ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that William succeeded in taking the tension out of English constitutional conflict. It also argues that it was his European experience and focuses which allowed him to do this. The chapter suggests that it took someone who was an Orange rather than a Stuart to get monarchical republicanism to function, and someone fixated on the continent rather than England to solve the country's troubles. Partly, this argument will be based on the distance which William's upbringing gave him from English paranoias. William's first and most important advantage as a constitutional arbiter was that his political priority was the defeat of France rather than the preservation of the royal prerogative. William's second qualification as a physician of the English constitution was that he was far less suspicious of representative assemblies than his predecessors. William's third continental advantage, his ability to present himself as a truly Protestant ruler, might seem surprising.
