742 



HOLLAND 



fested against his measures. These were mainly 

 the maintenance of a standing Spanish army and of 

 the Inquisition both contrary to the laws and privi- 

 leges of the people, as well as to his own solemn 

 vows before ascending the throne. Orange tried to 

 persuade the king that he had nothing to do with 

 the resistance complained of, as the Estates were 

 acting on their own responsibility when they had 

 petitioned his majesty. Whereupon Philip seized 

 the Prince of Orange by the wrist, shaking it 

 violently, and exclaiming in Spanish, No los 

 Estados, ma vos, vos, vos ! ( ' Not the Estates, but 

 you, you, you ! ' ). The king on this memorable 

 occasion showed as much perspicacity as his reign 

 betrayed perverseness and perfidy. In William of 

 Orange, then only twenty-six years old and six 

 years his junior, Philip had truly recognised his 

 worst foe, his most dangerous opponent, and the 

 soul of the coining struggle against the royal 

 authority. The king's secret correspondence is 

 there to confirm this view. Born on 16th April 

 1533, William belonged to an ancient family ruling 

 a small principality in the south of France (see 

 ORANGE), but his ancestors, originally vassals of 

 the pope, had settled in the Netherlands, where 

 they occupied high functions under the princes of 

 the House of Burgundy. William had been a 

 favourite with Charles, whom he accompanied 

 everywhere. It was thus that William had been 

 able to acquire that profound knowledge of the 

 military art, and to grasp the intricacies of the 

 prevalent occult diplomacy in which he afterwards 

 proved himself such a consummate master. It was 

 while he was hunting with the king of France in 

 the Forest of Vincennes that Henry II. communi- 

 cated to William of Orange the fiendish plot France 

 and Spain had concocted to massacre all the Pro- 

 testants in both countries. Henry II. did not 

 know then the man to whom he had been so com- 

 municative : he had spoken to William the Silent. 

 The prince never betrayed the least emotion. He 

 buried in his bosom the project of a crime which, 

 although a devout Catholic himself ( though a 

 Protestant afterwards ), he had resolved to prevent 

 at all hazards. He saw the storm coming. He 

 determined to face it, to devote his fortune, his best 

 powers, and his life to the cause of the weak against 

 the strong, of the free against crushing despotism, 

 fighting Philip with his own weapons, and having 

 but one noble, self-sacrificing ambition the welfare 

 and the liberty of the people. 



There is no doubt that Philip was betrayed by 

 those in whom he had most implicit conhdence, 

 and that William of Orange knew of all the king's 

 intentions and movements. Thus he was aware 

 that Alva had collected an army in Italy by the 

 orders of Philip in order to extirpate an abominable 

 rebellion of heretics by sword, and re-establish the 

 Inquisition. The prince warned his friends Egmont 

 and Hoorn in good time against the imminent 

 danger ; but they heeded not what he said, and paid 

 for their folly on the scaffold of Brussels as soon as 

 Alva had arrived there with 10,000 picked troops 

 and had established his Council of Troubles. This 

 was no better than a council of butchers, and by 

 means of it 20,000 inoffensive burghers were hurried 

 to their doom. William escaped to Germany in 

 order to organise the national defence with his 

 brothers. But his task was well-nigh hopeless. 

 What could he do with a handful of half-paid and 

 under-fed hirelings? In 1572 the position of affairs 

 could scarce have been more desperate. The 

 Spaniards were absolute masters of the land, and 

 the people, crushed under a reign of bloody rapine, 

 had ceased to hope for deliverance, when the bold 

 capture of Briel, by the Beggars of the Sea, on the 

 1st of April 1572 a great date in Dutch history, 

 duly honoured in 1872 changed the whole aspect 



of affairs. They were marauders, those Beggars of 

 the Sea, desperadoes clinging to the broad, hospit- 

 able ocean, after having been driven from the land 

 by the Spaniard ; but they were also patriots who 

 had adopted as a title of honour the opprobrious 

 epithet 'that Berlaymont had given them when they 

 were petitioning the regent for the maintenance of 

 their rights, and they held Briel for ' Father 

 William.' Their daring capture became the sign 

 of a general revolt, and soon William the Silent 

 was again at the head of affairs, ' in the name of 

 the king,' still nominally maintained as the ruler 

 of the land. Orange's projects, which consisted 

 of a junction with the French Huguenots, were 

 indeed direfully frustrated by the butchery of St 

 Bartholomew. The southern portion of the Low 

 Countries could not be delivered from the 

 clutches of the enemy and were for ever lost to the 

 cause of freedom ; but the north continued the 

 struggle single-handed, and at last Alva had to 

 depart in disgust without having accomplished his 

 mission. His successors could do nothing to retrieve 

 Philip's fortunes or damp the inspiriting influence 

 which the heroic defence of towns like Haarlem, 

 Leyden, and Alkrnaar had infused into the burghers 

 of the new state. The military chest of the Spanish 

 commanders was always empty, as the Dutch, 

 masters on the sea, cut off all supplies, and revolts 

 were frequent among the Spanish soldiery. Ottavio 

 Farnese, Duke of Parma, who succeeded to the 

 lieutenancy in 1578, saw but one way of settling 

 the question, and that was the forcible removal of 

 William of Orange. Philip, who had held all along 

 the same sinister designs, was only too eager to 

 fall in with this plan. In June 1580 there appeared 

 that infamous nan, which declared William a 

 traitor, a miscreant, and an outlaw, putting a heavy 

 price upon his head ( 25,000 gold crowns ), and pro- 

 mising the king's pardon and titles of nobility to 

 whosoever might be found willing to rid the land 

 of him. William replied in his famous Apologie ; 

 but he was not able to cope with a royal assassin. 

 Numerous attempts against the prince's life were 

 made, and although they failed for a time, the 

 bravo's work was finally accomplished. Balthasar 

 Gerards, the miserable instrument of a royal mur- 

 derer, shot William dead with a pistol, purchased 

 with the very money the prince had given him by 

 way of alms to a ' poor Cafvinist. ' This took place 

 at Delft on 12th July 1584, near the top of a stair- 

 case which has been preserved in the same state 

 ever since. Gerards was arrested, tortured, and 

 finally put to death in an atrocious manner ; but 

 no expiation, however awful, could bring to life 

 again the noble patriot. 



The blow was crushing and irreparable, yet 

 William might have fallen at a moment even 

 more critical to Holland than July 1584. He did 

 not leave his country in a state of paralysed chaos. 

 The Union of Utrecht, accomplished in January 

 1579, had cemented the alliance of the northern 

 provinces banded together against the king of 

 Spain ; and the solemn declaration of July 1581, by 

 which the free Netherlands for ever renounced their 

 allegiance to Philip II., had virtually completed 

 William's task of deliverer. His manifesto of 

 renunciation and denunciation would alone have 

 sufficed to stamp him as a man of genius in the 

 eyes of posterity. It is a remarkably clear, bold, 

 and spirited defence of a people's rights against the 

 claimed rights of the anointed king at a time when 

 the former had been forgotten. Yet William's 

 doom, far from undoing his work, as Philip and 

 Parma hoped, only tended to make it more dur- 

 able. The bloody deed seemed to spur the whole 

 nation to a revolt fiercer than ever. Maurice 

 of Nassau followed in his father's footsteps, and 

 the successes of the Dutch, especially at sea, 



