Lord Chancellor
The lord chancellor, formally titled Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, is a senior minister of the Crown within the Government of the United Kingdom. The lord chancellor is the minister of justice for England and Wales and the highest-ranking Great Officer of State in Scotland and England, nominally outranking the prime minister. The lord chancellor is appointed and dismissed by the sovereign on the advice of the prime minister. Prior to the union of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain, there were separate lord chancellors for the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland. Likewise, the Lordship of Ireland and its successor states maintained the office of lord chancellor of Ireland until the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, whereupon the office was abolished.
The lord chancellor is a member of the Cabinet and is, by law, the minister of the Crown responsible for the efficient functioning and independence of the courts. The lord chancellor thus leads the Ministry of Justice and is the judiciary's voice within Cabinet. In 2005, there were a number of changes to the legal system and to the office of the lord chancellor. Previously, the lord chancellor was also the presiding officer of the House of Lords, the head of the judiciary of England and Wales and the presiding judge of the Chancery Division of the High Court of Justice. The Constitutional Reform Act 2005 transferred these roles to the lord speaker, the lord chief justice and the chancellor of the High Court respectively.
One of the lord chancellor's responsibilities is to act as the custodian of the Great Seal of the Realm, kept historically in the Lord Chancellor's Purse. A lord keeper of the Great Seal may be appointed instead of a lord chancellor. The two offices entail exactly the same duties; the only distinction is in the mode of appointment. Furthermore, the office of lord chancellor may be exercised by a committee of individuals known as lords commissioners of the Great Seal, usually when there is a delay between an outgoing chancellor and their replacement. The office is then said to be in commission. Since the 19th century, however, only lord chancellors have been appointed, the other offices having fallen into disuse.
History
The office of lord chancellor may trace its origins to the Carolingian monarchy, in which a chancellor acted as the keeper of the royal seal. In England, the office dates at least as far back as the Norman Conquest, and possibly earlier. Some give the first chancellor of England as Angmendus, in 605. Other sources suggest that the first to appoint a chancellor was Edward the Confessor, who is said to have adopted the practice of sealing documents instead of personally signing them. One of Edward's clerks, Regenbald, was named "chancellor" in some documents from Edward's reign. The staff of the growing office became separate from the king's household under Henry III and in the 14th century located in Chancery Lane. The chancellor headed the chancery, which is a contraction of "chancellery", the office/staff of the Chancellor.Formerly, the lord chancellor was almost always a member of the clergy, as during the Middle Ages the clergy were amongst the few literate men of the realm. The lord chancellor performed multiple functions—he was the Keeper of the Great Seal, the chief royal chaplain, and adviser in both spiritual and temporal matters. Thus, the position emerged as one of the most important ones in government. He was only outranked in government by the Justiciar.
File:Seal of William de Longchamp.svg|thumb| Seal of William de Longchamp, chancellor in the late 12th century: the text includes, "Chancellor of England."
As one of the King's ministers, the lord chancellor attended the curia regis. If a bishop, the lord chancellor received a writ of summons; if an ecclesiastic of a lower degree or, if a layman, he attended without any summons. The curia regis would later evolve into Parliament, the lord chancellor becoming the prolocutor of its upper house, the House of Lords. As was confirmed by a statute passed during the reign of Henry VIII, a lord chancellor could preside over the House of Lords even if not a lord himself.
The lord chancellor's judicial duties also evolved through his role in the curia regis. Appeals from the law courts for justice in cases where the law would produce an unjust result were normally addressed to the king, but this very quickly bogged down because Parliament was, at the time, a discontinuous affair with no fixed seat that met only for a few days a year and only when the king called it together wherever he happened to be holding court at the time and the growing wealth of the kingdom ensured that an increasing number of people had the means to bring such petitions to what was, at the time, a traveling curia. To ease this backlog, in 1280, Parliament and Edward I instructed his high ministers to adjudicate such appeals themselves. Such appeals were addressed to the relevant high minister, often the Lord Chancellor. Cases that were particularly vexatious or of special importance were to be brought to the king's attention directly by the minister under whose purview they lay, but with the understanding that this would be an unusual phenomenon. Fairly quickly, the only other high minister exercising parallel jurisdiction was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his jurisdiction was initially limited to matters concerning revenues and expenditures. There was no right of appeal from the Lord Chancellor; he could refer the matter to the king for judgment, but that was at the Lord Chancellor's sole discretion.
