James Hope-Scott - Legal Practice

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.