Lord Chief Justice of England, whose opinion was relied on in the settlement of the Duke of Atholl's Manx claims.

The Manx connection is partly one of family. Mary, daughter of John and Bridget Senhouse, married Edward Law, Bishop of Carlisle, and among their children was the son who became Lord Ellenborough. The same Senhouse line runs into the Island: John Senhouse the High Sheriff died in 1767 and was succeeded by his son John, who in 1775 married Margaret, daughter of John Taubman of Castletown.

His part in the Atholl business is recorded in the Home Office papers. Colonel Wilks, writing on the Duke's projects, refers to the arrangement for assigning to the Duke a portion of the public revenue and to Ellenborough's position on it, and elsewhere notes that on the customs questions in which the Duke had become interested by the Act, the opinion of Lord Sidmouth is stated to have concurred pretty nearly with that of Lord Ellenborough.

In England he sat through the great set-pieces of the Regency years. He put questions to the witnesses in the proceedings against Queen Caroline, moved the second reading of the Marriage Act Amendment Bill in 1820, argued that a petition from a princess was to be treated exactly as one from the lowest subject in the kingdom, and objected in committee to the word engine as too general in a bill about the protection of game. The statute that bears his name, Lord Ellenborough's Act, is cited in the Commons on capital convictions for wounding.