Chancellor, Lord

Chancellor, Lord, properly, 'the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain' [fr. Cancellarius, low Lat., cancelli, Lat., latticework], the highest judicial functionary in the kingdom, and superior, in point of precedency, to every temporal lord. He is appointed by the delivery of the king's Great Seal into his custody. He may not be a Roman Catholic (10 Geo. 4, c. 7, s. 12). He is a cabinet minister, a privy councillor, and prolocutor of the House of Lords by prescription (but not necessarily, though usually, a peer of the realm), and vacates his office with the ministry by which he was appointed, but is entitled to a pension. When royal commissions are issued for opening the session, for giving the royal assent to bills, or for proroguing Parliament, the Lord Chancellor is always one of the commissioners, and reads the royal speech on the occasion. To him belongs the appointment of all justices of the peace throughout the kingdom, and the appointment and removal of county court judges (see COUNTY COURTS), and [see s. 8 of the (English) Coroners Act, 1887] the power to remove coroners. He is one of the three ex-officio trustees of the British Museum. Being, in the earlier periods of our history, usually an ecclesiastic (for none else was then capable of an office so conversant in writings), and presiding over the royal chapel, he became keeper of the sovereign's conscience, visitor, in right of the Crown, of the hospitals and colleges of royal foundation, and patron of all the Crown livings under the value of twenty marks per annum in the king's books. He is the general guardian of all infants, idiots, and lunatics, and has the general superintendence of all charitable uses'and all this, over and above the vast and extensive jurisdiction which he exercises in his judicial capacity in the Supreme Court of Judicature, of which he is the head. An ex-Chancellor is by virtue (English) of the Judicature Act, 1925, s. 6, an ex-officio judge of the court of appeal.

See CHANCERY; SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE. The Chancellorship of Scotland was abolished at the Union, and that of Ireland by the Irish Free State (Consequential Provisions Act, 1922, s. 2.

The multifarious duties of the Lord Chancellor and the excessive work entailed by them were fully dwelt upon by Lord Herschell in a statement to members of the House of Commons who has called attention to the appointment of Magistrates, which statement is reproduced in the Law Times of 17th November, 1906, from The Times of the 16th November, 1893. See also Chapter X. of the Report of the Machinery of Government Committee, 14th December, 1918. See Lives of the Lord Chancellors of England, by Lord Campbell.