William III

Stadtholder of the United Provinces (r. 1672-1702) and king of England (r. 1689-1702)

• Born: November 14, 1650
• Birthplace: The Hague, United Provinces (now in the Netherlands)
• Died: March 19, 1702
• Place of death: Kensington Palace, London, England

As stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands and as joint sovereign, with Mary II, of England, Scotland, and Ireland, William III organized the Grand Alliance of European powers, which eventually defeated Louis XIV and prevented French domination of Europe.

Early Life

William III of Orange was born November 14, 1650, in The Hague, the only son of William II, stadtholder of the Netherlands, and Mary Stuart, eldest daughter of Charles I of England. William’s childhood was harsh and loveless. His birth came eight days after the sudden death of his father, who was snatched away by smallpox at the conclusion of a failed attempt to overturn the federal structure of the United Provinces and to establish sovereignty in the House of Orange.

The years that followed were dominated by a bitter quarrel over William’s guardianship between his mother; his grandmother, Countess Amalia of Solms-Braunsfeld; and his uncle, Frederick William of Brandenburg. In addition, it was the public policy of the province of Holland, led by Johan de Witt, to strengthen its political position during William’s minority by depriving the House of Orange of its traditional offices and powers. As a child and an adult, William was also plagued by ill health. He was slight of stature, hunchbacked, hooknosed, and asthmatic. Thus, while his formal education provided him with a professional’s understanding of the art of war, a connoisseur’s appreciation for fine painting and architecture, and the language skills to express himself in Dutch, French, German, Latin, Spanish, and English, the normal lessons of his youth left him with a cold, cynical, and ruthless personality.

William’s recovery of his political influence was probably inevitable, although the process was hastened when de Witt’s policy of excluding him from his family’s traditional offices came to an abrupt end in 1672. De Witt preferred friendship and alliance with France; thus his foreign policy was fatally undermined when Louis XIV invaded the United Provinces in April. Public opinion demanded and received William’s appointment to all of his ancestral offices. Unable to stop the French by any other means, the new stadtholder opened the dikes and flooded a wide belt of the Netherlands. His desperate strategy worked; Louis withdrew his army, the war settled down to a stalemate, and a compromise peace was signed at Nijmegen in 1678. Supported by his deep Calvinist faith, William had now begun his life’s work of defeating Louis XIV and preserving the liberties of Europe.

Life’s Work

Although the ten years following the Treaty of Nijmegen were nominally a time of peace, Louis XIV used the threat offered by his large standing army to carry out a series of pseudolegal annexations along his eastern border. In 1686, William constructed the League of Augsburg, a coalition of Sweden, Spain, Austria, and various German states, to resist French aggression. Even more significant, however, was his intervention in England. In 1677, he had strengthened his dynastic ties to that country by his marriage to Mary, the eldest daughter of James, duke of York and future King James II of England.

William’s main concern was to contain French ambition, however, and not to gain a crown, and from 1687 on, he became increasingly anxious to secure English resources for the struggle against Louis XIV. At the same time, the English were growing disenchanted with their Roman Catholic king, whose policies appeared designed to overthrow the ancient constitution, destroy the Protestant religion, and establish absolutism on the French model. Worried by the threatened success of James II’s plan to pack a subservient Parliament and by the birth of a son who would supplant his Protestant sister Mary in the succession, a group of eminent Englishmen invited the Dutch prince to invade the island to preserve English liberties. In November, 1688, William landed on the south coast at Tor Bay. Deserted by his realm, James II, his queen, and his infant son fled to France.

It was a bloodless invasion. In January and February, 1689, the Convention Parliament legalized the Glorious Revolution and offered the throne jointly to William and Mary. It was William, however, who directed the government; though a captivating personality, Mary deferred to her husband in every respect and played only the slightest role in affairs of state. The newly crowned king now added the might of England to the League of Augsburg. Although the Nine Years’ War, which raged from 1688 to 1697, ended in the exhaustion of all the major combatants, the Treaty of Rijswijk was a defeat for France. The French king was compelled to restore most of his conquests since 1679 and to recognize William III as king of England. For the first time in Louis XIV’s reign, France had lost a war.

William’s last years were spent seeking a solution to the crisis of the Spanish succession. Charles II of Spain lacked direct heirs, and the grant of the Spanish empire to a foreign prince threatened to destroy the balance of power in Europe. William negotiated the First and Second Treaties of Partition with Louis XIV to divide the Spanish inheritance among various European nations. Unfortunately, William’s labors were undone by the will of Spanish king Charles II, which left all of his possessions to Louis XIV’s grandson.

William was appalled, but public opinion in England and the Netherlands preferred this solution to either war or the second partition treaty. Only Louis XIV’s blunders—his assertion that his grandson had a right to both the Spanish and French thrones, his occupation of the barrier fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands, his economic discrimination against English and Dutch merchants in France and Spain, and his recognition of James III as rightful king of England—brought English and Dutch public opinion to support war and allowed William to create the Grand Alliance of European powers that decisively defeated Louis XIV. William, however, was not to direct the War of the Spanish Succession himself. In February, 1702, his horse stumbled on a molehill, causing him to fall and break his collarbone. Complications developed, and on March 19, William died, worn out by his labors.

