Portrait of Willem Hyacinth (1666-1743)

When King William III of England died childless in 1702, several princes put in claims to his inheritance, and Willem Hyacinth of Nassau-Siegen was one of them. He was a Catholic German prince, born in Brussels, and as one of William's nearest male relatives he hoped above all for the principality of Orange. He lost. Louis XIV would not accept him, and the peace of 1713 left Orange in French hands.

Things went no better at home. In 1707, after he had a suspected leader of a revolt among his subjects beheaded without trial, Emperor Joseph I took his principality from him. He spent his last decades as a pensioner at the court of a cousin in Hadamar and died there in 1743, the last of his line. His lands then passed to William IV of Orange, and this portrait probably did too. It went down to William IV's son, William V, and it belongs to the Mauritshuis, which shows it in the Gallery Prince Willem V in The Hague, the picture gallery William V himself opened.