John Friend, a gentleman commoner at St Edmund’s Hall, Oxford, died of a fever in March 1673. His father, Nathaniel, after arranging his funeral, returned home “on his cousin’s advice” to tell his wife:
“I came neare home mine owne care and sorrow redoubled in relation to my poore wide and how I should acquaint her with soe heavy a Providence, I therefore called upon the Widdow Margaret Holliser acquainting her with my poore sonnes death and entreated her to goe to our house before and by discourse a little prepare my wife for it which shee honestly did, supposing to her the worst, I in the meantime lingered and about a quarter of an houre after (which was neare 9 at night). I came in bringing both to my wife and to my father the heaviest tidings that ever brought them in my life.”
His wife understandably took it “exceeding heavily”, “the presence and company of my loving Neighbour stood us in good stead.”
I can’t but wonder how recent a widow Margaret Holliser was. Did she not suffer too from her close involvement in the tragic scene, so like one she had herself endured?
(Quoted in A. Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning, Palgrave, Macmillan, 2006, p. 33.)
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