Note 19 — Chapter VI

“Lord Wellesley returned from his glorious administration at a very critical period in our parliamentary history. Mr. Pitt was stricken with the malady which proved fatal—a typhus fever, caught from some accidental infection, when his system was reduced by the stomach complaints he long laboured under. He soon appointed a time when his friend might come to see him. This, their last interview, was in the villa on Putney Heath, where he died a few days after. Lord Wellesley called upon me there many years after: it was then occupied by my brother-in-law, Mr. Eden, whom I was visiting. His lordship showed me the place where those illustrious friends sat. Mr. Pitt was, he said, much emaciated and enfeebled, but retained his gaiety and his constitutionally sanguine disposition; he expressed his confident hopes of recovery. In the adjoining room he lay a corpse the ensuing week; and it is a singular and melancholy circumstance, resembling the stories told of William the Conqueror’s deserted state at his decease, that, some one in the neighbourhood having sent a message to inquire after Mr. Pitt’s state, he found the wicket open, then the door of the house, and, nobody answering the bell, he walked through the rooms till he reached the bed on which the minister’s body lay lifeless, the sole tenant of the mansion of which the doors, a few hours before, were darkened by crowds of suitors alike obsequious and importunate, the vultures whose instinct haunts the carcases only of living ministers.”—Lord Brougham’s Historical Sketches.