William V, Prince of Orange
| William V | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Brunswick-Lüneburg | |||||
| Spouse | |||||
| Issue | Louise, Hereditary Princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel William I of the Netherlands Prince Frederick | ||||
| |||||
| House | Orange-Nassau | ||||
| Father | William IV, Prince of Orange | ||||
| Mother | Anne, Princess Royal | ||||
| Religion | Dutch Reformed Church | ||||
| Signature |  | ||||
William V (Willem Batavus; 8 March 1748 – 9 April 1806) was
Early life
William Batavus was born in The Hague on 8 March 1748, the only son of William IV, who had the year before been restored as stadtholder of the United Provinces. He was only three years old when his father died in 1751, and a long regency began. His regents were:
- Dowager Princess Anne, his mother, from 1751 to her death in 1759;
- Dowager Princess Marie Louise, his grandmother, from 1759 to her death in 1765;
- Duke Louis Ernest of Brunswick-Lüneburg, from 1759 to 1766, and kept on as a privy counsellor, in accordance with the Acte van Consulentschap, until October 1784;
- Princess Carolina, his sister (who at the time was an adult aged 22, while he was still a minor at 17), from 1765 to William's majority in 1766.
William was made the 568th Knight of the Order of the Garter in 1752.
Stadtholder
William V assumed the position of
The position of the Dutch during the
After the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783), there was growing restlessness in the United Provinces with William's rule. A coalition of old Dutch States Party regenten and democrats, called Patriots, was challenging his authority more and more. Mid September 1785 William left The Hague and removed his court to Het Loo Palace in Gelderland, a province remote from the political center.[1]: 104–105 In September 1786 he sent States-Army troops to Hattem and Elburg to overthrow the cities' Patriot vroedschap, despite the defense by Patriot Free Corps, organised by Herman Willem Daendels. This provoked the Patriot-dominated States of Holland to deprive him of his office of Captain-General of the Army.[1]: 107–109 (His function was given to Rhinegrave Salm.) In June 1787 his energetic wife Wilhelmina tried to travel to The Hague to foment an Orangist rising in that city. Outside Schoonhoven, she was stopped by the Gouda Free Corps, taken to a farm near Goejanverwellesluis and after a short detention made to return to Nijmegen.[1]: 127
To Wilhelmina and her brother,
Exile in Great Britain and Ireland
William V joined the
Directly after his arrival in England, the Prince wrote a number of letters (known as the Kew Letters) from his new residence in Kew to the governors of the Dutch colonies, instructing them to hand over their colonies to the British as long as France continued to occupy the "mother country". Only a number complied, while those that demurred from doing so became confused and demoralised. Almost all Dutch colonies were eventually captured by the British, who in the end returned most, but not all (South Africa and Ceylon), first at the Treaty of Amiens and later with the Convention of London signed in 1814.[2]: 1127
In 1799 the
After the
The last of the Dutch stadtholders, William V died in exile at his daughter's palace in
In 1813, his son,
Issue
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William V and Wilhelmina of Prussia were parents to five children:
- An unnamed son (23–24 March 1769).
- Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg and Princess Augusta of Great Britain, without issue.
- An unnamed son (born and deceased on 6 August 1771).
- Willem Frederik, Hereditary Prince of Orange-Nassau (The Hague, 25 August 1772 – 12 December 1843), who became the first King of the Netherlands as William I .
- Prince Willem Georg Frederik, Prince of Orange-Nassau (The Hague, 15 February 1774 – Padua, 6 January 1799), unmarried and without legitimate issue.
Ancestry
| Ancestors of William V, Prince of Orange Henriëtte Amalia van Anhalt-Dessau | |||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2. William IV, Prince of Orange | |||||||||||||||
| 10. Charles I, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel | |||||||||||||||
| 5. Marie Louise of Hesse-Kassel | |||||||||||||||
| 11. Maria Amalia of Courland | |||||||||||||||
| 1. William V, Prince of Orange | |||||||||||||||
| 12. George I of Great Britain | |||||||||||||||
| 6. George II of Great Britain | |||||||||||||||
| 13. Sophia Dorothea of Celle | |||||||||||||||
| 3. Anne, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange | |||||||||||||||
| 14. John Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach | |||||||||||||||
| 7. Caroline of Ansbach | |||||||||||||||
| 15. Princess Eleonore Erdmuthe of Saxe-Eisenach | |||||||||||||||
Appreciation
During his life and afterward, William V was a controversial person, in himself, and because he was the unwilling center of a political firestorm that others had caused. Many historians and contemporaries have written short appreciations of him that were often acerbic. Phillip Charles, Count of Alvensleben, who was the Prussian envoy to the Hague from 1787 (so not someone who must be suspected to be prejudiced against William) may be taken as an example. He wrote:
His education has all been theory. Duke Louis of Brunswick kept him away from practical affairs and did all the work himself, while the stadtholder merely signed documents. Hence this habit, this compulsion, of talking about public affairs, and turning the functions of stadtholder into the holding of tedious audiences of five, six, seven hours in length, swamping practical problems in useless verbiage, though putting forward wide-ranging proposals, often marked by sound reasoning, sometimes even by genius. Finally, the cardinal defect of settling nothing, of bringing nothing to a point, of replying to nothing, of signing nothing, of concluding nothing; but always of being the stadtholder in theory and never in practice. When he sets to work he does not know how to distinguish the functions of the head of the chancery from those of a mere secretary. In place of taking decisions on a hundred cases, he wastes his time in copying out some memorandum that has been presented to him. Nothing will ever change him, his bent is fixed, and when the Patriots declared that he fulfilled his functions in a ghastly fashion they were quite right.[5]
His great-great-granddaughter Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was less kind. She simply called him a sufferd (dummy).[6]
Legacy
- Orange County, North Carolina was named for William V of Orange
- Orange County, Indiana was named after the North Carolina county.
- The Orange River, the longest river in South Africa was named in honour of William V of Orange.[7]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Schama, Simon (1992). Patriots and Liberators. Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813. Vintage books.
- ^ a b Israel, J.I. (1995). The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806. Clarendon Press.
- ^ James, W.M. (2002). The Naval History of Great Britain: During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Vol. 2 1797-1799. Stackpole books. pp. 309–310.
- ^ Genealogie ascendante jusqu'au quatrieme degre inclusivement de tous les Rois et Princes de maisons souveraines de l'Europe actuellement vivans [Genealogy up to the fourth degree inclusive of all the Kings and Princes of sovereign houses of Europe currently living] (in French). Bourdeaux: Frederic Guillaume Birnstiel. 1768. p. 88.
- ^ Cobban, A. (1954). Ambassadors and secret agents: the diplomacy of the first Earl of Malmesbury at the Hague. Jonathan Cape. p. 23.
- ^ Meerkerk, E. van (October 2007). "De laatste stadhouder. Willem V (1748-1806)". Historisch Nieuwsblad (in Dutch). Retrieved 11 May 2018.
- ^ Earle, Anton et al. (2005), A preliminary basin profile of the Orange/Senqu River (pdf), African Centre for Water Research, retrieved 30 June 2007
External links
Media related to William V, Prince of Orange at Wikimedia Commons
