Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-xxrs7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T10:49:04.595Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

WILLIAM III'S MILITARY AND POLITICAL CAREER IN NEO-ROMAN CONTEXT, 1672–1702

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2005

CHARLES-EDOUARD LEVILLAIN
Affiliation:
Institut d'Etudes Politiques – Université de Lille II

Abstract

William III's military and political career was marked by a sustained tension between his obsessive struggle against France and the fear caused by his accession to enhanced titles of power. Crucial to William's shift from stadholderate to kingship was his assumption of emergency powers in 1672 to defend his country against French invasion. Throughout his stadholderate (1672–1702), he came to be seen by his Dutch republican opponents as a Roman dictator intent on using military power to break the harmony of the constitution, while Orangist propaganda tried to present the rule of the One as the best remedy to the recurrent danger of civil war and anarchy. Spurred by the Ryswick treaty of September 1697 and fuelled by a deeply engrained tradition of resistance to any expanded military establishment, the standing army debates of 1697–9 came as an effort to understand a major political controversy in the light of the history of republican Rome. The political theorists of the New Country Party strove to reassert the superiority of civil over military power by showing how the decay of the Roman Republic had been caused by a departure from the civic militia paradigm and a drift towards military monarchy which fostered the growth of tyranny. It was thought that England's commitment to a prolonged war effort would entail a similar process and imperil the age-old balance between king and parliament. The contention of this article is that the standing army debates of 1697–9 can be construed as an encounter between Dutch and English neo-Romanism, crystallizing in the controversial figure of William. An overall view of William's military and political career and the search for elements of continuity in his supporters' and his opponents' arguments will serve to look at the role of historicism in the construction of a late seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch ideological space.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I am indebted to Mark Goldie, David Hayton, Willem Frijhoff, Gillian Howarth, Franck Lessay, Cliona O'Mahony, John Miller, Claude Nicolet, David Onnekink, Robert Tombs, and Blair Worden for their help and support in preparing this article. All dates given Old Style. Year starts 1 January.