The man known to history as King William III of England, Scotland and Ireland was born in early November 1650. His father was William II, Prince of the House of Orange and the foremost nobleman in the Dutch Republic. His mother was Princess Mary, whose father King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland, had at the time of young William’s birth been executed less than two years earlier by the English parliament at the end of a long and bitter civil war across the 1640s. Owing to the English royal family’s exile on the continent throughout much of the 1640s, a marriage alliance had been organised with the House of Orange when Mary was just nine years old and she subsequently married the fourteen year old William. Years later she became pregnant for the first time in 1647, but suffered a miscarriage. William was consequently her and her husband’s first child, and ultimately their last. William’s birth date is different depending on which country’s tradition it is considered from. In the Dutch Republic, which was using the Gregorian Calendar in the seventeenth century, he was born on the 14th of November. But in England, the country which William became so closely associated with from the late 1680s onwards, the Julian Calendar was still in operation and under that calendar William was born on the 4th of November. Studies of William will give two different dates for his birth as a result depending on whether they are written from a British or Dutch perspective. William was born into a country which had one of the most complex and brilliant histories of any European state during the early modern period. Through much of the Middle Ages, the region corresponding with Belgium and the Netherlands in the Low Countries today had been ruled by a number of different local rulers such as the Count of Flanders, the Count of Guelders* and the Count of Holland. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries these small states were conquered by the Dukes of Burgundy, a power which controlled much of eastern France at the time. In 1477 the last Duke of Burgundy died and much of his lands were inherited by the House of Habsburg. This situation continued until the 1560s when the Dutch nobles, many of whom had adopted Protestantism, revolted against the Spanish Habsburgs. This war of independence, often known as the Eighty Years’ War, went on until 1648, but in reality the Dutch Republic was already emerging as an independent state by the end of the sixteenth century, buoyed by its enormous merchant fleet and Amsterdam’s position as the greatest trading city in the North Sea. Although it would remain a republic, the Dutch had a quasi-royal family in the shape of the heads of the House of Orange, a major Dutch aristocratic line, one of whose leading members, William the Silent, had been pivotal in leading the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule early on, prior to his assassination in 1584. William established a tradition in which the leading members of the House of Orange held the positions of Stadtholder* or ‘steward’ of the most important counties of the republic, Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht from the 1570s onwards. One peculiar thing which is worth noting is that the Principality of Orange was actually nowhere near the Low Countries, but was in fact a small lordship in Provence in southern France which William’s ancestors had inherited over a century before his birth. Young William’s father, William II, had become Stadtholder* of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht in 1647, in succession to his own father, Frederick Henry. As Stadtholders,* William II and his father were the most powerful political figures in the republic during a period when the Dutch were the wealthiest people on earth, with merchant ships travelling as far afield as the East Indies, China and Japan, colonies established in North America and Southeast Asia and Dutch explorers like Abel Tasman* even discovering Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand well over a century before James Cook undertook his famous south seas voyages. In the mid-1650s, just a few years after William was born, Dutch colonists would even begin settling the first major European colony in Africa, the Cape Colony at the south of the continent, which has shaped South Africa profoundly down to the current day. The Dutch Golden Age saw a flowering of Dutch culture in tandem as painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer were supported by wealthy patrons in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities. Yet the powerful position of the House of Orange within all of this was compromised dramatically in the early winter of 1650, just eight days before William was born, as his father, the Stadtholder,* William II, died from smallpox. As young William was just an infant he could not become Stadtholder* and so what is known as the First Stadtholderless* Period was ushered in. William’s efforts to claim what he deemed to be his birth-right would shape much of his early life. Because of William’s position as the head of the House of Orange from the very moment of his birth, control of his person was a very significant political issue. Many parties were anxious to claim the guardianship of the young Prince which would confer growing political power on the guardian as William became older. This broadly focused on William’s mother Mary, Mary’s mother-in-law, Amalia of Solms-Braunfels,* a scion of a prominent German aristocratic family which had ended up in exile in the Dutch Republic in the early stages of the Thirty Years War, and other prominent aristocrats and political figures who attached themselves to various factions surrounding the House of Orange. The internecine conflict was evident from the moment of William’s birth, as Mary and her mother-in-law clashed over what the child should be named. Mary wished to name him Charles after her own father and brother, but Amalia insisted on William after his own father. Amalia won out. Eventually the supreme court of the provinces of Holland and Zeeland decided that the guardianship of William should be divided between his mother, his grandmother and Frederick William, the Elector of Brandenburg, a major German lord who had also spent some of his youth in the Low Countries and who was married to William’s aunt. For all practical purposes, though, William was primarily raised by his grandmother Amalia, as his mother spent much of his early years living in Paris and Bruges and she too died from smallpox on Christmas Eve 1660 when William was just ten years old. Owing to his mother’s absence