James Robert Hope-Scott of Abbotsford

Wikipedia Biographical Summary

James Robert Hope-Scott (15 July 1812 – 29 April 1873) was a British barrister and Tractarian.

Early life and conversion

Born at Great Marlow, in the county of Buckinghamshire, and christened James Robert Hope, he was the third son of Sir Alexander Hope, and grandson of John Hope, 2nd Earl of Hopetoun. After a childhood spent at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, of which his father was governor (now called "commandant"), he was educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was a contemporary and friend of William Ewart Gladstone and John Henry Newman. In 1838 he was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn. Between 1840 and 1843 he helped to found Trinity College, Glenalmond. In 1840-41 he spent some eight months in Italy, Rome included, in company with his close friend Edward Louth Badeley.

On his return he became, with Newman, one of the foremost promoters of the Tractarian movement at Oxford and entirely in Newman's confidence. In 1841, he published an attack on the Anglican-German Bishopric in Jerusalem, and further defended the "value of the science of canon law, in a pamphlet. Edward Bouverie Pusey also valued Hope's advice and canvassed him in 1842 before publishing the Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury on some Circumstances connected with the Present Crisis in the Church. Hope supported publication.

Along with other Anglo-Catholics, Hope was disturbed by the Gorham judgment and, on 12 March 1850, a meeting was held at his house in Curzon Street, London which was attended by fourteen leading Tractarians including: Badeley, Henry Edward Manning and Archdeacon Robert Isaac Wilberforce. They eventually published a series of resolutions which started the process of distancing Hope, Badeley, Manning and Wilberforce from the Anglican Church.

In 1851 Hope was received with Manning into the Roman Catholic Church.

Legal practice

On 15 June 1841, Hope wrote to Gladstone:

My reason for staying in town is to read ecclesiastical law, and to prepare (if so be) for election committees. The former branch I reckon my flower-garden, the latter my cabbage-field.

Ormsby believed that Hope found some distraction from his frustration with the Anglican Church through his secular work.

By 1839, Hope was becoming involved in parliamentary work. He was retained as counsel for the British government on the Foreign Marriages Bill and in 1843, the report on the Consular Jurisdiction Bill. His brother's appointment as Under Secretary of State for the Colonies in Sir Robert Peel's administration may have opened some doors. In 1843-44 he was engaged again by the government in the matter of the aftermath of the Pastry War, whose settlement Britain had arbitrated, to prepare a report on some points in dispute between France and Mexico.

As an established ecclesiastical lawyer, he was much involved in the Ecclesiastical Courts Bill in 1843 and the same year he took the DCL degree at Oxford. In 1844 an English Criminal Code was under serious consideration and Bishop of London Charles James Blomfield recommended Hope to the Lord Chancellor John Copley, 1st Baron Lyndhurst as a commissioner to consider offences against religion and the Church. By the end of 1845 he stood at the head of the parliamentary bar but his objections to taking the Oath of Supremacy deterred him from accepting the professional honour of Queen's Counsel. In 1849, he therefore asked Lord Chancellor Charles Pepys, 1st Earl of Cottenham for, and was granted, a patent of precedence conferring equal status.

In 1852 he gave Newman the disastrously misleading legal advice that he was unlikely to be sued for libel by Giacinto Achilli, advice that led to Newman's criminal conviction for defamatory libel. Thereafter, Newman relied on Badeley for legal advice though in 1855 Hope-Scott conducted the negotiations which ended in Newman's accepting the rectorship of the Catholic University of Ireland.

Personal and family life

In 1847 he married Charlotte Harriet Jane Lockhart, daughter of John Gibson Lockhart and granddaughter of Sir Walter Scott, and, on her coming into possession of Abbotsford House six years later, he assumed the surname of Hope-Scott. After her death on 26 October 1858 he married as his second wife in 1861, Lady Victoria Fitzalan-Howard, daughter of the 14th Duke of Norfolk. He retired from the bar in 1870 and spent the rest of his life in charitable and literary work, in particular an abridgment of his father in law's seven volume biography of Scott with a preface dedicated to Gladstone. He maintained a lifelong correspondence with Badeley.

Both his wives died in childbirth. He left an only daughter by his first marriage, Mary Monica (born 2 October 1852), later wife of Joseph Constable Maxwell, third son of William, Lord Herries. Two other children of this marriage died in infancy. By his second marriage he left a son, James Fitzalan Hope (1870–1949), and three daughters. Two other children died young.

SOURCE: Wikipedia contributors, 'James Hope-Scott', Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 March 2013, 20:56 UTC, <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=James_Hope-Scott&oldid=54...> [accessed 17 February 2014]