a statesman of scarcely less ability than his father, though of a far more chequered fame. Under Maurice the power of the Stadtholder or Governor was, in spite of the jealousy with which it was regarded by the burgher party, considerably advanced, and he was not without reason suspected of the design of making himself an absolute ruler. Dying without issue, he was succeeded by his brother Frederick Henry, another renowned captain, under whom the long struggle with Spain was at last brought to a close by the renunciation, in the Treaty of Westphalia, of the Spanish claim upon the United Provinces. William II., the son of Frederick Henry, was born in 1626, and succeeded his father at the age of twenty-one. Endowed with all the restless activity and ambition of his uncle, he attempted, in prosecution of the same monarchical designs as that prince, to seize the city of Amsterdam by a _coup de main_. The project, however, was defeated, and William, after a troubled reign of only four years, was fatally attacked by the smallpox, and died on the 27th of October 1650, leaving no issue. Eight days after his death, however, his widow, Mary, daughter of Charles I., gave premature birth to the son whose career it is in these pages proposed to trace. Seldom has a new-born child been the object of such diverse emotions, the centre of so many conflicting hopes and fears among its countrymen as was this infant Prince. To the partisans of the House of Orange he appeared as the God-sent heir--an earlier _enfant du miracle_ vouchsafed by Providence to save the great race of William the Silent from extinction in the male line. To the party of the municipal oligarchy he presented himself as the probable inheritor rather of the ambitions of his father and his father's uncle, than of the virtues of his great-grandfather. The latter party, who for the moment had the upper hand, were fully resolved that the young Prince should never wield as much power as that which Prince Frederick Henry had sought during his four years' reign to abuse. The party of the infant Prince, on the other hand, a party headed by the Princess Dowager and her mother, made up as far as possible for the lack of direct and political power by incessant and indefatigable intrigue; and to their efforts it was that the Pensionary De Witt, the representative of the municipal party, ascribed, and not without reason, the war which broke out between the States and the Rump Parliament in 1651. Its effect, however, was temporarily disastrous to their ambitions; for, the United Provinces being compelled to solicit peace from Cromwell, the Lord Protector, who was naturally opposed to the elevation of a family allied by marriage to the exiled Stuarts, compelled the States of Holland and West Friesland, as a condition of his ratifying the articles of peace, to pass a decree that "they would never elect the Prince or any of his lineage Stadtholder of