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On 19 July 1572, in the midst of the struggle for Mons in Brabant, a political assembly was convened in Dordrecht of representatives of the north-western States of Holland – Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht, the territories largely secured by William of Orange as Protestant-supporting rebels against Spanish rule. William did not attend but was eloquently represented by Marnix. Marnix was a political theorist of distinction, who would in the course of a long career author a sequence of important republican-sympathising treatises on the limits of imposed rule. The speech he delivered at Dordrecht offered a considered version of the right of the Dutch people to revolt against tyrannical rule, and may be taken to mark the birth of the Dutch Republic as a reasoned rejection of Habsburg-imposed authority.
On the prince’s behalf Marnix fashioned William’s image for posterity as the defender of the right of all individuals to freedom of thought and worship. William vowed to the States of Holland, according to Marnix, ‘to protect and preserve the country from foreign tyrants and oppressors’. If the States of Holland would acknowledge him as their stadholder, he would lead the Netherlands out of political servitude, returning to them the historic ‘rights and privileges’ of the provinces and guaranteeing them freedom of worship – ‘the free exercise of religion should be allowed as well to Papists as Protestants, without any molestation or impediment’. As a piece of political propaganda William’s Dordrecht address was lastingly effective, and has coloured accounts of William the Silent as the heroic defender of freedom against tyranny ever since.
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William’s image as a ‘Christian soldier’, fighting for political freedom and freedom of worship on behalf of his oppressed people, was decisively sharpened by the behaviour of the Duke of Alva and his troops once Mons surrendered in mid-September 1572. As the revolt in Brabant crumbled, Mechelen, which had supported William, yielded to Alva without a struggle. To encourage the capitulation of other Orange-supporting towns, Alva nevertheless allowed his men to sack the city. On 14 November he did the same at Zutphen, where hundreds of the town’s population were massacred. Finally, on 2 December 1572 at Naarden, as Alva became impatient to engineer a general capitulation in the region before winter set in, he ordered the killing of every man, woman and child in the town.
As one historian of the period has written, ‘The slaughter at Naarden, in which almost the entire population perished, only a handful escaping in the dark across the snow, had a sensational effect on the popular imagination in the Low Countries, becoming a byword for atrocity and cruelty.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The ruthless and dogmatic way in which Alva imposed Spanish rule and the Catholic faith on the Dutch people clearly ran counter to any idea of consensual rule – government with the consent and in the interests of the country’s population.
REPUDIATING SPANISH RULE
Had Philip II decided to commit the entire massive might of the Spanish military machine to warfare in the Low Countries there is little doubt that the Dutch Revolt could have been crushed. But the Spanish king had other, equally pressing problems to deal with, and there were strong competing claims on his military forces and financial resources. Under the combined burden of paying for the war against the rebels in the Low Countries and that against the formidable navy of the Turkish Ottomans in the eastern Mediterranean, he found it increasingly difficult to raise the necessary credit from bankers outside Spain to pay his forces. In 1573 he recalled Alva from the Low Countries, replacing him with a new governor general who was encouraged to negotiate a peaceful settlement. The terms insisted upon by the rebels, with Prince William’s encouragement, however, included a commitment to limited monarchy, with the States General and provincial assembles sharing in government, and a clear statement of the right to free worship. Neither was acceptable to Spain, and hopes of peace evaporated.
Philip could now neither fund his Dutch operations nor disband his troops without payment. In the autumn of 1575 he ceased to be able to finance his mounting debt to his bankers in Genoa and was forced to suspend interest payments – effectively declaring bankruptcy. Royal finances in the Netherlands were completely paralysed. Philip’s governor general wrote from the Low Countries:
I cannot find a single penny. Nor can I see how the King could send money here, even if he had it in abundance. Short of a miracle, all this military machine will fall into ruins.
