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

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.21

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.22 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

AT POINT-BLANK RANGE

JUST BEFORE TWO in the afternoon on 10 July 1584,23 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.24

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.’25

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?

The cold-blooded killing of the Prince of Orange was high drama in the volatile political arena of the Low Countries. Its perpetrator, though, was unnervingly ordinary. Twenty-five-year-old Balthasar Gérard came from Vuillafans, in Franche-Comté, near Besançon in France (where you can still visit his family home in rue Gérard today).26 Small, quiet and unassuming, Balthasar was one of eleven children from a well-to-do, devoutly Catholic family, who were also staunch supporters of the Habsburgs as their rulers and benefactors (Franche-Comté had benefited materially from financial investment – and significant tax relief – through its special association with the Habsburgs). He had studied at the nearby Catholic University of Dôle, and it was apparently there that he became determined to fulfil Philip II’s request for a volunteer assassin to infiltrate the Orange court and rid him of his prime political adversary. Among the many conspiracy theories which inevitably followed the murder of the Prince of Orange, Gérard’s place of origin was judged significant. Antoine Perrenot, Cardinal Granvelle, Archbishop of Mechelen and Primate of the Catholic Low Countries – a figure loathed, feared and eventually unseated by the Orangists – also came from Franche-Comté, and it was suggested that Gérard’s family had owed particular allegiance to him.

It does seem unlikely that Gérard had acted without accomplices, or at least without some outside help. He used an elaborate sequence of ruses to gain access to William of Orange’s entourage, including forged testimonials and counterfeit sealed documents. Adopting the assumed name François Guyon, Gérard claimed to be the son of an obscure Protestant serving-man, Guy of Besançon, who had suffered persecution for his religious beliefs. To corroborate his story he produced letters signed by prominent figures within the Catholic administration in the Low Countries, which suggested that he was trusted enough by the Spanish to allow him access to classified Catholic information which might significantly help the Orange faction. His documentation had been sufficiently convincing for Pierre Loyseleur de Villiers, William of Orange’s close personal adviser, chaplain and intelligence-gatherer, to take him into his personal service on the strength of it, as a messenger and potentially valuable spy. Although in the aftermath of William’s death Villiers was briefly arrested and accused of double-crossing the Orange cause, there seems little doubt that he had been genuinely taken in by Gérard’s forged testimonials, and particularly by the quality of the sensitive intelligence he had provided by way of introduction.27

For several months Gérard came and went between Villiers and William’s household, running errands and carrying messages. He did not yet have the necessary level of security clearance to allow him to enter the inner circles around William. However, on 12 June 1584 an extraordinary stroke of luck fortuitously gave him the access and opportunity he was waiting for. As he rode to deliver a confidential message from Villiers to the Duke of Anjou, he was met on the road by messengers bringing news that Anjou had died two days earlier. Gérard seized the moment, and volunteered to ride post-haste to William at Delft to inform him of the death of his close, politically controversial ally. He was admitted into the presence of William himself (subsequently it was said that he was allowed into the prince’s own bedchamber because of the urgency of the message he carried), delivered his unwelcome news in a manner that pleased William, and was thereafter accepted by the prince into his intimate circle of followers. Given the assiduousness with which Gérard’s credentials were being examined and re-examined before this chance encounter, it must have seemed to him that God had indeed intervened on his behalf.

Gérard now bided his time, waiting for a suitable occasion on which to act. Improvisation seems to have been a key part of the success of his plan. He acquired his weapon (either a single pistol, or a pair) on the very day of the assassination. Seeing a small pistol (or ‘dag’ as they were commonly called in English) in the hands of one of the prince’s immediate servants, he asked if the man was prepared to sell it to him. He had, he told him, shortly to go on a journey, and a pocket pistol would be the ideal weapon to carry to protect himself en route. He may even have been telling the truth – the money used to buy the gun may have been given to him by Villiers to purchase shoes and clothing for the next mission he was to be sent on. According to the broadsheet accounts, Gérard paid a sum equivalent to ten English shillings for the pistol.

In this, as in all other aspects of the planning of the killing, the would-be assassin showed unerring good sense. Gérard could not possibly have entered the presence of the Prince of Orange armed – we must surely assume that in such uncertain times, with the threat of violent attempts on William’s life, openly encouraged by Philip II, hanging over him, body-searches were routine. But pistols were (as we shall see) fashion items for members of the style-conscious élite, and were worn visibly and even ostentatiously by men with military pretensions. William’s closest bodyguards and most trusted servants will certainly have worn them, jauntily thrust into their waistband, or hitched on to their belt (surviving pistols from this period are often provided with a belt-hook, as well as being lavishly decorated and inlaid, for ornamental wear). Gérard’s purchase of a small wheel-lock pistol within the court itself allowed him then to conceal it about his person. We may imagine the vendor will have shown him how to charge the weapon and wind the lock; all Gérard now had to do was wait for a suitable opportunity to fire it. He may have discharged a pistol on a previous occasion. An assassin who had never before fired a fully loaded weapon would be unlikely, even at close range, to hold steady aim under the force of the gun’s unexpectedly violent recoil.

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