Lord Chancellor

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lord Chancellor of Great Britain holds a rank so ancient that the Treason Act of 1351 made it high treason to slay one. For nearly a thousand years, this single office has cradled the Great Seal of the Realm, presided over Parliament's upper house, dispensed justice to England's poor through a court of equity, and served as the voice of the judiciary inside the Cabinet. At its height, no other figure in British government exercised executive, legislative, and judicial power simultaneously. How did one office accumulate so much, why did reformers spend decades trying to dismantle it, and what did it finally take to strip it down?

• 2. Ancient Roots

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  Some scholars trace the first English chancellor to Angmendus, said to have held the role in 605, though others credit Edward the Confessor with establishing the practice of sealing royal documents rather than signing them personally. One of Edward's clerks, Regenbald, was named "chancellor" in documents from that reign. After the Norman Conquest of 1066 the office became firmly embedded in royal administration. Under Henry III the chancellor's growing staff separated from the king's household, and by the 14th century the chancery had settled on Chancery Lane in London.

  For much of the medieval period the lord chancellor was almost always a clergyman. Literacy was scarce, and the clergy were among the few who could read and write. The chancellor kept the royal seal, served as chief chaplain, and advised the king on both sacred and worldly affairs. He was outranked in government only by the Justiciar, an office that has since disappeared entirely.

  The chancery evolved into something larger than a writing office when Parliament and Edward I, in 1280, instructed the king's senior ministers to handle the growing flood of appeals from people who had been failed by the rigid common law. The Lord Chancellor became the primary destination for such petitions, and with no right of appeal from his decisions he exercised an authority that was, in practice, close to absolute. By the reign of Edward III that caseload had grown large enough to require a separate tribunal. Known as the High Court of Chancery, it decided cases on the principle of fairness rather than strict legal precedent. From that work came the title that would follow the lord chancellor through the centuries: keeper of the king's conscience.

• 3. Clergy, Laymen, and Cardinal Wolsey

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  Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who held both the lord chancellorship and the archbishopric of York, was dismissed in 1529 after he failed to secure the annulment of Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon. His fall marked a turning point. After Wolsey, laymen came to be preferred for the office, ending centuries of clerical dominance. Ecclesiastics made a brief return under Mary I, but from that era onward almost all lord chancellors have been laymen.

  Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, who served in 1672-73, was the last lord chancellor who was not a lawyer, until Chris Grayling's appointment in 2012. The three holders who followed Grayling, Michael Gove (2015-2016), Liz Truss (2016-2017), and David Lidington (2017-2018), also lacked a legal background. David Gauke's appointment in January 2018 returned a lawyer to the post.

  Liz Truss, in 2016, became the first woman to serve as lord chancellor of the United Kingdom. The source notes a historical precedent worth acknowledging: Queen Eleanor of Provence served as keeper of the great seal, and thus arguably as lord chancellor of England, in 1253-54. Jack Straw, appointed in June 2007, became the first lord chancellor drawn from the House of Commons rather than the Lords or its predecessor the Curia Regis since Christopher Hatton in 1587.

• 4. The Great Seal

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  Custody of the Great Seal of the Realm has rested with the lord chancellor for nearly a thousand years, a responsibility confirmed by the Great Seal Act 1884 and reaffirmed by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. The seal is affixed to letters patent, writs of summons, writs of election, royal warrants, royal charters, and royal proclamations, among other instruments. The physical act of sealing is performed under the supervision of the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Justice, who also holds the statutory post of Clerk of the Crown in Chancery.

  When the office of lord chancellor fell vacant, a lord keeper of the Great Seal would be appointed to discharge the duties in the interim. Parliament under Elizabeth I passed an Act declaring that a lord keeper would hold "like place, pre-eminence, jurisdiction, execution of laws, and all other customs, commodities, and advantages" as a full lord chancellor. The two roles were identical in practice; they differed only in how the holder was appointed. The last lord keeper was Robert Henley, created a Baron in 1760 and elevated to the full chancellorship in 1761.

  Historically the purse containing the seal was the chancellor's most recognisable insignia, paired with a mace. The Elizabethan play Sir Thomas More opens a scene with directions to place the Purse and Mace on a cushioned table in More's Chelsea home, underscoring how central those objects were to the office's public identity.

