he was sixty-five years of age; and though his equanimity and wonderful constitution still seemed to befriend him, he had personally little desire, even if the ways had been open, to recover his ancient power. 'I believe nothing could prevail on him to return to the Treasury,' writes his son to Mann in 1743. 'He says he will keep the 12th of February—the day he resigned—with his family as long as he lives.' He continued nevertheless, to assist his old master with his counsel, and more than one step of importance by which the King startled his new Ministry owed its origin to a confidential consultation with Lord Orford. When, in January, 1744, the old question of discontinuing the Hanoverian troops was revived with more than ordinary insistence, it was through Lord Orford's timely exertions, and his personal credit with his friends, that the motion was defeated by an overwhelming majority. On the other hand, a further attempt to harass him by another Committee of Secret Inquiry was wholly unsuccessful, and signs were not wanting that his old prestige had by no means departed. Towards the close of 1744, however, his son begins to chronicle a definite decline in his health. He is evidently suffering seriously from stone, and is forbidden to take the least exercise by the King's serjeant-surgeon, that famous Mr. Ranby who was the friend of Hogarth and Fielding.[51] In January of the next year, he is trying a famous specific for his complaint, Mrs. Stephens's medicine. Six weeks later, he has been alarmingly ill for about a month; and although reckoned out of absolute danger, is hardly ever conscious more than four hours out of the four-and-twenty, from the powerful opiates he takes in order to deaden pain. A month later, on the 18th March, 1745, he died at Arlington Street, in his sixty-ninth year. At first his son dares scarcely speak of his loss, but a fortnight afterwards he writes more fully. After showing that the state of his circumstances proved how little truth there had been in the charges of self-enrichment made against him, Walpole goes on to say: 'It is certain, he is dead very poor: his debts, with his legacies, which are trifling, amount to fifty thousand pounds. His estate, a nominal eight thousand a year, much mortgaged. In short, his fondness for Houghton has endangered him. If he had not so overdone it, he might have left such an estate to his family as might have secured the glory of the place for many years: another such debt must expose it to sale. If he had lived, his unbounded generosity and contempt of money would have run him into vast difficulties. However irreparable his personal loss may be to his friends, he certainly died critically well for himself: he had lived to stand the rudest trials with honour, to see his character universally cleared, his enemies brought to infamy for their ignorance or villainy, and the world allowing him to be the only man in England fit to be what he had been; and he died at a time when his age and infirmities prevented his again undertaking the support of a government, which engrossed his whole care, and which he foresaw was falling into the last confusion. In this I hope his judgment failed! His fortune attended him to the last, for he died of the most painful of all distempers, with little or no pain.'[52]
From the Short Notes we learn further: 'He [my father] left me the house in Arlington-street in which he died, £5000 in money, and £1000 a year from the Collector's place in the Custom-house, and the surplus to be divided between my brother Edward and me.'
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