By this melancholy event the strength of the Jacobite party was considerably augmented. The Princess, indeed, still leaned to that faction. The part which she had acted in the Revolution had occasioned her incessant regret. Zeal for the Protestant religion, the popular outcry, and the persuasion that the Prince of Wales’s birth was an imposture, had, at that eventful period, influenced her conduct. Upon the death of her son, however, her feelings were awakened towards her own family. She wrote to inform James the Second of her calamity. She began to regard her brother’s legitimacy with different views from those which, during the irritations between her and her mother-in-law, she had been disposed to entertain.[341] She privately solicited her father’s sanction for her acceptance of the crown in case of the King’s death; and, far from being averse to the restoration of her own family, she declared her resolution to make a restitution of the crown, whenever it was in her power to perform what she considered an act of justice.[342] The decline in William’s bodily health, and mental energy, rendered these negociations by no means unimportant, for the King’s mind had been harassed by a series of trying and aggravating events. His distress and irritation upon the disbanding of his guards, and his exclamation, “If I had a son, by God these guards should not leave me!” betrayed the humiliation and the bitterness of spirit from which the unhappy monarch suffered; and it is well known that he even meditated relinquishing that crown which had cost him his peace of mind. Wasted with vexation, asthmatic, dropsical, his Majesty had recourse to wine to recruit his cheerfulness. Even in a state of partial inebriation, William was still the politician. He wished to have it supposed that he intended to settle the succession upon the reputed Prince of Wales, in order that his real design, of entailing it upon the Electress of Hanover, might not transpire prematurely. In one of those parties in which the King relaxed himself, in company with the infamous Lord Wharton, whom he always called “Tom,” he said to his lordship, “Tom, I know what you wish for—you wish for a republic.” “And not a bad thing, sir, neither,” was the reckless peer’s reply. “No, no,” returned the King, “I shall disappoint you there. I shall bring over King James’s son upon you.” Lord Wharton, with a low bow, and an affectation of deep reverence, answered, sneeringly, “that is as your Majesty pleases.” William was not displeased at the answer thus elicited.[343]