William III of England

• 1. Introduction

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  William III of England was born eight days after his father died. That timing shaped everything. When stadtholder William II, Prince of Orange died of smallpox in October 1650, his son arrived into the world already carrying a title - the sovereign Prince of Orange from the moment of his first breath - and already the subject of a family argument. His mother, Mary, Princess Royal, wanted to name him Charles, after her brother, the exiled English king. His paternal grandmother, Amalia of Solms-Braunfels, insisted on William, to preserve the dynasty's prospects. The grandmother won.

  What followed was a life spent on the edge of other people's conflicts: a Dutch boy educated to believe he was an instrument of Divine Providence; a prince who would one day invade England with a fleet larger than the Spanish Armada; a king whose constitutional compromises still shape British law today. How did a man born without a father, raised by a government committee, come to overthrow his own father-in-law and permanently shift the balance of power between the English Crown and its Parliament? And what did he leave behind when his horse stumbled into a mole's burrow?

• 2. A Child of the State

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  Cornelis Trigland, a Calvinist preacher and follower of the theologian Gisbertus Voetius, began instructing William daily in the Reformed religion from April 1656. The boy was barely five years old. His mother, Mary, had shown little personal interest in him, sometimes being absent for years at a time, and deliberately kept herself apart from Dutch society. William's earliest governesses included Walburg Howard and the Scottish noblewoman Lady Anna Mackenzie.

  A short educational treatise - possibly written by William's tutor Constantijn Huygens - laid out the ideal preparation for the prince. Its premise was remarkable: William was predestined to fulfil a divine historical destiny as heir to the House of Orange-Nassau. He was taught to see himself as the nation's protector, standing in the tradition of his great-grandfather William the Silent, his grand-uncle Maurice, and his grandfather Frederick Henry.

  From early 1659, William spent seven years at the University of Leiden, guided by ethics professor Hendrik Bornius, without ever formally enrolling as a student. Among the small personal retinue he kept while living in the Prinsenhof at Delft was a young man named Hans Willem Bentinck, a friendship that would prove durable and eventually scandalous. On the 23rd of December 1660, when William was ten years old, his mother died of smallpox at Whitehall Palace in London while visiting her brother, King Charles II. In her will, she requested that Charles look after William's interests. Charles took the opportunity to demand that the States of Holland end their interference in the boy's upbringing - and they complied.

  By 1666, the tug-of-war over William had gone on long enough that the States officially made him a ward of the government, a 'Child of State'. All pro-English courtiers, including his governor Frederick Nassau de Zuylenstein, were removed from his company. Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, the dominant politician of the Dutch Republic, took personal charge, instructing William weekly in state matters and playing regular games of real tennis with him.

• 3. The Disaster Year

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  1672 became known in the Netherlands as the Rampjaar - the disaster year. France, England, Munster, and Cologne invaded simultaneously. The French army overran the provinces of Gelderland and Utrecht in June. On the 14th of June, William withdrew with the remnants of his field army into Holland, where flooding of the Dutch Waterline had been ordered on the 8th of June to slow the French advance.

  Louis XIV, believing the war effectively over, began extracting financial terms from the Dutch. The presence of a large French army in the heart of the Republic triggered general panic. The people turned against de Witt and his faction. On the 4th of July, the States of Holland appointed William stadtholder. He took the oath five days later.

  The next day, an English envoy named Lord Arlington arrived at Nieuwerbrug with an offer from Charles II: if William would capitulate to England and France, Charles would make him Sovereign Prince of Holland. William refused. Arlington threatened that William would witness the end of the Republic. William replied: 'There is one way to avoid this: to die defending it in the last ditch.'

  Johan de Witt had already been wounded in an assassination attempt on the 21st of June. On the 15th of August, William released a letter from Charles claiming that England had gone to war because of de Witt's aggression. Inflamed by this, an Orangist civil militia brutally murdered Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis in The Hague on the 20th of August. William's direct role was never proven, but he blocked prosecutions and rewarded participants: Hendrik Verhoeff received money; Johan van Banchem and Johan Kievit received high offices. The historian Lord Acton later noted with bleak precision that 'one became a colonel, another a knight, a third a peer, and a fourth an earl.'

• 4. The Glorious Revolution

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  On the 30th of June 1688, a group of political figures who came to be known as the 'Immortal Seven' sent William a formal invitation to invade England. That same day, seven bishops who had publicly opposed King James II's Declaration of Indulgence were acquitted at trial - the verdict sharpened Protestant rage against James and cleared the way for William's move.

  William had been assembling an expeditionary force since April 1688. He believed France would remain occupied with campaigns in Germany and Italy, leaving him free to act. His fleet, when it sailed, was vastly larger than the Spanish Armada had been a century earlier: roughly 463 ships carrying approximately 40,000 people, among them 9,500 sailors, 11,000 foot soldiers, 4,000 cavalry, and 5,000 English and Huguenot volunteers. William came ashore at Brixham in southwest England on the 5th of November 1688 from the ship Den Briel, proclaiming that 'the liberties of England and the Protestant religion I will maintain'.

