lochiels:

_{In March 1603 Elizabeth was described as being unwell and seemed depressed. She took up residence in one of her favourite palaces – Richmond – close to the River Thames. She refused to allow herself to be examined, and she refused take to her bed – standing for hours on end. As her condition deteriorated her ladies-in-waiting spread cushions on the floor, and Elizabeth eventually lay down on them. The painting shown below depicts this scene beautifully. Elizabeth lay on the floor for nearly four days – mostly without speaking.She grew weaker and weaker until her servants insisted on making her more comfortable in her bed. Elizabeth’s Councillors gathered around her bed, and it is said that gentle music was played to soothe her. Death finally came on 24 March 1603, and she is said to have yielded ‘mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree’.Elizabeth’s body was embalmed and laid in state in a lead coffin at Whitehall – having been carried from Richmond to Whitehall at night on a barge lit with torches.  On the day of her funeral on 28 April the coffin was taken to Westminster Abbey on a hearse drawn by four horses robed in black velvet. In the words of the chronicler John Stow:} 

_{“Westminster was surcharged with multitudes of all sorts of people in their streets, houses, windows, leads and gutters, that came to see the obsequy, and when they beheld her statue lying upon the coffin, there was such a general sighing, groaning and weeping as the like hath not been seen or known in the memory of man, neither doth any history mention any people, time or state to make like lamentation for the death of their sovereign” [x]}