Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/60

40 Rome in 1720. This Jacobite Pigott died in 1770 and his death gave rise to a very singular lawsuit. Some hours after he had expired at Chetwynd, his son and the son of Sir William Codrington, dining at Newmarket without any idea of what had occurred, "ran their fathers' lives one against the other" for five hundred guineas. Such bets were not uncommon in those times, and were not apparently thought indecorous. The elder Pigott was seventy years of age, the elder Codrington only fifty. When Pigott learned that his father's death had occurred prior to the wager, he maintained that the bet was off; but Codrington, or rather Lord March (afterwards Duke of Queensberry), to whom he had assigned the money, insisted on payment. The case came before Lord Mansfield, who held that the impossibility of a contingency did not preclude its being the subject of a wager, if both parties were at the time unaware of that impossibility. He consequently gave judgment against Pigott. In 1774 Pigott was High Sheriff of Shropshire, as his grandfather had been before him. Two years later, sharing the belief of croakers that England was on the brink of ruin, he disposed of Chetwynd, as also, probably, of the manor of Chesterton, in Huntingdonshire. If, as is alleged, estates worth