William IV, Prince of Orange
William IV was the first stadtholder of all seven provinces at once and the first to hold the office by inheritance, and he got it in a month in 1747 because a French army had crossed the border and the towns of Holland remembered that the last time that happened an Orange had saved them. He was born at Leeuwarden in September 1711, six weeks after his father John William Friso, the Frisian stadtholder and William III's heir, had drowned crossing the Hollands Diep. He grew up stadtholder of Friesland and Groningen with a curved spine and a good education while Holland and the great provinces governed themselves without a prince, as they had since 1702. In 1734 he married Anne, the eldest daughter of George II of Britain, which gave him a court and a claim on English attention. The War of the Austrian Succession brought the French into Dutch Flanders in April 1747, and the Orangist crowds of Zeeland, then Holland, then the rest, forced the regents of each province to name him stadtholder and captain-general within the month. The States-General made the offices hereditary in the male and female line in November, which was the end of the republic of regents in all but name. He was not the man for it. The tax riots of 1748 in Amsterdam, which wanted him to break the regents, he calmed and then disappointed. The reforms of the tax farms and the East India Company he began he did not finish, and the peace of Aachen the same year gave back what the French had taken without his having fought for it. He died at The Hague in October 1751 at forty, leaving a son of three and a regency under Anne, and the constitution he had been given passed to William V, who kept it until 1795.
- Lived: 1711 CE – 1751 CE
- Nationality: Dutch
- Roles: stadtholder
