On hearing of the death of her husband, Lady Mary bethought herself of returning to England, from which she had been absent for more than a score of years.  She was seventy-two years old, and may well have thought that her time, too, would soon come, and that she would like to die in her native country.  Still, it was some time before she could bring herself to a decision to set out.  She was delighted with the political success of Lord Bute and pleased with her daughter’s prosperity, but “I am doubtful whether I will attempt to be a spectator of it,” she confided in Sir James Steuart in April.  “I have so many years indulged my natural inclinations to solitude and reading, I am unwilling to return to crowds and bustle, which would be unavoidable in London.  The few friends I esteemed are now no more:  the new set of people who fill the stage at present are too indifferent to me even to raise my curiosity.”  Also, as she said, she was beginning to feel the worst effects of age, blindness excepted, and was grown timorous and suspicious.

It was no light thing for a woman of Lady Mary’s age to voyage alone, except for a servant or two, from Venice to London.  Yet her indomitable spirit came to her aid, and in the autumn of 1761 she left Italy.  She travelled by way of Augsberg and Frankfort to Rotterdam.  The journey had been far from agreeable.  “I am dragging my ragged remnant of life to England,” she wrote to Sir James Steuart on November 20.  “The wind and tide are against me; how far I have strength to struggle against both I know not; that I am arrived here is as much a miracle as any in the golden legend; and if I had foreseen half the difficulties I have met with I should not certainly have had courage to undertake it....  I am nailed down here by a severe illness of my poor Marianne, who has not been able to endure the frights and fatigues that we have passed.”

When, about three weeks later, Marianne had sufficiently recovered to move on, Lady Mary was held up by a hard, impenetrable frost.  The delay irked her, and she became somewhat depressed, and said that she was dubious, in her precarious state of health, whether she would arrive at her destination.  At the beginning of the new year, she did actually make a start, and got half way to Helvoet, and was obliged to turn back by the mountains of sea that obstructed the passage.  “I have had so many disappointments I can scarce entertain the flattering thought of arriving in London,” the poor lady complained; but she found comfort in that “It is uncommon at my age to have no distemper, and to retain all my senses in their first degree of perfection.”  Later in the month she arrived in London.

Horace Walpole, who heard everything, had, of course, heard that Lady Mary was returned to England, and in a letter of October 8, 1761, announced her return, adding with a brutality unusual even in him:  “I have not seen her yet, though they have not made her perform quarantine for her own dirt.”  However, as he discovered shortly after, it was Lady Mary Wrottisley, and not Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had arrived.