Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden

Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, detail of an oil painting by Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland, 1767–69; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, in full Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, Viscount Bayham of Bayham Abbey, Baron Camden of Camden Place   (baptized March 21, 1714London, England—died April 18, 1794, London), English jurist who, as chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas (1761–66), refused to enforce general warrants (naming no particular person to be arrested). As lord chancellor of Great Britain (1766–70), he opposed the government’s North American colonial policy of taxation without parliamentary representation.

Pratt (created Baron Camden in 1765 and Earl Camden in 1786) was a school friend and political ally of the statesman William Pitt the Elder, 1st earl of Chatham. In 1763, as chief justice, he granted a writ of habeas corpus to the radical politician John Wilkes, who, in the periodical North Briton, had referred to a speech by King George III as a lie and had been arrested for sedition on a general warrant. In the cases of Wilkes v. Wood (1763) and Entick v. Carrington (1764–65), he firmly declared general warrants unlawful.

In his first speech in the House of Lords (1765), Camden attacked the Stamp Act, one of the colonists’ grievances that led to the American Revolution. His continued opposition to the colonial taxation policy resulted in his dismissal as lord chancellor.