THE AWFUL END OF PRINCE WILLIAM THE SILENT
The First Assassination of a Head of State with a Handgun

Lisa Jardine

EPIGRAPH

Politics in a work of literature are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something crude which it is impossible to ignore.

We are about to speak of very ugly matters.

Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma¹

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Foreword: The Making History series

Introduction: Accidents of History

Map: The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century

Family Tree: The House of Orange

1: How the Prince of Orange Came to Have a Price on his Head

2: Murder Most Foul

3: A Miraculous Escape

4: The Wheel-Lock Pistol – Killing Conveniently

5: English Aftermath 1 – ‘She is a Chief Mark they Shoot at’

6: English Aftermath 2 – Pistols and Politics

Finale

APPENDIX 1

APPENDIX 2

APPENDIX 3

APPENDIX 4

APPENDIX 5

Keep Reading

Notes

Further Reading

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

When Prince William the Silent was gunned down in the hallway of his Delft residence in 1584, his death rocked the cause of Protestantism in the Low Countries. Without their charismatic leader, the Dutch opponents of the occupying Catholic forces of Philip II of Spain looked likely to be brought permanently under the domination of the Habsburgs.

In the event, the Dutch Protestant cause managed to carry on its opposition to the Habsburgs, and eventually succeeded in establishing an independent Dutch Republic. But the assassination of William of Orange with a small, concealed, self-igniting handgun had lasting repercussions across the face of Europe. William had been a marked man for many years, with a Catholic price on his head. Honour and riches had been publicly promised to anyone who could assassinate him. Yet in spite of elaborate security, a lone assassin armed with a hidden pistol was able to penetrate William’s ‘ring of steel’ and shoot him at point-blank range in his own home. After that, no head of state would ever feel safe again, and regimes across the Continent enacted legislation attempting to ban small hand-guns entirely, or to restrict their use in the vicinity of a prominent political figure or head of state.

The assassination of William the Silent, then, marked the moment when new technology intruded into the lives of public figures, emphasising their perpetual vulnerability to violent assault. The event was one of those milestones in history – a marker, a turning point, an epoch-making incident, a directional laser-beam of light from the past to the future – on which our understanding of the past depends. Lisa Jardine’s account highlights the extraordinary way in which events on the ground at key moments in history influence forever what comes after them.

The Awful End of Prince William the Silent is the second title in an exciting series of small books edited by Amanda Foreman and Lisa Jardine – ‘Making History’– each of which covers a ‘turning point’ in history. Each book in the series will take a moment at which an event or events made a lasting impact on the unfolding course of history. Such moments are of dramatically different character: from the unexpected outcome of a battle to a landmark invention; from an accidental decision taken in the heat of the moment to a considered programme intended to change the world. Each volume of ‘Making History’ will be guaranteed to make the reader sit up and think about Europe’s and America’s relationship to their past, and the key figures and incidents which moulded and formed its process.

Amanda Foreman Lisa Jardine

Introduction

Accidents of History

William of Nassau, scion Of a Dutch and ancient line, I dedicate undying Faith to this land of mine. A prince I am, undaunted, Of Orange, ever free, To the king of Spain I’ve granted A lifelong loyalty.

(First verse of the Dutch national anthem, the ‘Wilhelmus’)²

FROM THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY down to the present day, Dutch history is saturated with heroic memories of the house of Orange. The Dutch football team wears an orange strip, while its fans sport the Prince of Orange’s colours in everything from scarves to face-paints. The Dutch national anthem celebrates the courage of a ‘prince undaunted of Orange’, prepared to stand up against the tyranny of the King of Spain and his occupying forces, in verses second only to the French ‘Marseillaise’ in their patriotic fervour (the Low Countries have suffered many occupations over the centuries).

Beyond the borders of the Netherlands, too, there are orange-coloured memorials to the lasting influence of a succession of princes who headed the Orange dynasty. Every July, Orangemen march in Northern Ireland, decked out in orange to remember and to celebrate the victory of a Protestant king of the house of Orange over a Catholic Stuart.³ The orange and black insignia of Princeton University in the United States is a reminder that the prince of that foundation was a Dutch one, of the house of Orange-Nassau.⁴

In English-language history books, the only member of the Orange dynasty in the Low Countries to feature prominently is William III (1650–1702), who in 1689 ascended the throne of England with his wife Mary Stuart, replacing his Catholic father-in-law King James II, who had been forced to abdicate following the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of the previous year. Yet the life and actions on the public stage of William III’s great-grandfather, William I of Orange (1533–1584) – known to contemporaries as William the Silent (because of his reluctance to speak his mind) and the man celebrated in the Dutch national anthem for his courage against foreign oppressors – played a prominent part historically in the policies of his royal neighbour Queen Elizabeth I and exerted lasting influence over European affairs of state. The manner of William’s assassination in 1584 provoked panic at the English court and alarmed Protestant administrations across Europe. It resulted in the decision to commit English forces on the European mainland against the Spanish Habsburg troops of Philip II in 1585 – an eventuality Queen Elizabeth had avoided with characteristic determination throughout almost twenty years of her reign, and a decision which led directly to the launch of the Spanish Armada against England in 1588.

