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to include Tournai and Charleroi. In 1681, Louis XIV attacked from his eastern border and took the strategic town of Strasbourg. In 1682, in a move designed specifically to antagonise the Dutch Stadholder, Louis seized Orange in southern France – an independent principality of which William was titular head, and whence the family claim to royal status derived. In 1684, France annexed Luxembourg. Faced with Charles’s continued reluctance to be drawn into the conflict, William was driven practically to despair by England’s strategic isolationism. ‘The insufferable behaviour of England,’ he expostulated in 1681, ‘is the principal cause of our present dangers because of which the situation at the end of this year will perhaps be even worse than in 1672.’11

The accession to the English throne of the Catholic James II in 1685 removed any further hopes of strengthening the Anglo–Dutch accord by family-based strategic alliance between England and the Protestant Low Countries. Instead, there were now real fears in the Dutch Republic that James would enter into a formal treaty with Louis XIV, significantly strengthening the French King’s power base, thereby allowing France to pursue its dream of universal rule in Europe by taking control of the Netherlands.

So when news of Maria of Modena’s pregnancy reached William of Orange, it gave concrete form to his growing alarm over England’s intentions regarding, and influence over, the wider political scene. It strengthened his resolve to put into action his ‘Grand Design’ – to invade England, settle the uncertainties over the succession, and assert his and his wife’s joint claim in person. Long before the English Queen’s condition was public knowledge, William’s agents and intelligence-gatherers in England had let him know that his and Mary’s position in the English inheritance stakes might be at risk. Whether plausible or not, the clamour of accusation and counter-accusation concerning the ‘warming-pan plot’ provided William with an excellent excuse for launching his invasion. Indeed, in the ‘invitation’ extended to William by a group of influential Englishmen on the eve of his fleet’s sailing for England, the ‘immortal seven’ who put their names to it reproached the Dutch Stadholder for having sent official congratulations to James following the birth:

We must presume to inform your highness that your compliment upon the birth of the child (which not one in an thousand believes to be the Queen’s) hath done you some injury. The false imposing of that upon the Princess and the nation, being not only an infinite exasperation of the people’s minds here, but being certainly one of the chief causes upon which the declaration of your entering the kingdom in a hostile manner must be founded on your part. Although many other reasons are to be given on ours.12

William’s Declaration of Reasons, published on the eve of the Dutch invasion to justify his unprecedented intervention by force in the affairs of a neighbouring nation state, did indeed cite as one of the grounds for what looked, on the face of it, like a piece of unwarranted international aggression, ‘the just and visible grounds of suspicion’ that ‘the Pretended Prince of Wales was not born by the Queen’. Should the invasion succeed, he promised to refer to Parliament ‘the enquiry into the birth of the pretended Prince of Wales, and of all things relating to it and the right of succession’. In the minds of the Dutch Stadholder and the Protestant faction in England, dynastic and political strategic planning thus became closely enmeshed. The claim that the birth of James II’s son was ‘suppositious’, however far-fetched, symbolised the acute concern on both sides of the Narrow Sea at this unexpected disruption of the anticipated train of events.

By 1688, the Dutch house of Orange had been actively manoeuvring to increase its control in the Low Countries and its wider European influence for three generations (since the turbulent times of William III’s greatgrandfather, William the Silent).13 In the climate of uncertainty that surrounded