was advanced to the attorney-generalship, which he held until the fall of Lord John Russell's second administration in July 1866.
On the accession of Mr. Gladstone to power, in December 1868, Palmer declined the great seal and a peerage rather than consent to the disendowment of the Irish church. He had taken no part in the debates raised in the session of 1867 on Mr. Gladstone's resolution on the subject. On the second reading of the Irish church disestablishment bill he attacked it strongly as an act of injustice (22 March 1869), and voted with the minority against it next day. He did his best to amend the measure in committee. But on other questions he gave an independent support to the administration. On the reference of the Alabama dispute to the international court of arbitration at Geneva, he appeared as counsel for Great Britain, and argued a hopeless case with the utmost patience, tact, and ability. He was generally said at the time to have refused the offer of a fee of 30,000l. for his services, but he is known to have accepted remuneration on a satisfactory scale, and the popular story cannot be corroborated.
On 15 Oct. 1872 Palmer succeeded Lord Hatherley as lord chancellor, and was sworn of the privy council. Three days later he was raised to the peerage of the United Kingdom by the title of Baron Selborne of Selborne in the county of Southampton. In 1865 he had purchased the Temple and Blackmoor estates (of about eighteen hundred acres) in the parish of Selborne, Hampshire, and he built there a house on the site of Blackmoor farmhouse. While digging the foundations the workmen discovered a rich hoard of Roman pottery and coins, an account of which Selborne contributed to the edition of Gilbert White's ‘Natural History of Selborne,’ published in 1875. He procured the formation of Blackmoor into a separate ecclesiastical district, to the endowment of which he contributed not only a large sum of money, but also a church, a parsonage, and schools.
As lord chancellor, Selborne at once proceeded to grapple in a large and statesmanlike spirit with the urgent and formidable problem of judicature reform upon which a royal commission had already reported. His measure, if carried in its original form, would not only have united the superior courts of law and equity and London court of bankruptcy into one supreme court in two principal divisions, original and appellate, but have transferred to the latter division the appellate jurisdiction, not only of the privy council but of the House of Lords, in all but ecclesiastical cases or such as originated in Scotland, Ireland, or the colonies or dependencies of the crown. So radical a reform, however, found favour neither with the profession, nor with the public, nor with the House of Lords; and, though the appellate jurisdiction of the privy council in admiralty and lunacy matters was transferred to the new court of appeal, that of the House of Lords was preserved intact. The London court of bankruptcy was also permitted to retain its independent existence, though it has since been merged in the supreme court. With these and some less important modifications the measure became law on 5 Aug. 1873, and effected a most salutary reform. Besides putting an end to the multiplicity of courts of original jurisdiction in which English justice had been administered for centuries, it provided for the gradual fusion of law and equity into a common system. The first effect indeed of the attempt to administer law and equity concurrently was to increase the uncertainty incident to both, and old practitioners loudly denounced the ‘fusion’ as sheer ‘confusion;’ but the gain to our jurisprudence in precision and symmetry is already apparent, and must in the end do more to expedite and cheapen the administration of justice than the most ingeniously devised system of procedure.
As a law lord sitting in court Palmer displayed a conspicuous reverence for precedent, which never degenerated into superstition. He knew exactly how to penetrate to the true ratio decidendi of a case, and so to elicit universal principles from particular decisions, and how to draw a fine distinction without falling into the vice of hair-splitting. Hence, both as a judge of first instance, sitting for Lord Romilly at the rolls court in 1873, and as lord chancellor, he contributed not a little to the extension and refinement of some of the leading doctrines of our equitable jurisprudence. The principal fault of his judgments was an appearance of excessive elaboration, the facts being stated with perhaps supererogatory fulness and minuteness, and side issues pursued at tedious length. In these respects they compare unfavourably with those of his great contemporaries, Lord Cairns and Sir George Jessel.
With the return of the conservatives to power under Disraeli in February 1874, Selborne was succeeded on the woolsack by Lord Cairns. As a member of the opposition, he took a leading part in the debates in the upper house. His speech of 20 May 1878 on the constitutional question involved in the transport, during peace and without consent
