The 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke, having lost money on the turf, cards and women, decided in 1767 ‘to marry a rich monster and retrieve his affairs’. First it was necessary to divorce his wife. Though the divorce bill went through, the ‘rich monster’ escaped and Bully spent some time in the 1770s on a proposal to enclose part of Sedgmoor, which would put £30,000 into his own pocket. That, like most of Bully's schemes, also failed and by 1777 he was driven back to his former suggestion: ‘he is gone down to Bath in pursuit of a lady, who he proposes should retrieve his finances. Her name is Curtis: she is about thirty years of age, and has a fortune of forty-three thousand pounds.’ But Miss Curtis found Bully's fading charms insufficient and two years later he declined into madness. His son, George Richard St John, freed from parental control, compounded the disaster with an imprudent early marriage to the penniless daughter of his tutor, and when, after years of separation, she died, he married his German mistress. It required only the 5th Viscount in 1869 to marry the daughter of a Belgian schoolmaster and, on her death, the daughter of a blacksmith, for the ruin of the family to be complete. Their delectable house at Lydiard Tregoze in Wiltshire became a corporation museum.

Careful marriages, on the other hand, were of great importance in consolidating or increasing family fortunes. The Gowers, at the time of the Glorious Revolution were Staffordshire baronets.