"Yours, most respectfully, "WILLIAM HARVEY.
Harvey died at Roehampton in the house of his brother Eliab on the 3rd of June, 1657. Aubrey says that on the morning of his death, about ten o'clock, he went to speak and found that he had the dead palsy in his tongue; then he saw what was to become of him. He knew there were then no hopes of his recovery, so presently he sends for his young nephews to come up to him, to whom he gives one the minute watch with which he had made his experiments, to another his signet ring, and to another some other remembrance. He then made signs (for being seized with the dead palsy in his tongue he could not speak) to Sambroke, his apothecary in Blackfriars, to let him blood in the tongue, which did him little or no good, and so ended his days, dying in the evening of the day on which he was stricken, the palsy giving him an easy passport.
It would appear from this account that Harvey died of a cerebral hemorrhage from vessels long injured by gout and situated rather at the base or internal parts of the brain than in the frontal lobes. Most probably the left Sylvian artery gave way, leading at first to a slight extravasation of blood, which rapidly increased in quantity until it overwhelmed his brain. The copy of the death mask in the church at Hempstead shows the left eye more widely open than the right, whilst the furrows on the right side of the face are much more marked than those on the left side.
The body was brought to London, where it seems to have been placed in Cockaine House, which also belonged to Eliab Harvey, and in that room of the house which became afterwards the office of Elias Ashmole, the antiquary to whom Oxford owes the Ashmolean Museum. Here it rested many days because, though Harvey died on the 3rd of June, it was not until the 25th of June that the Fellows of the College of Physicians received a notice requesting them, clothed in their gowns, to attend the funeral on the following day. In the meantime, Eliab, as his brother's executor, had decided that Harvey should be buried at Hempstead in Essex, and accordingly, on the 26th of June, 1657, the funeral procession started from London. It was followed far beyond the City walls by a large number of the Fellows of the College of Physicians, many of whom must afterwards have hurried back to Westminster Hall, where, on the same day, with the greatest ceremony and with all the pomp of circumstance, Cromwell was a second time inaugurated after the humble petition and advice had given him the power of nominating his successors and of forming a second House of Parliament, whilst it assigned to him a perpetual revenue.