ATHERTON, William (1806-1864), of 2 Brick Court, Temple, London and 1 Endsleigh Street, Tavistock Square, London

Remembered as ‘a sound lawyer, and a fair and zealous though not an impassioned advocate’ who ‘possessed a calm temper and a dignified bearing’, Atherton entered Parliament in 1852 as an ‘advanced Liberal’ and served as solicitor-general and attorney-general in Palmerston’s second administration.1J.T. Slugg, Woodhouse Grove school: memorials and reminiscences (1885), 238-39. He was born at Glasgow, the son of William Atherton, a Wesleyan minister, and, throughout his life, remained a committed Methodist.2For example, see a report of his speech at a Primitive Methodist chapel in Durham: Primitive Methodist Magazine (1860), 49-51. Admitted to the Inner Temple in 1829, from 1832 to 1839 he practised below the bar as a special pleader and published An elementary and practical treatise on the commencement of personal actions, and the proceedings therein to declaration, in the superior courts at Westminster (1833), which was well received.3T. Cooper, ‘Atherton, Sir William’, rev. H.J. Spencer, Oxf. DNB, www.oxforddnb.com. Called to the bar in 1839, he was appointed a queen’s counsel in July 1851, and became a bencher of his inn the same year.4Ibid.

At the 1852 general election Atherton offered for Durham city where, after a bitter campaign, he was returned in second place by a margin of just four votes. Two petitions against his return, 23 Nov. and 25 Nov. 1852, were subsequently withdrawn, 26 Nov. 1852, but a select committee appointed to inquire into the circumstance of the withdrawals reported that Atherton’s own agent had got up the 25 Nov. petition in order to delay the issuing of a new writ for Durham city (necessitated by the death of Atherton’s colleague three weeks after their return), in order to induce the withdrawal of the original petition.5PP 1852-53 (649), xii. 478-9. Unsurprisingly, Atherton used one of his first speeches in the Commons to defend his own propriety, and insisted that the circumstances had ‘perfectly warranted’ his agent’s petition.6Hansard, 31 May 1853, vol 127, cc. 958-960.

A frequent attender, Atherton voted against Disraeli’s budget, 16 Dec. 1852, and during Aberdeen’s coalition, divided against the repeal of the Maynooth grant, 23 Feb. 1853, and for the ballot, 14 June 1853. He backed Roebuck’s motion of inquiry into the condition of the army, 29 Jan. 1855, and thereafter supported the foreign policy of Palmerston’s first ministry, voting against Disraeli’s critical motion on the prosecution of the war, 25 May 1855, and pairing off against Cobden’s censure motion on Canton, 3 Mar. 1857. Elected without opposition at the 1857 and 1859 general elections, he remained loyal to Palmerston, backing his conspiracy to murder bill, 19 Feb. 1858, the defeat of which precipitated the collapse of his government, and supporting his second administration on most major issues. A champion of suffrage extension, he was in minorities for the county franchise bill, 13 Mar. 1861, and for the borough franchise bill, 10 Apr. 1861.

Although Atherton consistently voted for the abolition of church rates throughout his parliamentary career, he believed that an alliance between Churchmen and Wesleyans was critical for the success of Britain’s domestic politics.7E.D. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855-1865 (1991), 182. He therefore viewed mainstream Methodism as ‘never an opposing force to the church’ but as ‘an auxiliary army … with a peculiar fitness for … disseminating the truths of the gospel among the multitudes of the lower classes’.8Quoted in ibid., 182.

The vast majority of Atherton’s reported speeches in the Commons addressed legal matters, particularly his desire to reform land and inheritance law. His contributions to the debate on proposed changes to the law of mortmain displayed a mastery of detail, 28 June 1854, and the following year he was given leave to introduce a bill to remove restrictions on the conveyance of land for charitable uses, 15 May 1855. The bill was rejected by the Lords, however, and his subsequent charitable uses bill, which proposed the same removal of restrictions, 9 June 1857, suffered the same fate. Atherton also pressed for reform of the legal system itself. In his first known speech, he backed the judges’ exclusion bill, insisting that the efficiency of superior judges would ‘be impaired by their being eligible to a seat in Parliament’, 13 Apr. 1853, and during a debate on the common law procedure bill, he strongly supported the clause to discharge a jury after twelve hours if they could not agree, arguing that Britain should ‘no longer have to witness the spectacle of jurors being starved into unanimity by the dogged obstinacy of stout men in top-boots’, 29 June 1854. However, for some MPs, Atherton’s reformist instincts were insufficient. For example, when he spoke in opposition to Sir John Trelawny’s motion to introduce an affirmations bill to extend Scotch criminal law to the 1854 Criminal Procedure Act, 11 Mar. 1863, Trelawny noted in his diary that Atherton ‘has not breadth of views enough for a law Reformer’.9The parliamentary diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1858-1865 ed. T.A. Jenkins (1992), 232. Atherton’s interventions also caused John Arthur Roebuck to lament that ‘when any reform in the law was proposed, the reform was generally opposed by practising lawyers’, 11 Mar. 1863.

