The eloquent epigram of Voltaire records the result of his achievement. His career, like his nature and his circumstances, was made up of anomalies and filled with complex elements. The man who organised the national rebellion of Holland, by birth a German count, became by inheritance a Flemish magnate and a sovereign prince. A Lutheran by family, he was brought up a Catholic, and died a Calvinist. His early years were passed as a soldier and minister of the Empire, as ambassador and lieutenant of the King of Spain, and as a grandee of boundless magnificence. Himself the mainspring of a national and religious insurrection, his best energies were spent in moderating the political and religious passions which were at once the cause and the result of the struggle. Personally a devout man, he professed in succession all the three great forms of Christian belief, whilst steadily opposing all that was extreme and all that was violent in each. His memory is still passionately cherished in his adopted fatherland: first as the founder of an illustrious Commonwealth, then as the father of a long line of able statesmen and ruling princes, and finally as a martyr to the cause of national independence and liberty of conscience.
William, the eldest son of William, Count of Nassau, and of Juliana of Stolberg, was born in the hereditary castle of Dillenburg, in Nassau, on the 25th of April 1533, the eldest of five sons and seven daughters. By birth he was, through many generations, of pure German race, the heir of one of the smaller ruling houses of the Empire, a House which had produced many chiefs illustrious in war and in council, and which by a series of splendid alliances had amassed titles, offices, and vast
