The day after Rochester’s death, his Will was read in the presence of his widow, his mother, John Cary, Francis Warre, and two serving women. His son Charles was to receive his “hereditaments” and Lady Rochester kept the estates legally hers by jointure. The Wilmot daughters were to share £12,000: Anne to be paid £4,000 when she became eighteen and Elizabeth and Mallet the same when they reached sixteen. All this money was guaranteed by the Indenture of 1672. The Earl’s debts were to be paid, with charges against £5,000 “due to mee upon two severall grants or patents out of his Majesties Court of Exchequer.” Even in death, John Wilmot demanded every farthing owed him by Charles II. Belle-Fasse got his master’s clothes and linen; Robert Parsons got the living at Charlence; and “an infant child by the name of Elizabeth Clerke” got “fourty pounds annuitie … to contynue during her life.”

Finally, the widow and her mother-in-law were joint executrixes of the estate—so long as the widow remained single and lived in harmony with the Dowager Countess. If she did not, the estate fell entirely to the management of Anne Wilmot or, in the event of her death, to Rochester’s “verie good uncle,” Sir Walter St. John. Sir Allen Apsley was also an executor, along with “John Cary of Woodstocke esquire.” Thus the dying penitent reconciled with his opponents in the Woodstock controversy. Since Rochester’s Woodstock patents expired when he died, his effects had to be removed from the Lodge in readiness for the Lichfields. The Dowager Countess had already followed her son’s instructions to burn the “filthy pictures” adorning the walls. She and Sir Walter then proceeded to destroy his remaining papers, including whatever might prove politically embarrassing.

On August 9, two weeks after he died, Rochester’s body was carried to the hamlet of Spelsbury, where the Lee family vault was located. All of the immediate family were present but no record exists of others who gathered to weep and rejoice for the man hailed as Strephon in broadsheets being hawked in London on the same day. However, it is clear that many of those nearest to Rochester in life were absent. Parsons used the two-week interval between Rochester’s death and funeral to compose a sermon.