Littell's Living Age/Volume 162/Issue 2096/William the Silent

Wednesday, July 10th, was kept as a great and solemn occasion in Holland. Three hundred years ago, on the 10th of July, 1584, William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, the founder, champion, and martyr of Dutch independence, was basely murdered at his house in Delft, by Balthazar Gérard. This martyrdom of their great national hero, the life which it crowned, and the deliverance of which that life was the instrument and its end the seal, the people of Holland are now assembled in Delft to commemorate. There are few places in the world, perhaps, where an interval of three eventful centuries has wrought such slight material changes as the little Dutch town in which William the Silent was murdered, and in whose noble church he lies buried. The house in which the crime was committed, the Prinsenhof, formerly a convent, and now a barrack, still stands unchanged, and the descendants of the people whom William freed may still see the recess in which Gérard stood and the narrow staircase — so narrow that the pistol of the assassin must almost have touched his victim — towards which William was moving, when the fatal shot was fired. But slight as is the material change, the moral contrast is so vast as almost to baffle imagination in the attempt to realize it. In 1584 the independent polity of the United Netherlands created and sustained by William the Silent was still quivering in every fibre with the throes of that gigantic struggle in which it had withstood the inhuman despotism of Philip II., and resisted all his attempts to establish the Inquisition in the Netherlands. The cruelties, the treacheries, the intrigues, the chicaneries, which marked the course of that struggle were such as no man bred in the ideas of to-day could believe if they were not established on the irrefragable testimony not merely of those who suffered by them, but even of those who practised them. The question at issue between Philip and his Flemish subjects was no mere tissue of theological or metaphysical subtleties. It was a question of life and death, of liberty and tyranny, of the most implacable resolve that ever inspired the brain and armed the will of a bigot and a despot, of the most unflinching resistance to cruelty and usurpation that ever sustained the fortitude of a patient but determined people. The people of Holland cannot but be inspired by the memories which illuminate the anniversary they are keeping to-day. No people in the world ever maintained a more heroic struggle than their forefathers, to none was a nobler example of devotion and patriotism given than that of William the Silent. "As long as he lived," says their latest historian, "he was the guiding star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets." Assuredly their lamentation was neither unreal nor misplaced. They had lost the father of their country, "Father William," as his people affectionately and gratefully called him, and the hand that had struck the blow was bribed by the treasure of Spain. The descendants of those little children who shed tears when William died need, however, shed no tears to-day. It is the deliverance of their country that they are gathered to commemorate, and their gratitude for the achievement whose results they still enjoy will assuage their mourning for the man whose life and death assured their freedom.

William the Silent is, perhaps, the one spotless and heroic figure in the history of the great struggle whereby the Netherlands were freed. It was a contest of giants, but the meed of heroism belongs alone, or almost alone, to the victim of Balthazar Gérard. In calling him spotless, we do not intend to say that all the acts of his life deserve unstinted praise, but regarded as a whole his life presents in the midst of a corrupt, cruel, and unscrupulous age an example of civic virtue, of personal disinterestedness, of unsullied patriotism, of sustained devotion to truth and liberty, of fortitude in adversity, of moderation in prosperity, of unrivalled statecraft and consummate ability in affairs to which history affords but few parallels. It is singular to note how often in the affairs of mankind the opposing tendencies of a particular age and time seem to be personified and typified in the antagonisms of individual men. Such a contrast is exhibited with startling dramatic completeness in the careers of Philip II. and William the Silent. They were foes from the outset, but their lifelong enmity was caused less by personal antagonism than by contrast of character and of temperament and, in consequence, of their respective relations to the circumstances of their age and time. Philip was born to be an inquisitor, William to be a liberator. It is inconceivable that Philip should ever have become a Protestant, though he would, it seems, have consented to abate somewhat of his Catholic austerity for the sake of the Imperial crown. It is equally inconceivable that William should have remained a Catholic in the spiritual turmoil of the sixteenth century. His final conversion to Protestantism may have been quickened by his political necessities ; but it was not the outcome of an easy-going indifference like the adoption of Catholicism by Henry IV. of France, who frankly avowed that Paris was well worth a mass. No doubt it was necessary for the champion of Protestants in the Netherlands to be himself a Protestant, but William became their champion because he was always in spirit and in temper a Protestant, he did not become a Protestant in order to remain their champion. Philip, on the other hand, was equally the born champion of the spirit and temper opposed to Protestantism. He was not so much a religious man as a fanatic, a statesman whose whole policy was centred in absolutism and spiritual domination. Indeed, it cannot be doubted that William, in spite of appearances, was by far the more religious man of the two. Philip, throughout his whole life, never deviated from the straitest and most rigid orthodoxy, though he could be denounced by William in that apology, which even when compared with the oratory of Demosthenes and Cicero is, perhaps, the most scathing philippic of the three, as a lascivious, incestuous, adulterous, and murderous king. The life of William, on the other hand, though not, perhaps, blameless, if judged by the purer standards of the present age, was comparatively one of virtue, moderation, and devotion to noble and humane ends; and his religious faith, though by no means consistent with itself at different periods of his life, was, nevertheless, an evolution abundantly justified by its fruits, and controlled and sustained by the slow and resistless force of spiritual and moral conviction. At a distance of three centuries it is easy to see which of the two tendencies here exhibited and contrasted was destined to prevail in the end; but the case was altogether different when the great struggle began, and long before it was over even William himself might well have despaired. All the material forces of a great empire were arrayed on the side of Philip. Spain, when he ascended the throne, was incontestably at the head of the civilized world. He was served by the most renowned and capable warriors, by the most consummate and adroit statesmen. William himself would have been powerless to achieve success if his skill had not been equal and his craft superior to theirs. His cause was undoubtedly the better, and this was what gave it its strength and endurance, but his material resources were immeasurably inferior. But fortified by the inherent goodness of his cause and trusting in his own indomitable perseverance, meeting intrigue with intrigue, overcoming guile with guile, and opposing to the tortuous and hesitating policy of Philip, a policy of his own informed by a knowledge as accurate, and controlled by a sagacity far more patient and subtle, he baffled all Philip's generals and outwitted all his statesmen, and moulded the despised burghers and "beggars" of the Netherlands into a nation which wrested the sceptre from Spain and secured for itself a place among the foremost powers of the world.

