719 



WILLIAM III. (OF ENGLAND). 



WILLIAM IV. (OF ENGLAND). 



720 



persons both of the Whig and Tory parties, William was at length 

 induced to undertake an expedition into England for the restoration 

 of the national rights; and having arranged his preparations with 

 consummate skill, he sailed from Holland with an army of about 

 14,000 men, composed party of Dutch troops and partly of English 

 regiments in the service of the States, and landed at Torbay, on the 

 5th of November 1688. 



The landing of William in Torbay was followed, after a few days of 

 hesitation, by an almost total defection of James's English subjects 

 from their allegiance ; and with unparalleled ease and rapidity was 

 that memorable and bloodless revolution effected which changed the 

 royal line and firmly established the constitution of these realms. 

 For once all parties and orders of men in the nation, except a very 

 small minority of llomau Catholics, peaceably concurred in the neces- 

 sity for a change of government ; and when the betrayed and mis- 

 guided king fled to France, the most opposite principles of passive 

 obedience and popular rights were strained to the same practical con- 

 clusion, that James II. had either deserted or forfeited the throne. 

 The all-important question, in what manner the vacant regal seat 

 should be occupied, terminated the short-lived concord of factions. 

 But William, whether moved in part by a mere selfish ambition, or 

 wholly by a better conviction of the public exigencies of the crisis, 

 at once cut short all schemes of the high monarchical party for 

 restricting his functions to a regency, either on behalf of his wife or 

 her infant brother. He declared that, except as king, he would not 

 remain in the country. This decisive language hastened the proceed- 

 ings of the convention parliament, which William had composed of 

 the peers, the surviving members of the three last Houses of Com- 

 mons, and the corporation of London ; and in the famous Act of 

 Settlement passed by that body, the crown, with constitutional limi- 

 tations to its power, was conferred jointly upon the Prince and 

 Princess of Orange, with remainder successively to the issue of the 

 latter, to the Princess Anne and her children, and to the heirs of 

 William by any other wife. 



Notwithstanding the ease with which William III. thus acquired 

 the British crown, he was soon compelled to contend in arms for its 

 preservation. In Scotland the cause of James was upheld by the 

 gallant Viscount Dundee, but perished with his fall in the brief 

 moment of victory. In Ireland, the struggle maintained by James's 

 Roman Catholic adherents was more obstinate; but William in person 

 inflicted on them a memorable defeat at the passage of the Boyne in 

 1690; and the capitulation of Limerick in the following year com- 

 pleted the submission of Ireland. Meanwhile William had the satis- 

 faction of engaging England iu the League of Augsburg. The war of 

 that confederacy against Louis XIV., of which the principal conduct 

 was intrusted to William, had indeed little success ; for though 

 possessed of considerable military talents, he wanted that good 

 fortune which the ancients numbered among the most indispensable 

 attributes of a great general; and he sustained in the course of this 

 struggle two severe defeats from the French under the Duke of 

 Luxemburg at Steenkirk and Neerwinden. By the peace of Ryswick, 

 which terminated the war in 1697, little more was gained from the 

 French monarch by the allies than the recognition of William III. as 

 king of England. 



The possession of that throne had meanwhile given him little 

 happiness. Though almost all the nation had at first concurred in 

 the devolution of 1688, the Tory and high church party were in 

 general indisposed to the pretensions and person of the new king. 

 The Whigs were still full of jealousy of the royal power; and the 

 cold reserved temper and ungracious manner of William disgusted 

 and alienated the minds of his subjects in general. His most favourite 

 schemes were continually thwarted in parliament; his whole reign 

 was harassed with intrigues of faction and plans of insurrection at 

 home; and his life and throne were assailed from abroad with base 

 plots of assassination by the adherents of James II., and with pro- 

 jects of invasion undertaken by Louis XIV. for the restoration of the 

 dethroned king. To add to the distresses of William, he experienced 

 in 1695 a severe domestic calamity in the loss of his queen-consort 

 Mary, to whom he was deeply attached. Her decease, as she left no 

 issue, terminated all claim of her husband to the crown in the eyes 

 of that part of the nation who had been reconciled to his government 

 by the semblance of hereditary right iu her participation of the 

 throne. His measures now experienced systematic opposition from 

 all parties : from the Jacobites, as the partisans of the exiled monarch 

 were termed, who of course regarded him as an usurper; from the 

 Tories in general, to whom he was personally obnoxious : and from 

 the Whigs and republicans, who desired in various degrees to lower or 

 annul the royal power. The first use therefore which was made in 

 parliament of the peace of Ryswick was to compel him to reduce the 

 army to an insignificant remnant of guards and garrisons, and to send 

 out of the kingdom the regiments of French Protestant refugees, as 

 well as his own favourite Dutch guards ; and these and other mortifi- 

 cations had such an effect upon his mind as to extort from him a 

 passionate expression of his regret that he had interfered in the affairs 

 of a nation at once so ungrateful and so suspicious. 



