To the last Jeffreys continued to repeat that those who thought him cruel did not know what his orders were, that he deserved praise instead of blame, and that his clemency had drawn on him the extreme displeasure of his master, [414] Disease, assisted by strong drink and by misery, did its work fast.

The patient's stomach rejected all nourishment.

He dwindled in a few weeks from a portly and even corpulent man to a skeleton.

On the eighteenth of April he died, in the forty-first year of his age.

He had been Chief Justice of the King's Bench at thirty-five, and Lord Chancellor at thirty-seven.