[2]. Barbara, daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, died in September 1652. (Nicholas Papers.)
So abruptly the record ends. The writer has no more to say, for she is yet only on the threshold of life.
Turn the page. Over the leaf in another hand, large and straggling, someone has inscribed a final memorandum. The little book would never be wanted by its owner any more, but there was room for this.
“On the 3 day of March being fryday the Dutchess dyed at St James and was buried the wednesday following 1671.”
Between the two dates a little span of years, not a score; and yet how great a sum of the things which go to fill up life—of hope and love and splendour, of pain and grief and disappointment.
It is this story that we try now to construct out of the memorials of her time; the life story of the woman who, without any extraordinary beauty or charm, so far as we are able to judge, to balance the comparative obscurity from which she sprang, was fated in an age when the claims of high birth were jealously guarded to become the wife of a Prince of the Blood Royal of England.
Even in the seventeenth century, gilded as it was by the slowly dying radiance of romance, the “glory and the dream” of chivalry, the strange tale reads like a fable, and yet the life, short as it was, of Anne Hyde, had results for her age and country which even now can hardly be measured accurately and dispassionately, like the ever-widening circles on the surface of a pool into which a pebble has been cast.