from Wood; but on 22 Dec. the other vice-chancellors and the master of the rolls united in a letter to Lord Campbell protesting against this mode of indirectly lecturing a judge of the court of chancery, which obtained him amends from the chancellor. In addition to his judicial work Wood was constantly engaged in commissions on various legal and ecclesiastical topics, on cathedrals, divorce, legal education, consolidation of statute law, and on the university of Cambridge commission. He was also one of the arbitrators in the dispute between the queen and the king of Hanover with regard to the Hanover crown jewels. He became a lord justice of appeal in February 1868, and in the following December was appointed lord chancellor in the first Gladstone administration. His selection was somewhat unexpected, but in fact, at a juncture when the disestablishment of the Irish church was in preparation, Wood's two great characteristics, sound legal learning and earnest churchmanship, fitted him eminently for a place which Roundell Palmer felt that he could not accept owing to his disapproval of the measure. He was then created Baron Hatherley of Hatherley in the county of Gloucester. During his tenure of this office he took an effective part in the Irish church debates, though he was not a finished or attractive speaker. He passed the Bankruptcy Act of 1869—a measure chiefly defective by reason of the encouragement it gave to expense in bankruptcy proceedings and the insufficiency of its safeguards against the dissipation of assets—and the Judicial Committee Act of 1871. He did not pass his judicature bill. The failure of his eyesight led to his resignation in 1872, and he died at 31 George Street, Westminster, on 10 July 1881, and was buried in the churchyard of Great Bealings, Suffolk, five days later. His wife died on 19 Nov. 1898. They had no children, and the peerage became extinct on Hatherley's death.
As a lawyer Hatherley was learned, sound, and industrious; he was a good and efficient judge, and distinguished above most of his colleagues. His decisions were rarely appealed from, and reversed more rarely still. Outside the law he had many activities and interests. When a young man he translated the ‘Novum Organum’ for Basil Montagu's edition of ‘Bacon,’ and through Montagu became intimate with Coleridge, Carlyle, and Irving; with his school-friend Dean Hook he was intimate all his life. He was deeply pious and active in good works. From 1834 onwards he was a member of the committee of the National Society, and from 1836 to 1877 he was a constant Sunday-school teacher in the parish of St. Margaret's, Westminster, in which he lived. His portrait, by George Richmond, is in the National Portrait Gallery, and another is in Fishmongers' Hall. He published several religious and ecclesiastical works, a lecture called ‘Truth and its Counterfeits,’ 1857, a controversial treatise on ‘Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister,’ 1862, and a series of excerpts from the Bible called ‘The Continuity of Scripture,’ 1867, which ran through several editions.
[Stephen's Memoir of Lord Hatherley, 1882; Times, 12 July 1881; St. James's Magazine, new ser. iv. 763.]
WOODALL, JOHN (1556?–1643), surgeon, born about 1556, was son of Richard Woodall of Warwick and his wife Mary, daughter of Peirse Ithell of North Wales. He began life as a military surgeon in Lord Willoughby's regiment in 1591 [see Bertie, Peregrine], and afterwards lived abroad at Stoad in Germany, and, knowing German well, acted as interpreter to an embassy sent thither by Queen Elizabeth. He remained eight years in Germany, travelling also in France and in Poland, where he practised the cure of the plague. In 1599 he was admitted to the Barber-Surgeons Company in London, of which he became a warden in 1627 and master in 1633. He also spent some time in Holland, where he lodged with a Dutchman who lived by making counterfeit mithridate and Venice treacle, of which the former only contained nine simples instead of the seventy-five of the genuine composition, while the treacle was made to seem Venetian by ingeniously marked pewter boxes. On his return he lived in Wood Street, London, and worked hard with his cure in the plague of 1603. He was sent early in James I's reign to Poland on public business. He was elected surgeon to St. Bartholomew's Hospital on 19 Jan. 1616, on the resignation of Richard Mapes, and held office till his own death. In 1612, on the formation of the East India Company into a joint-stock business, Woodall was appointed its first surgeon-general, and continued in office for nearly thirty years. He at once drew up regulations for their surgeons, and exact lists of instruments and remedies for their chests, and in 1617 published, chiefly for their use and that of surgeons in the king's service, ‘The Surgion's Mate, or a Treatise discovering faithfully the due contents of the Surgion's Chest.’ On 26 March 1617–18 his salary was ‘increased to 30l. a year’ (Cal. State Papers, East Indies, 1617–21, p. 141). In 1624 he was accused of employing unskilful surgeons (ib. 1622–4, p. 413).
