Background
Henry Matthews was born on 13 January 1826 in Ceylon, the son of Henry Matthews, a judge, and Emma Blount. He was raised a Catholic.
politician statesman Home Secretary
Henry Matthews was born on 13 January 1826 in Ceylon, the son of Henry Matthews, a judge, and Emma Blount. He was raised a Catholic.
He was educated at the University of Paris and then at the University of London. He won a law scholarship in 1849 and was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1850. In the following years he built a substantial legal practice, which he maintained throughout his parliamentary career. He acted as counsel in various celebrated trials, such as the Tichborne case (1869).
Matthews entered the House of Commons in 1868, having won the borough of Dungarven for the Conservatives. Indeed, he lost his seat to a supporter of Irish Home Rule in 1874 and failed to win it back in 1880. In the 1885 and 1886 general elections, he was elected M.P. for East Birmingham. Also in the latter year, as a result of his personal friendship with Lord Randolph Churchill, he was appointed home secretary, thus becoming the first Catholic cabinet minister since the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Bill in the late 1820s. This meant that the ecclesiastical patronage of his office, which involved dealing with the offices and tides of the Church of England, was handled by the First Lord of the Treasury. However, he proved a poor home secretary, being likened to a “French dancing master” by one critic.
In the opposition from 1892 to 1895, Matthews did not participate in the debate surrounding Gladstone’s introduction of a bill to remove the remaining legal sanctions against Catholics (popularly known as the Russell and Ripon Relief Bill), and he voted against a bill calling for the disestablishment of the Welsh Church. His Conservative politics had obviously tempered his religious convictions. On the return of the Salisbury government in 1895, he was raised to the peerage as Viscount Llandaff. He continued to play a part in politics, though a diminishing one, until his death on 3 April 1913.
Between 1886 and 1892, Matthews was involved in many difficult legal cases (such as the Lipski case in 1886 and the Miss Cass case in 1887); and his decisions in these cases were ridiculed by Henry Labouchere in Truth and by W. T. Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette. His handling of the Miss Cass case evoked such strong parliamentary opposition that he offered his resignation, although it was refused by Salisbury. He also earned the hostility of a substantial proportion of the working class when he supported Sir Charles Warren, the commissioner of police, in his attempts to put an end to the use of Trafalgar Square for open-air meetings in the weeks leading up to “Bloody Sunday” (13 November 1887). The deaths of two in the crowd, from injuries sustained during clashes with police and military forces, heightened the tensions.
He favored Irish Home Rule, voting with W. E. Gladstone and the Liberals on the Irish Disestablishment Bill (1869).
