Richard Bethell, 1st Baron Westbury
British politician
Richard Bethell, 1st Baron Westbury, (30 June 1800 – 20 July 1873) was a British lawyer, judge and Liberal politician. He served as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain between 1861 and 1865. He was knighted in 1852 and raised to the peerage in 1861.
Background and education
Born at Bradford on Avon, in Wiltshire, he was the eldest son of the physician Richard Bethell of Bristol and Jane (née Baverstock). He was from an old Welsh family originally named Ap Ithel. His younger brother was John Bethell.
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 honours in classics and second class in mathematics, and he graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in 1818 and was elected a fellow of his college. In 1823, Bethell was called to the bar at the Middle Temple.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Richard Bethell, 1st Baron Westbury” as british politician. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as british politician. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6237389. VIAF identifies the subject as 33445584. The Library of Congress control number is n85252230. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1800, 1873, 1861 and 1865.
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This entry incorporates text from “Richard Bethell, 1st Baron Westbury” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.