[75] Madame Besson.
[76] Captain J. Eliot, R.N., was connected through his sister-in-law, Mrs. Eliot of Port Eliot, (née Catherine Elliston), with Gibbon. He died unmarried, an admiral and governor of Newfoundland.
[77] William Ponsonby (1744-1806), eldest son of Speaker Ponsonby, and first Lord Ponsonby.
[78] Thomas Lyttelton (1744-1779), son of the first Lord Lyttelton, afterwards known as "the wicked Lord Lyttelton," had engaged himself, while at Oxford, to a daughter of General Warburton. He was sent abroad, while the settlements were being arranged. The engagement was broken off in consequence of his bad reputation.
[79] Sir Horace Mann (1701-1786) was appointed Assistant Envoy at the Court of Florence in 1737. Three years later he became Envoy, and held the post till his death in 1786. From Florence he kept a close watch on the movements of Charles Stuart, and carried on his voluminous correspondence with Horace Walpole.
[80] George Nassau, Lord Fordwich (1738-1789), who succeeded his father in 1764 as third Earl Cowper, married in 1775 Miss Hannah Gore, and died at Florence in 1789.
[81] The Princess Augusta, eldest child of Frederick, Prince of Wales, born August 11, 1737, married the Duke of Brunswick.
[82] Near Stansted in Sussex, purchased in 1746 from the Earl of Tankerville by Sir Matthew Featherstonhaugh, M.P. for Portsmouth.
[83] The Manor and Mansion-house of Lenborough, in the county of Bucks, passed, by purchase from the families of Ingoldsby and Dormer, into the hands of Mr. John Rogers, of Buckingham, who, about the year 1730, sold them to the grandfather of Edward Gibbon. The "Mansion" was converted into a farmhouse for the tenant of the farm.
[84] The grandfather of Edward Gibbon died in 1736, leaving one son and two daughters. Catherine, the eldest of these two daughters, married Mr. Elliston, of South Weald, Essex, and her only child married, in 1756, Mr. (created in 1784 Lord) Eliot, of Port Eliot in Cornwall. Their three sons were Gibbon's nearest male relatives.