lding another new parliament; that no parliament should continue
longer than three years at farthest, to be accounted from the first day
of the first session; and that the parliament then subsisting should
cease and determine on the first day of November next following, unless
their majesties should think fit to dissolve it sooner. The duke of
Devonshire, the marquis of Halifax, the earls of Weymouth and Aylesbury,
protested against this bill, because it tended to the continuance of the
present parliament longer than, as they apprehended, was agreeable to
the constitution of England.

* They imposed certain rates and duties upon marriages,
births, and burials, bachelors, and widows. They passed an
act for laying additional duties upon coffee, tea, and
chocolate, towards paying the debt due for the transport
ships: and another, imposing duties on glass ware, stone,
and earthen bottles, coal, and culm.

DEATH OF ARCHBISHOP TILLOTSON AND OF QUEEN MARY

While this bill was depending, Dr. John Tillotson, archbishop of
Canterbury, was seized with a fit of the dead palsy in the chapel
of Whitehall, and died on the twenty-second day of November, deeply
regretted by the king and queen, who shed tears of sorrow at his
decease; and sincerely lamented by the public, as a pattern of elegance,
ingenuity, meekness, charity, and moderation. These qualities he must
be allowed to have possessed, notwithstanding the invectives of his
enemies, who accused him of puritanism, flattery, and ambition; and
charged him with having conduced to a dangerous schism in the church, by
accepting the archbishopric during the life of the deprived Sancroft.
He was succeeded in the metropolitan See by Dr. Tennison, bishop of
Lincoln, recommended by the whig-party which now predominated in the
cabinet. The queen did not long survive her favourite prelate. In about
a month after his decease she was taken ill of the smallpox, and the
symptoms proving dangerous, she prepared herself for death with great
composure. She spent some time in exercises of devotion and private
conversation with the new archbishop; she received the sacrament with
all the bishops who were in attendance; and expired on the twenty-eighth
day of December, in the thirty-third year of her age, and in the sixth
of her reign, to the inexpressible grief of the king, who for some weeks
after her death could neither see company nor attend to the business of