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In November a large, mutinous troop of Spanish soldiers – idle, unfed and unpaid – ran out of control and attacked Antwerp. Orange and his propaganda machine exploited to the full the revulsion felt at the slaughter, pillage and rape that followed in Europe’s greatest commercial and financial centre. The ‘Spanish Fury’ – a major and long-remembered atrocity – confirmed Philip II’s rule as that of a tyrant, legitimising armed uprising against him by many who might otherwise have remained obedient to him as their divinely-sanctioned sovereign.
Only for a brief period after Alva’s arrival in the Low Countries in 1568, when he succeeded in raising significant but deeply unpopular taxes from the Dutch to finance Spain’s military operations, did Philip have adequate resources for military success in one of his theatres of war. In 1571, thanks to Alva’s Dutch taxation, the King of Spain was able to send a massive fleet to the eastern Mediterranean and inflict a crushing defeat on the Ottoman navy at the Battle of Lepanto. Even so, the Turks made good their naval losses remarkably swiftly, forcing Philip to allocate an even larger share of his resources to the Mediterranean campaign in 1572, and requiring him to pressure Alva to raise even more revenues through taxation for his Dutch campaign, thereby making the Spanish regime yet more unpopular in the Netherlands.
(#litres_trial_promo) The arrival of the accomplished military commander Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, as Philip’s latest governor general in the Low Countries in 1579 brought an escalation in the scale of warfare and increased misery to ordinary Dutch people, but not the looked-for final victory for Spain. As Parma systematically regained control of key towns like Maastricht in the south, the northern provinces consolidated their alliance, and reaffirmed their commitment to William the Silent.
Yet in spite of strong support in Holland and Zeeland, and significant opposition to Spanish rule in Brabant, and although both groups looked to the prince for leadership against Philip II, William could not achieve lasting union between the two. In 1577 he moved his headquarters to Antwerp, where he cultivated local administrators assiduously in an effort to consolidate the Brabanters’ resistance, but failed nevertheless to broker an accord between the separate rebellions to collaborate in bringing Spanish rule in the Netherlands to an end. By 1580 a war-weary Prince William, who had by now exhausted most of his personal and family fortunes on financing the revolt, had become convinced that only by inviting in a foreign ruler acceptable to the people of the Low Countries could a stable solution to the conflict be engineered.
William now urged both rebel groups to offer sovereignty over the Netherlands to the Duke of Anjou, younger brother of the French King Henry III, who (having earlier dithered and procrastinated over his involvement) at last agreed to become titular ruler of the Low Countries. In January 1581 Anjou’s treaty of acceptance, in which he agreed on oath to abide by the privileges stipulated by the people of the Low Countries, was made public, and in return he was proclaimed ‘prince and lord of the Netherlands’ Six months later William succeeded in getting consensus among a significant number of provinces (loosely united under the title of the States General) on a treaty repudiating Philip II and his Spanish heirs in perpetuity, the so-called ‘Act of Abjuration’.
It was not, however, until February 1582 that Anjou arrived in the Netherlands. William played a leading role in the warm reception given to him. He was the first to honour the new ruler by kneeling before him as the duke stepped on to the quayside at Flushing on 10 February. William was also prominent when Anjou was installed as Duke of Brabant at Antwerp nine days later. After the duke had sworn the required oath, William laid the crimson mantle on his shoulders, saying as he fastened it: ‘My Lord, this mantle must be well fastened so that no one can tear it off Your Highness.’ Anjou then rode through the richly decorated streets with Orange at his left hand. Along the route, triumphal arches and processional floats had been set up, representing the role it was hoped Anjou would play as defender of the country against tyranny and restorer of its peace and prosperity. At William’s insistence no expense had been spared in celebrating Anjou’s ‘joyous entry’.
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To William’s profound disappointment, Anjou’s arrival did little to help build a more effective opposition to the Spanish forces, but instead widened the rift between Catholics and Protestants. Anjou’s own Catholicism and his insistence on public Catholic worship added to the widespread mistrust of his intentions, as did the fact that the duke had not after all brought with him the large army and financial aid that had been expected. On 18 March an unsuccessful attempt on William of Orange’s life was followed by violent reprisals against Anjou’s followers, who were believed to have conspired to kill the prince.
