Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 5.djvu/290

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

[12 S. V. Nov., 1919.

The next entry relative to this affair runs :

" By adjournment on the first day of March, 1749 [1750]. Upon consideration of several affidavits

concerning some irregularities alleged to have

been committed by Henry Broadhead, Esq.......

This Court is of opinion that a representation be drawn up to the Lord High Chancellor against the said Mr. Broadhead It is hereby recom- mended unto His Majesty's Justices of the Peace

to wit Thomas Lane Henry Fielding.. ....and

Walter Berry Esquires to meet together at Hicks Hall on the 'fourteenth day of March to draw up the said representation to the Lord High Chan- cellor against the said Mr. Broadhead."

Then occur entries occasioned by Mr. Broad- head putting in no appearance. Anxious, no doubt, to stave off the day of reckoning, he writes that he is obliged to resort to Bristol for the waters on the advice of his physicians. He is finally given a date on which the justices will proceed to draw up their representation whether he be present or not. It was finally settled and signed on April 26, and Lord Hardwicke appears to have removed Broadhead' s name from the com- mission. His chief offence was a continued practice of declining to proceed in a prose- cution for felony unless the prosecutor paid him for a warrant for arrest in cases whese the prisoner was actually before the Court, and had confessed to the fact.

Within less than a year a similar case was considered at the sessions held on Feb. 25, 26, 27, 28, 1751, at Hick's Hall Fielding being again present. On the last day a very strong representation was drawn up setting forth the malpractices of another justice, Sir Samuel Gower. It was sent -to the Lord Chancellor, but the knight could not have been removed from his office for his name appears as a regular attendant at the sessions for a long time subsequently. His villanies, however, stand recorded against him to this day, and they were of a blacker dye than Broadhead' s.

The persual of these graphic records gives rise to two reflections :

1. Do they not justify up to the hilt Miss Godden's remark that " from the days of his first boyish satires to the last energetic acts of his life as a London magistrate, for Fielding to see an abuse was to set about reforming it " ? (' Memoir,' 1910, p. 61).

2. Was it disgust at Gower going un- punished that determined Fielding to ex- pose that class of character, and have we here the original of " Justice Thrasher " in ' Amelia ' which appeared in December, 1751 ? j. PAUL DE CASTBO.

1 Essex Court, Temple.

NOTES FROM AN OLD DIARY:

THE MOORES OF MILTON PLACED EGHAM, SURREY.

THE accounts of this family which have appeared in the local and county histories are very meagre and inaccurate. This,, however, is not the fault of the compilers and historians, for though the family was an armigerous one, and was seated at Egham for nearly 150 years, they do not ap- pear in the Herald's ' Visitations.' Then, too, though they were wealthy and prolific, only one of them seems to have taken any active part in public life. This member is noticed in the * D.N.B.' under the name of Robert Moor, and the article, though short, contains more than one error, and is altogether mis- leading. There is another obstacle, one that every genealogist and biographer knows to his cost. Like many other families the Moores had a preference for one particular Christian name ; in their case it was Adrian. All the accounts of the family mention but two of that name ; there were at least five Adrians.

The third Adrian pre-deceased his father, who died in 1672, when the family estates passed to another Adrian, whose son Adrian ignored his cousin and heir-at-law, and left Milton Place to a distant relative, William Edgell. Edgell had no son and his daughters died childless or unmarried, so again the property passed to a cousin Richard Wyatt, whose descendants added the name of Edgell to their own.

To the late Arthur Wyatt Edgell I am indebted for the sight of an old diary kept by the Robert Moore above mentioned and his son Robert. For the most part the entries are merely records of the births, deaths, baptisms, and marriages of their numerous progeny, but there are a few notices of current events, and what is of greater interest, many particulars of the career of the elder Robert hitherto unknown.

All his entries are in Latin, as befits a cleric, and from them we learn that he was born at Antwerp in 1568, and not at Holyard, Hants, as stated in the ' D.N.B.' As all his brothers and sisters were born in that city it is evident that the family were settled there. His father was born in 1534 at Brerport (sic), Dorset, and married at Antwerp Katherine Cobinger of Breslau in 1562. The family returned to England about 1574 and Robert entered New College, Oxford, in 1587, proceeded M.A. in 1595, and: was ordained at Salisbury the next year.