He attended a party in which Byron and his friends John Hobhouse, Scrope Berdmore Davies, Charles Skinner Matthews and James Wedderburn Webster dressed up as monks.
Byron refers to this party in the canto 1 of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, stating "Now Paphian girls were known to sing and smile/And monks might deem their time was come agen".
A 1921 history of the settlement describes the accepted view of the confrontation:…almost immediately there began between him and the Government ‘those mischievous discussions,’ as the Indian Law Commissioners later termed them, which eventually led to his recall and removal from office.
Claridge eventually travelled to Malacca, but by that point the East India Company was petitioning the British government to remove him from office.
Fullerton was accusing Claridge of ‘extorting higher salaries for the Officers of his Court than the Government deemed proper, on the threat of refusing to administer justice’.
A Calcutta newspaper quoted the British Government as saying that Claridge ‘is not, in point of fact, recalled, for no successor is appointed; he is merely directed to return’.
It is unclear if he was practicing formally as a barrister, but it was at this time that he re-emerges out of the shadows as a player in one of the most notorious legal cases of the era, that of the Gloucester Miser.
James or more popularly Jemmy Wood was the proprietor of one of the oldest private banks in the kingdom, probably the first commoner in England to become a millionaire and a noted miser.
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.
[6] Claridge’s troubles, including implicitly his father’s suicide, the Recordership débâcle 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’[6] 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 ’[6] On 25 July 1848, Hansard [7] reports two interesting speakers in a debate on Sir John Claridge’s right to be appointed to another colonial position.
‘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.
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.’ [7] 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.
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.
He was buried at Leamington Priors Parish, All Saints, but there is no sign of his gravestone; it may have vanished due to headstone removals or perhaps Lady Claridge was unable to afford one.
In 1857, Claridge, living from hand to mouth in genteel poverty, made a gift to his old school of a five volume set of the ‘Arabian Nights’.
His inscription is roughly written across the frontispiece: This copy of the ‘Arabian Nights’ was given to me when I was at Harrow School, nearly 60 years ago (sic), by George Gordon, Lord Byron, Author of ‘Childe Harold’[11] Tenderly, Claridge goes on to recall both his headmaster Butler and master Henry Drury as ‘friend’, but there is no such epithet attached to the giver of the gift, the man who had once been ‘my dearest Byron’.