value in the sight of this Protestant nation. The feats of valour which he had displayed with Turenne in the Protestant cause of old, the dangers which he had fearlessly incurred more recently in battle with the Dutch, while admiral of the English fleet, all were being fast obliterated by the obstinate bigotry with which, as heir apparent, he persisted in defying the religious opinions of the House of Commons and of the country. The troubles which he drew down upon himself, upon his second consort, and her posterity, were beginning to be fomented almost with his marriage. Five years, however, from the date of her marriage are spoken of by Mary d'Esté as the happiest of her life, notwithstanding the death almost at their birth of two or three of her first children. She became deeply attached to her husband despite some infidelities on his part; she soon, also, learnt the English language and became a patroness of literature and authors. The duke's banishment to Flanders was scarcely an interruption to this dream, because she accompanied him, and when he obtained leave from Charles the Second, a little later, to transfer his residence to Scotland, she again followed his fortunes. It was in November, 1679, that the Duke and Duchess of York took up their quarters at Holyrood House, where they became exceedingly popular, and remained, with the exception of two or three visits to London, until they were called to the throne. It was while she held her court in Scotland that a grave accident occurred to Mary of Modena. She was thrown from her horse, dragged some distance and received several kicks from the animal before she could be extricated. She was at first thought dead, but fortunately had met with no dangerous wounds. On her recovery she again took equestrian exercise, which, however, the united entreaties of her husband and mother persuaded her to discontinue.

The duchess was again enceinte in 1684, and the duke being more popular just then in England, the king desired that the child should be born at St. James's. It was on the return of James by sea for the purpose of conducting his duchess to London, that he encountered that terrible shipwreck in the "Gloucester," in which many perished. Notwithstanding the terrors of her ladies, Mary Beatrice went by water immediately afterwards to London, and was, early in 1685, present at the death-bed of the king, her brother-in-law, for whom her grief was excessive.

The first act of Queen Mary d'Esté on ascending the British throne was somewhat arbitrary. It concerned not the subjects of these realms, but her own brother, from whom she had parted long

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years before on terms of the purest affection, but who had chosen to decline the matrimonial state up to the age of five-and-twenty. The Queen of England had selected a wife for him, and after in vain communicating her pleasure, proceeded to display much bitterness and anger in her correspondence, and threatened to withdraw her powerful support from his duchy and become his enemy. The sound morality of her conduct, however, made a strong impression amidst a court which had learnt to live in abandonment, though she had not, with all her youthful charms of person and mind, weaned the affections of her husband, as yet, from his avowed mistress, Catharine Sedley. In the early part of their reign, the queen suffered much unhappiness on this account, but at length, after James had made Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, and bestowed on her some Irish possessions, the wrong was at least publicly at an end. The next event which aroused to new pangs the sensitive heart of the queen, was the death of her mother at Rome, on July 19, 1687. The duchess had visited Mary more than once since they first quitted Italy together, and an affectionate correspondence had been maintained to the last.

Casting only a hasty glance at the portentous circumstance that James had just committed the Archbishop of Canterbury and six bishops to the Tower, to show the headlong madness with which he was ruining his own prospects and those of his wife and the child she then bore, we arrive on the 10th of June, 1688, at the birth of the Prince of Wales, christened James Francis Edward, and best known in history as the Pretender. The partisans of Mary and Anne raised an imputation that this was a spurious child, but the attestations of highly reputable Protestant ladies show it to have been a malicious calumny which could not have gained credence in less stormy times. This infant was to be the inseparable companion of Mary Beatrice in the calamities which now fell thick and fast upon her. The last mad act of the reign of his parents was, that of accepting the Pope as his godfather. William of Orange effected a landing, and James showed an irresolution wholly at variance with his early career. It was with difficulty and only to save the child that Mary Beatrice was persuaded to separate from her husband and fly first to France. She crossed the Thames from Whitehall to Lambeth on a stormy night in an open boat, took coach to Gravesend, and there embarked in the disguise of an Italian washerwoman in a common passage-vessel. She carried the little prince packed like a bundle of linen under her arm, and it was singular that he did not once cry, and that he proved himself, moreover, an excellent sailor.

The queen herself was very ill on the voyage, but both arrived safely at Calais on December 11th. She was only then in her thirty-first year. Sixteen years before, she had quitted Italy, as she now quitted England, for ever.

