Background
He was born on June 30, 1800 at Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire. He was the son of Dr Richard Bethel.
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(Originally published in 1873. This volume from the Cornel...)
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He was born on June 30, 1800 at Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire. He was the son of Dr Richard Bethel.
He was educated in Bath and Bristol before attending Wadham College, Oxford at only 14 years old. He received a scholarship the next year. He took first-class honors in classics and second class in mathematics, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1818, having been elected a fellow.
In 1823 he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple. On attaining the dignity of queen's counsel in 1840 he rapidly took the foremost place at the Chancery bar and was appointed vice-chancellor of the county palatine of Lancaster in 1851.
His most important public service was the reform of the then existing mode of legal education, a reform which ensured that students before call to the bar should have at least some acquaintance with the elements of the subject which they were to profess.
In 1851 he obtained a seat in the House of Commons, where he continued to sit, first as member for Aylesbury, then as member for Wolverhampton, until he was raised to the peerage.
On June 26, 1861, on the death of Lord Campbell, he was created lord high chancellor of Great Britain, with the title of Baron Westbury of Westbury, county Wilts.
The ambition of his life was to set on foot the compilation of a digest of the whole law, but for various reasons this became impracticable. The conclusion of his tenure of the chancellorship was unfortunately marked by events which, although they did not render personal corruption imputable to him, made it evident that he had acted with some laxity and want of caution.
Owing to the reception by parliament of reports of committees nominated to consider the circumstances of certain appointments in the Leeds Bankruptcy Court, as well as the granting a pension to a Mr Leonard Edmunds, a clerk in the patent office, and a clerk of the parliaments, the lord chancellor felt it incumbent upon him to resign his office, which he accordingly did on the 5th of July 1865, and was succeeded by Lord Cranworth.
After his resignation he continued to take part in the judicial sittings of the House of Lords and the privy council until his death.
In 1872 he was appointed arbitrator under the European Assurance Society Act 1872, and his judgments in that capacity have been collected and published by Mr F. S. Reilly.
As a writer on law he made no mark, and few of his decisions take the highest judicial rank. Perhaps the best known is the judgment delivering the opinion of the judicial committee of the privy council in 1863 against the heretical character of certain extracts from the well-known publication Essays and Reviews.
His principal legislative achievements were the passing of the Divorce Act 1857, and of the Land Registry Act 1862 (generally known as Lord Westbury's Act), the latter of which in practice proved a failure.
What chiefly distinguished Lord Westbury was the possession of a certain sarcastic humour; and numerous are the stories, authentic and apocryphal, of its exercise.
In fact, he and Mr Justice Maule fill a position analogous to that of Sydney Smith, convenient names to whom 44 good things " may be attributed.
Lord Westbury died on the 20th of July 1873, within a day of the death of Bishop Wilberforce, his special antagonist in debate.
(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
(Originally published in 1873. This volume from the Cornel...)
Lord Westbury married Ellinor Mary, daughter of Robert Abraham, in 1825. His younger brother John married another daughter of Abraham, Louisa Sarah, in 1833. After Ellinor Mary's death in March 1863, Richard Bethell married Eleanor Margaret, daughter of Henry Tennant, in January 1873
