The Orange Succession
A History of the Monarchy from the Glorious Revolution
William III & Mary II
By the Grace of God
King and Queen of England, Scotland, France and Ireland,
Stadtholder of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands,
Prince of Orange, Count of Nassau, Defenders of the Faith, etc.
JE MAINTIENDRAI
A History of the Monarchy from the Glorious Revolution
William III & Mary II
By the Grace of God
King and Queen of England, Scotland, France and Ireland,
Stadtholder of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands,
Prince of Orange, Count of Nassau, Defenders of the Faith, etc.
JE MAINTIENDRAI
Chapter I: The Lives of William & Mary and the Glorious Revolution
William III was born on 4 November 1650 (O.S.), the only child of William II, Prince of Orange, and his wife, Mary, Princess Royal. His father, who died shortly before his own birth, had been the Stadtholder of the Netherlands before him, and was a member of the House of Orange-Nassau, which had dominated the United Provinces since William III’s great-grandfather, William I, had led a successful rebellion against the Spanish Hapsburgs in the mid seventeenth century. His mother, on the other hand, was a member of the House of Stuart, being the daughter of Charles I and, thus, the sister of Charles II and James II.
As his father had died before his birth, William was born the sovereign of the Principality of Orange, and some saw him as destined to follow his ancestors as stadtholder. In his young age, however, the Dutch Council of State ruled against William II’s unsigned will, and awarded joint custodianship over the young prince to three parties: his mother, his paternal grandmother, Amelia of Solms-Braunfels, and his paternal uncle by marriage, Frederick William of Hohenzollern, the Elector of Brandenburg. He was raised mostly by a variety of Dutch governesses and educated by a variety of tutors, brought up an adherent of Calvinism in the strict Dutch Reformed Church. The politics of his regency were thrown into question when, after the death of his mother, the Dutch Estates General attempted to take control of William’s tutorship and, though they gained influence, the intervention of his Uncle Charles II dismayed many Dutch republicans and anti-Orangists.
William was, despite the influence of his mother and Charles II in his upbringing, a Dutch patriot, though had a fairly friendly relationship with his Stuart relations as he reached adulthood, and began his own political maneuvering in the Dutch Republic. He and his supporters managed to force Dutch leadership to admit William into the Council of State, in a voting position, in 1670. However, his uncle betrayed the Netherlands in 1672, when he joined France’s Louis XIV in a war with the Dutch. In the panic of the invasion, William seized power as the Captain-General and, ultimately, secured the stadtholdership for himself in the crisis. His fleets acted decisively, defeating the English several times at sea and, in conjunction with the English Parliament, forced Charles II to make peace in 1674, and finally drove the French from the United Provinces in 1678. His military victories secured his political dominance in the Netherlands and, after an agreement with Charles II, he strengthened his claims to the English throne by marrying his cousin Mary.
Mary II was born on 30 April 1662 (O.S.), the eldest daughter and surviving child of James II, then the Duke of York, and Lady Anne Hyde. Despite her parents’ Catholic faith, Mary was, at the insistence of her uncle, Charles II, brought up as a member of the Church of England. Mary, along with her younger sister, Anne, was raised apart from her parents by governesses chosen by the King. As Mary and Anne were their parents’ only surviving children, Mary spent much of her life as the second in line to the English throne, after her father.
At the respective ages of 27 and 15, William and Mary were married in London in 1677, to the chagrin of the latter and her father. Despite Mary’s initial reluctance, however, the marriage turned out to be a strong and successful one. The couple proved to be a fertile one, and Mary became pregnant almost immediately after the marriage, and there was much relief in England when the Duke of York’s daughter had not only married a Protestant prince, but had successfully given birth to a male heir. Their son was given the name William, after his father, in 1678. William’s birth was followed in quick succession by that of his brother, Charles, who died in infancy in 1680, and his three sisters, Mary, born in 1683, and twins Amelia and Anne (the latter of whom died in infancy), born in 1686.
Despite having made peace with the French shortly after his marriage to Mary, William continued to be wary of Louis XIV of Bourbon, the King of France and Navarre. The peace was, ultimately, doomed to failure by the attitudes of both rulers: William was suspicious of his much larger, Catholic neighbor, who had attacked him before and who he believed aimed to dominate all of Europe, while Louis XIV saw William as a desperate warmonger, describing the stadtholder-prince as his “mortal enemy.”
In 1686, in the aftermath of the War of the Reunions (which Spain had lost handily to the French), William joined into the League of Augsburg, an anti-French coalition which united him with several other European states. The League was formed in view of France taking advantage of Ottoman incursions in the east to seize German lands in the War of the Reunions, as well as the sudden monopolization of power in France which resulted from the wholesale expulsion of the Huguenots, France’s Protestant population. This latter angered many Protestants throughout Europe, especially those in the Dutch Republic, many of whom came forward in support of William’s efforts to limit Louis XIV’s wider influence.
