The Queen had been some time ill, but hopes were entertained of her recovery until within a very short period of her death. When the danger increased, Dr. Mayerne, according to a promise he had given her, told her, twenty-four hours before her decease, that she could not recover. It was then too late for the Queen to make a will; but she wished to leave all that she possessed, with the exception of a jewel to the King of Denmark, and a casket to the Princess Elizabeth, to her son Charles, adding an assurance that her faith was free from Popery. Although, when asked if she wished to leave all she had to her son, she answered, and had again, “Yes,” her possessions were so valuable, that the people about the Court did not expect that her wishes would be followed out without the usual formalities. Meantime, whilst her body lay at Denmark House, her funeral was delayed, because the Master of the Wardrobe would not pay double prices, usually then charged when ready money could not be produced. Crowds thronged round Denmark House; and far more curiosity was expressed to see her after her death than had ever been testified during her life. The ladies were weary of waiting till the money could be raised to carry to the grave one who had left 400,000_l._ in jewels, 90,000_l._ in plate, 80,000 Jacobuses in ready money, besides a costly wardrobe.[252] “The will,” says the precise Mr. Chamberlain, in a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton, “proves to be nothing.”[253] The King, meantime, was dangerously ill, of an agonising disease, and obliged to be carried part of the way to Theobalds in a Neapolitan portative chair, given him by Lady Hatton; weak as he was, and even whilst the Queen was unburied, he would have his deer brought before him, that he might enjoy his wonted pleasures. The lady mourners were, meantime, quarrelling by the funeral bier for precedency at the approaching ceremonial; and, amongst the foremost of the combatants was the Countess of Nottingham, who claimed, as one of the two conditions of Nottingham’s giving up the post of Lord High Admiral, that he should be the first Earl of England, and that she, as first Countess, should step out before all others on this occasion. The expenses of the funeral were to exceed those of Queen Elizabeth’s, although money was so scarce, that some of Queen Anne’s plate would have to be coined three times to pay them. There was not even money to put the King’s and Prince’s servants in mourning; and, though Anne died on the twenty-first of March, the twenty-seventh of March found her still in ghastly state at Denmark House.[254] At length, on the fourteenth of May, the corpse, with Prince Charles riding before it, was carried to its resting place. The chariot and six horses, on which the Queen’s effigy was placed, and the hearse itself, were very stately, yet the funeral was pronounced to be a “poor, drawling sight.” Two hundred and fifty indigent women followed the hearse. The Countess