This is the story of William the Silent’s murder. Apart from its seismic effect on the European political scene, it was the first assassination of a European head of state in which the weapon used was the new, technically sophisticated wheel-lock pistol – the first pocket-sized gun capable of being loaded and primed ready for use ahead of time, then concealed about the user’s person and produced and fired with one hand, in a single, surprise movement. The murder of William of Orange was the first in a long line of iconic killings of major political figures using handguns, stretching down to our own day. These include the assassination of Abraham Lincoln during a visit to the theatre, and of the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo which triggered the First World War. As a violent intervention by one man with a gun, calculated to put paid to a political party or movement and to rock a nation to its foundations, William the Silent’s murder anticipated the assassinations of Martin Luther King, J. F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy in the 1960s. The very metaphor of such an action ‘triggering’ momentous world events derives from the sudden and irrevocable act of firing a pre-primed gun.⁵

The second half of the sixteenth century saw its fair share of sensational gun crimes. Pistols may have been regarded as new-fangled and unreliable by military strategists, who doubted their tactical reliability as weapons of war and mistrusted the highly manoeuvrable light-horse cavalry pistoleers who used them, but they caught on rapidly with civilians bent on mischief. In February 1563, Francis, Duke of Guise was killed while out hunting, by a pistol-wielding Huguenot on horseback. In 1566 a pistol was held to the belly of Mary, Queen of Scots, while assassins stabbed her secretary Rizzio to death in the adjacent room. It was allegedly the sound of a pistol shot close by that led the French queen mother Catherine de Medici to believe that an assassination attempt against the Catholic faction was under way, and thereby set in action the chain of events leading to the infamous St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of French Huguenots in 1572.

Religious sectarian conflict figures prominently as a motive for audacious attempts at pistol assassination of key political figures in the early modern period. The internal rifts caused by the doctrinal antagonisms between Catholics and Protestants led to civil war in France, political fragmentation and violent confrontation in the Low Countries, and corrosive political mistrust in England. A brother might betray a brother, or one neighbour might reveal another’s secret religious observance. The new handgun was a weapon perfectly matched to the times – a hidden source of confidence, providing its wearer with a ready defence against attack, or a means of sudden, violent death in the hands of a hitherto undetected enemy.

In a Europe saturated with intelligence-gatherers working on behalf of both Catholic and Protestant causes (and the regimes which supported one or other religious party), almost every court and great household had been infiltrated by somebody covertly retained by a contrary faction to carry out local espionage and collect intelligence. A number of these individuals were double agents, serving whichever party currently had the political upper hand. William the Silent’s eventual assassin was believed by William’s household to be a loyal Protestant recruited as an agent to spy in the Spanish camp on behalf of the Protestant Dutch. In fact he was a secret agent of Philip II, a devout Catholic, who had insinuated himself into the very heart of the Prince of Orange’s entourage. His resolute adherence to the Habsburg and Catholic causes in the Netherlands was only uncovered during his interrogation after the event. Then as now, and all too like the suicide bombers of the twenty-first century, intense commitment to his faith gave the assassin the determination to commit an atrocity in circumstances which made it unlikely that he himself would survive the attempt.

In the sixteenth century the handgun – swift, convenient and efficient – became the weapon selected by the high-born individual bent on taking his own life, too. In 1585 Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, committed suicide in the Tower of London with a handgun loaded – like the one that killed William of Orange – with three bullets inserted into a single chamber. Because of the disbelief at the idea that a single pull on the trigger could unleash such a triple carnage, it was widely held that Northumberland’s death was murder rather than suicide – the shots that killed him were assumed to have been fired by three separate assassins.

William the Silent’s assassination preyed on the minds of European heads of state and haunted the imaginations of those responsible for maintaining their security. It was an emblem of the impossibility of preventing a determined intruder, armed with a deadly concealed weapon, from penetrating the most closely guarded of royal enclaves. With some justification those who sought to protect the Prince of Orange believed that the new weapons of war (guns, explosives, potent poisons) made an eventual successful attempt on his life an inevitability. Balthasar Gérard’s attack in 1584 was virtually a copycat version of an earlier unsuccessful attempt on William’s life, also employing a concealed wheel-lock pistol, also carried out in the prince’s private apartments by a supposedly trusted member of his entourage, two years previously.

