Читать книгу The Awful End of Prince William the Silent: The First Assassination of a Head of State with a Hand-Gun - Lisa Jardine - Страница 12

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.