William was primarily raised during his early years by several governesses appointed by his grandmother with his mother’s consent. These included Walburg Howard, an Englishwoman, and Lady Anna Mackenzie, the latter being a Scottish noblewoman. This ensured that William was surrounded by people of British ancestry during his youth, a fortunate upbringing for someone who would one day end up ruling England and Scotland. The young prince was raised in the Reformed faith and grew up to be a committed Calvinist under the tutelage of religious scholars such as Cornelis Trigland* and Constantijn Huygens,* the latter of whom was one of the leading scholars of the Dutch Golden Age and who had served as a private secretary to both William’s father and grandfather. When he was just nine William began receiving parts of his education at the University of Leiden, the foremost university in the Dutch Republic during the early modern era and one of the most renowned educational institutions in Europe at the time. He remained here for seven years down to 1666. William was in a difficult political situation throughout his childhood and early adult years. There were elements within the Dutch Republic who had always been opposed to what they perceived as the excessive and quasi-regal power of the Princes of Orange. These republicans or Statists were led by Johan de Witt, a major Dutch political figure who in 1653 was appointed as Grand Pensionary of the Dutch Republic, making him the most senior political figure in the state. De Witt, in alliance with others such as his brother Cornelis de Witt, was determined that when William grew up he would not rise to the office of Stadtholder* of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht like his forbears of the House of Orange and would consequently not assume the pre-eminent position within the Dutch Republic that his father, grandfather and other ancestors back to the time of William the Silent had enjoyed. De Witt was opposed in this by an Orangist faction that looked forward towards the day when William would be old enough to ascend to what many considered to be his birth right. Yet William’s cause was dealt a major blow in his youth by the Treaty of Westminster which brought the First Anglo-Dutch War to an end in 1654. Under the terms of this the Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, insisted that William would not be allowed to become Stadtholder* of Holland as he did not wish to see a grandson of King Charles I ascend to a position of pre-eminence in the Dutch Republic. This situation shifted again in 1660 when William was still shy of his tenth birthday. Cromwell’s death in 1658 had led to a period of crisis in England and the short-lived republic there came to an end in 1660 when William’s uncle, Charles Stuart, returned to Britain and restored the monarchy as King Charles II. From his new position as King of England, Scotland and Ireland, Charles was able to demand that the government of the Dutch Republic show due respect to William’s position as the head of the House of Orange and for several years in the early 1660s efforts by the de Witts and the Statist party to undermine the Orangists cooled. Yet the outbreak of a new war between England and the Dutch in 1665 removed William’s protection in this respect. Thus, in 1667 Johan de Witt moved to curb any possible ascent to major political power by William by having the states of the Dutch Republic pass the Perpetual Edict. Under the terms of this William was promised that he would be given the office of Captain General and admitted to the Dutch Council of State, but only when he turned 23 in 1673, not on his eighteenth birthday in 1668 as the Orangists had wished for. Most importantly, the Edict contained a provision that the holder of the office of Captain General could not become Stadtholder* of any of the Dutch provinces, thus blocking William from becoming Stadtholder* of the provinces of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht as so many of the princes of the House of Orange had been since the 1570s. The passage of the Perpetual Edict in 1667 opened up a period of half a decade of more direct conflict between William and the Statists led by the de Witts. The first thing that William and his faction attempted to do was to undermine the terms of the Perpetual Edict as William neared his eighteenth birthday by offering him the position of First Noble of the province of Zeeland as a means of getting around the ban on him becoming the Stadtholder* of the province. He received the title in September 1668 and just a few weeks later was declared by his grandmother Amalia to have attained his majority. Johan de Witt responded by convincing the nobles and leading political figures of Holland, the richest and most powerful of the Dutch provinces where Amsterdam was located, to abolish the office of Stadtholder* there in 1670. Yet he could not prevent William finally attaining a position on the Council of State that same year with full voting rights. Thereafter the tussle between the de Witts and William and the Orangists focused on his assumption of the position of Captain General which would make him the leading military commander of the republic. By the end of 1671 William had attained support from many of the foremost provinces including Zeeland and Utrecht, while opposition to the Orangists now centred on the province of Holland. William’s supporters from his early youth would have been encouraged by the fact that he was growing into a serious adult who showed promise as a potential Stadtholder* if he could acquire the office in several of the provinces. He was a serious individual, perceived by many to be old beyond his years even as a teenager. His religious beliefs were strongly held and he was a committed and puritanical Protestant. Yet to others he could appear dour and withdrawn, while he suffered from health issues throughout his life, notably severe respiratory issues and asthma which many years later when he would become king of England led to him avoiding London and its smoky environment which heaved with coal fumes long before the Industrial Revolution ever began. An exception to his somewhat aloof nature was the attention which he showed towards a group of young men who became his close companions. These included figures like William Bentinck,* who was a chamberlain of William’s entourage. Bentinck* won William’s everlasting friendship in the mid-1670s when he nursed him through a smallpox infection, the disease which had claimed both William’s father and mother. Given that, in order to nurse William back to health, he had risked his own