An Introduction to the Life and Religion of Matthew Hale
Matthew Hale was born to a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, was orphaned at the age of six, and came into the guardianship of Anthony Kingscot, a paternal relative of Puritan leanings. Obadiah Sedgwick (1600-1658) was Hale’s tutor at Magdalen Hall, Oxford to which he matriculated with ambition to take the cloth. Hale had something of a misspent youth. He arrived at Oxford late in life by the standards of those days and seems to have been taken up with revelry, attending plays, and other errant activities.
He joined Lincoln’s Inn in 1628 and, after a friend nearly died at a bibulous party, swore off both intoxicating spirits and the theatre, abandoned his prior penchant for fancy clothes, and prepared himself for a life of public service. As Herald Berman suspects, Hale’s personal and professional integrity likely explains his unique ability to navigate the tumultuous years surrounding the civil war and resultant regime changes. He served as lead counsel for royalists during the war, as judge on the Court of Common Pleas during the Cromwellian Protectorate, as defender of Puritan regicides after the restoration, and as Chief Baron of the Exchequer under Charles II. Finally, he was Chief Justice of the King’s Bench from 1671 until his death in 1676. But we will say more about his career in the future. For now, we are focused on Hale’s personal life, learning, and piety.
Following his abrupt personal reform, Hale thereafter never missed a Sunday service for 36 years, and his weekdays were taken up with making up for lost time, studying up to 16 hours per day; and he studied literally everything. His learning was legendary amongst his peers. The learning was put to good use, not only on the bench, but in publication, the record of which is long and diverse.
Hale’s conviction was that a jurist should be acquainted with all subjects, especially theology, since law concerns the ordering of human life.
“He read the Roman law and was of opinion that no one could understand law as a science until he had drunk deep at that fountain. He read Aristotle and Calvin. He studied, theology, philosophy, not only metaphysic philosophy, but natural philosophy, mathematics, medicine, anatomy and history.”
Hale was called to the bar in 1636 and was the protégé of William Noy (1577-1634), a famous jurist in his own right and one time attorney general—his Compleat Lawyer (1661) is difficult to find today. Hale was a close friend of John Selden (1584-1654)—apparently, Selden left Hale a share of his estate—and other noteworthy jurists, theologians, etc. Although he refused to entertain and shunned socializing generally, his counsel was in high demand throughout most of his life and he enjoyed some fame.
Hale’s first biographer, Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), describes the jurist’s religious disposition and habits. It is unlikely that any living judge, lawyer, or legal theorist alive today could be described as Hale was. Query how much (not whether) the legal profession has suffered for want of men of such discipline and breadth of knowledge.
Consider also Hale’s devotional, Sabbath-day practices:
“He looked with great sorrow on the impiety and atheism of the age, and so he set himself to oppose it, not only by the shining example of his own life, but by engaging in a cause, that indeed could hardly fall into better hands: and as he could not find a subject more worthy of himself, so there were few in the age that understood it so well, and could manage it more skilfully [sic]. The occasion that first led him to write about it was this. He was a strict observer of the Lord’s day, in which, besides his constancy in the public worship of God, he used to call all his family together, and repeat to them the heads of the sermons, with some additions of his own, which fitted for their capacities, and circumstances, and that being done, he had a custom of shutting himself up for two or three hours, which he either spent in his secret devotions, or on such profitable meditations as did then occur to his thoughts [i.e., theological “contemplations”]… in them appears a generous and true spirit of religion… The stile is clear and masculine… making some allowance for the largeness of the stile, that volume… is generally acknowledged to be one of the most perfect pieces both of learning and reasoning… [Life and Death, pp. 47-48]
As mentioned above, Hale became dedicated to his studies and religion whilst at Lincoln’s Inn. Surely the rigor and (then) piety of that society had its effect. Lamentably, Lincoln’s Inn is no longer a place Hale would have recognized. The society recently opted to become less honorable, removing prayer before meals in an effort to be more “inclusive.” The reader can easily imagine what Hale’s reaction would have been.
Consider John Eusden’s description (in Puritans, Lawyers, and Politics (1958), a brilliant work) of life at the Inns of Court in the seventeenth century. Needless to say, it was a substantially more rigorous program than most law students endure today.
“In general, the program was more rigorous than that encountered at the universities. Before one could be called to the bar, at least six years, and sometimes as many as eight, must have been spent in study at an inn. The length of study was regularized in 1596 at which time a seven-year limit was established. Not only academic endurance but an all-consuming love for the common law was demanded. Even in the moments of respite between reading, listening to arguments and the exposition of statutes, and participation in ‘moots,’ a student was expected to steep himself in the common law. He must ‘talk law,’ ‘put cases,’ and generally show that he had competence in ars bablativa, the ‘bablative art’ of the common lawyer.”
Eusden further recalls how members of the bench would retire in between hearings to replicate the kind of mental stimulus inculcated at the Inn’s by debating cases and reading the Bible together.
Next, on Hale’s dedication to the Sabbath even in his final hours:
“Not long before his death, the minister told him, there was to be a sacrament next Sunday at church, but he believed he could not come and partake with the rest; therefore he would give it to him in his own house: But he answered, no; his heavenly Father had prepared a feast for him, he would go to his Father’s house to partake of it: so he made himself be carried thither in his chair, where he received the sacrament on his knees, with great devotion…” [pp. 63-64]
Apparently, Hale had predicted his own death to be November 25, 1675. As it happened, that was a day he took the sacrament and did, indeed, die thereafter. The last sermon he heared was on Isaiah 57:1: The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart: and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come.
