William III

William III (1650–1702), king of England, Scotland (as William II), and Ireland (1689–1702), prince of Orange. Appointed stadtholder of Holland and Zeeland, and captain- and admiral-general of all the Dutch provinces for life in July 1672, these posts were rendered hereditary in 1674 and 1675, when William was additionally elected stadtholder of Utrecht and Gelderland. He was the only child of William II of Orange and Mary Stuart, eldest daughter of Charles I, and was born on 4 November, eight days after his father's death, at a time of extreme crisis in Orange's relations with Amsterdam, always the seat of anti-Orangist sentiment. Twenty years of republican rule then ensued, setting the Orangist interest at a discount: it was excluded from all future participation in Holland's government, the young prince's upbringing being left to his mother and then to his redoubtable paternal grandmother, Amalia van Solms. Like his cousin and lifelong antagonist Louis XIV, William's early life was overshadowed by adversity, though this proved preparation for an astute character with a destiny of exceptional challenge. Impressively educated in sciences and languages, and severely tutored in Dutch republican doctrine, William yet had his Stuart ties, the exiled Charles II conferring the Garter on his infant nephew in 1653. Charles's restoration in 1660 in fact saw Orange's readmission to Holland's public life, the 10-year-old William being ceremonially received at Amsterdam.

During the 1660s William, puny in stature and incurably asthmatic, reached manhood. The Dutch republicans tried to bolt the door against any renewed Orange challenge. In 1667 the Holland stadtholderate was abolished, and the other six provinces following suit in 1670. William's first visit to England in November 1670, when he was received with gratifying honour, left him distrustful of Charles II, who was now planning the dismemberment of the Dutch republic in conjunction with Louis XIV. The Anglo-French attack in 1672 brought forth so strong an Orangist reaction that the Dutch savagely discarded republican government and bore the 22-year-old William upwards as the embodiment of resistance to aggression. In the formation of an anti-French front, William attained European stature and, returning to England in October 1677, was able to take momentous advantage of Charles II's embarrassed foreign policies by marrying his 15-year-old cousin Princess Mary, the elder and indubitably protestant daughter of James, duke of York, a professed catholic since 1670. William's underlying objective, frustrated by Charles II's wiles and Louis XIV's bribes, was to bring England into the anti-French front, but since Mary at this time was heir to the British crown, after her father, William manifestly enhanced his own more distant claim through his mother. The duke of York's last son by his first marriage had died in 1671, but his second duchess, the Italian Mary of Modena, at 19 only four years the senior of Princess Mary, might well have a healthy son. From different motives the British and French monarchs resolved to acquiesce in the Orange marriage. Difficult though the marriage proved to be for two people of very different temperaments, and remaining childless, it enabled William to play the dynast and laid the foundation for his intervention in England's affairs in November 1688. His visit in July 1681 confirmed William's view that the collapse of the opposition to his father-in-law's succession would indefinitely prolong British non-alignment in Europe's struggle against France. His ‘failure’ to prevent Monmouth's attempt against James II from Holland in May 1685 may have been calculated, William presuming that the expedition would end in disaster.

In November 1685 James II's assertion of the prerogative on behalf of his non-Anglican subjects alienated the most loyal Parliament a Stuart king had known. That William could prepare to intervene in England in the spring of 1688, some three months before he received the celebrated ‘Invitation’ of 30 June to rescue English liberties ‘before it be too late’, was owing to a series of reverses for France, and misjudgements by Louis XIV. The French thrust across the Rhine in September 1688, which enabled William to take 40,000 men in 400 ships across to England in autumn weather six weeks later, was occasioned by a series of diplomatic reverses which threatened the collapse of French policy towards Germany. No less consequential was Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685 which united behind Orange a spectrum of Dutch protestant opinion of unprecedented breadth. Further, the French government endeavoured to arrest economic decline by reimposing in 1688 its harsh tariffs of 1667, a measure devastating for Dutch textile and dairy product exports. If William's move into England brought a renewal of war between the republic and France, even Francophile Amsterdam now accepted that the French market could only be prised open by a resort to arms.

William had no illusions about English dislike of his countrymen, but his experience as a Dutch prince with more influence than real authority was providential for his exercise of Britain's ‘Revolution’ kingship. He never doubted, and gratefully recognized, Mary's own contribution to the device of the joint monarchy, and her death on 27 December 1694 prostrated him for months. With whatever reservations, the couple had accepted the radical drift of the traditionally based Declaration of Rights in February 1689; and subsequent statutory changes in treason law and judicial tenure coincided with William's own preferences. But his rule in Scotland, where he delegated too much, is a blight on his record; and those terms in the Act of Settlement of 1701 which placed limits upon the executive were unmistakably censorious. His conduct of the war against France, once Jacobite forces had been defeated in Ireland in 1691, placed him and his ministries under unrelenting parliamentary scrutiny, the more severe since coherent political parties were still in germination. How much the reforms in British public finance, for example the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, owed to initiatives from William is uncertain, since such reforms had begun under Charles II. What is clear is that William's contribution to the disclosure of foreign policy to Parliament opened a new era in crown–Parliament relations, even if this was occasioned by strident criticism of his use of prerogative power in this area. When he died on 8 March 1702 he had won a measure of international recognition for Britain's protestant succession, and had endeavoured to resolve peaceably, in partnership with Louis XIV, the problem of the Spanish succession. No British king has stood higher than William in international renown.

David Denis Aldridge

Bibliography

Baxter, S. B. , William III (1966);
Jones, J. R. , ‘William and the English’, in Wilson, C., and Proctor, D. (eds.), 1688: The Seaborne Alliance and Diplomatic Revolution (1989);
Robb, N. A. , William of Orange: A Personal Portrait (2 vols., 1962–6).