’. He went on in 1804 to assume the clerkship of the court, worth ‘about £9,000 a year’ for himself, in addition to his chief justice’s salary, thus making ‘£20,000 a year’. Ellenborough, as he now was, took his seat in the Lords, 26 Apr. 1802, and continued to browbeat opposition there: Woodfall wrote of an attack he made on Lord Grenville; ‘lawyers so rapidly raised to high station cannot on the sudden forget their nisi prius manners’.
On the collapse of the ministry, Ellenborough had lost confidence in Grenville (the feeling was mutual), and, not seeing eye to eye with Perceval, remained attached to Sidmouth. He had been a commissioner in the ‘delicate investigation’ of the conduct of the Princess of Wales (1806) and clearly thought her guilty. He was also a councillor to the Queen during the Regency (1811). As chief justice, he tried Col. Despard for treason (February 1803), Peltier for libel on Napoleon (February 1803), Mr Justice Johnson (November 1805), Perry, Cossett and the Hunt brothers for libel in their newspapers (1810-12), and Lord Cochrane for fraud (June 1814). His heavy sentence on Cochrane and refusal to grant a re-trial made him unpopular and his house was one of those attacked by the mob during anti-Corn Law agitation (March 1815). Cochrane brought in 13 charges of injustice against him in the House, 5 Mar. 1816, and another on 1 Apr., but his motion for an inquiry was rejected by 89 votes to none, 30 Apr. By a subsequent motion, every notice of the charges was expunged from the votes of the House.
Ellenborough’s health began to break down during the trial of James Watson for treason (1817) and when his failing powers became manifest at the trial of Hone for blasphemy in December, he resolved to resign, so he informed Sidmouth, as soon as the government could find a suitable successor. This he eventually did on 6 Nov. 1818, by which time his general debility was much remarked on. He died on 13 Dec. 1818 at his house in St. James’s Square, the first common law judge to leave Bloomsbury for a West End residence, which he purchased from Lord Anson for £18,000 after renting it at first at £1,200 a year. By his will, the house and his villa at Roehampton were sold. He left upwards of £240,000.
Ellenborough was strongly opposed to innovations in the law and thwarted many of Romilly’s efforts to mitigate the criminal code; he was the author of the Act of 1803 (43 Geo. III c.58), which added ten capital offences to the code. Romilly, who deplored his ‘coarse invective’, said that he seemed ‘to consider himself as bound to defend the conduct of all judges, whether living or dead’, though someone hearing him make a panegyric on judges, advised him ‘Stick to obloquy, Ned’. His severity of demeanour, his intolerant manner and his frequent petulance naturally provoked more fear than love. In the exercise of his wit, of which he had a large share, there was ‘too much sarcasm and ridicule’, according to Foss. Brougham, who had no reason to love him, said his nature ‘had nothing harsh in it, except his irritable temper, quickly roused and quickly appeased: his mind was just ... his nature was noble; his spirit was open, manly, honest, and ever moved with disgust at anything false or tricky’.
In sharp contrast to his attractive wife, of whom he was jealous ‘without the least cause for it’, Ellenborough was ungainly (he was turned out of the Lincoln’s Inn volunteers for ‘awkwardness’):
he moved with a sort of semi-rotatory step, and his path to the place to which he wished to go was the section of a parabola. When he entered the court, he was in the habit of swelling out his cheeks by blowing and compressing his lips, and you would have supposed that he was going to snort like a war horse. His spoken diction, although always scholarlike, rather inclined to the sesquipedalian: his intonation was deep and solemn.
This led to his being mimicked, for example by Charles Mathews on the stage. He was also ‘a great voluptuary in eating’, drank freely and was ‘an entertaining companion at table, full of anecdote and information’.