death from a disease which claimed the lives of 15% or so of those who were exposed to it, as well as leaving many of those who survived badly scarred across their lower face, it is not difficult to see how such a bond developed between the pair, but William’s close associations with figures like Bentinck* led to the first suspicions in the 1670s that William was gay, though the evidence for this remains tenuous and, if he was, William appears to have not acted openly on his inclinations. William’s story is in many ways intertwined with that of a French royal who had been born twelve years before him, back in the autumn of 1638. Like William, King Louis XIV of France had also succeeded his father at a very young age. His father, Louis XIII, died in May 1643, making Louis king when he was just four years old. He would reign for the next 72 years, the longest reigning monarch in recorded history. During this time he became the paragon of monarchical absolutism, a ruler who ended any form of consultation with the wider political community in France and who even moved his government out of the eyes of prying Parisians to the grand palace he had built at Versailles near the French capital. There he established one of the great courts of early modern Europe in which he depicted himself as the Sun King and made a conscious effort to associate himself with the ancient gods of Greece and Rome. But it was not all pomp and ceremony. Louis aimed to make France the pre-eminent European power, as Spain, the superpower of the sixteenth century, was entering into rapid decline based on state bankruptcies and a failure to reform its political and economic system. To achieve this Louis intended to expand the French state, his great aim being to extend France’s western borders to the River Rhine, an ambition which would involve having to conquer the Spanish Netherlands, the German principalities west of the River Rhine and, most significantly, the Dutch Republic. William’s career in many ways would become based around his efforts to contain Louis and prevent French expansion at the expense of the Dutch. The first blow had already been struck by Louis in the mid-1660s, when William was still a teenager, though he was already beginning his efforts to re-establish the pre-eminence of the House of Orange within the Dutch Republic. In 1667, citing a law known as the Jus Devolutionis,* Louis had gone to war with Spain, claiming that his marriage to Maria Theresa, the daughter of King Philip IV of Spain, entitled him to a portion of the Spanish Netherlands, a region approximating to Belgium and Luxembourg which the Spanish had held onto during the Eighty Years’ War with the Dutch. In the brief War of Devolution between the summer of 1667 and the early summer of 1668, Louis succeeded in wresting control of extensive territories in the Spanish Netherlands. In response to this aggression the Dutch Republic had formed the Triple Alliance with England and Sweden in 1668, but Louis soon bribed King Charles II of England, William’s uncle, over to his camp and in the spring of 1672 he launched an invasion of the Dutch Republic. The Franco-Dutch War began disastrously for the Dutch, with Louis’ armies overrunning most of the country in May and June, an event which became known as the Rampjaar* or ‘Disaster Year’. Yet Louis failed to capitalise politically on this initial military victory and the crisis provided the opportunity for William to finally re-establish the House of Orange as the leading political family of the Dutch Republic. William and his supporters moved quickly to take advantage of the crisis presented by the French invasion of the republic. Firstly he issued a proclamation which asserted that his uncle, King Charles II, had only allied with the French owing to the mistreatment of William by the de Witts and the Statists. He then withdrew with the forces which he had under his personal command into the province of Holland, the region which had opposed his efforts to gain the office of Stadtholder* most stringently over the previous several years. There William ordered the flooding of the Dutch Waterline, a series of dams and other water defences which had been established earlier in the century to prevent any invasion of the provinces of Holland and Zeeland by turning this part of the Low Countries temporarily into an artificial island. With this he appeared as the saviour of Holland against the French, whereas the de Witts lost all credibility owing to their leadership during the disaster of the Rampjaar.* This broke the political deadlock and on the 4th of July 1672 the government of the province of Holland agreed to finally disregard the Perpetual Edict and appoint William as Stadtholder* of Holland. This was the moment which political figures in the provinces of Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders* and Overijssel* had all been waiting for and from this date William became Stadtholder* across each of these provinces, bringing the First Stadtholderless* Period in the history of the Dutch Republic to an end after 22 years since the death of William’s father back in 1650. William moved to consolidate his position quickly even as his forces were grappling with the French. His primary concern was to strike at the de Witt brothers before they could react to his assumption of the Stadtholdership.* In doing so he demonstrated the more ruthless elements of his personality. In early August Cornelis de Witt was arrested on charges of treason and was tortured. A confession could not be extracted and instead of being sentenced to death he was exiled from the Dutch Republic. Yet, before he could leave, a mob set on him and his brother Johan in the Hague on the 20th of August 1672. In a brutal act of political murder, the de Witt brothers were killed, then their bodies were strung up on a gibbet, a scene famously captured in a painting by Jan de Baen,* before being mutilated and allegedly having their livers removed, roasted and consumed by the mob. It remains a point of debate whether this alleged act of cannibalism ever occurred, but the sheer brutality of the incident points to the fury felt towards the de Witts who had led the government into the Rampjaar.