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

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 advice of his senior, Huguenot-sympathising military commander Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the French king acceded to the request. On 12 July Louis’ messenger, Jean de Hangest, lord of Genlis, left Paris with a force of around six thousand men. Five days later he marched straight into a Spanish ambush at St Ghislain, six miles south of Mons, and almost his entire force was destroyed either by the enemy troops or by the local peasants, for whom the French were still the traditional enemy.11

Charles IX, who considered the rout of troops sent on his express orders towards Mons (and surely betrayed into an ambush by Spanish-sympathising intelligencers in Paris) a political embarrassment, hastily tried to distance himself from Coligny’s support of the Orangists. On 12 August he instructed his ambassador in the Netherlands to deny his involvement:

The papers found upon those captured with Genlis [show] … everything done by Genlis to have been committed with my consent … Nevertheless, [you will tell the Duke of Alva] these are lies invented to excite his suspicion against me. He must not attach any credence to them … You will also tell them what you know about the enemy’s affairs from time to time, by way of information, in order to please him and to make him more disposed to believe in your integrity.12

To the French Catholic party, led by the Duke of Guise and backed by Charles IX’s mother Catherine de Medici, Gaspard de Coligny was directly responsible for the French humiliation at Mons. As the instigator of the continuing attempts to persuade the king to declare war on Spain on behalf of the Huguenots, and to engage with Alva’s forces in the Low Countries, he became the focus for the Guise party’s violent animosity. In August 1572, King Charles finally gave Coligny royal authorisation to invade the Netherlands. On the morning of 22 August there was a Guise-backed attempted assassination of Coligny, which failed when a musket-shot fired by Maurevel succeeded only in wounding the Admiral in the arm. The St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, which began on the night of 23 August, was a consequence of this failed assassination attempt. According to the papal envoy in Paris, reporting to the Vatican: ‘If the Admiral had died from the shot, no others would have been killed.’13 The opening move in the massacre was a second attempt on Coligny’s life. Having this time succeeded in stabbing him to death on his sickbed, Catholic supporters of the Guise faction went on to murder an estimated two thousand residents of Paris, including all the leading members of the Huguenot party and a number of notable Protestant intellectuals and public figures. The massacre continued in the French provinces well into October, and put paid once and for all to hopes of a major Huguenot force coming to the aid of the Protestant cause in the Low Countries.

William of Orange invaded the Duchy of Brabant from Germany on 27 August with a troop of twenty thousand men, still expecting to rendezvous with the promised French Huguenot army led by Coligny. News of Coligny’s assassination and the ensuing mass slaughter of Huguenots only reached him at Mechelen. It was a ‘stunning blow’, William wrote to his brother Count John of Nassau, since ‘my only hope lay with France’. Had it not been for the massacre, the combined Protestant forces would, William believed, have succeeded in relieving Mons and gaining the psychological upper hand in the conflict: ‘we would have had the better of the Duke of Alva and we would have been able to dictate terms to him at our pleasure’. On 24 September, having failed to break Alva’s grip on Mons, William told his brother that he had decided to fall back on Holland or Zeeland, ‘there to await the Lord’s pleasure’. A few weeks later he spoke gloomily of making his ‘sépultre’ (grave) in Holland.14 In fact he consolidated the rebel positions there, creating a reasonably secure base for the Orangist forces; he was right, though, in believing that he never would achieve the union of the north-western and south-eastern provinces in a single, Protestant state under his or any other leadership.

In spite of his own profound pessimism, and although history treats his first three campaigns as failed military operations, this was the moment when William the Silent began to be hailed within the Low Countries as the country’s hero and potential saviour. The creation in letters, pamphlets and speeches of a potent and lasting image of William the Silent as a man of heroic integrity, fighting selflessly on behalf of freedom for the Fatherland, was the achievement of a group of distinguished intellectuals who formed part of William’s immediate entourage. These included Philips Marnix van St Aldegonde, who acted first as the prince’s secretary and later as his trusted confidential emissary, Loyseleur de Villiers, who became his court chaplain and close adviser in 1577, and the Huguenot intellectuals Hubert Languet and Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, who joined the prince’s household in Antwerp around 1578.15

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.

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.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’.

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’.20

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.