William V, Prince of Orange
William V was stadtholder for forty-four years, lost a war to Britain, was driven out of The Hague by his own citizens and put back by his brother-in-law's Prussian army, and left for England across the ice in January 1795 as the French came in, the last of the office. He was three when his father died in 1751 and eighteen when he took up the government in 1766, indecisive, conscientious and dependent on the Duke of Brunswick, who had run the regency and stayed to run him. He married Wilhelmina of Prussia, Frederick the Great's niece, in 1767, and she was the stronger. The republic went into the American war on the wrong side of Britain in 1780 by accident, through the discovery of a draft treaty between Amsterdam and the Americans, and lost the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War at sea and in the colonies while the fleet he was responsible for stayed in port. The Patriots, a movement of regents and burghers with Rousseau and militias, blamed him, took the town councils of Holland from 1785, and in 1787 stopped the princess at Goejanverwellesluis on her way to The Hague. Her brother Frederick William II sent twenty thousand Prussians in September to avenge the insult, the Patriot militias melted, and William was restored with a purge and an alliance with Britain and Prussia. It lasted seven years. The French republic declared war in 1793, Pichegru's army crossed the frozen rivers in the winter of 1794, and on 18 January 1795 the stadtholder took a fishing boat from Scheveningen to Harwich, and the Batavian Republic was proclaimed the next day. From Kew he wrote the letters that ordered the Dutch colonies to admit British troops, which cost the republic Ceylon and the Cape. He gave up the office in 1802 for compensation in Germany and died at Brunswick in April 1806; his son came home in 1813 as a sovereign prince and was king in 1815.
- Lived: 1748 CE – 1806 CE
- Nationality: Dutch
- Roles: stadtholder
