Suspicion tainted every political breeze. The vigilant celibates in Cranford did not keep a closer watch on their neighbours' proceedings than did the public men of those days on each other. The mere fact of Pitt's commending a project of Cumberland, his former enemy, at once implied to Hardwicke that he was in harmony and understanding with Fox, Cumberland's right-hand man. And indeed Bubb assures us that this was the case. Fox and Pitt were agreed as to the division of the spoils, when spoils there should be. Fox was to be head of the Treasury and Pitt Secretary of State; 'but neither will assist the other.' All this came to nothing, and therefore need not detain us now; for Pitt was occupied with something far more vital to him than Fox, or Newcastle, or the distant echoes of American warfare. He had come up from Wotton, the residence of George Grenville, where in the last days of September he had plighted his troth to Lady Hester Grenville, the sister of the Grenvilles, and he was now hurrying back to join her at Stowe. The engagement was in some respects remarkable. Pitt was now forty-six and Lady Hester was thirty-three. When Pitt first went to Stowe in 1735 she was fourteen, and in the nineteen years that had elapsed they must have seen each other constantly. How was it then that the cripple of forty-six suddenly flung away his crutches to throw himself at the feet of this mature young lady? It seems inexplicable, but love affairs are often inexplicable. And we know little or nothing of Pitt's loves. Except the childish passage at Besançon, there is only the statement of Horace Walpole, a spiteful gossip if ever there was one, that Lady Archibald Hamilton had lost the affections of Frederick Prince of Wales by giving him Pitt as a rival.[265] This lacks confirmation and even probability. Were it true, it might be a clue to phases of Pitt's connection with Leicester House. He seems, too, as we have seen in a letter of Lyttelton's, to have had a tenderness for Lyttelton's sister Molly. Then there was another Molly, Molly West, with whom, it is said, he had been in love, the sister of his friend Gilbert, who afterwards married Admiral Hood, Lord Bridport. Want of means, we are told, prevented their union. But the authority for this is unknown to us.[266]