Archaeological Journal/Volume 3/Notices of New Publications: The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal
As Lord Campbell's work has already attained the dignity of a second edition, and may, possibly, reach a third, it will be rendering a useful service to the noble author and his readers, to call attention to some omissions, and many errors in that portion of it which falls within the scope of an archæological review.
It is unnecessary to follow his lordship into the question of the derivation of the word "chancellor," since he has neither cast any new light upon a point which has been frequently discussed, nor supplied any fresh material for conjecture. The noble author has been equally unsuccessful in his observations upon the duties of the office in early times, a part of his work remarkably full of contradictory positions. We shall also pass by his notices of the chancellors during the Anglo-Saxon period, from the pluviose St. Swithin to the notary Swardus, who is most preposterously elevated to the dignity of vice-chancellor under Edward the Confessor. Notwithstanding Lord Campbell's researches, and the admirable word-painting of Sir Francis Palgrave, we can no more recognise the chancellor, assisted by the masters in chancery, sitting in the Witteneagemot, as "law lords," than modern travellers can discern Jove and his attendant deities assembled on mount Olympus.
To begin, then, with Lord Campbell's Life of Thomas à Becket, first in point of eminence of the chancellors after the Conquest, respecting whose career and acts we possess most authentic and minute information. In the account of his parentage and birth in the city of London, we are not told that the locality of the house in which he was born is to this day very accurately marked by the hall of the Mercers' company in Cheapside, once the site of a hospital dedicated to his memory:—on that spot stood his paternal home, as we know from the will of Agnes, the martyr's sister; his father, Gilbert à Becket, was a parishioner of St. Mary Colechurch; and in the font of that church the future chancellor was baptized, as tradition asserted St. Edmund the king and martyr had been before him.
Speaking of the council of Northampton, by which Becket was sentenced, Lord Campbell remarks "it lasted a good many days, the court sitting on Sundays as well as week-days." Not so many days. That assembly was opened on Tuesday the 13th of October, 1164, and on the evening of Tuesday the 20th, at the latest, the chancellor fled, in disguise, to Sandwich[1], whence he sailed for Gravelines, landing there on the 2nd of November; but if the latter date be correct, his sentence must have been given on Sunday the 18th of October, and such is the opinion of Dr. Lingard. However, the dates of the Quadrilogus, with which Fitz-Stephen here agrees, are inconsistent; yet under any circumstances the council did not last more than a week, and its sittings, perhaps, did not exceed five days; so the laborious Sundays of Lord Campbell's narrative are reduced to one. This vagueness of statement is a remarkable feature of the author's style, and cannot be sufficiently reprehended. Another instance of it is the observation, that the archbishop suffered in the fifty-third year of his age; yet according to the dates supplied by Lord Campbell, he was born in 1119, and slain on the 29th of December, 1170, and therefore could not have been in more than his fifty-first year. But his lordship's dates are, in general, as loosely ascertained as his facts; thus he ascribes the coronation of King Henry the younger to the year 1169, whereas it took place on the 14th of June, 1170; and in the same manner refers the reconciliatory interview between Henry and Becket to "a meadow near the town of Fereitville, on the borders of Touraine." Freteval is the proper orthography of the name, but that is unimportant, since it was not there, but at Mont-Louis, between Amboise and Tours, that the king met the archbishop. Lord Campbell must have been thinking of the treaty of Freteval between Henry and Louis of France in 1161. Thierry has committed the same error in his history of the Norman Conquest.
From Becket we may pass, for the intervening chancellors are not worth a comment, to William Longchamp, bishop of Ely, the celebrated minister of Richard the First, and would add to the notice of him by Lord Campbell a fact which has hitherto been unpublished, viz. that it was about the times of Richard that "Chancery-lane" acquired its ominous name. There is extant a deed by which Longchamp demised certain messuages in the "Chancellor's-lane," heretofore the "New-street." Lord Campbell, it should be observed, has most successfully identified chancellor Longchamp with the minstrel Blondel, who is said to have serenaded Richard in his prison-house: according to his lordship the chancellor's song began, "O Richard, O mon Roy," &c. Unfortunately the authorities for this interesting discovery are omitted. It is difficult to imagine how the author fell into the singular error of dating the apocryphal letter of the Old Man of the Mountain at Messina, above all other places. Credulous as people undoubtedly were in those times, such a blunder could never have passed unnoticed. There is the less excuse for Lord Campbell, as the letter is printed in the Fœdera, and also translated by Thierry, to whom his lordship acknowledges many obligations.