Meanwhile, in England, James II’s policy of ignoring Parliamentary laws in favor of his new toleration acts was making waves. James II, due, no doubt, to his Catholic faith, served poorly in his role, as his subjects saw it, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Being, respectively, the heiress to the throne and her husband, Mary and William were intrinsically tied into the ongoing political intrigue in England. After it was revealed that James II’s wife, Mary of Modena, was with child, events there began coming very quickly to a head.
Unfortunately, at the same time, events elsewhere began to converge. After having been in a position not long earlier of being able to dictate his terms to any power in Europe, Louis XIV’s prestige sank after he had revoked the longstanding Edict of Nantes, which had granted tolerance to French Protestants. Anti-Huguenot persecution in France magnified incredibly, with thousands upon thousands of the Huguenots fleeing to the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, Orange and England. Louis XIV also made moves toward expanding French territories in the Rhineland, threatening both smaller German states and larger powers such as the United Provinces and eastern Hapsburg Empire.
As the time for Mary’s stepmother to give birth approached, William began gathering an army in the Netherlands. His worries were twofold: first, of course, was the removal of Mary from the direct line of succession, jeopardizing the Protestant succession in England; second was worrying developments in which James II had treated with Louis XIV, treaties which included the possibility of France funding an English fleet in the Channel. While William may have been able to tolerate losing his grasp on the throne of England, allowing England to fall into the French sphere at such a critical moment, with a new great war fast approaching, was unacceptable to him. However, William was unwilling to take direct action on his own, and risk losing to patriotic Englishmen resisting what would quite probably be seen as a foreign invasion. He insisted that the Protestant conspirators in England formally invite him to intervene to, as Gilbert Burnet put it, “rescue the nation and the religion.”
When James Francis Edward Stuart was born, and declared the Prince of Wales, the Immortal Seven complied with William’s request. These seven conspirators included Charles Tabot (the Duke of Shrewsbury), William Cavendish (the Duke of Devonshire), Thomas Osborne (the Earl of Danby), Richard Lumley (the Viscount Lumley), Henry Compton (the Bishop of London), Admiral Edward Russell and Henry Sidney - a mix of both Covaners and Cavaliers - wrote to William: “your highness may be assured, there are nineteen parts of twenty of the people throughout the kingdom, who are desirous of a change; and who, we believe, would willingly contribute to it.”
This was all the encouragement William needed. To secure his borders, he wrote to the Hapsburg Emperor, Leopold, acquiring his support after promising not to persecute English Catholics. He secured the neutrality of nearby German states, and acquired financial support from many sources, including from Amsterdam, the wealthiest city in the Netherlands, as well as from such disparate sources as Jewish banking families and Pope Innocent XI himself, an avowed rival to Louis XIV.
The final decision to invade England was made when Louis XIV finally committed his forces, launching his initial invasion to the east, into Germany. After a dispute between Louis XIV and Leopold over the succession to the electoral archbishopric of Cologne, France committed its forces to attack the Hapsburgs and their allies in Germany. Louis XIV sent intimidating letters to the United Provinces, warning them, first, not to intervene in English political affairs and, second, not to interfere in Germany. The combined effect of the letters convinced the other powers that be in the Netherlands to approve William’s invasion, as a preemptive act to prevent an Anglo-French alliance threatening Dutch security.
William invaded England in October of 1688, and several strategic missteps by both Louis XIV and James II facilitated the intervention’s success. In short order, uprisings against the King’s officials, especially Catholics, began throughout the kingdom. Many prominent English - including John Churchill, the future Earl of Marlborough, and Princess Anne of Denmark, Mary’s sister - defected to William, and in fairly short order, William arrived at London.
After James II’s wife and son fled England, he entered into terse negotiations with William, it soon becoming apparent that William had no intention of allowing James to keep the throne. After his first attempt to flee failed, James was finally able to escape England in late December, shortly before Christmas. It has been speculated that William intentionally allowed James’ escape, both to discredit him as king and to solve the question of what to do with him, with England still uneasy in the memory of the regicide of James’ father, Charles I.
A provisional government of lords of the realm appointed William the effective regent, and the Convention was called. As it was not technically a Parliament, the Convention could be called in the absence of a royally summoned assembly, setting a precedent that would come to haunt future monarchs. The Convention, after long debates, adopted the Bill of Rights 1689, and, after intense negotiations between the Convention’s leaders, William, Mary, and Anne, the Convention agreed to the Coronation Oath Act. The two monarchs were established by acclamation of the Convention on 13 February 1689 (O.S.), and, after William’s family arrived in London, and on 11 April 1689 (O.S.), William’s namesake son was proclaimed the Prince of Wales, and, with their formal coronation, the reign of William & Mary had begun.
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