The Earl of Manchester, English ambassador, left Paris without taking leave of the king, otherwise than by this note to M.de Torcy:-- "Sir: The king my master, being informed that his Most Christian.
Majesty has recognized another King of Great Britain, does not consider that his dignity and his service will permit him to any longer keep an ambassador at the court of the king your master, and he has sent me orders to withdraw at once, of which I do myself the honor to advertise you by this note." "All the English," says Torcy, in his Memoires, "unanimously regard it as a mortal affront on the part of France, that she should pretend to arrogate to herself the right of giving them a king, to the prejudice of him whom they had themselves invited and recognized for many years past." Voltaire declares, in the "Siecle de Louis XIV.,_ that M.de Torcy attributed the recognition of the Prince of Wales by Louis XIV.

to the influence of Madame de Maintenon, who was touched by the tears of the queen, Mary of Modena.

"He had not," he said, "inserted the fact in his Memoires, because he did not think it to his master's honor that two women should have made him change a resolution to the contrary taken in his council." Perhaps the deplorable state of William III.'s health, and the inclination supposed to be felt by Princess Anne of Denmark to restore the Stuarts to the throne, since she herself had lost the Duke of Gloucester, the last survivor of her seventeen children, might have influenced the unfortunate resolution of Louis XIV.

His kingly magnanimity and illusions might have bound him to support James II., dethroned and fugitive; but no obligation of that sort existed in the case of a prince who had left England at his nurse's, breast, and who had grown up in exile.

In the _Athalie_ of Racine, Joad (Jehoiada) invokes upon the impious queen: "That spirit of infatuation and error The fatal avant-courier of the fall of kings." The recognition of the Prince of Wales as King of England was, in the case of Louis XIV., the most indisputable token of that fatal blindness.
William III.