The Lord Chancellor further decreed that a commission should be named to inquire whether everything was forthcoming which was named in the _Catalogue_; in order that if anything was missing she should be constrained to replace it, and give security that nothing should be lost in future. The commissioners appointed to carry into effect the Chancellor's decree were however two persons with whom Ashmole must have been on terms of intimate friendship, namely, Sir Edward Bysh and Sir William Dugdale, both Heralds like himself; and with the latter he at length became most intimately connected by marrying his daughter. To them was also added, in his official capacity, Sir William Glascock, a Master in Chancery. Tredescant's widow, as may be imagined, did not very quietly submit to this, as it seemed to her, unjust decree; but all her endeavours at opposition were fruitless; she was constrained to yield; and it seems probable that the depressing influence of this struggle affected her so much as to cause her death. She was found drowned in the pond in the garden cultivated by her husband and his father at South Lambeth, on the 3rd of April, 1678. Whatever may have been the legal or equitable right of Ashmole, upon which the decree in Chancery was founded, it is impossible for a generous mind to come to any other conclusion than that the course he pursued was unworthy of him as a man of education, and of his wealth and station; for it must be obvious from the will of Tredescant, that even supposing he had willingly and wittingly made a deed of gift of his treasures to Ashmole, and given him formal possession by handing over the Queen Elizabeth's shilling, it is next to impossible to believe that Ashmole did not know that he repented that act, and wished to connect his own name with the bequest to the University. Dr. Hamel[2] is induced to think that many of Tredescant's curiosities were never sent to Oxford; that there had been a careful suppression of every written document which might serve to connect the name of the Tredescants with the collection; and that the relation of the voyage to Russia only escaped because it bore no mark by which it could be recognised as Tradescant's.