Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

It is noteworthy also that this man should have come from those same Low Countries from whose shores our Saxon ancestors had first come on their plundering forays to do their share of the work of making the English people. The ancestry of the great-grandson of William the Silent stretched far back, probably even into those remote and turbulent times, and it is within the limits of possibility that some stalwart ancestor of the ancient House of Nassau may himself have had something to do in the early making of that Realm, over which, a thousand years later, his descendant was to rule during one of the most critical and perilous periods of its existence.

Be that, however, as it may, the central fact which stands out in the story of William III. is this: Whatever his country or ancestry, he was, so far as we have any means of judging, the one man in the world just then who could have accomplished the difficult and, as it must often have seemed even to him, almost impossible task which had to be performed if the work of the other Empire-Makers who had gone before him was not to be sadly marred, if not altogether undone.

William of Orange may perhaps be most truthfully described as an overcomer of difficulties. Probably no other man ever had so many difficulties to conquer as he had, and his triumph over them is one of the finest examples of irresistible will-power and purely intellectual force that all history has to show. Mentally he was a giant, and as such he acquitted himself in what was undoubtedly a battle of giants fighting for the spoils of Europe. Physically he was a miserable weakling, shattered by disease, seldom free from bodily pain, and foredoomed from his youth by an exhausting and incurable malady.

Yet even his sports and pastimes were those, not only of a healthy, but even of a robust constitution. His pale, sickly, small-pox-pitted face never flushed save under the stimulus of battle or the chase. He fought his fight with Fate and won it by sheer intellectual strength, yet none of the pleasures of intellect were his. He knew nothing of science, little of literature, and less of art.

Apparently fitted by Nature only for the pursuits of the study, he found his rare moments of real happiness when riding down a stag or a boar in the forests of Windsor or the woods of Flanders, or, sword in hand, leading his men wherever the battle was hottest or the danger the greatest. A creature of contradictions, in short, determined to make himself that which Nature had seemingly not made him, and to do that which he appeared least fitted to do.

No one possessing an intelligent grasp of the deplorable state of affairs which obtained in England, and the threatening aspect of matters on the Continent during the last decade but one of the seventeenth century, would have guessed for a moment that this “asthmatic skeleton,” as Macaulay somewhat roughly describes his hero, was the man to turn England’s weakness into strength, and even in defeat to grapple successfully with the colossal Power which was threatening the liberties of Europe.

In England the weakness and baseness of the two last Stuart kings had more than undone the work of the great Oliver. He had, as has been shown, made England one of the first Powers in the world, strong at home and respected and even courted abroad. Charles II. had sold his country, or at any rate his own independence and what should have been his royal honour, to France. He had, in fact, exhibited to the world the disgraceful spectacle of an English king who was the pensioner of a foreign monarch.

The for-ever infamous Treaty of Dover had brought the prestige of England to its lowest ebb. For the first time in nearly seven hundred years the Isle Inviolate had been seriously threatened with invasion, and London, for the first time since it had been a city, had heard the sound of hostile guns. Now this of itself, taking the whole history of these islands into consideration, is a fact of absolutely unparalleled infamy, and yet if such infamy could have been equalled, the brother and successor of Charles II. would have done so. Indeed, from one point of view it may be said that he excelled it.

The guns of William’s countrymen were heard in the Thames because Charles II., having his brother James for Lord High Admiral, had so scandalously wasted the funds which should have been devoted to the maintenance of the Navy that no adequate defence was really possible; but it was left for James II., the last and most contemptible, if not in all respects the worst king of the royal and miserable House of Stuart, to be the only British monarch who ever brought a foreign army on to British soil for the purpose of coercing by force the will of the British people. More than this, too, it must be remembered that these foreign troops were Frenchmen supported by renegade English, Irish, or Scotsmen who had deliberately deserted their own country to serve under the standard of a man who was to the seventeenth century what Phillip II. of Spain had been to the sixteenth.

So low, then, had Britain sunk in the scale of nations when William of Orange made his entry upon the stage of British history. The fact which made his entry possible is hardly of the sort that would commend itself to people of a romantic turn of mind, although few romances have been really more romantic than his own life-story.