Two days after the arrival of Mary, both Houses of Parliament went in state to bestow the crown upon her husband and on her. The King, having accepted the gift for himself, and for his consort, was proclaimed with Mary, King and Queen, “in the very hall of that palace,” says Dalrymple, “from which the father had been driven; and at the gate of which her grandfather had, by some of those who now placed the crown on her head, and by the fathers of others, been brought to the block.”[151] On the following day Lord Churchill was sworn a member of the privy council, and a lord of the bedchamber; and two days before the coronation he was created Earl of Marlborough,—a title which he was supposed to have taken in consequence of a connexion on his mother’s side with the family of Ley, Earls of Marlborough, extinct ten years previously. But this famous designation did neither augur unbroken prosperity to the receiver, nor insure to the donor, King William, the devoted fidelity of Marlborough; and the reign upon which we are now entering may be considered to have been, in most respects, a season of anxiety to the spirits, and of depression to the affairs, of Lord Marlborough, and of her who participated in every emotion of his heart. CHAPTER V. State of the British Court—Character of William. The English court now presented a strange and gloomy contrast to those seasons of reckless dissipation which had characterised it in the two preceding reigns. The personal character of the monarch, his weak health and retired habits, had considerable influence in producing this change. William appeared, indeed, almost of a different species to the well-bred and easy-tempered Charles the Second, and to the affable though stately James. Both these monarchs were remarkable for the happy grace with which they bestowed favours;[152] William, as even his warmest panegyrist allows, generally “with a disgusting dryness, which was his character at all times, except in a day of battle, for then he was all fire, though without passion; he was then everywhere, and looked to everything.”[153] His “Roman eagle nose,” and sparkling eyes, ill corresponding with a weak and emaciated body, gave expression to a countenance otherwise disfigured by small-pox, the effects of which, added to a constitutional asthma, produced in him a deep and constant cough, the surest obstacle to conversation.