Lord Clive purchased, as his town residence, the lease of the excellent and spacious house, which still belongs to his family, in Berkeley Square. He made several improvements on Styche; but the house and lands being on a limited scale for his fortune, he bought the estate of Walcot, and employed a celebrated architect[192] to render the mansion suitable to the residence of his family. His kind attentions to his parents appear to have been greater than ever; and when on the eve of returning to India, though his agents' letters show that the purchases he had made and the stoppage of his jaghire had so embarrassed him, that he had no money at command, he generously gave a bond to each of his five sisters for 2,000_l._, in addition to the present to the same amount which he had before given them. Lord Clive carried to India Mr. Strachey, and Captain Maskelyne, a brother to Lady Clive. He exerted his utmost efforts to forward the interests of her other brother, Mr. Nevil Maskelyne of Cambridge; and these efforts, supported as they were by the great science and high character of that gentleman, obtained for him the Regius professorship at Woolwich.[193] Mr. George Clive, who (as has been before stated) brought home a moderate fortune, improved it by marriage; and was too comfortably settled to return to India. Mr. Scrafton had become a Director; but his grave duties do not appear to have deprived him of his usual high spirits. In one letter, he warns Lord Clive, that he is now in a different relation to him, being "one of his honourable masters." In another, he gives a humorous account of some of their mutual acquaintances and friends. "I add this letter," he observes, "to give you an account of that arch Tory Harry[194], who, having shook off a load of gout at Mortlake, is come to town so pert, so envenomed with toryism, that he is quite unsufferable. He goes about boasting of your Lordship's conversion, abuses Mr. Pitt, impeaching his patriotism and honour, because a private gentleman has left him an estate which he swears he has no right to, and that the will should be set aside, for that the man who made it must have been _non com._; trumps up the Duchess of Marlborough's legacy, the Hanover millstone, &c. &c.; swears Lord Bute is the only man of merit, and Tories the only true patriots. * * * * Young Walcot has married a parson's daughter _sans un sol_; and Walsh has married a country-house, that will run away with more money, and give him more plague, than half the wives in England. Poor Daddy King is half eat up with the gout; has just one hand left to play at cards, and the free use of his tongue, so that he has as much enjoyment of his faculties as if his whole body were at ease." Lord Clive's friend Mr. Pigot returned to England before his Lordship left it: his fortune[195] was reported to be very large; and through the influence it enabled him to establish, he attained first a baronetcy, and afterwards a peerage.