Erskine, THOMAS, LORD ERSKINE, the youngest son of Henry David, tenth Earl of Buchan, was born in Edinburgh, 21st January 1750, and was educated at St Andrews. In 1764, much against his will, he was sent to sea in the Tartar man-of-war, under Sir David Lindsay. After cruising about for four years in the West Indies and on the coast of America, he obtained an ensign's commission in the 1st Royals, at a price which absorbed his whole patrimony (1768), and was for some time stationed at Minorca, where he employed his leisure time in a minute and devoted study of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and other masters of English literature. On his return to London in 1772, Erskine mingled freely with the best social and literary circles, and acquired a distaste for military life, which an accidental visit to an assize court, and an interview with Lord Mansfield, turned into a determination to prosecute the study of law. He was admitted to Lincoln's Inn, 26th April 1775; and in 1776 entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took an honorary M.A. in 1778, just before being called to the bar. His professional career was one of immediate and unprecedented success. Accident threw in his way a retainer in the case of Captain Baillie, lieutenant-governor of Greenwich Hospital, who was threatened with a criminal prosecution for libel, at the instance of Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty. Erskine's advocacy secured the discharge of the rule for leave to file an information (24th November 1778), and as he left Westminster Hall from the scene of this signal victory the attorneys flocked round him with their retainers to the number, as he afterwards used to tell, of sixty-five. The next year saw an equally successful defence of Admiral Lord Keppel against charges of professional misconduct and incompetence. In 1781 Erskine secured the acquittal of Lord George Gordon, indicted for high-treason in connection with his conduct during the notorious riots, and on this occasion delivered his first assault upon the doctrine of constructive treason, by which it was sought to make persons who aimed at effecting a change in the sovereign's constitutional character and position guilty of the capital offence of 'compassing the king's death.' In 1783 Erskine was appointed a King's Connell on the special recommendation of Lord Mansfield, and at the same time was returned as member of parliament for Portsmouth. The high expectations of his friends were rudely disappointed by his first political appearance in the House of Commons, and, although he subsequently made effective and eloquent speeches, he never became a parliamentary orator. 'I'll tell you how it happens, Erskine,' said Sheridan, 'you're afraid of Pitt; and that is the flabby part of your character.' Erskine's sympathy with the French Revolution, aroused by a visit to Paris in 1791, led him to join the 'Society of the Friends of the People'—whose object was to bring about parliamentary reform—and to undertake the defence in the principal political prosecutions of 1793-94. His courageous acceptance of a retainer from Tom Paine resulted in his removal from the office of Attorney-general to the Prince of Wales, to which he had been appointed in 1786. But his speeches for this unpopular defendant, and for Frost (1793), Hardy (1794), and Horne Tooke (1794), are among the finest specimens of forensic skill, and, in the language of Hardy, 'will live for ever.' Erskine's defence of Hadfield (April 26, 1800), indicted for shooting at George III. in Drury Lane Theatre, was a powerful and logical analysis of a theory of criminal responsibility in mental disease, which had hitherto done bloody duty in English courts of law. In 1802 Erskine was appointed Chancellor to the Prince of Wales, an office which had lain dormant since the time of James I., but was now revived in his favour. In 1806 he was raised to the peerage and the woolsack, but soon retired into private life. He died at Amondell, Linlithgowshire, 17th November 1823.
Erskine had married first, in 1770, Frances, daughter of Daniel Moore, M.P. for Marlow; and secondly, at Greta Green, when he must have been about seventy, a Miss Mary Buck. He published a pamphlet on the abuses of the army in 1772; a view of the causes and consequences of the war with France in 1797; a political romance, Armata; a pamphlet in favour of the Greeks; and some poems.
Erskine's decisions as Lord Chancellor were styled by his contemporaries the 'Apocrypha,' and have added nothing to his permanent fame. His reputation is purely forensic, and in this respect is unrivalled in the history of the English bar. The charm of voice and presence and gesture may have contributed something to his unique influence over judges and jurymen; but the careful student will not fail to note in his speeches the enduring qualities of genuine sentiment, profound acquaintance with life and character, singular fertility in illustration, and powers of exposition and reasoning to which the history of advocacy hardly offers a parallel. See Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors, vol. viii.; Fergusson's Henry Erskine (1882); and Duméril's Lord Erskine, a Study (Paris, 1883).