Salathiel Lovell

Sir Salathiel Lovell (1631/2–1713) was an English judge, Recorder of London, an ancient and bencher of Gray's Inn, and a Baron of the Exchequer.

Origins and education Lovell was the son of Benjamin Lovell, rector of Lapworth, Warwickshire, and brother of Robert Lovell, and was born in 1631 or 1632. Aside from his religious calling, his father was a parliamentarian in the English Civil War, serving for a time under Colonel William Purefoy, one of the regicides of King Charles I of England.

Salathiel Lovell was accepted into Gray's Inn to read for the Bar in 1648. He worked as a clerk in Buckinghamshire, and as one of the parish trustees of parish lands in Lapworth,

Career He had moved to Northampton by 1661, as evidenced by baptism records for a son, also called Salathiel; was active in the factional politics of the town, and was relied upon as a legal authority, becoming the deputy Recorder of the town. The writer and pamphleteer Daniel Defoe wrote of him:

"He trades in Justice and the Souls of Men, And prostitutes them equally to Gain."

Unfortunately for Defoe, Lovell later presided over a trial in which Defoe was found guilty of seditious libel. He sentenced Defoe to pay an impossibly punitive fine, be publicly humiliated for days in a pillory and to serve an indeterminate term of imprisonment, decreeing that Defoe be set free only once he had paid the fine. Defoe's financial circumstances were such that he was unable to pay the fine. Lovell had deliberately structured the punishment to maximise the possibility that Defoe would remain incarcerated for the rest of his life.

List of prominent people sentenced by Lovell

Daniel Defoe, English writer, merchant, and spy. After Defoe was convicted of seditious libel, Lovell sentenced him to a fine, public humiliation for days in a pillory, and an indeterminate term of imprisonment. Defoe would later be released from prison after acquiring the patronage of Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer.

A son, Samuel, became a Welsh judge; but only one of the sons outlived Salathiel.

Richard Lovell Edgeworth, in his memoirs, provided an impression of Samuel Lovell:

"My grandfather, the Welsh (sic) judge, travelling over the sands near Beaumaris, as he was going circuit, was overtaken by the night and by the tide: his coach was set fast in quicksand; the water soon rose into the coach, and his register, and some other attendants, crept out of the windows and mounted on the roof, and on the coach-box. The judge let the water rise to his very lips, and with becoming gravity replied, to all the earnest entreaties of his attendants, 'I will follow your counsel, if you can quote any precedent for a judge's mounting a coach-box'"

Several of Lovell's descendants were notable figures in their own right, including: High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire Lovell Badcock High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire Thomas Stanhope Badcock Lieutenant-general Lovell Benjamin Badcock Vice-admiral William Stanhope Badcock Member of Parliament Lovell Stanhope Inventor and Lunar Society member Richard Lovell Edgeworth Novelist Maria Edgeworth Political economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth