Long North, a veteran Foxite, was in a ‘shocking state’ of depression in late 1819 and had to be ‘closely watched’. By early 1820, however, he was ‘getting quite well’.
North is certainly much better. He writes letters, and draughts upon his banker, but his spirits [are] low and [he] cannot yet touch on the state of his affairs without showing he considers them in a very different state from what they really are. Till that delusion subsides can we consider him ... himself again?Wentworth Woodhouse mss F48/161.
At that year’s general election his brother-in-law Charles Anderson Pelham* returned him for Newtown, as he had in 1807. He is not known to have spoken or voted in this period, was granted a month’s leave, 1 July 1820, and retired from the House at the opening of the 1821 session. A ‘gentleman of distinguished and accomplished manners, and a consistent Whig of the old school’, he died at Brampton, ‘aged 80’, in February 1829.