NORTH, Francis, Baron Guildford, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, was the elder brother of the preceding, and was born on the 22d October 1637. From the school of Bury he passed, in 1653, to St John's College, Cambridge, and after studying there for two years as a fellow commoner, he became a member of the Middle Temple. Young North began his legal career with all that concentration of purpose which distinguished his family. His volatile disposition and his passion for pleasure were kept in check; and, setting himself doggedly to the study of law, he endeavoured to subject all his propensities to the calm control of self-interest. The same line of policy was pursued when he had been called to the bar in 1661, and began to travel the circuit. No kind of influence was thought too insignificant to be won. He truckled to the prejudices of the judges; fawned upon those whose hands were full of briefs; and sometimes chose to ride and starve with a certain miserly serjeant named Earl, in order that he might draw from the large experience of his fellow-traveller an account of all the tricks and subtleties of law. By such means the time-serving aspirant soon acquired a proficiency and reputation which combined to lead him on to the highest legal preferments. He was appointed solicitor-general in 1671, attorney-general in 1673, and lord chief justice of the Common Pleas in 1675. At length, in 1682, the Great Seal was intrusted to his keeping. In
North. this high position, where he was the object of general attention, and at this time, when the political world was torn into two factions, North stood prominently out as the most temporizing of the Trimmers. With that low species of tact which cowardice supplies, he shunned every occasion and every company where he might be betrayed into an express statement of his political creed. The letter of the law was the moral code by which he justified his public conduct, and allegiance to the sovereign was the virtue with which he covered his private bearing. It was only when he was sinking into the grave amid general neglect and distrust, that he first showed courage, by warning the infatuated James II. of the ruin towards which the government was tending. His death took place on the 5th September 1685.
The Lives of Dudley and Francis North, and of Dr John North, a younger son of the same family, written by their brother Roger North, were published in 2 vols. 4to, 1740-42, and republished in 3 vols., London, 1826. The biographer, although a partial, self-conceited gossip, and a bigoted Tory, unconsciously blabs out now and then many little circumstances which silently cancel his absurd eulogies, and exhibit his heroes in their real characters. (See also Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors, and Macaulay's History of England.)