Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
When William of Orange landed in Devon in 1688, he brought with him a force of some 40,000 men, carried by a huge fleet of 463 ships – three times the size of the Spanish Armada. The Dutch-born prince arrived with the intention of usurping a legitimate monarch – James II of England – but he did so at the behest of a powerful group of nobles. As a result, his invasion of England passed off so peacefully it became known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’.
William’s claim to the throne was based on the fact that he was the grandson of Charles I, and the husband of Mary, James II’s daughter. Perhaps most importantly, he was also a staunch defender of Protestantism at a time when the country’s national religion was seen to be under imminent Catholic threat. If it was largely accepted in England, however, William’s intervention was violently resisted in Scotland and Ireland, where the cause of the exiled James continued to thrive. In Europe, meanwhile, the new king would continue his long-running struggle with Louis XIV, leading a military alliance which waged war with France for nine years.
In our two-part special feature for this issue, Graham Goodlad looks first at the life and career of the last British monarch to manage a sustained military campaign in person, and then analyses in detail his part in the battle against French domination of the Low Countries.
William III: From ‘Glorious Revolution’ to ‘King Billy’
The last king of Britain to command troops in battle was George II at the Battle of Dettingen, fought in southern Germany in June 1743. In an encounter with French forces, George earned admiration for his courage rather than for any notable tactical or strategic skill. It was William III, however, at the end of the previous century, who was the country’s last monarch to manage a sustained military campaign in person.
Born in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, William took the British throne in what was effectively a coup d’état in November 1688, displacing his Catholic father-in-law King James II. He was known as Prince William of Orange, after the French territory historically owned by his family.
William based his claim to the crowns of England, Scotland, and Ireland on his marriage to James’s daughter Mary. He arrived in Devon at the invitation of the ‘immortal seven’ – a group of nobles who feared that, under James, the country had embarked on a French-style path to popish absolute monarchy. The trigger for this initiative was the news that James’s second wife had given birth to a son – a development that raised the threat of a Catholic dynasty perpetuating its hold on the kingdom.
William had in fact been considering an invasion for some months, fearing that, unless he acted, Britain might be co-opted into an alliance with Louis XIV’s France against his Dutch homeland. By taking the throne, he could also win control of Britain’s resources for a war to combat the threat of French continental hegemony.
In England, the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ was a largely bloodless affair. But in Scotland and Ireland, where the ‘war of the two kings’ soon broke out, William faced a prolonged and violent struggle to establish his power. He also headed a military alliance that waged war with France in the Low Countries for nine years.
William was always something of an outsider in his adopted country. Physically small, hunchbacked and asthmatic, he did not look like a warrior. He was withdrawn to the point of rudeness in his personal relations, relying on a tight inner circle of Dutch associates. By contrast, Mary, who died prematurely in December 1694, was genuinely popular. The British people supported William for self-interested reasons, as the protector of their Protestant national religion against the Catholic threat represented by James. But they suspected that his principal loyalties were to the Netherlands, and that Britain was being drawn into a continental conflict in which its interests were not directly at stake.
The Williamite army
The army played a central role in the events that brought William to Britain. James had tried to remodel the army to make it an instrument of his policies, promoting Catholics and doubling its size to some 30,000 men. Reviews of this sizeable force on Hounslow Heath, west of London, supervised by James in person, revived fears of a standing army that might be used to intimidate Parliament and overturn the Protestant Church settlement.
No less concerning was the news that James’s ally, Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, was purging the army in Ireland and replacing Protestant officers with Catholics. In an era when many officers bought their commissions, this was viewed as an attack on established property rights.
In fact, many officers had no intention of fighting for James. After William landed in Devon and advanced towards Salisbury in Wiltshire, desertions convinced James that he could not rely on his troops. It was the disintegration of his army that prompted him to flee to France shortly before Christmas 1688, leaving Parliament to offer the throne to his daughter and son-in-law.
This left William with the task of reorganising, expanding, and readying the army to take part in the campaigns he was to fight, both in mainland Europe and closer to home. To make this possible, he had to resolve a political problem that had bedevilled the relationship between Crown and Parliament throughout the 17th century.
The Bill of Rights, accepted by William and Mary on their accession as joint monarchs in February 1689, stated that the existence of a standing army was dependent on Parliament’s consent. The king would direct the army, but its funding required parliamentary authority. This laid the foundation for the army to become an instrument of British global strategy over the next century.
