Doherty’s father, a Dublin attorney, was dead by the time he was admitted to King’s Inns in 1803. During his time as a student at the Middle Temple he heard Fox address the Commons in support of Catholic relief, 13 May 1805 - or so he claimed in the House, 8 May 1828; it was a cause which he himself consistently espoused. On his call to the Irish bar ‘Long Jack’ Doherty (he was strikingly tall) went the Leinster circuit. Having decided to make himself an expert in court practice (he was never an erudite lawyer) he did well, and built up an extensive general business. An Irish commentator later wrote of him:
He had most of the requisites for great success at the bar. His constitution was vigorous, and capable of enduring the vast labour of a legal practitioner; his character was open and generous, his manners ingratiating, yet withal manly and dignified ... There were intellectual faculties of no common order. His apprehension was rapid; in practical business his discernment was quick and sure; his understanding, though not subtle, or peculiarly adapted for dealing with severely abstract principles, was clear and comprehensive. If he had not imagination of the highest order, he possessed a lively and active fancy, which gave grace, variety and relief to the more sober qualities of his mind.
As a gentleman barrister of the old school, fluent, plausible and charming, he moved easily in Dublin society, where he was a popular figure:
A refined heartiness of spirit; a good-humoured toleration of the absurdities and follies of life, with a quick sense of the ridiculous; a flow of genial feelings, enhanced by winning manners, rendered his company peculiarly attractive.
Dublin Univ. Mag. xxix (1847), 741-2. See also Gent. Mag. (1850), ii. 658.
Doherty was related through his mother to George Canning*, a member of Lord Liverpool’s cabinet, though the precise family link has not been identified.
In late February 1824 Doherty informed Canning that he was to be was returned on the Leigh interest for New Ross, where his nephew John Carroll had sat briefly earlier in the Parliament. He preferred to postpone taking his seat until after the spring circuit, but he assured Canning that ‘if ... any question should arise on which you think that my services could be in any degree useful, I beg you may not hesitate to command ... [my] attendance’. Canning congratulated Doherty on his ‘success’, and ‘myself on such an acquisition to the House of Commons’.
he could not charge his recollection with a single instance where the slightest distinction had been made between persons of opposite religious persuasions ... He had reached this country perfectly untainted by party, and ... the present was the first time he had ever opened his lips upon any political question. He admitted that Ireland was divided by factions, and that their influence was most prejudicial to her welfare; but the administration of justice was untouched by them.
Doherty, who was named to the select committee on Irish disturbances, 11 May, presented a New Ross petition for Catholic relief, 25 May. He defended the Dublin magistrates’ indemnity bill, 5 June, and voted with government against Brougham’s condemnation of the trial of the Methodist missionary John Smith in Demerara, 11 June 1824. In August 1824, when he was in Ireland for the Kilkenny assizes, he offered to look into some problems with the tenants on Canning’s property there. Canning gratefully accepted, and also picked Doherty’s brains about the talents and character of the highly rated Irish barrister John Henry North, who had flopped in the last session as the new Member for Plympton Erle.
Doherty voted for Catholic relief, 6 Mar. 1827, when he was given six weeks’ leave to go the circuit. On the formation of Canning’s ministry he was regarded as a candidate for the office of Irish solicitor-general; and Canning indeed selected him, informing Wellesley that his being already in the House had given him the edge over ‘many worthy competitors’. O’Connell considered the appointment of Doherty, as a pro-Catholic, the only ‘single movement in Ireland favourable to an alteration in the system’, and said that it ‘certainly gave great satisfaction’, a view confirmed by Lord Lansdowne on the strength of reports from Ireland.
I have no desire to do anything affronting or even unfair to the profession. But we cannot go on here, without one of the Irish law officers in Parliament. Doherty is already in Parliament by his own means. He is at the head of his circuit in Ireland, and I was, and am, advised that he is eminently qualified for the office for which he was recommended.
At the same time, Canning wished Manners to be pacified, though not indulged, by being consulted ‘at large upon the proper selection’. Wellesley’s scheme for a more extensive reshuffle, which would have made the anti-Catholics Joy and Lefroy chief baron and attorney-general respectively, while keeping Doherty as solicitor, foundered on chief baron O’Grady’s refusal to resign except on conditions which government found unacceptable. It would not in any case have propitiated Manners, who repeated to Wellesley ‘in the most distinct terms’ his objections to Doherty’s appointment
first on the political and parliamentary considerations, which (as his Lordship says) solely have suggested ... Doherty’s name on this occasion; secondly, on the superiority of many others, both in point of seniority and knowledge.
