It was a cruel stroke of destiny. The wife of the Duke had the good fortune not to outlive the last Imperial decision; she died a few weeks previous to it; whilst her husband was fruitlessly setting heaven and earth in motion at Frankfort to ward off this fate. But the two parties quarrelled even over her coffin. The brother, and co-ruler with the Duke, refused to allow the corpse to be buried in the royal hereditary vault, nay even denied her the usual tolling of the bells for royal personages. Anthony Ulrich rushed furiously from Frankfort and commanded the tolling and the burial in the royal vault. Orders and counter orders crossed each other during several weeks; now the tolling began and now it was stopped. As Anthony Ulrich, who had again hastened to Frankfort, had commanded that the coffin should not be deposited anywhere but in the royal burial place, it was kept in a room in the castle covered over with sand; there it remained a year and a half, till in 1746, Anthony Ulrich's last brother died. Then the Duke in order to give satisfaction to his wife even in death, caused his brother's corpse after lying in state, to be placed in the same room next his wife's coffin and like hers to be covered over with sand. There the two coffins remained for a year, when they were both quietly deposited at the same time in the royal burial place. Now Anthony Ulrich, once the youngest of his family, remained sole ruler and the eldest of his race, but Meiningen was a source of annoyance to him. He could not take his dear children home as Dukes, therefore he went to them at Frankfort. His agnates could scarcely conceal the impatience with which they awaited for his death in order to take possession of the inheritance of the last of the Meiningens. He had passed the greater part of his life in struggle with them; now he would be revenged. Out of spite to them he married at the age of sixty-three a Princess of Hesse-Philippsthal. He had ten children by his first wife and eight by his second. He announced every fresh birth to the agnates on a sheet of the largest royal folio. He died at Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1763. Even in his last testament the stubborn determination breaks forth, of bringing the two sons of his first marriage into the country as co-heirs. All the children of the first marriage died unmarried.