There are other interesting passages, but as a final touch to the will of this stormy nature it may be noticed that he gives “the dust of this wicked carcase to be buried in the dust.” Altogether his will confirms the opinion of Aubrey in his “Brief Lives,” that “Dr. Gill, the father, was a very ingeniose person, as may appear by his writings. Notwithstanding he had moodes and humours.”
Sometimes the circumstances suggest romance. “On the morning of the action between the Portland packet and the Temeraire French privateer, off Guadaloupe, on the 14th of October, 1796,” says Kirby’s “Wonderful Museum” (1803), “Mr. Cunningham, a passenger, who, in a previous engagement sustained by the Portland packet with another privateer, had evinced great courage, observed to the captain that he felt a strong impression that his dissolution was at hand; and on the enemy bearing in sight, he went below and made his will, declaring his hour was come; returning to his station on deck, in a few minutes a bullet verified his prediction.”
So it has been again and again, from the case of Mary Stuart, writing her will in her own hand during the last hours before her execution, or of Archbishop Laud drawing up his will in the Tower, to the case of Señor Ferrer, dictating his testament in the prison chapel at Barcelona.
Strange histories, it will be seen, lie behind wills, dull and similar as at first sight the majority appears. The history may not always be explicit, but the suggestion conveyed by some gift or revocation, some phrase or fact, may often be completed by the reader’s imagination. So Dorothy Skipwith, of Catesby, in Lincolnshire (will dated 1677), “did revoke and declare void the legacy of twenty guineas mentioned to be given to Mr. Shomoon, a Frenchman living in Whitehall, which she said she so revoked in regard he refused to come to her in the time of her sickness.”
At times we know something of that which lies beneath the surface of the will. The Duchesse d’Angoulême (died October 19, 1851) forgives, “following the example of her parents,” all who have injured her, expressing her love for France and her gratitude to the Emperor of Austria. And towards the end she states: “I wish all the sheets, papers or books written by my hand, which are in my strong-box or my tables, to be burnt by the executors of my will.” These, we are told, were prayers, meditations, notes which might have caused hurt to the feelings of others, lists of charities and books of account. The will is signed in the name of “Marie Thérèse de France, Comtesse de Maines,” the title which she took in her days of exile.