William Wightman (judge)
Sir William Wightman | |
|---|---|
 Painting of Sir William Wightman by William Yellowlees In the collections of The Queen's College, Oxford. | |
| Justice of the Queen's Bench | |
| In office 15 February 1841 – 10 December 1863 | |
Sir William Wightman (28 September 1784 – 10 December 1863) was a British judge.
Life
[edit]Wightman came of an old Dumfriesshire family, the son of William Wightman, gentleman, of St. Clement's, London, and his wife, Elisabeth. He was baptised at St Clement Danes at nearly 1 year old.[1] He was an undergraduate of University College, Oxford, where he matriculated on 23 March 1801, and on 21 June was elected to a Michel exhibition at Queen's College, graduating BA on 30 May 1805, and MA on 23 October 1809; from 1859 to 1863 he was an honorary fellow of his college.[2]
On 31 January 1804, Wightman entered Lincoln's Inn, and, after some years of practice as a special pleader, he was called to the bar in 1821. In 1830 he transferred himself to the Inner Temple and joined the Northern Circuit. He was known as a sound and clear-headed lawyer, and for several years held the post of junior counsel to the treasury.
In 1830, Wightman was appointed a member of the commission of 1830 upon the practice of the common law courts. In 1833, Wightman was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Criminal Law 1833, a royal commission to consolidate existing statutes of criminal law into an English Criminal Code.[3]
He was engaged in many celebrated cases, particularly the prosecutions arising out of the Bristol riots; but, owing to an almost excessive modesty, was little known except to his profession. In February 1841 he was promoted to a judgeship of the Queen's Bench, on the resignation of Mr Justice Joseph Littledale, and was knighted on 28 April, and here he served as a judge for nearly 23 years. While on circuit at York, on 9 December 1863, he was seized with an attack of apoplexy, and died next day.[2]
Family
[edit]Wightman married in 1819, Charlotte Mary Baird, daughter of James Baird of Lasswade, near Edinburgh.[2][4] They had four daughters:
- Caroline Elizabeth, who married the Rev. Peter Almeric Leheup Wood.[5]
- Mary Henrietta, who married Henry Roxby Benson.[6]
- Frances Lucy, who married Matthew Arnold the poet.[6]
- Georgina, unmarried.[6]
Arms
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References
[edit]- ^ England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538-1975
- ^ a b c Lee, Sidney, ed. (1900). . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 61. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
- ^ Ilbert, Courtenay (1901). Legislative methods and forms. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 51–52. Retrieved 9 September 2024.
- ^ Wyndham, Henry Saxe (2013). The Annals of Covent Garden Theatre from 1732 to 1897. Cambridge University Press. p. 305. ISBN 978-1-108-06868-0.
- ^ "Wood, Peter Almeric Leheup (WT837PA)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
- ^ a b c Patrick McCarthy, Mrs. Matthew Arnold, Texas Studies in Literature and Language Vol. 12, No. 4 (Winter 1971), pp. 647–662, at pp. 652–653. Published by: University of Texas Press JSTOR 40755190
- ^ "Wightman W". Baz Manning. Retrieved 9 March 2023.
- Attribution
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Lee, Sidney, ed. (1900). "Wightman, William". Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 61. London: Smith, Elder & Co.