Peter Thellusson locked his fortune away for three generations, and Parliament changed the law to stop anyone copying him

Peter Thellusson came from a Genevan banking family, settled in London in 1761 and became a merchant and banker. Part of his wealth came from slavery: plantations in Grenada and Montserrat, and a share in the slave ship Lottery, which carried 172 enslaved Africans in 1766. He died in 1797 with personal estate over £600,000 and land worth about £5,000 a year. His will ordered the income to be "accumulated during the lives of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren" living at his death. Only after the last of them died would the capital pass to the eldest male descendants of his three sons. Projections put the final fund above £14 million. The family sued to break the will. In Thellusson v Woodford (1799) the Court of Chancery upheld it, and the decision was affirmed in 1805. Parliament passed the Accumulations Act 1800, known as the Thellusson Act, limiting accumulation to periods such as 21 years after death. The Act did not apply to his will. A suit over who qualified as heir began in 1856 and reached the House of Lords, which decided on 9 June 1859. Because of legal costs, the inheritance was "not much larger than that originally bequeathed." The case is believed to have inspired Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Dickens's Bleak House. In 2026 Brodsworth Hall in Yorkshire, which went to heir Charles Sabine Thellusson, belongs to English Heritage.