We should by no means be disposed to attribute undue importance to these errata, but like inadvertencies mark almost every page of that division of this work to which our observations must be restricted, and necessarily impair the value of its authority. Even after Lord Campbell has arrived, in the course of his narrative, at that period of English history when a writer, not averse to the labour of research, might well abandon conjecture for certainty, we find him yielding to an imaginatory version of clearly-recorded facts, and ingeniously, though, as we believe, unintentionally, distorting those facts for the purpose of introducing the notice of an individual who has no more title to appear in this memorial of English chancellors and keepers of the Great Seal, than Friar Bacon has to be accounted the inventor of the steam-engine: we allude to Eleanor, consort of Henry the Third, whose life has been written by Lord Campbell, as a "Lady Keeper of the Great Seal." According to his lordship's account "she held the office nearly a whole year, performing all its duties, as well judicial as ministerial." We propose to shew that such was not the case, and that Lord Campbell wrote under a misapprehension of certain very simple facts. His lordship's first position is that Henry, "in the prospect of his going into Gascony in 1253," entrusted her with the custody of the great seal, "and the queen was left in the full exercise of her authority as lady keeper."
To this we reply that the credible testimony of a contemporary annalist entirely disproves the statement. The queen and Richard earl of Cornwall, were appointed "custodes" of the realm, and Matthew Paris informs us that the king wrote to them as such, that if any rich abbey or bishopric should fall vacant during his absence they were to keep the same for him: although, ultimately, he gave express authority to the earl and William de Kilkenny to confer ecclesiastical benefices[2]. But Lord Campbell cites a document which he terms "a commission," to support his case, as proving that the great seal was committed to the queen's keeping. We object in the first place that the document relied on is not a commission, but letters patent, conveying a general notification of an act done, and secondly that instead of corroborating his lordship's assumption the instrument in question shews its fallacy, and confirms also the narrative of Matthew Paris.
This patent recites that theking, about to set out for Gascony, had committed his great seal to the custody of the queen, "under our privy seal and the seals of our beloved brother and liege-subject Richard earl of Cornwall, and of certain others of our council;" the condition of such trust being that if anything should be sealed in the king's name with any other seal than that, which might tend to the detriment of the king or his realm, it should be of no moment and wholly void. It must be sufficiently obvious from the circumstance of the great seal being under the king's privy seal, and the seals of others of his council, that it was sealed up in its pouch, and that the queen could not use it without the intervention of the council, and, therefore, that she was not de facto keeper of the seal in the usual sense of that phrase. The seal was rather in the hands of commissioners: but had they any power to use it? As the privy seal was upon it, the just inference would seem to be that it was the king's intention the pouch should not be opened at all during his absence. This view is supported by the next correction of Lord Campbell's narrative, which it is our unpleasant duty to make. His lordship says, "the sealing of writs and common instruments was left, under her direction, to Kilkenny, archdeacon of Coventry." It would naturally be supposed from these words that Lord Campbell had good authority for a fact so circumstantially stated; yet there is not the shadow of a foundation for it; and the authority which he cites, and on which he must be held to depend, contradicts him in every particular. The seal which the queen, in obedience to the king's precept, delivered to Kilkenny, was not the great seal, but the seal of the exchequer, which the king states in his letter he had deputed to be used "in place of our great seal which he will cause to he shut up until our return from the parts [of Gascony] aforesaid[3]." Although Lord Campbell prints that which purports to be a copy of this writ, the words we have distinguished by italics are left out in his work; yet even despite this remarkable omission, which we cannot suppose to be otherwise than accidental, or to have arisen from his copying at second-hand from some very careless compiler, it will be seen that his statements are incorrect; it was the exchequer seal which was entrusted to Kilkenny, to be used in place of the great seal, and instead of acting under the queen's direction, he was appointed absolutely and without restriction, to bear and use it until the king's return to England!
