He seemed to be in a room which a bird flew into; the bird changed into a woman in white, who told him he should die in three days.
He ‘did not much regard it, because he could in some measure account for it; for that a few days before he had been with Mrs. Dawson, when a robin-redbreast flew into her room.’ On the morning of Saturday he told the same ladies that he was very well, and believed he should ‘BILK THE GHOST.’ The dream has become an apparition! On that day--Saturday--he, with the ladies, Fortescue, and Wolsley, went to Pitt Place; he went to bed after eleven, ordered rolls for breakfast, and, in bed, ‘died without a groan,’ as his servant was disengaging him from his waistcoat. During dinner he had ‘a rising in his throat’ (a slight sickness), ‘a thing which had often happened to him before.’ His physician, Dr. Fothergill, vaguely attributed his death to the rupture of some vessel in his side, where he had felt a pain in summer.
From this version we may glean that Lord Lyttelton was not himself very certain whether his vision occurred when he was awake or asleep. He is made to speak of a ‘dream,’ and even to account for it in a probable way; but later he talks of ‘bilking the GHOST.’ The editor of ‘Notes and Queries’ now tries to annihilate this contemporary document by third-hand evidence, seventy years after date. In 1851 or 1852 the late Dowager Lady Lyttelton, Sarah, daughter of the second Earl Spencer, discussed the story with Mr. Fortescue, a son of the Mr. Fortescue who was at Pitt Place, and succeeded to the family title six years later, in 1785. The elder Mr. Fortescue, in brief, is said to have averred that he had heard nothing of the dream or prediction till ‘some days after;’ he, therefore, was inclined to disbelieve in it. We have demonstrated, however, that if Mr. Fortescue had heard nothing, yet the tale was all over the town before Lord Lyttelton died. Nay, more, we have contemporary proof that Mr. Fortescue HAD heard of the affair! Lyttelton died at midnight on the Saturday, November 27. In her diary for the following Tuesday (November 30), Lady Mary Coke says that she has just heard the story of the ‘dream’ from Lady Bute, who had it from Mr. Ross, WHO HAD IT FROM MR. FORTESCUE!* Mr. Fortescue, then, must have told the tale as early as the Monday after the fatal Saturday night. Yet in old age he seems to have persuaded himself that the tale came later to his knowledge. Some irrelevant, late, and fourth-hand versions will be found in ‘Notes and Queries,’ but they merely illustrate the badness of such testimony.