Humanly speaking, however, his prospects did not appear to brighten before him as years went on. At the age of ten he lost his mother, who had gone to England to visit her brother, just restored to the throne, and was there carried off by an attack of smallpox. In the same year he saw his principality of Orange forcibly seized by Louis, who, after demolishing its fortifications, held possession of it for five years, surrendering it only in 1665. Then came the war of that year between England and the Dutch Provinces, a conflict which his party temporarily conceived the hope of turning to their own profit, but which left them ultimately in a worse plight than before; for no provisions in the Prince's interests were insisted on by his uncle, Charles II., in the Treaty of Peace, and, under the instigation of De Witt, the States of Holland and West Friesland subsequently passed a perpetual edict suppressing the office of Stadtholder. A faint effort was made by Charles II. through Sir William Temple to vindicate the rights of his nephew, but the efforts of the ambassador were coldly received by the Pensionary, and the matter dropped. De Witt now pushed his hostility yet further, and the States resorted to the ignoble and ungrateful measure of calling upon the young Prince to quit the house at the Hague which, though technically the property of the States, had been for many years the official residence of his family. To the Pensionary, who was charged with the communication of this order, William replied by a spirited refusal, directing his visitor to inform the States that he would not quit the house unless removed by force; upon which his persecutors, apprehensive no doubt of the odium which such a step would excite among the common people, who were many of them well affected to his historic family, allowed their demand to lapse. William, now eighteen years of age, determined to make a counter-move on his own part, and presenting himself before the assembly of the States of the province of Zealand, he proposed to them to elect him first noble of that province, a dignity which they had been wont to confer upon his ancestors at his then age. The Zealanders complied readily with the request, though they did not proceed, as had been expected, to elect him to the higher office of Stadtholder of the province; and except by entitling him to a seat in the States General as representative of the nobility of Zealand, the minor honours procured him nothing but the increased jealousy and suspicions of the party of De Witt. Sir William Temple, then ambassador at the Hague, with whom the Prince came into contact at this time, characteristically reports of him in his Letters as a "young Man of more Parts than ordinary and of the better Sort; that is, not lying in that kind of Wit which is neither of use to one's self nor to anybody else, but in good plain Sense which showed Application if he had business that