NEW MINISTERS’ CHARGE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 726, 27 July 1929, Page 20

NEW MINISTERS’ CHARGE

A good deal of the constitutional history of England groups itself round the seals of office which tlie King recently handed over to his new Ministers. The oldest way of "signing” a document was by affixing a seal, writes Dermot Morrah, in an English exchange. King John did not sign Magna Carta with a quill pen, but by putting on the Great Seal of England. This great seal has been from time immemorial the formal instrument of sovereign power; aud the Lord Chancellor is its child. A Chancellor was originally the keeper of the seal; every mediaeval personage of note had his chancellor, or secretary; and the King’s Chancellor was “Secretary of State for all departments.” But our early kings were always losing control over their secretaries. The chancellor gradually became less and less the King’s personal secretary

and more and more a public official; and the King found that he was “signing” with his seal, documents lie had never seen. So he invented a new seal for his more personal use, called the Privy Seal, and appointed a lord to be his secretary and take charge of it. Exactly the same thing happened again. The Lord Privy Seal became just as much a public functionary as the Lord Chancellor; so the Tudors started afresh with what they called the little sqal, or Signet. This was kept by (he secretary of the King’s (personal) estate, but history repeated itself and the “e” of “estate” soon got mislaid. Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State governed England under the authority of the Signet.

Today' the King conducts his personal correspondence through his private secretary, and his “sign manual” or authograph has for many purposes taken the place of a seal: but constitutional historians will not be surprised if in the course of time Lord Stamfordham's successors blossom out into political personages, and someone even more intimately associated with the King has to be brought in to deal with his personal papers. The three principal seals were taken over—the Great Seal by the Lord Chancellor, the Privy Seal by its own Lord Keeper, and the Signet by the Home Secretary as .senior of the Secretaries of State. All other seals are

of minor importance except one, whose history perhaps illustrates best of all the power that once resided in seals. When the Council of the Plantagenet kings sat for financial business at their chequered table, they employed a kind of clerk to keep their seal, the seal of the exchequer. They called him their chancellor, and treated him as a hired servant. But, because he held the seal, he gradually drew to himself all their financial authority. For centuries he took a hack seat in comparison with the Lord High Treasurer: but in the eighteenth reutury that august personage gave way to Lords Commissioners; and today the Treasury is not ruled by its nominal chief, the First Lord, Prime Minister though he generally is, but by the nominal servant, the Chancellor, the man who keeps the seal.