to Kensington the same night. No serious alarm seems to have been felt at the time; and on 23 Feb. he sent a message to both houses, in reference to a motion by Nottingham for the calling of a new parliament in Scotland, recommending a union between the two kingdoms (Burnet, iv. 558). An accession of pain and weakness on 1 March induced him to grant a commission under the great seal for giving the royal assent to the bill for the attainder of the pretender and certain other bills. On 3 March he had what Burnet calls ‘a short fit of the ague,’ and from the following day had to keep his room. Four days afterwards, when Albemarle arrived from Holland with a satisfactory report of the progress of affairs, the king received it apathetically, and soon afterwards said, ‘Je tire vers ma fin.’ On the same day Tenison and Burnet were in attendance; and on the following morning, Sunday, 8 March, having received the sacrament, he bade farewell to several English lords and to Auverquerque, committed his private keys to the care of Albemarle, asked for Portland but was unable to speak to him articulately, and between seven and eight o'clock, while the commendatory prayer was being said for him, died (Burnet and Macaulay; for the incident of the finding of the gold ring with Mary's hair tied to the king's left arm, see also Kennet, iii. 832). The autopsy showed death to have resulted from an acute pleurisy, probably complicated by the inflammation of one lung. He had always been asthmatical (see ib. p. 833, the report of the nine physicians and four surgeons who conducted the post-mortem examination; and cf. Dr. Norman Moore's letter to the Athenæum, 7 July 1894).
On 18 March the privy council resolved to bury William decently and privately in Westminster Abbey, to erect a monument to him and his queen there, and to set up a statue on horseback in some public place (Luttrell, v. 154); no monument, however, was erected in the abbey (the king's wax effigy, upon which Michelet moralises in his Louis XIV, 1864, p. 170, may still be seen there). The funeral took place on the night of 12 April, when the remains were, without the slightest attempt at pomp, laid in the vault under Henry VII's chapel in the abbey (Burnet, iv. 570). The king's will, on the contents of which conjecture had freely exercised itself (Luttrell, v. 150), was opened in May; it left the whole of his inheritance to his youthful cousin, John William Friso, hereditary stadholder of Friesland and Gröningen, whom William had in vain wished to succeed him in his own stadholderates (Van Kampen, ii. 334). A codicil bestowed a large legacy upon Albemarle.
William III's chief title to fame consists in his lucid perception, from first to last, of the political task of his life, and in the single-minded consistency with which he devoted himself to its accomplishment. This task was, in a word, to save the united provinces from being overwhelmed by France. The military leadership in the crisis of the French invasion he assumed as belonging to him by inheritance. But, the extremity of peril past, he recognised that the peril itself remained. To avert it he made himself indispensable as the leader of the European coalition against Louis XIV; to establish that position on an enduring basis he mounted the English throne; to maintain it he digested all but unbearable provocations. With the same purpose primarily in view, he accepted a disappointing, and concluded a temporising, peace; he entered into hazardous engagements involving him in serious misunderstandings with his near but clear-sighted English subjects, and in a happier hour reknit the European alliance of which at his death he left England the foremost member. Although his acceptance of the English throne was primarily due to his solicitude for the safety of the united provinces, it reduced their own influence in the affairs of Europe, and during his own lifetime impaired the cherished independence of their conditions of government at home. In return, his affection for his countrymen was the main source of his unpopularity in England. This unpopularity was probably not so marked as has been affirmed, except in Jacobite regions of the country, and in those spheres of court and political society where his Dutch followers were begrudged favour and office; but it certainly increased in his last years, embittered as they were by disappointments, sorrows, and failing health. With his parliaments, and with the classes among his subjects represented by them, he was frequently at variance, because to them the purposes of his foreign policy remained imperfectly intelligible, while he had little or no sympathy with their conceptions of government in state or church. Yet, owing to the circumstances of his position, and to his willingness to postpone all other considerations to that nearest to his heart, the power of parliament grew under his strong rule, and the system of party government advanced under a king who, with reason, detested nothing so much as faction. A less paradoxical result of his reign was the ‘military tinge’ imparted by him to English
