William the Third - H. D. Traill

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Henry, was born in 1626, and succeeded his father at the age of twenty-one. Endowed with all the restless activity and ambition of his uncle, he attempted, in prosecution of the same monarchical designs as that prince, to seize the city of Amsterdam by a coup de main. The project, however, was defeated, and William, after a troubled reign of only four years, was fatally attacked by the smallpox, and died on the 27th of October 1650, leaving no issue. Eight days after his death, however, his widow, Mary, daughter of Charles I., gave premature birth to the son whose career it is in these pages proposed to trace.

      Seldom has a new-born child been the object of such diverse emotions, the centre of so many conflicting hopes and fears among its countrymen as was this infant Prince. To the partisans of the House of Orange he appeared as the God-sent heir—an earlier enfant du miracle vouchsafed by Providence to save the great race of William the Silent from extinction in the male line. To the party of the municipal oligarchy he presented himself as the probable inheritor rather of the ambitions of his father and his father's uncle, than of the virtues of his great-grandfather. The latter party, who for the moment had the upper hand, were fully resolved that the young Prince should never wield as much power as that which Prince Frederick Henry had sought during his four years' reign to abuse. The party of the infant Prince, on the other hand, a party headed by the Princess Dowager and her mother, made up as far as possible for the lack of direct and political power by incessant and indefatigable intrigue; and to their efforts it was that the Pensionary De Witt, the representative of the municipal party, ascribed, and not without reason, the war which broke out between the States and the Rump Parliament in 1651. Its effect, however, was temporarily disastrous to their ambitions; for, the United Provinces being compelled to solicit peace from Cromwell, the Lord Protector, who was naturally opposed to the elevation of a family allied by marriage to the exiled Stuarts, compelled the States of Holland and West Friesland, as a condition of his ratifying the articles of peace, to pass a decree that "they would never elect the Prince or any of his lineage Stadtholder of their province, nor consent that he or any of his family should be Captain-General of the forces of the United Provinces."

      Reared from his very cradle amid the animosities of contending factions, the young Prince learned early those four lessons of statecraft—to conceal his designs, to watch his opportunities, to choose his instruments, and to bide his time. His education, other than that which he was receiving daily in the stern school of circumstances, he owed to his mother alone. Under her care he acquired a good knowledge of mathematics and military science, and learned to speak English, French, and German almost as fluently as his native tongue. The chiefs of the municipal party, who became his official guardians, would have willingly stinted his instruction, if by so doing they might have checked his aspirations; but the ambition to emulate the fame of his great predecessors, and to secure the power which they had wielded, took root within him from his boyish years, and grew steadily with his growth. Weak and ailing from his childhood, for he shared the too common lot of those infants who are brought into the world before the appointed months are run, he took no pleasure, as he possessed no skill, in the ordinary pastimes of the boy; and, with a mind thus turned inward upon itself, from an age at which other children have no care or thought but for the thousand novel interests and attractions of the world without them, he acquired habits of reserve and thoughtfulness beyond his years. The religious faith in which he was nurtured was a Calvinism of the strictest sort. His firm hold of the grim doctrine of predestination stood him in much the same stead as Napoleon's belief in his destiny, and long before he arrived at man's estate he had in all probability convinced himself that the inscrutable counsels of Providence had designed him for great things.

      Humanly speaking, however, his prospects did not appear to brighten before him as years went on. At the age of ten he lost his mother, who had gone to England to visit her brother, just restored to the throne, and was there carried off by an attack of smallpox. In the same year he saw his principality of Orange forcibly seized by Louis, who, after demolishing its fortifications, held possession of it for five years, surrendering it only in 1665. Then came the war of that year between England and the Dutch Provinces, a conflict which his party temporarily conceived the hope of turning to their own profit, but which left them ultimately in a worse plight than before; for no provisions in the Prince's interests were insisted on by his uncle, Charles II., in the Treaty of Peace, and, under the instigation of De Witt, the States of Holland and West Friesland subsequently passed a perpetual edict suppressing the office of Stadtholder. A faint effort was made by Charles II. through Sir William Temple to vindicate the rights of his nephew, but the efforts of the ambassador were coldly received by the Pensionary, and the matter dropped. De Witt now pushed his hostility yet further, and the States resorted to the ignoble and ungrateful measure of calling upon the young Prince to quit the house at the Hague which, though technically the property of the States, had been for many years the official residence of his family. To the Pensionary, who was charged with the communication of this order, William replied by a spirited refusal, directing his visitor to inform the States that he would not quit the house unless removed by force; upon which his persecutors, apprehensive no doubt of the odium which such a step would excite among the common people, who were many of them well affected to his historic family, allowed their demand to lapse. William, now eighteen years of age, determined to make a counter-move on his own part, and presenting himself before the assembly of the States of the province of Zealand, he proposed to them to elect him first noble of that province, a dignity which they had been wont to confer upon his ancestors at his then age. The Zealanders complied readily with the request, though they did not proceed, as had been expected, to elect him to the higher office of Stadtholder of the province; and except by entitling him to a seat in the States General as representative of the nobility of Zealand, the minor honours procured him nothing but the increased jealousy and suspicions of the party of De Witt. Sir William Temple, then ambassador at the Hague, with whom the Prince came into contact at this time, characteristically reports of him in his Letters as a "young Man of more Parts than ordinary and of the better Sort; that is, not lying in that kind of Wit which is neither of use to one's self nor to anybody else, but in good plain Sense which showed Application if he had business that deserved it; and this with extreme good and agreeable Humour and Dispositions without any Vice; that he was asleep in bed always at Ten o'clock; loved Hunting as much as he hated Swearing, and preferred Cock-ale before any Wine." In the year 1670 he managed after some diplomatic difficulties to pay a visit to London, where he received the attentions of a civic banquet, and of an honorary degree at Oxford, and where too he acquired a very shrewd perception of the King's leanings towards the religion of Rome.

      But his day was now fast approaching. At the close of the year 1671 was concluded the ever-infamous Treaty of Dover. Charles transformed himself, with more than the celerity of the nimblest modern rat, from the champion of the Protestant faith in Europe into the ally of its deadliest enemy. Sir William Temple was recalled from the Hague, and the Triple League between England, the States, and Sweden, which that skilful envoy had taken so much pains to cement, was broken up. Early in 1672 war was declared by England against the Dutch, and the armies of Louis, pouring into the United Provinces, became masters of all their chief strongholds "in as little time," to quote the vigorous comparison of one of William's biographers, "as travellers usually employ to view them." The Prince's opportunity had come.

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

      William elected Stadtholder of Holland—Murder of the De Witts—Campaign of 1672–3—Successes of the Prince—Declared hereditary Stadtholder—Progress of the French arms—Marriage with Mary—Negotiations of Nimeguen—Conclusion of the Peace—Battle of St. Denis.

      Louis XIV., like other military malefactors before and since, was himself the creator of the enemy by whom his power was to be shaken to its foundations. His invasion of the United Provinces, an enterprise commenced with that contempt of public right in which no other

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