King William of Orange

The reason why William is a key figure is that his victory at the Battle of the Boyne, within an Irish context, secured the future of Protestantism on this island. He was born in 1650, in November 1650. He was married to his cousin Mary Stuart in 1677 and he died in March 1702. The marriage to his cousin Mary Stuart in 1677 was important because Charles II, who was the ruling monarch in England, was childless. The expectation therefore was that his brother James II would succeed and his Mary was James' eldest daughter. In due course, William was expecting to find himself married to the Queen of England. This scenario disintegrated in the course of James' reign because James II, William's father-in-law, married again, married an Italian princess called Mary of Medina, who unexpectedly gave birth to a son. James' intention seemed to be to undo the work of the Reformation and to create a continental style autocracy in the British Isles. This resulted in seven leading English noblemen inviting William to invade England and to rid them of the tyranny of James II. For me, William III is the person that God sent to bring deliverance to the United Kingdom at that time of the Glorious Revolution. He was the one who brought civil and religious liberty and therefore that event, that defence of civil and religious liberty at the time, that's really what is so important about it because that's something that's very precious to us. William invaded England in November 1688 and his progress to London was largely unopposed. In 1689, William and Mary were offered the crown jointly and in return they subscribed to a document called the Bill of Rights, which was really a commentary on the reign of James II. Events in Ireland took a different course where England rapidly moved over to accepting William. James II's Lord Deputy in Ireland, the Duke of Flacknell, did not lose his nerve. He suppressed all opposition to his regime in Ireland with the exception of Innisfil and Londonderry. I suppose he is more a metaphor to the Ulster Prosecutor today in the sense that here was a person who was invited over, who was asked to defend this country and for what it stood for, to defend and oppose the reformed tradition in religion and that he did that. He did it at a cost and that he was successful. I think that says a lot to the Unionists and to the Protestant community that if you want to be successful it will have a cost, a personal cost, a political cost, but if you sacrifice you will succeed and I think that's what King William stands for. William and Mary represent the establishment of the Protestant religion. As the established religion it signified the end of the divine right of kings and replaced it with constitutional monarchy and it started the evolution of the power of the Crown in Parliament with Parliament evolving as a democratic representative assembly. It was thus in June 1690 that William arrived in Cardiff Fergus or certainly Belfast Lock, which was then known as Cardiff Fergus Lock, with a huge army. An army was assembled which amounted to some 36,000 men and William sort of was at the north bank of the Boeing within a fortnight of his arrival in Ireland and on the 1st of July the Battle of the Boeing took place. King William's a very, very interesting personality. First of all he had great health problems, he was very small of stature, he struggled with asthma, so he wasn't a very healthy person, he was quite frail, but he was also a very brilliant statesman. One of the reasons why he only spent two weeks in Ireland was there were other pulls on his attention in terms of the great Protestant alliance that he had created in Europe to ward off the threat from Louis XIV of France, and so he was a man who was held in the highest esteem across Protestant Europe in terms of his statesmanship, his generalship and his political acumen and skills. But he was the only Presbyterian ever to sit on the British throne, which is an interesting facet as well, and for some reason the Protestant population of Ireland originally, now more concentrated in Ulster, the Protestant population took to this man and saw in him a representation of all that was best in their view and all that could be idealised. The popular iconography of William III depicts William on his white horse, sewered outstretched towards the Jacobite enemy, charging across the River Boyne. First of all the point about the white horse, we don't really know what colour of horse William rode across the Boyne. The second point that one would want to make is that in crossing the Boyne, William's horse, of whatever colour, got stuck in the mud. William, in many respects, was a physical wreck. He suffered from asthma. If he was not actually a hunchback, he was the next best thing to being a hunchback. He's an icon to many. He's a major figure and he's obviously the person that Orange Brethren look to as the leader of this movement that helped to change the course of history.