Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/148

90 The "Deliverer," William of Orange, was for so long, andinsome quarters still is, so popular a hero, that any consideration of his greatness may claim interest. That he was placed in a position which caused him to represent a great epoch of advance in the progress of the English nation—that the important movement with which his name is associated, if not "glorious," was certainly beneficial, no one will deny. Whether circumstances have not given him a place in English histories and a fame among English writers of which he himself was hardly worthy, may be a question at least worthy of discussion. Nor is the discussion irrelevant here. Hampton Court is so thoroughly, as we see it now, the great English memorial of the Dutch king, that we may well pause to consider, as we walk through its rooms, or as we stop before the bombastic allegory of Kneller in the "Presence Chamber," what manner of man he was. What did his greatness consist in? Was he a hero?

It is difficult to disentangle the man from his surroundings. The greatness of the men with whom he was brought into contact, the importance of the crisis in European history in which he mingled, would themselves invest with interest the biography of a prince opposed to Louis XIV. But it would be difficult for the most bigoted Jacobite to have denied that William of Orange had much more than this borrowed greatness. The romantic history of his early life, the difficulties with which he had to contend, the position to which he raised himself, and the actual success