The Most Famous Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
The chief officer of the Duchy of Lancaster, the organization I am studying for my PhD, is its chancellor. In the medieval and early modern period, the chancellor was responsible for the duchy’s writing office, issuing multiple commands to the duchy’s officials throughout England and Wales. He also presided over the duchy’s council on administrative matters and sat as president of it when it convened as a court to judge cases brought by the duchy’s tenants. What is interesting is that this office has survived until the modern day. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster still sits in the British cabinet. And the most famous chancellor was not from the medieval or early modern age. In fact, he has quite the global reputation. Perhaps you have heard of him: Sir Winston Spencer-Churchill
Sir Winston-Spencer Churchill, painted by Sir William Orpen in 1916. Churchill always thought this portrait captured him best.
Churchill held the office of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster for only six months in 1915.[1] For him, it was a demotion. He received it after he was removed as First Lord of the Admiralty, the civilian head of the Royal Navy (akin to the Secretary of the Navy in the United States). Despite his success in readying the fleet for the Great War in 1914, the disaster of the Gallipoli campaign in the Mediterranean and the organization of a new national government forced him from the Admiralty. The chancellor’s duties were not what they once were by 1915. Churchill was limited to appointing the county justices of the peace where the Duchy held sway and presiding over the management of the duchy as the king’s private estate, which took less than a day a week.[2] The rest of Churchill’s time in the new cabinet was as minister without portfolio, very much what the office of chancellor is in the twenty-first century as well. Churchill may have regarded the office as a “sinecure and backwater,” but it did allow him access to the cabinet and therefore access to the planning of the war effort for the rest of 1915. Yet in November 1915, Churchill resigned the chancellorship and his role in government to join his own regiment in France on active service.[3] He would later write to his wife of his time as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the following vein: “How I could have spent so many months in impotent misery, which might have been spent in war, I cannot tell.”[4] Misery the chancellorship might have been for him, but Churchill obviously learned that it enabled the British prime minister to keep on a close advisor who was not really suited for more significant appointments. From 1941 to 1943, as Churchill led the British Empire against the malaise of Hitler’s Nazi villainy, in a cabinet reshuffle of his own, he appointed his friend Alfred Duff Cooper (father of the historian John Julius Norwich) as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. This allowed Cooper to continue influencing the war policy from inside the cabinet. Today, the office is held by Pat McFadden, a supporter of the current prime minister, Sir Kier Starmer. When the office was first created in the fourteenth century, its purpose was to help aid in the governance of the English realm. Over 650 years later, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is still doing just that.[5]
[1] Churchill's Political Offices, 1906 - 1955 - International Churchill Society (winstonchurchill.org)
[2] A. Roberts, Churchill: Walking With Destiny (London and New York, 2018), 219.
[3] Roberts, Churchill, 225-30.
[4] Ibid, 232.
[5] Ibid, 667.