The pocket pistol became an emblem for the utter impossibility of keeping the sovereign secure. In a vain attempt to prevent the possibility of death-delivering devices being smuggled into the presence of the queen, the English government enacted a law prohibiting anyone from carrying a concealed handgun or firing one within two miles of a royal palace. And in the atmosphere of hysterical mistrust and anxiety that surrounded Elizabeth’s person, as the Spanish threatened to strengthen their hold on the Dutch coastline across the North Sea following Orange’s demise, several of the litany of supposed plots uncovered in the years immediately afterwards were claimed to have involved audacious attempts on Elizabeth’s life with a pistol.

Map: The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century

Family Tree: The House of Orange

1 How the Prince of Orange Came to Have a Price on his Head
BECOMING A DYNASTY

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 patriae’, the ‘father’ of his adopted country, celebrated down to the present day in the rousing stanzas of the Dutch national anthem.⁶ 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 uncle René 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 moment, left its lasting mark. Throughout his life his reputation was as a man of considered actions and a steady temperament – or, according to his enemies, a man who hedged his bets and would never speak his mind. In the public arena he displayed a combination of humanity, seriousness and personal restraint derived from his early modest upbringing, coupled with an easy ability to operate smoothly in the midst of all the magnificence of European court protocol and the procedural intricacies of diplomacy and power politics. His considerable skill as a negotiator depended on a relaxed familiarity with the forms and ceremonies of international power-broking, acquired during his period in the household of Charles V. Over and over again in the course of the ‘Dutch Revolt’ these were the skills needed to persuade ill-assorted parties to sign up to a political alliance, to retrieve lost ground by negotiation, or to gain time or a vital truce, in the all-too-evenly balanced conflict in which William became caught up – most probably against his better judgement – and which consumed the last twenty years of his life.

If William the Silent was not the kind of candidate we might expect for political leadership in the northern Netherlands, neither was he an obvious choice as the leading European protagonist on behalf of the Protestant cause. Although his family was Protestant, he himself was by no means a settled adherent to any sect of the reformed religion by birth or upbringing. One important outcome of the circumstances of his youth was William’s complicated attitude towards the religious disputes of the day. During his father’s lifetime, the house of Nassau moved closer to the evangelical Protestant princes in Germany. From puberty, however, amid the magnificence of the Catholic Antwerp court of Charles, where the Prince of Orange entered the Council of State on the succession of Philip of Spain as ruler in the Low Countries in 1555, and was elected a Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece by Philip in August 1559, it was assumed that William would uphold the Catholic confession of his Habsburg imperial masters. And indeed during his early tenure he showed no inclination to do otherwise.

When Charles V resigned the sovereignty of the Netherlands in 1555 in favour of his son Philip, the ageing Habsburg emperor gave his farewell address to the great assembly in Brussels leaning on the shoulder of Prince William, thereby proclaiming to the world the trust he placed in the young nobleman. Philip II in his turn appointed William governor general or ‘stadholder’ of the counties of Holland and Zeeland and the land of Utrecht (and other adjacent territories) in 1559, with the task of looking after Habsburg interests in the northern occupied Low Countries territories, and maintaining Philip’s ‘rights, highness and lordship’ there.

In spite of this careful grooming, William of Orange did not live up to the Habsburgs’ hopes for him as a loyal servant and administrator of their imperial rule. Instead, the care that had been taken with his upbringing, and the trust placed in him by Charles V, added emotional intensity to the later confrontations between William and Philip II. Philip considered that William had been privileged to have been succoured and supported by the Habsburgs. When the Prince of Orange subsequently became one of their most prominent and dangerous political opponents, the self-appointed defender of the Protestant faith in the Low Counties which the Habsburgs had pledged themselves to root out as a ‘vile heresy’, this was, for Philip, a personal betrayal.

The principality of Orange was, and is, of relatively small importance on the international scene. Then as now, its main claim to fame was its magnificent Roman amphitheatre and triumphal arch, which dominated the town. Nevertheless, it was William’s tenure of that Orange title which singled him out for leadership in the struggle of the Low Countries against the Habsburgs. The Princes of Orange were sovereign princes, and thus, in theory, William was of comparable rank to Philip II – King of Spain – himself. William always maintained that his status as prince removed from him the obligation to pay allegiance to Philip as ruler of the Netherlands. Contemporary political theory maintained that those subordinate to a reigning prince might not challenge his authority unless his rule amounted to tyranny. An equal prince, on the other hand, might voice concern without threatening the established hierarchy or sovereign entitlement to rule. In this respect William was unique among the Habsburgs’ provincial governors in the Netherlands and an obvious choice as spokesperson when it came to freely expressing opposition to the way the policies of the Habsburgs were being implemented by those locally appointed to administer the Low Countries territories.

