Page:The Queens of England.djvu/537

MARIA BEATRICE OF MODENA. 487 a descent upon that country, which he meditated ; but the winds and' waves this time destroyed the fleet, and returned him to her in despair although in safety. His health, however, began to decline fast, and though it was seven years from that date ere he breathed his last, he had frequent attacks which warned her that the heaviest blow of all to her heart was approaching. Her conjugal tenderness has rarely been surpassed; and when he was struck with apoplexy in March, 1701, her violent grief was only equaled by the devotion of' her attendance on him till the day of his death, September 16, following. The widowhood of Queen Mary Beatrice, with all its trials of poverty, sickness, and disappointed hopes for her son, has to summed up here in few words. She was nearly forty-three years of age at her husband's death ; she lived to the age of sixty, having survived James more than sixteen years, and hav- ing spent thirty years in exile after her deposition. Before that event, on the 7th of May, 17 18, she witnessed consecutively the deaths of her enemy William the Third, her daughter Louisa, of smallpox, in 1712, her kind friend and father, Louis the Fourteenth, the Electress Sophia of Hanover, her rival, and her stepdaughter. Queen Anne. She was besides doomed to a cruel separation from her son at the peace of Utrecht, when he Avas compelled to retire from the French territory, and finally to behold as the destruction of all her long-cherished hopes, the utter defeat of her son's cause in the Rebellion of 1715. What alternating effects all these occurrences produced upon the susceptible heart of the lonely and now aged exile, Mary Beatrice of Modena, must be left to the imagination of the reader. The funeral obsequies of the departed queen were performed at the Convent at Chaillot, at the expense of the French govern- ment. She had desired that her remains should rest there, and no Queen of England ever died so poor.