Americans defend independence, they shall find me in their way" and that his very last words (spoken to his soldier son John) were: "Leave your dying father, and go to the defence of your country". He was moved to his home at Hayes, where his middle son William read to him Homer's passage about the death of Hector. Chatham died on 11 May 1778, aged 69. Although he was initially buried at Hayes, with graceful unanimity all parties combined to show their sense of the national loss and the Commons presented an address to the king praying that the deceased statesman might be buried with the honours of a public funeral. A sum was voted for a public monument which was erected over a new grave in Westminster Abbey. The monument, by the sculptor John Bacon, has a figure of Pitt above statues of Britannia and Neptune with figures representing Prudence, Fortitude, the Earth and also a sea creature. In the Guildhall Edmund Burke's inscription summed up what he had meant to the city: he was "the minister by whom commerce was united with and made to flourish by war". Soon after the funeral a bill was passed bestowing a pension of £4,000 a year on his successors in the earldom. He had a family of three sons and two daughters, of whom the second son, William, was destined to add fresh lustre to a name that many regarded as one of the greatest in the history of England. Legacy Horace Walpole, not an uncritical admirer, wrote of Pitt: It were ingratitude to him to say that he did not give such a reverberation to our stagnating councils, as exceedingly altered the appearance of our fortune. He warded off the evil hour that seemed approaching, he infused vigour into our arms, he taught the nation to speak again as England used to speak to foreign powers ... Pitt, on entering upon administration, had found the nation at the lowest ebb in point of power and reputation ... France, who meant to be feared, was feared heartily ... They were willing to trust that France would be so good as to ruin us by inches. Pitt had roused us from this ignoble lethargy ... The admirers of Mr Pitt extol the reverberation he gave to our councils, the despondence he banished, the spirit he infused, the conquests he made, the security