William the Silent
William the Silent was the richest nobleman in the Netherlands, raised a Catholic at the court of Charles V, who led the revolt of the provinces against Charles's son for sixteen years, was outlawed with a price on his head, and was shot on his own staircase by a man who wanted the money. He was born in 1533 at Dillenburg in Nassau to a Lutheran count, inherited the principality of Orange and the Nassau estates in the Netherlands from a cousin at eleven on condition that he be brought up Catholic at Brussels, and was by 1559 stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht and a member of the council of state. The name came from a conversation that year with Henry II of France, who assumed he knew of a plan to exterminate the Protestants of both countries and to whom he said nothing. He opposed the cardinal Granvelle, the Inquisition and the new bishoprics as a politician, not yet a Protestant, and when Philip sent the Duke of Alba in 1567 he left for Germany rather than be arrested; Alba's tribunal condemned him in absence and took his son as a hostage to Spain. His invasions of 1568 failed and his brother died in one. In 1572 the Sea Beggars took Brielle, Holland and Zeeland rose, and the States of Holland made him their stadtholder against the king in whose name he still claimed to act; he cut the dykes to relieve Leiden in 1574 and founded its university. The Pacification of Ghent in 1576 briefly united all seventeen provinces behind him, and the Union of Utrecht of 1579 held the seven that stayed. Philip's ban of 1580 called him the enemy of the human race and offered twenty-five thousand crowns; his Apology answered it, and the Act of Abjuration of July 1581 deposed the king by the argument that a prince who breaks the contract may be renounced. He survived a shot in the face in 1582. On 10 July 1584 Balthasar Gérard, a Burgundian Catholic who had waited months for the chance, shot him at the foot of the stairs of the Prinsenhof at Delft, the first head of state killed with a handgun. His last words, if the record is right, asked God to have pity on this poor people. He left the war to his son Maurice, seventeen, and the country the name of father.
- Lived: 1533 CE – 1584 CE
- Nationality: Dutch
- Roles: stadtholder, general, founder
