It may be only a coincidence, but £700 is the sum specifically mentioned in the proceedings brought by Colonel Fielding in October 1722, five months after the loss of his Chancery suit, against the cardsharper, Robert Midford, who was then apparently threatening him with outlawry for the recovery of the gambling debt begun, as we have seen, at Princes' Coffee-house six years before. Had the colonel borrowed the £700 from Mrs Cottington, with intent to discharge those debts; and, on being brought to law by her (on her nephews' and nieces' behalf) for that debt, did it occur to him to escape from the clutches of the psuedo "Captain" Midford by pleading, as he now does in this Bill of 1722, that he "was tricked," and also "that gaming is illegal"? The latter plea has something of unconscious humour in the mouth of a gentleman who had lately lost £500 at faro. With this last echo of the coffee-house of St James's, and of the colonel's financial difficulties, that brave soldier, if somewhat reckless gambler, the Hon. Edmund Fielding vanishes from sight, as far as the life of his eldest son is concerned. At the triumphant conclusion of his grandmother's suit Henry Fielding would be just fifteen years of age, and it is impossible not to wonder what side he took in these spirited family conflicts. No evidence, however, on such points appears in the dry legal documents; and all that we have for guide as to the effect in this impressionable time of his boyhood of the long months of contest, and of his strictly ordered holidays with his grandmother, is the declaration on the one hand that "filial piety ... his nearest relations agree was a shining part of his character," and on the other, the undeniably strong Protestant bias that appears in his writing. Of his aunt, Mrs Cottington, we get one later glimpse, when in 1723 she is made his trustee, in place of his uncle, Davidge Gould, Mrs Cottington being then resident in Salisbury. At the end of the following year, however, in December 1724, Davidge Gould resumes his trusteeship, and with the record of that fact the disclosures yielded by these ancient parchments as to Henry Fielding's stormy boyhood come to an end.