Soon after the death of his patron, the Duke of Albemarle, Sloane returned to England. In 1693 he was secretary to the Royal Society, of which he edited the transactions for twenty years, contributing twenty-two papers. Of these one was an account of the earthquake of 1692 which destroyed Port Royal, already alluded to. Meantime he practised with great success as a physician. In 1716 he was created a baronet, being the first physician so honoured, and made physician-general to the army; from 1719 to 1735 he was president of the College of Physicians; and in 1727 president of the Royal Society. He bequeathed his books, manuscripts, prints and curiosities (including his Jamaica collections) to the nation, on condition that £20,000 (or less than half of what they had cost him) was paid to his executors. The collection formed the basis of the British Museum. He gave to the Apothecaries Company the freehold of the physic garden at Chelsea, and he assisted to start the Foundling Hospital. Tradition points to a house (now No. 14), in what has been known as Nugent Street, Spanish Town, for upwards of a century, as the residence of Sloane. In a MS. scrap book called “The Omnibus, or Jamaica Scrap Book,” in the West India Library of the Institute of Jamaica, dating from about 1840, there is an account of Sir Hans Sloane, wherein it states: “This celebrated naturalist during his stay in Jamaica resided in the old Spanish fronted building which was till about the year 1828 to be discerned in the lane at the back of the King’s House in Spanish Town, and which about that period came by purchase into the hands of a tradesman, who, without any respect to its former possessor, razed it to the ground and erected upon the site a blacksmith’s shop and other tradesmen’s offices, at which period some of his etchings, were discovered in a ruined outhouse.” The present building is of a type that has existed in the colony “from time.” Previous to the building of a _King’s House_, the governors of Jamaica apparently lived in whatever house they chose. From the following entry in the Council Minutes of June 16, 1684, it would appear that there were in 1683 two King’s Houses, one at Port Royal and one at Spanish Town: “Ordered that His Excellency’s order shall be sufficient warrant for issuing money for the fortifications, repair of the King’s Houses, &c., according to the Act of this country”; and this is confirmed by the accounts of the Receiver-General for 1684–85, which contains references to the “King’s House at Town” [Spanish Town] and the King’s House at Port Royal. In July 1689 it was reported that in the Duke of Albemarle’s time (December 1687 to October 1688) the King’s House at Port Royal had been appointed for a Popish priest, Thomas Churchill, to say Mass in.