He begged of Lord Arran to stay with him. The house seems
to have been in a most miserable condition, for in a letter from Lord
Arran to Dr. Sprat, he says, 'I confess it made my heart bleed to see
the Duke of Buckingham in so pitiful a place, and so bad a condition,
and what made it worse, he was not at all sensible of it, for he thought
in a day or two he should be well; and when we reminded him of his
condition, he said it was not as we apprehended. So I sent for a worthy
gentleman, Mr. Gibson, to be assistant to me in this work; so we jointly
represented his condition to him, who I saw was at first very uneasy;
but I think we should not have discharged the duties of honest men if we
had suffered him to go out of this world without desiring him to prepare
for death.' The duke joined heartily in the beautiful prayers for the
dying, of our Church, and yet there was a sort of selfishness and
indifference to others manifest even at the last.
'Mr. Gibson,' writes Lord Arran, 'asked him if he had made a will, or if
he would declare who was to be his heir? but to the first, he answered
he had made none; and to the last, whoever was named he answered, "No."
First, my lady duchess was named, and then I think almost everybody that
had any relation to him, but his answer always was, "No.
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