The name of Philip II. cannot be popular in the Netherlands. The man who was responsible for the deaths, in every circumstance of torture, cruelty, and humiliation, of thousands of peaceful citizens whose only crime was the desire to worship God in their own way, cannot but be remembered with loathing among the descendants of his victims. But sinister as was the influence of Philip, and disastrous as was his policy, they were forces contributory to the result which made the people of the Netherlands a free and self-reliant nation. Philip was the hammer and William was the anvil; between the two the steel which was heated hi the fires of the Inquisition was forged, tempered, and welded into the national life and independence of the Netherlands. Each was doubtless necessary to the result, but though the impartial historian is bound to do justice to both, the national gratitude is not unjustly reserved for the national champion and martyr. The work which William the Silent did he did for the most part alone. None but he could have baffled Philip in his Cabinet, his generals in the field, his statesmen in council. For years the two men lived in ostensible friendship, but Philip, though he was no match for William in statecraft, was shrewd enough to have discerned the capacity of his great opponent when they were boys together at the court of his father. William, on his part, must have known equally well and equally early that Philip was destined to be his lifelong opponent. It was not for nothing that Charles V. had trusted William with the profoundest secret of State while he was yet a boy; it was not for nothing that William had early shown a military capacity not unworthy of the greatest captains of the age. The favor shown by Charles to William, and the youthful renown of the latter, were enough of themselves to provoke the enmity of the brooding and suspicious Philip. He could not foresee, of course, all the mischief that William was destined to do him, but the impatient and contemptuous rebuke which he ad ministered to William as he finally quitted the Netherlands is sufficient to show that he already knew where to look for his most dangerous antagonist. "As Philip," says Motley, "was proceeding on board the ship which was to bear him forever from the Netherlands his eyes lighted upon the prince. His displeasure could no longer be restrained. With angry face he turned upon him, and bitterly reproached him for having thwarted all his plans by means of his secret intrigues, William replied with humility that everything which had taken place had beendone through the regular and natural movements of the States. Upon this the king, boiling with rage, seized the prince by the wrist, and shaking it violently, ex claimed in Spanish, 'No los estados, ma vos, vos, vos!'" The suspicion and distrust of Philip were not ill-founded. A few months before William had been sent to the court of France, as a hostage for the execution of the Treaty of Château-Cambresis. In an unguarded moment, during a hunting expedition, Henry II. Of France had revealed to the taciturn prince the existence of a secret convention between France and Spain for the extirpation of the Huguenots. William said nothing, and his countenance exhibited no surprise at the revelation; but when Philip reproached the prince at Flushing in the manner above described he knew, and William knew that he knew, that the terrible secret had been revealed to the silent and vigilant statesman whose life was henceforth devoted to the discovery and frustration of his plans.

