Author: DALLAS, Robert
Biography:
DALLAS, Robert (1756-1824: ODNB)
The son of an insurance broker, Robert Dallas (d 1797), and his wife, Elizabeth (Smith) Dallas, he was born in London on 16 Oct. 1756. Dallas’s brother was MP Sir George Dallas (1758-1833; q.v.). Educated at schools in Kensington and Geneva, beginning in Nov. 1777 he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn. He was called to the bar in Nov. 1782, was a bencher of Lincoln’s Inn from 1795, and, in 1806, treasurer at Lincoln’s Inn. There were several especially notable moments in Dallas’s eminent legal career: junior council for the East India Company opposing Charles James Fox’s East India Bill; junior council defending Warren Hastings; council representing the West Indies planters’ opposition to a slave trade abolition bill; commissioner in the trial of the Cato Street conspirators; and judge at the trial of Queen Caroline. He was well rewarded for supporting the government during his brief tenure as MP for Dysart burghs, Scotland (1805-06). In a single year, 1813, he was knighted, entered Liverpool’s cabinet as solicitor general, and became sergeant-at-law and puisne justice of the court of common pleas. His judicial career reached its epitome in 1818 with his appointment as lord chief justice of the common pleas. Biographers note that as a lawyer and judge he was highly intelligent and uncommonly humane, as a man polite and urbane. He married twice, on 11 Aug. 1788 to Charlotte Jardine, daughter of a lieutenant colonel, and, following her death, on 10 Sep. 1802 to Giustina, daughter of Henry Davidson of Tulloch Castle. By Charlotte, he had a son and a daughter, by Giustina, five daughters. Dallas died in London on 25 Dec. 1824. His sole book of poetry, Poetical Trifles, which appeared posthumously, was printed “for private circulation.” (ODNB 23 June 2023; R. G. Thorne, History of the House of Commons online 23 June 2023; GM [1825], 82–83) JC