Nederlandse historische bronnen 10

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Some unpublished letters from Prince William III to Sir William Temple (1671-1681)
Edited by K.H.D. Haley

I Introduction

In a letter-book in the Temple papers (now in the Library of the University of Southampton)¹ there are copies of forty-one private letters from William III to Sir William Temple, of which only two were printed from other versions by N. Japikse in his edition of the Correspondentie van Willem III en van Hans Willem Bentinck (Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, Kleine serie, vols. 23, 24, 26, 27, 28; The Hague, 1927-1937). Since such a batch of William's letters to a personal friend is rare, they are valuable for the light which they throw on his personality and relationship with Temple as well as for the information which they give on William's policies at the time of the Exclusion Crisis in England.

The letter-book in question was obviously intended for use in preparing the publication of Temple's Letters which was seen through the press by Jonathan Swift in three volumes in 1699-1703. Most of the selection of letters written by miscellaneous correspondents (not including William) to Temple in the years 1665-1668 were printed with minor omissions and amendments, in the first of those volumes. A smaller number of letters written to Temple in 1668-1671 (not, however, including letters 1-3 from William, printed below) appeared in the second volume, but very much as an appendage to Temple's own more numerous letters. The third volume, covering a later period down to the year 1679 contained none of the letters originally copied into the letter-book for publication; by that time Swift's interest was obviously only in the letters which Temple had himself written. Amongst the letters which never saw the light were an isolated one of William's, number 4 below, which was however printed by Japikse, and a complete section of the letter-book entitled ‘Letters from the Prince of Orange with his own hand’. One of them, number 5 below, was printed by Japikse from another version; the remainder, including two from 1677 and the remainder from 1679-1681, are given as numbers 6-41 below.

In the last period of two years William wrote to his friend on average once every three weeks. It is not to be supposed that he did not write at other periods as well, especially when Temple was in England; even when Temple was ambassador in The Hague, there must have been times when William was away on campaign or at Dieren and the two men needed to communicate. But when selecting letters to be copied with a view to publication, from a mass of papers which do not now

1 Broadlands MSS, BR 1/6, inscribed ‘Letters to me’ in Temple's hand.

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8 Sir William Temple (1628-1699). Painting attributed to Lely c. 1660.
National Portrait Gallery, London

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survive, Temple naturally chose to use principally those which best illustrated William's reliance upon him, and those were mainly the important series, addressed to him when he was a Privy Councillor in 1679-1681 and it was most important to William to have a confidant within the Privy Council. At that time the attempt of the Whigs to exclude James, Duke of York, from the succession to the English throne affected the prospects of William and his wife Mary, James's elder daughter. More immediately, there seemed to be a possibility that Charles II and his ministers would be drawn into a guarantee of the Nimwegen peace settlement or even into a defensive alliance which would hinder further French encroachments.

The confidential relationship between the two men which made the correspondence possible is a remarkable one, hitherto known to us largely from the Temple side in his Letters and Memoirs². When Temple paid his first visit to The Hague in September 1667 William was absent; he saw only Johan de Witt and formed a strong liking for him. When he negotiated the Triple Alliance with the Pensionary in January 1668 he took care not to arouse jealousies by frequenting the Orangist Court. Consequently when William made his famous journey to Middelburg to become First Noble of Zealand in September 1668, Temple was thought not to have had previous knowledge of it because he lived on terms of too great confidence with De Witt³, and he was indeed critical of the Prince's action. Thereafter he soon came to have a better appreciation of the young Prince's qualities, and when his sister Lady Giffard came to write a short Life of her brother she was right to credit him with considerable skill and tact for successfully living on cordial terms with William and De Witt at the same time. When his first embassy came to an end in the summer of 1671, William sent his personal regret, with promises of continued friendship, and undertook to send a portrait of himself (letter 3 below). On Temple's return after the war of 1672-1674, passing through Brussels he was slightly disconcerted to find that William would not take the time to see him, but this was immediately before the battle of Seneffe. Before very long the Prince was on terms of even closer friendship with him and Lady Temple than before. According to Lady Giffard he was fond of

eating their plain way ... [and] grew into so easy and familiar conversation in his [Temple's] family that he constantly dined once and commonly supped twice a week at his house, while he was at The Hague⁴.

