Thomas Edward Bale

Lord Chancellor of Britannia and keeper of the great seals: the government’s senior legal conscience, a close friend of the King, and the official most often required to explain why an urgent action cannot yet be made lawful.

Thomas Edward Bale is Lord Chancellor of Britannia: keeper of the great seals, master of much of chancery procedure, and the minister upon whom the Prime Minister, Sir Alured Marchmont, depends for legality as he depends upon others for money and military obedience. In the capital’s shorthand, Bale guards legality. When a constitutional doubt arises anywhere in the realm, it arrives in the end at his door.

He is older than Marchmont, personally closer to the King, and respected across both Houses for an exactness that can become infuriating when haste is fashionable. He rarely wins a public argument because he seldom conducts one in public. His friendship with King Edmund IV is counted among the quiet stabilisers of the present court, and his influence is the more durable for being so little displayed.

Petitioners know him chiefly through the paper consequences of his caution: a warrant returned for want of one missing authority, a charter clause narrowed until it can survive challenge, a royal instruction made slower and therefore harder to overturn. His writings share the same temper. He has advised newcomers to judge the recovered world first by what it must keep standing, a harbour road, a burial yard, a winter convoy, before trusting titles or theories, and his notes on office hold that a government is better learned from whose carriage has stopped at the door than from any schoolbook constitution.

Companies seldom stand before him, but they feel him. An errand that depends upon a Crown warrant, a charter or a sealed instruction may pass through chancery before it passes to them, and a commission that arrives slower and narrower than its patron promised has very often been through the Lord Chancellor’s office on the way. It is usually the version that holds.

In person

Tall, thin and slightly stooped, the Lord Chancellor is a man in his late sixties, mostly bald but for a narrow silver fringe, clean-shaven, with a long face, a prominent nose and heavy brows above wire spectacles. He wears the dark robes of chancery or the sober dress of a statesman, and is most at home among great seals, warrants and charter papers. His manner is exact and cautious rather than theatrical, that of a man weighing each sentence for its consequences on paper.