The and my nephew cannot want accomplishments." still more important duties of preceptor to the youth were entrusted to Burnet, as already indicated. Windsor then being within the diocese of Salisbury, the Prince was to live there during the summer months, when the Bishop reckoned he would be in his diocese, and therefore in the way of his proper episcopal duties; he satisfied himself with thinking, that all would be right if the King allowed him ten weeks in the year for the other parts of his diocese, a circumstance which shows how in those days notions of a Bishop's office were different from what, happily, they are now. "I took to my own province," says the right reverend preceptor, reading and explaining the Scriptures to him, the instructing him in the principles of religion, and the rules of virtue, and the giving him a view of history, geography, politics, and government. I resolved also to look very exactly to all the masters that were appointed to teach him other things." 1 66 But a sad fatality brooded over all the offspring of poor Anne. After a few days' attack of fever, the young Duke died on the 30th of July. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and recently, upon the family vault being opened, amongst the ten small coffins of the children of James II., and the eighteen small coffins of the children of his daughter Anne, lay the coffin of the youthful William, resting in remarkable juxtaposition upon that of Elizabeth of Bohemia.2 Thus one of an unfortunate race, who never attained the crown he inherited, mingled his dust with that of a great aunt, who soon lost the crown she had prompted her husband too eagerly to seize. As the nation unaffectedly mourned 1 Burnet, ii. 211. 2 Stanley's Memorials of Westminster Abbey; Supplement, 136. 1 the death of the youthful Duke, a gentleman, 1 living at Holland House, a friend of Atterbury's, lamented the removal of his Royal neighbour in the following lines, which afford a specimen of the affected elegiac strains popular at the period: "So by the course of the revolving spheres, Upon the infant luminary gaze. They find their heaven's enlarged, and wait from thence, But suddenly, alas! the fleeting light Retiring, leaves their hopes involved in endless night." The Duke of Gloucester was the last Protestant heir to the Crown recognized in the Act of Settlement. His death therefore exposed the Royal succession to new perils, revived the hopes of the Jacobites, and created anxiety in the minds of William and his Ministers. The King at the time had left England nearly a month; and as, amidst the gardens of his retreat at Loo, he saw the shortening of the summer days, he had pondered future contingencies, and laid plans for preserving the work which he had wrought. When, in the following February, 1701, he, bearing evident signs of increasing frailty, met Parliament, he told the Houses that the loss just sustained made it necessary there should be a further provision for a Protestant succession; adding, that the happiness of the nation, and the security of religion, seemed to depend so much upon this, that he could not doubt it would meet with general concurrence. The addresses echoed the same sentiment, and in March the Bill of Succession came under Parliamentary debate. It determined that the Princess Sophia, Duchess-Dowager of Hanover, or her heirs, should 1 Mr. Shippen. succeed upon failure of issue to William and Anne; and it laid down the principle that whosoever wore the Crown should commune with the Church of England, as by law established. Other important resolutions, which it does not come within my province to notice, were incorporated in the Bill; and these gave rise to fierce discussions between the two great political parties, who, throughout the whole of this reign, were teasing William out of his life, provoking the phlegmatic Dutchman to exclaim, that "all the difference he knew between the two parties was, that the Tories would cut his throat in the morning, and the Whigs in the afternoon." The Act of Settlement at length passed, and received the Royal assent. It is curious to observe with respect to this Act, that Sophia, who was made the protectress of the Reformed faith, and who was to supersede the Stuarts on the throne, was neither a zealous Protestant nor a foe to the exiled family. For when asked what was the religion of her blooming daughter, at the time just thirteen years of age, she replied she had none as yet; "we are waiting to know what prince she is to marry, and whenever that point is determined, she will be duly instructed in the religion of her future husband-whether Protestant or Catholic." And in a communication, which Lord Chancellor Hardwicke called her Jacobite letter, she bewailed the fate of the poor Prince of Wales, who, if restored, she said, might be easily guided in a right direction.2 A limitation of the heirship, within the pale of any particular Protestant community, which may become less and less national as time rolls on, is open to grave objections; but the limitation of descent within Protestant lines of some kind, appears to rest upon a sound basis. The 1 Ralph, ii. 908. 2 Stanhope's Queen Anne, 19. 1 reasons for it are furnished not by the religious, but by the political character of Romanism. No doctrinal or ecclesiastical opinions ought to exclude a legitimate heir, but a Popish claimant is the subject of another and an ambitious power, which associates temporal with spiritual authority, and exercises assumed prerogatives after an elastic fashion, which can contract or expand them with exquisite cunning, as fear darkens, or as hope brightens the prospect of futurity. A Roman Catholic Sovereign is involved in complications intolerable to a Protestant people, with a history full of warning against foreign interference. It was a true instinct which led Lord William Russell, amidst the aberrations of party zeal, to deprecate as a terrible calamity the accession of a Papist; the same instinct prompted the limitation of the Succession Act. Taught by the story of the past, our ancestors guarded against Romish intermeddling, and it is well for the fortunes of this country, that, acting on this maxim, our fathers did not, in a fit of blind generosity, mistaken for justice, open or keep open a door of mischief which, in some perilous hour, it might be impossible to shut. Another important event was now approaching. James II., tired out by a chequered life, desired to die. Whatever may be thought of his principles, and the effect of his reign upon the interests of his country, no one can doubt his religious sincerity, and when the immoralities of his earlier days had been discontinued, confessed, and deplored,1 he manifested an earnest devoutness, tinged, of course, by the peculiarities of his faith. Dwelling upon the examples of some good men who had longed to be removed from this world, and upon the moral dangers to which others had been exposed, he counted 1 Clarke's Life of James II., ii. 606. it "a high presumption for a slender reed not to desire to be sheltered from such terrible gusts as had overturned those lofty cedars." When indulging in such meditations, he was seized with a fit in early spring, from which he partially recovered. Once more, within the Palace at St. Germains, he was seized, in the midst of his devotions at chapel, with another attack on the 2nd of September. Afterwards he sent for his son, who, seeing the bed stained with blood from a violent hæmorrhage, burst into violent weeping. Having calmed the child, his father conjured him to adhere to the Catholic faith; to be obedient to his mother, and grateful to the King of France; to serve God with all his strength, and if he should reign, to remember kings were made not for themselves but the good of their people, and to set a pattern of all manner of virtues.1 This was good advice, but it bore an application such as would guide the son in the father's ways. He exhorted everybody about him to spend pious lives, and urged his few Protestant courtiers and servants to embrace the Catholic faith. It deserves mention that he forgave all who had injured him, mentioning in particular his daughter Anne, and his son-in-law William. But the most important circumstance connected with his dying moments was the visit of the Grand Monarque, who promised James he would take his family under his protection, and acknowledge the Prince of Wales as King of England—an assurance which drew joyful tears from the family and courtiers. On Friday, the 16th of September, 1701, James expired; as if a saint had been taken to heaven, the physicians and surgeons who made a post-mortem examination, kept particles of his body as relics, and the 1 Clarke's Life of James II., ii. 590-594. |