The Awful End of Prince William the Silent

The First Assassination of a Head of State with a Hand-Gun

Lisa Jardine

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780007192588
• eBook ISBN: 9780007402779
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This edition contains a limited number of illustrations.

Please note that due to the level of detail, both the map and family tree are best viewed on a tablet.

A brilliantly detailed and gripping account of the assassination in 1584 of Prince William of Orange, and the shockwaves it sent through an age.

The illustrious ‘Making History Series’, edited by Lisa Jardine and Amanda Foreman, explores an eclectic mix of history's tipping points. In ‘The Awful End of Prince William the Silent’, series editor Lisa Jardine explores the historical ramifications of just such an instance, the first assassination of a head of state with a hand-held gun. The shooting of Prince William of Orange in the hallway of his Delft residence in July 1584 by a French Catholic – the second attempt on his life – had immediate political consequences: it was a serious setback for the Protestant cause in the Netherlands, as its forces fought for independence from the Catholic rule of the Hapsburg empire. But, as Jardine brilliantly illustrates, its implications for those in positions of power were even more far-reaching, as the assassination heralded the arrival of a lethal new threat to the security of nations – a pistol that could be concealed and used to deadly effect at point-blank range.

Queen Elizabeth I, William’s close Protestant ally, was devastated by his death and thrown into panic; in the aftermath of William's death, legislation was enacted in the English parliament making it an offence to bring a pistol anywhere near a royal palace. Elizabeth’s terror was not misplaced – as Jardine observes, this assassination was the first in a long and bloody line including those of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 and is all too relevant today.

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How the Prince of Orange Came to Have a Price on his Head

BECOMING A DYNASTY

THE PROTESTANT PRINCE who fell victim to a Catholic assassin’s three bullets in July 1584 had not been destined from birth to lead a nation. When William of Nassau was born in the castle of Dillenburg, in Nassau in Germany, in 1533, nobody could have imagined that he would one day become the greatest of all national heroes remembered in the Netherlands – Holland’s ‘pater patriae’, the ‘father’ of his adopted country, celebrated down to the present day in the rousing stanzas of the Dutch national anthem.⁶ The eldest son of William the Rich and Juliana of Stolberg, and a German national, William inherited from his father the comparatively modest title of Count of Nassau. But in 1544 his uncle René of Chalon, hereditary ruler of the small independent principality of Orange in southern France, died on the battlefield, leaving no direct descendants. Orange was a Habsburg possession. After delicate negotiations between the Habsburg Emperor Charles V (of whose extensive empire the Orange territory ultimately formed a part) and William’s father, the eleven-year-old William unexpectedly became heir to the Chalon titles. He was immediately removed from his family home and sent to reside at the ancient seat of the Nassau family in Breda in the Low Countries. From there he could be conveniently introduced into Charles V’s court at Antwerp, to be raised in a manner befitting the designated ruler of a Habsburg territory.

The suddenness of William’s elevation, at such a formative moment, left its lasting mark. Throughout his life his reputation was as a man of considered actions and a steady temperament – or, according to his enemies, a man who hedged his bets and would never speak his mind. In the public arena he displayed a combination of humanity, seriousness and personal restraint derived from his early modest upbringing, coupled with an easy ability to operate smoothly in the midst of all the magnificence of European court protocol and the procedural intricacies of diplomacy and power politics. His considerable skill as a negotiator depended on a relaxed familiarity with the forms and ceremonies of international power-broking, acquired during his period in the household of Charles V. Over and over again in the course of the ‘Dutch Revolt’ these were the skills needed to persuade ill-assorted parties to sign up to a political alliance, to retrieve lost ground by negotiation, or to gain time or a vital truce, in the all-too-evenly balanced conflict in which William became caught up – most probably against his better judgement – and which consumed the last twenty years of his life.

