According to the rumour of the time, Burke sold two of his pensions upon lives for L27,000, and there was left the third pension of L1200.

By and by, when the resentment of the Opposition was roused to the highest pitch by the infamous Treason and Sedition Bills of 1795, the Duke of Bedford and Lord Lauderdale, seeking to accumulate every possible complaint against the Government, assailed the grant to Burke, as made without the consent of Parliament, and as a violent contradiction to the whole policy of the plan for economic reform.

The attack, if not unjustifiable in itself, came from an unlucky quarter.
A chief of the house of Bedford was the most unfit person in the world to protest against grants by favour of the Crown, Burke was too practised a rhetorician not to see the opening, and his _Letter to a Noble Lord_ is the most splendid repartee in the English language.
It is not surprising that Burke's defence should have provoked rejoinder.

A cloud of pamphlets followed the _Letter to a Noble Lord_--some in doggerel verse, others in a magniloquent prose imitated from his own, others mere poisonous scurrility.

The nearest approach to a just stroke that I can find, after turning over a pile of this trash, is an expression of wonder that he, who was inconsolable for the loss of a beloved son, should not have reflected how many tender parents had been made childless in the profusion of blood, of which he himself had been the most relentless champion.