y in the most sensitive spot, all England with him and
Holland into the bargain, without giving the Prince of Wales, by
recognition, any solid support in his own case."

[Illustration: News for William III.----481]

William III. was at table in his castle of Dieren, in Holland, when he
received this news. He did not utter a word, but he colored, crushed his
hat over his head, and could not command his countenance. The Earl of
Manchester, English ambassador, left Paris without taking leave of the
king, otherwise than by this note to M. de Torcy:--

"Sir: The king my master, being informed that his Most Christian.
Majesty has recognized another King of Great Britain, does not consider
that his dignity and his service will permit him to any longer keep an
ambassador at the court of the king your master, and he has sent me
orders to withdraw at once, of which I do myself the honor to advertise
you by this note."

"All the English," says Torcy, in his Memoires, "unanimously regard it
as a mortal affront on the part of France, that she should pretend to
arrogate to herself the right of giving them a king, to the prejudice of
him whom they had themselves invited and recognized for many years past."

Voltaire declares, in the "Siecle de Louis XIV.,_ that M. de Torcy
attributed the recognition of the Prince of Wales by Louis XIV. to the
influence of Madame de Maintenon, who was touched by the tears of the
queen, Mary of Modena. "He had not," he said, "inserted the fact in his
Memoires, because he did not think it to his master's honor that two
women should have made him change a resolution to the contrary taken in
his council." Perhaps the deplorable state of William III.'s health, and
the inclination supposed to be felt by Princess Anne of Denmark to
restore the Stuarts to the throne, since she herself had lost the Duke of
Gloucester, the last survivor of her seventeen children, might have
influenced the unfortunate resolution of Louis XIV. His kingly
magnanimity and illusions might have bound him to support James II.,
dethroned and fugitive; but no obligation of that sort existed in the
case of a prince who had left England at his nurse's, breast, and who had
grown up in exile. In the _Athalie_ of Racine, Joad (Jehoiada) invokes
upon the impious queen:

"That spirit of infatuation and error
The fatal avant-courier of the fall of kings."

The recognition of the Prince of Wales as King