* However, such was the calculated and organised manner in which the murders were carried out that few doubted that William had sanctioned the assassination of his political rivals. In the days that followed he purged the state councils of the provinces and filled them with his supporters, bolstering Orangist control of the republic after two decades of dominance by the Statists led by the de Witts. He also ensured that those who had been the ringleaders of the mob in the Hague were not prosecuted for the murder of the de Witts. William did not have any time to enjoy his seizure of power. Although the French had failed to capitalise on their military victories over the Dutch in the first months of the war, the conflict was still at a crisis point for the Dutch. He began efforts to remove the French from Dutch soil by striking towards Maastricht with the goal of cutting off the supply lines of the French, while also developing a military alliance with the Austrian Habsburgs, Spain and Brandenburg-Prussia to counter the French and English. By mid-1673 the situation had stabilised and later that year William was even able to campaign south-eastwards towards the west bank of the River Rhine in Germany around Cologne. By striking at French positions here he forced Louis to withdraw many of his remaining troops from the Dutch Republic. In the course of 1674 William reconsolidated control over most of the provinces, reversing most of the damage inflicted during the Rampjaar.* Such was his popularity at this juncture that he was offered the aristocratic titles of Duke of Guelders* and Count of Zutphen,* though he rejected these to assuage republican sentiment in Amsterdam and the wider provinces of Holland and Zeeland. By the time William was being offered these titles he had scored a major success by knocking England out of the war. Parliament in England and the wider political community had never displayed any major support for the alliance with France, which Charles had negotiated with Louis in secret some years earlier and which contained a secret clause that he would one day convert to Catholicism. Once the French advance towards Amsterdam stalled in 1672, the English parliament effectively cut off funding for the English war effort. Peace negotiations were consequently entered into in 1673 and in February 1674 the Treaty of Westminster was agreed between the English and Dutch, whereby they would largely return to their pre-war footings. The agreement brought to an end a near quarter of a century of conflict between the Dutch and the English which had resulted in three wars since 1652. Instead the two countries now moved to ally with each other against the French, with the alliance being cemented by William’s proposed marriage to the daughter of James, Duke of York, King Charles II’s niece and the second in line to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. Mary was also William’s first cousin, her aunt having been William’s deceased mother. Mary was still barely a teenager and in the end the marriage was not carried out until November 1677. It would have a dramatic bearing on the rest of William’s life. By the time William’s marriage to Mary occurred, the war with France was winding down. 1676 and 1677 saw both the French and the Dutch pumping huge amounts of resources into fighting which was now primarily playing out in the Spanish Netherlands, a territory approximate with Belgium and north-eastern France where towns like Valenciennes,* Cambrai* and Saint-Omer* were in contention. Little headway was made and peace talks were tentatively beginning at the town of Nijmegen* as both sides sought to extricate themselves from a war which neither side was expecting to win a clear victory in. William’s marriage to Mary and the impending conclusion of a military alliance between the Dutch and the English was the final spur which Louis needed to end the conflict. The Peace of Nijmegen* was finally concluded in August and September 1678. Under the terms of it the French gained some lands in the Spanish Netherlands in what is north-eastern France today, thus, extending France’s border in that region to its modern extents. The Dutch did not really gain or lose anything, although, Louis ceded full ownership of the Principality of Orange in southern France to William, strengthening the Dutch leader’s claims to quasi-kingship. With this, the Dutch and the French entered into a period of peace which would last for a decade, a rarity between the two nations which were nearly constantly at war between the mid-1660s and the mid-1710s. With peace agreed with France, William entered into a period of unprecedented stability in his life. He had spent his entire adult life either battling the French abroad or the de Witts and the Statists at home in order to acquire the office of Stadtholder* across the leading provinces. His marriage to Mary began well. Despite a relatively significant age difference, William having turned 27 the day they were married, while Mary was just 15, they formed a close enough bond based on their mutual religious piety, both being committed Protestants. Children would not follow, though, as Mary suffered at least one and possibly multiple miscarriages in the first years of their marriage, after which she was seemingly unable to have children. Meanwhile, William continued to consolidate his control over the republic. The 1680s witnessed him trying to forge new alliances with other European states in anticipation of a new war with France, while in the mid-1680s the Dutch Republic became a major haven for French Protestant Huguenots* who left France at this time in a mass exodus following Louis’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes, a declaration of toleration for French Protestants which had been issued in 1598 by King Henri IV as he sought to end the French Wars of Religion. Many of these French Huguenots* would take ship for southern Africa where they settled in the Dutch Cape Colony, in the process contributing significantly to the emergence of the Boer community there. While the early 1680s were a period of comparative political stability and quiet in the Dutch Republic, the first sustained period during which William could broadly enjoy his position of Stadtholder* without war with France or political machinations domestically taxing him, the situation was very different back in his wife’s homeland, and this would have major implications for the remainder of William’s life. When he married Mary in 1677 her uncle, King Charles II, was entering into a particularly precarious period of his reign. Although Charles had sired over a dozen illegitimate children with numerous mistresses, his marriage to Catherine of Braganza had not resulted in children. By the late 1670s, unless he were to divorce her and remarry, it was clear that Charles would be succeeded by his brother, William’s father-in-law, James Duke of York. However, this was a sensitive issue in England, as it had become apparent in the mid-1670s that James was a Roman Catholic. Many within the nobility and political