He became a successful lawyer himself and was appointed a
Queen's Counsel in 1855. He was
knighted in 1860, shortly after his appointment as a
Baron of the Exchequer. He presided over the
Court of Probate and Divorce from 1863 until his retirement in 1872, being raised to the peerage as
Baron Penzance, of
Penzance in the
County of Cornwall, in 1869. He was the judge in the sensational
Mordaunt divorce case. In 1875, he accepted the post as
Dean of Arches and presided over a number of notorious trials;
Bell Cox,
Dale,
Enraght,
Green and
Tooth, under the
Public Worship Regulation Act 1874 arising out of the
Ritualist controversy in the
Church of England. In 1866, he presided over
Hyde v. Hyde, a polygamy case. In his ruling, Lord Penzance stated: What, then, is the nature of this institution as understood in Christendom?...If it be of common acceptance and existence, it must have some pervading identity and universal basis. I conceive that marriage, as understood in Christendom, may for this purpose be defined as the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others. This remained the common-law definition of marriage throughout the British Empire and successor states. In Canada, it was overruled by an explicit statutory definition in the
Civil Marriage Act 2005, which allowed for same-sex marriage. ==Shakespeare==