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Twelve English Statesmen
WILLIAM THE THIRD
[Publisher's logotype]
WILLIAM THE THIRD
by
H. D. TRAILL
London
Macmillan and Co., Limited
New York: The Macmillan Company
1906
All rights reserved
First Edition, May 1888
Reprinted August 1888, 1892, 1897, 1902, 1906
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
1650-1672
Birth, ancestry, and early years--State of Dutch parties--
William's boyhood--His character and ambitions--Hostility of
De Witt and his partisans--Visit to England--Outbreak of the
War of 1672 Page 1
CHAPTER II
1672-1678
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 9
CHAPTER III
1678-1688
An interval of repose--Revival of continental troubles--Death of
Charles II.--Expedition of Monmouth--Mission of Dykvelt--James's
growing unpopularity--Invitation to William--Attempted intervention
by France--William's declaration--He sets sail, and is driven back
by storm--Second expedition and landing 17
CHAPTER IV
1688
Advance to Exeter--Measures of James--Council of the Lords--Their
proposals--The King goes to Salisbury--Defection of Churchill--
James returns to London--Negotiation--Attempted flight of James--
His arrest--Advance of William--Entry of Dutch troops into London
--Actual flight of James 30
CHAPTER V
1688-1689
Characteristics of the English Revolution--Views of the various
parties--The Convention--Proposal to declare the throne vacant--
The Regency question--The resolution of the Commons--Amendment of
the Lords--The crisis--Attitude of Mary--Announcement of William
--Resolution passed--Declaration of Right--Tender of the Crown 39
CHAPTER VI
1689
William's part in the Revolution--Convention declared a Parliament
--Oath of Allegiance--Settlement of Civil List--Appropriation
Clause--Toleration and Comprehension--Address of the Commons
inviting the King to declare war 56
CHAPTER VII
1689-1690
Invasion of Ireland--Campaign of 1689--Parliamentary strife--The
conduct of the war--The Oates Case--The Succession Bill--Attempts
to pass an Indemnity Bill--Rancour of the Whigs--Their factious
opposition to William's Irish plans--Dissolution of Parliament 67
CHAPTER VIII
1690-1691
Parliament of 1690--Tory majority--Settlement of the royal income
--Case of the Princess Anne--The "Act of Grace"--Detection of
Preston's conspiracy--William's departure for Ireland--Battle of
the Boyne--Battle off Beachy Head--Marlborough's Irish campaign--
William's departure for the Hague 79
CHAPTER IX
1691-1692
Campaign of 1691 in the Netherlands--Fall of Mons--Disaffection of
William's councillors--Conclusion of year's campaign--Disgrace and
dismissal of Marlborough--Massacre of Glencoe 93
CHAPTER X
1692-1693
Gloomy European prospects--Campaign of 1692 in the Netherlands--
Defeat of Steinkirk--Attempt of Grandval--Session of 1692--Place
Bill and Triennial Bill--Campaign of 1693--William outwitted by
Luxembourg--Defeat of Landen--Session of 1693-94--Louis's
overtures of peace 104
CHAPTER XI
1693-1694
Formation of the first party Ministry--Reintroduction of the
Triennial Bill and its defeat--Of the Place Bill and its veto
--Causes of the disallowance--Macaulay's account examined--
Campaign of 1694--Death of Mary 119
CHAPTER XII
1695-1697
Campaign of 1695--Capture of Namur by the allies--Dissolution of
Parliament--William's "progress"--The elections--New Parliament
--Grants to Portland--The Assassination Plot--Campaign of 1696--
Fenwick's conspiracy--Negotiations with France--Peace of Ryswick 135
CHAPTER XIII
1698-1699
Portland's embassy--His life in Paris--The question of the Spanish
Succession--The First Partition Treaty--General election and
meeting of the new Parliament--Its temper--Opposition to William's
military policy--Reduction of the army 156
CHAPTER XIV
1699-1700
Death of the Electoral Prince of Bavaria--Renewed negotiations--
Second Partition Treaty--The Irish forfeitures--The Resumption
Bill--Will and death of the King of Spain 171
CHAPTER XV
1701-1702
English indifference on the Spanish Question--Death of James II.
and Louis's recognition of the Pretender--Reaction in England--
Dissolution of Parliament--Support of William's policy by its
successor--The Treaties--Accident to William--His illness and
death--Character--The Whig legend examined--His great qualities
as man and ruler--Our debt to him 189
CHAPTER I
1650-1672
Birth, ancestry, and early years--State of Dutch parties--
William's boyhood--His character and ambitions--Hostility
of De Witt and his partisans--Visit to England--Outbreak
of the War of 1672.
William Henry, Prince of Orange and Count of Nassau, a ruler destined to
play a greater part in shaping the destinies of modern England than any
of her native sovereigns, was born at the Hague on the 4th of November
1650. By blood and ancestral tradition he was well fitted for the work
to which he was to be called. The descendant of a line of statesmen and
warriors, the scion of a house which more than a century before had been
associated with the most heroic struggle for national freedom that
history records, he could hardly have added stronger hereditary to the
great personal qualifications for the enterprises reserved for him. His
family was one of the most ancient in Europe--reaching back, indeed, for
its origin into the regions of fable. "I will not take upon me," says an
English biographer, writing shortly after his hero's death, "to extend
the Antiquity of the House of Nassau as far as the time of Julius
Cæsar, though that Emperor in his first book of Commentaries, _De Bello
Gallico_, says that one Nassau, with his brother Cimberius, led a body
of Germans out of Suabia and settled upon the banks of the Rhine near
Treves, which is the more observable by reason of the Affinity of the
Words, which differ only in the Transposition of one Letter; but I doubt
'tis rather Presumption than Truth for any one to affirm that there is
an Estate upon that very Spot of Ground mentioned by Cæsar which belongs
to the Nassovian Family to this Day." Without insisting on so very
ancient and remote an origin as this, we may take it as certain that the
House of Nassau had been established in Europe for some thousand years
at the birth of William. As early as in the thirteenth century it was
honoured with the imperial dignity in the person of Adolph of Nassau.
The title and domains of Orange were added to the family in the
sixteenth century by the marriage of Claude de Chalons, sister and
heiress of the then Prince of Orange, with Henry of Nassau, from whose
son Réné the principality passed by testamentary bequest to the great
Stadtholder of Holland, William, surnamed the Silent, the illustrious
liberator of the United Provinces from the yoke of Spain. The
acquisition of this petty principality--only twelve miles in length by
nine in breadth--was by no means the matter of trivial importance which
its territorial dimensions might imply. Its situation in the very heart
of the dominions of France, the incidents attaching to that situation
and the consequences flowing from it, contributed in their degree to
that complex system of forces by which the course of history is
determined. To William I. succeeded his son Maurice, the bearer of a
name also memorable in the history of the States, a greater soldier and
a statesman of scarcely less ability than his father, though of a far
more chequered fame. Under Maurice the power of the Stadtholder or
Governor was, in spite of the jealousy with which it was regarded by the
burgher party, considerably advanced, and he was not without reason
suspected of the design of making himself an absolute ruler. Dying
without issue, he was succeeded by his brother Frederick Henry, another
renowned captain, under whom the long struggle with Spain was at last
brought to a close by the renunciation, in the Treaty of Westphalia, of
the Spanish claim upon the United Provinces. William II., the son of
Frederick 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.