United as he was by his marriage to the Lytteltons, Grenvilles, and Cobham, he naturally became an adherent and favourite of the Prince of Wales. He probably called the Prince's attention in glowing terms to the possibilities of the Heir Apparent's Duchy of Cornwall, and, at any rate, became His Royal Highness's parliamentary manager in the West, the realm of rotten boroughs. There the Prince was flattered, or flattered himself, with influence as Duke of Cornwall, in a region where Lord Falmouth, the famous threatener of 'we are seven,' and Thomas himself exercised a more substantial sway. He enjoyed a fleeting triumph at the General Election of 1741, not unaccompanied with the constant quarrels which were the vital element of his family. As a reward he was appointed in 1742 Warden of the Stannaries. Then he seems to decay. The General Election of 1747, on which he had built high hopes, brought him nothing but debt and disaster. He writes in despair to the Prince, and Frederick sends kindly and reassuring messages in reply; but he was now ruined, and his last prospects vanished with the Prince of Wales, on whose death he was superseded in the Stannaries; this perhaps marks the date of his final catastrophe. At any rate, there was a financial collapse, and he had to go abroad. Shelburne met him at Utrecht and heard him hold forth in the true Pitt style, abusing his brother William as a hypocrite and scoundrel, with a great flow of language and a quantity of illustrative anecdotes. 'A bad man,' says Horace Walpole. 'Never was ill-nature so dull as his, never dullness so vain.' Shelburne hints that he was mad, or nearly mad, and that, though not actually confined, he was obliged to live a very retired life, complicated by straitened circumstances. 'The unhappy man,' as William calls him, had never been on cordial terms with his brother: they had had the usual family wrangles about property, and recently, in his distress, Thomas had solicited from William, now Secretary of State and supreme, the appointment of Minister to the Swiss Cantons. He might have foreseen refusal, for he was fit for no such employment, and William was sensitive as to charges of favour to his family from the Crown. But men are friendly judges of their own fitness for any post which they may happen to desire, and Thomas did not care, probably, to have his merits or demerits so justly appraised by his junior; so he spent his time of exile in denouncing to any audience that was attracted by his name, the ingratitude and neglect of his successful relative. He died in July 1761, and William frigidly announces to his nephew the death of 'the unhappy man' from apoplexy. This nephew was created Lord Camelford under the auspices of his first cousin, the younger Pitt, whom, by the way, Pitt-like, he seems unable to forgive for this favour, as he never mentions his creator. The malicious bards of the Rolliad hinted that the peerage accrued from some borough-mongering transaction: