By John Lindsay
February 13 marks 335 years to the day that Parliament declares William of Orange as King of England.
Tucked away amongst the mostly rather drab sleeves of my father’s record collection was a picture that my childish mind thought was the most beautiful image that had ever been created. Astride a white horse, resplendently attired, his curly locks flowing in the breeze, King William of Orange pointed his sword across the River Boyne to where the forces of tyranny and enemies of liberty were encamped. Their defeat the following day would ensure that justice, harmony, and all that was good would be restored to these Sceptred Isles.
In a culture that eschewed idols, icons, and saints, King Billy fulfilled all of these roles. He was the fairytale prince and king who ensured all of our happily ever afters. The iconic equestrian image, sometimes well painted, other times less so, decorated countless gable ends in Belfast, the city of my birth. In the summer these streets would be festooned with union flags and red white and blue bunting. On the 12th day of July the cream of Belfast’s Protestant manhood would put on their best suits and drape radiant orange and purple collarettes around their necks to walk behind flute and drum bands, belting out martial airs to commemorate the anniversary of King Billy’s victory at the Boyne. The celebrations have been described as the greatest display of colour and pageantry to be seen anywhere in Western Europe.
I’m an Orangie. Our street was Orange. We weren’t Roman Catholics, and at some time back in the day both my mother’s and my father’s ancestors had attended Protestant churches—my father’s family Presbyterian, my mother’s Anglican. Elderly Scottish relatives told me stories of Great Aunt Annie Lindsay, who was said to be a crack shot with a Bible aimed at anyone she spotted dozing off in the Kirk. Other more recent relations weren’t so fussed about religion but we were still Orangies whether we liked it or not. I must have been aware from an early age that there were other streets that saw things differently. My mother was an economic historian and industrial archaeologist, later a history teacher at a comprehensive school. Her research took her to the old steel foundry on the Catholic Falls Road. Foolishly she told the toddler me not to mention orange when we took the bus there. Of course I spent the entire journey shouting loudly that my favourite colour was orange, and that a very nice colour it was too. My mother did not record the reaction of the other passengers. I hope that their empathy for a mother dealing with an annoying little brat trumped their disapproval of our being of the other sort.
We moved away from Belfast in 1966, while I was still very young. A few years afterwards, Belfast descended into a violent sectarian conflict known, with euphemistic understatement, as “the Troubles.” History lessons at primary school in our new home in North Wales told us of the greatness of the British Empire, that the Welsh were better than the English but that nonetheless Britain was the best, a guiding light to the rest of the world. King Billy barely featured in this story. We were told that something glorious happened in 1688, that it should be easy to remember, because it happened a century after the Spanish Armada, when a Welsh dynasty had been on the throne. William and Mary were the last joint monarchs during the slightly dull period after the Tudors and Stuarts but before the heroic age of pirates and the glorious war against that rotter Napoleon.
E.C. Fuller’s parody on the history teaching of the period, 1066 and All That describes his reign thus:
“WILLIAMANMARY (sic) for some reason was known as the Orange in their own country of Holland, and were popular as King of England because the people naturally believed it was descended from Nell Glynn. It was on the whole a good king and one of their first Acts was the Toleration Act, though afterwards it went back on this and they decided that they could not tolerate the Scots…
… Meanwhile the Orange increased its popularity and showed themselves to be a very strong King by its ingenious answer to the Irish question; this consisted in the Battle of the Boyne and a very strong treaty which followed it, stating that (a) that all the Irish Roman Catholics who liked could be transported to France, (b) that all the rest who liked could be put to the sword, (c) that Northern Ireland should be planted with Blood Orangemen.
These Blood Orangemen are still there; they are of course all descendants of Nell Glyn and are extremely fierce and industrial and so loyal that they are always ready to start a loyal rebellion to the Glory of God and the Orange. All of which shows that the Orange was a Good Thing, as well as being a good King. After the treaty the Irish who remained were made to go live in a bog and think of a New Question.”
The parody wasn’t that different from what we were taught, the main difference being that it was more entertaining.
Fashions in history teaching changed as I entered my teenage years in the 1970s. Patriotism fell out of vogue. Empire and imperialism became dirty words, and the narrative in the teaching about the British Empire switched from its philanthropic mission to an almost exclusive focus on its evils. If William of Orange manages a mention in today’s history textbooks it may relate to his takeover of the Royal African Company founded by his father in law and predecessor on the throne, and the millions that it made from the trans-Atlantic slave trade—and it is of course right that those horrors are not forgotten.
Punk rock happened. I embraced it and its rejection of deference. When I moved back to Northern Ireland at the age of twenty in 1984, and started to meet people from the Catholic community and listen to their take on the events that they’d lived through, the heroes of my childhood came out in a very different light.
Was it possible that we were the bad guys?
I don’t think that we are, because that’s not the way that history works. It’s more complicated than that.
Who then was the real King William of Orange, and what is the legacy, both of the man himself, and the myths that have grown up around him?
