The Queen still lingered on, her brain and faculties clear till the last. But the King’s mind was giving way under the strain. He was conscious of this to some extent, for he told his pages that if he were unreasonable in chiding and swearing at them they were not to mind it. Lord Hervey, in his grim and ghastly account of the Queen’s deathbed, mocks at the lamentations of the King, and jeers at his behaviour. Yet there is every reason to believe that his grief was absolutely sincere, and in the presence of so great a sorrow these gibes should surely have been stilled. It was all very human and very pitiful. The King was not one of those who could suffer and be still, his grief was noisy and garrulous, and he talked incessantly during those trying days to all whom he met of the Queen’s many virtues and the great and irreparable loss her death would be to him and the nation. He said the same to his wife over and over again, and they babbled their love together with tears and broken words. She knew now that she was first with him, had always been first with him, and their love was as fresh and fragrant as when he wooed her in the rose-gardens of Ansbach long ago. Yet, evidently overwrought by long watching and emotion, the King would sometimes break off in the middle of his vows of love and devotion to chide her in the old peevish fashion. Her pain made her very restless, and she complained that she could not sleep. “How the devil should you sleep,” burst forth the King, “when you will never lie still a moment?” or again, when the Queen at his bidding lay perfectly still, the King would rail at her for looking straight before her, “like a calf waiting for its throat to be cut”. But Caroline knew better than to blame him for these rough words, which were more welcome to her than sweetest music. Her wifely obedience never failed, even at the last. The doctors said that her strength must be kept up, so the King was always forcing down her throat all sorts of food and drink. The poor Queen would swallow whatever he wished, and when he thanked her, she would say: “It is the last service I can do you”. But her stomach was not so complaisant, and she could only retain the food for a few minutes. Then she would bravely try again. For her own sake she wished not to live; for his she would fain have done so. So the days wore on, the Queen almost apologising for being so long in dying. Thursday, Friday and Saturday passed without change, but on Sunday (November 20th, 1737), the eleventh day of her illness, she grew weaker every hour. About ten o’clock in the evening the end came quietly and suddenly. Her last word was _Pray_. The King was with her when she passed away, and in an agony of grief he kissed the face and hands of the dead Queen. FOOTNOTES TO BOOK III, CHAPTER XV: [123] The Hon. Peter Wentworth to the Earl of Strafford, London, December 10th, 1734.