it was not as we apprehended.  So I sent for a worthy gentleman, Mr. Gibson, to be assistant to me in this work; so we jointly represented his condition to him, who I saw was at first very uneasy; but I think we should not have discharged the duties of honest men if we had suffered him to go out of this world without desiring him to prepare for death.’  The duke joined heartily in the beautiful prayers for the dying, of our Church, and yet there was a sort of selfishness and indifference to others manifest even at the last.

‘Mr. Gibson,’ writes Lord Arran, ’asked him if he had made a will, or if he would declare who was to be his heir? but to the first, he answered he had made none; and to the last, whoever was named he answered, “No.”  First, my lady duchess was named, and then I think almost everybody that had any relation to him, but his answer always was, “No.”  I did fully represent my lady duchess’ condition to him, but nothing that was said to him could make him come to any point.’

In this ‘retired corner,’ as Lord Arran terms it, did the former wit and beau, the once brave and fine cavalier, the reckless plotter in after-life, end his existence.  His body was removed to Helmsby Castle, there to wait the duchess’ pleasure, being meantime embalmed.  Not one farthing could his steward produce to defray his burial.  His George and blue ribbon were sent to the King James, with an account of his death.

In Kirby Moorside the following entry in the register of burials records the event, which is so replete with a singular retributive justice—­so constituted to impress and sadden the mind:—­

    ‘Georges Villus Lord dooke of Buckingham.’

He left scarcely a friend to mourn his life; for to no man had he been true.  He died on the 16th of April according to some accounts; according to others, on the third of that month, 1687, in the sixty-first year of his age.  His body, after being embalmed, was deposited in the family vault in Henry VII.’s chapel.[7] He left no children, and his title was therefore extinct.  The Duchess of Buckingham, of whom Brian Fairfax remarks, ’that if she had none of the vanities, she had none of the vices of the court,’ survived him several years.  She died in 1705, at the age of sixty-six, and was buried in the vault of the Villiers’ family, in the chapel of Henry VII.

Such was the extinction of all the magnificence and intellectual ascendency that at one time centred in the great and gifted family of Villiers.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  Dryden.]

[Footnote 2:  The day after the battle at Kingston, the Duke’s estates were confiscated. (8th July, 1648.)—­Nichols’s History of Leicestershire, iii. 213; who also says that the Duke offered marriage to one of the daughters of Cromwell, but was refused.  He went abroad in 1648, but returned with Charles II. to Scotland in 1650, and again escaped to France after the battle of Worcester, 1651.  The sale of the pictures would seem to have commenced during his first exile.]