community were unhappy with the prospect of a Catholic becoming king just a few decades after they had fought a civil war against Mary’s grandfather, Charles I, in large part owing to concerns that he was a crypto-Catholic. With these concerns in mind, parliament in England had moved to exclude James from the line of succession in the late 1670s. This attempt, though, had failed, laying the grounds for a future political crisis in the 1680s. Charles II died in 1685 and James duly succeeded to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, much to the consternation of many Protestants. Nevertheless, there was some reassurance in all of this. At the time of his succession James was already 51 years of age and he did not have a legitimate son. Instead his marriage to Mary of Modena in 1673 after Mary’s mother Anne had died in 1671 had resulted in a string of stillbirths and miscarriages. Owing to all of this, critics of James consoled themselves in 1685 with the expectation that James’ reign would be a short one, given his age, and that he would soon be succeeded by Mary, with her and William bringing impeccable Protestant credentials with them from the Dutch Republic. Yet it all went wrong very quickly. First James began implementing policies in England and Ireland to aggressively promote Roman Catholicism as the state religion and then, against all expectations, in June 1688 Mary of Modena gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Now the likelihood was that this child, named James like his father, would be raised as a Catholic and a new line of Roman Catholic monarchs would begin placing England back under the yoke of Rome which it had laboured to remove itself from during the sixteenth century. Faced with such an unacceptable scenario many in England looked towards Mary and William as their salvation. On the 30th of June 1688 William received one of the most famous documents in British political history. The Invitation to William had been authored by seven British political figures including Henry Sydney, who authored the letter, the earls of Shrewsbury, Devonshire and Danby, and the Bishop of London, Henry Compton. In it they outlined their grievances against King James and the fear of Britain once again becoming a bulwark of Catholicism, as well as outlining what can only be called an early modern conspiracy theory that the child that Mary of Modena had recently given birth to was not the king’s son. Finally, they implored William to come to their aid and use his wife’s position as James’ daughter to claim the English throne, stating, “We have great reason to believe, we shall be every day in a worse condition than we are, and less able to defend ourselves, and therefore we do earnestly wish we might be so happy as to find a remedy before it be too late for us to contribute to our own deliverance.” In closing they assured him that the vast majority of the people would rise up against James in support of William’s cause if he made haste across the Channel. What followed over the next year is a political event known as the Glorious Revolution. William quickly gathered an army, which in truth he had begun to assemble already in the spring of 1688 in anticipation of a potential invasion of England, and in early November he invaded southern England. There was no real conflict to speak of thereafter. As the seven individuals who had sent the Invitation to William had predicted, James’ supporters melted away as soon as they perceived that there was a viable alternative and as the English army and navy refused to fight for him James began preparing to flee to the continent to seek aid from King Louis XIV of France, William’s perennial enemy, to reclaim his thrones. With this done, William proceeded to London where he was joined by his wife. A political dispensation was soon worked out whereby they would rule jointly as King William III and Queen Mary II. This was a major moment in the development of England’s constitutional monarchy as the passage of a Declaration of Right in February 1689 established that the English parliament would henceforth enjoy significant powers independent of crown authority and that the monarch of the day would be restricted in his or her actions. As such, the Glorious Revolution saw the Catholic James deposed and replaced by the Protestant William and Mary, but it also established the means whereby the English parliament would become the primary governing institution within the British state during the eighteenth century that followed. James was not inclined to take matters lying down and there were many individuals throughout his realms who were still supporters of him, particularly so in Ireland, one of his three kingdoms where Roman Catholics were in the majority and where James’ reign had been viewed as an opportunity to reacquire the lands they had lost to English and Scottish Protestants over the last century. Therefore, while England was under the control of William and Mary by 1689, in Ireland a major rebellion was brewing. More worryingly, Louis XIV used the opportunity presented by the Glorious Revolution to launch a new war against the Dutch and England. The Nine Years’ War, as it would become known, would drag on until 1697. For William, thought, the early stages of it were concerned with the Irish issue. James landed here with significant French military support in March 1689. His supporters had control of Dublin, where a Catholic government was led by Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnell, and a parliament was being organised to revolutionise the landholding system across the country in favour of the Catholic Irish. Yet they suffered a reverse in the late summer when Catholic efforts to seize the northern city of Londonderry were foiled as the siege of the town was lifted by a relief fleet breaking through to the city on the River Foyle. This ensured that the northern province of Ulster remained in the hands of English and Scottish Protestants who were supporters of William and Mary, allowing William to use it as his base in Ireland to wage war against James there in a subsidiary conflict of the Nine Years’ War known as the Williamite War. William initially viewed James’ expedition to Ireland as an effort by Louis to distract him away from the main theatre of the war in the Low Countries and the English Channel and so at first he did not head to Ireland himself but dispatched one of his leading military commanders, the Duke of Schomberg,* to east Ulster with a large contingent of English and Dutch troops in August 1689. The campaign stalled though during a particularly bad autumn and winter during a