  James's support dissolved rapidly. Protestant officers defected from the English Army, most notably Lord Churchill of Eyemouth, James's most capable commander. James attempted to flee on the 11th of December, throwing the Great Seal into the Thames as he went. He was discovered and brought back to London by fishermen. William allowed a second escape attempt on the 23rd of December, deliberately avoiding the creation of a Catholic martyr.

  A Convention Parliament met on the 22nd of January 1689 to settle what had happened. William refused to be a regent or to accept that his kingship would end with his wife's death. He threatened to leave the country immediately if the Lords proclaimed Mary sole ruler. Mary, loyal to her husband, refused to rule without him. After negotiations between the two houses, Parliament passed the Declaration of Right on the 13th of February 1689, declaring that James had abdicated. William and Mary were crowned together at Westminster Abbey on the 11th of April 1689 by the Bishop of London, Henry Compton - the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, refusing to officiate because he would not recognise James's removal.

• 5. The Bill of Rights and What It Cost

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  December 1689 brought one of the most consequential documents in English constitutional history: the Bill of Rights. It restated the earlier Declaration of Right and added hard limits on royal power. The sovereign could not suspend laws without Parliament's consent, levy taxes without parliamentary approval, raise a standing army in peacetime without Parliament, or punish members of either House for words spoken in debate. Excessive bail and cruel punishments were prohibited. Roman Catholics, and those who married Catholics, were excluded from the throne.

  William opposed these constraints. He accepted them rather than fight Parliament over them, a practical concession that settled a conflict over royal and parliamentary power that had been running since James I took the English throne in 1603 - a conflict that had produced the English Civil War in the 1640s and now produced this settlement.

  The costs of William's reign were not only constitutional. His war with France damaged English maritime trade and led to a doubling in taxation. Rapid inflation caused widespread hunger from 1693 onwards. A currency crisis hit in 1695-1697, triggering a run on the recently created Bank of England. That institution had itself been created at William's direction: in 1694, he granted a Royal Charter to the Bank of England, a private institution owned by bankers. Whatever its immediate difficulties, the Bank would eventually underpin the English displacement of the Dutch Republic at the centre of global commerce in the eighteenth century.

• 6. The Massacre of Glencoe

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  William offered Scottish clans that had participated in the Jacobite rising of 1689 a pardon on one condition: they had to sign an oath of allegiance by a set deadline. The clan at Glencoe was late. William's government in Scotland responded in 1692 with a massacre that became infamous - and William had countersigned the orders.

  John Graham, 1st Viscount Dundee, had raised Highland forces and won a victory at the Battle of Killiecrankie on the 27th of July 1689. Dundee died in the fighting, and a month later Scottish Cameronian forces suppressed the rising at the Battle of Dunkeld. The immediate military threat had been extinguished, yet the Glencoe punishment went ahead. The massacre became central to Jacobite propaganda and severely damaged William's reputation in Scotland.

  Bowing to public pressure, William dismissed those responsible. Yet, as Lord Acton recorded, the same men prospered: one became a colonel, another a knight, and two more received titles. The pattern echoed the aftermath of de Witt's murder in The Hague - public censure, private reward. His reputation in Scotland suffered further damage when he withheld English assistance from the Darien scheme, a Scottish colonial venture from 1698 to 1700 that ended in catastrophic failure.

• 7. Death and What It Left Behind

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  On the 8th of March 1702, William died at Kensington Palace, aged 51. He had broken his collarbone falling from his horse, Sorrel, and pneumonia followed. The horse, rumour had it, had been confiscated from Sir John Fenwick, one of the Jacobites who had conspired against William's life in 1696. Because Sorrel had stumbled into a mole's burrow, Jacobites raised a toast to 'the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat'. Winston Churchill, writing in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, later said the fall 'opened the door to a troop of lurking foes'. William was buried in Westminster Abbey alongside Mary.

  He was the last person to successfully invade England by force of arms, and the only member of the Dutch House of Orange to reign over England. The five provinces of which he had been stadtholder - Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, and Overijssel - all suspended the office of stadtholder after his death. In Ulster, William is still called King Billy and remains the central figure of the Orange Order. His victory at the Battle of the Boyne on the 1st of July 1690 is commemorated annually in the Twelfth of July parade.

  In 1693, William endowed the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Nassau County on Long Island carries his dynasty's name. Nassau, the capital of The Bahamas, is named after a fort renamed in his honour in 1695. New York City was briefly renamed New Orange in 1673 when the Dutch recaptured it - one of two moments when his name was applied to the fort at its centre, first as Fort Willem Hendrick and later as Fort William. The five bastions of the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town were named after his titles: Orange, Nassau, Catzenellenbogen, Buuren, and Leerdam. His primary achievement, in the words of one contemporary assessment preserved in the source, was to contain France 'when it was in a position to impose its will across much of Europe' - and that effort continued after his death in the War of the Spanish Succession, which broke out in July 1701 and ran until 1713-1714.