ole
conditions of life were exactly what he would have them to be. He
lived up to the age of fifty-four a contented, stolid, happy, dissolute
Elector of Hanover; and it was a complete disturbance to all his habits
and his predilections when the expected death of Anne compelled him to
turn his thoughts to England.

The other claimant of the English crown was James Frederick Edward
Stuart, the Old Pretender, as he came to be afterwards called by his
enemies, the Chevalier de Saint George, as his friends called him when
they did not think it prudent to give him the title of king. James was
the step-brother of Queen Anne. He was the son of James the Second, by
James's second wife, Maria D'Este, sister to Francis, Duke of Modena.
Maria was only the age of Juliet when she married: she had just passed
her fourteenth year. Unlike Juliet she was not beautiful; unlike
Juliet she was poor. She was, however, a devout Roman Catholic, and
therefore was especially acceptable to her husband. She had four
children in quick succession, all of whom died in infancy; and then for
ten years she had no child. The _London Gazette_ surprised the world
one day by the announcement that the Queen had become pregnant, and
upon June 10, 1688, she gave birth to a son. It need hardly be told
now that the wildest commotion was raised by the birth of the prince.
The great majority of the Protestants insinuated, or stoutly declared,
that the alleged heir-apparent was not a child of the Queen. The story
was that a newly-born child, the son of a poor miller, had been brought
into the Queen's room in a warming-pan, and passed off as the son of
the Queen. It was said that Father Petre, a Catholic clergyman, had
been instrumental in carrying out this contrivance, and therefore the
enemies of the royal family talked of the young prince as Perkin or
Petrelin. The warming-pan was one of the most familiar objects in
satirical literature and art for many generations after. {10} A whole
school of caricature was heated into life, if we may use such an
expression, by this fabulous warming-pan. Warming-pans were associated
with brass money and wooden shoes in the mouths and minds of Whig
partisans, down to a day not very far remote from our own. Mr. Jobson,
the vulgar lawyer in Scott's "Rob Roy," talks rudely to Diana Vernon, a
Catholic, about "King William, of glorious and immortal memory, our
immortal deliverer from Papists and pretenders, and wooden s