es prove took place three years
earlier, and by his other arrangements for his family at Basel and for
Philip at Paris, Holbein held himself free of any further responsibility
for their support, and, indeed, determined that they should not obtain
possession of the residue in London.

Secondly, that if the mother of his two illegitimate children had lived
with him in London as his wife, she must have just died--perhaps in
childbed, perhaps of the Plague. She is not in any way referred to.
And there is something in the very signs of confusion and distress
throughout the wording of the Will which seems to exhale a far-away
anguish--sudden parting, sad apprehensions, keenest anxiety for "my two
chylder which be at nurse." There comes before the eye a picture of
the five grave men--Holbein, his two executors, the one a goldsmith,
the other an armourer, and his two witnesses, a "merchaunte" and a
"paynter"--hurrying along the plague-infected streets to get this
document legalised as some protection for two motherless babies, in the
event of their father's death. No man knew whose turn would come within
the hour.

And by November 29th Holbein's had come, and one executor's also,
apparently. The Latin record of administration on this date is that it
has been consigned to John Anwarpe (Johann or Hans of Antwerp), and
accepted by him in accordance with "the last will of John, alias Hans
Holbein, recently deceased in the parish of Saint Andrew Undershaft."

It would seem probable, then, that the painter was buried in this church
rather than in the closely adjoining church of Saint Catharine-Cree to
which tradition assigned his body. But the horrors of such an epidemic
as that in which the painter was swept suddenly away make it easy to
understand how even such a man as he had now become could die unnoticed
and be buried in an unrecorded grave. When the Earl of Arundel, a few
years later, sought to learn where he might set up a monument to one he
so greatly admired, there was only this vague and uncorroborated rumour
that the painter was buried in Saint Catharine-Cree. And so no monument
was built to mark the spot where Holbein's "measure of sliding sand" had
been spilled at last.

But, as they ran, those sands had measured more than "_a great
portrait-painter_." They had measured Greatness; greatness which is not
to be delimited by the wanton outrages of man or the accidents of time.
Both have had their share in the judgments