Canning’s Ministry, 319-21, 326, 332; Greville Mems. i. 176, 178.
When William Lamb, the new Irish secretary, arrived in Dublin in the first week of July, he reported to Canning that Manners ‘feels he has gone too far, but [that] it is now too late for him to retreat’, and that Doherty himself, who had recently written to Canning pressing the claims of a friend of O’Connell to legal promotion, was ‘naturally annoyed’. Perceiving Manners’s weakening resolve, Lamb gave him the chance to back down with ‘a good grace’; and on 21 July 1827 he swore in Doherty, who wrote to Canning that the chancellor had
excited a general impression among the bar and ... the public here, that his conduct in interposing the delay, has been as unwarrantable as childish ... In order to relieve your mind from any apprehension that my promotion is extraordinary and without a precedent on account of my alleged juniority, I shall only observe that of the last eight persons who have held the office of solicitor-general ... but one was of as long standing at the bar as I am ... I have now been for 20 years in my profession.
Canning assured him in reply that there had never been any question of his being sacrificed to the bigotry of those ‘of both persuasions who would have been glad to stir up a controversy’.
As the session had ended three weeks after Doherty’s formal appointment, his re-election was delayed until Parliament met again. In the interim, he remained in office under Lord Goderich, adding his own testimony to the anxiety felt by Irish pro-Catholics that Lord Lansdowne should not resign.
He is a delightful person: frank, high minded, moderate in his politics yet perfectly firm, prudent, highly talented. I am quite sure you will like him much. I hardly ever met with a man who has inspired in me such early confidence. I think he is rather desponding about his own country and does not believe that any material improvements can be effected.
Lord Anglesey, One-Leg, 371; Add. 40325, ff. 23, 25, 27, 29; 51567, Anglesey to Holland, 4, 16 May 1828; PRO NI, Anglesey mss D619/32A/2/47.
He made his first speech on Catholic relief in the Commons in support of Burdett’s motion, 8 May 1828, when he urged that the question, essential as its settlement was to the tranquillity and prosperity of Ireland, should be ‘set at rest’ by ‘acceding to the just demands’ of Catholics. Lord Seaford, who was in the gallery, deemed it ‘a very good speech, in a very good style, very good temper and very good taste, and (which is a rare merit in a lawyer) very agreeable to listen to’.
could just keep the country together till Parliament met, and hand it over to the table of the House, but could not be answerable for more. He was very shy, however, of entering deeply into the subject with me; but I understood that he was the guiding adviser of Lord Anglesey.
Ashley, Palmerston, i. 184; Anglesey, 200.
Doherty gave ‘valuable assistance’ to Peel in drafting the bills to suppress the Catholic Association, implement Catholic emancipation and adjust the Irish franchise, and attended cabinet meetings on this legislation.
Doherty was reported to be ‘much alarmed’ at ‘the state of things’ in Ireland in late July 1829.
I should be rather surprised if Doherty should wish to be a puisne judge, because the acceptance of it might exclude him from the higher judicial stations to which after some additional service as solicitor or attorney-general he might naturally aspire; elevations from a puisne judgeship to a chief judgeship are not very desirable or popular out of the profession, and there is always the claim of the existing law officers in the way ... I cannot think it would be wise in him at his time of life, and with his fair prospects, to take one now.
Leveson Gower consulted Doherty on his return to Dublin, ‘looking dreadfully ill and exhausted’, from a trial at Roscommon, and found him quite prepared to acquiesce in Foster’s promotion:
I really believe, however, that if the proposal were made to him merely for a matter for his own consideration, the love of a quiet life would prevail; and I have felt that I was fully justified in assuring him that his laying aside his claim to a puisne judgeship now, would strengthen rather than impair its validity on a future occasion, if he chose to put it forward. I should be sorry in the present state of the country to lose the assistance of his very extraordinary talent as a public prosecutor.
Add. 40337, ff. 99, 106, 112, 115.
