On his return he became, with Newman, one of the foremost promoters of the Tractarian movement at Oxford and was entirely in Newman's confidence.[2] In 1841, he published an attack on the Anglican-German Bishopric in Jerusalem, and further defended the "value of the science of canon law, in a pamphlet.[4][5]Edward Bouverie Pusey also valued Hope's advice and canvassed him in 1842 before publishing the Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury on some Circumstances connected with the Present Crisis in the Church. Hope supported publication.[4]
My reason for staying in town is to read ecclesiastical law, and to prepare (if so be) for election committees. The former branch I reckon my flower-garden, the latter my cabbage-field.
Ormsby believed that Hope found some distraction from his frustration with the Anglican Church through his secular work.[8]
By 1839, Hope was becoming involved in parliamentary work. He was retained as counsel for the British government on the Foreign Marriages Bill and in 1843, the report on the Consular Jurisdiction Bill. His brother's appointment as Under Secretary of State for the Colonies in Sir Robert Peel's administration may have opened some doors. In 1843-44 he was engaged again by the government in the matter of the aftermath of the Pastry War, whose settlement Britain had arbitrated, to prepare a report on some points in dispute between France and Mexico.[8]
In 1852 he gave Newman the disastrously misleading legal advice that he was unlikely to be sued for libel by Giacinto Achilli, advice which ultimately led to Newman's criminal conviction for defamatory libel.[3] Thereafter, Newman relied on Badeley for legal advice,[9] though in 1855 Hope-Scott conducted the negotiations which ended in Newman's accepting the rectorship of the Catholic University of Ireland.[3]
In 1847, James Hope married firstly to Charlotte Harriet Jane Lockhart, daughter of John Gibson Lockhart and granddaughter of Sir Walter Scott. Six years after their marriage Charlotte came into possession of Scott's Abbotsford House estate, and Hope then assumed the surname of Hope-Scott.[2][10] His wife died on 26 October 1858.
Hope-Scott retired from the bar in 1870[2] and spent the rest of his life in charitable and literary work,[3] in particular in making an abridgement of his father-in-law's seven-volume biography of Scott, with a preface dedicated to Gladstone.[11][12] Hope-Scott maintained a lifelong correspondence with Badeley.[9]
Both his wives died in childbirth.[3] The only child by his first marriage to survive to adulthood, Mary Monica (born 2 October 1852), married Joseph Constable Maxwell, third son of William, Lord Herries. (James and Charlotte Hope's two other children died in infancy.) By his second marriage, he left a son, James Fitzalan Hope (1870–1949), who was created Baron Rankeillour, and three daughters, one of whom was the novelist Josephine Ward and another of whom married the diplomatSir Nicolas Roderick O'Conor. (Two other children from the second marriage died young.)[11][13]
Hope, J. R. (1842). The Bishopric of the United Church of England and Ireland at Jerusalem, Considered in a Letter to a Friend (2nd ed. revised ed.). London: C. J. Stewart.
