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 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.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