Abraham Hayward - Life

Life

He was son of Joseph Hayward, and was born in Wilton, near Salisbury, Wiltshire.

After education at Blundell's School, Tiverton, he entered the Inner Temple in 1824, and was called to the bar in June 1832. He took part as a conservative in the discussions of the London Debating Society, where his opponents were JA Roebuck and John Stuart Mill. The editorship of the Law Magazine, or, Quarterly Review of Jurisprudence, which he held from 1828 to 1844, brought him into connection with John Austin, G Cornewall Lewis, and such foreign jurists as Savigny, whose tractate on contemporary legislation and jurisprudence he rendered into English.

In 1833 he travelled abroad, and on his return began contributing to the New Monthly, the Foreign Quarterly, the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review.

In February 1835 he was elected to the Athenaeum Club under Rule 11, and he remained for nearly fifty years one of its most conspicuous and most influential members. He was also a subscriber to the Carlton, but ceased to frequent it when he became a Peelite. At the Temple, Hayward, whose reputation was rapidly growing as a connoisseur not only of a bill of fare but also as company, gave recherché dinners, at which ladies of rank and fashion appreciated the wit of Sydney Smith and Theodore Hook, the dignity of Lockhart and Lyndhurst and the oratory of Macaulay. At the Athenaeum and in political society he to some extent succeeded to the position of Croker. He and Macaulay were commonly said to be the two best-read men in town.

Political ladies first, and statesmen afterwards, came to recognize the advantage of obtaining Hayward's good opinion. The "old reviewing hand" became an acknowledged link between society, letters and politics. In one notable and lengthy land rights case, 'The Queen v. Ames', Hayward acted on behalf of the town of Lyme Regis in securing the permanent right of way for its citizens, across the cliffs to Axminster. There were other successes, but his promotion to be Q.C. in 1845 excited a storm of opposition, and, disgusted at being 'black-balled' by J. A. Roebuck and therefore not elected a Bencher of his Inn in the usual course, Hayward virtually withdrew from legal practice. His enemies prevented him from enjoying a well-selected quasisinecure, which both Palmerston and Aberdeen admitted to be his due. Samuel Warren attacked him as Venom Tuft in Ten Thousand a Year; and Disraeli aimed at him partially in Ste Barbe (in Endymion), though the satire here was directed primarily against Thackeray.

As a counsellor of great ladies and of politicians, to whom he held forth with a sense of all-round responsibility surpassing that of a cabinet minister, Hayward retained his influence to the last years of his life. But he had little sympathy with modern ideas. He used to say that he had outlived every one that he could really look up to. He died, a bachelor, in his rooms at 8 St James's Street (a small museum of autograph portraits and reviewing trophies).