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WIL and was born at the Hague on the 14th of November, 1650. In 1688 he announced to the English and Scotch his intention of visiting this country in order to obtain redress for the people for the grievances of which they complained under James II. He landed with a considerable force at Torbay, on the 6th November, and on the 19th December arrived at St. James'. On the 12th of February, 1689, it was resolved by the Convention that the prince and princess of Orange should occupy the throne, and on the 11th of April they were crowned at Westminster, being also proclaimed king and queen of Scotland. At this time Louis XIV. of France was openly assisting James II. in his attempts to regain the crown of England. Accordingly on the 7th May William declared war against him, having previously taken care to oppose the schemes of James' partisans in Ireland. In that country Talbot, duke of Tyrconnel, raised an army to support the deposed monarch, who had landed at Kinsale. On the 24th of March, James entered Dublin; and having summoned a parliament for the 7th of May, he proceeded to join the army in the north. The only towns that resisted him were Londonderry and Enniskillen. The former of these cities sustained a siege with the most heroic fortitude, under the governor, Major Baker, and a protestant clergyman, named George Walker. The garrison, however, having held out through all the horrors of pestilence and famine from the 20th of April till the 31st of July, were at length relieved by some succours under General Kirke, and on the 1st of August the French commander Rosen was marching from before the walls. During this memorable siege, which lasted for one hundred and five days, three thousand of the besieged, and nearly nine thousand of the besiegers, perished. During this period William had been organizing a plan for the effectual quelling of the rebellion in Ireland, and on the 13th of August the duke of Schomberg was sent over with ten thousand troops. Various operations took place there until on the 14th June, 1690, William landed at Carrickfergus in order to conduct the war himself. On the 1st July was fought the celebrated battle of the Boyne, in which the French and Irish were totally defeated, with a loss of fifteen hundred men, while James, now finding his hopes utterly broken, fled to France. William then went to Dublin, and from thence, after having reduced Waterford, he proceeded to lay siege to Limerick. On the 27th of August, however, he raised the siege, and retired to Waterford. On the 5th of September, having left Count Solms and General Ginkel to command in Ireland, he himself returned to England. He was most cordially received by parliament, and £4,000,000 was granted for carrying on the war. This having been done, on the 16th of January, 1691, the king went to the Hague to attend a congress of the allies; and after its having been unanimously voted that the war should be continued, he returned on the 13th April to his own country. During all this period the Jacobites carried on their plots; and when William came back from a second expedition into Holland on the 18th October, he learned that Athlone, Limerick, and other strongholds in Ireland had been reduced by Ginkel, and the war in that country terminated. The ensuing year was memorable for the massacre of the Highlanders of Glencoe. Their chief M'Donald, who was detained by the snow from coming to take the oath of allegiance, was hated by the earl of Breadalbane and Dalrymple of Stair. These obtained William's consent to extirpate the M'Donalds and their followers, and of the two hundred men who lived in the glen thirty-eight were murdered. The rest fled, their houses and flocks were destroyed, and several of their women and children perished from want and cold. On the 5th March the king went again to Holland, to oppose an intended invasion of England by James. The army of the latter was composed of English, Irish, and Scotch exiles, and together with the French, numbered nearly twenty thousand men, who lay at La Hogue waiting to be conveyed to England. The English fleet was sent to oppose them, commanded by Lord Russell, Sir George Rooke, and Sir Cloudesley Shovel, and being joined by the Dutch, they gained a complete victory over the enemy (19th May). From this period to 1697 the war was carried on with various fortune on either side till the 22nd September, 1697, when a treaty was signed at Ryswick, a village lying between the Hague and Delft in Holland, by which Louis of France agreed to recognize William as the lawful sovereign of England. As the war had cost £17,000,000, parliament resolved that all the troops raised since 1680 should be disbanded, and that the army should consist of only ten thousand men, while the ensuing year they not only voted that this number should be further reduced, but that no one but natural-born Englishmen should be allowed to serve. This resolution so irritated William, who was warmly attached both to his Dutch guards and to the French protestants who had assisted him, that he entertained serious intentions of abdicating the throne and retiring to Holland. This design, however, he abandoned; for on the 1st of February, 1699, he gave his royal assent to the bill, and on the 18th March the foreign troops received their dismissal. Another collision occurred between the king and the commons, in consequence of his being forced by them to restore for the public advantage the forfeited lands of the Irish Jacobites, which he had distributed among his own favourites. The king, however, again thought fit to succumb, and in 1701 parliament was occupied in settling the destination of the crown, about which a doubt had arisen in consequence of the death of William, duke of Gloucester, the only surviving child of the prince and princess of Denmark. On the 12th of June an act was passed limiting the succession to Sophia, dowager electress of Hanover, daughter of Elizabeth queen of Bohemia, who was sister to Charles I., and to the heirs of her body, being protestants. Various other important acts were also passed during this session, and questions arising out of the succession to the throne of Spain were settled by what is termed the "barrier-treaty." As Charles II. of Spain had died childless, the kings of England, France, and the States agreed to partition his dominions among them. This project was, however, thwarted by the Spanish monarch bequeathing his crown to Philip, second son of the dauphin; and as William found his parliament and the nation adverse to another war, he was compelled to acknowledge Philip as king of Spain. Nevertheless he still continued to intrigue in order to prevent the union of France and Spain, and was negotiating an alliance with the emperor and the States for that purpose, when the death of James on the 16th April gave a new turn to the thoughts both of the king and the nation. Louis had promised the deceased monarch to aid his son in his attempts to regain the throne of England, and influenced by Madame de Maintenon he now prepared to perform what he had undertaken. William immediately recalled his ambassador from France, and ordered the French secretary of legation to quit England without delay. When parliament met on the 30th December ninety thousand men were voted for the army and navy; a bill of attainder was passed against James Francis Edward, calling himself the prince of Wales (otherwise known as the Pretender and the Chevalier St. George); and another requiring all who held offices of church or state to abjure him, to swear allegiance to William, and to acknowledge his successors as designated by the Act of settlement to be the right and lawful heirs to the throne. Meanwhile supplies were being voted with alacrity, and the nation was exhibiting the utmost impatience to oppose the schemes of France and the Pretender, when an accident happened to the king which soon afterwards terminated fatally. On the 20th February, 1702, as he was riding from Kensington to Hampton court, his horse stumbled with him in Bushy park, and his collar-bone was fractured. He was conveyed to Hampton court, where the bone was set, and returned to Kensington the same evening. For a few days no very serious consequences seemed to have arisen from his fall; but on the 4th March fever set in, and he became gradually so weak, that on the 7th he was forced to stamp his name to a commission for giving his royal assent to the bills which had passed the houses of parliament. These were, the act for the further security of his majesty's person; for the succession to the throne of the protestant line, to the exclusion of the Pretender and all other Roman catholics, called the Abjuration act; and the malt bill; and these important measures became law the same evening. On the morning of the 8th the king received the sacrament from the hands of Archbishop Tenison and Bishop Burnet; and between the hours of seven and eight of the same m orning, he calmly breathed his last, being in the fifty-second year of his age, and the fourteenth of his reign. He was buried in Henry VII.'s chapel at Westminster, and after his death a gold ring and a locket containing his queen's hair was found fastened to his body. In person William was of the middle stature. His frame was slender and delicate, and he suffered much from asthma. He had an aquiline nose, keen and bright eyes, and his expression was calm, thoughtful, and dignified. His manners were austere and cold, and his deportment reserved and unconciliating. He possessed vast military genius, unflinching courage, deep but unostentatious feelings, and great soundness of judgment. He