William I of the Netherlands

William I of the Netherlands (Dutch, Willem Frederik) (1772-1843), king of the Netherlands and Grand Duke of Luxembourg (1815-1840), born in The Hague. He was the son of Prince William V of Orange, the last hereditary stadtholder of the United Netherlands. In the War of the First Coalition against revolutionary France, William commanded the Dutch army from 1793 until 1795, when his country was overrun by the French. He afterwards lived in England and Germany, returning to the Netherlands in 1813. The Treaty of Paris (1814) provided that the Netherlands and Belgium should be united into a single kingdom, and William was proclaimed its first king. In 1815, by decision of the Congress of Vienna, he ceded his hereditary properties in Germany to Prussia, receiving in exchange the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. William soon estranged his Belgian subjects by his discriminatory policies, and he was unable to prevent the secession of Belgium in 1830. He abdicated in favour of his son, William II, in 1840 after repeated demands by his Dutch subjects for a liberalized constitution. Despite his reactionary policies, William greatly encouraged the agricultural and industrial development of the Netherlands.