The following year a life of much greater importance in the royal family came to a close. George II. died at Kensington Palace on October 25, 1760, in the seventy-seventh year of his age, under circumstances which have always been surrounded by a certain amount of mystery. The version generally received is as follows: The King rose in the morning at his usual hour, drank his chocolate, and retired to an adjoining apartment. Presently his German valet heard a groan and the sound of a heavy fall; he rushed into the room and found the King lying insensible on the floor with the blood trickling from his forehead, where he had struck himself against a bureau in falling. The valet ran to Lady Yarmouth, but the mistress had some sense of the fitness of things, and desired that the Princess Amelia should be sent for. She arrived to find her father quite dead. His death was due to heart disease and was instantaneous. George II. was buried in Henry VII.'s Chapel, Westminster Abbey. His last wishes were fulfilled to the letter. He had desired that one of the sides of Queen Caroline's coffin (who had predeceased him by twenty-three years) should be removed and the corresponding side of his own coffin should be taken away, so that his body might lie side by side with hers, and in death they should not be divided. This touching injunction was piously carried out by command of his grandson, who now succeeded him as King George III. CHAPTER III. THE BETROTHAL. 1760-1765. The accession of George III. to the throne made at first little difference in the lives of his brothers and sisters, especially of the younger ones. It made a difference in their position, for they became brothers and sisters of the reigning king, and the public interest in them was quickened. But they remained under the control of the Princess-Dowager, and continued to live with her in the seclusion of Carlton House and Kew. The Princess-Dowager's dominion was not confined to her younger children, for she continued to exercise unbounded sway over the youthful monarch. He held his accession council at her residence at Carlton House, and there he delivered his first speech--not the composition of his ministers, who imagined they saw in it the hand of the Princess-Dowager and Lord Bute. "My Lord Bute," said the King to the Duke of Newcastle, his Prime Minister, "is your very good friend, he will tell you all my thoughts." Again in his first speech to Parliament the King wrote with his own hand the words, to which we have already alluded: "Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Briton". Ministers affected to find in all this an unconstitutional exercise of the royal prerogative, and the Whig oligarchy trembled lest its domination should be overthrown.