Theodore now divided Wilfrid's large diocese into three; and the aggrieved prelate went to lay his case before the bishop of Rome. On his way a west wind drove him to Friesland, where he evangelized the natives and prepared the way for Willibrord (q.v.). Late in life he ordained Suidbert bishop of the Frisians. A synod held at Rome under Agatho (680) ordained his restitution; but even this decision could not prevent his being cast into prison on his return home. When released he wandered first to Mercia, then to Wessex and finally to Sussex. Here he rescued the pagan folk, from an impending famine, sent preachers to the Isle of Wight and founded a monastery at Selsey. After Ecgfrith's death (20th May 685) Wilfrid was restored to York, (much circumscribed), and Ripon (686–687). He was once more driven out in 691–692, and spent seven years in Mercia. A great council of the English Church held in Northumbria excommunicated him in 702. He again appealed to Rome in person, and obtained another decision in his favour (703–704). Despite the intercession of Brihwald, archbishop of Canterbury, Aldfrith king of Northumbria refused to admit the aged prelate into his kingdom till his last illness (705). This year or the next a council was held near the River Nidd, the papal letters were read, and, despite the opposition of the bishops, Wilfrid once more received the abbeys of Ripon and Hexham. Not long after he died at Oundle in Northamptonshire as he was going on a visit to Ceolred, king of Mercia (709). He was buried at Ripon, whence, according to Eadmer, his bones were afterwards removed to Canterbury.
Wilfrid's is a memorable name in English history, not only because of the large part he played in supplanting the Celtic discipline and in establishing a precedent of appeal to papal authority, but also by reason of his services to architecture and learning. At York he renewed Paulinus's old church, roofing it with lead and furnishing it with glass windows; at Ripon he built an entirely new basilica with columns and porches; at Hexham in honour of St Andrew he reared a still nobler church, over which Eddius grows eloquent. In the early days of his bishopric he used to travel about his diocese attended by a little troop of skilled masons. He seems to have also reformed the method of conducting the divine services by the aid of his skilled chanters, Ædde and Æona, and to have established or renewed the rule of St Benedict in the monasteries. On each visit to Rome it was his delight to collect relics for his native land; and to his favourite basilica at Ripon he gave a bookcase wrought in gold and precious stones, besides a splendid copy of the Gospels.
Wilfrid's life was written shortly after his death by Eddius at the request of Acca, his successor at Hexham, and Tatbert, abbot of Ripon—both intimate friends of the great bishop. Other lives were written by Frithegode in the 10th, by Folcard in the 11th, and by Eadmer early in the 12th century. See also Bede's Hist. Eccl. v. 19, iii. 25, iv. 13, &c. All the lives are printed in J. Raine's Historians of the Church of York, vol. i. “Rolls” series.
WILHELMINA [Wilhelmina Helena Pauline Maria of Orange-Nassau] (1880-), queen of the Netherlands, was born at the Hague on the 31st of August 1880. Her father, William III. (Willem Paul Alexander Frederik Lodewijk), had by his first wife, Sophia Frederika Mathilde of Württemberg, three sons, all of whom predeceased him. Having been left a widower on the 3rd of June 1877, he married on the 7th of January 1879 Adelheid Emma Wilhelmina Theresia, second daughter of Prince George Victor of Waldeck-Pyrmont, born on the 2nd of August 1858, and Wilhelmina was the only issue of that union. She succeeded to the throne on her father's death, which took place on the 23rd of November 1890, but until her eighteenth year, when she was “inaugurated” at Amsterdam on the 6th of September 1898, the business of the state was carried on under the regency of the queen-mother, in accordance with a law made on the 2nd of August 1884. On the 7th of February 1901 Queen Wilhelmina married Henry Wladimir Albert Ernst, duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (born on the 19th of April 1876). To the great joy of the Dutch people. Queen Wilhelmina, on the 30th of April 1909, gave birth to an heir to the throne, the Princess Juliana (Juliana Louise Emma Maria Wilhelmina). (See Holland: History.)
