This seems a digression, but at this time Pitt and Walpole were not far apart; they secretly acknowledged each other's power and merit. Pitt had already begun to appreciate the solid sagacity of Walpole, and to repent of some random invective. Walpole saw the rhetorical boy developing into the man of the future, and was more and more anxious to enlist him. 'Sir Robert Walpole,' said Pitt in Parliament at a later period, 'thought well of me, and died at peace with me. He was a truly English minister.'[158] CHAPTER XI. [Sidenote: March 1744.] Soon after this memorable debate France formally declared war against Great Britain in a document reciting the injuries sustained by France at the hands of the 'King of England, Elector of Hanover,' and faction was for the moment laid on one side, though Pitt, while supporting the Government, managed to declare that perdition would attend Carteret as the 'rash author of those measures which have produced this disastrous, impracticable war.' Still Parliament adjourned with comparative harmony in May. Before it met again two events occurred of the greatest importance to Pitt. The first was the death of that vigorous old termagant Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. All through life she had been more bellicose, though with less success, than her illustrious husband, and of late years had devoted her peculiar powers of hatred to Walpole. This bitterness extended even beyond the grave, for by a codicil dated two months before her death she bequeathed legacies to the two men who had most distinguished themselves by their attacks on that Minister. One was Chesterfield, to whom she left 20,000_l._; the other was Pitt, to whom she left 10,000_l._, 'for the noble defence he made for the support of the laws of England, and to prevent the ruin of his country.' Moreover, she seems to have bequeathed to him her 'manor in the County of Buckingham, late the estate of Richard Hampden Esq: and leasehold in Suffolk; and lands etc. in Northampton.'[159] Pitt, in acknowledging the bequest to Marchmont, her executor, demurely and ambiguously replies: 'Give me leave to return your Lordship my thanks for the obliging manner in which you do me the honour to inform me of the Duchess of Marlborough's great goodness to me. The sort of regard I feel for her memory I leave to your Lordship's heart to suggest to you.'[160] Nor was this legacy all, for she settled her Wimbledon estate on her favourite grandson John Spencer, and after him on his only son; should that only son die without issue, it was to be divided between Chesterfield and Pitt. She, moreover, induced John Spencer to make a will bequeathing his own Sunderland estates to Pitt after his own sickly son.[161] Two years afterwards Spencer himself died at the age of thirty-seven 'because he would not be abridged of those invaluable blessings of an English subject, brandy, small beer and tobacco,'[162] so that only a child stood between Pitt and this great inheritance.