2 There are several editions of these. The Letters include, besides many reports of conversations with the Prince, eight letters to him before 1679; a further eight, with one exception in 1679-1680, are in Groen van Prinsterer, Archives de la Maison d'Orange-Nassau, 2nd Series, V, and there is one letter, dated June 28, 1681 in: Dalrymple's Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, II, Appendix to Part I, 3-5.

3 Wicquefort, 20 Sept., Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS 75 c8, f. 97.

4 Moore Smith, The early essays and romances of Sir William Temple, 17.

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It was Lady Temple who was commissioned to return to London and see whether Princess Mary was of suitable ‘humour and dispositions’ for a man who knew that he ‘might, perhaps, not be very easy for a wife to live with’⁵.

At first sight the friendship which grew up between the two men may well appear surprising, because (apart from good plain English cooking) they had few tastes in common. Temple had no interest whatsoever in hunting or in the battlefield; William was not exactly bookish. One may suspect that his intellectual interests may have been underrated, but certainly his letters contain no allusion to authors, whether ancient or modern. No doubt like all gentlemen of the age they were interested in building, and in gardens; and Temple's instructions prescribed, and self-interest counselled, an attempt to form intimate relations with a prince of the blood who was so close to the English succession. William on his side had every incentive to seek to attract Charles II into an anti-French coalition, and therefore to be on good terms with his ambassador. But fundamentally the relationship was closer than that would imply. William could relax in the Temple household as he could not so easily do elsewhere. Old enough to be the parents of whom the young Prince had been deprived, the Temples had naturalness, informality, charm, and no obvious axe to grind; while they saw the young man as serious-minded, responsible, hemmed in by difficulties and perhaps lonely. From this relationship sprang William's personal letter of condolence to Temple on the death of his thirteen-year-old daughter Diana (letter 13), a letter which sprang from knowledge of the girl and appreciation of what the loss would mean to her father. The postscript to another letter refers to the death of the page whom Lady Giffard had left behind (letter 35). But the whole series, in spite of its predominantly political content, breathes a desire to exchange views without ceremony, and always with the expectation of getting an honest reply without flattery.

In politics the two men shared the view that it was in the interests of both countries, and indeed all Europe, to resist the expansion of France; perhaps their sympathy on this point was all the greater because each knew that the other's view of the French danger was not equally appreciated by all his compatriots. It is striking how William turned to those English politicians who were pointed out to him by Temple. When he visited England in 1670-1671 he did not stay with Temple's patron Arlington at Goring House as he had first intended, having instead to stay at Whitehall, but it was noticed how often he dined there. From 1674 to 1679 there was the Earl of Danby, the cousin of Lady Temple, and it was he whose influence obtained the King's consent to the marriage of William and Mary. The Earl of Halifax was another friend of Temple's who, though he had an antipathy to Danby, and did not like him share in the Revolution of 1688, was employed by William III in the 1690s. And the family connection between the Temples and the Sidneys which dated back to the time of Sir Philip Sidney's death in the arms of his secretary, an earlier William Temple, at Zutphen in 1586,

5 Temple, Works (1754 edn.) I, 255-257.

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produced a close friendship between Temple and Henry Sidney, who succeeded him as ambassador at The Hague and as William's friend; while Henry's sister Dorothy, whom Temple had once admired, was also the mother of the Earl of Sunderland, Secretary of State in 1679-1681 and again adviser to William III from 1693. It was to such people, rather than to opposition peers like Shaftesbury and Buckingham, that William's attention was diverted.