In spite of his theoretically key political position, William for many years avoided any course of action that might set him on a collision course with Philip II. It was apparently this political reticence that led to William’s being dubbed ‘le taciturne’ (‘the tight-lipped’), in Dutch ‘de Zwijger’, which was turned in English into ‘the Silent’. The soubriquet suggested an irritating tendency in the prince to hold back from expressing his true opinions and a reluctance to take sides. It turned out to be particularly inappropriate as an enduring nickname for a man renowned in his everyday conduct of affairs in private and in public for his eloquence and loquacity.

Following the early death of William’s first wife,⁷ his second marriage to Anna of Saxony in 1561 was the first public intimation of his desire to distance himself from the Habsburg cause in the Netherlands, doctrinally and politically. Anna was the daughter of the staunchly Protestant Maurice of Saxony, who had died in battle fighting for the Protestant cause in 1553; her guardians were two of the Habsburgs’ most prominent opponents in Germany, Augustus, Elector of Saxony and Philip of Hesse (who had been held prisoner by Charles V for a number of years). As anticipated by both camps (Philip opposed the match), William and Anna’s marriage created a political focus for anti-Catholic feeling in the northern Netherlands, which came to a head in the mid–156os.⁸

The immediate issue which provoked confrontation between Philip II and the nobility in the Netherlands was the reorganisation of the bishoprics in the Low Countries undertaken in 1559, and designed to rationalise the existing system of Church authority. Under the reorganisation, direct responsibility for the Church and (above all) its revenues passed to Philip’s appointed regent Margaret of Parma and Antoine Perrenot, a prominent attorney from Franche-Comté and influential adviser to Philip II, who had been conveniently appointed Cardinal (at the request of the Habsburg administration), under the title of Cardinal Granvelle. In 1562 the Dutch nobility formed a league aimed at the overthrow of Granvelle (who had been appointed to the key bishopric of Mechelen), on grounds of his excessive zeal in persecuting Protestant heretics, and his complicity in eroding the nobility’s secular power and diverting their Church revenues.

Led by William of Orange, the Dutch nobles refused to attend any meetings of the Council of State until such time as Granvelle should be removed from office, thereby bringing the administration of the Netherlands to a standstill. Faced with what amounted to a boycott by the key local figures in the Low Countries administration, Philip withdrew Granvelle in 1564. The gesture, however, came too late to halt a growing tide of opposition against the strong-arm way in which the Low Countries were being run, particularly insofar as this involved a ruthless repression of all reformed religious observance which went beyond anything imposed in Philip’s Spanish territories.

At first William, with typical caution, held back from direct defiance of Spanish rule, and it was a group whose leaders included instead his brother, Count John of Nassau, which delivered a petition on behalf of the Dutch people to the regent, Margaret of Parma, in April 1566. Margaret responded by dispatching William of Orange (as local stadholder) at the head of an armed force to subdue the unrest and re-establish full Catholic observance in Holland and Utrecht. William, however, characteristically negotiated a compromise with the States of Holland at Schoonhoven, under which Calvinists – the radical wing of Protestantism – would be given limited freedom to observe their religion openly. This was a position he would take repeatedly in his negotiations over more than fifteen years with local provinces, and it does suggest that he did not consider the strict imposition of either Catholic or Protestant worship a matter of particular importance, temperamentally preferring a broad toleration (though whether for strategic reasons, or on grounds of his own moderate beliefs, is less clear). In 1566 his expressed opinion was that Catholics and Protestants ‘in principle believed in the same truth, even if they expressed this belief in very different ways’, and this was a view to which he remained committed, although he was unable to prevent those serving under him from taking more extreme positions with regard to the prohibition of alternative forms of worship.⁹

The Low Countries had had a long-standing and widespread commitment to the beliefs and forms of worship of the Reformed Church, beginning with Luther’s opposition to the established Church in the 1520s. The Dutch Revolt started in earnest in the mid-1560s with a spontaneous wave of anti-Catholic iconoclasm, subsequently encouraged by Calvinist outdoor preachers (‘hedge preachers’) who urged their congregations to cast down the idolatrous worship of Catholicism. Riots and the ransacking of churches and monasteries rapidly spread across the Netherlands. The uprising was put down with ruthless efficiency by forces sent by Philip from Spain under the Duke of Alva (Alba), who arrived as Philip’s commander-in-chief in 1568. Calvinist worship, hitherto a tolerated, alternative set of doctrines and practices to which the local authorities had largely turned a blind eye, was driven underground, and many leading Calvinist clergy and their supporters among the nobility fled the country.

Throughout the period of this first Dutch uprising William the Silent tried to maintain a careful balance between the demands of Spanish Habsburg-imposed rule and the commitments and beliefs of the Low Countries he had been nominated to represent as stadholder. Loyal to the Habsburgs who had raised him, he nevertheless sympathised with the broader inclusiveness of Low Countries religious observance and the aspiration of the Netherlanders to self-governance, free from the imposed regime and its foreign occupying troops. When eventually he came under too much pressure from Philip to submit to his authority and impose direct Spanish rule, he resigned his stadholderships and withdrew to his German Nassau territories.

