Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/De Villiers, John Henry
DE VILLIERS, JOHN HENRY, first Baron De Villiers (1842-1914), South African judge, was born of Huguenot stock at the Paarl, Cape Colony, 15 June 1842. He was the second son of Carel Christiaan de Villiers, government land-surveyor, of the Paarl, by his wife, Dorothea Elizabeth Retief, also of the Paarl. In 1861 he went from the South African College, Cape Town, to Utrecht to study for the Dutch reformed ministry. He soon departed thence to Berlin to read law, but finally entered the Inner Temple, London, in June 1863, and was called to the bar in November 1865. Early in 1866 he began to practise at the Cape bar. In 1871 he married Aletta Johanna (died 1922), daughter of Jan Pieter Jordaan, a wine farmer, of Worcester, Cape Colony. Two sons and two daughters were born of the marriage. From 1867 he sat as member of the house of assembly, for Worcester, advocating railway construction, the withdrawal of state aid from the churches, and the institution of responsible government. In 1872 he became attorney-general in the ministry of Sir John Charles Molteno [q.v.], but, at the urgent request of the premier and of William Porter [q.v.], he resigned in December 1873 in order to become chief justice. In spite of his youth he speedily established his reputation, not only in South Africa but with the judicial committee of the Privy Council. Though now a judge, he never lost touch with politics. He was ex officio president of the legislative council; thrice, in 1888, 1893, and 1895, he was invited to stand for the Free State presidency; once, in 1892, at the suggestion of Cecil Rhodes, he contemplated standing for election as president of the Transvaal; once he was offered the premiership of Cape Colony, and twice, in the crises of 1896 and 1902, he volunteered his services, which were not accepted. De Villiers’ chief political aim was federation. He tried to arrange this with President J. H. Brand of the Orange Free State in 1871; in 1877 they actually agreed upon a scheme, which would have been submitted to the high commissioner, Sir Bartle Frere, but for Sir Theophilus Shepstone’s annexation of the Transvaal. In 1881 he was a member of the royal commission which drew up the Pretoria convention. He had already been knighted in 1877, and he now received the K.C.M.G. (1882).
De Villiers’ influence on politics, though indirect, was considerable, through his intimacy with Cape and republican politicians and with the high commissioners, Sir Hercules Robinson (afterwards Baron Rosmead) and Sir Henry (afterwards Baron) Loch. In 1887 he was chairman of the diamond law commission; in 1893 at the invitation of Cecil Rhodes he was preparing to take office as prime minister, when Rhodes suddenly reformed his cabinet without him. Next year, however, he went to the Ottawa colonial conference to further Rhodes’s schemes of intercolonial preference and communications. Personally he was on good terms with Rhodes, but, like Loch, he feared the use to which Rhodes might put his wide and indefinite powers, and he began to turn against him early in 1894. After the Jameson Raid (January 1896), De Villiers urged President Kruger to show mercy to his prisoners; and early in 1897 he hurried to Pretoria to mediate between Kruger and the judges in their quarrel over the power claimed by some of the judges to test the validity of laws by the touchstone of the grondwet (constitution). For some time past De Villiers had endeavoured to form a South African court of appeal as a step towards federation, and had urged the inclusion of colonial judges in the Privy Council. In July 1897 he himself was sworn in as privy councillor, the first colonial judge to take his seat on the judicial committee.
During 1899, in spite of failing health, he worked hard for peace. He was not robust, but he had never spared himself; and now the shock of the South African War nearly killed him. He lay dangerously ill for many weeks in England and on the Riviera in 1901; but he recovered and helped to resist the proposed suspension of the Cape constitution in 1902. By 1906 his hopes of federation revived, and early in 1907 he joined in the correspondence already begun on the subject by J. X. Merriman, the Cape premier, and General Smuts. A visit to Canada as representative of the four South African colonies at the Canadian tercentenary convinced him that union was better than federation. On his return, he was unanimously elected president of the national convention; he conducted the negotiations personally with the imperial government on the future of the native protectorates; and in the convention itself, thanks to the confidence that men had in him, secured the adoption of motions which, moved by any other man, must have been rejected. He headed the drafting committee which watched the passage of the Union Bill through the imperial parliament; was created baron, with the title De Villiers of Wynberg; and returned home to become first chief justice of the Union (1910). In 1912, and again in July 1914, he was acting governor-general. He died after a very short illness at Pretoria 2 September 1914. He was succeeded as second baron by his elder son, Charles Percy (born 1871).
In person De Villiers was moderately tall, lean, and active, a man of immense dignity which was relieved by a kindly spirit and a certain dry humour. He was a good shot, a keen fisherman, a lover of animals, especially dogs, and of bees, and an ardent farmer and grower of vines. In politics he cherished the best traditions of Cape native policy, upheld the British connexion and South African liberties, and, throughout his life, saw South Africa whole. His chief claim to remembrance is as a judge, and a great one. Other South Africans have been more learned in the letter of the law, but none have understood its spirit so well. Some say that at times he dispensed ‘De Villiers’ law’, and his judgments have been reversed on one or two points since his death; but in spite of the rapidity with which he gave his decisions, the Privy Council questioned his judgments only four times. For the space of forty-one years he did substantial justice, delivering a series of weighty judgments on a far greater variety of subjects than usually falls to the lot of any British judge. He outlived the judges of his own generation, and, when a new generation arose, he was already an institution.
He had become chief justice at a critical time. In 1873 the gold and the diamonds were drawing a flood of new men to the interior, and the various states and colonies into closer contact. Besides the supreme court at Cape Town, there were by 1882 five similar courts in South Africa under four separate legislatures, unchecked by a common. court of appeal. Their law and practice were fundamentally the same, but divergences were bound to occur. These divergences were checked by the fact that the Cape supplied many of the judges to the other courts, and by the growing prestige of De Villiers. Even so the law of the colony was in a state of confusion. The criminal law had become practically English. But the Roman-Dutch civil law was being anglicized in a haphazard manner. De Villiers’ great achievement was to incorporate in the main body of the Roman-Dutch code as much of the English civil law as was necessary to meet rapidly changing circumstances. And the new system, which owes more to him than to any other single man, has spread from the borders of the South Africa of 1878 northward to the Zambesi.
[Unpublished papers and correspondence; notices in the Cape (South African) Law Journal, passim; B. Williams, Cecil Rhodes, 1921; J. H. Hofmeyr, Life of J. H. Hofmeyr, 1913; E. A. Walker, Lord De Villiers and His Times: South Africa, 1842-1914, 1924; private information.]