In the meantime a spirit of public dissatisfaction and disorder manifested itself which showed to the sagacious Regent that the measures enacted and enforced by Cardinal Granvella would lead to a revolt against the Spanish régime. The people of Brussels showed their hatred and contempt for the Cardinal in many ways. In public processions they carried banners with insulting inscriptions or offensive caricatures and cartoons exhibiting him in ridiculous positions. Alarmed at these manifestations of public hostility, the Duchess Regent applied to the King, imploring him to remove Granvella from his post as President of the Council of State. The King reluctantly complied with the request, but Granvella’s removal did not change the spirit of the Council; and it was only too evident that its decisions were emanations from the King’s own mind. When Count Egmont, who had gone to Madrid on a special mission to plead for the personal and political rights of the Netherlanders, urged upon the King to give them greater religious liberty and to annul some of the stringent laws of the Council of State, Philip got into a rage and exclaimed: “No, no, I would rather die a thousand deaths and lose every square foot of my empire than permit the least change in our religion!” And he added that the decrees of the Council of Trent, which had recently been held, and which had affirmed anew the immutable doctrines of the Catholic Church, should be rigidly enforced in all his states. New instructions to that effect were sent to the Netherlands, followed by new convictions and new executions.
It was at this perilous and critical time that William of Orange openly accepted the Lutheran faith. Shortly before, he had been married to Princess Anne of Saxony, a daughter of the famous Maurice, Elector of Saxony, and a fervent Lutheran. William’s conversion to Protestantism has been often ascribed to the influence of his wife, but it should be remembered that William was born a prince of Nassau in Germany and the son of Lutheran parents, and that his Catholicism dated only from the time of his later education at the court of Charles the Fifth, where he was placed as a page at the early age of nine years. William had never forgotten the lessons of Protestantism which he had imbibed in his early childhood, and while professing the Catholic faith in later years, he had retained that respect and that affection for the principles of the Reformation which so peculiarly qualified him to act as umpire and leader in a contest in which religion played so conspicuous a part.
Up to that time the nobility had taken much less interest in the religious quarrels than the lower classes of the people; but the steadily increasing number of convictions and executions for heresy aroused their fears that the Spanish monarch intended to abolish their time-honored privileges and wished to substitute a Spanish autocracy for their liberal self-government. Against this intention they loudly protested, Catholics as well as Protestants, and bound themselves to stand together in their resistance to further acts of aggression. They presented petitions and protests to the Duchess Regent who received them in a conciliatory spirit, and forwarded them to the King, recommending at the same time greater leniency and moderation. But Philip the Second, getting tired of the many complaints and remonstrances reaching him from Brussels, and determined to stamp out heresy at whatever cost, sent the Duke of Alva, the sternest and most cruel of all his commanders, at the head of a considerable army to the Netherlands, with full powers to restore order and to reëstablish the authority of the Catholic Church. From the well-known character of the commander-in-chief it could not be doubted that the King’s severe orders would be carried out in the most cruel and unrelenting spirit, and that neither age nor sex nor rank would be spared. That Alva’s mission would be successful, the King did not doubt for a minute. But it was on his part a case of misplaced judgment, because his narrow mind could not measure the difference between the Jews and Moriscoes, and the Netherlanders: against the former the policy of violence and compulsion had been successful; against the latter that same policy was doomed to ignominious failure. The rumor that he would come as a bloody avenger preceded Alva’s arrival, and filled the hearts of the Netherlanders with terror. A regular panic ensued, and an emigration en masse was organized; it looked as though the northern provinces were to be depopulated entirely by this exodus of men, women and children, mostly belonging to the mercantile and working classes, and taking their merchandise and their household goods with them.
The sending of an army composed entirely of Spaniards and Italians into the Netherlands was so flagrant a violation of the constitutional rights of the provinces, which the King had sworn to maintain, that the Prince of Orange thought the time for open resistance had come, and he conferred with Egmont, Hoorn, and other prominent men concerning its organization. But finding it impossible to organize united resistance against Alva’s army, William of Orange, with his profound insight and with his distrust in the Spanish King’s intentions, deemed it prudent to leave the Netherlands and withdraw to his estates in Germany instead of imperilling his head by remaining at Brussels. It was in vain that he tried to persuade Egmont, to whom he was greatly attached, to accompany him and to place his valuable life beyond the reach of the Spanish “avenger.” Egmont’s openhearted and confiding character refused to believe the sinister forebodings of the penetrating genius of his friend; he relied on his immense popularity among the Netherlanders and on the great services he had rendered, on the battle-field, to the House of Hapsburg. He therefore remained at Brussels, and even welcomed Alva on his arrival at the capital. The Spanish commander conducted himself as the regent de facto without paying much attention to the Duchess, who still held that position nominally. One of his first official acts was the appointment of a special tribunal, which he named the Council of Troubles, composed exclusively of Spaniards, to try charges of heresy and treason. The people, however, found another, and more appropriate name for it. On account of the indecent haste and rapidity with which persons were tried, convicted, and executed by this Council, they named it “The Bloedraad” (The Council of Blood). The number of victims was so great that gallows and scaffolds had to be erected in all the cities and towns of the Netherlands, and that the executioners were kept busy in beheading and quartering the heretics and “traitors.” Counts Egmont and Hoorn had been arrested, soon after Alva’s arrival, on the charge of treason; they were also tried before the Court of Troubles and convicted on trumped-up charges. They were beheaded, together with eighteen members of the nobility, at the public square of Brussels.
