Francis Page (judge)

Sir Francis Page (1661 – 19 December 1741) was an English judge and politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1708 to 1713.

[2] His coarseness and cruelty earned him a reputation as ‘the hanging judge’, and the singular distinction of being satirized by Pope, Fielding, Hogarth, Dr Johnson and the poet Richard Savage, over whose trial for murder he presided.

Savage wrote of him: Of heart impure and impotent of head, In history, rhetoric, ethics, law unread; How far unlike such worthies, once a drudge – From floundering in law causes – rose a judge; Formed to make pleaders laugh, his nonsense thunders, And on low juries breathes contagious blunders; His brothers blush, because no blush he knows, Nor e’er one uncorrupted finger shows.

The Flemish sculptor Henry Scheemakers created a grandiose monument to Page's specifications, which destroyed at least one of the existing tombs when it was erected.

Most his estate, including a house in ‘Bedford Row’ and a manor at Lechlade, Gloucestershire, was left to his great-nephew Francis Bourne on condition that he changed his name to Page.

Memorial to Sir Francis Page and his second wife in Steeple Aston church, by Henry Scheemakers