First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [39]
Under the governance of a Hanoverian mother and a Prussian tutor, the meager share of Orange vigor that might have slipped through collateral inheritance into William’s blood did not flourish, even less so when after his marriage yet another strong-minded character entered the domestic circle. His wife was Frederika Sophia Wilhelmina, a niece of Frederick the Great. Described as “well-educated, intelligent, energetic and amiable,” she was well equipped to join mother and tutor in doing the Prince’s thinking for him, leaving her husband all too aware of her effect.
“He is so jealous, not of her virtue but of her sense and power,” wrote Malmesbury, “that he would not even go to paradise by her influence; and she has so mean an opinion of his capacity and in general that kind of contempt a high-spirited woman feels for an inferior male being, that I see no hopes of bringing them into cohesion.”
In physical appearance, with the same bulging eyes and thick lips and pudgy body, William V resembled his cousin of Hanover blood, George III of England, while he lacked George’s emphatic temperament. “His understanding,” reported Wraxall, “was cultivated, his conversation … entertaining and even instructive, abounding with historical information that displayed extensive acquaintance with polite letters.”
Suffering from the same sense of inadequacy felt by many of his English contemporaries who gained important governing positions from rank, rather than from merit and experience, William felt convinced that he was unequipped for the responsibility he held, a feeling that disabled him from acting with firmness or conviction. He tried to make up for the lack by conscientious attention to duty, rising at six and often working till midnight, filling his day with court levees and military reviews interspersed with prayers and meals. But keeping busy failed to dispel his anxieties or his belief that all his military training had fitted him for no higher rank than corporal. In one hard moment he exclaimed that he wished his father had never become Stadtholder and added, in so many words, “I wish I were dead.” This was the unhappy man who was Sovereign of the Netherlands.
In this situation, weak and irresolute government began at the top. The Prince’s advisers provided no one of reliable strength and consistency on whom to lean. Duke Louis of Brunswick was strong but unpopular, because his efforts to stay friendly with every faction made him distrusted by all and because he was resented for his influence with the Prince. Princess Wilhelmina, who might have formed a useful partnership with him in support of the insecure sovereign, resented his sway over her husband. Influenced by the pro-French sympathies of her uncle Frederick II, she took the opposite side from Brunswick of the great divide between the pro-British and pro-French parties. Consequently, William’s two closest associates could give him only divided counsel in place of firm guidance. Engelbert François Van Berckel, Pensionary of the city of Amsterdam, with its dominant influence as the major mercantile center and largest taxpayer, was too firmly attached to the commercial and therefore anti-British interests to give