Lisa Jardine - The Awful End of Prince William the Silent - The First Assassination of a Head of State with a Hand-Gun

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.