William ‘the Silent’ (correctly ‘the Prudent’) (1533-84), the figure around whom the Netherlands revolt coalesced. Ruler of the county of Nassau-Dillenburg in Germany and of the principality of Orange in Provence, also the largest landholder in Brabant, he was brought up under the tutelage of the Emperor Charles V. His son Philip II made William a councillor of state in 1555, governor (stadtholder) in Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht in 1559, and in Franche-Comté (where he also had extensive lands) in 1561. With so much to lose he was indeed careful, but events forced him into a role for which he was unprepared by training or temperament. A Lutheran, he suppressed Calvinist disorders in Antwerp in 1566 and strove to maintain peace between Catholics and Protestants, but he was pushed into rebellion by the Duke of Alba's infamous Council of Blood, which declared his lands forfeit and seized his son. In 1568 Alba crushed one mercenary army under William's brother Louis and evaded battle with the second, led by William himself. As always out of money, he withdrew to France, where he made peace with the local Calvinists (Huguenots) before returning to his lands in Germany.
William prepared a co-ordinated attack for 1572, but the St Bartholomew's Day massacre in France dashed his hopes of support from that quarter. Generalized revolt was in fact sparked by the capture of Brielle by the ‘Sea Beggars’ as a result of being driven out of their havens in England. Most of Holland and Zeeland declared for William, later joined by Gelderland and Friesland. For the next four years he led the maritime provinces' resistance to the Spanish, his brothers Louis and Henry falling at Nijmegen in 1574, the same year he gave up trying to tame Calvinist fanaticism and joined the Reformed Church.
In 1576, taking advantage of disorder among the Spanish, he achieved the Pacification of Ghent in which the Habsburgs' own states general, exceeding their authority, restored his lands and confirmed his status as stadtholder. This arrangement did not survive the arrival of the new captain general, Don Juan of Austria, and the lid was nailed down by Don Juan's successor Parma, who drove a permanent wedge between the Catholic south and the Protestant north. William's last efforts were to bring in the French to counterbalance the Spanish, on his terms, but he was assassinated before the plan bore fruit.
— Richard Holmes
