The Protestant religion and the liberties of England. Je maintiendrai. (I will maintain.)
Words on William of Orange's banner when he landed at Torbay, November 1688
William III
parents: William II, Prince of Orange, and Mary, Princess Royal (daughter of Charles I)
date and place of birth: 4 November 1650 at the Binnenhof, The Hague
years of reign: 1689-1702 (jointly with Mary until 1694)
date and place of death: 8 March 1702 at Kensington Palace
place of burial: Westminster Abbey
Mary II
parents: James, Duke of York (later James II), and Anne Hyde
date and place of birth: 30 April 1662 at St James's Palace, London
years of reign: 1689-1694
date and place of death: 28 December 1694 at Kensington Palace
place of burial: Westminster Abbey
date of marriage: 4 November 1677 at St James's Palace
children: none
date of coronation: 11 April 1689 at Westminster Abbey
William and Mary were first cousins. William's mother was the eldest daughter of Charles I, and Mary's father was Charles I's second son, James. William was born eight days after his father died of smallpox, and he grew up a prince without power, as the leading families of the Dutch Republic had abolished the office his ancestors held. In 1672, when France invaded the Netherlands, the Dutch turned to him in panic and made him Stadtholder at the age of twenty-one. He held off Louis XIV by opening the dykes and flooding the land around Amsterdam. Resisting Louis became the purpose of his life.
Mary was raised a Protestant on the orders of her uncle, Charles II, though her father had converted to Catholicism. Charles had no legitimate children, and James had no surviving son, so Mary stood second in line to the throne. In 1677 Charles arranged her marriage to William to reassure Protestant opinion. She was fifteen, he was twelve years older, several inches shorter, asthmatic and cold in manner, and when she learned of the match she reportedly wept for a day and a half. They married in her bedroom at St James's Palace on William's twenty-seventh birthday, and she went to live in Holland. Over time she came to love him and the Dutch. She had at least one miscarriage early in the marriage, and they had no children.
The Glorious Revolution
Charles II died in 1685 and Mary's father became James II. James set out to win rights for his fellow Catholics. He appointed Catholic officers to the army, suspended the laws against them, and prosecuted seven bishops who refused to read his Declaration of Indulgence from the pulpit. Protestants tolerated this while they could expect Mary to succeed him. Then, on 10 June 1688, James's second wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son, who would be raised a Catholic and would come before his half-sister in the line of succession. Rumours spread that the baby had been smuggled into the queen's bed in a warming pan. On 30 June, the day the seven bishops were acquitted, seven leading politicians wrote to William inviting him to come to England.
William wanted England's army and money on his side against France. He assembled a fleet of around five hundred ships and about fifteen thousand men, and a "Protestant wind" from the east carried it down the Channel while it held James's fleet in the Thames estuary. William landed at Brixham in Torbay on 5 November 1688. James marched west to Salisbury, where his officers began deserting, among them John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough. Even his daughter Anne left him. James's nerve broke. He sent his wife and son to France, and in December he fled, dropping the Great Seal in the Thames on the way. Some fishermen caught him in Kent and brought him back, and William, who did not want to make a martyr of him, let him escape a second time. James reached France on Christmas Day.
A Joint Monarchy
A Convention Parliament met in January 1689 to decide what to do. Some members wanted Mary to reign alone, with William as her consort. William refused to become, as he put it, his wife's gentleman usher, and said he would go home to Holland. Mary, for her part, wrote that she would not accept the crown without him. The solution was a joint monarchy, the only one in English history. Parliament declared that James had abdicated by fleeing, and on 13 February 1689 it offered the crown to William and Mary together, with William to hold executive power. They accepted it along with a Declaration of Rights, and were crowned in April.
The Declaration became the Bill of Rights in December 1689. It barred Catholics from the throne, forbade the monarch to suspend laws, raise taxes or keep a standing army in peacetime without Parliament's consent, and required free elections and regular parliaments. The Toleration Act of 1689 allowed Protestant dissenters to worship in their own chapels. These measures, and the events that produced them, became the Glorious Revolution, glorious to the Whigs because it was nearly bloodless in England. Scotland and Ireland saw far more fighting.
Ireland and Scotland
James landed in Ireland in March 1689 with French support, and Catholic Ireland rallied to him. The Protestant city of Derry held out through a siege of more than a hundred days. William crossed to Ireland himself in June 1690 and beat James at the Battle of the Boyne on 1 July 1690 (Old Style), the anniversary Protestants in Northern Ireland still mark on 12 July. James fled to France again, and the war ended with the Treaty of Limerick in 1691.
In Scotland the Jacobite Highlanders won at Killiecrankie in July 1689 but lost their leader, Viscount Dundee, in the battle, and the rising faded. William's government demanded that the Highland chiefs swear an oath of allegiance by 1 January 1692. The MacDonalds of Glencoe swore theirs a few days late, and on 13 February 1692 soldiers of the Earl of Argyll's regiment, who had been staying as their guests, killed thirty-eight of them. William had signed the order for "extirpation," and though an inquiry blamed his Scottish Secretary, Sir John Dalrymple, the Massacre of Glencoe stained his reputation in Scotland for good.
Queen Mary
William spent most summers campaigning against Louis XIV in the Low Countries in the Nine Years' War, and in his absence Mary governed England. She did it well, though she claimed to know nothing of politics and deferred to William in everything when he returned. She was popular, which William was not: the English found him cold, foreign and rude, and he found English politics exhausting and London's smoke bad for his asthma. The couple moved out of Whitehall to Kensington, where they bought Nottingham House and had Christopher Wren turn it into Kensington Palace. Wren also rebuilt much of Hampton Court for them. Mary collected Delftware and Chinese porcelain and laid out gardens, and began the Royal Hospital for seamen at Greenwich.
In December 1694 Mary caught smallpox. She sent away anyone who had not had the disease, put her papers in order, and died on 28 December, aged thirty-two. William, whom many thought incapable of feeling, collapsed with grief. Henry Purcell wrote music for her funeral in March 1695, and a few months later it was played at his own.
William Alone
William reigned alone for seven more years. His wars cost more than any before them, and the government found new ways to pay: the Bank of England, founded in 1694 to lend money to the crown, and the national debt that came with it. The Nine Years' War ended with the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, in which Louis XIV recognised William as king. When Mary's sister Anne lost her last surviving child, the eleven-year-old Duke of Gloucester, in 1700, Parliament passed the Act of Settlement of 1701, which settled the crown after Anne on the Protestant descendants of Sophia, Electress of Hanover, a granddaughter of James I.
On 21 February 1702 William was riding in the park at Hampton Court when his horse, Sorrel, stumbled on a molehill. He fell and broke his collarbone. He seemed to recover, but pneumonia set in and he died at Kensington on 8 March. Jacobites toasted "the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat," the mole. His sister-in-law became Queen Anne. When William's body was prepared for burial, the attendants found a locket containing a ring of Mary's hair, tied with a black ribbon, on his left arm.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "William III and Mary II" https://englishhistory.net/stuarts/william-iii-and-mary-ii/, September 30, 2026