CHAPTER VIII.
Nelly in real mourning, and outlawed for debt—Death of Otway, tutor to her son—James II. pays her debts—The King's kindness occasions a groundless rumour that she has gone to mass—Her intimacy with Dr. Tenison, then Vicar of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and Dr. Lower the celebrated physician—She sends for Tenison in her last illness—Her death and contrite end—Her will and last request of her son—Her funeral—Tenison preaches her funeral sermon—False account of the sermon cried by hawkers in the streets—The sermon used as an argument against Tenison's promotion to the see of Lincoln—Queen Mary's defence of him and of Nelly—Her son the Duke of St. Alban's—Eleanor Gwyn and Harriet Mellon—Various portraits of Nelly—Further anecdotes—Conclusion.
It was no fictitious mourning, for the Cham of Tartary or a Prince of France, which Nelly and the Duchess of Portsmouth were both wearing in the spring of 1685. Each had occasion, though on very unequal grounds, to lament the monarch so suddenly removed from his gorgeous chambers at Whitehall to the cold damp vaults of Westminster Abbey. It was at this period if not on other occasions, that