decade of brutal weather which induced famines across Europe at the tail end of the Little Ice Age, a period of markedly cold global temperatures in the early modern era. Owing to this, Schomberg* was not able to make much progress, although James was increasingly dealing with a number of factions with different agendas in Dublin and could only obtain enough military support from France to keep the war simmering in Ireland, not to actually seize full control of the island. In this stalemate, William eventually decided to take charge of affairs himself. He sailed from Cheshire in the early summer of 1690 with considerable reinforcements and landed at Carrickfergus near Belfast on the 14th of June. Combining with Schomberg’s* forces and their allies amongst the British settlers in Ulster they then marched south to meet James directly in the field and end the Williamite War. James had set up his defences by the summer of 1690 along the course of the River Boyne, a large river to the north of the capital Dublin. There he and William’s armies would clash on the 1st of July 1690. The Battle of the Boyne is one of the most famous events in Irish history, though its political significance was not entirely matched by the battle itself. William’s forces of approximately 35,000 men outnumbered James’ French and Irish force of 24,000 considerably. His Dutch troops were also much better trained than the Irish irregulars. The engagement focused on the Williamite efforts to cross the river, while fending off charges by the Jacobite cavalry. Once William’s armies gained the upper hand, the French and Irish made a relatively controlled withdrawal towards Dublin. Only around 2,000 men were lost cumulatively on both sides and while William’s forces had suffered fewer casualties, Schomberg* was one of them, robbing William of one of his leading generals. Nevertheless, despite the inconclusive nature of the engagement, the Battle of the Boyne has become a major event in the development of Northern Irish political identity, one in which the alleged arrival of news of William’s victory at the Boyne to Ulster is celebrated every year on the 12th of July by northern Unionists. Thus, despite the fact that William had only a fleeting association with Ireland in 1690, his legacy there has been lengthy, with northern Unionists later forming themselves into groups such as the Orange Order as a symbol of their ties to England and the British monarchy. Having met with only a very limited setback at the Boyne, James nevertheless fled from Ireland in its aftermath, returning to France and leaving a number of French and Irish commanders in charge of the ongoing war effort, who began retreating westwards from Dublin towards the cities of Limerick and Galway, with the intention of using the vast River Shannon as a defensive line. William and his forces headed southwards and took the city of Dublin without any resistance. On his way he issued the Declaration of Finglas,* named after a small suburb of the capital, in which he offered a full pardon to any of James’ soldiers and supporters who surrendered within two weeks. Yet William made a bad political misstep here, excluding Irish Catholic landholders and any military officers who had supported James’ cause from the amnesty offer. This ensured that very few people availed of it and the fighting in Ireland would continue for well over another year. William was gone by then. Soon after issuing the Declaration he left Godard de Ginkel,* another of his Dutch military commanders, in charge and left Ireland. It was de Ginkel* who really oversaw the completion of the Williamite War when he won a decisive victory over the Irish and French at the Battle of Aughrim* on the 12th of July 1691, following which he moved to seize Galway and Limerick and concluded the Treaty of Limerick whereby James’ supporters were allowed to leave Ireland for France or other parts of Europe unhindered. William’s swift departure from Ireland after the victory at the Boyne and the issuing of the Declaration of Finglas* was occasioned by news that the French navy had won a major victory against the English Royal Navy at the Battle of Beachy Head off the southern coast of England on the 10th of July 1690. This concerned him far more than events in Ireland and shows that William always considered the war to be fought primarily against the French not the father-in-law that he had deposed. In the early 1690s the conflict continued to expand as William built up a Grand Alliance that included not just the Stuart realms and the Dutch Republic, but also the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, the Duchy of Savoy straddling the border between France and Italy, and loose aid from Sweden and Denmark. But William also had many opponents, not least in Scotland, where the deposition of James had also not been accepted by many prominent lords there. Eventually William pacified that country, but not before having dozens of members of the powerful Clan MacDonnell massacred at Glencoe on the 13th of February 1692, an event which along with the murder of his de Witt enemies twenty years earlier points to William’s ruthlessness when it came to ridding himself of opponents and those he deemed untrustworthy. Meanwhile, 1691 and 1692 saw some of the bitterest engagements of the whole war, as Louis pursued a two-pronged strategy of launching an invasion of the Spanish Netherlands and an amphibious landing in southern England to restore James to his throne there. The assault into the Spanish Netherlands was relatively successful, however William’s combined English and Dutch navies won engagements in the English Channel against the French at Barfleur* and La Hougue* which ended any French hopes of effecting a successful invasion of Britain. William always had opponents in England during these years. There were many political figures who viewed him as a Dutch interloper and some who were even in contact with James and his followers in exile in France about a possible resumption of his rule if he would make promises not to try to impose Catholicism in the manner in which he had in the 1680s. He had his wife Mary to thank for ending many of these conspiracies in the early 1690s as she had several conspirators arrested and exiled from court while William was often away managing the war effort. Consequently by the mid-1690s the threat posed by the supporters of James, the Jacobites, had reduced considerably. It was just as well, for Mary was not long for the world. In late November or early December 1694 she contracted smallpox, the same disease which had claimed both of William’s parents decades earlier and