William V, Prince of Orange, the last Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, was born in The Hague on 8 March 1748, the only son of William IV and Princess Anne.
His mother was the eldest daughter of King George II of Great Britain and Caroline of Ansbach, so when the French Army invaded the Netherlands in 1795 in support of the Batavian Revolution in Amsterdam, the Stadtholder and his family fled to protection of his uncle, King George III, in England. William V’s wife, Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia, was also a cousin of the king, so the family was welcomed with open arms.
The Dutch royals lived at Kew for more than a decade, and William V repaid King George III by penning the Kew Letters, which he wrote to:
the governors of the Dutch colonies, instructing them to hand over their colonies to the British “for safe-keeping.” Though only a number complied this contributed to their confusion and demoralisation. Almost all Dutch colonies were in the course of time occupied by the British, who in the end returned most, but not all (South Africa and Ceylon), first at the Treaty of Amiens and later with the Convention of London 1814.
In spite of his helpful surrender of Dutch property to the British, he nevertheless made himself very unpopular in England by his venal behavior and for sponging off the taxpayers in spite of his own ostentatious wealth, leading to his frequent skewering in the popular press. Famous Georgian cartoonist, James Gillray, was especially fond of mocking the Dutch moocher.
William V died on 9 April 1806 while visiting the Brunswick palace of his daughter Frederika Luise Wilhelmina and son-in-law, Karl Georg August, Hereditary Prince of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. He was unlamented by the British, although his grandson, known in the press as Slender Billy — the future William II of the Netherlands — gained a measure of popularity for his purported heroics during the Napoleonic Wars.
In 1813, the late William V’s son returned to the Netherlands and became the first Dutch monarch from the House of Orange, King William I. The following year the Dutch king’s heir, Slender Billy, was engaged briefly to George III’s granddaughter, Princess Charlotte of Wales. HRH Charlotte didn’t like Billy as much as her father did, however, and broke the engagement to marry a Lieutenant-General in the Russian cavalry, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld.