It is a dreary epitaph to place on the tomb of Anne, Duchess of York. Alas for her! The goodly fruit which her aspiring hand had plucked so eagerly had long ago turned to ashes in her very grasp, and she had drained to the utmost dregs the cup of disillusion. And thus we leave her, as all must be left, to the infinite mercy of God.
She died on Friday, 31st March 1671, in the thirty-fourth year of her age. On the Sunday following, her body, being embalmed, was privately buried in the vault of Mary Queen of Scots, in Henry the Seventh’s Chapel of Westminster Abbey.[[288]]
[288]. “Memoirs of the Court of England during the Reign of the Stuarts.” John Heneage Jesse.
Her little son Edgar, Duke of Cambridge, the last of her boys, followed her on the 8th of June succeeding, and thus of her eight children only Mary and Anne, both destined to be successively Queens of England, survived their childhood.
In the memoirs of his own life, written years subsequently, James II. paid a full and generous tribute of respect to the memory of his first wife, though, as we have seen, the early, passionate, imperious love had so soon died out.
Long afterwards, in the grey, weary days of exile at St Germain, when there remained to him only the luckless heir to a vanished inheritance and the winsome child Louisa, whom he called with such sad significance his “douce consolatrice,” the thoughts of the banished King must sometimes at least have travelled back to the storied past, to the days of his strenuous if stormy youth, to his English wife, to the fair little brood of children, of whom but two lived on to become the Goneril and Regan of this later Lear.
When his time came, and he, too, lay down to die in the hunting palace of King Louis, the last Stuart king was laid to his rest, unburied, in the Church of the English Benedictines in Paris, in the vain, pathetic hope that some day he might yet repose among his kindred in the England he loved so well.
In the mad upheaval of the French Revolution ninety years later, his bones, like those of the great lines of Valois and Bourbon, were cast out in dishonour, and no man knows the place of his sepulture; but Nan Hyde sleeps undisturbed in Westminster, among the kings to whose company the passion of a prince had raised her.
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