Page:The Queens of England.djvu/542

492 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. that she married William with unconcealed aversion ; she grew to entertain the most ardent conjugal attachment to him ; so much so as that she resisted all attempts to make her the Queen of England independent of him. To his pleasure she sacrificed her hereditary claim to the throne, and though admitted to an equal share of it, yet, even while governing in her husband's absence, she never opened parliament in person, nor did she even accompany William on any such occasion when he was at home. That this was in submission to his known prejudices, is clear from the fact, that William himself on returning to Eng- land, and thanking parliament for its good government in his absence, never, on any occasion, mentions his queen by name, as he ought to have done, and with praises for her able manage- ment — an omission so strange that parliament felt bound to thank the queen itself by special address. As regards her sister Anne, the same causes produced the same eventual alienation between that princess and Mary. The first ground of quarrel was William's parsimonious attempt to withhold the 50,000/. per annum settled by the government on Anne. King William, with a civil list of 600,000/. per annum, was still always in need. His constant wars drained the British treasury, and at the same time he was surrounded by a host of people who were scrambling for all possible places, grants, and perquisites. The Whig nobility by whom he had been brought in showed themselves rapacious beyond all example, and Wil- liam's position was too critical to refuse them. They soon con- trived to load themselves with the crown lands ; and besides the enormous grants which William conferred on his Dutch fol- lowers he found the English nobility absolutely insatiable. Oppressed, therefore, by the demands of his Dutch wars, and those demands at times, which, if not gratified, would soon have sent off the disappointed nobles to James again, William was not only compelled to commence that system of forestalling the revenue by loans, which had grown into the national debt, but he sought to cut down expenditures in every quarter that he could. He tried this plan upon the Princess Anne, but only with the result of a deadly opposition to himself and his queen, who most heartily supported him in all such measures, from Anne and her partisans and dependents. At the head of these were Lord and Lady Marlborough, who were not only extremely ready for all that they could get, but were in treasonable cor- respondence with the court of the deposed monarch. These