For this important service to his country, he was cre ated a peer of the realm, under the title of lord Anson; and on the death of admiral Norris, in 1749, he was appointed vice-admiral of England. In 1751, he suc ceeded lord Sandwich as first commissioner of the ad miralty ; but, in consequence of the censure to which he was exposed about the loss of Minorca, he resigned this situation in 1756. Being acquitted however of all blame, after a parliamentary enquiry, he was, in 1757, reinstated in his high office, which he continued to fill with honour to himself, and advantage to his country, during the remainder of his life. When lord Anson was attending the brother of the present queen of Eng land, to spew him the arsenal at Portsmouth, and the fleet which was then about to sail for the Havannah, he caught a violent cold, of which he died, at Moor Park, in Hertfordshire, on the 6th June 1762, in the sixty fifth year of his age. Having had no issue by the daugh ter of lord Hardwicke, whom he married in 1748, he left the whole of his property to his brother.
Lord Anson appears to have been remarkable for the coolness and equanimity of his temper. Amid all the dangers and successes which he experienced in his cir cumnavigation of the globe, he never expressed any strong emotion, either of joy or sorrow, excepting when the Centurion hove in sight of the island of Tinian. He was a man of few words, and was reckoned won derfully silent in a country which has never been distin guished by loquacity. He introduced into the English navy a discipline which resembled that of the Prussian army, and revived that bold and close method of fight ing at pistol-shot, which Blake and Shovel had so suc cessfully employed, and which has created in the breasts of British sailors that daring courage and unconquerable intrepidity which anticipate and secure success to the most hazardous enterprises. See the account of An son's Voyage round the World, drawn up by the cele brated Benjamin Robins, and likewise count Algarotti's Military and Political Letters, letter viii. p. 68. (o)