The Awful End of William The Silent
by Lisa Jardine
Lisa Jardine's stated aim in the series of elegant little books she is editing with Amanda Foreman - of which this is the second - is to find history's "tipping points", or landmarks "along the horizon of the past" at which its course has been dramatically and irrevocably changed. For this one she has chosen a rather racy moment in Dutch history - the shooting of the country's founding father, William the Silent - and examines its reverberations down the ages.
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The Protestant prince who fell victim to a Catholic assassin’s three bullets in July 1584 had not been destined from birth to lead a nation. When William of Nassau was born in the castle of Dillenburg, in Nassau in Germany, in 1533, nobody could have imagined that he would one day become the greatest of all national heroes remembered in the Netherlands – Holland’s ‘pater patria’, the ‘father’ of his adopted country, celebrated down to the present day in the rousing stanzas of the Dutch national anthem. The eldest son of William the Rich and Juliana of Stolberg, and a German national, William inherited from his father the comparatively modest title of Count of Nassau. But in 1544 his under Rene of Chalon, hereditary ruler of the small independent principality of Orange in southern France, died on the battlefield, leaving no direct descendants. Orange was a Habsburg possession. After delicate negotiations between the Habsburg Emperor Charles V (of whose extensive empire the Orange territory ultimately formed a part) and William’s father, the eleven-year-old William unexpectedly became heir to the Chalon titles. He was immediately removed from his family home and sent to reside at the ancient seat of the Nassau family in Breda in the Low Countries. From there he could be conveniently introduced into Charles V’s court at Antwerp, to be raised in a manner befitting the designated ruler of a Habsburg territory.
The suddenness of William’s elevation at such a formative
Copyright© 2008 Lisa Jardine
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