The jury is still out on whether William was a great general. When he died in 1702, most contemporaries agreed that he was one of the great soldiers of his day. But later generations have not been so kind and it has often been said that he was a poor or unlucky general.

He rose to prominence through his spirited defence of his country from French attack in 1672, and over the next thirty years displayed impressive personal courage and organisational ability. His exceptional personal courage endeared him to his men; at the battle of Neerwinden in 1693 he personally led his men in ten separate charges against Louis XIV's Guards.

William was a soldier's soldier. He took a close interest in the welfare of his men, an interest which ensured that they were intensely loyal to him. He was also genuinely concerned to lessen the terrible burden of war upon the civilian population caught-up in the fighting.

On the minus side, though, he had not served a military apprenticeship before assuming command, and this probably accounted for strategic errors on the battlefield. Too often he got stuck into the fighting when he should have been in the rear making decisions for the battlefield as a whole.

William lost or drew more battles than he won, but he rarely ever faced his enemy with sufficient men or a united command. His greatness lay in his creation of a broad anti-French coalition which drew France, the great super-power of the age, into a series of long, costly, and ultimately futile campaigns.

Marlborough's famous victory over the French at Blenheim in 1704 was the vindication of Williams's strategy, and the great tragedy for William was that it came two years after his death.