William of Orange

William was born on 24 April 1533 at Dillenburg castle in the county of Nassau, the first of the twelve children of Count William 'the Rich' and Juliana of Stolberg. The family was Lutheran and, by the standards of the nobility, not wealthy. That changed in 1544, when his cousin René of Chalon was killed and left him the principality of Orange in southern France and large estates in Brabant, Holland and the Franche-Comté.

Emperor Charles V agreed to the inheritance on condition that the eleven-year-old prince be brought up a Catholic at the court of the regent Mary of Hungary in Brussels. He learned French, Dutch, Spanish and the manners of the high nobility, married the rich heiress Anna of Egmond in 1551 and commanded an army at twenty-two. His nickname 'the Silent' referred not to taciturnity but to his habit of keeping his opinions to himself.

Under Philip II, Orange was among the great nobles who opposed the power of Cardinal Granvelle, the new bishoprics and the inquisition. He held that princes should not rule over the consciences of their subjects. After the Iconoclasm of 1566 he tried in Antwerp to mediate between Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists; when Alba came with an army to restore order, he left the country and chose armed resistance.

He financed that resistance with his own fortune and that of his brothers, three of whom were killed. Militarily he had little success; his strength lay in politics and propaganda. He held the rebel towns of Holland and Zeeland together, negotiated with German princes, French Huguenots and England, and tried with the Pacification of Ghent and a 'religious peace' to unite Catholic and Protestant provinces. He himself went over to Calvinism in 1573.

In the middle of the sixteenth century the Netherlands were the richest and most urbanised part of the Habsburg empire, with Antwerp as the commercial centre of Europe. The provinces and towns were attached to their privileges and to having a say in taxation. Philip II, ruling from Spain, wanted to centralise government and Church and to root out heresy, just when Calvinism was spreading fast.

All of Europe was torn in those years by wars of religion. In the German Empire the rule since 1555 was that the prince determined the religion of his land; in France Catholics and Huguenots fought, with the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572 as the low point. That different faiths could exist side by side in one state was unthinkable to most contemporaries. Orange's plea for it was prompted in part by political necessity.

Alba's Council of Troubles had more than a thousand people put to death, among them the counts of Egmont and Horne, and his Tenth Penny tax turned moderates against the regime as well. The revolt that Orange led set in motion a war that lasted, with interruptions, eighty years, brought sackings and sieges to towns such as Naarden, Haarlem and Antwerp and drove large numbers of people to flee, mainly from south to north.

In 1579 unity fell apart: the Union of Arras made its peace with the king, the Union of Utrecht continued the struggle and became the foundation of the Republic. With the Act of Abjuration the States General declared in 1581 that a prince who treats his subjects as slaves forfeits his right to obedience. That idea, which Orange defended in his 'Apology', carried over into later conceptions of popular sovereignty.

In 1580 Philip II offered a reward of 25,000 gold crowns to whoever killed the prince. He survived a first attempt, in Antwerp in 1582, badly wounded. On 10 July 1584 the Burgundian Balthasar Gérard shot him on the stairs of the Prinsenhof in Delft; the bullet holes can still be seen there. It is regarded as one of the first assassinations of a head of state with a handgun. He was entombed in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, where the members of the House of Orange-Nassau have been buried ever since.

His sons Maurice and Frederick Henry continued the war until shortly before the recognition of the Republic in 1648. The image of Orange changed with the times: for Calvinists he was the liberator sent by God, for the nineteenth-century nation the father of the fatherland, for Catholic and Spanish historians long a rebel acting out of self-interest. Modern historians stress his pragmatism and the fact that he did not at first aim at an independent Republic.