On the ensuing day she saw Sir Robert Walpole.  ‘My good Sir Robert,’ she thus addressed him, ’you see me in a very indifferent situation.  I have nothing to say to you but to recommend the king, my children, and the kingdom to your care.’

Lord Hervey, when the minister retired, asked him what he thought of the queen’s state.

‘My lord,’ was the reply, ’she is as much dead as if she was in her coffin; if ever I heard a corpse speak, it was just now in that room!’

It was a sad, an awful death-bed.  The Prince of Wales having sent to inquire after the health of his dying mother, the queen became uneasy lest he should hear the true state of her case, asking ’if no one would send those ravens,’ meaning the prince’s attendants, out of the house.  ‘They were only,’ she said, ’watching her death, and would gladly tear her to pieces whilst she was alive.’  Whilst thus she spoke of her son’s courtiers, that son was sitting up all night in his house in Pall Mall, and saying, when any messenger came in from St. James’s, ’Well, sure, we shall soon have good news, she cannot hold out much longer.’  And the princesses were writing letters to prevent the Princess Royal from coming to England, where she was certain to meet with brutal unkindness from her father, who could not endure to be put to any expense.  Orders were, indeed, sent to stop her if she set out.  She came, however, on pretence of taking the Bath waters; but George II., furious at her disobedience, obliged her to go direct to and from Bath without stopping, and never forgave her.

Notwithstanding her predictions, the queen survived the fatal Wednesday.  Until this time no prelate had been called in to pray by her majesty, nor to administer the Holy Communion and as people about the court began to be scandalized by this omission, Sir Robert Walpole advised that the Archbishop of Canterbury should be sent for:  his opinion was couched in the following terms, characteristic at once of the man, the times, and the court:—­

‘Pray, madam,’ he said to the Princess Emily, ’let this farce be played; the archbishop will act it very well.  You may bid him be as short as you will:  it will do the queen no hurt, no more than any good; and it will satisfy all the wise and good fools, who will call us atheists if we don’t pretend to be as great fools as they are.’

Unhappily, Lord Hervey, who relates this anecdote, was himself an unbeliever; yet the scoffing tone adopted by Sir Robert seems to have shocked even him.

In consequence of this advice, Archbishop Potter prayed by the queen morning and evening, the king always quitting the room when his grace entered it.  Her children, however, knelt by her bedside.  Still the whisperers who censured were unsatisfied—­the concession was thrown away.  Why did not the queen receive the communion?  Was it, as the world believed, either ’that she had reasoned herself into a very low and cold assent to Christianity?’ or