[2] His father's family was descended from the Gwynnes of Glanbran, Carmarthenshire, described in the nineteenth century as "one of the oldest in the Empire".

Already in November 1873, he was promoted to Attorney General by Gladstone, a post he held until the government fell the following year.

James and Russell, with disastrous consequences, advised Dilke not to go into the witness box saying there was insufficient evidence to convict him.

The judge agreed, but decided Mrs Crawford's confession was sufficient to award her husband a divorce, resulting in an apparently contradictory verdict: that she had committed adultery with Dilke, but he had not with her!

[8] At a second hearing instigated by the Queen's Proctor, Dilke was cross-examined to devastating effect and his career ruined.

[1] Gladstone had offered him the Lord Chancellorship in 1886, but he declined it and the knowledge of the sacrifice he had made in refusing to follow his old chief in his new departure lent great weight to his advocacy of the Unionist cause in the country.

In later years he was a prominent opponent of the Tariff Reform movement, adhering to the section of Free Trade Unionists.