King's daughter." It is
certain that some of the ejected priests pursued her to the grave with
invectives. Her death, they said, was evidently a judgment for her
crime. God had, from the top of Sinai, in thunder and lightning,
promised length of days to children who should honour their parents; and
in this promise was plainly implied a menace. What father had ever been
worse treated by his daughters than James by Mary and Anne? Mary was
gone, cut off in the prime of life, in the glow of beauty, in the
height of prosperity; and Anne would do well to profit by the warning.
Wagstaffe went further, and dwelt much on certain wonderful coincidences
of time. James had been driven from his palace and country in Christmas
week. Mary had died in Christmas week. There could be no doubt that, if
the secrets of Providence were disclosed to us, we should find that the
turns of the daughter's complaint in December 1694 bore an exact
analogy to the turns of the father's fortune in December 1688. It was
at midnight that the father ran away from Rochester; it was at midnight
that the daughter expired. Such was the profundity and such the
ingenuity of a writer whom the Jacobite schismatics justly regarded as
one of their ablest chiefs. [554]

The Whigs soon had an opportunity of retaliating. They triumphantly
related that a scrivener in the Borough, a stanch friend of hereditary
right, while exulting in the judgment which had overtaken the Queen, had
himself fallen down dead in a fit. [555]

The funeral was long remembered as the saddest and most august that
Westminster had ever seen. While the Queen's remains lay in state at
Whitehall, the neighbouring streets were filled every day, from sunrise
to sunset, by crowds which made all traffic impossible. The two Houses
with their maces followed the hearse, the Lords robed in scarlet and
ermine, the Commons in long black mantles. No preceding Sovereign had
ever been attended to the grave by a Parliament; for, till then, the
Parliament had always expired with the Sovereign. A paper had indeed
been circulated, in which the logic of a small sharp pettifogger was
employed to prove that writs, issued in the joint names of William and
Mary, ceased to be of force as soon as William reigned alone. But this
paltry cavil had completely failed. It had not even been mentioned
in the Lower House, and had been mentioned in the Upper only to be
contemptuously overruled. The whole Magistracy of the City sw