| Honorific-Prefix: | The Right Honourable |
| The Lord Talbot | |
| Monarch1: | George II |
| Primeminister1: | Sir Robert Walpole |
| Office1: | Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain |
| Term Start1: | 29 November 1733 |
| Term End1: | 14 February 1737 |
| Predecessor1: | The Lord King |
| Successor1: | The Lord Hardwicke |
| Birth Date: | 1685 |
| Death Place: | Lincoln's Inn Fields |
| Alma Mater: | Oriel College, Oxford |
| Education: | Eton College |
Charles Talbot, 1st Baron Talbot, (168514 February 1737) was a British lawyer and politician. He was Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain from 1733 to 1737.
Talbot was the eldest son of Rt. Rev. William Talbot, Bishop of Durham, a descendant of the 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, and Catherine King.
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 a capable equity judge during the three years of his occupancy of the Woolsack. Among his contemporaries he 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; Joseph Butler dedicated his famous Analogy to Talbot, as was Upton's edition of Epictetus. The title he assumed derived from the Hensol estate in Pendoylan, Glamorgan, which came to him through his wife.
Talbot is remembered as one of the authors of the Yorke–Talbot slavery opinion, as a crown law officer in 1729. The opinion was sought to determinate the legality of slavery: Talbot and Philip Yorke opined that it was legal. The opinion was relied upon widely before the decision of Lord Mansfield in Somersett's Case.
Talbot married, in the summer of 1708, Cecil Mathew (d. 1720), daughter of Charles Mathew of Castell y Mynach, Glamorganshire, and granddaughter and heiress of David Jenkins of Hensol. There he built a mansion in the Tudor style, known as the Castle. They had five sons, of whom three survived him:
After an illness during which the King and Queen enquired after his health every day, Talbot died on 14February 1737 at his home in Lincoln's Inn Fields.[1] He was succeeded in the title by his second son, William (1710–1782).[2]