When, after the Peace of Nimwegen had been completed, Temple was recalled to London in February 1679 (after letter 9 below), William could hope to have in Charles II's counsels both a confidential correspondent and an ally who would press for England at least to join the States General and other European powers in guaranteeing the Nimwegen peace settlement. Though Temple evaded the Secretaryship of State which was pressed upon him, it was Sunderland who filled the vacant post; it was Temple's scheme for a reorganisation of the Privy Council which was adopted, and Temple was one of the new Council's members. Sunderland was allowed to proceed with negotiations which might serve the domestic purpose of removing the Whig imputation that the government was pro-French and its Protestantism suspect. After a scare that Amsterdam and the States might be tempted back into a Franco-Dutch alliance, these developed into proposals for a general defensive alliance. This is one obvious theme which can be followed in this correspondence.

Temple however rapidly became disillusioned about the prospects of reaching such an alliance. Reading between the lines, it is possible to suspect that he was not confident of his master's sincerity and determination to reach it; but also he rapidly despaired of the harmony between King and Parliament which he had always declared to be indispensable if England was to pursue any effective foreign policy.

The intractable issue here was that of the succession to the throne. Following the Popish Plot agitation, Charles had found it advisable to ask James to go into temporary exile in the Low Countries (where he visited William and Mary) but this did not deter the majority in the House of Commons from voting for an Exclusion Bill in May 1679. If it had become law this would have been prevented James from succeeding, without making it clear whether his daughter Mary would inherit, or whether Charles's son, the Duke of Monmouth, would be declared legitimate and have the prior claim, debarring William's wife as well as James from the succession. William had to hope for the preservation of Mary's ultimate rights, while keeping on good terms both with Charles and James (his wife's father) whose help he needed if the alliance immediately under negotiation was to come off; at the same time he knew that Charles was fond of Monmouth, and that only agreement between King and Commons would make such an alliance effective. It is not surprising that he sought to avoid committing himself for as long as possible, and valued the information and advice which a friend like Temple could provide. This may be taken as the second theme of the correspondence.

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Already in June 1679 Temple was discontented when Charles prorogued Parliament without adequately consulting the Privy Council of which he was a member, and in the autumn, when a new House of Commons had been elected, Charles refused to meet his Parliament for twelve months. Temple had always had an ambivalent attitude to the calls of politics and those of his garden and study (particularly when politics were not going the way that he wanted); he began in the autumn of 1679 to absent himself from meetings of the Privy Council, and it was largely William's persuasion (see letter 29) and William's interests which kept him there. When in the autumn of 1680 Sunderland and Sidney tried to persuade William to come to London to intervene personally in the crisis caused by the meeting of the second Exclusion Parliament, William set out his attitude in his important letter of December 1680 (letter 39) which explained that he would like to come but not until ‘the Duke's affairs’ were over; he hoped that some expedient would be found to bring about a good understanding between King and Parliament, but emphatically not on the basis of limitations on the royal authority. Perhaps William would have intervened had Parliament lasted longer, but it was dissolved in January 1681, and Temple was (without reluctance on his part) put out of the Privy Council, while other ‘Williamite Exclusionists’, notably Sunderland, also suffered. In the last letter of the series (letter 41) William sincerely regretted this, and expressed the fear that Temple had suffered for being his friend; ironically, a decade earlier some had said that he had suffered for being too much the friend of De Witt.

In evaluating the letters it is necessary to bear in mind that they were written in the knowledge that they might be opened in the post and read by others. This is clear not only from inferences from the content, and from explicit statements that in conversation William could have said more than he dared to trust to the paper (see, for example letters 36 and 39), but also from his use of a groom of his own to carry an especially confidential letter (letter 29). The letters are reproduced here exactly as they were copied into Temple's letter-book, with William's usual execrable French, perhaps augmented by further errors of the copyist. There are occasions to be found where the copyist omitted words, perhaps because he found William's handwriting indecipherable; these are all indicated in the footnotes.

The letters are all dated in the New Style calendar habitually used by William, but in the footnotes events and letters written in England are dated in the Old Style customarily used there, followed by the letters OS to remind the reader of the ten days' difference. The letters are published by kind permission of the Trustees of the Broadlands Archives, and I gladly acknowledge the assistance of the staff of the Hampshire Record Office in obtaining access to them.

Though the late Professor Daan J. Roorda of Leiden University did not live to see them, I recall with pleasure his friendship and many conversations on William III, and find it appropriate to dedicate the publication to his memory.