The Chancery case following his death and disputed will may form the theme of ‘Bleak House’. Wood, who lived alone and had no close relatives, died in early 1834 and left an estate valued at £900,000, (around £40,000,000 today). A will naming Wood’s executors as his beneficiaries was submitted for probate, but then alternative wills appeared and a conspiracy was suspected. A £1000 reward was offered for information about any earlier will. In 1836, at the height of the will controversy, ‘Thomas Leighton, Gent’, an attorney from Gloucester working in London, published a fifty-page pamphlet called ‘Extraordinary facts and circumstances relating to the last will and testament of the late James Wood’. Leighton had attempted to win the reward and, rebuffed, set out the full and complex case in his pamphlet. Sir John Claridge was a business associate of Leighton’s employer, who advised him to take his case to the barrister. Leighton soon started to feel Claridge himself was part of a conspiracy. The knight’s behaviour inexplicably changed from rude and dismissive, to civil and agreeable, and back again. Claridge, though only comparatively briefly involved in the case, receives a storm of opprobrium. This Sir John Thomas Claridge is a son of an Attorney deceased, who lived at Seven Oaks, in Kent, and who was knighted on being sent out as Recorder of Penang; … he petitioned the House of Commons, against the appointment of a party proposed by my Lord Glenelg…as he considered himself better entitled. Claridge’s troubles, including implicitly his father’s suicide, the Recordership debacle and his Commons petition to regain his post in 1835, were clearly known in legal circles. Leighton calls him someone capable of ‘genteel bullying’ and guilty of ‘dirty conduct’ and even employs poetry by the popular contemporary satirist, Peter Pindar, to characterize Sir John as a sinister eminence cooking ‘some rare dish of sin’: ‘The devil’s a fellow of such sterling humour/And all so civil in each act and look ’ Decline and death On 25 July 1848, Hansard reports two interesting speakers in a debate on Sir John Claridge’s right to be appointed to another colonial position. Claridge had spent many years trying to regain his right to a judge’s post and finally to be granted a pension and this was his last petition to Parliament. The opposing speakers were William Gladstone, Secretary of State for the Colonies in the previous Government,