Sir John Hawkins, in his _History of Music_, would seem to suggest that Purcell left his family in distressed circumstances, but the will of the widow, of which he evidently knew nothing, gives a satisfactory refutation of such a surmise. Hawkins also charges Purcell with associating with tavern company; his words are:--
"Mirth and good humour seemed to have been habitual to him; and this is perhaps the best excuse that can be made for those connections and intimacies with Brown and others, which show him not to have been very nice in the choice of his company. Brown spent his life in taverns and ale-houses; the Hole in the Wall in Baldwin's Gardens was the citadel in which he baffled the assaults of creditors and bailiffs, at the same time that he attracted thither such as thought his wit atoned for his profligacy. Purcell seems to have been of that number, and to merit censure for having prostituted his invention, by adapting music to some of the most wretched ribaldry that was ever obtruded on the world for humour."
"There is a tradition that his death was occasioned by a cold which he caught in the night waiting for admittance to his own house. It is said that he used to keep late hours, and that his wife had given orders to his servants not to let him in after midnight; unfortunately he came home heated with wine from the tavern at an hour later than that prescribed him, and through the inclemency of the air contracted a disorder of which he died. If this be true, it reflects but little honour on Madam Purcell, for so she is styled in the advertisements of his works; and but ill agrees with those expressions of grief for her dear, lamented husband, which she makes use of to Lady Howard in the dedication of the _Orpheus Britannicus_. It seems probable that the disease of which he died was rather a lingering than an acute one, perhaps a consumption."
We see from this, that Hawkins had some doubt as to the truth of the story, and his daughter writing in 1822,[52] respecting some aspersions which had been cast on her mother in reference to her treatment of her father, says, "Sir John Hawkins was not at home at all the sooner for his wife's fetching him. Mrs. Purcell, I should conjecture, had other modes of attracting Mr. Purcell; yet _perhaps the whole may have been as gross a falsification as that_ by which Lady Hawkins is vilified."