His wife was of the family of Innes in Morayshire, 'of Scotch and Cornish extraction,' says Lord Camelford, and she was lineally descended from the Regent Murray. Sir John Sinclair, like a loyal Scot, attributes the genius and eloquence of the Pitts to their 'fortunate connection ... with a Miss Innes of Redhall, in the Highlands of Scotland.' Of her, nevertheless, in unconsciousness of this obligation, but in receipt of private advices, the Governor writes in terms of implacable hostility. He had heard, he says to his son, 'that your mother has been guilty of some imprudence at the Bath ... let it be what it will, in my esteem she is noe longer my wife, nor will I see her more if I can help it.'[9] But his children were not to be released from duty to her by her supposed misconduct. Four years earlier he had written to Robert: 'If what you write of your mother be true, I think she is mad, and wish she was well secured in Bedlam; but I charge you let nothing she says or does make you undutiful in any respect whatever.' So when they apparently act on the Governor's view of Mrs. Pitt, he turns round and belabours them. 'Have all of you,' he inquires of his eldest son, 'shook hands with shame, that you regard not any of the tyes of Christianity, humanity, consanguinity, duty, good morality, or anything that makes you differ from beasts, but must run from one end of the kingdome to the other, aspersing one another, and aiming at the ruine and destruction of one another?' This genial picture of his offspring does not seem wholly imaginary, for the Governor proceeds: 'That you should dare to doe such an unnatural and opprobrious action as to turne your mother and sisters out of doors?--for which I observe your frivolous reasons, and was astonished to read them; and I no less resent what they did to your child at Stratford. But I see your hand is against every one of them, and every one against you, and your brother William to his last dying minute.' (William had died young, in 1706.) A week later he writes again: 'Not only your letters, but all I have from friends, are stuffed with an account of the hellish confusion that is in my family; and by what I can collect of all my letters, the vileness of your actions on all sides are not to be paralleled in history. Did ever mother, brother, and sisters study one another's ruine and destruction more than my unfortunate and cursed family have done?' He again reverts to the grievance of Robert's having turned his mother and sisters out of doors, though he calls them, in the same letter, 'an infamous wife and children,' and states that he has 'discarded and renounced your mother for ever;' apparently on suspicion, for he makes 'noe distinction between women that are reputed ill and such as are actually soe.' The wife of the Cæsar of Fort St. George had to be above suspicion. Nor is this by any means an isolated passage. From his Eastern satrapy the