ni,—the only instrument by which, on solemn occasions, the will of the sovereign can be expressed. Absolute faith is universally given to every document purporting to be under the Great Seal, as having been duly sealed with it by the authority of the sovereign. The law, therefore, takes anxious precautions to guard against any abuse of it. To counterfeit the Great Seal is high treason, and there are only certain modes in which the genuine great seal can be lawfully used.
In stormy times these potent symbols of authority have passed through many vicissitudes. It has been usual to consider the Great Seal as inseparable from the person of an existing chancellor; but there were often concurrently a chancellor and a keeper of the Great Seal. When the king went abroad, sometimes the chancellor accompanied him with the Great Seal, another seal being delivered to a vice-chancellor, to be used for the sealing of writs and despatch of ordinary business; and sometimes the chancellor remained at home while the vice-chancellor attended his sovereign. When Richard I. went to the wars in Palestine, Longchamp, his chancellor, remained in England; but while he held the office he always had vice-chancellors acting under him, who were intrusted with the custody of the Great Seal. Hoveden relates that while Longchamp stayed in England to administer the government, Malchien, as vice-chancellor, attended Richard in Sicily, on his way to Palestine. Off Cyprus the unfortunate man fell overboard, having the Great Seal suspended round his neck; and both man and seal found a watery grave.
In 1206 King John, to raise money for his necessities, put up the Great Seal at auction, and it was purchased by one Walter De Gray, who paid down 5,000 marks (equal to £61,245 of present money) for it during the term of his natural life, and the grant was made out to him in due form. Under this he actually held the chancellorship for six years.
It is somewhat surprising among the "Lives of the Chancellors" to find recorded the history of a woman. The only lady keeper of the Great Seal was Queen Eleanor, who was appointed by King Henry custodian of the Great Seal, in the summer of 1253, when he was about to lead an expedition into Gascony to quell an insurrection in that province. She held the office nearly a whole year, performing all its duties, as well judicial as ministerial.
In 1688, on the landing of William the Prince of Orange, James II. conceived the plan of destroying the Great Seal, believing that without it the government could not be conducted. On the night of December 10, he left Whitehall, completely disguised, accompanied by Sir Edward Hales, whom he afterwards created Earl of Tenterden. London Bridge (which they durst not cross), being then the only one over the Thames, they drove in a hackney-coach to the horseferry, Westminster; and as they crossed the river in a boat, the king threw the Great Seal into the water, and thought that he had sunk with it, forever, the fortunes of the Prince of Orange. But this seal, the emblem of sovereign sway, which had been thrown into the Thames, was found shortly after in the net of a fisherman near Lambeth, and was delivered by him to the Lords of Council, who were resolved to place it in the hands of the founder of the new dynasty. This finding called forth the observation from Sir John Dalrymple, "that Heaven seemed by this accident to declare that the laws, the constitution, and the sovereignty of Great Britain were not to depend on the frailty of man."
About a century later, March 24, 1784, London was thrown into consternation by the news that the Great Seal had been stolen from Lord Thurlow, who was then Lord Chancellor; and many who attached a superstitious reverence to this bawble imagined that for want of it all the functions of the executive government must be suspended. A charge was brought against the Whigs, that, to prevent the threatened dissolution, they had burglariously broken into the Lord
