Creswell Levinz

He represented the crown in the trials of Ireland, Pickering, Grove, Langhorn, Whitebread, and other supposed Popish Plotters in 1678–9.

In December the celebrated proclamation against "tumultuous petitioning" was under discussion in the council, and Levinz was required to draft it.

Levinz was thus able, when examined by the House of Commons of England as to his part in the affair (24 Nov. 1680), to shift the entire responsibility on to North's shoulders.

He was also a member of the special commission which sat at the Old Bailey in July 1683 to try Lord Russell for his supposed participation in the Rye House plot.

He was one of the counsel for the Seven Bishops in 1688, defended Major John Bernardi (an alleged conspirator in the Jacobite Assassination Plot), securing the dismissal of the bill of indictment by the grand jury and, in the great habeas corpus case of Rex v. Kendall and Roe, before Lord Chief Justice Holt in 1695, he argued successfully against the legality of a committal to prison under a general warrant by a secretary of state.

[1] Part of his monument there survives: a more than life-size marble statue of Levinz wearing his judge's robes and wig.

Levinz also compiled A Collection of Select and Modern Entries of Declarations, Pleadings, Issues, Verdicts, Judgments, &c., referring to the Cases in Sir Creswell Levinz's Reports, the judgment of the Court being added to each President (sic), which was published in London in 1702, fol.