The attentions of Louis the Fourteenth to Mary Beatrice, from the day of her landing in his territory, were munificent beyond description. She was his adopted daughter, and well did this powerful friend in her need supply the place of a parent towards her. When joined by her husband, he gave up to the royal pair one of the finest palaces in France, St. Germains, and there they held their court during the remainder of their career. A melancholy separation from her husband, when he departed on his Irish expedition, speedily ensued; and his failure at the battle of the Boyne might have afflicted her more painfully, had it not brought him back to her side in safety. She collected and advanced sums of money during his absence, and her letters to Jacobites at home, both now and afterwards, displayed considerable talent for business. Religion also much occupied her thoughts; she had formed an intimacy with the inmates of the Convent of Chaillot, which deepened as years of increased misfortune rolled on; and whatever time she could spare from her husband and his interests, and the tedious ceremonies of the French court, was passed in visiting or corresponding with them. The destruction of the French fleet by the English, which occurred shortly before the birth of his youngest child, and with it the last hope of James, seemed to have unsettled the royal exile's mind ; for he protracted his absence at La Hogue, despite the queen's earnest solicitations for his return, until almost the period of her accouchement. The birth of the Princess Louisa took place on June 28, 1692. In little more than two years from that date, the death of her brother added one more to the number of her griefs. It was about this time, 1694, that the exiled queen sold her jewels for the support of her numerous faithful followers at St. Germains; for though Louis allowed a certain sum for their maintenance, her own dower, voted by parliament, was regularly appropriated by William of Orange.

At the commencement of 1695, Mary the Second being dead, James's hopes revived in England, and there was another heart-rending parting between him and his doting wife previous to a descent upon that country, which he meditated; but the winds and waves this time destroyed the fleet, and returned him to her in despair although in safety. His health, however, began to decline fast, and though it was seven years from that date ere he breathed his last, he had frequent attacks

which warned her that the heaviest blow of all to her heart was approaching. Her conjugal tenderness has rarely been surpassed; and when he was struck with apoplexy in March, 1701, her violent grief was only equalled by the devotion of her attendance on him till the day of his death, September 16, following.

The widowhood of Queen Mary Beatrice, with all its trials of poverty, sickness, and disappointed hopes for her son, has to be summed up here in few words. She was nearly forty-three years of age at her husband's death; she lived to the age of sixty, having survived James more than sixteen years, and having spent thirty years in exile after her deposition. Before that event, on the 7th of May, 1718, she witnessed consecutively the deaths of her enemy William the Third, her daughter Louisa, of small pox, in 1712, her kind friend and father, Louis the Fourteenth, the Electress Sophia of Hanover, her rival, and her step-daughter, Queen Anne. She was besides doomed to a cruel separation from her son at the peace of Utrecht, when he was compelled to retire from the French territory, and finally to behold as the destruction of all her long-cherished hopes, the utter defeat of her son's cause in the Rebellion of 1715. What alternating effects all these occurrences produced upon the susceptible heart of the lonely and now aged exile, Mary Beatrice of Modena, must be left to the imagination of the reader.

The funeral obsequies of the departed queen were performed at the Convent of Chaillot, at the expense of the French government. She had desired that her remains should rest there, and no Queen of England ever died so poor.

MARY THE SECOND,

QUEEN OF WILLIAM THE THIRD.

MARY, the eldest daughter of James the Second, was born at St. James's Palace, A.D. 1662, during the reign of her uncle, King Charles, her father being then Duke of York, and heir apparent to the throne, which he afterwards filled. Her mother, Anne Hyde, was a daughter of the celebrated Lord Clarendon. It was fortunate for Mary and for England that her mother was a Protestant, and, perhaps, quite as much so that she attracted little public notice, owing to the expectations of a male succession from the marriage of her uncle Charles the Second, which took place about the time of her birth. She was named Mary after her aunt, the Princess of Orange, and Mary Queen of Scots; and Prince Rupert stood as her godfather. Soon afterwards, she was sent to her grandfather's, the Earl of Clarendon, at Twickenham, to be nursed in a pure air. In fifteen months, a little brother was born, —James, Duke of Cambridge,—who did not live long; and in about another such interval of time, her sister Anne. The three children were for the most part brought up at Twickenham and Richmond, till the death of their mother, which took place in 1671, when Mary was about nine years of age. Their governess at Richmond was Lady Francis Villiers, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk; and the two princesses were constantly associated with Lady Villiers' six daughters; the whole of whom ever afterwards clung tenaciously to the courts and fortunes of Mary and Anne; and Elizabeth Villiers, the eldest, became in future years the trouble of Mary's wedded life. Here also were introduced the afterwards celebrated Frances and Sarah Jennings; and it is curious that Sarah, afterwards the Duchess of Marlborough, attached herself at this early age especially to the Princess Anne, as her playfellow. After the marriage of their father with the Catholic princess, Mary of Modena, the education of the two children was removed from under their father's control, and they were still educated in the Protestant faith.