The Legacy Of William Of Orange
On February 20, 1702 William was riding Sorrel, a new horse,
in the park of Hampton Court. As the horse began to gallop
it stumbled on a molehill and fell throwing William who broke
his collarbone, with ultimately fatal consequences. This unhappy
incident was to give rise to a new Jacobite toast, ‘To
the little gentleman in black velvet’.
The bone was set and William returned to Kensington by coach.
As a result of a jolt in the coach it had to be set again.
For a younger man such a riding accident would not have proved
fatal but William at 51, by early 18th century standards,
was not a young man. Furthermore, William had never enjoyed
good health. He was asthmatic and, if not a hunchback he certainly
had the appearance of one.
Throughout his life William’s indomitable willpower
had pushed his weak and feeble physical frame to its limits
and beyond. For example, William’s crossing of the Boyne
was significantly more fraught with difficulty than Orange
banners suggest. William’s horse got stuck in the mud
and he was obliged to dismount to extricate the animal. Unable
to achieve this himself, he received assistance from an Inniskillinger
called McKinlay. The struggle brought on one of William’s
asthma attacks but he recovered fairly quickly and was soon
in the thick of the fray.
To return to early 1702, complications ensued. William succumbed
to fever on March 4. By the following day his strength had
failed greatly. By March 6 he was scarcely alive at all but
William was tenaciously hanging on to life: “You know
that I never feared death; there have been times when I should
have wished it; but now that this great prospect is opening
before me, I do wish to stay a little longer”. However,
he entertained no illusions as to his plight. He told his
physicians: “I know that you have done all that skill
and learning could do for me, but the case is beyond your
art; and I submit”.
Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Gilbert Burnet,
the Bishop of Salisbury, were summoned to his bedside at 5.00
a.m. on the morning of Sunday March 8. William professed his
firm belief in the Christian religion and received the sacrament
from their hands with great seriousness. William died between
7.00 and 8.00 a.m. He closed his eyes and gasped for breath.
The bishops knelt down and read the commendatory prayer. By
the time the bishops had completed the prayer William was
no more.
When William’s remains were laid out, it was found
that he wore next to his skin a small black silk riband. The
lords in waiting ordered it to be taken off. It contained
a gold ring and a lock of Mary’s hair. Queen Mary had
been devoted to him, and he to her. After the shock f her
unexpected death in 1694, William became very withdrawn.
William was buried in Westminster Abbey beside Mary on Sunday,
April 12. Six dukes carried his pall and the chief mourner
was his brother-in-law, Prince George, husband of Queen Anne.
The Dean of the Abbey met the funeral procession and the Bishop
of Rochester conducted the service, which took place in private
at midnight, as was customary for the great in those days.
Official mourning in England was half-hearted because William
remained to the end, in the eyes of the English ruling classes,
a foreigner. In part this was because when William became
King he rapidly discovered that many of his most prominent
new subjects (for example, Marlborough, Godolphin and Shrewsbury)
were disloyal and in secret communication with the Jacobite
court in exile at Versailles.
Since William could not rely on such people he understandably
preferred to surround himself with Dutchmen and Huguenots
(such as Bentinck, Ginkel, Schomberg, de Ruvigny and Rochford)
whom he could trust. Nor were William’s public persona
and his ordering of priorities best calculated to win the
favour of the Court. Although privately kindly, courteous,
and forbearing, in public William was reserved, and could
be irritable and ungracious, partly as a result of ill health
and overwork. As Lord Macaulay in his History of England observed:
“He was in truth far better qualified to save a nation
than to adorn a court …. He seldom came forth from his
closet, and when he appeared in the public rooms, he stood
among the crowd of courtiers and ladies, stern and abstracted,
making no jest, and smiling at none. His freezing look, his
silence, the dry and concise answers which he uttered when
he could keep silence no longer, disgusted noblemen and gentlemen
who had been accustomed to be slapped on the back by their
royal masters ……. He spoke our language, but not
well. His accent was foreign: his diction was inelegant; and
his vocabulary seems to have been no larger than was necessary
for the transaction of business.
However, to the common people William was a great man and
a Protestant hero. Unlike sections of the English ruling classes,
they recognised William’s greatness with gratitude,
viewing his passing differently.
William’s overriding mission in life was to preserve
the independence of the Netherlands. In 1672 when the English
Duke of Buckingham asked the young William: “Surely
you see that everything is lost?” William’s retort
was “My Lord, my country is indeed in danger, but there
is one way never to see it lost and that is to die in the
last ditch”
Time and time again, against overwhelming odds he succeeded
in maintaining the freedom, prosperity and independence of
his native land.
The territorial ambitions of Louis XIV of France threatened
not only Holland but also the whole of Europe. In the 1930s
in his biography of his great ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough,
Winston Churchill observed: “it seemed that (in William)
a being had been created for resisting the domination of France
and the Great King”. Just as Churchill in the 1940s
was to frustrate Hitler’s ambitions, William succeeded
in frustrating those of Louis XIV.
William may not have been a great soldier, a view to which
Churchill subscribed. He certainly was not a fortunate soldier
but he was a courageous, determined and tenacious one. He
kept going when lesser men would have given up. The Prince
de Conde, also known as the Great Conde, perhaps William’s
most illustrious military opponent, remarked, after the bloody
Battle of Seneffe in 1674, that the Prince of Orange had in
all things borne himself like an old general, except in exposing
himself like a young soldier.
The Great Conde claimed Seneffe as a victory but it was William’s
smaller army, which held its ground, and it was the Great
Conde who withdrew. The reckless courage displayed by the
24-year-old William at Seneffe was still very much in evidence
in the 39-year-old William at the Boyne. At Donore part of
his boot was shot off and another musket ball shattered one
of his pistols. Whereas, James played a passive, almost fatalistic
role at the Boyne, William played an active and energetic
part in the battle and his victory owed much to his personal
courage and fortitude.
William’s great strength lay in his remarkable political
skills. He was a consummate statesman capable of forging and
sustaining great alliances. Although William is often thought
of as ‘the Protestant champion’, and he was a
devout Protestant, his rare diplomatic skill enabled him to
bring the Emperor, Brandenburg, Hanover, Saxony, Bavaria,
Savoy, and Spain into an alliance which transcended denominational
boundaries against Louis XIV. William was the alliance’s
linchpin. William’s league of Augsburg was the 17th
century counterpart of Winston Churchill’s Grand Alliance
in the 20th century.
William’s interest in the affairs of the British Isles
primarily lay in harnessing manpower and resources of these
islands to preserve the independence of his native land and
to frustrate Louis XIV’s ambition for hegemony in Europe.
But William’s reign was most emphatically of great importance
for the constitutional and political history of our country,
and his own contribution to these developments was far from
negligible.
During William’s reign religious toleration was established,
the independence of the judiciary was achieved, and, because
a standing army could not be maintained without annual parliamentary
approval, Parliament became a regular and permanent feature
of political life. It is no exaggeration to claim that during
William’s reign Britain set out on the journey that
would lead eventually to parliamentary democracy. Furthermore,
in international terms Britain embarked on a trajectory that
would make her a global power.
Without William these islands would have succumbed to continental-style
absolutism, the work of the Reformation would have been overturned,
and Britain, at least in the short term, would have become
a satellite of France. William richly deserves to be considered
one of the greatest men to occupy the throne.
By Gordon Lucy
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