The condition of the Queen was deplorable, and a succession of fits almost prostrated her as low as her royal husband. The Prince of Wales himself ‘seemed frightened,’ says Mr. Neville to the Marquis of Buckingham, ‘and was blooded yesterday,’ November 6, the second day of the King’s delirious condition; but as phlebotomy was a practice of this princely person when in love, one cannot well determine whether his pallor arose from filial or some less respectable affection. Up to this time the King had grown worse, chiefly through total, or nearly total, loss of sleep. He bewailed this with a hoarse, rapid, yet kindly tone of voice; maintaining that he was well, or that to be so he needed but the blessing of sleep. The Queen paced her apartment with a painful demonstration of impatient despair in her manner; and if, by way of solace, she attempted to read aloud to her children or ladies, any passage that reminded her of her condition and prospects made her burst into tears. Previous to the first night of the King’s delirium he conducted, as he had always been accustomed to do, the Queen to her dressing-room, and there, a hundred times over, requested her not to disturb him if she should find him asleep. The urgent repetition showed a mind nearly overthrown, but the King calmly and affectionately remarked that he needed not physicians, for the Queen was the best physician he could have. ‘She is my best friend,’ said he; ‘where could I find a better?’ The alarm became greater when the fever left the King, after he had three times taken James’s powders, but without producing any relief to the brain. The Queen secluded herself from all persons save her ladies and the two eldest Princes. These, as Lord Bulkeley said, did not announce to her the state of the King’s health with the caution and delicacy due to the wife and mother who now depended on them. This dependence was so complete that the Prince of Wales, as before said, took the command of everything at Windsor, one result of which was a disappearance of everything like order. The Queen’s dependence on such a son was rather compulsory than voluntary. When he first came down to Windsor, from Brighton, the meeting was the very coldest possible, and when he had stated whence he came her first question was when he meant to return. However, it is said that when the King broke out, at dinner, into his first fit of positive delirium, the Prince burst into tears. The sufferer was occasionally better, but the relapses were frequent. The Queen now slept in a bed-room adjoining that occupied by the King. He once became possessed with the idea that she had been forcibly removed from the bed, and in the middle of the night he came into the Queen’s room with a candle in his hand, to satisfy himself that she was still near him. He remained half-an-hour, talking incoherently, hoarsely, but good-naturedly, and then went away. The Queen’s nights were nights of sleeplessness and tears.