Charles Talbot, 1st Baron Talbot

Who was Charles Talbot, 1st Baron Talbot?

Charles Talbot, 1st Baron Talbot PC was a British lawyer and politician. He was Lord Chancellor of Great Britain from 1733 to 1737.

Talbot was the eldest son of William Talbot, Bishop of Durham, a descendant of the 1st Earl of Shrewsbury. He was educated at Eton and Oriel College, Oxford, and became a fellow of All Souls College in 1704. He was called to the bar in 1711, and in 1717 was appointed solicitor general to the prince of Wales. Having been elected a member of the House of Commons in 1720, he became Solicitor General in 1726, and in 1733 he was made lord chancellor and raised to the peerage with the title of Lord Talbot, Baron of Hensol, in the County of Glamorgan.

Talbot proved himself an equity judge of exceptional capacity and of the highest character during the three years of his occupancy of the Woolsack. Among his contemporaries Talbot enjoyed the reputation of a wit; he was a patron of the poet James Thomson, who in The Seasons commemorated a son of his to whom he acted as tutor; and Butler dedicated his famous Analogy to the lord chancellor. The title assumed by Talbot was derived from the Hensol estate in Pendoylan, Glamorgan, which came to him through his wife.