William III, Prince of Orange, Count of Nassau, Stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, King of England, Scotland and Ireland

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 his ancestral principality of Orange occupied by Louis XIV (1660); but the restoration of the Stuarts in England also raised up again the fortunes of the Oranges in Holland. 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, 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, anxious 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, afterwards 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 promoter, 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, the eldest daughter of James II. Even 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. then prepared the military expedition that 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.

Ernesto Sestan