After the Restoration Charles II. gave back the Wimbledon manor-house to his widowed mother, {201} but it was too full of sad memories for her to care to live in it, and she sold it in 1661--the year, by the way, of the trial of General Lambert for treason--to John Digby, Earl of Bristol, who with the aid of the famous John Evelyn soon completely transformed it to suit his own taste. It was in the parish church of Wimbledon that the earl made his famous renunciation of the Roman Catholic religion, that was described by the French ambassador, who happened to be present, as an insolent and daring act; and it was whilst he was living in his half-finished mansion that he narrowly escaped arrest somewhat later when Charles II. sent messengers to arrest him. The Earl of Bristol died at Wimbledon in 1676, and his estate, after changing hands several times, was bought in 1717 by Sir Theodore Jansen, one of the promoters of the luckless South Sea scheme, who, with little reverence for the beauty and historic associations of the house, at once began to pull it down. Before he had time to build another he and his fellow-speculators were ruined, and the Wimbledon estate was sold by him to Sarah Jennings, the famous Duchess of Marlborough. She in her turn built a new and costly mansion which she bequeathed, with the rest of the property, to her grandson, John Spencer, to whose descendants it belonged--passing, in accordance with the custom known as borough English, to the youngest, not the eldest son--until 1871, when it was sold and broken up into a number of small holdings. The house built for the duchess, in which Hannah More was the guest, in 1786, of the Bishop of St. Asaph, was {202} burned down in 1785, and the then owner replaced it with that still standing, known as Wimbledon Park House, that is associated with the memory of Sir William Paxton, the architect of the Crystal Palace, who began his career as assistant to his brother, who was head gardener for many years to the Cecil family. At the present time Wimbledon, in spite of all the changes that have taken place in its general appearance, is one of the most beautiful of the London suburbs, and though it has lost its historic manor-house, it retains many fine old mansions that bear witness to its aristocratic associations. Amongst these, perhaps the finest is Eagle House, on the Green, a noble Jacobean structure, with ten gables, built by Robert Bell, a wealthy London merchant in the reign of James I., and occupied for some years, from 1789, by the Right Honourable William Grenville, the relation and colleague of William Pitt, who often visited him there, one of the bedrooms being still named after him. A house not far off, known as Wimbledon Lodge, was at the same time the home of the famous philanthropist, William Wilberforce, who in his _Journal_ makes many allusions to his happy meetings at Eagle House with William Pitt, whom he sometimes persuaded to go to church with him.