In June 1751 she was appointed Keeper of the Privy Purse to the Princess of Wales, and superintendent of the education of the Princess Augusta, afterwards Duchess of Brunswick. She obtained this appointment, we are told, through the interest of Mr. Cresset, the confidential servant and Treasurer of the Princess of Wales, whose authority in the Court soon afterwards gave way to the ascendancy of Lord Bute; though Pitt imagined that here again he could trace the hand of Bolingbroke. 'However,' says Lord Camelford, 'thinking she could be useful to him in so important a post, he sought a reconciliation—he flattered, he menaced, he insulted, but was rejected.'

Of these proceedings two records remain in letters which have already been published, but cannot be omitted here, as they are instinct with passion and light. Whether they answer to Lord Camelford's description must be left to the judgment of those who read them. That they are powerful, tender, and unaffected all must allow. They also contain quotations from the quarrels which are not devoid of interest. Ann had declared that William expected absolute deference and a blind submission to his will; and that he had in several conversations directly explained to her that, to satisfy him, she must live with him as his slave. On this point William admits that he did expect some measure of deference to his views, and that, living together, he thought she might shape her life in some degree to his. This seems to have been the real ground of separation. William wished to be master in his own house. Ann could brook no control. Perhaps the brother may have asked the sister to discontinue or relax her intimacy with the Bolingbrokes, as injurious and inconvenient to him, and Ann, we may guess, would curtly bid him mind his own business. But these are only probabilities.

In the course of these proceedings we learn that William lost his temper, declaring that she had a bad head and a worse heart; for this he humbly begs her pardon.

Another complaint of Ann's is easily explained. She says that William had been talking of the 200l. a year that he allowed her. William's answer makes it perfectly clear that he had been reproached with the fact of his sister's destitute condition, and that he had had to explain, in his own defence, that he gave her this income.

Whether Pitt wished for a reconciliation because his sister had become Privy Purse to the Princess of Wales must be judged by the light of his character. It seems more probable that it was because she had returned from abroad, and that he would now meet her constantly in society. In any case, here are the letters. Whatever Pitt's motives may have been, it is clear that Ann, had she not been a vixen, would have gladly accepted the olive-branch offered by her brother, who, still unmarried, wished to be restored to the companionship which had been the joy of his life, 'that friendship which was my very existence for so many years,' 'a harmony between brother and sister unexampled almost all that time.'

(A)

June 19, 1751. Wednesday morning.

Dear Sister!—As you had been so good to tell me in your note of Monday that you would write to me again soon in a manner capable, you hoped, of effacing every impression of any thing painfull that may have passed from me to you, I did not expect such a letter as I found late last night, and which I have now before me to answer: without any compliment to you, I find myself in point of writing unequal enough to the task; nor have I the slightest desire to sharpen my pen. I have well weighed your letter, and deeply examined your picture of me, for some years past; and indeed, Sister, I still find something within, that firmly assures me I am not that thing which your interpretations of my life (if I can ever be brought to think them all your own) would represent me to be. I have infirmities of temper, blemishes, and faults, if you please, of nature, without end; but the Eye that can't be deceived must judge between us, whether that friendship, which was my very existence for so many years, could ever have received the least flaw, but from umbrages and causes which the quickest sensibility and tenderest jealousy of friendship alone, at first, suggested. It is needless to mark the unhappy epoque, so fatal to a harmony between sister and brother unexampled almost all that time, the loss of which has embitter'd much of my life and will always be an affliction to me. But I will avoid running into vain retrospects and unseasonable effusions of heart, in order to hasten to some particular points of your letter, upon which it is necessary for me to trouble you with a few words. Absolute deference and blind submission to my will, you tell me I have often declared to you in the strongest and most mortifying terms cou'd alone satisfy me. I must here beseech you cooly to reconsider these precise terms, with their epithets; and I will venture to make the appeal to the sacred testimony of your breast, whether there be not exaggeration in them. I have often, too often reproached you, and from warmth of temper, in strong and plain terms, that I found no longer the same consent of minds and agreement of sentiments: and I have certainly declared to you that I cou'd not be satisfy'd with you, and I could no longer find in you any degree of deference towards me. I was never so drunk with presumption as to expect absolute deference and blind submission to my will. A degree of deference to me and to my situation, I frankly own, I did not think too much for me to expect from you, with all the high opinion I really have of your parts. What I expected was too much (as perhaps might be). In our former days friendship had led me into the error. That error is at an end, and you may rest assured, that I can never be so unreasonable as to expect from you, now, anything like deference to me or my opinions. I come next to the small pecuniary assistance which you accepted from me, and which was exactly as you state it, two hundred pounds a year. I declare, upon my honour, I never gave the least foundation for those exaggerations which you say have been spread concerning it. I also declare as solemnly, before God and man, that no consideration cou'd ever have extorted from my lips the least mention of the trifling assistance you accepted from me, but the cruel reports, industriously propagated, and circulating from various quarters round to me, of the state you was left to live in. As to the repayment of this wretched money, allow me, dear Sister, to entreat you to think no more of it. The bare thought of it may surely suffice for your own dignity and for my humiliation, without taxing your present income, merely to mortify me: the demonstration of a blow is, in honour, a blow, and let me conjure you to rest it here. When I want and you abound, I promise you to afford you a better and abler triumph over me, by asking the assistance of your purse. I will now trouble you no farther than to repeat my sincere wishes for your welfare and to rejoice that you have so ample matter for the best of happiness, springing from a heart and mind (to use your own words) entirely devoted to gratitude and duty.

