Franche Comté and other places in Spanish Flanders to France. For some reason never yet made clear, but perhaps in order to produce a modification of terms which threatened the balance of power, William attacked the French army at Mons four days after the signature of peace. Luxembourg defeated him after a sanguinary and resultless struggle, and William gained nothing by his inexplicable action.
After the war Louis continued a course of aggression, absorbing frontier-towns in imperial or Spanish territory. William started a new coalition against him in October 1681 by making a treaty with Sweden, and subsequently with the empire, Spain and several German princes. After absorbing Strassburg (1681), Louis invaded Spanish Flanders and took Luxemburg (1684). Even then the new league would not fight and allowed Louis to retain his conquests by the truce of Regensburg (1685), but none the less these humiliations gave rise to a more closely knit and aggressive coalition, which was organized in 1686 and known as the League of Augsburg.
From 1677 onwards William had carefully watched the politics of England. On the accession of James II. in 1685 he forced the duke of Monmouth to leave Holland, and sought to dissuade him from his ill-starred expedition to England. He apparently tried to conciliate his father-in-law in the hope of bringing him into the League of Augsburg. At the same time he astutely avoided offending the party in England which was opposed to James. By November 1687 he had decided that it was hopeless to expect that James would join the league against Louis, and he therefore turned for support to the English opposition. He caused his chief minister Fagel to write a letter expressing his disapprobation of the religious policy of James, which was published in November 1687. This announcement of his views was received with wild enthusiasm by the English who saw in him the friend of their liberties and their Church. But he knew too much of the English to suppose they would tolerate an armed invasion, and he accordingly made it clear that he would not undertake active interference unless he received a definite invitation from leading Englishmen. On the 30th of June 1688 Admiral Herbert, disguised as a bluejacket, set out from England with a letter from seven influential Englishmen, asking William to “bring over an army and secure the infringed liberties” of England.
William set out from Holland with an army on the 2nd of November and landed at Torbay (Nov. 5th 1688). After a few days of hesitation, many influential noblemen declared for him in different parts of the country. James, who had at first joined his army at Salisbury, fell back to London and tried to negotiate. While his commissioners were amusing William, James sent off his wife and son to France, and tried to follow them. He was stopped in his flight by some fishermen at Faversham, and was forced to return to London. William insisted that he should be sent to Rochester, and there allowed him to escape to France. After this final flight of James, William, on the advice of an assembly of notables, summoned a convention parliament on the 22nd of January 1689. After a great deal of discussion, William was at length proclaimed joint-sovereign of England in conjunction with his wife, Mary (Feb. 13th 1689).
A constitutional settlement was effected by the end of 1689, almost all the disputed points between king and parliament being settled in favour of the latter. Though William by no means appreciated this confinement of his prerogative, he was too wise to oppose it. His own initiative is more clearly traceable in the Toleration Act, extending liberty of private worship to Dissenters. He also succeeded in passing an Act of Grace and Indemnity in 1690, by which he calmed the violence of party passion. But in general his domestic policy was not very fortunate, and he can hardly claim any personal credit for the reassessment of the land tax (1602), the creation of the national debt or the re coinage act (1693–1695). Further, he threatened the existence of the Bank of England, by lending his support to a counter-institution, the Land Bank, which ignominiously collapsed. Though he was not blind to the commercial interests of England, he was neglectful of the administration and affairs of her oversea colonies. But though he was unable to extract the best results from parliament he was always able to avert its worst excesses. In spite of strong personal opinions to the contrary, he accepted the Triennial Act (1694), the vote reducing the army to 10,000 men (1697), the vote disbanding his favourite Dutch Guards (1699) and even (November 1699) a bill rescinding the grants of forfeited Irish estates, which he had made to his favourites. The main cause of the humiliations William suffered from parliament lay in his incapacity to understand the party or cabinet system. In his view the best way to govern was to have both parties represented in the ministry, so that, as Whig and Tory fell out, the king came by his own. A study of his reign shows that this method was unsuccessful, and that his affairs went most smoothly when the parliamentary majority held the same views as the ministry. It is not often remembered that William possessed an experience of the workings of representative government in Holland, which was remarkably similar to that in England. Hence his mistakes though easy to understand are by no means so pardonable as were, for example, those of the Georges, who had been absolute monarchs in their own country. William's unpopularity with his new people was, on the whole, unjustified, but his memory is rightly darkened by the stain of the “Massacre of Glencoe.” In 1692 he signed an order for the “extirpation” of the Macdonalds, a small clan in the vale of Glencoe. It is improbable that he meant his order to be literally executed, it is not certain that he knew they had taken the oath of allegiance to him. None the less, when the massacre was carried out with circumstances of revolting barbarity, William behaved as he had done after the murder of De Witt. Popular pressure forced him to bring the murderers to justice, to punish them and dismiss them from his service. But shortly afterwards they were all received into favour; “one became a colonel, another a knight, a third a peer.”
These and other actions indicate that William could show on occasion a cold and cynical ruthlessness. But while admitting that his means were sometimes unprincipled, it must be recollected that his real ends were high and noble. While he sometimes disregarded the wishes of others, no one was more ready to sacrifice his own feelings for the attainment of the master aim of his life, the restoration of the “Balance of Power,” by the overthrow of the predominance of France. This was the real aim of William in going to England in 1688. He had set off to secure an ally against Louis, and he came back from his expedition with a crown on his head and a new nation at his back, united in its detestation of popery and of France.
As king of England he concluded treaties of alliance with the members of the League of Augsburg and sent a large army to oppose the French in Flanders. But his greatest immediate peril during 1689–1690 came from the circumstance that the French disputed the mastery of the seas with the Anglo-Dutch fleet, and that Ireland was strongly for King James. On the 1st of July 1690 the allies were badly beaten at sea off Beachy Head, but on the same day William himself won a decisive victory over James’s army at the Boyne in Ireland. Dublin and Drogheda soon fell and-James fled from Ireland. The chances of continued resistance in Ireland, which depended on communication with France, were finally destroyed by the great victory off Cape La Hogue (May 19th, 1692). Ireland was speedily conquered when once the supremacy of England on the sea became assured. Now the French fleet was definitely destroyed, and though a destructive privateering warfare continued, England was no longer in danger of invasion.
The decisive successes for the Alliance were gained by its naval victories, whose importance William somewhat underrated and for whose execution he had only an indirect responsibility. In 1692 he lost Namur and was badly defeated at Steinkirk (August 4th), and in 1693 he was disastrously beaten at Neerwinden or Landen (July 19th). In 1695 he was able to resume the offensive and to retake Namur in a brilliant and, what was more unusual, a successful campaign. William had assumed the duties of commander-in-chief too young to learn the full duties of a professional soldier himself, and his imperious will did not suffer