which he himself had had a close shave with in the mid-1670s. Mary was less fortunate and on the 28th of December 1694 she died from a disease which was the cancer of its time. William was devastated by her passing at just 32 years of age and was seemingly emotionally incapable of attending her state funeral when it was held in early March. He would never remarry. Mary’s death left William in a difficult position. He had never been popular amongst a broad array of his British subjects and the fact that he and Mary had not produced an heir ensured that many viewed him as a Dutch interloper who had to be simply tolerated for as long as his reign lasted. Against this backdrop he had to continue to lead the war effort against France. A major victory was scored in September 1695 with the recapture of the city of Namur in the Spanish Netherlands from the French. This allowed for a consolidated control of the banks of the River Meuse and, combined with the death of Marshal Luxembourg, Louis XIV’s foremost general, earlier that year, led to a dawning realisation in France that the war could not be won in a manner which would achieve Louis’s war aims. Secret peace negotiations were entered into as a result between the French and the Dutch early in 1696. Meanwhile, efforts to assassinate William led by the Jacobite plotters, George Barclay and Sir John Fenwick, in the same year, actually galvanised support for William in England when the conspiracy was discovered and foiled, leading to a temporary surge in popularity for the generally disliked monarch. The peace negotiations became more public in the course of 1697 as concessions were made by the different parties and the possibility of an agreement loomed. One of the major sticking points was whether or not the French government would acknowledge William as the rightful King of England, Scotland and Ireland and so renounce its political support for James to reclaim his thrones. The Treaty of Ryswick* saw Louis finally abandon his British ally and acknowledge William’s position. Agreed in the late autumn of 1697, the treaty saw the major parties largely return to their pre-war borders, with some small transfers of land in the Low Countries, along what is now the Franco-German border and between the Kingdom of Savoy and France along its south-eastern borders. The French gained some colonies from the Spanish in the Caribbean, a testament to Spain’s ever declining power. Overall the treaty points to wasted bloodshed over nine years, but William had gained international recognition of his position as king. James II would remain in exile with his supporters in France down to his death in 1701. The Jacobite cause persisted for another half a century as his son and grandson tried to reclaim power for the exiled Stuarts in 1715 and 1745 by launching rebellions in Scotland, both of which failed. While William had finally won unanimous recognition of his position as King of England, Scotland and Ireland from Europe’s major powers, this was achieved in the full knowledge that the succession to those same thrones was still very fickle. William’s decision to not remarry after Mary’s death further fuelled speculation about his sexuality. The upshot of this was that he would continue to have no heir. Tensions grew in England at this state of affairs in the years following the end of the Nine Years’ War and by 1701 the need for a firmer political settlement to determine the succession was clear. The result, which William agreed to, was the Act of Settlement, which he gave the royal assent to on the 12th of June 1701. Under the terms of this it was agreed unequivocally that when William died he would be succeeded by his sister-in-law, Anne, who would continue the direct line of succession. Yet it was acknowledged that Anne did not have a clear successor and had suffered an astonishingly high number of miscarriages and stillbirths. Consequently provision was also made that should Anne predecease William or die herself without an heir, then the thrones would descend to the German Hanoverians, who were related to the Stuarts as being descended from Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of King James I, who back in 1613 had married Frederick V, Elector Palatine in Germany. The Hanoverians were Protestants and a clause of the Act of Settlement stated that no Roman Catholic could henceforth ascend to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, permanently ending the possibility of another situation developing like that which occurred in 1685 when James II became king. Even as the political situation was evolving in England, matters were entering into a new crisis as well on the continent. In November 1700 King Charles II of Spain died childless. Charles had reigned as king from 1665, when he had succeeded at just three years of age. His premature death at 38 years of age was not entirely unexpected as he had suffered from extremely bad health throughout his life which included hydrocephalus and other conditions which are understood to have been partially due to generations of inbreeding within the House of Habsburg. He did not have any children and with his passing the direct line of the Spanish Habsburgs died out. There was now a succession crisis to inherit what was a declining European power, but one which still controlled a vast overseas colonial empire. Both the Austrian House of Habsburg, which was closely related to the Spanish line, and the French royal family had a claim through Louis’s marriage to Maria Theresa, a daughter of King Philip IV of Spain and the sister of the deceased King Charles II. Consequently, as the succession crisis began Louis started to press France’s claims to the Spanish throne. His case was enormously strengthened when it was learned that Charles II had willed his kingdom and empire to Philip, Duke of Anjou, Louis’s grandson and the deceased king’s great-nephew. William played a key role in the diplomatic wrangling which ensued in 1700 and 1701. As ever, his key goal was to prevent Louis acquiring control of Spain and its empire and the enormous resources which this would allow the French to bring to bear in future wars against the Dutch. This took on a different hue depending on whether he was in England or in the Netherlands, as in England a growing concern was with Anglo-French rivalry in colonial theatres such as North America, the Caribbean and India, whereas the Dutch were almost exclusively concerned with their southern border. Other powers who became involved had other concerns. The Austrians, for instance, were keen that if they could not acquire the Spanish throne themselves, they would be