Westbury, RICHARD BETHELL, BARON

Westbury, RICHARD BETHELL, BARON, was born at Bradford-on-Avon, the son of a Bristol physician, June 30, 1800. He had his schooling at Corsham, near Bath, and at Bristol, at fourteen entered Wadham College, Oxford, and was just eighteen when he graduated with a first-class in classics and a second in mathematics. Soon after he was elected to a fellowship in his college, and in 1823 he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple. His industry, acuteness, and audacity quickly brought him a large practice, and made him by 1841 the leader of the Chancery bar with an annual income of over £20,000. He became Q.C. in 1840, was returned as an advanced Liberal for Aylesbury in 1851, for Wolverhampton at the general election of 1852. Already in 1851 Vice-chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, he became Solicitor-general in 1852, Attorney-general in 1856, and in 1861 succeeded Lord Campbell on the wool-sack, taking his title from Westbury in Wiltshire. In the House of Commons he had borne the burden of several important measures of law reform—the Succession Duty Bill, the Probate and Administration Bill (1857), the Divorce and Matrimonial Bill, the Fraudulent Trustees Bill, and the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Bill (1861). His ideas about legal education were too comprehensive for his contemporaries, but induced the various Inns of Court to consolidate their rules. Unsuccessful also were his schemes for revising and codifying the statutes, and for putting an end to the separation between law and equity—a consummation effected by Lord Selborne which Westbury died a fortnight too soon to see. He delivered the judgment of the judicial committee of the Privy-council on the appeals in the 'Essays and Reviews' cases, and in the debate in the House of Lords employed the unwonted artillery of railing and irony against Wilberforce and the whole bench of bishops. In 1865 Westbury was compelled to resign office through the clamour against some official appointments, but the chancellor was personally acquitted of unworthy motives. He opposed Gladstone's Irish Church Bill, and still more the Irish Land Act of 1870, and gave the last year of his life to arduous labour as arbitrator of the European Assurance Society. He died in London, July 20, 1873. Lord Westbury's acuteness of intellect was indeed great, but did not justify his merciless use of the weapon of sarcasm, and that of the bitterness. But he has had his reward. Though a zealous reformer and great lawyer, with a rare faculty of piercing quickly to the heart of his subject, he is already remembered only by a few stories and sayings, and these not all authentic. See his Life by T. A. Nash (2 vols. 1888).