Born in Leeds, Yorkshire, on 6 March 1733, he was one of eight sons and ten children of cloth merchant Thomas Lee and his wife, Mary (née Reveley).

[3][1] Lee was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn and joined the Northern Circuit, where eventually he gained an equal share with James Wallace of the leadership.

[1][3][4] In the Wilkite agitation of that year around the Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights, Rockingham brought Lee and Alexander Wedderburn to Wentworth, to steer a moderate course, and in mid-September they found a precedent from 1701 for a petition to the Crown to dissolve parliament.

The trial in Portsmouth was politicised, Keppel being a Whig, and his second-in-command, Sir Hugh Palliser, a Tory, acting for the prosecution.

[3] In the second administration of Lord Rockingham, Lee was appointed Solicitor General for England and Wales, and sat in parliament for Clitheroe.

[3][7] Lister was a Whig, Assheton Curzon a Tory ministerialist, and when the two came to an agreement in 1790 to share the double-member seat, Lee lost out.

[1] Lee died from cancer on 5 August 1793, having suffered from ill health and played little part in politics at the end of his life.

[16] In Franklin's Privy Council hearing of 1774, over the Hutchinson letters affair, Lee acted as his counsel, as second to John Dunning.

[17] With Thomas Townshend, Lee was attacked in 1775 by John Shebbeare writing as a government hack for Lord North's administration.

[20] He was a sympathetic adviser to the promoters of the Feathers Tavern petition of 1772 to Parliament, asking for lifting of restrictions on religious dissenters.

Lee persuaded the relevant London justices to register the Essex Street Chapel at Hicks Hall, and attended Lindsey's inaugural sermon.

[28] With Charles James Fox and others, Lee worked successfully for the release of John Trumbull, during the American Revolutionary War.

[30][31] John Burgoyne, on parole in England after his capture by the Continental Army, was summoned back to America in 1781 (apparently tit-for-tat, in relation to the detention in the Tower of London of Henry Laurens.