Page:The Earl of Auckland.djvu/17

Rh Pitt were colleagues in the Shelburne Ministry. The two men found themselves in close agreement on all questions of economy and finance. During Pitt's long tenure of power Eden was employed on several important missions to France, Spain, Holland, and the United States. In 1793, Pitt made his friend a peer under the title of Lord Auckland. On Pitt's retirement in 1801, Auckland withdrew from active politics into the rural privacy of Eden Farm, where he died of heart disease in 1814, four years after the death of his eldest son. His wife was sister to Lord Minto, a former Governor-General of India, and his eldest daughter, Pitt's first and only love, was married to the Earl of Buckinghamshire, whose family has furnished more than one Governor to Madras.

The new Lord Auckland had taken his degree at Oxford in 1806, had been called three years later to the Bar, and in 1811 had entered the House of Commons, where he voted steadily with the Whigs, until his father's death removed him to 'another place.' When the Whigs in 1830 returned to power after their long exile, Lord Auckland at once found a seat in Lord Grey's Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Four years later he became First Lord of the Admiralty under Grey's successor, Lord Melbourne. Going out with his leader in December, he returned to the same post under the same Premier in the following April. In November, 1835, Lord Auckland sailed for India round the Cape, the Court of Directors having first sped their parting guest with