Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

Default and Modern Process 139
for their help and elaborate gifts or payments were a good way of showing
a properly thankful stance. No matter how they had gained their offices,
holders thought they had property in them. No thoroughgoing challenge to
this conception appeared until the wars at the end of the eighteenth century
forced on Britain some of the characteristics of modern bureaucracy. But
from the sixteenth century forwards purchase of office was repeatedly,
if unsuccessfully, condemned. A 1552 statute forbade the sale of offices
connected with royal property, defence and justice, 44 but it safeguarded thenexisting
rights and was in any case widely ignored. Still, outright purchase and
sale of offices was to many offensive, particularly when practised on a grand
scale, as Thomas Parker, Lord Macclesfield, discovered in 1725.
Parker, who by 1714 had become the Chief Justice of the King's Bench,
'found favour with George I, receiving a peerage in 1716 and in 1718 the
Lord Chancellorship'. 45 Well understanding the value of such a position,
Macclesfield proceeded to dispense his powers of patronage over various
offices with vigour and resolution, exacting the highest price available for any
position. By the standards of the time he was doing nothing wrong in expecting
payment from the grateful recipients of a post within his patronage, but
Macclesfield erred in offering them for sale. He also had bad luck. The South
Sea Bubble burst in 1718. In the wake of that financial collapse, it became
apparent that the Masters in Chancery, appointed by the Lord Chancellor
and charged with stewardship of various monies, had been speculating with
them with disastrous results. These losses exposed the dangers of the office
holding system in an especially salient way, for the masters had gone beyond
the ordinary petty harassment represented by the fee system: whole estates
had vanished. A parliamentary investigation which began with irregularities
into care of funds went on to suggest that such speculation was likely when
the Lord Chancellor had sold the offices to people who would feel the need to
wring every opportunity for profit out of them. Macclesfield, who to the end
had vigorous defenders (including George I), was impeached by Parliament
and imprisoned until he had paid a fine of £30,000.
Scandal is an historical wild card. One cannot prove that without
Macclesfield's disgrace there would have been no default legislation. 46 I
want to make a more cautious statement: scandals like the Macclesfield affair
are the sort of thing that can momentarily jar legislatures, causing them to do
things to interests that would ordinarily be sacrosanct. Macclesfield's fall did
not destroy office holding, which flourished for another century, but perhaps
it enabled Parliament to engage in one of those tiny spasms that passed for
procedural reform until the great tremors of the mid nineteenth century. Even
44 Stat. Realm, IV, i, 151-52.
45 Biographical Dictionary of the Common Law, A.W.B. Simpson, ed. (1984), 404.
46 In particular, I am not arguing that the 1725 legislation was aimed at the Chancery officers who
had purchased their places from Macclesfield. Entirely separate officers issued the common law writs
of distringas and capias. The link is rather with the general institution of office holding.