All his piteous importunity proved of no avail. His friends turned aside from his petitionings, and the king would give him no help. He came to be regarded as a crack-brained enthusiast, and a wild projector of impracticable things. He could not find any one to believe in his water-commanding engine, though he himself regarded it as of greater worth than either his titles or his estates. It had been his own creation--the child of his brain--the product of studies and experiments extending over nearly forty years. But what signified all this if no one would make use of the invention? His difficulties and embarrassments grew from day to day; and his projects met with increased contumely and even contempt. None valued them, because none understood them. It was even proposed to appropriate to other purposes the premises at Vauxhall, on which he so much plumed himself, but which he had been unable to purchase. To prevent this, he again petitioned the king in 1666, representing that he had expended 9000_l._ in building the house he occupied there as “an operatory for engineers and artists to make public works in,” and “above 50,000_l._ trying conclusions of arts in that operatory which may be useful to his Majesty and his kingdom;” and he concluded by praying that Vauxhall might be granted to him at a fee-farm rent. The Marchioness, his wife, at the same time petitioned the House of Lords, representing the state of poverty to which her husband had been reduced, and that, in consequence of an execution having been put in at Worcester House, through a debt of 6000_l._ which the Marquis had incurred in 1642 to pay the garrison of Monmouth, then in a state of mutiny, he was actually threatened to be turned out of house and home. It is not known what came of this petition; but shortly after its presentation the poor Marquis was beyond all worldly help. Broken in health, harassed, embarrassed, and disappointed, he died in April, 1667, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, and his remains were conveyed to Raglan for interment in the family vault. [16] Letter to some person unknown, quoted by Mr. Dircks from the Badminton MSS.--Dircks’s ‘Life, Times,’ &c., 276. It will be remembered that the Marquis concluded the 98th article of his ‘Century’ with the words, “I call this a semi-omnipotent engine, and do intend that a model thereof be buried with me.” A diligent search for the model has recently been made in the vault under Raglan church, under the direction of Mr. Bennet Woodcroft, whose enthusiasm as a collector of primitive engines and machines is so well known; but the search proved unsuccessful, and no traces of the Marquis’s model could be found. [Illustration: RUINS OF RAGLAN CASTLE. [By Percival Skelton.]] CHAPTER II. SIR SAMUEL MORLAND--DR. DIONYSIUS PAPIN.