On the first of March the royal sufferer was seized with cramps, but improved sufficiently to be able to walk in the gallery of Kensington Palace a few days later. Feeling fatigued from the exercise, he threw himself on a lounge and fell asleep in front of an open window. Two hours later he awoke with a chill, the precursor of death. Both the Prince and Princess of Denmark made repeated efforts to see the dying king, but to the very end he framed his lips into an emphatic "no!" every time the request was made. No one was admitted to the sick-room besides physicians and nurses, excepting the old favorites Bentinck, and Keppel, Earl of Albemarle. The latter arrived from a mission to Holland just before the king lost his speech, and gave his royal master information of the progress of his preparations for the commencement of war in the Low Countries. For the first time the dying warrior listened to such details with cold indifference, and at their close merely said: "I draw towards my end." Then handing Keppel the keys of his writing-desk, he bade that favorite take possession of the twenty thousand guineas it contained, and directed him to destroy all the letters enclosed in a certain cabinet. The next morning, when Bentinck entered the room, the king was speechless but conscious. He took his old friend's hand and pressed it to his heart for several minutes, {436}and then expired. After his death a bracelet of Queen Mary's hair, tied with black ribbon, was found on his left arm. William III. was fifty-one years old, and had reigned thirteen years. {437} CHAPTER XIII. |Bishop Burnet had watched at Kensington with a host of other clergymen and lords for the king's last gasp, and then hastened to St. James's Palace to be the first to prostrate himself before the new queen. But he was disappointed; for the Earl of Essex, lord of the bedchamber, whose duty it really was to communicate the news, had forestalled him. Burnet had never been popular with Anne, and on her accession he was treated with marked indifference, and turned out of his lodgings at court. [[A.D. 1702.]] All was business and bustle on that Sunday that witnessed the death of William III. The queen was receiving the crowd of politicians that filled her antechamber, anxious for a private audience before her recognition by the privy council took place. Among others, the queen's old uncle, the Earl of Clarendon, sent in his name and requested "admittance to his niece." Her majesty's reply was, "That if he was prepared to take the oath of allegiance to her as sovereign she was willing to receive him." Queen Anne answered thus because she remembered the nature of her uncle's former conversations with her, and knew that he had come to urge her to make way for her brother, the Prince of Wales. His reply confirmed this, for he said: "No, I come to talk to my niece; I shall take {438}no other oath than I have taken." He remained true to this decision to the day of his death.