Maurice of Nassau
Maurice of Nassau was made stadtholder at seventeen because his father had been shot, rebuilt the army of the Dutch Republic into the first modern one, took the fortress towns back from Spain one siege a year, beat a Spanish army in the open at Nieuwpoort, and in the peace that followed had the statesman who had made him executed. He was born in 1567 at Dillenburg, the son of William the Silent by Anna of Saxony, and was at Leiden studying when his father was killed in 1584; the States of Holland and Zeeland made him stadtholder in 1585 and captain-general of the Union's forces in 1588, with Oldenbarnevelt managing the politics and the money. He and his cousin William Louis read the Roman tacticians with the scholar Lipsius and drew the conclusions: smaller units, drill by the count, the countermarch so that ranks of musketeers fired in turn, standard calibres, regular pay, and spades for every soldier, so that a Dutch army entrenched faster than a Spanish one could attack. The engineer Simon Stevin taught him the mathematics of fortification. From 1590, when a peat barge carried seventy men into Breda, he took Zutphen, Deventer, Nijmegen, Groningen and the whole ring of the north, and in July 1600 at Nieuwpoort on the Flemish beach, in a battle he had not wanted, the new infantry held. He thought the Twelve Years' Truce of 1609 a mistake, since the army was the state's only argument, and the peace years turned the difference into a war for the constitution, fought through the quarrel of the Calvinist theologians. In 1618 he purged the councils of Holland with troops, arrested Oldenbarnevelt, and let the court behead him in May 1619; he had become Prince of Orange the year before on his brother's death. The war resumed in 1621 and went badly: Spinola took Breda in 1625 while Maurice lay dying at The Hague. He never married and left the stadtholderate to his half-brother Frederick Henry. Every army in Europe drilled his way within a generation.
- Lived: 1567 CE – 1625 CE
- Nationality: Dutch
- Roles: stadtholder, general