From the annoyances of his position in England, he sought relief 

 by renewing with more ardour than ever his attention to the affairs of 

 Europe, and by pursuing his favourite project for humbling the power 



of the French king, which the precarious health of Charles II., the 

 childless monarch of Spain, and the pretensions of the house of 

 Bourbon to the inheritance of his dominions, threatened to render 

 more dangerous than ever. To avert these impending evils to the 

 balance of power in Europe, William successively negociated two 

 treaties of partition for the Spanish monarchy, to both of which 

 Louis XIV. was an artful and faithless subscriber; for when the 

 Spanish king, in indignation that other powers should dismember and 

 distribute his dominions, bequeathed them at his death, in 1700, to 

 Philip duke of Anjou, second son of the dauphin, Louis XIV., in 

 spite of every obligation of treaties, accepted the testament for his 

 grandson. 



William III., now in declining health, was sensibly affected by this 

 defeat of all his labours : but ho applied himself with his usual 

 energy to form a new league against France ; and the insulting con- 

 duct of Louis XIV. at this crisis, in giving the son of James II., on 

 the death of that prince, the title of king of England, so exasperated 

 the British nation, that they eagerly seconded William's wishes for a 

 war. But, in the midst of eager preparations for the commencement 

 of hostilities, William's life was suddenly brought to a close. His 

 constitution, originally frail and sickly, had now been completely 

 exhausted by a career of incessant and harassing anxieties. An 

 accidental fall from his horse, by which he broke his collar-bone, gave 

 a fatal shock to his worn-out frame ; and he expired at Kensington 

 palace, on the 8th of March 1702, in the fifty-second year of his age. 



WILLIAM (HENRY) IV., King of England, was the third son of 

 King George III., and was born at Buckingham House, on the 21st of 

 August 1765. He was placed, with his elder brothers, the Prince 

 of Wales and Prince Frederick (afterwards Duke of York), under the 

 care of Dr. Majendie, till the year 1771, when a separate establishment 

 was formed for the two elder princes, and Prince William was left at 

 Kew with his younger brother Edward (afterwards Duke of Kent), under 

 the superintendence of Colonel Bude, a native of Switzerland, who 

 afterwards became private secretary to the Duke of York. It having 

 been determined that he should enter the navy, he was, on the 15th 

 of June 1779, rated as a midshipman on board the Prince George, of 

 98 guns, then bearing the flag of Rear-Admiral Digby at Spithead. 

 The Prince George soon after joined the Channel fleet, under the 

 command of Sir Charles Hardy, and in the end of the year sailed as 

 one of the squadron sent out with Rodney to Gibraltar with supplies 

 for the garrison. On the passage out they fell iu, on the 8th of 

 January 1780, with a Spanish fleet of store-ships, under the convoy 

 of seven men-of-war, and took them all, twenty-two in number : the 

 largest man-of-war, the Guipuscuano, of 84 guns, Rodney named tho 

 Prince William, " in respect to his royal highness, in whose presence 

 she had the honour to be taken." In this first affair however in which 

 his royal highness met the enemy there was no fighting. But eight 

 days after a Spanish squadron of fourteen ships of the line, com- 

 manded by Don Juan de Langara, was encountered off Cadiz, and a 

 sharp though short engagement ensued, which ended in the capture 

 of several of the enemy's ships, and the destruction or dispersion of 

 the rest. Rodney having then proceeded to the Bay of Gibraltar and 

 thrown in his supplies to the garrison, lay there for about three weeks, 

 during which time his royal highness often visited the rock. The 

 Prince George returned in the division under the command of Admiral 

 Digby, who was despatched home with the prizes, and who on the 

 passage fell in with a French convoy bound for the Mauritius, of 

 which he captured three store-ships and a man-of-war; and his royal 

 highness found himself again in England by the beginning of May. 



Having made two or three more short cruises in the Prince George, 

 he then went out a second time to Gibraltar in that ship in the spring 

 of 1781, in the fleet commanded by Admiral Darby. After this 

 Admiral Digby, with the Prince George and three other ships, pro- 

 ceeded to New York, which he reached on the 24th of August. 

 While his royal highness remained here, which he did throughout 

 the winter, lodging in the town, it appears that a plan was arranged 

 by some of the revolutionary partisans, with the sanction of Washing- 

 ton, for getting possession of his person ; but the attempt was never 

 actually made. In the autumn of 1782 he was, at his own request, 

 transferred on board the Warwick, 50 guns, commanded by Captain 

 Elphinstone, afterwards Lord Keith; from which however he was 

 soon after, by the king's orders, removed to the Barfleur, commanded 

 by Sir Samuel Hood. It was while he was in this ship, then lying 

 off Staten Island, that he made his first acquaintance with Nelson, at 

 the time commanding the Albemarle frigate, whose fast friend he 

 ever afterwards continued. In the early part of 1783 Sir Samuel, now 

 Lord Hood, arrived with his fleet at Port Royal, Jamaica ; and the 

 prince remained here and at the Havauna, to which he proceeded in the 

 Fortune^ frigate, on the sailing of Lord Hood for England, till mid- 

 summer, when he returned home in the Fortune'e, in which he reached 

 Spithead on the 26th of June. The next two years were spent in a 

 continental tour, on which he set out 31st July 1783, attended by 

 General Bude and Captain Merrick, and in the course of which, after 

 being joined at Hanover by his brother Frederick, now styled Bishop 

 of Osnaburg, he visited Berlin, where the two young English princes 

 saw a great deal of Frederick the Great, Luneburg, where they spent 

 a winter, Gottingen, Hesse-Cassel, &c., after which Prince William 

 proceeded alone through Switzerland to Savoy and Piedmont, and 



