Richard Aston

Sir Richard Aston (1717 – 1 March 1778) was an English judge, best known as King's Counsel and Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas in Ireland. Sir Richard Aston was known as one of the early pioneers in Irish Law, in which he sought to change the process in which bills of indictment were issued without the examination of witnesses. In 1765 Sir Aston resigned from his role in Irish law and was subsequently Knighted. Aston died on the 1 March 1778, leaving nothing to either of his surviving wives.

Early life

Aston was the son of Richard Aston, Esq., of Wadley House at Littleworth in Faringdon, Berkshire (now Oxfordshire), grandson of Sir Willoughby Aston, Bart., and great-grandson of Sir Thomas Aston, the first of the Aston baronets. The Astons derived their name from Aston in Cheshire, where the family had been settled since the time of Henry II. His mother, Elizabeth, was a daughter of John Warren, Esq., of Oxfordshire.

Career

It is not known at what date Richard Aston began practice as a barrister. His name appears in the first volume of Sir James Burrow's Reports of Cases in the King's Bench (1756-8). He became king's counsel in 1759, and in 1761 was made lord chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas in Ireland, on the resignation of Sir William Yorke. Discovering that it was the practice of grand juries in that country to find bills of indictment upon the viewing of depositions without examining any witnesses, he set himself to reform the practice. He failed to carry his colleagues with him, only two out of nine disapproving of the practice, which remained unaltered until 1816, when a bill making the examination of witnesses obligatory was introduced into the House of Commons by Horner and passed into law.

On the resignation in 1765 of Sir Thomas Denison, one of the judges of the King's Bench in England, he resigned his Irish post, and was transferred to the English court and knighted.

Courts

In 1768, Aston was a member of the court presided over by Lord Mansfield, which unanimously decided that the writ of outlawry issued against John Wilkes, upon his conviction for publishing two seditious libels in No. 45 of the 'North Briton' and in the 'Essay on Woman', was bad by reason of two formal defects. Wilkes, who had kept out of the country until the writ was issued, voluntarily surrendered himself to the sheriff of Middlesex before the execution of it, and then appeared before the court upon a writ of error, claiming to have the writ of outlawry declared invalid upon certain technical grounds. The judges disallowed all the objections urged by the counsel for Wilkes, but the result of a careful examination of precedents conducted by the junior members of the court (Yates, Aston, and Willes) was to show that in the days when the writ of outlawry (capias utlagatum) was in common use 'a series of judgments required that ... after the words "at my county court" should be added the name of the county, and after the word "held" should be added "for the county of —" (naming it).' The writ being faulty in these respects, the court held that it was invalid. A decision based upon a ground so purely technical, overlooked by the counsel for the applicant, and only discovered by the judges after careful research, excited in the minds of those hostile to Wilkes suspicions of corrupt motives, and a report was circulated to the effect that the judges, or at any rate Willes and Aston, had been bribed by a gift of lottery tickets, that Aston had been seen selling them on 'Change, and had remarked that he had as good a right to sell his tickets as his brother Willes.

On January 20, 1770, on the sudden death of Charles Yorke (immediately after his acceptance of the office of Lord Chancellor in succession to Lord Camden), the Rockingham administration were unable to find any lawyer to succeed him. Determined to put the great seal in commission; and Sir Sidney Stafford Smythe of the Exchequer, Sir Richard Aston of the King's Bench, and the Hon. Henry Bathurst of the Common Pleas, were selected as commissioners. These three judges, having had no experience of chancery business, in the space of a year (1770-1) committed so many blunders that a change was necessary. On 21 January 1771, the three commissioners delivered up the great seal, and on the same day it was redelivered to one of them, the Hon. Henry Bathurst. Aston, sitting with Lord Mansfield in the court of King's Bench at Westminster, in 1777, sentence of fine and imprisonment was passed upon John Horne (afterwards John Horne Tooke) for a seditious libel in advertising a subscription in relief "of the widows, orphans, and aged parents of our beloved American fellow subjects, who, faithful to the character of Englishmen, and preferring death to slavery, were, for that reason only, inhumanly murdered by the king's troops at or near Lexington and Concord in the province of Massachusetts".

Personal life

Aston was married twice, first to a Miss Eldred, and then to Rebecca, daughter of Dr. Rowland, a physician of Aylesbury, and widow of Sir David Williams, Bart., of Rose Hall, Hertfordshire. He is said to have been brusque in his manners. He died in 1778, leaving no issue by either of his wives.

Further reading

• Burke's Extinct Baronetage, 23, 569;
• Wotton's Baronetage
• Cal. of Home Office Papers, 1766–69, 1770–72
• Hansard, xxxii. 548, 552
• Horner's Life, Letter from Horner to Murray upon the Irish Jury Bill
• Smyth's Law Officers of Ireland, 311
• Law and Lawyers (reputed author James Grant), ii. 140
• Burrow's Settlement Cases, 533; Burrow's Reports, iv. 2527
• Howell's State Trials, xix. 1085, 1098, 1109, 1116, xx. 787
• Cr. Off. Min. B. No. 2, fol. 16; Annual Reg. xiii. 186.