This infamous act stirred up William of Orange to immediate action. What he had foreseen and predicted had come to pass. Evidently it was Alva’s intention to kill off the leaders in order to get control of the great mass of the people without much difficulty or resistance. William of Orange himself was charged with treason and summoned to appear before the judges of the Court of Troubles. But since his appearance at Brussels would have been equivalent to his conviction, he refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the court, claiming that as a knight of the Golden Fleece he had the right to be tried by the King personally and by no other judges than his peers. At the same time he published an address to the King in which he defended his public actions in a masterly manner, convincing every unbiased mind not only of his patriotic devotion to his country, but also of his loyalty to his sovereign in all his legitimate and constitutional acts of government. The Duke of Alva took no further notice of this defence; but when the day for William’s appearance at court had passed, he was sentenced to death, and his property, personal and real, was confiscated as that of a rebel and traitor.
In the meantime the Prince of Orange had not been idle in Germany. He had appealed to his co-religionists for assistance, pointing out to the Protestant princes that the cause of Protestantism itself was the issue of the war in the Netherlands, and that the complete victory of the Spanish army over the Netherlanders would be followed by an overthrow of the Protestant churches, both Lutheran and Calvinistic, in Europe. He succeeded in collecting a considerable army, which he divided into two corps, placing the one under the command of his brother Lewis, Count of Nassau, and invading Brabant with the other. The Count of Nassau was defeated in battle and driven out of Frisia with heavy loss, while Alva avoided giving battle to the Prince of Orange. By skilful manœuvres the Spanish general tired out the patience of the German troops, and when the severe cold of winter set in, the Prince, finding himself without means of paying his soldiers and getting no support from the inhabitants (who were overawed by the Spanish authorities), had to disband his army and to return, temporarily, to Germany. Alva triumphed and pompously reported to the Spanish King that both the rebellion and heresy had been stamped out in the Netherlands, and that his presence was hardly required there any longer. In his overweening vanity he went even so far as to order a bronze monument to be erected in his own honor, in which he was represented as a conqueror, standing with one foot on a Dutch nobleman in full armor and with the other on a man of the people, kneeling and with a Lutheran prayer-book in his hands.
It is not my intention to go into the details of the cruel war in the Netherlands,—cruel even beyond human imagination,—to recount the sufferings, the tortures, the atrocities, the martyrdom imposed upon the unfortunate victims of political and religious persecution, conceived by human fiends educated in the school of the Spanish Inquisition and warmly applauded by him whom both his cotemporaries and posterity have justly named “the demon of the South.” Such a war had never been seen between nations claiming to be civilized; and never has patriotic devotion in defence of home and country, of liberty and creed, been carried to a higher degree than by those brave Netherlanders in the sixteenth century. The world should never forget the immense service which they rendered to mankind by victoriously maintaining the principles of religious liberty, which, without their heroic perseverance, would very likely have perished under the incubus of Spanish despotism and the Spanish Inquisition. That they did not succumb and perish must be considered one of the marvellous enigmas of history, in which the finger of God is plainly visible. Immortal glory and renown should be accorded to the gallant leader who, under the most discouraging and desperate circumstances, never lost hope and confidence in the righteousness and final triumph of his cause, and who, undaunted by personal danger and persecution, never wavered in his loyalty to principle, and held high the banner of popular sovereignty and individual liberty, until the pistol shot of a hired assassin interrupted his glorious career.
If to-day, after the lapse of three centuries, we look back upon that career, our admiration for William of Orange grows steadily. We follow him from his first appearance on the public stage of the Netherlands, as a friend and confidant of Charles the Fifth, as a loyal adviser of the Duchess Regent, as a loyal subject pleading with Philip the Second and warning him to respect the rights of citizenship and religion of the Netherlanders,—pleading and warning in vain; we behold him unsheathing his sword for the defence and, when they appeared to be lost, for the recovery of those rights, toiling, struggling, fighting for the people, always subordinating his own interests to those of the nation and to the sublime cause of which he was the acknowledged champion; we recognize him as the first in the field, the first in the council-room, filling his countrymen with an enthusiasm and a confidence which alone could sustain them in undergoing sufferings and hardships unequalled in history. Thus he stands before us fully realizing and even surpassing the eulogy which Goethe wrote for the monument of another national hero, perhaps worthy, but certainly not so worthy of it as William the Silent:—
“In advance or retreat,
In success or defeat,
Ever conscious and great,
Ever watchful to see,
From foreign dominion he made us free!”
In translating Goethe’s inscription on the famous Blücher monument at Rostock we were strongly impressed with the fact that it was even better adapted for a monument of the great Prince of Orange than for that of the indomitable, but rather reckless, “Marshal Vorwärts.”