‘that she was heterodox?’ or ’that the archbishop refused to administer the sacrament until she should be reconciled to her son?’ Even Lord Hervey, who rarely left the antechamber, has only by his silence proved that she did not take the communion.  That antechamber was crowded with persons who, as the prelate left the chamber of death, crowded around, eagerly asking, ’Has the queen received?’ ‘Her majesty,’ was the evasive reply, ’is in a heavenly disposition:’  the public were thus deceived.  Among those who were near the queen at this solemn hour was Dr. Butler, author of the ‘Analogy.’  He had been made clerk of the closet, and became, after the queen’s death, Bishop of Bristol.  He was in a remote living in Durham, when the queen, remembering that it was long since she had heard of him, asked the Archbishop of York ‘whether Dr. Butler was dead?’—­’No, madam,’ replied that prelate (Dr. Blackburn), ‘but he is buried;’ upon which she had sent for him to court.  Yet he was not courageous enough, it seems, to speak to her of her son and of the duty of reconciliation; whether she ever sent the prince any message or not is uncertain; Lord Hervey is silent on that point, so that it is to be feared that Lord Chesterfield’s line—­

    ‘And, unforgiving, unforgiven, dies!’

had but too sure a foundation in fact; so that Pope’s sarcastic verses—­

    ’Hang the sad verse on Carolina’s urn,
     And hail her passage to the realms of rest;
     All parts performed and all her children blest,’

may have been but too just, though cruelly bitter.  The queen lingered till the 20th of November.  During that interval of agony her consort was perpetually boasting to every one of her virtues, her sense, her patience, her softness, her delicacy; and ending with the praise, ’Comme elle soutenoit sa dignite avec grace, avec politesse, avec douceur!’ Nevertheless he scarcely ever went into her room.  Lord Hervey states that he did, even in this moving situation, snub her for something or other she did or said.  One morning, as she lay with her eyes fixed on a point in the air, as people sometimes do when they want to keep their thoughts from wandering, the king coarsely told her ’she looked like a calf which had just had its throat cut.’  He expected her to die in state.  Then, with all his bursts of tenderness he always mingled his own praises, hinting that though she was a good wife he knew he had deserved a good one, and remarking, when he extolled her understanding, that he did not ’think it the worse for her having kept him company so many years.’  To all this Lord Hervey listened with, doubtless, well-concealed disgust; for cabals were even then forming for the future influence that might or might not be obtained.

The queen’s life, meantime, was softly ebbing away in this atmosphere of selfishness, brutality, and unbelief.  One evening she asked Dr. Tessier impatiently how long her state might continue.