Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster

“ He has got a fat place; a place, the profits of which would find some hundreds of Englishmen's families in provisions all the year round; be has been made what is called Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which will give him immense patronage, and of course afford him ample means of enriching his family, friends, and dependents, besides his having held places of great salary for many years before. ”

“ Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was successively member of parliament for St Germans, Plympton and Lostwithiel from 1701 to 1742; on two occasions he served as a lord of the treasury; and from 1724 to 1742 he was paymaster-general for Ireland, becoming chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster in 1743. ”

“ It seems to have been understood very early after the statute of Henry VII., that the Duchy of Lancaster was by no means thereby made a separate inheritance from the royal patrimony, since it descended, with the crown, to the half-blood in the instances of Queens Mary and Elizabeth; which it could not have done as the estate of a mere Duke of Lancaster in the common course of legal descent. ”

“ Your correspondent is alarmed lest the honour he claims for the Lancastrians should be denied them, because it has been "discovered that William III. never created himself Duke of Lancaster." Where is it asserted that either he or any other of our sovereigns ever did? When Henry of Bolingbroke merged the lesser name of duke in the greater name of king, he was no more Duke of Lancaster than he was Earl of Derby or Duke of Hereford; but the title of Duke of Lancaster he willed not to be lost altogether as the others were, and therefore by an act of parliament (1 Hen. IV., Art. 81.) ”

“ The queen was defamed, that he that was called the prince was not the king’s son, but a bastard gotten in adultery.” When it is added that the Lancastrian party avoided holding a parliament for three years, because they dared not face it, and that the French were allowed to sack Fowey, Sandwich and other places because there was no English fleet in existence, it is not wonderful that many men thought that the cup of the iniquities of the house of Lancaster was full. ”

“ The lords and prelates crowded round him, entreating him to be pacified, "for no mortal being could give credit to such imputations." The Commons pointed to the fact that they had named Lancaster as their principal adviser, and finally the duke allowed himself to be appeased. But it was clear that the Commons were very strong against him. The majority consisted of the very men who had been opposed to him in 1376 ”

“ Wales had died while the “Good Parliament” was sitting; thus the opposition had been deprived of their strongest support. The prince’s heir was a mere child, Richard of Bordeaux, aged only nine. It was feared by some that Duke John might carry his ambitions so far as to aim at the throne—he could do what he pleased with his doting father, and flaws might have been picked in the marriage of the Black Prince and his wife Joan of Kent, who were cousins, and therefore within the “prohibited degrees.” As a matter of fact Lancaster was a more honest man than his enemies suspected ”

“ Only one duke had been created in England before, and that was fourteen years previously, when the king’s son Edward, the Black Prince, was made duke of Cornwall. This Henry Wryneck died in 1361 without heir male. His second daughter, Blanche, became the wife of John of Gaunt, who thus succeeded to the duke’s inheritance in her right; and on the 13th of November 1362, when King Edward attained the age of fifty, John was created duke of Lancaster, his elder brother, Lionel, being at the same time created duke of Clarence. ”

“ Richard was but ten years of age when he was raised to the throne. The French plundered the coast, and the Scots plundered the Borders. In the presence of such dangers Lancaster and Wykeham forgot their differences, and as Lancaster was too generally distrusted to allow of his acting as regent, the council governed in the name of the young king. Lancaster, however, took the lead, and renewed the war with France with but little result beyond so great a waste of money as to stir up Parliament to claim a control over the expenditure of the Crown. ”

“ Our kings have held inferior titles drawn from other kingdoms, as Duke of Normandy and Earl of Anjou; but Lord Coke says the sovereign cannot be rex and dux in the same realm. The Queen, as queen, holds her palatinate of Lancaster, and the other duchy lands and franchises; but she holds them jure ducatus, so distinguished from those estates which she holds jure coronæ. She cannot however properly be styled Duchess of Lancaster. ”

