1865 he married again (his first wife having died in 1848) Sarah Constance, daughter of Joseph Johnson Miles, J. P., of Highgate. In 1867 he was made a knight. Owing to an attack of cancer in the cheek, he resigned his office, some weeks before his death, to Mr. Edlin, Q.C. He died, aged 83, 26 March 1874, at his house, West Hill, Highgate, and was buried in the Highgate cemetery. For many years Sir William Bodkin was counsel to the treasury, and the president of the Society of Arts, of which he was one of the earliest and most zealous members. He was also a deputy lieutenant of Middlesex and chairman of the Metropolitan Assessment Sessions.
He is the author of: 1. 'Brief Observations on the Bill now pending in Parliament to amend the Laws relative to the Relief of the Poor in England,' London, 1821. 2. 'A Speech delivered at a Meeting of the Constituents at the Crown Inn, Rochester,' 8 Sept. 1841.
[Debrett's House of Commons, &c. 1872, p. 423; Cooper's Men of the Time, 8th ed.; Hampstead and Highgate Express, 28 March 1874; Times, 25 March 1874; Brit. Mus. Catal.]
BODLEY, Sir JOSIAS (1550?–1618), soldier and military engineer, was the fifth and youngest son of John Bodley of Exeter, of whose sons Sir Thomas Bodley was the eldest. The date of his birth is not known, but it was probably about 1550. His early youth was spent abroad with his family at Wesel and Geneva [see Bodley, Sir Thomas]. He had the same foreign education as the rest of his brothers, and figures with them as one of the correspondents of the learned Drusius. On the return of the family to England, he is said by Wood to have studied for a short time at Merton College, Oxford, but would seem to have left it without taking a degree. For a long interval nothing then is heard of him; we only know from a casual allusion by himself, in his ‘Journey to Lecale,’ to the Polish drinking customs of which he had been a witness, that he at some time visited Poland. He afterwards served in the English army in the Netherlands, and appears in 1598 as captain of a company of old troops withdrawn from Holland for service in Leinster against the great Earl of Tyrone. Thenceforward his life, with short intervals, was spent in military service in Ireland. In 1601, when governor of Newry, he distinguished himself by destroying a village on some small islet called Loghrorcan by Moryson, by means of arrows tipped with wild fire; and in the last months of the same year he was employed as trench-master at the siege of Kinsale, with an allowance of ten shillings per day. In 1603 he was engaged in a like capacity at Waterford, and in various garrisons in Ulster. On 28 May 1604, he had the custody of Duncannon Castle granted to him (by privy seal order of 15 Jan.), and resigned it in June 1606. On 25 March 1604 he was knighted by the lord deputy Mountjoy. In 1605 he was engaged on fortifications in Munster, and seems in that and following years to have been held in high repute for his skill in engineering. In 1607 he was in England, but returned to Ireland with an appointment from the privy council as superintendent of castles, at a stipend of twenty Irish shillings per day; in which work, in that and the next year, he says that he rode over seven hundred miles. The survey for the great Ulster plantation was entrusted to him, with others, in 1609, and was so well performed that in 1616 the king proposed to employ him in a renewed survey of the same province. But he complained in 1611 that he had had no share in the division, and prayed for a ‘competent allowance’ for the rest of his life. The prayer was answered on 3 Dec. 1612 by the issue of letters patent appointing him director-general of fortifications in Ireland for life. In November 1613 he was in England. He had probably come over in the earlier part of the year for the purpose of attending the funeral of his brother Thomas on 29 March, to whose library he had given in 1601 an astronomical sphere (which is now, by loan from the library, preserved in the new observatory at Oxford) and some other brass instruments. Sir Thomas in his will made a bequest to Josias of 100l. with some leasehold property in London, and a release from debt for loans. In 1615 he applied to Secretary Winwood for arrears of his allowance, which were ordered to be paid to him on 19 Jan. 1615–16, and in the application he says that he had served three apprenticeships in the army, a period which would carry back the date of his entering it to about the year 1594. But he had now reached the last years of his service, for on 9 Feb. 1617–18 we find that two successors were jointly appointed to the post of director of fortifications in the room of Bodley, deceased. His burial-place in Ireland has not been recorded.
In the catalogue of Sir James Ware's manuscripts (Dubl. 1648), two productions of his are mentioned. The first is entitled ‘Descriptio (lepida) itineris d. Josiæ Bodleii ad Lecaliam in Ultonia anno 1602.’ This copy is now in the British Museum, Add. MS. 4784, another copy is among the Tanner MSS. in the Bodleian Library, and others are to be met with elsewhere. It is a jocose
