The sermon became an increasingly important element of the English funeral during and after the Reformation. The chief explicit purpose of funeral rites was instruction of the living, not intercession for the soul of the dead. The sermon played a central part in this process. Preachers tended to present or interpret the behaviour of many godly Protestants, especially puritans, as a triumph over the pains of illness and the terror of death, a triumph which signalled to witnesses their elect status. This essay focuses on a narrative of a godly deathbed in which the last communion and confession of sins played an unusually large part. William Walker's sermon on his patron William Lord Russell of Thornhaugh contains one of the most dramatic of early Stuart deathbed narratives.