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Meanwhile, Belsize Avenue dips down on the left, and a little further on the opposite side of the road Rosslyn House, once the home of the clever but unscrupulous Lord Loughborough, Earl of Rosslyn, who began life as ‘plain Mr. Wedderburne, a Scotch lawyer,’ and lived to be Lord Chancellor of England.

But the Wedderburnes, though poor, were well descended, and it is said that backstairs influence was not spared to second his own unblushing efforts for position. Lord Campbell tells us he was the first to deny the right of the poor, ‘which old usage and the piety of our forefathers had given them, to glean in the cornfields after the harvest.’ He gave judgment also that the law of burning women alive for the crime of coining should not be mitigated to hanging, and on the occasion of the Gordon Riots showed himself merciless as another Jeffreys in taking life, condemning the rioters to be hanged by scores without reference to age or degree of culpability.[42]

Rosslyn House.

He hanged mere children, for some of these unfortunates were not more than fourteen years of age, of whom Selwyn, who never missed an execution or a death at which he could be present, noted in his ‘Diary’ that he ‘never saw boys cry so much in his life.’