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 state. Mary was in her person tall and well-proportioned, with an oval visage, lively eyes, agreeable features, a mild aspect, and an air of dignity. Her apprehension was clear, her memory tenacious, and her judgment solid. She was a zealous protestant, scrupulously exact in all the duties of devotion, of an even temper, and of a calm and mild conversation. She was ruffled by no passion, and seems to have been a stranger to the emotions of natural affection; for she ascended without compunction the throne from which her father had been deposed, and treated her sister as an alien to her blood. In a word, Mary seems to have imbibed the cold disposition and apathy of her husband; and to have centered all her ambition in deserving the epithet of an humble and obedient wife. 056 [See note L, at the end of this Vol.]