Up for auction a RARE! "1st Baron Hatherley" William Wood Hand Written Letter Dated 1889.

ES-3949D

William Page Wood, 1st Baron Hatherley, PC (29

November 1801 – 10 July 1881) was a British lawyer

and statesman who served as a Liberal Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain between 1868 and

1872 in William Ewart Gladstone's

first ministry. Wood was born in London, the second son of Sir Matthew Wood, 1st

Baronet, a London alderman and Lord Mayor who became

famous for befriending Queen Caroline and

braving George IV. Sir Evelyn Wood and Katharine O'Shea were his nephew and niece respectively. He

was educated at Winchester, from which he

was expelled after a revolt against the headmaster, Woodbridge School, Geneva University,

and Trinity College, Cambridge,

where he became a fellow after being 24th wrangler in

1824.

Wood

entered Lincoln's Inn, and

was called to the Bar in

1824, studying conveyancing in John Tyrrell's

chambers. He soon obtained a good practice as an equity draughtsman and

before parliamentary committees.

In 1845 he became a Queen's Counsel, and in 1847 was elected to parliament for the

city of Oxford as

a Liberal. In 1849 he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the County Palatine of

Lancaster, and in 1851 was made Solicitor

General for England and Wales and knighted, vacating the former position in 1852. When his party

returned to power in 1853, he was raised to the bench as a Vice-Chancellor.

In 1868 he was made a Lord Justice of Appeal,

but before the end of the year was selected by Gladstone to be Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and was raised to

the peerage as Baron Hatherley, of Down Hatherley in the County of

Gloucester. He retired in 1872 owing to failing

eyesight, but sat occasionally as a law lord. Wood married Charlotte, daughter

of Edward Moor, in 1830. They had no children. Charlotte's death

in 1878 was a great blow to Wood, from which he never recovered, and he died in

London on 10 July 1881, aged 79. Both are buried in the churchyard in Great Bealings, where Charlotte's brother was rector. The

title became extinct on his death.