Herschell's public services from 1880 to 1885 were of great value, particularly in dealing with the "cases for opinion" submitted by the Foreign Office and other departments. He was also very helpful in speeding government measures through the House, notably the Irish Land Act 1881, the Corrupt Practices and Bankruptcy Acts 1883, the County Franchise Act 1884 and the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885. This last was a bitter pill for Herschell, since it halved the representation of Durham city, and so gave him statutory notice to quit. Reckoning on the local support of the Cavendish family, he contested the North Lonsdale division of Lancashire; but in spite of the powerful influence of Lord Hartington, he was badly beaten at the poll, though Mr Gladstone again obtained a majority in the country. Herschell now thought he saw the solicitor-generalship slipping away from him, and along with it all prospect of high promotion. Lord Selborne and Sir Henry James, however, successively declined Gladstone's offer of the Woolsack, and in 1886 Herschell, by a sudden turn of fortune's wheel, found himself in his forty-ninth year lord chancellor. Herschell's chancellorship lasted barely six months, for in August 1886 Gladstone's Home Rule Bill was rejected in the Commons and his administration fell. In August 1892, when Gladstone returned to power, Herschell again became lord chancellor. In September 1893, when the second Home Rule Bill came on for second reading in the House of Lords, Herschell took advantage of the opportunity to justify the "sudden conversion" to Home Rule of himself and his colleagues in 1885 by comparing it to the duke of Wellington's conversion to Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and to that of Sir Robert Peel to Free Trade in 1846. In 1895, however, his second chancellorship came to an end with the defeat of the Rosebery ministry.