Joint Monarchs of the Glorious Revolution

William III (1650 - 1702)  and Mary II (1663 - 1694)

So often our sole Joint Monarchs are regarded as one that we speak and think of William III and Mary II as "WilliamanMary".  Yet no two sovereigns were less alike in their upbringing, their outlook, and their character than these two first cousins.

William was brought up by an English mother, Mary Stuart, and a German grandmother, Amelia of Solmes, on the death of his father, William II, Prince of Orange.   This was during the "Stadholderless" period of the Dutch Republic, when there was a reaction by the oligarchy of Amsterdam against the princely House of Orange.

So the young Prince was regarded as "the Child of State" until his hour struck in 1672, when the French invaded the Netherlands.  God's hour had struck and with it his own.  As his great-grandfather, William the Silent, had called in the cold, grey waters of the North Sea to drive out the Spaniards, so Prince William Henry could say "better a drowned land than a doomed land."  Holland was saved by its young Captain General, now also its Stadholder.

Meanwhile, in England his cousin, also Mary Stuart, was growing up at the court of her uncle Charles II.  Her parents, the Duke and Duchess of York, were to become Roman Catholics.  But she and her sister, Anne, were loyal members of the Church of England, with a detestation of Popery.

In spite of his secret Treaty of Dover with his cousin, Louis XIV of France, Charles II was shrewd enough to ensure that his Protestant nieces should marry Protestant husbands.  So the 15-year-old Mary was married to the 28-year-old William of Orange in 1678, and Anne to George of Denmark in 1683.

Somewhat reluctantly the child-bride, vivacious and talkative, made her home at the Hague with her sterner and more silent cousin.  Although a devoted Anglican, with a great lover for the Book of Common Prayer, she accustomed herself to the austere worship of the Dutch Reformed Church.  William, who was a convinced Calvinist, believing himself predestined to resist the encroachments of his arch-enemy, Louis XIV, found some Anglican practices distasteful, such as kneeling to receive the Lord's Supper.  But he made no attempt to interfere with Mary's devotions in her private chapel, regarding them as preferable to the Romanism of her father, and the neo Romanism of their uncle.   Mary's loyalty to her husband was absolute, and she shared fully his distrust of both of them.

So the years passed, and in 1685 the Duke of York became James II on the death of Charles II, into whose death chamber he had smuggled a Roman Catholic priest.   This meant that the Princess of Orange was the heiress presumptive to the Throne of Great Britain and Ireland, since her father and her Italian step-mother, who called her "dearest Lemon", had no surviving children.  That summer saw the abortive Western Rebellion of her illegitimate cousin, the Duke of Monmouth.  Shrewd enough to bide his time, as he had done before leading his own countrymen against the French in 1672, the Prince of Orange offered the services of his regiments against the unhappy "Protestant Duke", whom his deluded followers called "King Monmouth".

Birth

Three years were to pass before the birth of a male heir to James II, and events moved quickly during that summer, from the Trial of the Seven Bishops to the invitation of "The Immortal Seven" to William to make his peaceful "Descent on England".  This took place at Brixham in Torbay on what came to be known as the "Double Fifth" of November, the anniversary of the Discovery of the Gunpowder Plot.  James II, his wife and baby son, the Old Pretender, fled to France, and William III spent Christmas at Whitehall.

It was not till February 1689 that Mary arrived at Gravesend in Kent, having spent her last Christmas in the waterlogged land of her adoption, whose Protestant people had come to love their English Protestant Princess.  In April Britain's chosen King and Queen were crowned by the staunchly Protestant Bishop of London, Dr. Henry Compton, while their Chaplain, Dr. Gilbert Burnet, now Bishop of Salisbury, preached the Coronation Sermon.  Bishop Compton had been one of "the Immortal Seven", while Archbishop Sancroft, leader of "the Seven Bishops" found it impossible to break his oath of allegiance to the deposed King James, whom he had previously withstood on another matter of conscience.  The new King refused to touch the sick for "the King's Evil" (scrofula) regarding it as "a silly old Popish custom".   Queen Anne was the last British Monarch to do so.

It was a difficult position for Queen Mary in 1690, when her father and husband were at war in Ireland.  Yet there is no doubt as to where her loyalties lay, as they always had done "for better, for worse."  Her skilful handling of affairs during King William's Irish campaign won her the respect and admiration of all but the most bitter Jacobites.  Four years later, in December, 1694, she succumbed to the contemporary scourge of smallpox, receiving spiritual comfort from such men as Archbishop Tillotson and Bishop Burnet.  Fierce attacks on the good Queen were made by Jacobite clergy - "Go bury this accursed woman. She is a King's daughter" was one funeral sermon text, thus comparing the virtuous Mary with Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, the persecutor of Elijah the Prophet.

Seven lonely years as a widower remained to the disconsolate William, who kept her hair in a locket till the day of his own death in March, 1702 only a few months after James II had died, a pensioner of "the most Christian King" of France.  He died at Kensington Palace, his horse, Sorrel, stumbling over a mole-hill.  This prompted the notorious Jacobite toast to "the little gentleman in black velvet", which they invariably linked with one to "the King over the water" - James Francis Edward, the Old Pretender, whom they called King James III and VIII.  So lived and died William III, the heart and head of the Confederacy against France, who linked his ancestral motto, "I will maintain", with the motto of the Glorious Revolution, "For Religion and Liberty".

Canon Dr. Michael W. Dewar