Lord Chief Justice Scroggs

Sir William Scroggs (c. 1623 – 25 October 1683) was Lord Chief Justice of England from 1678 to 1681.

Scroggs was the son of an Oxford landowner; an account of him being the son of a butcher of sufficient means to give his son a university education is merely a rumour. He spent his youth in Stifford. He went to Oriel College, and later to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1640, having acquired a fair knowledge of the classics. There is some evidence that he fought on the royalist side during the Civil War; certainly his loyalty to the Crown was never doubted in later years. In 1653 he was called to the bar, and soon gained a good practice in the courts.

He was appointed a judge of the Common Pleas in 1676, and two years later was promoted to be Lord Chief Justice on the recommendation of the Earl of Danby, the King's chief minister, who was his patron, and knew that he was a good lawyer and a staunch supporter of the Crown. His hatred of Roman Catholic priests, which was to play so large a part in the Popish Plot trials, was not a fault in the eyes of Danby, who although he was the son of a Catholic mother, adhered strongly to his father's Protestant faith. The King, although he was himself in all but outward appearance a Catholic, accepted the need to maintain an appearance in public of conformity to the Church of England, and like Danby he was anxious that the High Court judges should be good "King's men".

Scroggs was noted for his violent hatred of and public outbursts against Catholic priests, of which perhaps the most notorious was that : "they eat their God, they kill their King, and saint the murderer!". His attitude towards Catholic laymen was less hostile: even in 1678, at the height of the Plot fever, he said that he knew that there were hundreds of honest Catholic gentlemen in England who would never engage in any conspiracy against the King. Lay Catholics who gave evidence at the Plot trials were in general accorded more courtesy than were priests: at the trial of Sir George Wakeman, Ellen Rigby, the former housekeeper of the Benedictine order's house in London, was treated by Scroggs (who was reputed to be something of a misogynist) with the utmost respect.

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