The East Gate of Delft, one of the quaintest and quietest cities of the Netherlands
To come upon Delft, therefore, during this weekly interruption in the perennial polishing of the town, whatever the reason for it, offers the traveler a different and vastly more agreeable impression. He will see Delft and her people at their best, the latter more congenially courteous, the former more serenely stolid. Instead of the boatmen being continually in the act of disturbing the bottoms of the canals with their poles, so that the housemaids can skim off the most graveolent of it with which to scour and rinse their pavements, they assume for the day the rôle of flower sellers. Boats bearing fragrant burdens of potted plants of every variety, and cut flowers as well, as if to try to make amends for the mal-odor of the previous week, will be drawn as close to the sidewalks as the banks of the canals permit, in order to tempt the frailty of the Delft housewife—if an inherent love of flowers may be termed as such—on her way home from church.
Delft is old and she show’s symptoms of the fact in spots. Down at the southern end of the city, near the Rotterdam gate, stands a venerable building, once one of the numerous warehouses scattered over the country belonging to the Dutch East India Company—that most famous and wealthiest of all Dutch trading concerns, founded in 1602, when the power and wealth of the Republic had attained their high-water marks under the stadtholdership of Maurice, one of the sons of the ill-fated Prince William of Orange. The place has long since been put to use as a military storehouse. Directly opposite is the ominous-looking city arsenal, bearing above its arched entrance a massive copy of the arms of the old Dutch Republic, carved in stone. Another of the old buildings is the Gemeelandshuis van Delftland, showing in sandstone a rich Gothic façade of the beginning of the sixteenth century.
With us, Delft’s principal claim to notoriety lies in the manufacture of its faience, commonly called “Delft ware,” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its composition and design at first copied from the Chinese and Japanese porcelain, this faience became celebrated throughout the world. Dutch designs were soon substituted for the Oriental, and the industry prospered proportionately. Later it lapsed into decay and the true process has been revived in Delft only within comparatively recent years. A large plant for its manufacture now operates on the Oosteinde, not far from the New Church.
But in the heart of the Hollander, Delft will ever be revered as the scene of the tragedy that cut short the life and terminated the praiseworthy deeds of that eminent founder of Dutch liberty, “William the Silent,” Prince of Orange, the George Washington of the Netherlands.
Born of noble German parentage at Dillenburg in the Duchy of Nassau in 1533, William, curiously enough, became the favorite of Philip II of Spain, who appointed him, in 1559, when but twenty-six years of age, stadtholder or governor of the provinces of Zeeland, Holland, Friesland, and Utrecht. Two years later William found himself in bad odor with Granvella, the Bishop of Arras, whom Philip had appointed as counselor to his half-sister, Margaret of Parma, the then regent of the Netherlands. William finally effected the enforced relinquishment of this post by the Bishop in 1564.
The subsequent unrest in the Netherlands, provoked mainly by the atrocities of Spanish soldiery, led to the sanguinary assignment of Ferdinando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, to command an army of 10,000 picked men, mustered from Lombardy, Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples, to quell the possible insurrection. This move was bitterly resented, not only by her subjects, but was opposed, although without success, by Margaret of Parma herself; for the name of Alva was as odious to her as it was to them.
A man of brilliant military attainments and the most experienced general in Europe at the time, but bubbling over with avarice and revengefulness, cruel and overbearing, Alva accepted the assignment with alacrity. “I have tamed people of iron in my day,” he was reported to have said contemptuously; “shall I not easily crush these men of butter?”
When Alva, with his army, entered the Netherlands and took it upon himself, after much intrigue and conniving, to supersede the half-sister of his sovereign as governor of the province, the Prince of Orange retired to Dillenburg. Continued oppressions by the Spaniards later called him to arms with the French Huguenots as allies, and he set out betimes upon an unsuccessful campaign to liberate the southern provinces from their yoke of Spanish tyranny. Since that time he was ever an active revolutionist. In 1571 he championed the “Water Beggars,” by which name those insurgents who assisted their compatriots by sea were known, and one year later, having been invited by the provinces of Zeeland and Holland to command their troops against the Spaniards, he captured Middelburg, and later came to the successful rescue of the besieged town of Leyden. Soon after the formation of the famous defensive league known as the “Utrecht Union,” William was condemned to exile by Philip. The fact that the States-General defied the sovereign’s authority in this matter was the percussion cap that exploded the general uprising and the throwing off of Dutch allegiance to Spain in 1581.
“Uneasy lies the head that wears”—the helmet of revolt, and from the time of his first attempt to achieve the success of his ambitious project, the life of no medieval ruler was ever more in jeopardy than was that of William of Orange. Within a period of two years five separate and distinct attempts to take his life had been perpetrated, and a sixth, albeit an abhorrently successful one, was about to follow—all of which were undoubtedly at the initial instigation of the Duke of Alva.