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 9

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.