William II of the Netherlands

Biography

William II was born in The Hague in 1792, the eldest son of the future King William I and Wilhelmine of Prussia. When French troops overran the Dutch Republic in 1795 his family fled to England, and he grew up at the Prussian court in Berlin, where he had a military education and served in the Prussian army, before studying civil law at Christ Church, Oxford.

He joined the British Army and from 1811 served as aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War, fighting at Badajoz and Salamanca. In 1815, aged 22, he commanded the I Allied Corps at Quatre Bras and Waterloo, where a musket ball wounded him in the shoulder. As Prince of Orange and heir to the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, he married Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna, sister of Tsar Alexander I, in 1816.

Popular in the southern provinces, he tried to broker a settlement when the Belgian Revolution broke out in 1830, proposing autonomy under the House of Orange, but his father rejected his terms. In 1831 he led the Dutch army in the Ten Days' Campaign, which was halted by French intervention.

He became King of the Netherlands and Grand Duke of Luxembourg when his father abdicated in October 1840. Faced with the revolutions of 1848, he turned to reform and had a committee led by Johan Rudolf Thorbecke draft a new constitution that made ministers answerable to an elected parliament, the foundation of Dutch parliamentary democracy. He died suddenly at Tilburg in March 1849.