Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Giffard, Hardinge Stanley
GIFFARD, HARDINGE STANLEY, first Earl or Halsbury (1823-1921), lord chancellor, the third son of Stanley Lees Giffard [q.v.], by his first wife, Susanna Meares, daughter of Francis Moran, J.P., of Downhill, co. Sligo, was born at his father’s house at Pentonville, Middlesex, 3 September 1823. His mother died when he was five years old, and in 1830 his father married a second cousin, Mary Anne Giffard, who acquired the complete affection of her step-children. Hardinge was never sent to school, but received from his father so complete an education at home that he continued throughout his life to read the Latin and Greek classics for pleasure, and retained also some knowledge of Hebrew. His father had taught him to speak in all three languages, and he had at one time and another read practically the whole of the classical authors in the first two. His memory, to the very end of his life, was quite exceptional. In 1842 Giffard went into residence at Merton College, Oxford, where he rowed in the college eight and made a great many speeches at the Union. In the matter of passing examinations, his usual and in substance extremely effective education was not calculated to promote success, and in 1845 he took a fourth class in literae humaniores—a long-remembered disappointment.
On coming down from Oxford Giffard assisted his father for some years in the production of the Standard newspaper, of which Lees Giffard was editor for the first twenty-five years of its existence. Father and son were excellent friends, and were both, throughout their lives, the most uncompromising of tories upon every issue of party politics. As soon as he felt that he could afford it, Giffard was called to the bar at the Inner Temple (1850), of which he became a bencher in due course (1865). He shared the chambers in Chancery Lane of his eldest brother, John, and joined the Western circuit; but a year later (1851), by the advice of one of his father’s friends, he migrated to the South Wales circuit, where he at once acquired a steady practice. About the same time he joined (Sir) Harry Bodkin Poland in chambers at 7 King’s Bench Walk. They afterwards moved to 5 Paper Buildings, where Poland remained as long as he continued to practise. From this time Giffard obtained a steady and increasing practice at the Old Bailey and at the Middlesex sessions at Clerkenwell. He was also one of the founders of the Hardwicke Debating Society.
In 1859 (Sir) William Henry Bodkin was appointed assistant judge of the Middlesex sessions, and Giffard succeeded him as junior prosecuting counsel at the Central Criminal Court. In this capacity he appeared for the Crown in all important prosecutions at police courts, and in many of the consequent trials, until 1865, when he took silk, being one of the last barristers to receive that honour from Lord Westbury. Two years later he distinguished himself greatly as leading counsel for Governor Edward John Eyre [q.v.], when the latter was prosecuted for murder before the magistrates at Market Drayton and again at Bow Street in 1868 for alleged offences against the Colonial Governors Act. From the time of his taking silk, Giffard’s practice at nisi prius increased largely. He was second counsel with Serjeant William Ballantine for the Tichborne claimant, Arthur Orton [q.v.], in the ejectment case before Chief Justice Sir William Bovill, which lasted 102 days (1871–1872). He obtained a very large general practice and a well-deserved reputation as pre-eminent in any case which required hard fighting and inextinguishable courage. His extraordinary memory enabled him to remember everything in a brief that he had once read, and he had a singular ability of discerning at once what were the essential points of a case, and of concentrating resolutely upon them.
At the general elections of 1868 and 1874 Giffard stood as a conservative candidate for Cardiff, and was defeated. In November 1875, when Sir John Holker succeeded Sir John Burgess Karslake as attorney-general, Mr. Disraeli appointed Giffard solicitor-general, and he was knighted in the usual course. He stood unsuccessfully for Horsham in the following year, but in February 1877 he was elected member for Launceston and retained the seat at the general election of 1880. His work as solicitor-general was sound but not especially conspicuous, Holker also being a common law barrister and an attorney-general of peculiar efficiency and eminence. As solicitor-general Giffard led for the Crown in the Franconia case (R. v. Keyn, 1876), wherein the master of a German ship was convicted of the manslaughter by negligence of persons drowned in a collision between his vessel and an emigrant ship, the Strathclyde. The conviction was quashed by the Court for Crown Cases Reserved, which held by a majority that the English court had no jurisdiction over a crime committed by a foreigner on board a foreign ship on the high seas. This decision was overruled by the Territorial Waters Jurisdiction Act of 1878, which not merely enacted that the jurisdiction covered the sea to a distance of one marine league from the coast, but declared, in a preamble suggested by Giffard, that the law had always been to that effect.