(B)

June 20, 1751. Pay Office.

'Dear Sister!—I am this moment returned out of the Country and find another letter from you. I am extremely sorry that any expressions in mine to you should make you think it necessary for you to trouble yourself to write again, that you might convey upon paper to me, what you would avoid saying in conversation, as disagreeable and painfull. I believe I may venture to refer you to the whole tenor of my letter to convince yourself that I had no desire to irritate; and I assure you very sincerely that the expression, which seems to have had some of that effect, did not in the least flow from a thought that you was capable of intending to represent falsely. I only took the liberty to put it to your candid recollection, whether the very cause you mention, strong feelings and emotions of mind attending them, with regard to conversations of a disagreeable kind, might not have led to some exaggerations of them to your own self. I verily believe this cause, and this alone may have had some of this effect: for sure I am, that I never could wish, much less exact that the object of my whole heart and of my highest opinion and confidence, thro the best part of my days, could be capable of such vileness as absolute deference and blind submission to my will. All I wished and what I but late quite despaired of, I took the liberty to recall to you in my last letter. As to the late conversation you have thought necessary (since your letter of yesterday) to recollect, I am ready to take shame before you, and all mankind, if you please, for having lost my temper, upon any provocation, so far as to use expressions, as foolish as they are angry: that you had a bad head will easily pass for the first: and a worse heart for the last. This you made me angry enough to say: but this I never was, nor I hope shall be, angry enough to think: and this, Sister, I am sure you know. As to the other word, which I am sorry I used because it offended you, I will again beg to appeal to your recollection, whether it was not apply'd to your forbidding me ever to talk to you of every thing that interested you: and as to shaping your life in some degree to mine, which I believe were my very words, let me ask you, if you don't know that they were said in an answer to your telling me that I had in several conversations directly explained to you that to satisfy me you must live with me as my slave? So much, dear Sister, for the several points of your letter; which I am sorry to find it necessary to say so many words upon. I will be with you by nine to-morrow, as that hour seems most convenient to you: is it impossible I may still find you so obliging as not to think any more of repaying what I certainly never lent you, in any other sense than that of giving me a right to your purse, whenever I should want it, and which you must forego some convenience to repay?[79]

Whether a reconciliation took place on this occasion or not we have no evidence apart from Camelford's. But if he is to be believed as to William's motives, there was little to be gained by one, for Ann was soon to leave the Court. Her new office 'very soon grew uneasy to her,' says her nephew, 'through the artifices of her royal pupil.' Horace Walpole gives a different account. 'Being of an intriguing and most ambitious nature, she soon destroyed her own prospect by an impetuosity to govern her mistress and by embarking in other cabals at that Court. Her disgrace followed, but without dismissal, on which she had retired to France.'[80]

'It was then,' says Camelford, 'that her brother, then Secretary of State, made a new overture of reconciliation by a letter that you will read, which had too much the appearance of sincerity and disinterestedness not to be gladly accepted.'