WILLIAM AND MA11Y.

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woman and bury her: for she is a King’s daughter.” It is certain chap.that some of the ejected priests pursued her to the grave with ■ [C34 - ■invectives. Her death, they said, was evidently a judgment forher crime. God had, from the top of Sinai, in thunder andlightning, promised length of days to children who shouldhonour their parents; and in this promise was plainly implieda menace. What father had ever been worse treated by hisdaughters than James by Mary and Anne ? Mary was gone, cutoff in the prime of life, in the glow of beauty, in the height ofprosperity; and Anne would do well to profit by the warning.Wagstaffe went further, and dwelt much on certain wonderfulcoincidences of time. James had been driven from his palaceand country in Christmas week. Mary had died in Christmasweek. There could be no doubt that, if the secrets ofProvidencewere disclosed to us, we should find that the turns .of the daugh-ter’s complaint in December 1694 bore an exact analogy to theturns of the father’s fortune in December 1688. It was at mid-night that the father ran away from Rochester: it was at mid-night that the daughter expired. Such was the profundity andsuch the ingenuity of a writer whom the Jacobite schismaticsjustly regarded as one of their ablest chiefs.*

The Whigs soon had an opportunity of retaliating. Theytriumphantly related that a scrivener in the Borough, a stanchfriend of hereditary right, while exulting in the judgment whichhad overtaken the Queen, had himself fallen down dead in afit.** *•*

The funeral was long remembered as the saddest and most Funeral

° , ot Uarj.

august that Westminster had ever seen. While the Queensremains lay in state at Whitehall, the neighbouring streets werefilled everyday, from sunrise to sunset, by crowds which made

* Remarks on some late Sermons, 1695; A Defence of the Archbishop’s

Sermon, 1695.

*•* Narcissus Luttrell’s Diary.