The fatigues of two anxious and exhausting sessions had not improved his health, so shattered before. How long he remained abroad does not appear. During the subsequent session, as all attempts to fix upon him any act of criminality during his first government of Bengal had totally failed, some feeble and malignant efforts were made, through the public papers, to throw suspicion on his conduct during his last administration there. But they were too miserable to be persisted in, or to produce any effect; and were only the last dregs of enmity, meant, perhaps, less to answer their apparent object than to vex and harass the sensitive feelings of a noble mind.[204]
During the remainder of 1773, and in the following year, which was the last of his life, he seems to have very much relaxed in the frequency of his epistolary correspondence. But it is a characteristic of his native warmth of attachment, and steady regard for his friends, that a great proportion of the letters written during that period consists of recommendatory letters. Some of them contain instances of very earnest and active exertions in behalf of those whom he befriended. He seems, in particular, to have used great exertions to procure the government of Bombay for General Carnac; and one letter, written only six weeks before his death, is addressed to Lord North, to forward the interest of his friend Mr. Strachey.
Though the ministers of the Company which he had so nobly served, had requited his services with persecution and ingratitude, the injury that most deeply wounds the most generous spirit, he had many sources of happiness around him. He was happy in his family; he had a numerous circle of friends warmly attached to him; he had a princely fortune and generosity to use it. He enjoyed a reputation of the highest class as a soldier and a statesman. His political influence was considerable; he was still little beyond the middle period of active life. But his residence in India, and the fatigues, mental and bodily, which he had undergone there, had long since ruined his constitution. He suffered from a derangement of the liver, the fatal disease of warm countries, which exposed him to frequent and violent attacks of bile. But above all, he had been subject to excruciating attacks of pain from gall-stones, attended with severe spasms, both before he left India and since his return. To moderate these, he had long called in the dangerous aid of opium; a remedy which, while it alleviates the present suffering, is generally followed by corresponding depression of spirits, and requires to be used in constantly increasing quantities. He had been driven to the use of this drug when first in India, and probably had never abandoned it, as a few days after his last return to Bengal, writing to Mr. Billers[207], the chief at Patna, he asks him to procure for him five or six pounds of the purest opium that could be got: "As this medicine," continues he, "is entirely for my own use, and I find great difficulty in procuring any other than what has been adulterated, I depend on your judgment in purchasing some that is perfectly good and genuine." When he first went to France, we have seen that he had been able in some measure to reduce the quantity which he had been in the habit of using during his previous illness. In November, 1774, when in Berkeley Square, he had a violent return of his complaint. On the 21st and 22d he endured extreme agony, and had recourse, for relief, to powerful doses of laudanum. Though he had perfect command of his faculties, he testified much impatience under his sufferings. It is probable that the excessive acuteness of the paroxysms of pain, arising from the gall-stones, combined with the effects of the medicine which he had used, acting on his feverish irritability, led to the melancholy event which ensued. The feelings of disappointed hope, and wounded dignity, which had long haunted his haughty soul, were but little calculated to soothe him at such a moment. He expired on the 22d of November, soon after he had completed his forty-ninth year, and was buried in his native parish of Moreton-Say.