Undeterred, William, once he was on the road to recovery, pressed yet harder for consolidation of Anjou’s hold over Low Countries government. Anjou’s official installation went ahead on the Prince of Orange’s own insistence. If the purpose of the 1582 assassination attempt was to prevent the Franco-Dutch alliance, it failed, just as it had, remarkably, failed to end William’s life. It is hard at this point to see why William continued to press for Anjou’s settled sovereignty. According to his brother, Count John of Nassau, William believed that he could thereby engineer political confrontation between France and Spain, diverting Spanish forces and perhaps Parma from making continued gains in the Low Countries. But however strategically desirable, William’s dogged defence of Anjou was increasingly unpopular.
Meanwhile Anjou’s own frustration intensified as he awaited the required formal consent of the Dutch people. Finally, he took matters into his own hands. When military reinforcements arrived in January 1583 under their French commander he decided to take effective power over Brabant and Flanders by means of a military coup. Although William was warned by Duplessis-Mornay that Anjou was making treacherous plans to subvert his careful arrangements for the assumption of power, he chose to ignore him. Anjou entered Antwerp at the head of his troops, to the cry ‘Ville gagnée, vive la messe, tue, tue’ (‘The town is taken, long live the Mass, kill, kill’). He expected that his show of force would allow him to take the town without resistance. To his consternation, armed citizens blocked his way, and more than a thousand French troops, including many prominent noblemen, were killed as they fled; around a hundred citizens of Antwerp also lost their lives. After this ‘French Fury’ – which in its calculating callousness matched anything perpetrated by Alva or Parma in the name of Spanish rule – Anjou’s presence in the Netherlands was as much loathed and mistrusted as Philip’s had been.
Orange took no part in the defence of Antwerp, and was indeed implicated in Anjou’s attack. His fourth marriage, to Louise de Coligny on 12 April 1583, added to his growing unpopularity. Although she was the daughter of the great Huguenot commander assassinated at the outset of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, she was French by birth, and the union seemed to confirm William’s blind determination to forge lasting alliances between France and the Low Countries. In late July 1583, under mounting pressure, William withdrew to Holland, and took up residence in Delft. As confidence in his policy of support for Anjou seeped away, the prince’s loyal propagandists Marnix and Duplessis-Mornay quietly resigned and returned to their homes (Languet had died some years earlier). Anjou, chastened and dispirited by the fiasco of his second Antwerp entry, had meanwhile returned to France, leaving his French General Biron in charge of his troops. In June 1584, with negotiations still dragging on to determine the exact nature of Anjou’s sovereignty in the Low Countries, word came that he had died.
With no alternative candidate in sight, William was now persuaded to revive negotiations with the northern provinces for his own nomination to the title ‘Count of Holland and Zeeland’ – an idea first proposed in 1581, and which would have regularised his now anomalous position as unappointed stadholder. Negotiations over the fine print of such an arrangement were still in progress when, on 1o July 1584, William the Silent was shot and killed by an assassin in his Delft home.
WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE
A striking feature of William the Silent’s leadership of the Dutch Revolt is the significant part pamphlet publications by both sides played in the unfolding of events. A steady stream of passionate pleas on behalf of each party’s cause issued from European printing houses and circulated throughout Europe. Copies of a number of these survive in three or more languages (generally Dutch, French and English), thereby guaranteeing the broadest possible dissemination of the views expressed.
It is against this background of a propaganda war in which – unlike the war on the ground – the Protestant cause was winning hands down, that in 158o Philip II issued a proclamation inciting all good Catholics and all those loyal to the sovereignty of Spain to seek an occasion to kill William the Silent, and offering the successful assassin a reward of twenty-five thousand gold crowns, together with lands and titles. Like fatwahs before and since, the proclamation, which circulated widely in numerous European languages, was strategically counter-productive. The immediate response was the publication of William’s ‘Apology’ – a compellingly-written treatise in which the political theories of Marnix, Duplessis-Mornay and Languet fleshed out into respectability an open declaration of defiance of Spain and Spanish-imposed rule.
