Less despicable

I don't have a question, but just wanted to share a rather surprising
turn of phrase from my 1967 Britannica.

The article is BROUGHAM AND VAUX, HENRY PEER BROUGHAM, 1st BARON.(**)
The relevant paragraph is

"His other great forensic triumph as a lawyer was at the trial of
Queen Caroline accused by her husband of infidelities a a ground of
annulment of the royal marriage, a charge which ill became the
profligate George IV, especially in light of his earlier illegal
marriage to Mrs Fizherbert. ...

"When Caroline became queen, Brougham was made her attorney general,
and ... tried the annulment suit in the house of lords. Brougham's
cross-examination of the crown's unsavoury witnesses and his
magnificent summation, which laste two days, turned the cause in
favour of his client. He became the most popular figure in England,
representing a woman who had no claim on him or the people except,
perhaps, by reason of the fact hat she was less despicable than her
husband."

I just had to chuckle at that last phrase, and I hope you will too.

You might wonder which contributor showed such animadversion(*)
towards George IV. The author is identified as P.B.K., who is or was
Philip B Kurland, Professor of law at the University of Chicago and
editor of /The Supreme Court Review/.

(*) Amazingly, a web search for this word finds 338,000 hits,
though not all of them use the word in this sense.

(**) The 1911 online Britannica's article at
is a complete pig's breakfast. Most of Brougham's article is missing,
and chunks of the article headed Brougham and Vaux are actually about
Byron! The scanning was particularly bad too -- lots of garbage
characters. I wish there were an effective way to get these sorts of
problems fixed.