The Question:
In America there is Orange County, NY, named after Ulster Scots.
In Northern Ireland, there's the Orange Order. In England, there was
William of Orange.
However, England doesn't grow oranges. What Orange was William
of? How did it get its name? Do they actually grow oranges
there?
The Answer:
The William of Orange you're probably referring to (there were
several) is William
III, who, though he became King of England, Scotland, and
Ireland, was actually not English but Dutch. He was born in the Hague,
Netherlands, in 1650. In 1688, seven English nobles invited the
Protestant William, who had previously married England's Princess
Mary, to wrest the
English throne from her father, the unpopular and Catholic King James II. Marching on
London with an army of 15,000 William met with virtually no
opposition. The crown thus changed hands without bloodshed in what
came to be known as the Glorious
Revolution.
The Orange in William's title referred not to the fruit or the
color, but to a region of
Southeast France that was among William's family holdings. It
is likely that the citrus fruit, which was of Chinese or Indochinese
origin, inherited its western name from this area, in which it was
grown.
For more information on oranges (the fruit), check out a brief
history of them at Sunkist.com,
or go to The Ultimate
Citrus Page.
—The Editors
Information Please® Database, © 2007 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
