Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Four: The Earl of Halsbury, 3 times Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, the compiler and editor of Halsbury’s Laws of England, and on his death aged 98 the oldest man to have ever sat in Parliament

Jubilee 1897, silver; Coronation 1902, silver; Coronation 1911; Worshipful Company of Saddlers Quarter Warden’s Badge, silver-gilt and enamel, the reverse engraved ‘The Right Honourable the Earl of Halsbury, Quarter Warden’ good very fine (4) £300-400

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, A Collection of Medals to Members of the Nobility and The Royal Household.

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Hardinge Stanley Giffard, 1st Earl of Halsbury, was born in Pentonville, London, on 3 September 1823, the third son of Stanley Giffard Esq., the founder and first editor of The Standard (now the London Evening Standard). Educated at Merton College, Oxford, he was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1850. Appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1865, he was engaged in some of the most celebrated criminal trials of his time, including the famous Tichborne claimant case. Appointed Solicitor-General by Benjamin Disraeli in 1875, and given the customary knighthood, he finally obtained a seat in parliament (at the fourth attempt) when he was elected M.P. for Laundeston. In June 1885 he was appointed Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, in Lord Salisbury’s first administration, and was created Baron Halsbury, of Halsbury in the County of Devon. He served as Lord High Chancellor until December 1905, with his tenure broken only by the brief Liberal ministries of 1886 and 1892-95, and in 1898 he was further elevated in the peerage on being created Earl of Halsbury and Viscount Tiverton. He continued to serve in the House of Lords after finally vacating the Woolsack in 1905, and was one of the principal leaders of the faction of Tory peers that resolved on all out opposition to the Liberal government’s bill that brought in the Parliament Act 1911. He also served as President of the Royal Society of Literature, Grand Warden of English Freemasons, High Steward of the University of Oxford, and a Quarter Warden of the Worshipful Company of Saddlers. His lasting legacy in the legal field was the compilation of ‘Halsbury’s Laws of England’, a major reference work which provides the only complete narrative statement of all English law, and which is still published today.

Lord Halsbury married firstly Miss Caroline Humphreys, the daughter of William Humphreys Esq., on 28 August 1852. Following her death he remarried Miss Wilhelmina Woodfall, daughter of Henry Woodfall Esq. on 14 October 1874, with whom he had one son and two daughters. He died on 11 December 1921, aged 98, the oldest peer to have ever sat in the House of Lords, and was succeeded to the Earldom by his only son Hardinge, Viscount Tiverton. Upon the death of the 4th Earl of Halsbury in 2010 all the titles became extinct.