Clarke quickly gained a high reputation at the junior bar, and made his name appearing for the defence in the two most notorious cases of 1877, securing the acquittal of his namesake Chief Inspector Clarke in the Great Scotland Yard scandal and unsuccessfully defending Patrick Staunton in the Penge Murder. On the back of these successes Clarke took silk in 1880, and quickly came to be recognised as one of the leading members of the bar; he became a bencher of Lincoln's Inn in 1882, and was knighted in 1886. He also entered Parliament as Conservative MP for Southwark at a by-election early in 1880, but being unable to hold the seat at the general election later that year he was elected instead for Plymouth. He was Solicitor-General in the Conservative administration of 1886–1892, but declined office when the party returned to power in 1895 as he would have been debarred from continuing his lucrative private practice. In 1899, Clarke found himself in total disagreement with his party over the government's South African policy, and in early February 1900 his constituency party in Plymouth called upon him to resign his seat. He resigned the following day. He did not contest the general election of 1900, but returned to the House as MP for the City of London in 1906; however, he offended a section of his constituents by a speech against tariff reform in the House of Commons on 12 March 1906, and shortly afterwards he resigned his seat again on grounds of health. He published a Treatise on the Law of Extradition in 1903, and several volumes of speeches. He also wrote a biography of Benjamin Disraeli. His autobiography, The Story of My Life, was published in 1918, and a biography by Derek Walker-Smith and his grandson Edward Clarke followed in 1939.
Famous cases
R v Clarke and Others, 1877. Clarke secured the acquittal of Chief Inspector Clarke, the acting head of the Detective Department at Scotland Yard, on charges of corruption. Three other, more junior, police officers were convicted, and the detective division of the Metropolitan Police was completely reorganised as a result.
R v Staunton, Staunton, Staunton and Rhodes, 1877. Harriet Staunton, a mentally-disabled woman of 38, had died at Penge in Kent, apparently of starvation. Her husband, Lewis Staunton, together with his brother, his brother's wife and his mistress were charged with murdering her by deliberate neglect; although they were charged only with one murder, it was generally believed that they were also responsible for the death of Harriet's baby son, also by starvation. Clarke defended Patrick Staunton, the brother; although all four were convicted and sentenced to death, sufficient doubt about the strict legal position had been raised at the trial that the sentences of the three Stauntons were commuted to penal servitude for life, and the fourth defendant, Alice Rhodes, was given a free pardon.
R v Bartlett, 1886. Clarke defended Adelaide Bartlett on a charge of having murdered her husband by poisoning with chloroform; she was acquitted.
Gordon-Cumming v. Wilson and Others, 1891. Clarke represented Sir William Gordon-Cumming, who sued five people for slander after being accused of cheating at cards. The case was notorious because the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, had been banker during the game in which Gordon-Cumming was said to have cheated; the prince was called as a witness, and vigorously cross-examined by Clarke. Nevertheless, Gordon-Cumming lost the case.
Wilde v Queensberry, 1895; R v Wilde, 1895. Clarke represented Oscar Wilde in his ill-advised prosecution of the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. Queensberry being found not guilty, Clarke considered himself partly to blame for the tactics pursued during the trial, and when Wilde was subsequently arrested and prosecuted for homosexual practices, Clarke considered himself duty-bound to undertake the defence, which he did while refusing to accept a fee. Clarke was initially widely condemned for doing so, even within the legal profession, outraged as much by a barrister appearing without a fee as by their revulsion for Wilde, although opinions were later reversed. In the first trial, when Clarke's conduct of the defence was described by the prosecuting counsel as "courageous and brilliant", the jury disagreed; but Clarke was unable to persuade the jury in the re-trial against a guilty verdict.
R. v Jameson, Willoughby and others, 1896. Clarke defended Leander Starr Jameson for his organisation of the Jameson Raid. Jameson was convicted and sentenced to fifteen months in jail, but was soon pardoned, and was generally treated as a national hero.
