What the morrow would have produced if time had been allowed for a renewal of hostilities can only be guessed.  The supplies had been voted.  The King was determined not to receive the address which requested him to disgrace his dearest and most trusty friends.  Indeed he would have prevented the passing of that address by proroguing Parliament on the preceding day, had not the Lords risen the moment after they had agreed to the Resumption Bill.  He had actually come from Kensington to the Treasury for that purpose; and his robes and crown were in readiness.  He now took care to be at Westminster in good time.  The Commons had scarcely met when the knock of Black Rod was heard.  They repaired to the other House.  The bills were passed; and Bridgewater, by the royal command, prorogued the Parliament.  For the first time since the Revolution the session closed without a speech from the throne.  William was too angry to thank the Commons, and too prudent to reprimand them.

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The health of James had been during some years declining and he had at length, on Good Friday, 1701, suffered a shock from which he had never recovered.  While he was listening in his chapel to the solemn service of the day, he fell down in a fit, and remained long insensible.  Some people imagined that the words of the anthem which his choristers were chanting had produced in him emotions too violent to be borne by an enfeebled body and mind.  For that anthem was taken from the plaintive elegy in which a servant of the true God, chastened by many sorrows and humiliations, banished, homesick, and living on the bounty of strangers, bewailed the fallen throne and the desolate Temple of Sion:  “Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us; consider and behold our reproach.  Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens; the crown is fallen from our head.  Wherefore dose thou forget us for ever?”

The King’s malady proved to be paralytic.  Fagon, the first physician of the French Court, and, on medical questions, the oracle of all Europe, prescribed the waters of Bourbon.  Lewis, with all his usual generosity, sent to Saint Germains ten thousand crowns in gold for the charges of the journey, and gave orders that every town along the road should receive his good brother with all the honours due to royalty.21

James, after passing some time at Bourbon, returned to the neighbourhood of Paris with health so far reestablished that he was able to take exercise on horseback, but with judgment and memory evidently impaired.  On the thirteenth of September, he had a second fit in his chapel; and it soon became clear that this was a final stroke.  He rallied the last energies of his failing body and mind to testify his firm belief in the religion for which he had sacrificed so much.  He received the last sacraments with every mark of devotion, exhorted his son to hold fast to the true faith in spite of all temptations, and entreated Middleton,