If William the Silent was not the kind of candidate we might expect for political leadership in the northern Netherlands, neither was he an obvious choice as the leading European protagonist on behalf of the Protestant cause. Although his family was Protestant, he himself was by no means a settled adherent to any sect of the reformed religion by birth or upbringing. One important outcome of the circumstances of his youth was William’s complicated attitude towards the religious disputes of the day. During his father’s lifetime, the house of Nassau moved closer to the evangelical Protestant princes in Germany. From puberty, however, amid the magnificence of the Catholic Antwerp court of Charles, where the Prince of Orange entered the Council of State on the succession of Philip of Spain as ruler in the Low Countries in 1555, and was elected a Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece by Philip in August 1559, it was assumed that William would uphold the Catholic confession of his Habsburg imperial masters. And indeed during his early tenure he showed no inclination to do otherwise.

When Charles V resigned the sovereignty of the Netherlands in 1555 in favour of his son Philip, the ageing Habsburg emperor gave his farewell address to the great assembly in Brussels leaning on the shoulder of Prince William, thereby proclaiming to the world the trust he placed in the young nobleman. Philip II in his turn appointed William governor general or ‘stadholder’ of the counties of Holland and Zeeland and the land of Utrecht (and other adjacent territories) in 1559, with the task of looking after Habsburg interests in the northern occupied Low Countries territories, and maintaining Philip’s ‘rights, highness and lordship’ there.

In spite of this careful grooming, William of Orange did not live up to the Habsburgs’ hopes for him as a loyal servant and administrator of their imperial rule. Instead, the care that had been taken with his upbringing, and the trust placed in him by Charles V, added emotional intensity to the later confrontations between William and Philip II. Philip considered that William had been privileged to have been succoured and supported by the Habsburgs. When the Prince of Orange subsequently became one of their most prominent and dangerous political opponents, the self-appointed defender of the Protestant faith in the Low Counties which the Habsburgs had pledged themselves to root out as a ‘vile heresy’, this was, for Philip, a personal betrayal.

The principality of Orange was, and is, of relatively small importance on the international scene. Then as now, its main claim to fame was its magnificent Roman amphitheatre and triumphal arch, which dominated the town. Nevertheless, it was William’s tenure of that Orange title which singled him out for leadership in the struggle of the Low Countries against the Habsburgs. The Princes of Orange were sovereign princes, and thus, in theory, William was of comparable rank to Philip II – King of Spain – himself. William always maintained that his status as prince removed from him the obligation to pay allegiance to Philip as ruler of the Netherlands. Contemporary political theory maintained that those subordinate to a reigning prince might not challenge his authority unless his rule amounted to tyranny. An equal prince, on the other hand, might voice concern without threatening the established hierarchy or sovereign entitlement to rule. In this respect William was unique among the Habsburgs’ provincial governors in the Netherlands and an obvious choice as spokesperson when it came to freely expressing opposition to the way the policies of the Habsburgs were being implemented by those locally appointed to administer the Low Countries territories.

In spite of his theoretically key political position, William for many years avoided any course of action that might set him on a collision course with Philip II. It was apparently this political reticence that led to William’s being dubbed ‘le taciturne’ (‘the tight-lipped’), in Dutch ‘de Zwijger’, which was turned in English into ‘the Silent’. The soubriquet suggested an irritating tendency in the prince to hold back from expressing his true opinions and a reluctance to take sides. It turned out to be particularly inappropriate as an enduring nickname for a man renowned in his everyday conduct of affairs in private and in public for his eloquence and loquacity.

Following the early death of William’s first wife,⁷ his second marriage to Anna of Saxony in 1561 was the first public intimation of his desire to distance himself from the Habsburg cause in the Netherlands, doctrinally and politically. Anna was the daughter of the staunchly Protestant Maurice of Saxony, who had died in battle fighting for the Protestant cause in 1553; her guardians were two of the Habsburgs’ most prominent opponents in Germany, Augustus, Elector of Saxony and Philip of Hesse (who had been held prisoner by Charles V for a number of years). As anticipated by both camps (Philip opposed the match), William and Anna’s marriage created a political focus for anti-Catholic feeling in the northern Netherlands, which came to a head in the mid–156os.⁸