In 1568, however, William of Orange found himself drawn into the Low Countries conflict. He had hoped that his withdrawal to Germany would be taken as a sign of deliberate neutrality. Instead, as part of a ferocious programme of reprisals against the iconoclastic rebellion, Alva’s Spanish forces confiscated William’s Dutch properties and his revenues. The Counts of Egmont and Hornes were arrested and summarily executed, along with over a thousand ‘rebels’. Both Egmont and Hornes had belonged to the ‘League of the Great’ which had engineered Granvelle’s removal, but unlike William they had not gone abroad as the Spanish grip on the Low Countries tightened. Finally, Alva also seized William’s eldest son (also named William) from the university of Leuven (Louvain), where he was studying, and took him as a virtual hostage to Spain. His father never saw him again. In spite of his father’s repeated attempts to get him back, he remained in Spain, to be raised as an obedient Catholic servant of the Habsburgs (after William the Silent’s death, the Dutch refused to acknowledge him as their next stadholder, and turned instead to his younger brother Maurice). Under these provocations, William crossed into the Low Countries from his base in Germany, at the head of an army subsidised by a number of his German neighbours.

William’s volunteer forces were no match for Alva and his Spanish army. In 1568 and again in 1570 his military incursions from his German territories were disastrous (Dutch historians refer to them as ‘débâcles’), not least because William could not raise the necessary finance from among his allies outside the Low Countries to pay his troops, and was increasingly hampered in his operations by threats of desertion and mutiny. On both occasions he was driven back by Alva, having only managed to secure a number of towns in Holland and Zeeland – the two north-western provinces which fronted the Netherlands coastline, providing control over sea-traffic in the North Sea (or, as the Dutch called it, the Narrow Sea). William’s success in obtaining control of Holland and Zeeland was, however, of enormous importance to England, since his domination of the coastline offered Protestant protection from the Spanish invasion the English feared constantly throughout this period. The English queen, Elizabeth I, though reluctant to be drawn into direct confrontation with Spain in the Netherlands, nevertheless provided a steady stream of soldiers and indirect financing for William the Silent’s Dutch Revolt, in her own interests.

A historical turning point for the Orange cause – though not military success – came in 1572. As so often in the story of the Dutch Revolt, the gains made by William the Silent (who on this occasion also was eventually forced to concede victory and withdraw) derived as much from political events outside the Netherlands as from the outcomes of specific battles and sieges within the provinces themselves.¹⁰ In May 1572 the strategically important town of Mons on the French-Low Countries border went over to the Protestant cause. Mons had been heavily fortified by Charles V as a border stronghold at the time of his wars against France. Its almost impregnable walls were now defended by Count Louis of Nassau and a group of supporters of the Orange cause, with the help of a contingent of French Huguenots (a total of around 1,500 troops) and about a thousand local Protestant supporters. An independent provincial government was set up in the town and Calvinist worship made legal (contravening the explicit prohibitions of Philip II and his Inquisition).

The French king, Charles IX – vacillating between Catholic and Protestant causes in his own civil-war-torn country – was known to be considering an invasion of the Low Countries in support of the Protestant Huguenot cause, with the strategic political objective of confronting Spain in the arena of the Netherlands. Alerted to this, and faced with the possibility of a full-scale invasion across the French border, Alva pulled most of his troops back from the heart of the revolt in the northern provinces of Holland and Zeeland, and massed them in Brabant at Mons, besieging the city. This was a shrewd move, even though it allowed Holland and Zeeland to consolidate their advantage in the north-west.

In mid-June, just before Alva’s blockade of Mons became total, Count Louis sent a messenger out of the city to urge the French Huguenots to carry out their promise and mount a massive invasion of the Netherlands in the name of Charles IX. On the advice of his senior, Huguenot-sympathising military commander Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the French king acceded to the request. On 12 July Louis’ messenger, Jean de Hangest, lord of Genlis, left Paris with a force of around six thousand men. Five days later he marched straight into a Spanish ambush at St Ghislain, six miles south of Mons, and almost his entire force was destroyed either by the enemy troops or by the local peasants, for whom the French were still the traditional enemy.¹¹

Charles IX, who considered the rout of troops sent on his express orders towards Mons (and surely betrayed into an ambush by Spanish-sympathising intelligencers in Paris) a political embarrassment, hastily tried to distance himself from Coligny’s support of the Orangists. On 12 August he instructed his ambassador in the Netherlands to deny his involvement:

