Great Offices of State have come close to achieving this distinction: Herbert Henry Asquith and Winston Churchill both served as Chancellor, Prime Minister and Home Secretary while Harold Macmillan and John Major served as Prime Minister, Chancellor and Foreign Secretary. Rab Butler and Sir John Simon served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary. Two of the Great Offices of State have often been held simultaneously by one person, most recently by Ramsay MacDonald, Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary in 1924; Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, is the only person to have held three of the Great Offices simultaneously, serving
First Lord of the Treasury a royal warrant only in 1905. William Pitt the Younger once opined that the Prime Minister ""ought to be the person at the head of the finances"" (though Pitt also served as Chancellor of the Exchequer for the entirety of his time as Prime Minister, so his linkage of the finance portfolio to the premiership was wider than merely proposing the occupation of the First Lordship of the Treasury by the Prime Minister). Prior to 1841 the First Lord of the Treasury also held the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer unless he was a peer and thus barred from