It is not our purpose to narrate the life of William the Silent in detail. We are concerned rather with his policy and character, and, in relation to the present anniversary, with the tragedy which brought his career to a close. No space at our command would enable us to do justice to the romantic and heroic circumstances of a life so various and eventful as that of the great liberator of the Netherlands. It was not for years after their stormy parting at Flushing that the overt antagonism of the two men was revealed. William at that time was a Catholic, and content to remain in the faith he had adopted as a favorite of Charles V. Even on the occasion of his second marriage, two years later, with the Protestant princess Anna of Saxony he still showed himself a loyal Catholic and subject of Philip by some rather questionable negotiations on the subject of her religious privileges. He would not bind himself by a deed which the friends of the princess desired him to sign, though he gave a verbal undertaking to the same effect. In fact, at this time he was not the patriot and the man of profoundly religious temper which he afterwards became. He was brought up in an age and country of brilliant revelry and display, and he himself in his early years was as brilliant a reveller as any. It was only in tribulation and adversity that his character was purified and sobered, and so little at this time did he take religious differences seriously that when, immediately after his marriage, the electress entreated that he would not pervert her niece from the paths of the true religion he replied, with almost contemptuous flippancy: "She shall not be troubled with such melancholy things. Instead of Holy Writ she shall read Amadis de Gaule, and such books of pastime which discourse de amore, and instead of knitting and sewing she shall learn to dance a gailiarde and such curtoisies as are the mode of our country and suitable to her rank." In politics also William strove long and anxiously to avoid an open rupture with Philip. Throughout the regency of Margaret of Parma he was constant and earnest in his endeavors to establish an acceptable modus vivendi, to induce Philip to abstain from establishing the Inquisition, and to organize the government of the Netherlands so as to maintain the liberties of the people without throwing off the yoke of Spain. Philip, however, was inexorable. The man who had celebrated his return to Spain by an auto da fé was not likely to come to terms with the Protestant "beggars" of the Netherlands. Even his sister Margaret was too lenient for him and was at last replaced in the regency by the infamous Alva. Then it was that William gave up the hope of reconciliation and compromise. He retired to Germany after vainly endeavoring to persuade his friend Egmont to follow his example. Egmont, Horn, and others were arrested, condemned, and ultimately executed. When the wily Granvelle, who had been Margaret of Parma's chief counsellor in the regency, heard that Orange had escaped, he exclaimed, "Then if the duke has not caught him, he has caught nothing." It was the failure of Egmont's mission that convinced William that nothing was to be expected from Philip. When Egmont returned and reported in the Council the result of his negotiation, "Now," said William, "we shall see the beginning of a great tragedy." The remaining years of his life were the fulfilment of his prediction and his death was the catastrophe of the tragedy he had foreseen. From this time forth his life was a long martyrdom, only sustained by the growing strength of his religious convictions and his unshaken confidence in the justice of his cause.

We cannot dwell at length here on the warlike exploits of William. His military fame is established by the fact that he baffled such captains as Alva, as Don John of Austria, and Alexander of Parma "Alva," writes one whose enthusiasm is inspired by the glowing page of Motley, "was his earliest antagonist; and the gaunt and shallow duke was one of Charles's veterans. Till he came to the Netherlands, he had never been worsted; on many a pagan and Christian battlefield he had triumphed; more than once his eagle eye and tigerlike heart had nerved his beaten soldiers, turned the tide of victory, and saved the monarchy. Vehement and bloodthirsty by nature, only on the battlefield did he manifest perfect self-restraint. The ferocious executioner, who sent maidens and matrons to the stake, who spilt the blood of the tenderest and noblest like water, never threw away the life of a single trooper. … But even Alva, everywhere else the victor, left the Netherlands a baffled man. Don John of Austria, who followed him, did not fare better. The beautiful and fascinating son of the emperor, the hero of Lepanto, who had captured the sacred standard of the Prophet, and shaken the supremacy of the Crescent, was foiled and outwitted by the subtle brain of William. And even the splendid military genius of Alexander of Parma, the most patient, temperate, fearless, and unscrupulous of men, could not turn the scale against the Netherlander. With a few foreign mercenaries who could not be relied on, and a few unarmed burghers who could, the Prince of Orange drove back the invincible legions of Spain, led by their most consummate captains."

