Roundell Palmer, 1st earl of Selborne was a British lord high chancellor (1872–74, 1880–85) who almost singlehandedly drafted a comprehensive judicial-reform measure, the Supreme Court of Judicature Act of 1873.
Background
Roundell Palmer was born on the 27th of November, 1812 in Mixbury, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. His father was rector of the parish, his grandfather and great-grandfather were merchants in the City of London, where their descendants for a long while continued to be influential people; his mother belonged to the family of Roundell, which had been settled for four centuries in the West Riding of Yorkshire.
Education
Roundell was educated at Rugby School and Winchester College. He graduated in 1834 from the University of Oxford, and received his master"s degree in 1836.
Career
A successful equity lawyer and a member of the House of Commons (1847–52, 1853–57, 1861–72), Palmer served as solicitor general (1861–63) and attorney general (1863–65). In April 1868 he voted with a Commons minority against resolutions for disestablishing the Church of Ireland, introduced by William Ewart Gladstone, then chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons. Later that year, Gladstone, the newly appointed prime minister, offered Palmer the lord chancellorship, which he declined. Four years later, however, he accepted the office from Gladstone and was created Baron Selborne. In 1882, when Queen Victoria formally turned over to him the new law court building in London, he received an earldom. He was one of the few ministers to urge the relief of General Charles George (“Chinese”) Gordon’s garrison at Khartoum, the Sudan, besieged (1884–85) by the Mahdist revolutionaries. In 1885 he finally broke with Gladstone over the prime minister’s conversion to the principle of Irish Home Rule.