The immediate issue which provoked confrontation between Philip II and the nobility in the Netherlands was the reorganisation of the bishoprics in the Low Countries undertaken in 1559, and designed to rationalise the existing system of Church authority. Under the reorganisation, direct responsibility for the Church and (above all) its revenues passed to Philip’s appointed regent Margaret of Parma and Antoine Perrenot, a prominent attorney from Franche-Comté and influential adviser to Philip II, who had been conveniently appointed Cardinal (at the request of the Habsburg administration), under the title of Cardinal Granvelle. In 1562 the Dutch nobility formed a league aimed at the overthrow of Granvelle (who had been appointed to the key bishopric of Mechelen), on grounds of his excessive zeal in persecuting Protestant heretics, and his complicity in eroding the nobility’s secular power and diverting their Church revenues.

Led by William of Orange, the Dutch nobles refused to attend any meetings of the Council of State until such time as Granvelle should be removed from office, thereby bringing the administration of the Netherlands to a standstill. Faced with what amounted to a boycott by the key local figures in the Low Countries administration, Philip withdrew Granvelle in 1564. The gesture, however, came too late to halt a growing tide of opposition against the strong-arm way in which the Low Countries were being run, particularly insofar as this involved a ruthless repression of all reformed religious observance which went beyond anything imposed in Philip’s Spanish territories.

At first William, with typical caution, held back from direct defiance of Spanish rule, and it was a group whose leaders included instead his brother, Count John of Nassau, which delivered a petition on behalf of the Dutch people to the regent, Margaret of Parma, in April 1566. Margaret responded by dispatching William of Orange (as local stadholder) at the head of an armed force to subdue the unrest and re-establish full Catholic observance in Holland and Utrecht. William, however, characteristically negotiated a compromise with the States of Holland at Schoonhoven, under which Calvinists – the radical wing of Protestantism – would be given limited freedom to observe their religion openly. This was a position he would take repeatedly in his negotiations over more than fifteen years with local provinces, and it does suggest that he did not consider the strict imposition of either Catholic or Protestant worship a matter of particular importance, temperamentally preferring a broad toleration (though whether for strategic reasons, or on grounds of his own moderate beliefs, is less clear). In 1566 his expressed opinion was that Catholics and Protestants ‘in principle believed in the same truth, even if they expressed this belief in very different ways’, and this was a view to which he remained committed, although he was unable to prevent those serving under him from taking more extreme positions with regard to the prohibition of alternative forms of worship.⁹

The Low Countries had had a long-standing and widespread commitment to the beliefs and forms of worship of the Reformed Church, beginning with Luther’s opposition to the established Church in the 1520s. The Dutch Revolt started in earnest in the mid-1560s with a spontaneous wave of anti-Catholic iconoclasm, subsequently encouraged by Calvinist outdoor preachers (‘hedge preachers’) who urged their congregations to cast down the idolatrous worship of Catholicism. Riots and the ransacking of churches and monasteries rapidly spread across the Netherlands. The uprising was put down with ruthless efficiency by forces sent by Philip from Spain under the Duke of Alva (Alba), who arrived as Philip’s commander-in-chief in 1568. Calvinist worship, hitherto a tolerated, alternative set of doctrines and practices to which the local authorities had largely turned a blind eye, was driven underground, and many leading Calvinist clergy and their supporters among the nobility fled the country.

Throughout the period of this first Dutch uprising William the Silent tried to maintain a careful balance between the demands of Spanish Habsburg-imposed rule and the commitments and beliefs of the Low Countries he had been nominated to represent as stadholder. Loyal to the Habsburgs who had raised him, he nevertheless sympathised with the broader inclusiveness of Low Countries religious observance and the aspiration of the Netherlanders to self-governance, free from the imposed regime and its foreign occupying troops. When eventually he came under too much pressure from Philip to submit to his authority and impose direct Spanish rule, he resigned his stadholderships and withdrew to his German Nassau territories.

