Leading Catholic layman, lawyer and writer, especially on legal matters. In 1791 he became the first Catholic called to the Bar since the Revolution of 1688; he was closely involved in attempts to secure Catholic Emancipation from parliament. Southey met him in 1811 and found him ‘thoroughly amiable’. However, he replied to Southey’s Book of the Church (1824) with a defence of Catholicism, The Book of the Catholic Church (1825). This in turn provoked Southey’s Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1826).