CHARLES

See also:

• ABBOTT
• ABBOTT, EMMA (1849-1891)
• ABBOTT, JACOB (1803-1879)
• ABBOTT, JOHN STEVENS CABOT (1805-1877)
• ABBOTT, LYMAN (1835- )

ABBOTT

See also:

• TENTERDEN
• CHARLES ABBOTT TENTERDEN

TENTERDEN  , 1st BARON (1762-1832), lord chief justice of England, was born at Canterbury on the 7th of October 1762, his father having been a hairdresser and wigmaker of the town . He was educated at Canterbury King's School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, of which he after-wards became fellow and tutor . On the advice of Mr Justice Buller (1746-1800), to whose son he had been tutor, he deter-mined on the legal profession, and entered at the Middle Templein 1787 . For several years he practised as a special pleader under the bar, and was finally called at the Inner Temple in 1996 . He joined the Oxford circuit and soon made rapid head-way . In 18oi he was appointed recorder of Oxford . In 1802 appeared his Law relative to Merchant Ships and Seamen, a concise and excellent treatise, which has maintained its position as an authoritative work . Its publication brought to him so much commercial and other work that in 1808 he was in a position to refuse a seat on the bench; this, however, he accepted in 1816, being made a judge of the court of common pleas . On the resignation of Lord Ellenborough in 1818 he was promoted to the chief justiceship of the king's bench . In his capacity as chief justice he presided over several important state trials, notably that of Arthur Thistlewood and the Cato Street conspirators (1820) . He was raised to the peerage in 1827 as Baron Tenterden of Hendon . Never a great lawyer and with no pretence to eloquence, Tenterden made his way by sound common sense and steady hard. work .

He was an uncompromising Tory, and had no sympathy with the reform of the criminal law carried out by

Romilly; while he strongly opposed the Catholic Relief Bill and the Reform Bill . He died on the 4th of November 1832, and was buried, by his own desire, in the Foundling Hospital, London, of which he was a governor . Tenterden was succeeded in his title by his son, John Henry Abbott (1796-1870), then by his grandson, Charles Stuart Aubrey Abbott (1834-1882), permanent under-secretary for foreign affairs, who was made a K.C.B. in 1878 . In 1882 the latter's son, Charles Stuart Henry Abbott (b .