Later in August 1829 Doherty acted for the crown in the prosecution at Clonmel assizes of four Protestant policemen accused of murdering a number of Catholics by opening fire during disturbances at Borrisokane, Tipperary in June. He made it plain from the start that his sympathies lay with the accused, whom he believed to have acted under provocation; and, to the fury of O’Connell and the nationalists, all four were acquitted by the Protestant jury.
I cannot condole with Doherty on account of the trouble and vexation which he has met with ... I rejoice that he has had the opportunity of manifesting, under very trying circumstances, so much temper, ability and firmness. Whatever be the nominal character in which he appeared, he had a duty to discharge which was paramount to every other, and which he did discharge like an honest man, namely to promote the discovery of the whole truth, and the execution of impartial justice.
Greville Mems. i.315; Add. 40337, f. 166.
For his own part Doherty, who felt that he had been placed in a ‘false position’, claimed that there had been ‘a deliberate attempt to swear away the lives of innocent men by an artfully concocted story’, and that he had resisted enormous pressure from the policemen’s enemies to
lend myself to achieve a conviction ... by producing the doubtful and suspicious evidence of partisans, and by withholding the testimony of clear, impartial, disinterested and intelligent witnesses who were capable to my knowledge of elucidating the entire transaction.
He deplored ‘the continuance of a savage and bigoted feeling notwithstanding the passage of the relief bill’, and urged Leveson Gower to encourage government to give the Irish police their ‘countenance and protection’ by increasing their numbers. After gauging the state of feeling on arrival in Clonmel, he had taken the precaution of having full shorthand notes of the trial taken, which he thought would come in useful, possibly in the form of a pamphlet, to help him meet the parliamentary inquiry into his conduct threatened by O’Connell and Robert Otway Cave. Soon afterwards, at the civil action of Byng against Callaghan at Cork, when Doherty agreed to settle at the request of Callaghan’s counsel, he was approached by O’Connell, retained on the same side, who, ‘in violation of every feeling which should restrain a lawyer and a gentleman, muttered that my conduct in that case was like my proceeding in Clonmel, a mere humbug’. O’Connell’s view was that Doherty had ‘botched’ and made ‘a special bad hand’ of the Byng case, as was only to be expected as a result of ‘employing great geese’.
Doherty (who was said by the Whig Thomas Spring Rice* to be ‘much the worse for wear since the special commission at Cork’)
Doherty voted against Jewish emancipation, 17 May, and was in the ministerial minorities against the Galway franchise bill, 24, 25 May 1830. On that day he regretfully endorsed the dismissal of his friend Sir Jonah Barrington from the Irish bench, as ‘just and necessary’. He made light of objections to the Scottish and Irish paupers removal bill, 4 June. He divided with his ministerial colleagues for the grant for South American missions and voted against abolition of the death penalty for forgery, 7 June. On 24 June, after defending the Subletting Act amendment bill, he attacked O’Connell for his recent letter ‘to the lower orders of Ireland’ calling for a run on the banks in Munster:
He does this not with the hope of procuring a gold currency for Ireland, but with the declared, absurd, and vain notion that he can drive ministers from their object by his declaration of ‘war to the knife’.
He likened O’Connell to a crazed actor who shouted ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre in an attempt to ruin the proprietor because they did not get on. Having just returned from Ireland, he spoke of the
sufferings which are apprehended to impend over the poorer classes ... [and] which no effort, perhaps, can altogether arrest, but which may be grievously aggravated by violence and indiscretion: so easy is it for folly to achieve mischief; so difficult for wisdom to accomplish good.
O’Connell privately admitted that Doherty’s ‘foolish’ tirade had been ‘cheered’, but reckoned that he had given as good as he got in reply, by ‘laughingly’ landing ‘some wicked hits upon his ignorance, dexterity, etc’. The former Tory minister William Vesey Fitzgerald* observed to Peel that ‘Doherty seems to me to be the only man who has the courage to stand up to O’Connell’.
When O’Connell renewed his motion for a return of casualties in incidents with the police, 5 Nov. 1830, Doherty cast doubt on whether they could be ascertained, and was promptly accused of callous indifference. He asked Spring Rice not to press government to rush into legislation on the complex problem of abuses in the office of sheriff in Irish towns, 8 Nov. On O’Connell’s presentation of a petition for repeal of the Union the following day, Doherty challenged him to raise the issue directly, but O’Connell would not commit himself. Doherty forcefully opposed O’Connell’s motion for repeal of the Subletting Act, 11 Nov., and was a teller for the hostile majority in the division. Sir Henry Hardinge, the new Irish secretary, suggested to Ellenborough that Doherty might usefully be made chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster if Wellington could be prevailed on to shift Charles Arbuthnot*; but they thought this most unlikely.
