Note 6 — Chapter V

How idle this story was may best be judged by studying the so-called evidence in its favour, as set forth in the pages of that writer who, more perhaps than any other chronicler of the events of that period, would have liked to establish its truth. No one, I think, can read Burnet's account of the Queen's accouchement, so completely demonstrating as it does the impossibility of the alleged fraud, without wondering at the strength of the partisanship and popular prejudice which could for a moment have believed in its perpetration.