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James Parke, Baron Wensleydale

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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Baron (1782-1868), English judge, was born near Liverpool on the 22nd of March 1782. He was educated at Macclesfield grammar school and Trinity College, Cambridge. He had a brilliant career at the university, winning the Craven scholarship, Sir William Browne's gold medal, and being fifth wrangler and senior chancellor's medallist in classics. Called to the bar at the Inner Temple he rapidly acquired an excellent common law practice and in 1828 was raised to the king's bench, while still of the junior bar. In 1834 he was transferred from the king's bench to the court of exchequer, where for some twenty years he exercised considerable influence. The changes introduced by the Common Law Procedure Acts of 1854, 1855 proved too much for his legal conservatism and he resigned in December of the latter year. The government, anxious to have his services as a law lord in the House of Lords, proposed to confer on him a life peerage, but this was opposed by the House of Lords (see Peerage), and he was eventually created a peer with the usual remainder (1856). He died at his residence, Ampthill Park, Bedfordshire, on the 25th of February 1868, and having outlived his three sons, the title became extinct.