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By Root 1119 0

the birth of James II’s son, one thing is beyond a shadow of doubt: William of Orange acted with characteristic personal decisiveness in seizing the opportunity to intervene in English dynastic affairs while the country was internally in considerable political disarray. William had always taken a keen interest in English dynastic affairs. Third in line to the English throne after James II’s daughters, he himself was known to consider that his claim was technically stronger than theirs. Orphaned at the age of ten, he had been brought up carefully to understand the importance of his English heritage. His mother (James II’s older sister) had been quite clear that her royal line was superior to that of James’s children, since James’s first wife Anne Hyde had been a mere commoner (married hastily, and against his family’s wishes, indeed when pregnant with their first child, who was stillborn).

Constantijn Huygens junior records in his diary that on a wet and windy day in October 1673, when he and the future King William III were in the field, engaged in military action against the French, the Stadholder talked, at table during the midday meal, about ‘the death of his grandfather the King [Charles I] and affairs in England’. His own line, he insisted, surely took priority over that of James: ‘He said that if the Duke of York [James] died before the King [Charles II], the right of [James’s] daughters to take precedence over himself with regard to the Crown would be disputed.’14

The opportunity for William to marry James II’s elder daughter in 1677 significantly strengthened his claim to the English throne, since in the dynastic chess-game it united the second and third in line. The claim became a real prospect at another moment when the inheritance rankings of the various possible claimants on the English throne were apparently in the process of reorganisation. Four years into James’s marriage to his second wife (his first, Anne, died in 1671), Maria of Modena had given birth to one daughter who had lived only months, while a second daughter, Isabel, was a year old. Now, in spring 1677, the Queen was again pregnant, and the clear expectation was that she would finally give birth to a boy, who would take precedence over James’s daughters by his first marriage as claimant to the English throne.

The possibility of Charles II’s brother producing a male heir by his second wife meant that at that moment Princess Mary looked temporarily a less attractive figure dynastically, less of a ‘catch’ on the international royal marriage market, and hence suitable as a bride to a member of the comparatively minor house of Orange. Maria of Modena did indeed give birth to a son, Charles, Duke of Cambridge, just three days after William and Mary’s wedding on 4 November 1677. Princess Mary’s new husband was one of the little Prince’s godfathers. Baby Charles died, however, just a month later, on 12 December.15

William’s dynastic interests were not merely aspirational in European royal terms. They were inseparably entwined with his political and military aspirations, in particular with a strategy of pressuring England into an anti-French coalition. The ambitious dual purpose of the match with Princess Mary Stuart was simultaneously to advance his chances of inheriting the English crown, and to exploit the favour of the English government, whose expressed desire in 1677 was to assist the Dutch in their struggle to retain their independence in the face of a ruthlessly expansionist France.16

William of Orange’s marriage was the second occasion within forty years on which the minor royal house of Orange successfully exploited a situation in which a Stuart bride’s currency on the international dynastic market was temporarily reduced by circumstances, in order to move themselves strategically up the European royal rankings, increasing their power inside and outside the United Provinces. The first of these occasions had been William’s own English mother Princess Mary Stuart’s marriage to his Dutch father, the future William II of Orange, in May 1641.