Atherton was judge-advocate of the fleet and standing counsel to the admiralty from 1855 until 1859, when he became solicitor-general and subsequently received a knighthood. He succeeded to the post of attorney-general in June 1861 following the elevation of Sir Richard Bethell to the lord chancellorship, and was the first Methodist to hold the position.10Cooper, ‘Atherton, Sir William’, rev. Spencer. His succession, though, was not universally welcomed. Trelawny believed that he was ‘not strong enough for the post’, and responding to a rumour that Roundell Palmer, a prominent lawyer and former member for Plymouth, was going to be promoted to the position over Atherton’s head, Lord Westbury, the Lord Chancellor, remarked that ‘I did not know that Atherton had a head’.11Trelawny diaries, 184; The life of Richard Lord Westbury, formerly Lord High Chancellor, ed. T.A. Nash (1888), ii. 8.

As attorney-general during the early part of the American civil war, Atherton’s brief tenure was a difficult one. In November 1861 the boarding of the Trent, a British mail steamer, by a Union captain who proceeded to remove two Confederate diplomats on board sparked a crisis in relations between the United States and Britain.12G.H. Warren, Fountain of discontent: the Trent affair and the freedom of the seas (1981), 94-119. Atherton, along with the queen’s advocate and the solicitor-general, initially informed Lord John Russell, then foreign secretary, that ‘according to the principles of international law laid down in our courts … a belligerent has a right to stop and search any neutral’, but following confirmation that the two diplomats had been seized, the law officers subsequently concluded that ‘the conduct of the United States officer ... was illegal and unjustifiable, by international law’ because the Trent ‘was not captured or carried into a Port of the United States for adjudication as Prize’ and therefore the British government would ‘be justified in requiring reparation for the international wrong’.13Harding. Atherton, and Palmer to Russell, 12 Nov. 1861, quoted in Warren, Trent affair, 98; Harding. Atherton, and Palmer to Russell, 28 Nov. 1861, quoted in ibid., 110. After a month of tense diplomacy, the release of the two diplomats effectively ended the crisis.14Warren, Trent affair, 142-185. Despite the peaceful resolution, many in Parliament believed an ‘outrage on the British flag’ had occurred, and a subsequent motion declared that international maritime law was ‘ill-defined and unsatisfactory’.15Hansard, 11 Mar. 1862, vol. 165, cc. 1359-92. Atherton resisted calls for a change in the law, arguing that it would be ‘worse than useless for Great Britain to act towards other nations upon any code, however approved of here, until that code had received the approval and assent of other nations affected by it’, but his insistence that the law was ‘well and intelligibly expressed’, was roundly rejected by fellow MPs.16Hansard, 11 Mar. 1862, vol. 165, cc. 1369-74; 17 Mar. 1862, vol. 165, cc. 1599-1706.

Atherton’s competency as attorney-general was also posthumously called into question. One line of inquiry during the 1872 Geneva Tribunal Arbitration, which investigated whether the British government had violated neutrality by allowing the Alabama, a future Confederate raider, to be built in Birkenhead, was why Russell only received Atherton’s legal opinion concerning whether the Alabama should be seized after the vessel had already departed.17HP Commons, 1832-68: ‘Laird, John’; D.B. Mahin, One war at a time: the international dimensions of the American civil war (1999), 145-50. Although the tribunal, which awarded the United States $15,500,000 in reparations, failed to pinpoint the exact reason for the delay, Sir Roundell Palmer, who had been solicitor-general at the time, insisted that ‘no government ever had a more diligent, conscientious, and laborious servant than Sir William Atherton; and it is in the last degree unlikely that he would have been guilty of any negligence or unnecessary delay’.18Quoted in C. Cushing, The Treaty of Washington (2008 edn), 284. For Russell’s account of the delay, see J. Russell, Recollections and suggestions 1813-1873 (1875), 235. Moreover, modern scholars have generally confirmed that the British government was acting within international law and was free of any wrong-doing in the ship’s escape from Merseyside.19F.J. Merli, The Alabama, British neutrality and the American Civil War, ed. D.M. Fahey (2004).

The strain of office, however, took its toll on Atherton and in September 1863 he resigned as attorney-general on account of ill health.20Cooper, ‘Atherton, Sir William’, rev. Spencer. Thereafter his health deteriorated and he died at his residence in Hyde Park, London, in January 1864. He was succeeded by his eldest son, William Crossley Atherton.21The Times, 4 Nov. 1863, 23 Jan. 1864. One obituary noted that ‘when amongst his constituents and the pitmen of the North, he was always pleased to tell those who listened to him that he was the son of Wesleyan minister’.22Quoted in Slugg, Woodhouse Grove school, 238-9. Atherton’s correspondence with Lord Russell whilst attorney-general is located at the National Archives, Kew, London.23FO 83/2212.