Spence’s father was a successful London dentist, who patented and marketed a brand of tooth powder and bought property at Cranford. His elder brother Thomas Richard Spence took holy orders and died at Rome in 1827; and his younger brother Henry Francis Spence (?1789-1856) entered the navy in 1803, saw action in various theatres and was paid off in 1814.
very eccentric in his dress and appearance. His father was strict with him in money matters, which materially influenced him in his studies, to gratify his ambition, which was then very great, to get on in his profession, and to become independent.
Law Rev. xiii (1851), 431.
On his father’s death in 1818 he inherited the Cranford property, subject to his mother’s life interest, and £10,000 in consols.
In 1826 Spence published a treatise, dedicated to lord chancellor Eldon, on the Origin of the Laws and Political Institutions of Modern Europe, which he traced to those of Imperial Rome. At the general election that year he stood on the Tory True Blue interest for Reading, with which he had no connection, against the Whig sitting Members, in conjunction with the philanthropist Edward Wakefield. In a series of verbose and bombastic written addresses, he pledged support for the Liverpool ministry while they continued to promote ‘the reduction of taxation, the improvement of our judicial institutions (a subject I have much at heart), the amelioration of the condition of all ranks of society, and the extension and establishment of liberty at home and abroad’. At the same time he laid claim to ‘the most uncompromising independence’. On the hustings he denied having raised a ‘No Popery’ cry, but justified his avowed hostility to Catholic relief on the ground that he was ‘averse to granting political power to a sect which had always abused it’. He advocated a ‘diffusion of education and of the lights of the gospel’ as the likeliest remedies for the ‘wretched condition’ of Ireland. He was at odds with the sitting Members, he said, ‘because he thought their opposition to ministers was systematic, and carried to a culpable extreme’. After an eight-day contest, which was reckoned to have cost him ‘many thousand pounds’, he edged one of them into third place by four votes.
Spence soon showed his interest in judicial reform by speaking on Harvey’s motion for returns of business in the exchequer court, 1 Dec. 1826, when he asserted that its judges wished it to be made ‘efficient’, with ‘an active and extensive jurisdiction’. He thought the motion did not go far enough, and on 6 Dec. he moved for information on business transacted in the exchequer, rolls and vice-chancellor’s courts, with the object of demonstrating that the underutilized equity jurisdiction of the exchequer could be employed to help clear the massive arrears in chancery. In the absence of the government law officers the home secretary Peel complained that the motions exceeded the terms of their notice, and Spence reluctantly agreed to their withdrawal.
Spence was returned on a vacancy for Ripon in March 1829 on the interest of Miss Sophia Lawrence, whose election manager Sir Lancelot Shadwell*, vice-chancellor of England, was his personal friend. He came in explicitly as an opponent of Catholic emancipation, against which he duly voted, 6, 27, 30 Mar. 1829. He presented petitions complaining of distress in the silk manufacturing industry, 28 Apr. He denounced the grant to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth, which ‘fostered principles of the grossest idolatry’, and voted in the minority of 14 against it, 22 May. He divided in favour of the issue of a new writ for East Retford, 2 June 1829. He voted against Lord Blandford’s parliamentary reform scheme, 18 Feb., but was in the anti-government majority against the Bathurst and Dundas pensions, 26 Mar. 1830. He voted for Jewish emancipation, 5 Apr., 17 May and the abolition of capital punishment for forgery, 7 June. On 5 Apr. he moved for returns of the salaries and fees of chancery clerks and registrars, with a view to proposing ways of reducing the notorious delays and expenses of procedure in that court. Soon afterwards he published Reform of the Court of Chancery, in which he made detailed suggestions for improvements designed to save at least £35,000 a year. In the House, 17 June, he criticized the government’s suits in equity bill, which proposed the appointment of an additional chancery judge, and its two related pending measures for reform of the registrars’ and masters’ offices: ‘I cannot conceive that the appointment of a new judge, to send an additional number of causes to offices already encumbered, and so defective in their constitution, will prove of any advantage’. He declared that unless ministers proposed effective reform of equity jurisdiction he would take the initiative himself. The Whig lawyer Henry Brougham* thought his speech was ‘excellent’.
After the 1830 general election, when he came in again for Ripon, ministers listed Spence among their ‘friends’, but he was absent from the division on the civil list which brought them down, 15 Nov. 1830. He voted for the second reading of the Grey ministry’s reform bill, 22 Mar., when he spoke briefly for it, and against Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment, 19 Apr. 1831. According to an obituary notice the bill
troubled the conscience of Mr. Spence. He had been returned as a Tory and sat for a close borough. He became convinced that it was his duty to vote for the bill, and he informed Miss Lawrence of his intention, resolving that if she objected he would resign his seat. She informed him that he might do as he pleased, and he voted throughout for the measure, having been again returned at the election of 1831.
Gent. Mag. (1851), i. 435.