The papers found upon those captured with Genlis [show] … everything done by Genlis to have been committed with my consent … Nevertheless, [you will tell the Duke of Alva] these are lies invented to excite his suspicion against me. He must not attach any credence to them … You will also tell them what you know about the enemy’s affairs from time to time, by way of information, in order to please him and to make him more disposed to believe in your integrity.¹²

To the French Catholic party, led by the Duke of Guise and backed by Charles IX’s mother Catherine de Medici, Gaspard de Coligny was directly responsible for the French humiliation at Mons. As the instigator of the continuing attempts to persuade the king to declare war on Spain on behalf of the Huguenots, and to engage with Alva’s forces in the Low Countries, he became the focus for the Guise party’s violent animosity. In August 1572, King Charles finally gave Coligny royal authorisation to invade the Netherlands. On the morning of 22 August there was a Guise-backed attempted assassination of Coligny, which failed when a musket-shot fired by Maurevel succeeded only in wounding the Admiral in the arm. The St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, which began on the night of 23 August, was a consequence of this failed assassination attempt. According to the papal envoy in Paris, reporting to the Vatican: ‘If the Admiral had died from the shot, no others would have been killed.’¹³ The opening move in the massacre was a second attempt on Coligny’s life. Having this time succeeded in stabbing him to death on his sickbed, Catholic supporters of the Guise faction went on to murder an estimated two thousand residents of Paris, including all the leading members of the Huguenot party and a number of notable Protestant intellectuals and public figures. The massacre continued in the French provinces well into October, and put paid once and for all to hopes of a major Huguenot force coming to the aid of the Protestant cause in the Low Countries.

William of Orange invaded the Duchy of Brabant from Germany on 27 August with a troop of twenty thousand men, still expecting to rendezvous with the promised French Huguenot army led by Coligny. News of Coligny’s assassination and the ensuing mass slaughter of Huguenots only reached him at Mechelen. It was a ‘stunning blow’, William wrote to his brother Count John of Nassau, since ‘my only hope lay with France’. Had it not been for the massacre, the combined Protestant forces would, William believed, have succeeded in relieving Mons and gaining the psychological upper hand in the conflict: ‘we would have had the better of the Duke of Alva and we would have been able to dictate terms to him at our pleasure’. On 24 September, having failed to break Alva’s grip on Mons, William told his brother that he had decided to fall back on Holland or Zeeland, ‘there to await the Lord’s pleasure’. A few weeks later he spoke gloomily of making his ‘sépultre’ (grave) in Holland.¹⁴ In fact he consolidated the rebel positions there, creating a reasonably secure base for the Orangist forces; he was right, though, in believing that he never would achieve the union of the north-western and south-eastern provinces in a single, Protestant state under his or any other leadership.

In spite of his own profound pessimism, and although history treats his first three campaigns as failed military operations, this was the moment when William the Silent began to be hailed within the Low Countries as the country’s hero and potential saviour. The creation in letters, pamphlets and speeches of a potent and lasting image of William the Silent as a man of heroic integrity, fighting selflessly on behalf of freedom for the Fatherland, was the achievement of a group of distinguished intellectuals who formed part of William’s immediate entourage. These included Philips Marnix van St Aldegonde, who acted first as the prince’s secretary and later as his trusted confidential emissary, Loyseleur de Villiers, who became his court chaplain and close adviser in 1577, and the Huguenot intellectuals Hubert Languet and Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, who joined the prince’s household in Antwerp around 1578.¹⁵

On 19 July 1572, in the midst of the struggle for Mons in Brabant, a political assembly was convened in Dordrecht of representatives of the north-western States of Holland – Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht, the territories largely secured by William of Orange as Protestant-supporting rebels against Spanish rule. William did not attend but was eloquently represented by Marnix. Marnix was a political theorist of distinction, who would in the course of a long career author a sequence of important republican-sympathising treatises on the limits of imposed rule. The speech he delivered at Dordrecht offered a considered version of the right of the Dutch people to revolt against tyrannical rule, and may be taken to mark the birth of the Dutch Republic as a reasoned rejection of Habsburg-imposed authority.

On the prince’s behalf Marnix fashioned William’s image for posterity as the defender of the right of all individuals to freedom of thought and worship. William vowed to the States of Holland, according to Marnix, ‘to protect and preserve the country from foreign tyrants and oppressors’. If the States of Holland would acknowledge him as their stadholder, he would lead the Netherlands out of political servitude, returning to them the historic ‘rights and privileges’ of the provinces and guaranteeing them freedom of worship – ‘the free exercise of religion should be allowed as well to Papists as Protestants, without any molestation or impediment’. As a piece of political propaganda William’s Dordrecht address was lastingly effective, and has coloured accounts of William the Silent as the heroic defender of freedom against tyranny ever since.¹⁶

William’s image as a ‘Christian soldier’, fighting for political freedom and freedom of worship on behalf of his oppressed people, was decisively sharpened by the behaviour of the Duke of Alva and his troops once Mons surrendered in mid-September 1572. As the revolt in Brabant crumbled, Mechelen, which had supported William, yielded to Alva without a struggle. To encourage the capitulation of other Orange-supporting towns, Alva nevertheless allowed his men to sack the city. On 14 November he did the same at Zutphen, where hundreds of the town’s population were massacred. Finally, on 2 December 1572 at Naarden, as Alva became impatient to engineer a general capitulation in the region before winter set in, he ordered the killing of every man, woman and child in the town.

