On the other hand, the intrigue and party strife that prevailed at the court, and in the legislative councils of England, were of a nature, not less serious, than those which menaced the success of the Jacobite arms. Since the accession of William to the throne, two factions had been gradually maturing there, and at this time had reached the acme of party strife and hatred. These, for convenience, may be termed the Dutch and English interest, which they respectively represented, while apart from both, and, perhaps, numerically as strong as either, stood the Jacobite party, watching the course of events, and determined to take advantage of their mutual animosity. William, who looked to the elevation of Holland as a European power, and the humiliation of France as the primary objects of his life, had neglected his English partisans, and raised his Dutch and foreign mercenaries to the highest civil and military offices of the State; and this lost him much of his prestige among the parliamentary leaders, while the people, who had begun to look calmly on the condition of their country, saw it, after all, but a conquered province of Holland. The invasion had succeeded, but their liberties were more circumscribed: "Popery" was ignored, but prelacy was enslaved; the Parliament existed, but the people had no voice in its construction; the foreign legions revelled in the capital, but the English soldiers were disfranchised and conscripted for foreign service. The general discontent had become alarming, and to add to the growing disaffection, and give it point and purpose, the Princess Anne, the younger daughter of King James, being treated with studied neglect by both William and Mary, to whose elevation she had contributed by a plot unworthy of her station as a princess and her dignity as a wife, had become their bitterest enemy, and the recognized head of the English interest. To such a pitch had she carried her resentment, that on William's return from Ireland, she had raised up an English champion to humble his pride, by eclipsing his military fame, and the person thus put forward was Lord Churchill, afterwards the renowned Duke of Marlborough. Owing to this, the return of William was not hailed by any of those popular manifestations that mark the return of a conqueror to his country. On the contrary, the ordinary gratulations, things of everyday occurrence, were but coldly accorded to him by the people;--his parliamentary partisans scarcely deigning the formal acknowledgments of success, while the opposition declared that the victory of the Boyne was overbalanced by the defeat at Athlone and Limerick, and that the result of his expedition was degrading to the British arms. He endeavored to remove this impression by representing to the Parliament, and causing to be reported on the continent, that the heavy rains which had fallen during the siege were the cause of its abandonment, although many then