When George, on hearing of the death of his unhappy wife, Sophia Dorothea, set out on his last journey to Hanover, his only companion was the Duchess of Kendal, the woman to whose grim fascinations he had been loyal for more than forty years; and it was she who closed his eyes in the Palace of Osnabrück, in which he had drawn his first breath sixty-seven years earlier.
A French fortune-teller had warned him that "he would not survive his wife a year"; and, as he neared Osnabrück, the home of his brother, the Prince Bishop, his fatal illness overtook him.
"When he arrived at Ippenburen, he was quite lethargic; his hand fell down as if lifeless, and his tongue hung out of his mouth. He gave, however, signs enough of life by continually crying out, as well as he could articulate, 'Osnabrück!' 'Osnabrück!'"
As night fell the sweating horses galloped into Osnabrück; an hour later George died in his brother's arms, less than twelve months after his wife had drawn her last breath in her fortress-prison of Ahlden.
The Duchess of Kendal was disconsolate.
"She beat her breasts and tore her hair, and, separating herself from the English ladies in her train, took the road to Brunswick, where she remained in close seclusion about three months."
Returning to England, to the only solace left to her—her money-bags—she spent the last seventeen years of her life alternating between her villas at Twickenham and Isleworth. George had promised her that if she survived him, and if it were possible, he would revisit her from the spirit world.
"When," to quote Walpole again, "one day a large raven flew into one of the windows of her villa at Isleworth, she was persuaded that it was the soul of the departed monarch, and received and treated it with all the respect and tenderness of duty, till the Royal bird or she took their last flight."
Thus, shorn of all her powers and splendour, in obscurity, and hoarding her ill-gotten gold, died the most remarkable woman who has ever figured in the British Peerage. Her vast fortune was divided between her two "nieces," one of whom, created by her father, George, Countess of Walsingham, became the wife of that polished courtier and heartless man of the world, Philip, fourth Earl of Chesterfield.