compensated by acquiring some of Spain’s other territories in the Low Countries and Italy. In the end negotiations broke down. William was infuriated by Louis’s acknowledgement of the exiled James’ son as the legitimate heir to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland shortly before James himself died in 1701, while Louis was unable to abandon efforts to claim the entirety of the Spanish kingdom and empire. Consequently in July 1701, less than four years after the Nine Years’ War had come to an end, a new pan-European conflict erupted. The War of the Spanish Succession would last for over thirteen years. William would only live to see the first seven months of the conflict, but when it concluded well over a decade later it would not end in unequivocal success for Louis. Although Philip, Duke of Anjou, Louis’s grandson, was eventually recognised by the other European powers as King Philip V of Spain, establishing the Bourbon line of Spanish monarchs, under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, the peace terms also involved a guarantee that the Spanish and French thrones could not be united under one ruler. William’s home country gained little through the treaty and was largely betrayed by its British ally which acquired large territories and concessions in return for acknowledging Philip V as ruler of Spain. It is to this time, for instance, that Britain’s control of the Rock of Gibraltar dates. From beyond the grave, though, William would no doubt have been pleased to see that the Spanish Netherlands came under Austrian rule, a dispensation which ensured a stronger ally now lay on the southern border of the Dutch Republic. William might well have lived to see the peace treaties concluded between 1713 and 1715 and might have argued for a much better result for the Dutch Republic had it not been for a terminal accident just months after the War of the Spanish Succession broke out. On the 20th of February 1702 he was riding a new horse called Sorrel in the park of Hampton Court when the horse slipped and stumbled on a molehill, throwing William to the ground. On impact he broke his collarbone. The bone was set there and then, but while riding back to Kensington in a coach a jolt knocked the bone out of position again. The strain of the fall, break and having to have the bone set twice was great and in the days that followed his health declined considerably. In early March he developed a severe fever and on the 8th he died from what is assumed to have been pneumonia caused by complications arising from his accident two weeks earlier. His body afterwards lay in state for several weeks and the state funeral was not held until the 12th of April 1702. It was a much more muted affair than was typical of funerals for English monarchs, a product both of his own desire for a modest ceremony and also the public perception of William as an interloper who had become king only because of the tortured political circumstances of the late 1680s. He was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey alongside Mary. William’s death ushered in a period of considerable change in both Britain and the Low Countries. In England his sister-in-law Anne succeeded to the throne in line with the provisions of the Act of Settlement of 1701. By then Anne was entering her late thirties, but she had gone through one of the most difficult natal histories ever recorded, suffering a dozen miscarriages and stillbirths, while of the five children which she bore alive all died in infancy except for a boy named William who too was claimed in 1700 when he was just eleven years old. The complicated succession history of the House of Stuart continued through her reign as a result and when she died in 1714 the German line of the Stuarts claimed the throne of England, Scotland and Ireland as the House of Hanover. In the Dutch Republic, William’s death without a direct heir ushered in the Second Stadtholderless* Period. He appointed John William Friso,* a cousin and member of the cadet branch of the House of Orange, as his heir designate, but while John William became the leader of the Orangists within the Dutch Republic, he did not command enough support to be acknowledged as William’s heir as Stadtholder.* Consequently the office of Stadtholder* went into abeyance again. It would not be revived until 1747 when John William’s son, William IV, led the Orangist Revolution which saw the Stadtholderate* revived after 45 years. This, though, could not arrest the general decline of the Dutch Republic in the eighteenth century after the Golden Age of the seventeenth. By the time of the French Revolutionary Wars in the 1790s, the Dutch Republic had become a second-rate European power that was conquered by the French. William III has often been criticised on numerous fronts. From a military perspective many commentators in his own day viewed him as a middling commander and historians have tended to take the same view, attributing many of the Williamites’ successes in the Nine Years’ War to more capable commanders like Godard de Ginkel* who won the truly decisive victory over the Jacobites in Ireland at the Battle of Aughrim* in July 1691 after William had long left Ireland himself. Equally, he was only an average politician and he never managed to win widespread support in England where he was always viewed as a Dutch interloper who was conveniently utilised to get rid of the Catholic James. On a moral level he was ruthless and his orchestration of the murder of the de Witt brothers was one of just several unscrupulous acts of bloodshed which he organised. However, where William succeeded brilliantly during his lifetime was in containing the ambitions of Louis XIV for France to dominate Western Europe. In the 1670s he managed to ensure the Dutch Republic was not destroyed by France, while his victory over the French in the Nine Years’ War ensured that James did not reclaim his thrones as a French puppet, while the closing act of his life saw William play a role in building up a pan-European alliance which many years later would ensure that the Spanish Empire was not directly subsumed into the Kingdom of France. Viewed purely from the perspective of containing Louis’s ambitions, William’s career was immensely successful and paved the way for Britain’s emergence in the eighteenth century as a power that could challenge and then eclipse France as the European powers began to dominate much of the globe. What do you think of William III? Was he an effective figure in preventing Louis XIV from establishing French hegemony across Western Europe? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.