ink almost everybody that
had any relation to him, but his answer always was, "No." I did fully
represent my lady duchess' condition to him, but nothing that was said
to him could make him come to any point.'

In this 'retired corner,' as Lord Arran terms it, did the former wit and
beau, the once brave and fine cavalier, the reckless plotter in
after-life, end his existence. His body was removed to Helmsby Castle,
there to wait the duchess' pleasure, being meantime embalmed. Not one
farthing could his steward produce to defray his burial. His George and
blue ribbon were sent to the King James, with an account of his death.

In Kirby Moorside the following entry in the register of burials
records the event, which is so replete with a singular retributive
justice--so constituted to impress and sadden the mind:--

'Georges Villus Lord dooke of Buckingham.'

He left scarcely a friend to mourn his life; for to no man had he been
true. He died on the 16th of April according to some accounts; according
to others, on the third of that month, 1687, in the sixty-first year of
his age. His body, after being embalmed, was deposited in the family
vault in Henry VII.'s chapel.[7] He left no children, and his title was
therefore extinct. The Duchess of Buckingham, of whom Brian Fairfax
remarks, 'that if she had none of the vanities, she had none of the
vices of the court,' survived him several years. She died in 1705, at
the age of sixty-six, and was buried in the vault of the Villiers'
family, in the chapel of Henry VII.

Such was the extinction of all the magnificence and intellectual
ascendency that at one time centred in the great and gifted family of
Villiers.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Dryden.]

[Footnote 2: The day after the battle at Kingston, the Duke's estates
were confiscated. (8th July, 1648.)--Nichols's History of
Leicestershire, iii. 213; who also says that the Duke offered marriage
to one of the daughters of Cromwell, but was refused. He went abroad in
1648, but returned with Charles II. to Scotland in 1650, and again
escaped to France after the battle of Worcester, 1651. The sale of the
pictures would seem to have commenced during his first exile.]

[Footnote 3: Sir George Villiers's second wife was Mary, daughter of
Antony Beaumont, Esq., of Glenfield, (Nichols's Leicestershire, iii.
193,) who was son of Wm. Beaumont, Esq., of Cole Orton. She afterwards
was married successively to Sir Wm. Rayner and Sir