After the defeat of the conservatives in 1880, Giffard became more prominent in the House of Commons as a pugnacious and useful member of the opposition. When Charles Bradlaugh [q.v.] began his controversy with the House of Commons, Giffard moved (22 June 1880) the first amendment to the effect that Bradlaugh should neither affirm nor take the oath, and carried it against the government; he took an active part both in parliament and in the law courts in the prolonged struggle which followed. He also had the better of an animated controversy with Mr. Chamberlain concerning the alleged responsibility of the political parties for rioting at a political meeting at Aston, near Birmingham. Throughout the duration of this parliament his practice at the bar continued to increase. Perhaps his greatest forensic triumph was in the famous case of Belt v. Lawes (1882). The plaintiff was a sculptor, and the substantial issue in the case was whether he prepared with his own hand and mind the works which issued from his studio, or employed ‘ghosts’, that is, paid small sums to obscure persons who were better artists than himself, to make the busts and statues by the supply of which he earned a large income. The case against Giffard’s client, Belt, was almost overwhelming, and the defendants were represented by Sir Charles Russell—then at the height of his powers—and Sir Richard Webster (each of them subsequently lord chief justice) instructed by Sir George Henry Lewis, whose reputation as an exposer of impostors was unrivalled. But Giffard carried with him the judge, the jury, and a large proportion of the public, and obtained for the plaintiff a verdict for £5,000.
In 1885 Giffard was appointed lord chancellor in Lord Salisbury’s first administration. His appointment came as something of a surprise both to the public and to the legal profession. His early work as an ‘Old Bailey man’ had never been forgotten, and his general reputation as an advocate had never been that of a Russell or a Cockburn on the one hand, or of a Palmer or a Cairns on the other. The promotion, however, had been fully earned. Holker having died in 1882, the only possible competitor was William Brett, Viscount Esher [q.v.], master of the Rolls. Brett had been, seventeen years previously, solicitor-general for less than twelve months, after which he had accepted a puisne judgeship. Giffard, besides fighting several elections, had done excellent service to his party in parliament, both in office and in opposition, for eight years. His claim to the woolsack was admitted on reflection; his ability to occupy it with distinction was widely doubted by superficial observers. Such doubts were laid to rest before the government went out of office in January 1886. From the first Giffard took command, as much as a president should, of any court over which he presided. He was strong enough to be primus inter pares whoever his peers might be, and they included at different times Lords Selborne, Watson, Blackburn, Bramwell, Herschell, Davey, Bowen, Macnaghten, and Robertson. On his appointment he took the title of Baron Halsbury, of Halsbury, in the parish of Parkham, Devon, one of the former seats of the Giffard family.
When the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill and the consequent general election restored the conservatives to power in July 1886, Halsbury again became lord chancellor, and he was appointed for the third time to that office by Lord Salisbury in 1895. His third period of office, in the Ministries of Lord Salisbury and Mr. Arthur Balfour, lasted until 1905. He thus held the great seal for seventeen years—longer than any one else except Hardwicke and Eldon. When he resigned shortly after his eighty-second birthday he still possessed, but for a slight degree of deafness, all the necessary powers of body and mind in full vigour. In 1898 he was created Earl of Halsbury and Viscount Tiverton.
Halsbury’s dissenting judgment in Allen v. Flood (1898) taken together with his prevailing judgment in Quinn v. Leathem (1901) is a good illustration of his robust and cogent methods of thought, and incidentally exhibits his increasing control of the tribunal of which he was the chief. The wealth of his learning and his facile mastery of exceedingly complicated facts are well displayed in his judgment in the Free Church of Scotland case (1904). The cases of R. v. Jackson (1891), which denies to a husband the right to use force for the purpose of securing or retaining his wife’s cohabitation, Powell v. the Kempton Park Race Course Co. (1899), as to the legality of betting on race courses, and Cowley v. Cowley (1901), as to the use of titles after remarriage, are other examples of Halsbury’s confident and effective treatment of questions that came before him.
