The legal ethics problem in Orley Farm
A legal ethics problem lies at the heart of Orley Farm. The main legal protagonist is Lady Mason’s lawyer Furnival, and his difficulty is this. When Lady Mason first learns that Dockwrath is trying to revive the old litigation against her, she turns to Furnival for advice (OF I.89-96).
Much as he would like to believe that Lady Mason is innocent, Furnival suspects immediately that she is not, and that the victory he won twenty years earlier on her behalf was achieved through falsehood - a thought he entertained at that time, but then repressed (OF I.93). Yet Furnival does not want to believe Lady Mason’s guilt - in part because (without admitting it to himself) he is infatuated with Lady Mason, but also because he fears that he will not be able to muster adequate professional zeal on her behalf unless he thinks her innocent. Trollope is at his keenest unfolding the delicate games with belief and truth that Furnival plays against himself, holding at arm’s length his steadily growing certainty that Lady Mason is guilty, and masking from himself the understanding that that is what he is doing.Throughout the novel, Furnival never doubts that Lady Mason will be acquitted of criminal charges, because he knows that jurors will find her appealing and will perceive that her persecutors are revolting. The ticklish issue is what should be done about the ill-gotten Orley Farm. Even if she is acquitted, should not the farm be returned to Joseph Mason, its rightful owner? Lucius Mason poses an obstacle to any effort to return Orley Farm. Furnival knows that Lucius has no suspicion that his mother is really the forger that her enemies say she is. Control of the farm passed to him when he turned twenty-one, and if it is to be returned to Joseph Mason, Lucius is the one who will have to sign it over. An even more important obstacle is that returning the farm before the trial would be damning evidence of Lady Mason’s guilt.
Furnival realizes that if he ever tells Lady Mason that he thinks she is guilty, she will very likely confess to him - and if she confesses, he will have no alternative except to instruct her to return the farm regardless of whether that leads to her perjury conviction. So Furnival has to enter into a conspiracy of silence with Lady Mason. Even when he becomes certain of her guilt, he never tells her what he believes; and even when she becomes certain that he thinks her guilty, she never lets him know that she has guessed his mind.[571]Furnival is an extremely good lawyer - good enough to understand (as every good white-collar defender understands today) that legal victory by itself will not save his client unless he also acquits her in the eyes of her community. His conclusion is straightforward: the only successful outcome for Lady Mason is acquittal on the perjury charge and keeping her guilty secret from everyone, including Lucius. The result for Furnival is an intricate slalom around the truth, a struggle to know the truth while not knowing it - a struggle of a kind that every successful criminal lawyer will recognize instantly.
Shaffer rightly notes that Trollope carefully situates Furnival between two lawyerly extremes.[572] On the one side is young Felix Graham, who holds the unusual view that lawyers should never disserve the truth, and, therefore, should represent only the truthful side in a case. (Not surprisingly, Graham’s fledgling career as a barrister is going nowhere.) On the other side are the hardened Old Bailey warriors Aram and Chaffanbrass, who never need to ask whether their clients are guilty, because they assume that if their services are required the client must be guilty.[573] Furnival is neither self-righteous like Graham (equal parts self-absorbed and righteous) nor, like Chaffanbrass, a “Pharisee” (Shaffer’s word, and, I will shortly suggest, a word fraught with significance).13 Instead, Furnival is - as Shaffer elaborately argues in American Lawyers and Their Communities - a gentleman.14 As a gentleman, he wants to defend the weak (for that is how Furnival wrongly perceives Lady Mason).
He also wants to do so with honor. The outcome Furnival desires - acquitting Lady Mason and restoring her to her community, which as a practical matter requires her to keep Orley Farm and perpetuate her twenty-year-old lie - dictates that he, Furnival, play hide-and-seek with the truth. He hides, and he hopes that the truth will not seek him out. He understands all too well that the alternative to perpetuating the lie is disaster - Lady Mason disgraced, exiled, turned out of her home, and perhaps jailed; her son, disinherited and very likely estranged from his own mother. And for what? So that a very rich, very hateful man, Joseph Mason, who inherited almost all of his father’s estate, will now have the last piece of it, along with his vengeance against Lady Mason.Let me repeat the conclusion: because Furnival is a gentleman, he desires above all to save Lady Mason from a great deal of suffering. Because he is a man of honor, he hides, from himself and from others, for as long as he can, the lie that he is perpetuating. He perpetuates the lie to avert the far greater wrong of Lady Mason’s destruction at the hands of Dockwrath and Joseph Mason.