There is no doubt that William the Silent was the winner in this pamphlet war. Indeed, such has been the success of the picture painted by him, speaking in the first person (ghosted, probably, by Marnix, Villiers, Languet and Duplessis-Mornay), or by others speaking on his behalf, that it is hard to remember that at the time of his death William did not appear to all those around him as the irenic, tolerant and eminently reasonable man of the pamphlet characterisations. Nor did the Protestant cause he championed, and in which he remained resolutely supported by Queen Elizabeth I of England and her key ministers, Leicester and Walsingham, look as bright a prospect as it had in the 1570s.
On the contrary, by the time of William’s assassination many of those around him appear to have been ready to settle for peace at any price. For the first time pamphlets began to appear in which even convinced Protestants urged a reconciliation with Philip II. William himself wrote privately to the unwaveringly supportive Walsingham in January 1584 admitting that in spite of his bravado in public, his country was in a dreadful state:
I can assure you that the body of this state is much more gravely sick than appears on the outside, and that the evil has gone so far that the most vital organs have long ceased to function. I ask you to excuse me for so often behaving like the sick, who are ashamed to tell others of their complaints and even try to conceal them as far as they can from their doctors.
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By 1584, not only Philip II, but almost any of the other groups locked in struggle in the Low Countries could have conspired to have William the Silent dead, to end the political deadlock. A proposal to nominate him Count of Holland and Zeeland while Anjou was alive would have made him a barrier between the northern rebels and the new ruler, whom they did not trust to rule them as they wished. Even without that title, William’s position was anomalous, since after Anjou’s nomination as Lord he remained stadholder of the two provinces, but had not actually been appointed (or had his appointment ratified) by Anjou. After Anjou’s death his position continued to be constitutionally awkward. He was recognised and accepted as the States of Holland’s provincial ruler, but without appointment as such, and they continued to grant him political leadership or ‘high authority’. Following the Act of Abjuration, William was designated ‘sovereign and supreme head’ in Philip’s place, but ‘sovereign’ was carefully glossed as ‘having the High Authority and Government’ of the state.
(#litres_trial_promo) Like Yassar Arafat, William the Silent – once the beloved figurehead of the revolt or intifada – had become, by his anomalous political position, in the end a liability.
2 Murder Most Foul (#ulink_3b82a8cd-e0a6-5729-811f-a1d8976f30d7)
AT POINT-BLANK RANGE
JUST BEFORE TWO in the afternoon on 10 July 1584,
(#litres_trial_promo) William of Orange rose from dining with his immediate family in his Delft residence, the Prinsenhof, and prepared to withdraw to his private chambers upstairs. Leaving the table and crossing the hallway, he paused briefly to exchange pleasantries with three of the military men protecting him – an Italian officer named Carinson, and two English soldiers who had volunteered to fight for the Orange cause, Colonel Thomas Morgan and Captain Roger Williams. The prince took the Italian by the hand in a gesture of welcome; Roger Williams dropped to one knee, and the prince laid his hand briefly on his head.
As William turned and made to ascend the stairs, Balthasar Gérard, an agent recently recruited to provide intelligence on the activities of the enemy Spanish troops under the command of the Prince of Parma, stepped forward from the assembled company. Pointing a pistol at William’s chest, he fired at point-blank range. He had loaded his single-barrel handgun with three bullets. Two passed through his victim’s body and struck the staircase wall; the third lodged in William’s body ‘beneath his breast’. The prince collapsed, mortally wounded. He was carried to a couch in one of the adjoining rooms, where his sister and his distraught wife tried to staunch the wounds, to no avail. William the Silent died a few minutes later.
