Kinlight · The British Royal Line

King William III

1650 – 1702 · Generation XXVIII · King of England, Scotland and Ireland (r. 1689–1702)

Portrait of King William III

William III was born at the Binnenhof in The Hague in November 1650, eight days after his father, William II, Prince of Orange, had died of smallpox, so he was sovereign Prince of Orange from his first day. His mother, Mary, was the eldest daughter of Charles I of England. The republican party that controlled Holland meant to keep the House of Orange out of power, and the Act of Seclusion of 1654 shut him out of the offices his forebears had held. His mother died in 1660, when he was ten. From 1666 he was a ward of the States General, and he learned the business of government under the grand pensionary Johan de Witt.

The year 1672 made him. France and England attacked the Republic together, French troops took three provinces in about three weeks, and the neglected Dutch army could do little more than hold the flooded “water line”. Amid the panic William, captain general since February, was proclaimed stadtholder in July. In August a mob at The Hague murdered Johan de Witt and his brother. William’s complicity has never been proved, but the killers went unpunished and some were later rewarded with money or office. He turned down the harsh peace terms the two kings offered, rebuilt the army, retook Naarden in 1673 and captured Bonn that November, and the French pulled out of the Republic. Checking the power of Louis XIV became the purpose of his life.

In November 1677 he married his first cousin Mary, the fifteen-year-old elder daughter of James, Duke of York, at St James’s Palace. When James became king in 1685, his Catholicism and rule by decree alarmed Protestant England, and the birth of a son to his queen in June 1688 promised a Catholic dynasty. Invited by seven leading Englishmen, William landed with a Dutch army at Brixham in Devon on 5 November 1688 and marched on London as James’s support collapsed. James fled to France. Early in 1689 the Convention Parliament treated his flight as an abdication and offered the crown to William and Mary jointly, together with a Declaration of Right. They were crowned in Westminster Abbey on 11 April 1689, the first joint coronation England had seen. The Declaration became the Bill of Rights, which barred Catholics from the throne and declared a standing army in peacetime illegal without Parliament’s consent.

The revolution was almost bloodless in England, but not elsewhere. James landed in Ireland with French support in 1689, and William defeated him at the Battle of the Boyne on 1 July 1690. In Scotland in 1692, the chief of the MacDonalds of Glencoe and a number of his clansmen were killed because he had been late in swearing allegiance. William had countersigned the orders, and when the Scottish Parliament forced a public inquiry in 1695 he did no more than remove Sir John Dalrymple from his secretaryship. His part in Glencoe remains notorious.

For most of the 1690s William was at war with France. His diplomacy built a broad alliance against Louis with England at its centre, and from 1691 he spent much of his time campaigning on the Continent while Mary governed at home. Mary’s death from smallpox in December 1694 devastated him. A Jacobite plot to assassinate him failed in 1696. The Treaties of Rijswijk ended the war in 1697 and obliged Louis XIV to recognise William as king. Paying for the war produced the Bank of England, chartered in 1694, and a funded national debt.

The peace did not last. When Charles II of Spain died in 1700, Louis accepted the whole Spanish inheritance for his grandson, and in 1701 he recognised James II’s son as king of England, so William set about rebuilding the Grand Alliance. He and Mary had no children, and the death in 1700 of Princess Anne’s last surviving child, the Duke of Gloucester, left the Protestant line nearly exhausted. The Act of Settlement of 1701 passed the crown, after Anne, to Sophia of Hanover and her Protestant heirs. It also wrote into law the independence of the judges, which William had conceded voluntarily in 1689.

In 1702 his horse, Sorrel, stumbled on a molehill and threw him, breaking his collarbone. He died of pneumonia at Kensington Palace on 8 March 1702, aged 51, and his enemies afterwards praised the mole as “the little gentleman in black velvet”. At his own wish he had a plain, private funeral and was buried beside Mary in a vault beneath the south aisle of Henry VII’s Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey. England’s governing class never took to him, but to many ordinary Protestants he was a hero, and the armies Marlborough led against France in the next war were at least partly his creation.

Place in the family

  • King William III was a 5× great-nephew of King Henry VIII.

Images

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → Margaret Tudor → King James V of Scotland → Mary Queen of Scots → King James I → King Charles I → Mary Princess Royal → King William III.

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Life

  • 1650 — Born
  • 1677 — Married Mary II Stuart
  • 1689 — William and Mary become joint King and Queen.
  • 1690 — William defeats James and French troops at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland. Scottish Jacobites defeated at Haughs of Cromdale
  • 1691 — William offers the Scottish Highlanders a pardon for the Jacobite uprising if they sign allegiance him
  • 1694 — Bank of England founded by William Paterson
  • 1694 — Death of Mary. William now rules alone.
  • 1701 — William forms grand alliance between England, Holland, and Austria to prevent the union of the French and Spanish crowns.
  • 1702 — Died
  • 1702 — William dies after a riding accident. Stuarts in exile toast 'the gentleman in black velvet' in the belief that his horse stumbled on a mole hill.

Sources

  1. William III · Encyclopaedia Britannica
  2. Glorious Revolution · Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. William III · Westminster Abbey
  4. William III of England · Wikipedia

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