Ecclesiastical History of England: The Church of the Revolution

William Henry, Prince of Orange, was a member of the House of Nassau—the antiquity of which is traced by some historians as far back as the days of Julius Cæsar. Others are content to stop at Count Otho, in the 12th century, whom they regard as founder of the family, because, through his wife, he obtained large possessions in the Low Countries. The immediate ancestors of William Henry are renowned as fathers of the Dutch Republic, and from them he inherited patriotic virtues.

He was born in Holland on the 14th of November, 1650—the posthumous son of William II., who had in 1641 married Mary, the eldest daughter of Charles I. of England. He created the fondest hopes, and medals were struck to commemorate his auspicious birth. “Though the orange-tree be fallen down,” so ran the Dutch legend in allusion to his father’s death, “this noble sprig has been preserved, by Divine care, in the bosom of Mary. Thus the father arises after his death like a phenix in his son. May he grow, may he flourish, and in virtue excel the greatest princes, to the glory and safety of his country.” At the age of ten, the youth lost his mother, who died within her native shores in 1660, when on a visit to her brother Charles. The affectionate care of his grandmother could not make up for these bereavements, and this child of sorrow had the further misfortune to be deprived of the hereditary Stadtholdership bestowed on his ancestors by the States General. With the death of his mother came the loss, for a time, of the Principality of Orange, which was unscrupulously seized by Louis XIV., who demolished the fortifications of the town.

William’s education fell into the hands of the Barneveldt party, headed by the two De Witts, who sought to break down his spirit, and refused him a range of education befitting his rank. Having been brought up in the Stadtholder’s Palace at the Hague—which then, as now, uniquely combined, in streams and woods, the quiet rusticity of a village, with the bustle and magnificence of a metropolis—he received a notice to quit his ancestral abode in his seventeenth year, and only retained the favourite residence, by declaring that nothing but force should tear him from its hearthstone.

First made Captain and Admiral-General, and then forced by public acclamation into the position of Chief Magistrate when he was but twenty-two—at a time of tremendous peril—he had to bear the yoke in his youth. Nothing indeed could have saved his dominions just then but the magnanimity inspired by memories of his country’s heroic struggles with Spain: that magnanimity he expressed in the well-known words, “There is one method which will save me from the sight of my country’s ruin: I will die in the last ditch.”