The result of William's resistance to all the might of Spain, to all the skill of her generals, and all the statecraft of her ruler was finally established and recorded in the Union of Utrecht, that charter of the United Provinces whose acceptance at Utrecht by the national representatives on the 23d of January, 1579, was commemorated in Holland five years ago, as the death of William is being commemorated to-day. From that time forward the power of Spain was virtually at an end, though the Act of Abjuration repudiating the sovereignty of Philip was not issued till two years later by the deputies assembled at the Hague, nor was it till thirty years had elapsed that peace was concluded with Spain in 1609 Philip, however, could not or would not accept defeat. He still believed, and Granvelle — who had early discerned and long observed William's rare political capacity — encouraged him in the belief, that the removal of William would result in the collapse of the revolt. He, therefore, willingly listened to Granvelle's advice that a price should be publicly put on the prince's head. Granvelle, who after all can but have imperfectly gauged the strength of William's character, professed to think that the fear of assassination would paralyze William's policy and might even lead to his death by his own hand. Philip and his crafty counsellors little knew the stuff of which William was made or the fortitude to which adversity had tempered him. They did not shrink, however, from the act which has branded them with infamy. Cardinal Granvelle drew up the ban which denounced William as a "wretched hypocrite" and traitor. After reciting the catalogue of his alleged crimes, this monstrous document concluded as follows: "For these causes we declare him traitor and miscreant, enemy of ourselves and of the country. As such we banish him perpetually from all our realms, forbidding all our subjects, of whatever quality, to communicate with him openly or privately — to administer to him victuals, drink, fire, or other necessaries. We allow all to injure him in property or life. We expose the said William of Nassau as an enemy of the human race, giving his property to all who may seize it. And if any one of our subjects or any stranger should be found sufficiently generous of heart to rid us of this pest, delivering him to us, alive or dead, or taking his life, we will cause to be furnished to him immediately after the deed shall have been done, the sum of twenty-five thousand crowns in gold. If he have committed any crime, however heinous, we promise to pardon him; and if he be not already noble, we will ennoble him for his valor."

Such was the document, whose issue by the command of Philip, resulted after many unsuccessful attempts in the murder of William by Balthazar Gérard, on the 10th of July, 1584. But William was not daunted by it; he pursued his course undisturbed, and his life had been too often in danger for him to pay any serious heed to the plots of hired murderers. "I am in the hands of God," he said, in that famous apology which was his prompt answer to Philip's ban, "my worldly goods and my life have long since been dedicated to his service. He will dispose of them as seems best for his glory and my salvation. … Would to God," he said, in conclusion, addressing the people whom he had saved, "that my perpetual banishment or even my death could bring you a true deliverance from so many calamities. Oh, how consoling would be such banishment — how sweet such a death! For why have I exposed my property? Was it that I might enrich myself? Why have I lost my brothers? Was it that I might find new ones? Why have I left my son so long a prisoner? Can you give me another? Why have I put my life so often in danger? What reward can I hope after my long services, and the almost total wreck of my earthly fortunes, if not the prize of having acquired, perhaps at the expense of my life, your liberty? If then, my masters, you judge that my absence or my death can serve you, behold me ready to obey. Command me — send me to the ends of the earth — I will obey. Here is my head, over which no prince, no monarch, has power but yourselves. Dispose of it for your good, for the preservation of your republic, but if you judge that the moderate amount of experience and industry which is in me, if you judge that the remainder of my property and of my life can yet be of service to you, I dedicate them afresh to you and to the country."

Such was the spirit in which William encountered the dastardly menaces of Philip. The true temper of the man and the true lesson of his life are exhibited in these touching words. Je maintiendrai was his family motto; Sævis tranquillus in undis was the device he chose to symbolize his imperturbable endurance, and he remained steadfast and tranquil and moderate to the end. Jaureguy, one of his would-be assassins, whose bullet passed through both his cheeks at Antwerp, was taken red-handed by his attendants. William would not allow either Jaureguy or his accomplices to be tortured, though torture was a recognized and permitted punishment of the time, for nothing more showed William's superiority to his contemporaries than his total lack of vindictiveness and his genuine toleration of spirit. Alone in his generation, he realized and practised that tolerant temper which gave to the Reformation its permanent vitality as an irresistible element of human progress. None but he in his time, or for long afterwards, could have written to the magistracy of Middleburg in language which takes us at once from the age of Philip and the Inquisition into the region of ideas not too readily accepted after three centuries have passed: "We declare to you that you have no right to trouble yourselves with any man's conscience so long as nothing is done to cause private harm or public scandal." We are content to leave the character of William the Silent to be judged by these remarkable words. He died by the bullet of Gérard, and the family of his assassin was rewarded and ennobled by Philip. His last words were, "O my God, have mercy on this poor people." For a time it might have seemed as if Philip had conquered and as if the life of William the Silent had been lived and sacrificed in vain. But the descendants of those poor people for whom William prayed for mercy with his dying breath know now, and will acknowledge to-day with national thankfulness, that Philip was finally defeated in the hour of his apparent triumph, and that the prayer of his victim was answered a thousandfold.