What we know is, he was journeying towards Hanover again, hopeful of a little hunting at the Gorhde; and intended seeing Osnabruck and his Brother the Bishop there, as he passed. That day, 21st June, 1727, from some feelings of his own, he was in great haste for Osnabruck; hurrying along by extra-post, without real cause save hurry of mind. He had left his poor old Maypole of a Mistress on the Dutch Frontier, that morning, to follow at more leisure.
He was struck by apoplexy on the road,--arm fallen powerless, early in the day, head dim and heavy; obviously an alarming case.
But he refused to stop anywhere; refused any surgery but such as could be done at once. "Osnabruck! Osnabruck!" he reiterated, growing visibly worse. Two subaltern Hanover Officials, "Privy-Councillor von Hardenberg, KAMMERHERR (Chamberlain) von Fabrice, were in the carriage with him;" [Gottfried,
Historische Chronik (Frankfurt, 1759), iii. 872.
Boyer, The Political State of Great Britain,
vol. xxxiii. pp. 545, 546.] King chiefly dozing, and at last supported in the arms of Fabrice, was heard murmuring, "C'EST FAITDE MOI ('T is all over with me)!" And "Osnabruck! Osnabruck!"slumberously reiterated he: To Osnabruck, where my poor old Brother, Bishop as they call him, once a little Boy that trotted at my knee with blithe face, will have some human pity on me!
So they rushed along all day, as at the gallop, his few attendants and he; and when the shades of night fell, and speech had now left the poor man, he still passionately gasped some gurgle of a sound like "Osnabruck;" --hanging in the arms of Fabrice, and now evidently in the article of death. What a gallop, sweeping through the slumber of the world: To Osnabruck, Osnabruck!
In the hollow of the night (some say, one in the morning), they reach Osnabruck. And the poor old Brother,--Ernst August, once youngest of six brothers, of seven children, now the one survivor, has human pity in the heart of him full surely. But George is dead; careless of it now. [Coxe (i. 266) is "indebted to his friend Nathaniel Wraxall" for these details,--the since famous Sir Nathaniel, in whose Memoirs (vague, but NOTmendacious, not unintelligent) they are now published more at large. See his Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin, Dresden, &c. (London. 1799), i. 35-40; also
Historical Memoirs (London, 1836), iv. 516-518.]
After sixty-seven years of it, he has flung his big burdens,--English crowns, Hanoverian crownlets, sulkinesses, indignations, lean women and fat, and earthly contradictions and confusions,--fairly off him; and lies there.
The man had his big burdens, big honors so called, absurd enough some of them, in this world; but he bore them with a certain gravity and discretion: a man of more probity, insight and general human faculty than he now gets credit for. His word was sacred to him. He had the courage of a Welf, or Lion-Man; quietly royal in that respect at least. His sense of equity, of what was true and honorable in men and things, remained uneffaced to a respectable degree; and surely it had resisted much. Wilder puddle of muddy infatuations from without and from within, if we consider it well,--of irreconcilable incoherences, bottomless universal hypocrisies, solecisms bred with him and imposed on him,--few sons of Adam had hitherto lived in.