The Bill for the Regulation of Trials in cases of Treason went up again to the Peers.  Their Lordships again added to it the clause which had formerly been fatal to it.  The Commons again refused to grant any new privilege to the hereditary aristocracy.  Conferences were again held; reasons were again exchanged; both Houses were again obstinate; and the bill was again lost.547

The Triennial Bill was more fortunate.  It was brought in on the first day of the session, and went easily and rapidly through both Houses.  The only question about which there was any serious contention was, how long the existing Parliament should be suffered to continue.  After several sharp debates November in the year 1696 was fixed as the extreme term.  The Tonnage Bill and the Triennial Bill proceeded almost side by side.  Both were, on the twenty-second of December, ready for the royal assent.  William came in state on that day to Westminster.  The attendance of members of both Houses was large.  When the Clerk of the Crown read the words, “A Bill for the frequent Calling and Meeting of Parliaments,” the anxiety was great.  When the Clerk of the Parliament made answer, “Le roy et la royne le veulent,” a loud and long hum of delight and exultation rose from the benches and the bar.548 William had resolved many months before not to refuse his assent a second time to so popular a law.549 There was some however who thought that he would not have made so great a concession if he had on that day been quite himself.  It was plain indeed that he was strangely agitated and unnerved.  It had been announced that he would dine in public at Whitehall.  But he disappointed the curiosity of the multitude which on such occasions flocked to the Court, and hurried back to Kensington.550

He had but too good reason to be uneasy.  His wife had, during two or three days, been poorly; and on the preceding evening grave symptoms had appeared.  Sir Thomas Millington, who was physician in ordinary to the King, thought that she had the measles.  But Radcliffe, who, with coarse manners and little book learning, had raised himself to the first practice in London chiefly by his rare skill in diagnostics, uttered the more alarming words, small pox.  That disease, over which science has since achieved a succession of glorious and beneficient victories, was then the most terrible of all the ministers of death.  The havoc of the plague had been far more rapid; but the plague had visited our shores only once or twice within living memory; and the small pox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover.  Towards the end of the year 1694, this pestilence was more than usually severe.  At length the infection