Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/33

THE ANCESTOR 13 was not only the first of two witnesses who attested Handel's last will and testament, but he also enjoys the unique distinc- tion of having performed this same duty at the signing of three of these codicils, the technicalities of law forbidding him to take part in the attestation of the fourth and last — for under this codicil he himself became a beneficiary, and in it Handel bequeathed to him a legacy of £^00. The following is the exact text of this bequest : — ' I give to Thomas Harris, Esquire, of Lincoln's Inn Fields, three hundred pounds ' — and by a curious coincidence, Harriot, the daughter of George Amyand (afterwards Sir George Amyand, Bart.), to whom Handel bequeathed a legacy, and who was also one of the executors of his will, became in 1777 the wife of Thomas Harris' nephew, the first Lord Malmesbury. It only remains to be added that Thomas Harris married Catherine, sister to Sir Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham, fifth baronet, of Mersham Hatch in Kent, thus uniting by ties of marriage, for the third time within three generations, the Wyndham and Harris families. He predeceased his wife, without issue, in Mention has frequently been made in the foregoing pages of James Harris, the eldest of the brothers, and it has already been stated that besides being a learned scholar and an ardent musician he was Member of Parliament for Christchurch in Hampshire, a Commissioner of the Admiralty and subsequently at the Treasury, as also towards the end of his life Secretary and Comptroller to the queen of George III. The life of the then head of the Harris family furnishes us with many interest- ing opportunities of becoming acquainted with several of the leading men of the day, as well as of acquiring some informa- tion concerning the opinions then generally held in England of events truly important in our national history. As a man of literature he mixed much in that talented coterie in which Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr. Johnson, David Garrick, Miss Hannah More and others of their sort shone so brilliantly. As a Member of Parliament, who enjoyed the private friendship and implicit confidence of his political chiefs, and as a holder of office, he is often to be found in the society of such eminent men as George Grenville and Lord North ; while in later days, as a member of Queen Charlotte's household, he was privileged to receive many marks of the royal favour from her Majesty ; and, in fact, it was at the joint request of both