Brought up in Holland in the midst of parties which he understood and whose springs he had moved for a long time, sympathizing with the very persons there who hereditarily opposed his family and his policy, William III. found himself in England as much a stranger as he was generally considered. Cold and reserved, like a man surrounded by enemies or critics, he only had confidence in the Dutch; he lavished his personal favors on Dutchmen alone; he only opened his heart and unbent his countenance for Dutchmen. This marked preference for his native land and this eagerness to flee from the soil of his new country so soon as the summer could bring him back to Holland, were a constant reproach and source of weakness to the King of England. In Holland alone he breathed at ease; there, alone he freely spread the wings of his grand policy, more European than English, difficult to be imported by a foreign prince into a new kingdom still entirely peopled for him with secret or open enemies. For a long time England had remained isolated from the combinations of continental politics; lowered in her own eyes and those of Europe, she had submitted, under Charles III. and James II., to the yoke of France, against which William III. proudly stood erect, demanding from England, as from Holland, the last sacrifices to sustain the cause of European independence. It was not without disquiet and a certain insular jealousy that the English saw themselves drawn into all the political complications on the continent; they had given themselves to William of Orange, but they preserved towards him a secret distrust, silently nursed by the persistent distrust of the Church of England. {18} William was a Protestant; but, a Calvinist by conviction, accustomed to the widest toleration in his own country, which had become the refuge of all persons suffering persecution, he found himself in England confronted by the Anglican Church, which was divided in regard to him, and had partially remained faithful to the fugitive monarch he had dethroned; obliged to struggle at once against the anti-Catholic spirit which had carried him to the throne and against the intolerance towards dissenters, which was contrary to all his principles. Dutchman, European statesman, tolerant Calvinist, he met throughout England distrust and impediments which all the success of the revolution of 1688 could not dispel, and which the personal superiority of the new king never wholly succeeded in repressing.