threat. But now the clergy of Winchester, backed by the English people, dared to decide for themselves, and to act on their decision, that the dead man was beyond the pale of Christian fellowship. They said no mass, they tolled no bell, they suffered his brother and his friends to make no offerings for the soul of the king of whose life and reign the English chronicler gives this terrible summary: ‘Though I hesitate to say it, all things that are loathsome to God and to earnest men were customary in this land in his time; and therefore he was loathsome to wellnigh all his people, and abominable to God, as his end showed, forasmuch as he departed in the midst of his unrighteousness, without repentance and without expiation.’ The fall of the cathedral tower seven years later confirmed the popular belief that he who lay beneath it was unfit for Christian burial. In recent times the Red King's tomb—a black marble slab, of the form known as dos-d'âne, and without any inscription—has been removed into the lady-chapel. He was unmarried, and his kingdom was seized by his younger brother Henry I [q. v.]
[William II has been so exhaustively dealt with by Freeman in his Norman Conquest (vol. v.) and his Reign of William Rufus that it is needless to give here more than a brief enumeration of the chief original authorities: the English Chronicle, Eadmer, Florence of Worcester, Ordericus Vitalis, William of Malmesbury, and Henry of Huntingdon. For the minor authorities see Freeman's footnotes and appendices.]
WILLIAM III (1650–1702), king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, was born on 4 Nov. 1650 at the Hague, in the stadholder's apartments in the old palace of the counts of Holland. William Henry, as he was named in a baptismal service celebrated with inopportune pomp, was the posthumous and only child of William II, Prince of Orange, and his consort Mary [q. v.], the eldest daughter of King Charles I and princess royal of England. At the time of his birth the prospects of the house of Orange seemed hopelessly darkened by a shadow which was to dominate the whole of his youth. Eight days before his birth his father had suddenly died, in the midst of schemes for redeeming the failure of his recent coup d'état, designed to raise the authority of the stadholderate at the cost of the provincial liberties and peace. Although the States-General were the sponsors of the young prince, it was inevitable that the opportunity of his father's death should be seized by the wealthy and powerful province of Holland, under the guidance from 1652 onwards of the far-sighted and resolute grand pensionary, John de Witt. Without a chief, the friends of the house of Orange could rest their hopes merely on its traditional hold over the masses, on their Calvinistic antipathies against the existing régime, and on the apprehensions excited by its neglect of the defensive powers of the Commonwealth, and of its land forces in particular. Yet the goodwill of both people and army towards the young prince increased with his growth, ‘ever presaging some revolution in the state, when he should come to the years of aspiring, and managing the general affections of the people’ (‘Observations upon the United Provinces,’ &c., Temple, Works, i. 73, 107).
Together with public hopes and fears, private jealousies were rife round William's cradle. The claims to his sole guardianship of his high-spirited but unconciliatory mother were disputed by his intriguing grandmother, the Princess-dowager Amalia, born Countess of Solms-Braunsfeld, and by his versatile uncle, the great elector, Frederick William of Brandenburg, until a compromise assigned the chief but not undivided authority to the princess royal. Personal ambitions sapped the loyalty of the collateral branches of the house of Nassau to his interests; and his resources were impaired by a vast debt contracted by his father, and by heavy jointures payable to his mother and grandmother (Burnet, i. 582). Yet even in his infancy, when the calamities of the first Anglo-Dutch war agitated the provinces (1653, autumn), De Witt with difficulty thwarted a scheme for nominating him captain-general of Holland, Zealand, and other provinces (Van Kampen, ii. 153). In 1654 Cromwell made the conclusion of peace conditional upon the adoption by the states of Holland of the Act of Exclusion, which bound them in no event to appoint the Prince of Orange or any of his descendants stadholder or admiral of their province, or to vote for him as captain-general of the Union (GARDINER, Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii. 364, 373). Although in September 1660 this act was revoked, owing to the Restoration in England, the connection between the houses of Orange and Stuart increased republican jealousies in Holland, and a project for sending the young prince on a pacific mission to his uncle, Charles II, in 1666, was speedily abandoned (Pontalis, i. 371).
Of William's education his mother retained the chief control till her death on 24 Dec. 1660 even after the states of Hol-
