The King and Queen had never, since the commencement of their reign, been on very good terms with their sister.

That William should have been disliked by a woman who had just sense enough to perceive that his temper was sour and his manners repulsive, and who was utterly incapable of appreciating his higher qualities, is not extraordinary.

But Mary was made to be loved.
So lively and intelligent a woman could not indeed derive much pleasure from the society of Anne, who, when in good humour, was meekly stupid, and, when in bad humour, was sulkily stupid.

Yet the Queen, whose kindness had endeared her to her humblest attendants, would hardly have made an enemy of one whom it was her duty and her interest to make a friend, had not an influence strangely potent and strangely malignant been incessantly at work to divide the Royal House against itself.
The fondness of the Princess for Lady Marlborough was such as, in a superstitious age, would have been ascribed to some talisman or potion.
Not only had the friends, in their confidential intercourse with each other, dropped all ceremony and all titles, and become plain Mrs.Morley and plain Mrs.Freeman; but even Prince George, who cared as much for the dignity of his birth as he was capable of caring for any thing but claret and calvered salmon, submitted to be Mr.Morley.The Countess boasted that she had selected the name of Freeman because it was peculiarly suited to the frankness and boldness of her character; and, to do her justice, it was not by the ordinary arts of courtiers that she established and long maintained her despotic empire over the feeblest of minds, She had little of that tact which is the characteristic talent of her sex; she was far too violent to flatter or to dissemble: but, by a rare chance, she had fallen in with a nature on which dictation and contradiction acted as philtres.

In this grotesque friendship all the loyalty, the patience, the selfdevotion, was on the side of the mistress.