I know that Doherty’s remaining where he is is unpopular; but I had nothing to do with it. I was asked [by Grey], Did I object to him? I said, No. I said I had liked him whilst I was in Ireland, but it is utterly false that it was through my influence that he was kept. It is not, however, meant to keep him where he is. He and Joy [the attorney-general] must both go to the bench; and I am making some arrangements that cannot be objected to. Yet there is no pleasing everybody.
Anglesey, 245.
In the final arrangement, Joy became chief baron of the exchequer and Doherty lord chief justice of the common pleas. His appointment provoked cries of outrage among the Irish nationalists. O’Connell was furious, taking it as a personal insult; but Anglesey, who was running out of patience with him, explained the irony of the situation to Holland, 11 Dec:
Our law arrangements were fully weighed and discussed, and I do believe they cannot be amended, but there is no pleasing everybody and more particularly those who ... [are] determined to be at perpetual war. I am almost ashamed to acknowledge that the very appointment most cried out against was settled with a view of doing a kind act by O’Connell, by removing his master (for so Doherty certainly was in the House of Commons) from under his nose. Yet the ungrateful man turns round and grumbles at it, as of a deep grievance.
Dublin Evening Post, 9, 23 Dec. 1830; O’Connell Corresp. iv. 1744; Add. 51568; Anglesey, 245-6.
On Anglesey’s official entry to Dublin there were cries of ‘Dirty Doherty’; and at a repeal meeting, 28 Dec. 1830, O’Connell asserted that ‘from pure hatred to me ... has a briefless, talentless barrister been made a chief justice’. Anglesey, who believed that Doherty’s appointment was ‘merely the pretext’ for O’Connell’s ‘hostility’ to the ministry, found ‘the brutal violence’ threatened against him so ‘frightful’ that he was ‘obliged to give him a guard in his house’.
Doherty, who was suspected of ‘working with the anti-reformers’ at the general election of 1831,
There are some (perhaps far too partial friends) who are good enough to say that I should be found not an altogether useless addition to the House of Lords, having had a long and intimate acquaintance with Ireland; possessing opportunities for observation and acquiring information which would entitle me to speak with somewhat of authority on Irish affairs; and a moderation in my political views which might not be unserviceable in restraining the violence of some who do me the honour of saying that they are much influenced by my opinions.
Peel did not encourage him to expect gratification of his wishes.
Doherty died of ‘a disease of the heart’ in September 1850 at Beaumaris, Anglesey, his customary summer holiday resort.
a man of ordinary mould. He had slight pretensions to genius - in truth none at all; but he had a strong and cultivated intellect, which was sharpened and improved by practical knowledge of the world; and with this he combined singular tact and address, which spurned the questionable aspect of intrigue; a rich store of humour which passed for wit, but had no claims to that rare quality; and a fluent, sonorous, self-possessed style of elocution, which passed for eloquence, but had as little of the genuine article as his broad humour had of wit.
Freeman’s Jnl. 11 Sept. 1850.
By his will, dated 30 Aug. 1850, Doherty directed that his Dublin house at 5 Ely Place be sold or let for the benefit of his wife, who was to receive the annual proceeds of a sum of £9,000 settled on her at their marriage. He had borrowed that amount from Charles William Wall, the surviving trustee of the settlement, on the security of insurance policies on his own life; and to enable Wall to pay the premiums he had transferred to him £2,800 in London and North Western Railway Company stock. This was to be applied for his wife’s benefit, and after her death to be divided equally among his children, along with the £9,000 and the residue of his estate. Doherty bequeathed the Carlow property inherited from Carroll to his eldest son John, subject to a mortgage debt of £15,000, which he wished to remain a charge on it. John also got the livestock and agricultural equipment of his farm at Black Lion, Carlow. He confirmed an annuity of £200 settled by Carroll on his sister Letitia as a valid charge on the Carlow estates, and directed that she be paid the interest on the sum of £700, which he had borrowed from her. From the annual rental of houses in Francis and Thomas Streets, Dublin he devised small annuities to the spinsters Eliza Jones and Margaret Moore, the latter being about 21 years of age.