Some four years afterwards Ann received this short note, which shows that there was no rupture of relations; and the tone indeed is cordial for the period, when the expression of the warmest affection was far from gushing.
Burton-Pynsent Aug. ye 1st 1765.
I am extremely obliged to you, Dear Sister, for the trouble you are so good to take of writing to enquire after my health, which I found mend on the journey and by change of air. I still continue lame, but have left off one Crutch, which is no small advance; tho' with only one Wing my flights, you will imagine, are as yet very short: the Country of Somersetshire is beautifull and tempts much to extend them. I hope your health is much better and that you have found the way to subdue all your complaints, or at least to reduce them within such bounds, as leave your life comfortable and agreeable. Lady Chatham desires to present her compliments to you.
I am Dear Sister Your affectionate Brother
William Pitt.
And now there come the last sad words, the last sign of life that William gives to Ann. It is not without significance that even at this period of prostration he bids his wife tell Ann that his official life is ended. It does not appear that there had ever been or was ever to be any formal reconciliation between them. But through all the gusts and squalls and storms that had troubled their intercourse an underlying tenderness had survived.
Hayes. Oct. 21st. 1768.
Madam,—The very weak and broken state of my Lord's health having reduced him to the necessity of supplicating the King to grant him the permission to resign the Privy Seal, he has desir'd I wou'd communicate this Step to You.
I am Madam, Your most Obedient Humble Servant
H. Chatham.
About this time (1768) she took up her abode at Kensington Gravel Pits, in the region of Notting Hill, 'where out of a very ugly odd house and a flat piece of ground with a little dirty pond in the middle of it, she has made a very pretty place; she says she has "hurt her understanding" in trying to make it so.'[86] Before that time she seems to have lived for a while at Twickenham; at least Horace Walpole speaks of her as a close neighbour. Being fairly launched as a pensioner, she throve on the system, and eventually accumulated a treble allowance; this Bute pension, another procured by M. de Nivernois, and another, mentioned by Horace Walpole in a letter of Nov. 25, 1764, which must have raised her whole income from this source to some 1500l. a year. On this she entertained, and frolicked, and danced. We hear of her choice but miniature balls, and her band of French horns, which Horace Walpole enjoyed and described. But her intercourse with William, once so bright and genial, was ended, and that is all with which we are here concerned. A frigid letter or two counted as nothing in a connection which had once been as intimate as it was delightful.
Ann went on living at Kensington a somewhat frivolous life so far as we know anything about it, in intimate relations with Horace Walpole and his society. But in 1774 she went abroad, under the auspices of the Butes, to Italy, to Pisa and elsewhere. Then came her brother's sudden death. Though she had been so long aloof from him, the shock finally shattered her reason, which, it would appear, had already given cause for apprehension. Chatham died May 11, 1778. She soon returned to England, and in the October of that year Horace Walpole writes that she is 'in a very wild way, and they think must be confined.'[87] In the following May he announces that she is actually under restraint.[88] There is a letter at Chevening from her to her niece, Lady Mahon, dated 'Burnham, May 9, 1779,' which betrays her distraught condition. Burnham was probably that 'one of Dr. Duffell's houses' to which she had been removed. On Feb. 9, 1781, she dies, still in confinement. Lady Bute, it should be noted, was kind and attentive to the end.[89]
'She was in Italy at the time of his (Chatham's) death,' writes Lord Camelford, who was probably there too. 'I can bear witness that the grief she felt at the reflection of his having died without a reconciliation with her made such an impression of tenderness on her mind that not only obliterated all remembrance of his unkindness, but recoiled upon herself, as if she had been the offending party, and doubtless contributed greatly to the melancholy state in which she died.'
Horace Walpole, who had come to hate all Pitts, confirms this in his sardonic way. 'Did I tell you that Mrs Ann Pitt is returned and acts great grief for her brother?' and he goes on to say that Camelford himself 'gave a little into that mummery, even to me; forgetting how much I must remember of his aversion to his uncle.'
There were perhaps few genuine tears save those of wife and children shed over the grave of the grim, disconcerting old statesman, for men of his type are beyond friendship: they inspire awe, not affection; they deal with masses, not with individuals; they have followers, admirers, and an envious host of enemies, rarely a friend. But Ann had no reason to feign grief or self-reproach. She had lost her first love, her only love, the love of her life. It is probable that the brother and sister had understood each other throughout in their quick-kindling, petulant way. 'My brother, who has always seemed to guess and understand all I felt of every kind,' she wrote in 1757;[90] a sentence which is a clue to all. The memory of childhood, the glad sympathies of youth, the impressions received when their characters were plastic and fresh, the habit of close intimacy for the score of years during which intimacy was possible for him, all these contributed to form a bond which survived the skirmishes and collisions of their later lives. Two persons of highly charged temperament, and of natures too much akin, who understood each other, respected each other, and perhaps secretly enjoyed each other's ebullitions, such were Ann and William after they separated in 1746. Their long affection is interesting if only that it seemed impossible that two such characters should agree even for a time. And therefore, though the narrative of this episode has swollen beyond all limit and proportion, the space is not lost, for it is invaluable to the student of Pitt's career. It lights up the only expressed tenderness in his life, it is the one relief to his sombre nature, it is the sole record that we have of the unbending of that grim and stately figure.