Catalogue description Records of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Office

The forerunner of the modern office of Chancellor of the Exchequer was the Clerk of the Lord Chancellor when attending sessions at the Exchequer in the early middle ages. By the reign of Henry III the Lord Chancellor had ceased to attend in person and his clerk, who acted as his deputy, had become known as the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The office expanded in the 1540s, when successive holders had held the post simultaneously with the Under-Treasurership, thus acquiring power in both sides of the Exchequer, and consolidated as the effective deputy to the Treasurer during Mildmay's Chancellorship from 1559 to 1589.

When the office of Lord Treasurer was put into commission early in the seventeenth century, the Exchequer became, at least nominally, part of the responsibility of that commission, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, therefore, became a member of it. His rise to prominence dates from his membership of these Treasury Commissions and was unaffected by the decline in the significance of the Exchequer. The new style of commission introduced in 1667 increased his importance, as the Lord Chancellor and the secretaries of state were no longer members. Later on in the eighteenth century, when the First Lord became preoccupied with the wider functions of first minister, the Chancellor became the working head of the Treasury. The modern conception of the office as charged with the efficiency and economy of the whole machine of government and concerned through finance with virtually all the main spheres of government policy was made effective by Gladstone.

The responsibilities of the Chancellor cover the whole range of Treasury business, including control of public expenditure and the direction of economic and financial policy. The Chancellor is the minister responsible for the two great revenue departments, the Board of Inland Revenue and the Board of Customs and Excise, and several smaller departments, including the National Debt Office. Until 1972 he was also responsible for the Stationery Office and the Central Office of Information. Since 1870 he has held the office of Master of the Royal Mint, with power to discharge all its duties by deputy.

The term 'budget', as applied to the Chancellor of the Exchequer's annual statement of national accounts and proposals for the coming year, dates from the 1730s, when it was humorously applied to the wallet or budget (bougette) from which Walpole, as Chancellor, drew his proposals for the year's finance.