• 5. A Tower of Functions

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  The breadth of responsibilities the office accumulated over the centuries is striking. The lord chancellor appoints clergy in over four hundred parishes and ten cathedral canonries, serves ex officio as one of the thirty-three Church Commissioners who manage the assets of the Church of England, and must be consulted before appointments can be made to ecclesiastical courts including the Arches Court of Canterbury and the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved.

  Under the Regency Act 1937, the lord chancellor is one of only five people authorised to determine whether the sovereign is capable of discharging the functions of head of state. The others are the sovereign's spouse, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and the Master of the Rolls. If three or more of the five sign a written instrument lodged with the Privy Council, declaring on medical evidence that the monarch cannot perform the duties of head of state, those functions pass to a regent.

  The ministerial department attached to the office changed names several times: the Lord Chancellor's Office from 1885 to 1971, the Lord Chancellor's Department from 1971 to 2003, the Department for Constitutional Affairs from 2003 to 2007, and finally the Ministry of Justice from 2007. Lord Falconer, who oversaw the transition, became the inaugural Secretary of State for Justice while retaining the title, salary, and office of lord chancellor.

• 6. The Reform Battle

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  Tony Blair's Labour government concluded in the early 21st century that one person exercising executive, legislative, and judicial power simultaneously was incompatible with Montesquieu's principle of separation of powers, and also inconsistent with the European Convention on Human Rights. In 2003 Blair chose Lord Falconer, a close friend and former flatmate, to be Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, and at the same time announced his intention to abolish the office altogether.

  What followed surprised the government. The office could not be abolished by a simple announcement. Several of its functions were fixed to the title of lord chancellor by statute and could only be transferred to another minister by an Act of Parliament. Lord Falconer appeared in the House of Lords the day after the announcement to carry out his duties from the Woolsack as if nothing had changed. In February 2004 the Government introduced the Constitutional Reform Bill, which proposed distributing the lord chancellor's roles among a new Speaker of the House of Lords, the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, and the Lord Chief Justice.

  In March 2004 the Lords sent the bill to a Select Committee, a move initially read as an attempt to kill it. Eventually both Government and Opposition agreed to let the bill proceed. On the 13th of July 2004 the House amended the bill to retain the title of lord chancellor, while preserving the other proposed reforms. A further amendment in November 2004 merged the positions of secretary of state and lord chancellor into a single person. The final Constitutional Reform Act received royal assent on the 24th of March 2005. The major transfers of historical functions were complete by mid-2006, though the lord chancellor remained in Cabinet and kept most of the office's original statutory powers.

• 7. Dress, Precedence, and Culture

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  On state occasions such as the State Opening of Parliament, the lord chancellor wears black silk velvet court dress with lace cuffs, black silk stockings, and cut-steel buckled patent court shoes, covered by a black silk damask robe of state with a long train trimmed with gold lace. A full-bottomed wig is worn, and the tricorne hat may be carried. There is an unofficial precedent, observed by Chris Grayling, Michael Gove, Liz Truss, David Lidington, David Gauke, and Dominic Raab, that lord chancellors without a legal background do not wear the wig. Robert Buckland, Brandon Lewis, Alex Chalk, Shabana Mahmood, and David Lammy, all barristers, have worn it.

  In rank, the lord chancellor formally outpaces the prime minister, though political reality runs in the opposite direction. The annual salary is fixed at £227,736, higher than that of any other public official including the prime minister, though recent holders have often chosen to accept the reduced salary of a secretary of state. The Treason Act 1351 placed the lord chancellor's personal safety alongside that of judges on the bench: harming one was high treason.

  The office has left its mark on fiction as well. The lord chancellor is the central character of Iolanthe, the comic opera by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, identified only by his title. William Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States, was so taken by the costume of the lord chancellor in a production of Iolanthe that he added four golden stripes to the sleeves of his own judicial robes. Charles Dickens placed a lord chancellor at the head of the ruinous Jarndyce and Jarndyce case in Bleak House, a portrait of institutional delay that the office's own long history of accumulated functions might have made all too recognisable.