Highland pacification
Jacobitism, the cause of the exiled King James, thrived in the Scottish Highlands, where more than half the clans supported the reversal of the Glorious Revolution. There was a close link to religion as well as geography, with loyalty to the new regime taking root in the Presbyterian-dominated Lowlands, while the Highland population adhered mainly to Episcopalianism or Catholicism.
William took no direct part in the suppression of the Jacobite cause in Scotland. The key figure in the early stages was John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, who raised an army on behalf of James in the spring of 1689. In July, he inflicted a stunning defeat on government forces headed by General Hugh Mackay in the Pass of Killiecrankie in Perthshire.
In a major setback to the Jacobite cause, Dundee was killed in the moment of victory. Without his leadership, an assault on the town of Dunkeld the following month was unsuccessful. This was an intense urban battle, where the narrow streets prevented the Highlanders from overwhelming their opponents with a mass charge. They withdrew, exhausted, after 16 hours of fighting.
Driven back in disorder, the Highland rebels launched a further rising in 1690. This time a better-prepared General Mackay marched through the Highlands and started the construction of Fort William, near Inverlochy, as a base from which to control the clans. The Jacobite uprising fizzled out after a further defeat at Cromdale, in Inverness-shire, in May 1690. The rebels were outnumbered and, crucially, never had the resources to take a port through which they could be resupplied.
William played a less than creditable role in a violent episode which occurred in February 1692 during the pacification of the Highlands. This was the massacre of Glencoe, when more than 30 members of the MacDonald clan were killed by Scottish government troops billeted among them. The pretext for the atrocity was the failure of the clan chief to meet a deadline to swear allegiance to the new sovereigns.
The killings were ordered not by William but by the Scottish secretary of state John Dalrymple, Master of Stair. But William showed a staggering lack of sensitivity to Scottish opinion in his handling of the aftermath. Although Stair was initially forced to resign, he was later reinstated. Combined with the London government’s apparent indifference to Scottish economic hardship in the second half of the decade, the massacre left a legacy of bitter resentment against the Williamite regime.
The Irish theatre
Catholic Ireland was the part of the British Isles where the exiled James II came closest to recovering his throne. Pushed by Louis XIV, who had given him shelter after he fled from England, James landed in Ireland in March 1689 and began to rally the opposition to his son-in-law. He believed that Ireland would provide him with a launchpad for the invasion of mainland Britain. This proved to be an overly optimistic vision.
The struggle for the Crown in Ireland was inextricably linked with the existing ethnic division between the native Catholic majority and the Protestant settler community. Although his own involvement in the island’s affairs lasted barely three months, ironically it is here that, in some quarters, ‘King Billy’ is best remembered. William’s equestrian image is a familiar sight on walls and banners in Protestant districts of Northern Ireland, where he has become an unlikely symbol of the Loyalist cause.
This was a war in which the basic problem of feeding large numbers of men and horses played a critical part. According to the historian John Childs, author of the most detailed study of the campaign (see ‘Further reading’ opposite), disease killed 20 times as many participants as military action. The Williamite army lost almost half its numbers to dysentery in the winter of 1689 while encamped at Dundalk, halfway between Belfast and Dublin.
The Irish campaign is known for the 105-day siege of Protestant-held Londonderry/Derry. Here the war was most brutal. The Jacobite commander Marshal von Rosen put pressure on the garrison by rounding up thousands of local Protestants and threatening to leave them to starve under the city walls. This desperate measure – which James himself disowned – was abandoned when the defenders erected a gallows and declared that they would hang their Jacobite prisoners.
The city was relieved at the beginning of August 1689, after supply ships finally forced their way up the River Foyle. The other Williamite outpost in the north, Enniskillen, became a base from which the embattled defenders successfully harried Jacobite forces.
The turning point came in June 1690, with the arrival of William himself at Carrickfergus, near Belfast, to take charge. He superseded the lacklustre theatre commander, the 75-year-old Frederick, Duke of Schomberg, gathering support en route. His was a multinational force, comprising English, Irish, Dutch, German, Danish, and French Protestant (Huguenot) soldiers. The mainly Irish Catholic Jacobite army, meanwhile, was bolstered by a contingent of French troops.