In 1568, however, William of Orange found himself drawn into the Low Countries conflict. He had hoped that his withdrawal to Germany would be taken as a sign of deliberate neutrality. Instead, as part of a ferocious programme of reprisals against the iconoclastic rebellion, Alva’s Spanish forces confiscated William’s Dutch properties and his revenues. The Counts of Egmont and Hornes were arrested and summarily executed, along with over a thousand ‘rebels’. Both Egmont and Hornes had belonged to the ‘League of the Great’ which had engineered Granvelle’s removal, but unlike William they had not gone abroad as the Spanish grip on the Low Countries tightened. Finally, Alva also seized William’s eldest son (also named William) from the university of Leuven (Louvain), where he was studying, and took him as a virtual hostage to Spain. His father never saw him again. In spite of his father’s repeated attempts to get him back, he remained in Spain, to be raised as an obedient Catholic servant of the Habsburgs (after William the Silent’s death, the Dutch refused to acknowledge him as their next stadholder, and turned instead to his younger brother Maurice). Under these provocations, William crossed into the Low Countries from his base in Germany, at the head of an army subsidised by a number of his German neighbours.

William’s volunteer forces were no match for Alva and his Spanish army. In 1568 and again in 1570 his military incursions from his German territories were disastrous (Dutch historians refer to them as ‘débâcles’), not least because William could not raise the necessary finance from among his allies outside the Low Countries to pay his troops, and was increasingly hampered in his operations by threats of desertion and mutiny. On both occasions he was driven back by Alva, having only managed to secure a number of towns in Holland and Zeeland – the two north-western provinces which fronted the Netherlands coastline, providing control over sea-traffic in the North Sea (or, as the Dutch called it, the Narrow Sea). William’s success in obtaining control of Holland and Zeeland was, however, of enormous importance to England, since his domination of the coastline offered Protestant protection from the Spanish invasion the English feared constantly throughout this period. The English queen, Elizabeth I, though reluctant to be drawn into direct confrontation with Spain in the Netherlands, nevertheless provided a steady stream of soldiers and indirect financing for William the Silent’s Dutch Revolt, in her own interests.

A historical turning point for the Orange cause – though not military success – came in 1572. As so often in the story of the Dutch Revolt, the gains made by William the Silent (who on this occasion also was eventually forced to concede victory and withdraw) derived as much from political events outside the Netherlands as from the outcomes of specific battles and sieges within the provinces themselves.¹⁰ In May 1572 the strategically important town of Mons on the French-Low Countries border went over to the Protestant cause. Mons had been heavily fortified by Charles V as a border stronghold at the time of his wars against France. Its almost impregnable walls were now defended by Count Louis of Nassau and a group of supporters of the Orange cause, with the help of a contingent of French Huguenots (a total of around 1,500 troops) and about a thousand local Protestant supporters. An independent provincial government was set up in the town and Calvinist worship made legal (contravening the explicit prohibitions of Philip II and his Inquisition).

The French king, Charles IX – vacillating between Catholic and Protestant causes in his own civil-war-torn country – was known to be considering an invasion of the Low Countries in support of the Protestant Huguenot cause, with the strategic political objective of confronting Spain in the arena of the Netherlands. Alerted to this, and faced with the possibility of a full-scale invasion across the French border, Alva pulled most of his troops back from the heart of the revolt in the northern provinces of Holland and Zeeland, and massed them in Brabant at Mons, besieging the city. This was a shrewd move, even though it allowed Holland and Zeeland to consolidate their advantage in the north-west.

In mid-June, just before Alva’s blockade of Mons became total, Count Louis sent a messenger out of the city to urge the French Huguenots to carry out their promise and mount a massive invasion of the Netherlands in the name of Charles IX. On the advi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Map: The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century
• Family Tree: The House of Orange
• 1: How the Prince of Orange Came to Have a Price on his Head
• 2: Murder Most Foul
• 3: A Miraculous Escape
• 4: The Wheel-Lock Pistol – Killing Conveniently
• 5: English Aftermath 1 – ‘She is a Chief Mark they Shoot at’
• 6: English Aftermath 2 – Pistols and Politics
• Finale
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Appendix 4
• Appendix 5
• Keep Reading
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Praise
• Also by the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher