and Sir John Hobhouse. ‘Hobby’, Byron’s best friend and flame-bearer and Claridge’s erstwhile fellow guest at Newstead that Easter many years before, was now a member of the Government. From 1846 to 1852, he was President of the Board of Control, and in this role, played an inexplicably negative part in Claridge’s attempts to gain reparation. Gladstone spoke for the motion, telling the Commons ‘that he had been guilty of no act which should incapacitate him from serving the Crown hereafter in a judicial capacity.’ Claridge wished to be appointed now as a judge in India. Hansard reports a dismissive Hobhouse response: The appointment had taken place twenty years ago, and he had nothing to do with it, and had had nothing to do with the matter at all except having been so unfortunate as to have had a long and by no means agreeable correspondence with that gentleman…He had nothing to say against the character of Sir J. T. Claridge, but he would rather not make him a judge… He wished it was in his power to come to some other conclusion on the subject, and to be able to say that Sir J. T. Claridge was the fittest person to be appointed as judge in India or elsewhere; but he could not give such an answer. The motion was withdrawn. Why was Hobhouse so openly and cruelly dismissive of his and Byron’s old friend? Letters to Hobhouse from Sir Frederic Thesiger, (Frederic Thesiger, 1st Baron Chelmsford) until recently the Attorney General, warmly pleaded his friend Claridge’s case, but they only seemed to rouse Hobhouse’s ire. Hobhouse, who had once pleaded Claridge’s decency and kindness to a dismissive Byron, (‘he wrote me a very kind letter, kind both to me and to you’), now disowned his former associate in the most public manner possible. Without a legal practice or any pension, the Claridge household income declined so far that, in the 1851 census, his wife Mary is recorded as running a ‘scholastic establishment’ in Sidmouth with two 14-year-old local tradesmen's daughters living in. On 20 June 1868, the Claridges' arrival was reported in the ‘Leamington Spa Courier’, but he died the very same day. Claridge’s death certificate states he had died of ‘Apoplexy 10 weeks. Paralysis right side 3 days’ so a stroke is the most likely cause of death. He was buried at Leamington Priors Parish, All Saints,