1692-3, was defeated in the Commons in 1693-4, and so also it happened with the Place Bill. The inference which I think suggests itself in both cases is that the exercise of the royal veto, though unpopular with the country, was not by any means equally so with the House of Commons; that there were many Tories who were not particularly keen on purging Parliament of office-holders, and not a few Whigs whose zeal for the limitation of its constitutional life was somewhat lukewarm; and that both Whigs and Tories of this order were not sorry to be able to evade their party obligations to vote for these measures by pleading their unwillingness to force the King's hand, and perhaps provoke a constitutional crisis. The day on which William gave his assent to the Triennial Bill was to him a day of grave anxiety; and a year fairly prosperous abroad and peaceful at home was to bring him ere its close the heaviest calamity of his life. The illness of the Queen, who had been for two or three days confined to her bed, was on the evening of the 21st of December recognised by her physician as smallpox. A week afterwards, at one in the morning of the 28th of December, she died. William's grief at her loss was uncontrollable, and to all but those, and they were few, who had penetrated the stoicism beneath which he was accustomed to conceal deep feelings, it must have been a strange and moving sight. He remained for days at her bedside scarcely taking food or sleep. He broke out in the presence of Burnet into passionate outcries upon his agony at the thought of losing her, and into fervent praises of her love and virtues. "He cried out," says the Bishop, "that there was no hope, and that from being the happiest he was now going to be the miserablest creature on earth. He said that during the whole course of their marriage he had never known one single fault in her; there was a worth in her which nobody knew besides himself.... The King's affection was greater than those who knew him best thought his temper capable of; he went beyond all bounds in it; during her sickness he was in an agony that amazed us all, fainting often and breaking out into most violent lamentations; when she died his spirits sank so low that there was great reason to apprehend that he was following her; for some weeks after he was so little master of himself that he was not capable of minding business or of seeing company."