WILLIAM II, Prince of Orange, Count of Nassau, stadtholder of the United Provinces of the NETHERLANDS. - Son of Frederick Henry, b. at The Hague on 27 May 1626, d. on 6 Nov. 1650. In 1647 W. succeeded his father, at a moment when the conflicts that had arisen between the States General and the executive power made the internal situation more difficult than ever. Although the Peace of Westphalia assured the country the greatest political and economic prosperity, these internal struggles disturbed the stadtholderate of the young prince. He therefore soon found himself involved in the dispute with the strengthened pacifist party, whose members demanded the immediate dismissal of the mercenary troops enlisted for the war previously waged.
The conflict reached its dramatic phase when W. II no longer hesitated to use force to reduce the States to obedience. Trusting in the support of the popular masses, in July 1650 he ordered the arrest of six deputies of Dutch cities, among them Jacob de Witt, burgomaster of Dordrecht, a supporter of the sovereignty of the province of Holland, under whose leadership the opposition had been sustained; at the same time he sent an armed force against Amsterdam, where resistance was most fervent. These energetic measures met with success, and W. succeeded in quelling every remnant of rebellion; except that shortly thereafter further incidents broke out. In fact, in the agreement concluded with Card. Mazarin (then struggling against the Fronde) the Stadtholder had stipulated that among the possible conquests made by the Dutch from the Spaniards, Antwerp and the duchy of Brabant should be assigned to him personally (29 Oct. 1650). A new revolution seemed to hang over the country, when W. died suddenly.
BIBL.: sources
WILLIAM III, Prince of Orange, Count of Nassau, stadtholder of the United Provinces of the NETHERLANDS, king of ENGLAND, Scotland and Ireland. - B. at The Hague on 14 Nov. 1650, d. at Hampton Court on 19 March 1702. Posthumous son of William II of Orange and of Mary Stuart, daughter of Charles I of England, he had a troubled childhood; with the stadtholderate suspended in the United Provinces, where the star of the grand pensionary De Witt was rising, he saw even the ancestral principality of Orange occupied by Louis XIV (1660); but the restoration of the Stuarts in England raised up again the fortunes of the Oranges in Holland as well. In the face of the French invasion, W. was first appointed captain general (1672) and shortly afterwards, in the patriotic enthusiasm of the defense against the invader and in the resentment against the plutocratic party of De Witt, stadtholder. W., until then almost unknown and in poor health, soon gave the measure of his qualities as a general and a diplomat; though without much originality, he knew how to neutralize the effects of the French victories and to organize the union of the Protestant and non-Protestant states of Europe, concerned about a French hegemony, and to detach England from the alliance with France (1674).
The Peace of Nijmegen (1678), first concluded by W. with little regard for the interests of the allies, crowned his policy, subsequently continued with other agreements and leagues to secure himself against an offensive return of Louis XIV, especially after the latter's revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685); this provoked, with W. as matchmaker, the formation of the so-called League of Augsburg (1686), a merely political league, comprising Catholic powers and Protestant powers. The league secured his rear while he was coloring his design upon England, where the parliamentary and popular opposition to James II had not been slow to fix its eyes, as upon a successor, on W. and on his wife Mary, eldest daughter of James II. Amid the hesitations of the Dutch, who saw their first citizen (but not king) becoming king in a neighboring nation, with the danger that with English forces he might then return to impose his dominion on Holland as well, W. had the military expedition prepared which in Nov. 1688 landed in England and secured for himself and his wife the English throne. King in England, stadtholder in Holland, W. divided his residence between the two countries, seeking to reconcile their not always concordant interests, especially in the maritime-commercial and colonial field. The keystone of his common Anglo-Dutch policy was distrust of the policy of Louis XIV, especially as the great question of the Spanish succession drew nearer. But the war of the League of Augsburg (1689-97), conducted by him with scant success, had not succeeded in appreciably weakening France, and death prevented him from seeing more than barely the beginning of that duel.
BIBL.: sources