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Updated: May 26, 2025
Notwithstanding his illustrious descent, Simon Harcourt raised himself to the woolsack by his own exertions, and was in no degree indebted to powerful relatives for his elevation. The son of a knight, whose loyalty to the House of Stuart had impoverished his estate, he spent his student-days at Pembroke, Oxford, and the Inner Temple, in resolute labor, and with few indulgences.
Rather than incur the ridicule of 'going out with a Quaker, and the sin of shooting at a man whom he had actually treated with unjustifiable freedom, Henley retreated from an embarrassing position by making a handsome apology; and years afterwards, when he had risen to the woolsack, he entertained his old acquaintance, Zephaniah Reeve, at a fashionable dinner-party, when he assembled guests were greatly amused by the Lord Chancellor's account of the commencement of his acquaintance with his Quaker friend.
Most persons, I suppose, have observed how the example of a successful ancestor is apt to determine the pursuits of his descendants down to the third and fourth generations, inclining the lads of this house to the sea, and of that to the bar, according as the great man of the family achieved his honors on shipboard, or climbed his way to the woolsack.
Through years of his practice at the bar, he himself, and all who knew him, looked to the woolsack as his certain destination. You remember the many entries in his diary bearing upon the matter; arid I suppose the opinion of the most competent was clear as to his unrivalled fitness for the post. Yet all ended in nothing. The race was not to the swift.
Having pronounced a decision in the House of Lords, which deprived an excellent clergyman of a considerable estate and reduced him to actual indigence, the Chancellor, before quitting the woolsack, addressed the unfortunate suitor thus: "As a judge I have decided against you, whose virtues are not unknown to me; and in acknowledgment of those virtues I beg you to accept from me a presentation to a living now vacant, and worth £600 per annum."
This year a part was proposed by the Right Honorable Aureus de Woolsack in the tribe of Pecus, first commissioner of the Treasury, to the Council of State, which soon after passed the ballot of the Senate and the people, by which the lands of the public revenue, amounting to £1,000,000, were equally divided into £5,000 lots, entered by their names and parcels into a lot-book preserved in the Exchequer.
The post of honour and the post of shame, the general's station and the drummer's, a peer's statue in Westminster Abbey and a seaman's hammock in the bosom of the deep, the mitre and the workhouse, the woolsack and the gallows, the throne and the guillotine the travellers to all are on the great high road, but it has wonderful divergencies, and only Time shall show us whither each traveller is bound.
In the interval, his tastes, feelings, prejudices, and degree of enlightenment were inevitably those of his own order, and the qualifications which he ultimately brought to office were those which he had acquired in the practice and study of his profession. An English Chancellor goes through precisely the same training, and carries to the woolsack the same qualifications.
"You couldn't leave us now if you were on the Woolsack. Play, Orpheus! The Cadi accompanies." With a whoop, a buzz, and a crash, the organ sprang to life under the hand of Giuseppe, and the procession passed through the rained-to-imitate-walnut front door. A moment later we saw the monkey ramping on the roof.
There was no regular army in Elizabeth's time; and the younger sons of gentlemen and well-to-do yeomen, who received from their fathers little more than an education and a very small allowance, and who did not become either military or maritime adventurers, opening their oyster with a sword, entered the Church or the profession of the law in its higher or lower grade; and as at that period there was much more demand for lawyers and much less for clergymen than there is now, and the Church had ceased to be a stepping-stone to political power and patronage, while the law had become more than ever before an avenue to fame, to fortune, and to rank, by far the greater number of these young gentlemen aspired to the woolsack.
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