King William
[to his dinner guests]
I thank you for your good wishes on my birthday. It has been a long life and an interesting one. But I shall be content with only a short while more. Just enough to dispense with any thought of a Regency. So that I may pass the Royal Authority directly to that young lady. And not to the hands of a person now near me who is surrounded by evil advisers and who cannot act with propriety in the station in which she's been placed! I have been insulted! Grossly and continually insulted! She has kept her daughter, my brother's child, from my Court! But from now on, I'll have her know that I am King! And I will not be flouted or disobeyed by her or by that jackanapes she keeps about her!