“ It is equally true that Lancaster was their favourite, and that they would willingly accept him as king; and had he been content to accept the crown as the popular gift, he would have had the highest possible title to it, far beyond any hereditary plea. But Lancaster disdained that only valid ground of right, and determined to claim it by descent. Than this there could be nothing more palpably untenable, for the Earl of March, the grandson of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the third son of Edward III., was the true heir. ”

“ The king's growing infirmities, the prince's mortal illness, and the fuct that the next heir was but a child, naturally directed men's thoughts to the succession; and the position held by Lancaster and his increasing unpopularity prompted the suspicion that he was aiming at the crown. This distrust of his brother was apparently shared by the Black Prince, who also could not fail to be exasperated at the mismanagement of the war since his retirement. Matters came to a crisis when parliament met on 23 April 1376. ”

“ But any claim to popularity which Lancaster’s administration might have advanced on this ground was destroyed by their mismanagement of the finances and the disasters of the foreign war. In fact, there is little doubt that the ecclesiastics he had displaced were far better governors than the partisans he had put in their places. Another party was therefore formed, at the head of which was the Black Prince, a party consisting of those who preferred the old system of government, and which included the higher clergy and the financial reformers. ”

“ In the Scottish war of this year Lancaster was sent with the Earl of Kent and other lords to Newcastle to strengthen the border. They were unable to check the ravages of Douglas, and were forced to remain inactive while he wasted the country almost to the walls of the town. Lancaster attended the parliament held at Leicester in November, and prevailed on the clergy in convocation to make a grant. In spite of the high place which he held in the council and as guardian of the king, he found himself without power, and was denied access to the king by the queen-dowager and Mortimer. ”

“ In spite of a prohibition issued by Edward on 7 Feb., he and others of the barons attended the parliament which met in March 1310 in arms, and by threats of withdrawing their allegiance forced the king to consent to the appointment of twenty-eight ‘ordainers,’ by whom his own authority was to be superseded until Michaelmas 1311, and who were to make ordinances for the redress of grievances and the good government of the kingdom. Lancaster was one of the six co-opted earls on this commission, his father-in-law, Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln and Salisbury, being one of the two co-opting earls. ”

“ As Clarence was King Edward’s third son, while John of Gaunt was his fourth, in ordinary course on the failure of the elder line the issue of Clarence should have taken precedence of that of Lancaster in the succession. But the rights of Clarence were conveyed in the first instance to an only daughter, and the ambition and policy of the house of Lancaster, profiting by advantageous circumstances, enabled them not only to gain possession of the throne but to maintain themselves in it for three generations before they were dispossessed by the representatives of the elder brother. ”

“ The King swore vengeance for the death of his favourite, which led this weak sovereign into a long series of dissentions with the barons, at the head of whom, was the Earl of Lancaster. Both parties now flew to arms, but Lancaster soon found himself ill supported by his compeers, and marching northward for reinforcements from the celebrated Bruce, King of Scotland, the King in the meantime, sent the Earl of Surrey and Kent to besiege the castle of Pontefract, which surrendered at the first summons. Lancaster was next closely pursued by the king with great superiority of numbers. ”

“ The impressive approach to Lancaster Castle is by way of John o’ Gaunt’s gateway, one of the many works added by that historic personage, Shakespeare’s “time-honoured Lancaster,” when his father, Edward the Third, created him Duke of Lancaster and raised Lancashire in consequence to the condition of County Palatine. The “time-honoured” one himself stands in effigy in a niche over the door-way. One would like to think the statue contemporary with him, but the guide-books, from which no derogatory secrets are hid, tell the disappointing tale that it dates only from 1822. ”

“ But there was bitterness and mistrust between the old Lancastrian faction and the Nevilles, and Queen Margaret Restoration of Henry VI. refused to cross to England or to trust her son in the king-maker’s hands. Her partisans doubted his sincerity, while many of the Yorkists who had hitherto followed Warwick in blind admiration found it impossible to reconcile themselves to the new régime. The duke of Clarence in particular, discontented at the triumph of Lancaster, betrayed his father-in-law, and opened secret negotiations with his exiled brother. ”