Although always a tenacious and resolute conservative, Halsbury did not for a moment suppose that English law was incapable of improvement, and he was substantially the author of two such important reforms as the Land Transfer Act (1897), and the Criminal Evidence Act (1898) by which persons accused of indictable offences, and their spouses, were made competent witnesses. Halsbury, during his occupancy of the woolsack, appointed in each division of the High Court more judges than it had ever contained at the same time, viz. eight in Chancery, seventeen in the queen’s (or king’s) bench, and three in the probate division. After his resignation he continued to do active service judicially and politically. He was increasingly troubled by deafness, but his other physical faculties remained almost unimpaired until the closing years of his long life. He presided, from start to finish, over the production of the complete digest of The Laws of England (1905–1916), which is known by his name and took its place at once as the most necessary work in any collection of books purporting to be a library of English law.
In the parliament of 1905–1910, the Marquess of Lansdowne being the conservative leader in the House of Lords, Halsbury acquiesced with reluctance in the mildness of the opposition offered in the Upper House to such measures as the Trades Disputes Act (1906), which relieved trade unions and their members of official responsibility for breaches of contract or tortious acts committed by them, and the Finance Act of 1909. After the second general election of 1910, when the Parliament Bill which most seriously curtailed the legislative powers of the House of Lords came before that House, the opposition, having regard to the great majority by which it had been carried in the House of Commons, allowed it to be read a second time, and then carried against the government amendments in committee so largely limiting its scope that there was known to be no possibility of their acceptance by Mr. Asquith’s government. After the House of Commons had refused to accept these amendments, and when it became known that ministers were prepared to advise the creation of as many peers favourable to their proposals as might be necessary, and that the King had indicated that he would follow such advice, Lord Lansdowne advised his party in the Lords not to insist upon the amendments which they had carried. Halsbury’s capacity for surrender was now exhausted. At the age of eighty-eight he formed and led a new party among the peers, popularly known as the ‘die-hards’; and the debate which ensued, upon the question whether the Lords’ amendments had been merely a formal protest or a minimum of genuine resistance to the proposed constitutional change, was not less exciting than momentous, for no one really knew how the decision would go. Halsbury fought his hardest, insisting that the House ought to stand by what it thought right, whatever the consequences might be. The division was taken on 10 August 1911, and the die-hards were defeated by the narrow margin of seventeen.
In 1913 Halsbury presided effectively over a committee of the House of Lords which inquired into the conduct of a peer—a member of the government—concerned in speculation in the shares of the American Marconi Company; and after the outbreak of war in 1914 he rendered further judicial service. His last judgment was delivered in 1916. He lived to see peace concluded, and to celebrate in 1920 the seventieth anniversary of his call to the bar, when he received and responded to an affectionate address from the bench and bar. In his ninety-eighth year his strength perceptibly failed, though his mind remained perfectly clear. He died in London, after two days’ illness from influenza, 11 December 1921.
Halsbury married twice: first, in 1852 Caroline (died 1873), daughter of William Conn Humphreys, of Wood Green, Middlesex, by whom he had no children; secondly, in 1874 Wilhelmina, daughter of Henry Woodfall, of Stanmore, Middlesex, a kinsman of Henry Sampson Woodfall [q.v.], the publisher. By his second wife he had one son, Hardinge Goulburn, second Earl of Halsbury, and one daughter.
Halsbury’s features were good, and expressive of power and resolution; his short and stoutly built figure lent itself to caricature. A fine portrait of him by Sir George Reid is in the possession of the family; another, by the Hon. John Collier, belongs to the benchers of the Inner Temple, and a copy of it is in the hall of Merton College (Royal Academy Pictures, 1898).
[The Times, 12 December 1921; J. B. Atlay, The Victorian Chancellors, 1906–1908; private information; personal knowledge.]