As one historian of the period has written, ‘The slaughter at Naarden, in which almost the entire population perished, only a handful escaping in the dark across the snow, had a sensational effect on the popular imagination in the Low Countries, becoming a byword for atrocity and cruelty.’¹⁷ The ruthless and dogmatic way in which 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 killed as they fled; around a hundred citizens of Antwerp also lost their lives. After this ‘French 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 and a vile heretic.²⁴

Subjected to extreme torture, Gérard steadfastly insisted that he had acted alone, refusing to name any co-conspirators or to implicate anybody else to whom he might have spoken in advance of his intended action. This act of assassination was, it appeared, the deed of a solitary fanatic, a loner with an intense commitment to the Catholic Church and a faithful upholder of the legitimacy of the rule of Philip II in the Netherlands, and so it was reported in the many broadsheets and pamphlets which circulated the news rapidly across Europe.

The accounts of the prince’s death rushed out in the hours following his assassination all stressed the deadly effectiveness of the assassin’s bullets by reporting that the victim had succumbed without uttering a single word. Five days after the event, England’s head of information-gathering, Sir Francis Walsingham, reported, on the basis of the intelligence gathered from his agents in the Low Countries:

On Tuesday in the afternoon, as [the Prince of Orange] was risen from dinner and went from the eating place to his chamber, even entering out of a door to go up the stairs, the Bourgonian that had brought him news of Monsieur [the Duke of Anjou] his death, making show as if he had some letter to impart and to talk with his Excellency, with a pistol shot him under the breast, whereof he fell down dead in the place and never spake word, to the wonderful grief of all there present.

Given the appalling blow the assassination dealt to Protestant fortunes in the Low Countries, however, more lurid versions of the stricken prince’s dying moments rapidly emerged. ‘Last words’ began to circulate, in which, with his dying breath, William lamented the disastrous impact his death would have on the United Provinces. The first English printed account of the murder stated that ‘the Prince fell down suddenly, crying out, saying Lord have mercy upon me, and remember thy little flock’. The Queen of England herself, sending her condolences to William’s widow ten days after the event, referred to similar sentiments she had been informed had come from the lips of the dying prince,

who by his last words, recommending himself to God with the poor afflicted people of those countries, manifested to the world his Christian determination to carry on the cause which he had embraced.

Protestants across Europe needed a narrative of calamitous upheaval, the world turned upside down, violent alteration and lasting damage to the cause. This iniquitous Catholic blow struck at the very heart of the prince’s ‘flock’ of feuding and disorganised northern Low Countries provinces; his ‘deathbed utterances’ acknowledged the impact his death was bound to have on the temporary and fragile accord William had managed to impose.

Similarly, early accounts rushed out in broadsheets and pamphlets insisted that the assassin, when seized, refused to speak, while others maintained that he cried out in cowardly fashion, ‘Sauve moi la vie, je conterai tout’ (Spare me and I will tell all), and others again claimed that he expostulated: ‘What is the matter, have you never seen a man killed before now? It is I who have done the deed and would do it if it were still to do again.’ ‘And they making him believe that the Prince was not dead, he regretted that more than the punishment which he should receive, and thus was led to prison.’²⁵

Like tabloid newspapers’ reaction to a politically significant murder today, the sixteenth-century ‘press’ versions of the assassination and its consequences relished every ghastly detail and, where detail was lacking, invented it to increase the sensationalism of their accounts. Gérard’s bullets had cut down the one man capable of sustaining the fragile alliance among the Protestant provinces, each with its separate character and interests, opposed to Philip II in the Low Countries. Without him that accord crumbled and the Spanish regained a firm foothold in the territory. The idea that so drastic an act had been carried out by a stolid, unprepossessing nobody, and that its success had been in large measure the result of a grotesque bungling of the security around the Prince of Orange, was too awful to contemplate. No wonder sixteenth-century chroniclers and pamphleteers felt the need to put brashly unrepentant words in the assassin’s mouth.

WHO WAS THE ASSASSIN?

