THE CLERICAL PRINCE OF SINECURISTS.

Thames Star, Volume VI, Issue 1811, 22 October 1874, Page 3

THE CLERICAL PRINCE OF SINECURISTS.

We lake; the following paragraph from n letter of the Liverpool Mercury's London correspondent:—

" There is living, at the present time, a iclergyman—Tlrarlow by name, who has received about halt' a million of money from the t:ixcs of the country for doing Nothing. Forty years ago, two sinecures which he held were aholished, and he was granted pensions in compensation to the extent of over a £1000 a year. He still lives at a park near Horsham, and continues to draw more than the income of a 'Lord Chancellor without ever having done a stroke of real honest work for it. The facts are set forth in an interesting article in the Contemporary Review, by Francis Rowsell, a very able civil servant, nephew of the Rev. T. Rowsell, onfeof the Queen's Chaplain*." The facts'as to the reverend gentleman s pickings from the public purse have been !set forth year after year in our Almanac. As compensation for the loss of his sinecure office " Patentee of Bankrupts," which was abolished in 1832, he received up to the llth of January last, £308,814 19s. In compensation for the lo*s_oo r another sinecure—that of " Hamper (i.e., hamper of Wastepaper- basket) peeperhe has received £4,028 per annum from 1852, which, for 22 years, would be £88,616 ; and for a third sinecure, that of Prothonotary of the Palatine, of Durham, £398 10a lid,' since 1842,-making £23,738 18s 6d—in all £421,] 69 7s 6d. The Rev. gentleman had the luck to be born son of a Bishop of Durham, by far the richest see in the kingdom at that time; and nephew to Lord Chancellor Thurlow who was eminently Christian in at least one respect, that of taking very good card of those of his own household. The nephew was, appointed to these offices in his boyhood, to one of them it is said when in his cradle ; and as, ho was born in 1788, he must have been in receipt of his " Patentee and Prothonotary " for twenty or thirty years previous to the abolition of the offices, and of Hamper Keeping pay for thirty or forty years. Tako the lesser numbers, and assume the compensation to have been measured by fees and pay, and we have £147,054 30s more' for tho Patentee, £80,560 more for the Hamper Keeper, and £11,956 7s 6d for the Prothonotary—making a grand total of £660 740 j>s for the " three gentlemen in one," all because he had the luck to have a bishop for his father and a Lord Chancellor for his uncle.—Liverpool Financial Reformer. . ■ .