His lordship proceeds—"She sat as judge in the Aula Regia, beginning her sittings on the morrow of the Nativity of the blessed Virgin Mary. These sittings were interrupted by the accouchement of the judge." We decline to enter into the knotty question of the constitution and jurisdiction of the Aula Regia, but if Lord Campbell intends his readers to believe that Queen Eleanor sat therein individually as keeper of the great seal, and with any equitable jurisdiction, it must be observed that he is entirely mistaken. He quotes as his authority a Plea roll[4] of the 37th year of Henry the Third; the title of the first rotulet of which is "Pleas before the lady the queen and the council of the lord the king," &c. Just the sort of title that might be expected when the king was out of the realm; those pleas which, had he been present, would be described as "coram Rege," were now recorded as heard before his council, and the queen having been nominated, as already stated, one of the guardians of the kingdom, took her place in the council by virtue of such appointment[5]. Moreover, had his lordship examined this Plea roll, he would have found that after the first rotulet, or skin, the queen's name is not again mentioned—the proceedings are thenceforward described simply as "coram consilio." Her majesty was not present after the sittings on the morrow of the Nativity of the Virgin, that was the 9th of September, and her accouchement did not take place until the 25th of November; so much for the marvellous story of her sittings being interrupted by that interesting event. We confess it seems to us very surprising that Lord Campbell, who must know that in the middle of the reign of Henry the Third, the jurisdiction of the chancellor was already defined and distinguished from the common law, should quote an ordinary Plea roll as a proof of purely imaginary sittings in equity. We need scarcely, after the preceding observations, take the further trouble of contradicting the assertion that after her favourable recovery the "lady keeper" resumed her place in the Aula Regia.
There are so many errors in this little bit of romance by Lord Campbell, that we can do no more than cursorily allude to them. The story of the queen commencing "an unextinguishable feud with the citizens of London," about the dues at Queenhithe, is a monstrous absurdity. Those dues were payable long before Eleanor's time, and the citizens farmed them under the queen consort, by charter. Lord Campbell might just as well have said that Queenhithe took its name from her majesty. With respect to her claim to "Queengold" we would refer his lordship to Prynne's essay, for further information on that point, and to his assertion that "the city of London had hitherto been a sort of free republic in a despotic kingdom, and its privileges had been respected in times of general oppression," we reply that, whatever it may have been in theory, it had been no such thing in fact; but that during no reign, from first to last, were its privileges so utterly disregarded as during the times of Henry the Third; that monarch suspended the franchise of the citizens again and again on the most trifling pretexts. Then Lord Campbell states that the queen made a speech to the parliament, assembled in the beginning of 1254, and pressed for a supply. We find no record of this oratorical effort; in fact Matthew Paris expressly says that the king's prolocutor and "messenger" made the speech in question.
In the notice of the chancellorship of William de Kilkenny, who was promoted to the office, according to Lord Campbell, on the resignation of Queen Eleanor, his lordship sets out with a singular mistake, attributing the dictation of a speech delivered by Henry in April, 1253, to "lord chancellor Kilkenny," who, according to his own shewing, was not appointed till 1254. We cannot moreover find any authority for this statement, which is not borne out by Matthew Paris.
The length to which this notice has extended obliges us to pass over other and equally grave errors. In conclusion we would observe that it has seldom been our lot to find so many inaccuracies in notes, extracts, and references, as in Lord Campbell's work; there is scarcely a Latin quotation correct; for this it must be presumed his lordship is not amenable to criticism, his amanuensis must be censured; yet such carelessness could not fail to detract very materially from the reputation of any writer less above the suspicion of ignorance than we gladly admit Lord Campbell ta be.
- ↑ Taking a circuitous route, by Lincoln and Boston.
- ↑ Pat. 37 Hen. III. m. 4.
- ↑ "Loco magni sigilli nostri quod claudi faciemus usque ad reditum nostrum de partibus predictis." Pat. 37 Henry III. m. 5.
- ↑ Lord Campbell cites this document, wrongly, as Rot. Thes.
- ↑ Henry sailed from Portsmouth on the 6th of August, and all patents and writs subsequent to that date were prepared "coram consilio," and tested by the Queen and Richard earl of Cornwall. "Memorandum quod sexto die Augusti anno regni regis Henrici filii Regis Johannis xxxvijo. transfretavit idem dominus rex usque Wasconiam, et facte fuerunt he subsequentes littere patentes coram consilio ipsius domini regis in Anglia, et continuate usque ad annum ipsius regis xxxviij." Pat. 37 Hen. III. m. 2.