Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 29.djvu/202

 jected proposals of violence against the Prince of Orange (cf., p. 237). Macaulay takes the opposite view (iv. 648 seqq.), and strains the commission to Barclay, who was not dismissed from the service of King James (, vii. 192).

James's disappointment was perhaps connected with his illness in the following year (, vi. 83). After his return some time passed before the intercourse with England could be resumed (, ii. 555); and the illness of William III only brought the certainty that the Princess Anne would not sacrifice her interests to his (Life, ii. 559–560). It soon became evident that the abandonment of his claims by France would be a condition of peace between the two countries. Preliminaries signed by Louis's envoys at the Hague included the recognition of William III (10 Feb.), and James issued vain protests to the catholic and protestant princes of Europe (ib. ii. 566 seqq.; cf. {sc|Macpherson}}, i. 561). He was refused a representative at the congress of Ryswick (May), and publicly disclaimed all acknowledgment of its resolutions (Life, ii. 572 seqq.; {sc|Macpherson}}, i. 569–571). Louis steadily refused to assent to the demand for the removal of James beyond the French frontier, and after promising not to countenance any attempt to subvert William's government, contrived that no mention of James should be made in the treaty. An arrangement suggested by Louis, whereby after the death of William the Prince of Wales should succeed to the throne, liberal allowance being made to James, was rejected by both James and his consort (, i. 409; Life, ii. 574–5; {sc|Macpherson}}, i. 557–8, 569).

The peace of Ryswick deprived James of political occupation, and he gave himself up to religious exercises. About 1695 he had first begun to practise austerities indicative of his wish to sever himself from the world, and had ‘turned St. Germains into a sort of solitude’ (Life, ii. 528). Besides his diligent attendance on the great ecclesiastical solemnities at Paris, he occasionally went into retreat in religious houses for periods of seven or eight days, and attended the night offices of Easter week. He was especially impressed by periodical retreats of three or four days to La Trappe, which he had commenced after his return from Ireland (ib. pp. 527–9, 582–3; Les derniers Stuarts, i. 77–80). He composed religious treatises, inveighing against worldly dissipations, but to avoid the appearance of affectation, he took part in hunting and other diversions of the French court (ib. i. 582 seqq.). His charities, so far as his means went, seem to have kept pace with his austerities ({sc|Macpherson}}, i. 591 seqq.).

In March 1701 James had an attack of partial paralysis, and the waters of Bourbon proved ineffectual (, ii. 448, iii. 22; Life, ii. 591–2). After a final illness of a fortnight he died at St. Germains, ‘like a saint,’ on Friday, 6 Sept. (, viii. 184, 194). He exhorted Middleton and his other protestant followers to embrace the catholic faith; took loving farewell of his wife and son; repeatedly asseverated his forgiveness of his enemies, among whom he specified the Prince of Orange, the Princess Anne, and the Emperor Leopold, and in the second of two interviews with Louis obtained his promise to recognise the Prince of Wales as king of England (Life, ii. 592 seqq., 601–2; cf., iii. 188–91; , i. 407-408; , Briefe an die Raugräfinnen, &c., 1888, p. 217; see also ‘An Exact Account of the Sickness and Death of the late King James II,’ 1701, in Somers Tracts, xi. 339 seqq.; and his ‘Last Dying Words to his Son and Daughter and the French King,’ ib. pp. 342–3).

Though James had expressed a wish to be buried in the parish church at St. Germains, his remains were ‘provisionally’ transported to the English Benedictine church of St. Edmund, in the Faubourg St. Jacques, where miraculous cures were reported to have been performed through his intercession ({sc|Macpherson}}, i. 596 seqq.). He had largely touched for the king's evil in the course of his reign (see e.g., Diary, p. 74; and cf. , p. 231), and continued the practice at the Petit Couvent des Anglaises in Paris. His heart was deposited in the Convent of the Visitation at Chaillot; his brain was bequeathed to the Scots College at Paris; while his bowels were divided between the English College at St. Omer and the parish church of St. Germains. His corpse remained in its original resting-place, awaiting transportation to Westminster Abbey, till the first French revolution, when the coffin was broken up for the sake of the lead, and its contents were carried away—it was said to be thrown into the fosse commune. His other remains disappeared, with the exception of those in the church at St. Germains, which, being discovered in 1824, were, in pursuance of orders by George IV, solemnly reinterred in September of that year, a temporary inscription being placed over them (Les derniers Stuarts, i. 99). The king's letters and autographs, entrusted to the Benedictine fathers, disappeared during the French revolution, though some of them at all events seem to have fallen into