In fact, Spence was absent from the division on the second reading of the reintroduced bill, 6 July 1831, but he was present to vote for some of its details, 19, 27 July, 3, 9 Aug. Ill health, for which he took periods of leave, 12 Sept. and 7 Oct., accounted for his absence from the divisions on the passage of the bill, 21 Sept.,
Spence had continued to concern himself principally with his campaign for reform of equity jurisdiction. On 9 Nov. 1830 he gave notice that after Christmas he would move a series of resolutions on the simplification and improvement of chancery practice, but on 7 Dec. he postponed them until after Easter to give the new ministers the chance to take the matter into their own hands. He renewed his motion for returns of chancery fees, which had not yet been produced, 22 Nov., and on 9 Dec. was praised by the attorney-general Denman for his ‘able statement’ in explanation of his call for further documentary evidence. On 13 Dec. 1830 he drew attention to the scandal of the three civil offices, all part of the judicial bureaucracy, from which the Rev. Thomas Thurlow derived an annual income of £9,713. In the debate on Sugden’s motion for information on chancery practice, 20 Dec. 1830, he dismissed John Williams’s notion of transferring the bulk of equity business to the common law courts. Arguing that ‘the House of Commons alone can reform the court of chancery’, which successive governments had failed to touch, he detailed the abuses of delay and expense which originated in the inefficient and hidebound registrars’ and masters’ offices. He advocated payment of the chancellor by a fixed salary rather than by fees, abolition of the six clerks office, and the creation of a new, streamlined system of record keeping, which would ‘get rid of three-fourths of the abuses’. He vowed to bring forward his own plan if ministers did not act:
I am sure ... government will not consider that it is [in] the slightest spirit of hostility to them that I had formed this resolution, but I have been grievously disappointed by trusting to other governments, and feel it necessary, therefore, to narrowly watch this government.
He sent copies of the published versions of this speech and that of 17 June 1830, together with one of his 1830 pamphlet, to Jeremy Bentham.
During 1831 Spence was invited by lord chancellor Brougham to assist in carrying out his scheme of chancery reform. He was entrusted with the preparation of a bill to regulate the masters’ office, which was originally intended to be presented before Christmas, but Brougham subsequently decided that it would be preferable to embody in one bill proposals to reform all the offices connected with chancery. Thus on 15 Dec. Spence announced in the House that he was ‘authorized to state’ that measures were in train ‘for the effectual reform of the most crying of the abuses’. Yet on 6 June 1832 he had to explain the long delay, and it was not until 10 July that he moved, successfully, for leave to introduce a bill to improve equity jurisdiction in connection with the administration of testators’ estates. It was, he said, part of a general scheme of reform, and Brougham was about to introduce to the Lords an ‘extensive’ measure which would ‘so construct the court of chancery as that a system will no longer exist for the benefit of the officers and practitioners of that court, but solely for the benefit of the public’. Spence’s bill was presented and read a first time on 31 July 1832, but made no further progress before Parliament was dissolved. On 26 July he intervened in the squabble over the appointment of the chancellor’s brother James Brougham* to two chancery sinecures, assuring the House that it was purely a temporary measure and that these offices would be abolished by pending legislation. In a discussion on judges’ salaries, 30 July 1832, he replied to opposition criticism of the government’s tardiness in introducing its chancery reforms. He provoked mocking laughter with his confession that the general reform bill had not yet been presented to the Lords because he had been unable to complete the complex work of drafting an additional clause, requested by Brougham, to establish an appellate court within chancery. He concluded:
I believe I shall not have another opportunity of addressing this or any other House of Commons ... From the moment I entered this House, I have laboured most assiduously to bring about a reform in the court of chancery. I have frequently ... seen a prospect of an effectual reform being introduced, and have been in some instances most grievously disappointed ... I hope and trust, however, that there is now a prospect of an effectual reform being completed.
Spence knew that his days as Member for Ripon were numbered. In July 1832 Benjamin Disraeli†, who earlier in the year had described Mrs. Spence as being ‘very silly, trying to apologize for her husband’s ratting’, reported that Miss Lawrence had ‘turned violent Tory and chassed’ Spence and his colleague Petit, another convert to reform, from the borough.
After much consideration I cannot but think that I shall be able to render much more effectual assistance out of Parliament than in. The distraction and consumption of time occasioned by having to attend the House together with the labour of chancery drawing leaves too small a portion of time to be devoted to so important a subject as chancery reform, especially for completing the most essential part, namely the orders and minor details.
Brougham mss.
He accepted Brougham’s offer of the first vacancy in the chancery masterships, which would enable him to use his ‘utmost personal exertions’ to make the reforms effective. Yet in July 1833 he declined Brougham’s offer of remuneration for his ‘time and trouble’ in preparing chancery reform bills since leaving Parliament and, on being informed that a reduction in the number of masters was now in contemplation, waived his own pretensions if they would cause any ‘embarrassment’. He continued to co-operate with Brougham in the slow work of chancery reform.
In 1839 he published two Addresses on chancery abuses, in which he commended Lord Lyndhurst’s scheme for the appointment of additional vice-chancellors as the only practical solution with any chance of immediate adoption. In 1842 he produced a Summary of Documents relating to the masters’ office. His later years were largely devoted to the composition of his magnum opus on The Equitable Jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery. The first volume of this pioneering work, which is still regarded as the standard authority on the subject, appeared in 1846 and the second in 1849.