page_title: Joseph Yates (judge)
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Joseph Yates (judge) / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: John Wilkes Esq; before the Court of King's Bench, engraving from The Gentleman's Magazine for May 1768.
context_page_description: Sir Joseph Yates of Peel Hall, Little Hulton, Lancashire was an eminent English judge.
context_section_description: He was born in Manchester, the son of Joseph Yates, barrister, of Stanley House, Lancashire and educated at Manchester Grammar School and Queens College, Oxford. He studied law at Staple Inn and the Inner Temple and was called to the bar in 1753.
  In 1761 he was appointed King's Council for the Duchy of Lancaster. He was knighted in 1763 and appointed early the following year to the King's Bench, in the same year becoming the Chancellor of Durham. During his time on the King's Bench he adjudicated at the famous trial of John Wilkes who was charged with sedition and obscenity, sentencing him to two years in jail. He later transferred, in 1770, from the King's bench to the Court of Common Pleas, holding the latter appointment little more than a month before he died.
  He was buried at Cheam, in Surrey, where there is a monument to his memory.
  He had married Elizabeth Baldwyn, the daughter of Charles Baldwyn of Munslow, Shropshire. They had one son, Joseph, and a daughter, Charlotte Elizabeth (d.1845), who married Cholmeley Dering (1766-1836) in 1789. Descendants include Walter Baldwyn Yates C.B.E., Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP, Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and the novelist Edward Heneage Dering.
caption: John Wilkes before the King's Bench, 1768
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