Gilbert also includes verse from Hale dedicated to Christmas, of which he was exceedingly fond. Life and Death, pp. 65-66.
“He used constantly to worship God, in his family, performing it always himself, if there was no Clergyman present… He laid aside the tenth penny of all he got for the poor… He loved building much [on his estate and home], which he affected chiefly because it employed many poor people.”
Here, a story is included of Hale paying the rent of his own tenant because she was a widow with no source of income.
It was during Hale’s Sabbath day study that he likely penned his various religious works, some of which were produced to satisfy the demand of his friend, Richard Baxter (1615-1691). This was especially the case with his Discourse of Religion, although Hale’s Discourse of the Knowledge of God might be more noteworthy. Many of Hale’s non-legal writings enjoyed enduring popularity. In Washington Irving’s Life of George Washington, for example, the author claims that after the untimely death of the first president’s father, his mother assumed the household educational duties. As part of her regiment, she would regularly read Hale’s Contemplations Moral and Divine to her children. Indeed, it is the only book that Irving cites by name.
Speaking of Baxter, per his annotations on Hale’s life, Baxter gave Hale a modest house at Acton to live in which the former claims was so simple and beneath the latter’s status that it was an embarrassment. But Hale, being so intentionally spartan in his existence, found the place agreeable. Baxter also defends Hale for marrying his housemaid after his first wife died. Some members of society found this move utterly absurd and embarrassing given the disparity in status between the two. But Hale would have none of it, and Baxter attests to the fitness of their union, the wife’s character and charm, and Hale’s lifelong dedication to “never grasp at riches.”
As mentioned already, Hale generally neglected society and the attention of important people in favor of study and solitude. Neither did he seek fame, instructing explicitly that nothing he wrote should be published upon his death, an order his admirers quickly ignored. “God made him a public good,” said Baxter, and Hale was evidently universally beloved, even after his passing.
Baxter, recalling his regular meetings with Hale, casts him as a perpetually eager schoolboy. On their shared epistemology:
“Whenever we were together, he was the spring of our discourse (as chusing [sic] the subject)… We both were conscious of human darkness, and how much of our understandings, quiet in such matters, must be fetched from our implicit trust in the goodness and promises of God… and how great use we have herein of our faith in Jesus Christ, as he is the undertaker, mediator, the Lord and lover of souls, and the actual possessor of that glory. But yet we thought, that it greatly concerned us, to search as far as God allowed us, into a matter of so great moment… He was but of a slow speech, and sometimes hesitating, that a stranger would have though him a man of low parts, that knew not readily what to say… But I never saw Cicero’s doctrine de Oratore, more verified in any man…”
“He was much for coming to philosophical knowledge by the help of experiments: but he thought, that our new philosophers, as some call the Cartesians, had taken up many fallacies as experiments, and had made as unhappy a use of their trials, as many emprics and mountebanks do in medicine: and that Aristotle was a man of far greater experience, as well as study, than they… for he thought that few of these contemners of Aristotle, had ever so far studied him, as to know his doctrine.”
Of interest too is Baxter’s description of Hale’s opinions regarding church government. He was not a full-fledged Erastian like his friend, Selden, but,
“[T]he lord chief justice thought, that the power of the word and sacraments in the ministerial office, was of God’s institution; and that they were the proper judges appointed by Christ, to whom they themselves should apply sacraments, and to whom they should deny them. But that the power of chancellors courts, and many modal additions, which are not of the essence of the priestly office, floweth from the king, and may be fitted to the state of the kingdom. Which is true, if it be limited by God’s laws, and exercised on things only allowed them to deal in, and contradict not the orders and powers settled by Christ and his apostles. On this account he thought well of the form of government in the church of England.”
Baxter also notes that he bought a “great bible” with money allocated to him by Hale in his will. Baxter thought this purchase, “the testament of Christ, the meetest purchase by that price, to remain in memorial of the faithful love, which he bare and long expressed to his inferior and unworthy, but honouring [sic] friend.”
In the front, Baxter apparently kept a picture of Hale and inscribed on the first page,
“Sir Matthew Hale, that unwearied student, that prudent man, that solid philosopher, that famous lawyer, that pillar and basis of justice (who would not have done an unjust act for any worldly price or motive,) the ornament of his majesty’s government, and honour of England; the highest facult of the soul of Westminster-hall, and pattern to all the reverend and honourable judges; that godly, serious, practical Christian, the lover of goodness and all good men; a lamenter of the clergy’s selfishness, and unfaithfulness, and discord, and of the sad divisions following hereupon; an earnest desire of their reformation, concord, and the church’s peace, and of a reformed act of uniformity, as the best and necessary means thereto; that great contemner of the riches, pomp and vanity of the world; that patter of honest plainness and humility, who while he fled from the honours that pursued him, was yet lord chief justice of the king’s bench…”
Baxter closes his account by expressing longing “for the day of his perfect conjunction with the spirits of the just made perfect,” of which Hale most assuredly was one. They don’t make judges like they used to.