Significance

Despite poor health and an ill-shaped body, William III was one of the great men of his age, an international figure with a sincere concern for the security of all Europe. Perhaps nowhere was his impact greater, however, than in England. Cosovereign in name only, his reign is one of the most significant periods in English history. William did not invade England in 1688 out of personal ambition to acquire a royal title. He journeyed to London because he hoped that it would prove to be the shortest path to Paris.

Thus, virtually William’s first act as king was to revolutionize English foreign policy. Both of his Stuart predecessors had ignored the rise of France and had turned away from Europe. The cosmopolitan Dutchman, however, was determined that England should no longer evade its international responsibilities but should become involved in Continental affairs. Although his policies eventually encountered resistance and at one point made him so unpopular that he considered withdrawing from the conduct of the government, William’s impact on English foreign policy was both profound and enduring. Despite occasional lapses into isolationism, England remained committed to active intervention in European affairs in defense of the balance of power.

It was not enough that England have the will to intervene in foreign affairs; it must also have the power to do so. Throughout the seventeenth century, Stuart England had proved remarkably incapable of waging successful war, largely as a consequence of an obsolete and ineffective system of government. In place of the old machinery of the state, William substituted a more powerful, professional, and effective financial and administrative structure, with an enlarged bureaucracy and a completely new system of public credit. Without these changes, England’s emergence as a great power and its numerous military and naval exploits in the Nine Years’ War and the War of the Spanish Succession would have been impossible.

The impact of William’s reign also extended to the English constitution, though this charge was unintentional on his part. It is certain that he had no wish to be a constitutional monarch; his temperament was autocratic, and he fully intended to rule as well as reign. Nor had the Glorious Revolution and the events of 1689 seriously curtailed the powers and prerogatives of the monarchy. Nevertheless, the unprecedented financial demands of the Nine Years’ War made annual sessions of Parliament essential and gave the political nation the unexpected leverage to put additional limits on the Crown not even contemplated in 1689. Because William valued his throne chiefly as a means of bringing English resources into the war against France, he was forced to compromise and to make concessions that altered significantly the balance of power between king and Parliament and which contributed to the development of limited monarchy in England.

Little respected and less than loved by his English subjects, William deserved a better fate. His reign had profound consequences for both England and Europe, not the least of which was to demonstrate that parliamentary government could be as effective as the government in the much admired Continental states without resorting to their methods of centralization and absolutism.

Bibliography

Baxter, Stephen B. William III and the Defense of European Liberty, 1650-1702. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966. The best biography of William III, though weak in its understanding of Dutch politics and foreign affairs.

Bevan, Bryan. King William III: Prince of Orange, the First European. London: Rubicon Press, 1997. In his brief but extensive biography, Bevan argues that William III was a true defender of liberty throughout Europe.

Burnet, Gilbert. Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time. Edited by J. Routh. 2d enlarged ed. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1833. One of the best contemporary accounts of the period. Burnet, a staunch Whig, was in exile in the Netherlands during much of the 1680’s, sailed with William to invade England in 1688, and was appointed bishop of Salisbury.

Carswell, John. The Descent on England: A Study of the English Revolution of 1688 and Its European Background. London: Cresset Press, 1969. Valuable chiefly for establishing the Glorious Revolution in its European context instead of treating it solely as an English event.

Claydon, Tony. William III and the Godly Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Describes how royal propaganda sought to legitimize William’s regime by depicting him as a godly magistrate who would restore piety and virtue to England after the Glorious Revolution.

Geyl, Pieter. The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century. London: E. Benn, 1961-1964. A well-documented study that offers critical insights into the decline of the Netherlands and the puzzling character of William III.

Grimblot, Paul, ed. The Letters of William III and Louis XIV. London: Longman, Brown, and Green, 1848. A valuable collection of the correspondence between the two monarchs in the years 1697-1700. Essential for understanding the foreign policy of this period.

Holmes, Geoffrey, ed. Britain After the Glorious Revolution, 1689-1714. London: Macmillan, 1969. A collection of ten concise and informative essays that examine the impact of the Glorious Revolution on English government and society. The essays on the transformation of English foreign policy and the impact of the Nine Years’ War on constitutional developments in the 1690’s are particularly valuable.

Horwitz, Henry. Parliament, Policy, and Politics in the Reign of William III. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1977. A detailed narrative of English politics in the reign of William III. Indispensable, but not easy to read.

Jones, J. R. The Revolution of 1688 in England. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. The best study of the Glorious Revolution. Particularly useful for explaining the motivation for and the timing of William’s involvement in English affairs.

Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The History of England, from the Accession of James II. Edited by C. H. Firth. London: Macmillan, 1913-1915. Although dated and marred by the author’s Whig bias, this remains a classic survey of late seventeenth century England.

Troost, Wouter. William III the Stadholder-King: A Political Biography. Translated by J. C. Grayson. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. Translated from the Dutch, the book offers a thorough recounting of William’s life, including detailed information about the position of the House of Orange before and after his birth.

Van der Kiste, John. William and Mary. Stroud, England: Sutton, 2003. Examines the life and relationship of the cousins who wed and became joint monarchs of England.