William III

William III united the houses of Orange-Nassau and Stuart in his own person. He was born at The Hague in November 1650, eight days after the death of his father, William II, Prince of Orange; his mother was Mary, eldest daughter of Charles I of England. His early years coincided with the Dutch Republic's stadtholderless period, but the French invasion of 1672 brought him to power as stadtholder and captain-general, and he spent the rest of his life organizing resistance to the expansion of Louis XIV's France.

In 1677 William married his first cousin Mary, elder daughter of James, Duke of York, the future James II. When James's Catholicizing policies and the birth of a male heir in 1688 alarmed the English political nation, seven notables invited William to intervene. He landed at Torbay in November 1688 with a substantial army; James fled to France, and in February 1689 Parliament offered the crown jointly to William and Mary. The accompanying Bill of Rights placed lasting conditions on the exercise of royal power.

The new reign was dominated by war. William defeated James's Franco-Irish forces at the Boyne in 1690 and brought England and Scotland into the Nine Years' War against France, which ended at Ryswick in 1697 with French recognition of his title. His reign also saw the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 and the consolidation of regular parliamentary sessions, driven by the financial demands of continental warfare.

Mary died of smallpox in December 1694, leaving William to rule alone, childless and increasingly isolated. With his sister-in-law Anne's last surviving child dead by 1700, the Act of Settlement of 1701 fixed the succession, after Anne, on the Protestant House of Hanover. William was preparing a new coalition against France in the War of the Spanish Succession when his horse stumbled at Hampton Court; he died of complications on 8 March 1702 and was succeeded by Anne.