William was a prince from the day of his birth (November 4, 1650). His father, also William, died a week before he was born. The princely title passed to him as his only son and heir. His grandfather, William the Silent (also William of Orange) had been a leader in the wars that freed the United Provinces of the Netherlands from Spanish Hapsburg rule. He was baptised and raised a Protestant within the Calvinistic tradition, closer in beliefs and values to Scottish Presbyterianism than to the Episcopalianism of the Church of England to which he formally converted when he took the English throne.
William was never a king in Holland—which, formally at least, remained a loosely confederated republic until the nineteenth century. Dutch royalist enthusiasm for the colour orange comes from common roots, but the Dutch kings called William don’t include our King Billy. Some years ago, with little understanding of this, and presuming that the ubiquitous banners reading “Wij houden van Oranje” (We love Orange) meant that they were kindred spirits, I pressed an Amsterdam tour guide on the legacy of our King William there. His reply was not what I expected. He didn’t want to talk about King Billy, instead he told me about the “Rampjaar” (disaster year), the terrible events that led indirectly to William of Orange becoming Stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands in 1672.
The period 1588 to 1672, is sometimes referred to as the Dutch Golden Era. The country prospered, as Calvinistic countries seem wont to do. It was also a haven for toleration and sanctuary for Protestant, Jewish, and freethinking refugees. The arts flourished, as did the sciences. Ideological rivalry led to numerous conflicts with their absolutist and Catholic French neighbours. Economic rivalry to wars with England. In 1672 the two foes joined forces and invaded. The country was laid waste to. The nation previously famed for its practicality and reasonableness played host to the lynching and partial cannibalisation of their Stadtholder (captain general). William of Orange was installed as stadtholder in his place and tasked with picking up the pieces.
My hero’s coming to power in his native land marked, it would seem, not the apogee, but epitaph of a golden age.
The Rampjaar demonstrated the fragility of the Republic to outside tyrannies, most manifest at that time in the absolutist regime of Louis XIV in France. William’s response to this was a pragmatic one. He was a shrewd diplomat. As well as firming up links with natural allies—the Swedes, the Danes, and the German Protestant Principalities—he understood that his enemies’ enemies were his friends.
One way in which he safeguarded such alliances was through his marriage to Mary, the niece of his erstwhile enemy Charles II, the King of England. The marriage would prove even more serendipitous after Mary’s father succeeded his brother on the English throne. It was not a love match but it’s said to have been characterised by very genuine affection. He took mistresses. That was the norm amongst European royalty. His wife was said to have been more concerned about the peril this placed on his immortal soul than by any feeling of betrayal.
There has been a lot of speculation that William may have been an active bisexual. Perhaps he was—in his later life he certainly had close bonds with male companions. It’s not a question that we’re ever likely to get a definitive answer to after such a long passage of time. To his credit William himself is said to have taken a good humoured approach when the rumours were put to him. It was no one else’s business. It’s sometimes thrown at current members of the Orange Order (who are in reality more of a religious organisation with political dimensions than a fan club for the late monarch) by their detractors. Does it matter? Almost certainly not.
Another part of William’s alliance building that is sometimes thrown at William’s supporters as though it exposes a fatal flaw in their ideology are the good relations that William built with the Vatican. On the face of it, it certainly seems surprising. The Dutch republic’s values of religious toleration and accountable government rested to a large extent on its Calvinist traditions. The very idea of a Pope is anathema to Calvinists, an idolatrous inversion of the priesthood of all believers. When looked at more closely the alliance was extremely expedient and greatly to the advantage and credit of both parties. Pope Innocent XI was a cultured and educated man. Educated by the Jesuits, and trained in civil law, he had worked with providing relief to plague victims prior to his election to the papacy. As Pope he campaigned against nepotism in the Catholic Church and for the personal morality and behaviour of priests to be brought in line with Christian teachings. He was also financially astute, lowering taxes but still managing to produce a surfeit in the budget of the Papal States.
Perhaps these character traits were a factor in his coming into conflict with the extravagant Louis XIV of France. Louis’s absolutism also led him to exercise greater control over the Catholic Church in France, but the real breaking point came when Louis XIV moved militarily against the Papal States in Avignon. When James II of England began to establish closer ties with Louis XIV, Pope Innocent discreetly began to support the Protestant William against the two Roman Catholic monarchs.
Absolutism reached a new low in 1685, the year of James II/VII’s coronation, when Louis of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, the law that had brought an end to the French Wars of Religion almost a century earlier, and brought a measure of religious toleration and secularism to French government and society. After the revocation, it became illegal to be a Protestant in France. In England, King James made what looked at first glance to be a move in the opposite direction, dismissing Parliament to force through a “Declaration of Indulgence” supposedly to remove restrictions on Roman Catholics and dissenting Protestants, closing the Scottish Parliament to enforce a similar measure there a year later. He began to replace officials with Roman Catholic favourites. The “indulgence” was a facade. Scottish Covenanters were rounded up, imprisoned, and executed en masse.
