He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and recently, upon the family vault being opened, amongst the ten small coffins of the children of James II., and the eighteen small coffins of the children of his daughter Anne, lay the coffin of the youthful William, resting in remarkable juxtaposition upon that of Elizabeth of Bohemia.[310] Thus one of an unfortunate race, who never attained the crown he inherited, mingled his dust with that of a great aunt, who soon lost the crown she had prompted her husband too eagerly to seize. As the nation unaffectedly mourned the death of the youthful Duke, a gentleman,[311] living at Holland House, a friend of Atterbury’s, lamented the removal of his Royal neighbour in the following lines, which afford a specimen of the affected elegiac strains popular at the period:-- “So by the course of the revolving spheres, When’er a new discover’d star appears, Astronomers with pleasure and amaze, Upon the infant luminary gaze. They find their heaven’s enlarged, and wait from thence, Some blest, some more than common influence; But suddenly, alas! the fleeting light Retiring, leaves their hopes involved in endless night.” The Duke of Gloucester was the last Protestant heir to the Crown recognized in the Act of Settlement. His death therefore exposed the Royal succession to new perils, revived the hopes of the Jacobites, and created anxiety in the minds of William and his Ministers. The King at the time had left England nearly a month; and as, amidst the gardens of his retreat at Loo, he saw the shortening of the summer days, he had pondered future contingencies, and laid plans for preserving the work which he had wrought. When, in the following February, 1701, he, bearing evident signs of increasing frailty, met Parliament, he told the Houses that the loss just sustained made it necessary there should be a further provision for a Protestant succession; adding, that the happiness of the nation, and the security of religion, seemed to depend so much upon this, that he could not doubt it would meet with general concurrence. The addresses echoed the same sentiment, and in March the Bill of Succession came under Parliamentary debate. It determined that the Princess Sophia, Duchess-Dowager of Hanover, or her heirs, should succeed upon failure of issue to William and Anne; and it laid down the principle that whosoever wore the Crown should commune with the Church of England, as by law established. Other important resolutions, which it does not come within my province to notice, were incorporated in the Bill; and these gave rise to fierce discussions between the two great political parties, who, throughout the whole of this reign, were teasing William out of his life, provoking the phlegmatic Dutchman to exclaim, that “all the difference he knew between the two parties was, that the Tories would cut his throat in the morning, and the Whigs