By the reign of Edward III, this judicial function developed into a separate tribunal for the Lord Chancellor as the case load continued to grow. Authority was first delegated to the Master of the Rolls, who remains the second-highest-ranking official in the English judiciary, and eventually to other members of his staff. In this body, which became known as the High Court of Chancery, the Lord Chancellor would determine cases according to fairness instead of according to the strict principles of common law, though petitioners first had to show that they could not receive an appropriate remedy in the common law courts. As a result, the Lord Chancellor became known as the "keeper of the king's conscience".
Churchmen continued to dominate the chancellorship until the 16th century. In 1529, after Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who was Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of York, was dismissed for failing to procure the annulment of Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, laymen tended to be more favoured for appointment to the office. Ecclesiastics made a brief return during the reign of Mary I, but thereafter, almost all lord chancellors have been laymen. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury was the last lord chancellor who was not a lawyer, until the appointment of Chris Grayling in 2012. The three subsequent holders of the position, Michael Gove, Liz Truss and David Lidington are also not lawyers. However, the appointment of David Gauke in January 2018 meant that once again the lord chancellor was a lawyer.
At the Union of England and Scotland, the lord keeper of the Great Seal of England became the first lord high chancellor of Great Britain, but Lord Seafield continued as lord chancellor of Scotland until 1708; was re-appointed in 1713; and sat as an extraordinary lord of session in that capacity until his death in 1730, since which time the office of lord chancellor of Scotland has been in abeyance.
The office
Formerly, when the office was held by ecclesiastics, a "Keeper of the Great Seal" acted in the lord chancellor's absence. Keepers were also appointed when the office of lord chancellor fell vacant, and discharged the duties of the office until an appropriate replacement could be found. When Elizabeth I became queen, Parliament passed an Act providing that a lord keeper of the Great Seal would be entitled to "like place, pre-eminence, jurisdiction, execution of laws, and all other customs, commodities, and advantages" as a lord chancellor. Like the lord keeper, the lord chancellor is formally appointed by receiving the Great Seal in the Privy Council, however the chancellor also takes an oath at the Royal Courts of Justice.Formerly, it was customary to appoint commoners to the office of Lord Keeper, and peers to the office of lord chancellor. A Lord Keeper who acquired a peerage dignity would subsequently be appointed lord chancellor. The last Lord Keeper was Robert Henley, who was created a Baron in 1760 and was appointed lord chancellor in 1761. Since then, commoners as well as peers have been appointed to the post of lord chancellor; however, until the 21st-century changes to the office, a commoner would normally have been created a peer shortly after appointment.
It is also possible to put the office of lord chancellor into commission. The individuals who exercise the office became known as Lords Commissioners of the Great Seal. Lords commissioners of the Great Seal have not been appointed since 1850.
Formerly, there were separate chancellors of England, Scotland and Ireland. When the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland united to form the Kingdom of Great Britain under the Act of Union 1707 the offices of the chancellor of England and the lord chancellor of Scotland were combined to form a single office of lord chancellor for the new state. Similar provision was not made when Great Britain and Ireland merged into the United Kingdom under the Act of Union 1800. Thus, the separate office of lord chancellor of Ireland continued to exist until the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922. The office of lord chancellor of Ireland was abolished, and its duties transferred to the governor of Northern Ireland, and later the secretary of state for Northern Ireland. Thus, the lord chancellor remains "Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain" and not "Lord High Chancellor of the United Kingdom".