In one of several amusing letters from Vanbrugh, now at Bayfordbury, Tonson, who was then in Paris, was congratulated upon his luck in South Sea stock, and there is other evidence that he made a large sum in connection with Law's Mississippi scheme. "He has got £40,000" wrote Robert Arbuthnot; "riches will make people forget their trade." In January 1720 Tonson obtained a grant to himself and his nephew of the office of stationer, bookseller, and printer to some of the principal public offices; and on 12 October 1722 he assigned the whole benefit of the grant to his nephew. The grant was afterwards renewed by Robert Walpole, in 1733, for a second term of forty years. The elder Tonson seems to have given up business about 1720. He had bought the Hazells estate at Ledbury, Herefordshire, and in 1721 he was sending presents of cider to the Dukes of Grafton and Newcastle, the latter of whom called Tonson "my dear old friend," and asked him to give him his company in Sussex. Henceforth we may suppose, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that "Tonson" in contemporary allusions means the nephew.