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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