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

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. 16

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.’ 17 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.

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. 18

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. 19 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’.