without the smallest stain on his reputation. I have heard (but at what exact period of his life I know not) that, having accomplished such a sum as he thought would enable him to pass the remainder of his days in peace, he was taken prisoner, together with the greatest part of his effects, on his return to England, and released at the intercession of the Duchess of Portsmouth, who was then in France. He went back to India and made in a shorter time a much larger fortune from the credit he had established and the experience he had acquired.'

However that may be, he now returned promptly to England, by way of Bergen, having shipped on a Danish vessel, and having sent before him in the heel of his son's shoe[5] the precious chattel which made his name famous, until, under his descendants, it acquired a different lustre. This was a prodigious diamond, to which he alludes in his correspondence as his 'grand concern,' which he bought for 48,000l., and sold, after keeping it for some sixteen years, to the Regent of Orleans for the French Crown. It was rather a sonorous than a profitable bargain, for though he sold it for 133,000l., he was never paid in full. He received 40,000l. and three boxes of jewels, but the balance, calculated at 20,000l., was never discharged. He and his descendants reckoned, indeed, that on the whole he was the poorer by the possession of this gem. A tradition remains that the bargain might have fallen through at the last moment but for the shrewdness of the Governor's second son, Lord Londonderry. When Rondet, the royal jeweller, came from Paris to receive it, he criticised the water of the stone. 'His lordship, who was quick enough in business, understood him, and putting a bank-note into his hands, bid him go to the window to see it in a better light. It was then decided to be in all respects perfect.'[6]

It is evident, however, that he was possessed of considerable though exaggerated wealth, and he was probably the first of those nabobs who were to bulk so largely in the drama, the society, and the politics of the eighteenth century. Among these his diamond gave him pre-eminence, and made his name both famous and proverbial. In England he remained for the rest of his life, some sixteen years, dying in 1726. The reformed filibuster had become a power in the land. He had wealth, force of character, political connection, and parliamentary influence. This last must have been an object with him, as we find him sitting for Thirsk instead of his own borough of Old Sarum; and his eldest grandson seems to have inherited a considerable but indefinable interest in the borough-mongering of the West, having definite powers in regard to Okehampton and Sarum, and vaguer connections elsewhere. So the Governor, a staunch Whig and furious anti-Jacobite, with an influential son-in-law in Stanhope, a soldier and statesman who was First Minister for a time, was a man to be reckoned with. He was indeed offered, and had accepted, the Governorship of Jamaica, a high compliment, for it was then a position of peculiar difficulty, but never took up the appointment; finding probably his hands full at home, with an insubordinate family to manage, capital to invest, and estates to superintend.

We find him living at Twickenham, Swallowfield, Blandford, and in Pall Mall, but mainly at Stratford, near Old Sarum. He had indeed contemplated building his principal residence at Blandford, his early home. But the younger children, finding that this would be settled on the eldest son, intercepted his purpose and turned his attention to Swallowfield, 'where, however, he contrived to throw away as much money in a very ugly place with no property about it,'[7] writes his resentful heir.

Finally, in 1726, the Governor was gathered to his fathers, and his spoils caused some disappointment. His wealth had been over-rated, as is perhaps the case with all notorious fortunes, and not well invested; at any rate, he had burned his fingers in the South Sea Bubble. He seems to have left 100,000l. in personal property, though some of that may have consisted in unsubstantial and unrealised advances to Lord Londonderry, or others of his children. He had bought land wherever he could find it (for the sake, perhaps, of influence as much as income), in London (Soho), Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Devonshire, and Cornwall, as well as that most marketable of assets, Old Sarum, and apparently other borough interests. But his greatest acquisition was the noble estate of Boconnoc, which he purchased in 1717 from the widow of that wild Mohun who was slain in duel by his brother-in-law, the Duke of Hamilton. The Governor paid 53,000l. for the estate, a great price in those days; but was held to have got a bargain.[8]

To his family he had always been formidable, but also an object of jealous rapacity and expectation. They wrangled and intrigued for his money both during his life and afterwards, and seem to have been universally dissatisfied by the result. 'From the various characters of these persons' (the Governor's children) 'it is easy to conceive,' writes Lord Camelford, 'in what manner the Governor must have been pulled to pieces by their different passions and interests when he came to realise his wealth in England.' The transactions with Lord Londonderry seem to have been particularly complicated; in fact they were never unravelled. We only gather, as a specimen of them, that after the Governor's death his executors claimed 95,000l. as due from Lord Londonderry; which Lord Londonderry denied, claiming 10,000l. from the estate. Thirty years were vainly spent in the endeavour to clear up this issue, a process rendered all the more arduous by Lord Londonderry's having peremptorily possessed himself of his father's papers after death. Only one case seems to have been free from complication. The Governor stated succinctly that his son John was good for nothing, and so he logically left him nothing. John, however, claimed an annuity which, we may be confident, he never obtained. Thus there were endless disputes, a civil war in the family, not uncongenial, perhaps, to those who waged it; which died out only with the combatants, but which illustrates once more the volcanic character of these truculent Pitts.

It is in his family relations, in his dealings with these ungracious heirs and with his own wife, that the Governor is most vivid and interesting; at any rate, to one who has to trace the heredity of genius and character in his descendants. Thomas Pitt's blood came all aflame from the East, and flowed like burning lava to his remotest descendants, with the exception of Chatham's children; but even then it blazed up again in Hester Stanhope. There was in it, even when it throbbed in the veins of his eldest son and grandson, some tropical, irritant quality which, under happy circumstances and control, might produce genius, but which under ordinary circumstances could only evolve domestic skirmish and friction. The Governor himself, in his dealings with his wife and children, does not seem to