[6] _How_ idle this story was may best be judged by studying the so-called evidence in its favour, as set forth in the pages of that writer who, more perhaps than any other chronicler of the events of that period, would have liked to establish its truth. No one, I think, can read Burnet's account of the Queen's accouchement, so completely demonstrating as it does the _impossibility_ of the alleged fraud, without wondering at the strength of the partisanship and popular prejudice which could for a moment have believed in its perpetration. [7] The fact that the _practical_ cause of this sharp conflict was the rivalry between the partisans of William and those of Mary is only a partial explanation of the phenomenon referred to in the text. It is a reason for the Convention having debated the Whig corollary so much, but not for their debating the Whig-Tory original proposition so little. Of course the _practical_ explanation is the simple one, that James had made himself impossible. Both parties concurred so readily in that opinion that they applied it without either of them pausing to consider its scope as a precedent, and that, quite apart from all controversies as to regency, demise of the crown, vacancy of the throne, or what not, the first instance in which a people pronounced _any_ king impossible--such king being of sound mind, and still asserting his sovereignty--let in the whole modern democratic theory. [8] It is somewhat singular that Macaulay should have taken no notice of an address which really constituted William's sole legal, or quasi legal title to the administration of affairs between the assembling of the Convention (which necessarily revoked his original commission) and the conclusion of its king-making labours.