WILHELMINA (Sophia Friderika Wilhelmina) (1709–1758), margravine of Baireuth, was born in Berlin on the 3rd of July 1709, the daughter of Frederick William I., crown prince, afterwards king of Prussia, and of Sophia Dorothea, daughter of the elector of Hanover (George I. of England). Wilhelmina shared the unhappy childhood of her brother, Frederick the Great, whose friend and confidante she remained, with the exception of one short interval, all her life. Sophia Dorothea wished to marry her daughter to Frederick, prince of Wales, but on the English side there was no disposition to make the offer except in exchange for substantial concessions, to which the king of Prussia was not prepared to assent. The fruitless intrigues carried on by Sophia Dorothea to bring about this match played a large part in Wilhelmina's early life. After much talk of other matches, which came to nothing, she was eventually married in 1731 to Frederick, hereditary prince of Baireuth. The marriage, only accepted by Wilhelmina under threats from her father and with a view to lightening her brother's disgrace, proved at the outset a happy one, though it was clouded at first by narrow means, and afterwards by the infidelities of the future margrave with Dorothea von Marwitz, whose ascendancy at the court of Baireuth was bitterly resented by Frederick the Great, and caused an estrangement of some three years between Wilhelmina and the brother she so devotedly loved. When Wilhelmina's husband came into his inheritance in 1735 the pair set about making Baireuth a miniature Versailles. Their building operations included the rebuilding of their summer residence, the Ermitage, the great Baireuth opera-house, the building of a theatre and the reconstruction of the Baireuth palace and of the new opera house. They also founded the university of Erlangen, the undertakings bringing the court to the verge of bankruptcy.
The margravine made Baireuth one of the intellectual centres of Germany, surrounding herself with a little court of wits and artists which gained added prestige from the occasional visits of Voltaire and Frederick the Great. With the outbreak of the Seven Years' War, Wilhelmina's interests shifted from dilettantism to diplomacy. She acted as eyes and ears for her brother in southern Germany until her death on the 14th of October 1758, the day of Frederick's defeat by the Austrians at Hochkirch. Her only daughter Frederica had contracted in 1748 an unhappy marriage with Charles Eugene, duke of Württemberg.
The margravine’s memoirs, Mémoires de ma vie, written or revised between 1748 and her death, are preserved in the Royal Library of Berlin. They were first printed in two forms in 1810—a German translation down to the year 1733 from the firm of Cotta of Tübingen; and in French published by Vieweg of Brunswick, and coming down to 1742. There have been several subsequent editions, including a German one published at Leipzig in 1908. An English translation was published in Berlin in 1904. For the discussion on the authenticity of these entertaining, though not very trustworthy, memoirs, see G. H. Pertz, Über die Merkwürdigkeiten der Markgräfin (1851). See also Arvede Barine, Princesses et grandes dames (Paris, 1890); E. E. Cuttell, Wilhelmine, Margravine of Baireuth (London, 2 vols., 1905); and R. Fester, Die Bayreuther Schwester Friedrichs des Grossen (Berlin, 1902).
WILHELMSHAVEN, or Wilhelmshafen, a town of Germany, and the chief naval station and war harbour of the empire on the North Sea, situated on the north-west shore of the Jade Busen, a large shallow basin formed by inundations and united with the sea by the Jade, a channel 3 m. long. Pop. (1885), 19,422; (1905), 26,012, of whom 8227 belonged to the navy or army. The ground on which it stands (4 sq. m.) was purchased by Prussia from the grand-duke of Oldenburg in 1853, when the Prussian navy was being formed. The construction of the harbour and town was begun in 1855, and the former was opened in 1869. Though reckoned a part of the Prussian province of Hanover it is completely surrounded on the landward side by Oldenburg territory. The town is laid out on a regular plan and ample scale, and the streets are wide and shaded with trees. The main thoroughfare is the Roonstrasse, which, running E. and W., passes the market-square, upon which stand the town hall and the post office. There are two Evangelical and two Roman Catholic churches, a gymnasium, schools for warrant officers and engineers and other naval educational institutions. The original harbour, constructed in 1855–1869, consists of an inner and outer basin. To the south-east of the inner harbour a large new harbour has been more recently constructed for war vessels in commission. This so-called new harbour (170