The cold-blooded killing of the Prince of Orange was high drama in the volatile political arena of the Low Countries. Its perpetrator, though, was unnervingly ordinary. Twenty-five-year-old Balthasar Gérard came from Vuillafans, in Franche-Comté, near Besançon in France (where you can still visit his family home in rue Gérard today).²⁶ Small, quiet and unassuming, Balthasar was one of eleven children from a well-to-do, devoutly Catholic family, who were also staunch supporters of the Habsburgs as their rulers and benefactors (Franche-Comté had benefited materially from financial investment – and significant tax relief – through its special association with the Habsburgs). He had studied at the nearby Catholic University of Dôle, and it was apparently there that he became determined to fulfil Philip II’s request for a volunteer assassin to infiltrate the Orange court and rid him of his prime political adversary. Among the many conspiracy theories which inevitably followed the murder of the Prince of Orange, Gérard’s place of origin was judged significant. Antoine Perrenot, Cardinal Granvelle, Archbishop of Mechelen and Primate of the Catholic Low Countries – a figure loathed, feared and eventually unseated by the Orangists – also came from Franche-Comté, and it was suggested that Gérard’s family had owed particular allegiance to him.

It does seem unlikely that Gérard had acted without accomplices, or at least without some outside help. He used an elaborate sequence of ruses to gain access to William of Orange’s entourage, including forged testimonials and counterfeit sealed documents. Adopting the assumed name François Guyon, Gérard claimed to be the son of an obscure Protestant serving-man, Guy of Besançon, who had suffered persecution for his religious beliefs. To corroborate his story he produced letters signed by prominent figures within the Catholic administration in the Low Countries, which suggested that he was trusted enough by the Spanish to allow him access to classified Catholic information which might significantly help the Orange faction. His documentation had been sufficiently convincing for Pierre Loyseleur de Villiers, William of Orange’s close personal adviser, chaplain and intelligence-gatherer, to take him into his personal service on the strength of it, as a messenger and potentially valuable spy. Although in the aftermath of William’s death Villiers was briefly arrested and accused of double-crossing the Orange cause, there seems little doubt that he had been genuinely taken in by Gérard’s forged testimonials, and particularly by the quality of the sensitive intelligence he had provided by way of introduction.²⁷

For several months Gérard came and went between Villiers and William’s household, running errands and carrying messages. He did not yet have the necessary level of security clearance to allow him to enter the inner circles around William. However, on 12 June 1584 an extraordinary stroke of luck fortuitously gave him the access and opportunity he was waiting for. As he rode to deliver a confidential message from Villiers to the Duke of Anjou, he was met on the road by messengers bringing news that Anjou had died two days earlier. Gérard seized the moment, and volunteered to ride post-haste to William at Delft to inform him of the death of his close, politically controversial ally. He was admitted into the presence of William himself (subsequently it was said that he was allowed into the prince’s own bedchamber because of the urgency of the message he carried), delivered his unwelcome news in a manner that pleased William, and was thereafter accepted by the prince into his intimate circle of followers. Given the assiduousness with which Gérard’s credentials were being examined and re-examined before this chance encounter, it must have seemed to him that God had indeed intervened on his behalf.

Gérard now bided his time, waiting for a suitable occasion on which to act. Improvisation seems to have been a key part of the success of his plan. He acquired his weapon (either a single pistol, or a pair) on the very day of the assassination. Seeing a small pistol (or ‘dag’ as they were commonly called in English) in the hands of one of the prince’s immediate servants, he asked if the man was prepared to sell it to him. He had, he told him, shortly to go on a journey, and a pocket pistol would be the ideal weapon to carry to protect himself en route. He may even have been telling the truth – the money used to buy the gun may have been given to him by Villiers to purchase shoes and clothing for the next mission he was to be sent on. According to the broadsheet accounts, Gérard paid a sum equivalent to ten English shillings for the pistol.

In this, as in all other aspects of the planning of the killing, the would-be assassin showed unerring good sense. Gérard could not possibly have entered the presence of the Prince of Orange armed – we must surely assume that in such uncertain times, with the threat of violent attempts on William’s life, openly encouraged by Philip II, hanging over him, body-searches were routine. But pistols were (as we shall see) fashion items for members of the style-conscious élite, and were worn visibly and even ostentatiously by men with military pretensions. William’s closest bodyguards and most trusted servants will certainly have worn them, jauntily thrust into their waistband, or hitched on to their belt (surviving pistols from this period are often provided with a belt-hook, as well as being lavishly decorated and inlaid, for ornamental wear). Gérard’s purchase of a small wheel-lock pistol within the court itself allowed him then to conceal it about his person. We may imagine the vendor will have shown him how to charge the weapon and wind the lock; all Gérard now had to do was wait for a suitable opportunity to fire it. He may have discharged a pistol on a previous occasion. An assassin who had never before fired a fully loaded weapon would be unlikely, even at close range, to hold steady aim under the force of the gun’s unexpectedly violent recoil.

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