Many of the Williamite units were inexperienced, with the important exception of the Dutch, and the Jacobites enjoyed superiority in terms of cavalry. Overall, however, William had the upper hand. His forces outnumbered the Jacobites by 37,000 to 25,000. The latter were generally less well-trained and -equipped. Their infantry typically carried the older matchlock musket rather than the flintlock, which was more reliable and enabled a more efficient rate of fire. Many of James’s men carried virtually obsolete pikes or even home-made agricultural tools. Crucially, they lacked the artillery fielded in strength by the Williamite army.
Showdown at the Boyne
Marching southwards at the end of June 1690, William found James’s troops encamped on the River Boyne, near the port town of Drogheda. This was the only engagement in which the rival kings faced each other. James did not lack courage, but he had become increasingly indecisive – a fatal weakness, as it turned out. It was an unwise location to make a stand. The river was fordable in several places, raising the possibility of James’s army being outflanked.
William, too, made a serious mistake on the eve of battle, leading a reconnoitring party and then stopping to picnic within range of the enemy lines on the opposite bank. Spotting their opportunity, the Jacobites fired a cannon ball which struck him on the shoulder, prompting premature jubilation. Although wounded, William was soon riding among his troops to reassure them that he had survived.
The following morning, battle was joined as one section of William’s army forded the river to outflank the Jacobites on the western edge of the battlefield. Here they met strong but ultimately unsuccessful resistance. James rushed large numbers of men to reinforce his beleaguered troops, but the natural obstacle presented by a deep ravine hindered the two sides from getting to grips with each other.
The main Williamite contingent then mounted an assault on the Jacobite centre at Oldbridge, preceded by a heavy artillery bombardment. This was where the river was shallowest, and William’s elite Dutch guards soon crossed and began to push back the poorer quality Jacobite troops. James now threw in his strongest asset, his cavalry, who made repeated charges. They were beaten back by the disciplined musket-fire and fixed bayonets of the Dutch troops.
The action did not all go the Williamites’ way: Schomberg was killed as he rallied his troops. Crossing the river on the eastern end of the battlefield, William struggled in the deeper water and was later wounded in the leg, tearing away part of his boot. He was also threatened with a firearm by one of his own men, who failed to recognise him. ‘What, do you not know your own friends?’, retorted the startled king.
Ultimately, the outcome was not in doubt. Although the main Jacobite body avoided encirclement and retreated southwards from the Boyne in good order, their leader had lost his nerve, returning hastily to France. A final effort to revive James’s cause was crushed a year later at the Battle of Aughrim. Shortly afterwards, the town of Limerick finally capitulated to Williamite forces, bringing the war to an end. The ensuing peace treaty guaranteed the rights of Irish Catholics in return for an oath of loyalty to the new monarchs – a provision which was ignored when the victorious Irish Protestants enacted a harsh penal code of their own devising.
What manner of man?
William spent most of his 13-year reign fighting to win and retain control of his new dominions, while also safeguarding his Dutch inheritance. When he died, quite suddenly in March 1702 following a fall from his horse at Hampton Court, he was preparing to resume his long-running feud with Louis XIV. William’s wars drained both his countries financially, and in the 18th century his beloved Holland declined as a great European power.
In Britain, William’s willingness to accept parliamentary restraints on his power, in return for funding his military exploits, meant that his legacy was more positive. He helped to set the country on the path to both constitutional monarchy and the headship of a global empire. But he was little known or loved in his adopted realm. At Lincoln Cathedral, Victorian stained-glass commemorates his visit to the city in October 1695, during a rare tour of the country undertaken between campaigns. Contemporary accounts record that loyal householders lit candles in their windows to welcome him. By and large, however, beyond the ranks of Northern Ireland’s Orange Order, there was little real affection for him.
William was not one of history’s all-time outstanding commanders. He demonstrated immense courage and persistence rather than any great strategic insight. In Ireland, he was fortunate to face an adversary with deficient leadership skills, at the head of an army using outdated equipment. But William deserves credit for the training and preparation that meant his Dutch troops performed well in battle. His greatest asset as a military leader was his ability to build an effective coalition against French power on the continent: his conduct of the Nine Years War is the subject of the companion piece that follows this article (see here).
Further reading:
• William III (Stephen Baxter, Longman, 1966)
• The Williamite Wars in Ireland 1688-1691 (John Childs, Hambledon Continuum, 2007)
All images: Wikimedia Commons, unless otherwise stated
You can read the second part by Graham Goodlad here and find Calum Henderson's infographics here