In the ensuing pandemonium, the assassin dropped his weapon and fled, pursued by Roger Williams and others from among the party of diners. Gérard was apprehended before he could escape over the ramparts behind the royal lodgings. Cross-questioned on the spot (and, one imagines, brutally manhandled in the process), he ‘very obstinately answered, that he had done that thing, which he would willingly do if it were to do again’. Asked who had put him up to the attack, he would say only that he had done it for his king (the Spanish king, Philip II) and his country; ‘more confession at that time they could not get of him’. Questioned again under duress later that night he told them that he had committed the murder at the express behest of the Prince of Parma and other Catholic princes, and that he expected to receive the reward of twenty-five thousand crowns widely advertised in Philip II’s denunciation of Orange as a traitor to Spain and a vile heretic.
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Subjected to extreme torture, Gérard steadfastly insisted that he had acted alone, refusing to name any co-conspirators or to implicate anybody else to whom he might have spoken in advance of his intended action. This act of assassination was, it appeared, the deed of a solitary fanatic, a loner with an intense commitment to the Catholic Church and a faithful upholder of the legitimacy of the rule of Philip II in the Netherlands, and so it was reported in the many broadsheets and pamphlets which circulated the news rapidly across Europe.
The accounts of the prince’s death rushed out in the hours following his assassination all stressed the deadly effectiveness of the assassin’s bullets by reporting that the victim had succumbed without uttering a single word. Five days after the event, England’s head of information-gathering, Sir Francis Walsingham, reported, on the basis of the intelligence gathered from his agents in the Low Countries:
On Tuesday in the afternoon, as [the Prince of Orange] was risen from dinner and went from the eating place to his chamber, even entering out of a door to go up the stairs, the Bourgonian that had brought him news of Monsieur [the Duke of Anjou] his death, making show as if he had some letter to impart and to talk with his Excellency, with a pistol shot him under the breast, whereof he fell down dead in the place and never spake word, to the wonderful grief of all there present.
Given the appalling blow the assassination dealt to Protestant fortunes in the Low Countries, however, more lurid versions of the stricken prince’s dying moments rapidly emerged. ‘Last words’ began to circulate, in which, with his dying breath, William lamented the disastrous impact his death would have on the United Provinces. The first English printed account of the murder stated that ‘the Prince fell down suddenly, crying out, saying Lord have mercy upon me, and remember thy little flock’. The Queen of England herself, sending her condolences to William’s widow ten days after the event, referred to similar sentiments she had been informed had come from the lips of the dying prince,
who by his last words, recommending himself to God with the poor afflicted people of those countries, manifested to the world his Christian determination to carry on the cause which he had embraced.
Protestants across Europe needed a narrative of calamitous upheaval, the world turned upside down, violent alteration and lasting damage to the cause. This iniquitous Catholic blow struck at the very heart of the prince’s ‘flock’ of feuding and disorganised northern Low Countries provinces; his ‘deathbed utterances’ acknowledged the impact his death was bound to have on the temporary and fragile accord William had managed to impose.
Similarly, early accounts rushed out in broadsheets and pamphlets insisted that the assassin, when seized, refused to speak, while others maintained that he cried out in cowardly fashion, ‘Sauve moi la vie, je conterai tout’ (Spare me and I will tell all), and others again claimed that he expostulated: ‘What is the matter, have you never seen a man killed before now? It is I who have done the deed and would do it if it were still to do again.’ ‘And they making him believe that the Prince was not dead, he regretted that more than the punishment which he should receive, and thus was led to prison.’
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Like tabloid newspapers’ reaction to a politically significant murder today, the sixteenth-century ‘press’ versions of the assassination and its consequences relished every ghastly detail and, where detail was lacking, invented it to increase the sensationalism of their accounts. Gérard’s bullets had cut down the one man capable of sustaining the fragile alliance among the Protestant provinces, each with its separate character and interests, opposed to Philip II in the Low Countries. Without him that accord crumbled and the Spanish regained a firm foothold in the territory. The idea that so drastic an act had been carried out by a stolid, unprepossessing nobody, and that its success had been in large measure the result of a grotesque bungling of the security around the Prince of Orange, was too awful to contemplate. No wonder sixteenth-century chroniclers and pamphleteers felt the need to put brashly unrepentant words in the assassin’s mouth.
WHO WAS THE ASSASSIN?