# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Raymond, Robert

1904 Errata appended.
​RAYMOND, ROBERT, Lord Raymond (1673–1733), lord chief-justice, only son of Sir Thomas Raymond [q. v.], by his wife Anne, daughter of Sir Edward Fishe, bart., born on 20 Dec. 1673, was educated at Eton and admitted pensioner of Christ's College, Cambridge, in Nov. 1689, aged 15, afterwards becoming a fellow-commoner. By his father's special request, he was admitted, at the age of nine (1 Nov. 1682), of Gray's Inn, where he was called to the bar on 12 Nov. 1697. Devoting himself to the law with assiduity, he began reporting during his pupilage and continued it almost to the close of his life. Nor had he to wait for briefs (see his report of his own very learned argument in Pullein v. Benson, Mich. 1698). In Easter term 1702 he appeared for the crown in the prosecution of Richard Hathaway (fl. 1702) [q. v.], the would-be witch-finder. On 19 April 1704 his ingenious argument secured the acquittal of David Lindsay, a Scotsman, charged with high treason under the statute 9 Will. III, c. 1, which construed as treason the unlicensed return to England of persons who had gone to France without license since 11 Dec. 1688.
On the triumph of the tory party in 1710 Raymond, who had hitherto taken little part in politics, received the office of solicitor-general, 13 May, and was knighted 24 Oct. following, having in the meanwhile been returned to parliament (10 Oct.) for Bishop's Castle, Shropshire, which seat he retained at the general election of September 1713. His name is found in a list of the commissioners of sewers dated 13 June 1712. On the accession of George I he was removed from office, 14 Oct. 1714, and though he secured his return to parliament for Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, 29 Jan. 1714–15, he was unseated on petition on 12 April 1717, having in the interim delivered a weighty speech, his only ​important parliamentary effort, in opposition to the Septennial Bill (24 April 1716). He re-entered parliament in 1719, being returned on 26 March for Ludlow, for which borough he was re-elected on accepting, 20 May 1720, the office of attorney-general; in that capacity he conducted the prosecution of the Jacobite Christopher Layer [q. v.] At the general election of April 1722 he was returned to parliament for Helston, Cornwall. On 31 Jan. 1723–4 he received a puisne judgeship in the king's bench, having been sworn serjeant-at-law on the previous day. He was one of the lords commissioners for the custody of the great seal during the interval, 7 Jan. to 1 June 1725, between its surrender by Lord Macclesfield and its delivery to Lord King [see Parker, Thomas, first Earl of Macclesfield; King, Peter, first Lord King]. In the meantime, 2 March 1724–5, he succeeded Sir John Pratt [q. v.] as lord chief justice, and on 12 April was sworn of the privy council. He was continued in office by George II, by whom he was raised to the peerage on 15 Jan. 1730–1731 with the title of Baron Raymond of Abbot's Langley, Hertfordshire. He took his seat in the House of Lords on 21 Jan., and was at once placed on the committee of privileges. He died of stone at his house in Red Lion Square, London, on 18 March 1732–3. His remains were interred in the chancel of Abbot's Langley church, whence his monument, an elaborate but tasteless structure of marble, has recently been removed to the south nave aisle. His estate at Langley Bury, Abbot's Langley, passed, with his title, to his only son, Robert, by his wife Anne (d. 1720), eldest daughter of Sir Edward Northey of Woodcote Green, Epsom, attorney-general to Queen Anne. Robert Raymond, second lord Raymond (1717–1756), married, on 25 June 1741, Mary, daughter of Montagu, viscount Blundell in the peerage of Ireland, but died without issue on 19 Sept. 1756.
Raymond was a man of great learning, and, though he does not rank with the most illustrious of the sages of the law, left an enviable reputation for strict, impartial, and painstaking administration of justice. His judgments in the cases of the notorious duellist, Major Oneby, in 1726, and the warden of the Fleet prison in 1730 [see Chesshyre, Sir John; Darnall, Sir John, the younger], contributed to elucidate the distinction between murder and manslaughter; in the case of Rex v. Curll in 1728 he established the principle that the publication of an obscene libel is punishable at common law. In a subsequent libel case, Rex v. Franklin, in 1731, where the offence was the publication of certain strictures on the peace of Seville in the ‘Craftsman,’ No. 235, his direction, which was followed by the jury, afterwards furnished Lord Mansfield with a precedent in support of his view of the functions of the jury in such cases. Raymond's portrait (artist unknown) is in Gray's Inn Hall.
Raymond's ‘Reports of Cases argued and adjudged in the Courts of King's Bench and Common Pleas in the reigns of the late King William, Queen Anne, King George I, and his present Majesty,’ appeared at London in 1743, 2 vols. fol. (2nd ed. 1765). They were edited, with the entries of pleadings, by Serjeant Wilson, London, 1775, 3 vols. fol.; and again by John (afterwards Sir John) Bayley [q. v.] in 1790, London, 3 vols. 8vo; a fifth edition, by Gale, 1832, London, 8vo. They are of great but unequal authority, by no means all of the earlier cases being Raymond's own reporting.
J. M. R.
Dictionary of National Biography, Errata (1904), p.231 N.B.— f.e. stands for from end and l.l. for last line
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| 345 | ii | 25 | Raymond, Robert, Lord Raymond: after 1673, insert was educated at Eton and was admitted pensioner of Christ's College, Cambridge, in Nov. 1689, aged 15, afterwards becoming a fellow-commoner. He |