In his will King James had directed that he should be buried with his ancestors at Westminster Abbey; therefore the queen ordered that the funeral service should be performed in France, but that the body should remain unburied until the restoration of her son, which she fondly hoped would soon take place.
It was therefore at the chapel of the Benedictine Monks that the corpse of King James remained covered with the pall for many years, until all hope for the Stuart family had vanished forever.
The queen remained at Chaillot only four days, for her children needed her at St. Germain, and she returned to them on the nineteenth of September.
The next day King Louis called on her, and she received him in a darkened room hung with black. He tried very hard to console the widowed queen by kind offers of protection to her and her son, and insisted upon her receiving the same courtesy from his ministers as though she had been queen regent really and not only in name.
A.D. 1702. However King James's will had given her that title, and her first steps was to publish a manifesto in the name of her son, setting forth his claim to the crown of Great Britain. It made little impression in England, but those who were opposed to King William in Scotland were anxious to bring the young king forward. So Lord Belhaven was sent to consult the queen as to what was best to do, and told her that if only her young son would declare himself a Protestant he should be proclaimed King of Scotland without waiting either for the death of William or the consent of parliament. Her majesty replied: "That she would never be the means of persuading her son to barter his hopes of Heaven for a crown." Then Lord Belhaven was willing to compromise, and said, "That if the prince would not change his religion, would he not agree that only a limited number of Romish priest, should enter his kingdom, and that he would make no attempt to alter the established religion?" This the queen freely promised in the name of her son, and then the lord declared that he and his party would do all in their power to establish King James's heir on the throne.
Mary Beatrice would have resigned herself to fate if she had not felt convinced that her son's rights were denied him so long as any Stuart claimed the crown. At the time of the prince's birth, parliament had decided that he should succeed his father, James II., and a new interest was awakened in him on account of the sympathy felt in England for him and his widowed mother. Alarmed that such would be the state of affairs, William hired a notorious fellow to prove that the Prince of Wales was not the son of James II. and Mary Beatrice at all, but that one Mrs. Mary Grey was his real mother, who had been murdered in Paris shortly after his birth. A copy of the book containing a full account of this matter was presented to the lords, the ministers of state, and the lord mayor. Of course this statement was utterly false and absurd, and raised the indignation of the House of Commons to such a degree that Fuller, the man who got out the book, underwent the disgrace of the pillory. But as he had often been employed by William III. as a spy and had been punished more than once for perjury, he did not sink under the disgrace as an honest man would have done.
As soon as the news of King James's death reached William III. he was prepared with a blow to aim at his orphan cousin that he was determined should not fail if he could help it. It was an accusation of high treason, in which Mary Beatrice was also included. The bill, as William presented it to his parliament, did not designate his uncle's widow as the queen dowager, because he had pocketed her dower, and he desired to deprive her even of the honors due a royal lady. So she is called "Mary, late wife of the late King James."
Without describing all the scenes enacted in parliament while this disgraceful bill was under consideration, it is only necessary for us to know that it passed the House of Lords; but when it was laid before the Commons, they pitched it under the table.
The very last act of William III. was to affix the royal seal to the bill that he had exerted every means to have executed against the young Prince of Wales. He was on his death-bed when it was presented for his signature, but controlled his almost paralyzed fingers enough for the accomplishment of this last act of hatred.
He expired the next day.