He was President of the Royal Society from 1698 to 1703. He was, however, active in 1702 in opposing the Occasional Conformity Bill, and in 1706 was one of the managers of the Act of Union 1707. In the same year, he carried a bill regulating and improving the proceedings of the law courts. He was made Lord President of the Council in 1708 upon the return of the Whigs to power, and retained the office until their downfall in 1710; while Queen Anne had long detested the Whig Junto, she came to like and admire Somers: Jonathan Swift called him "the perfect courtier" whose charm and good manners were almost irresistible. He spent his later years at Brookmans Park in Hertfordshire. Somers died on the day the Septennial Bill—which extended the maximum life of parliaments from three years to seven—passed the Commons. A story, possibly apocryphal, goes that Lord Townshend visited Somers during his last illness, with Somers saying to Townshend on his death bed: I have just heard of the work in which you are engaged, and [I] congratulate you upon it. I never approved the Triennial Bill, and always considered it, in effect, the reverse of what it was intended. You have my hearty approbation of this business, and I think it will be the greatest support possible to the liberty of the country. Somers never married, but left two sisters, of whom the eldest, Mary, married Charles Cocks, whose grandson, Charles became the second Baron Somers in 1784, the title subsequently descending in this line. Legacy Somers is immortalised in St Stephen's Hall, where he and other notable Parliamentarians look on at visitors to Parliament. In the eighteenth century, Somers was hailed as the chief constitutional architect of the Protestant succession. The achievements of Somers and other Whig lawyers defined Whiggism for those living in the reigns of King George I and George II. William Pitt the Elder stated in 1761 that "he learnt his maxims and principles" from "the greatest lawyers, generals and patriots of King William's days: named Lord Somers". For the later eighteenth-century Whig politician, Edmund Burke, Somers was of the "Old Whigs" whom he admired against the New Whigs who supported the French Revolution. Burke wrote: "I never desire to be thought a better whig than Lord Somers". The Whig historian Thomas Macaulay, writing in the nineteenth century, held Somers in high