In England the crunch came when Bishops who refused to accede to his usurpation of Parliament and swear allegiance to the king and his successors were taken to the Tower of London and charged with treason. News that James’s second wife had given birth to a son (or according to some accounts a male child had been smuggled into her bedchamber in a warming pan) moving Mary and her sister Anne further down the line of succession, heightened fears that the slide into absolutist tyranny might be irreversible.
Almost the entire country turned against the King. Delegates of the prorogued Parliament went to the Hague begging William to intervene, telling him that he would be met with a heroes’ welcome if he came to England with an army behind him to take the throne.
William considered his options. He studied the broader international situation, particularly the intentions of the French regime. Then, on November 4, 1688, his 38th birthday, he set sail for England, landing in Torbay in Devon to avoid a fleet that might still have been loyal to James in London, William marched towards London meeting little to no resistance.
Outflanked, James fled to seek sanctuary with his ally, the French despot. Parliament met and declared that James’s desertion constituted an abdication, and invited William and his wife to take the throne in his stead. With barely a shot fired, for England at least, the Glorious Revolution had been won. Britain was changed utterly. Never again would a King, of England or of Scotland, be able to rule without the consent of Parliament. Over time, as the franchise was extended to all of the Crown’s subjects, this would mean that a sovereign could only reign by the consent of citizens. British democracy, the constitutional monarchy, was born.
It would be tempting to close this story on this note, but of course it doesn’t end there. There was some resistance to William’s accession in Scotland than in England, especially in the largely Roman Catholic Highlands. Jacobite soldiers had some success at the Battle of Killiecrankie (the name of that battle for some reason used to prompt giggling amongst my mother’s students in 1970s Llandudno) but were halted by Williamite forces at Dunkeld. I’ve visited Dunkeld to pay homage to this victory with Scottish members of the Orange Order. The legacy of this Highland resistance lived on in infamy later, when King William signed off the order that led to the massacre of members of the McDonald clan by members of the Campbell clan at Glencoe. It was perhaps the one most indisputably shameful act of his reign.
Then there is the other island. An island where, as I said at the start, William’s memory is still very much alive. Ireland had its own bloody history of grudges and sacrifice—invasion, settlement, massacres of settlers and massacres in reprisal. It suited James and his French backers to exploit these to seek support from his coreligionists. James sailed to Kinsale in the South of Ireland to raise an army. James is not remembered fondly in Catholic Ireland. He was nicknamed Séamas an Chaca (James the Sh*t).
William came to Carrickfergus in the North to meet him. Irish Catholics, the majority of the island’s people, had good cause to rally behind James. Protestants had perhaps better cause to believe that their survival depended on the success of William.
I’ll not reprise the details of the war in Ireland that followed. There was real heroism on the part of the besieged citizens of Londonderry, who held out, half starving against a Jacobite army (James himself came to the city walls to taunt them) for 105 days before British ships broke through the River Foyle to come to their relief). Had they not done so then the path might have lain open for James to sail to Scotland and try to retake the throne.
As a member of the Apprentice Boys of Derry, a fraternity established to remember the young apprentices who closed the city’s gates against King James’s soldiers at the beginning of the siege, I’m proud to wear a crimson collarette (the colour of the flag that flew above the besieged city) to remember those brave defenders of what is now my home city when we parade every December and August to mark the anniversaries of the beginning and ending of that siege.
William led his troops from the front to meet King James and his men at the Boyne— the image on my father’s record sleeve and on countless walls across Northern Ireland. He won. Religious toleration of the kind that William genuinely believed in did not follow, but I’ll let others take up that tale.
William went on to reign for another 12 years. His Calvinistic values may, some argue, have made Britain a more tolerant country than she was before. He spent much of his reign abroad, involved in continental wars. His absence may have helped to reinforce the primacy of Parliament over the Crown. Parliament governed and made laws. The King reigned.
While her husband was away, Queen Mary was said by those who met her to be an attentive and insightful sovereign, listening to the concerns, and occasionally offering advice to her government. In 1694 she fell ill with smallpox and died. Before her death she sent the members of her household who had escaped the contagion away for their own protection. When she died later that year, King William was said to be genuinely wracked with grief. William himself died in 1702, as the result of a riding accident, when the horse upon which he was riding caught its hoof in a molehill. Jacobite supporters in Scotland are said to raise a toast to the “gentleman in the velvet jacket” in commemoration of this happenstance. As with snakes and weasels, we do not have native moles in Ireland.
That’s my take on King Billy then. It’s an account by a supporter, so it isn’t impartial, but I have tried to be fair.
Whatever faith you may follow, and whatever your politics—and you should of course always be free to follow your conscience in such matters—may I invite you to raise a toast to the glorious memory of King Billy.
This piece previously appeared in Happy & Glorious: A Royal Celebration.