The Awful End of Prince William The Silent
By Lisa Jardine, HarperCollins, £ 12.99

That great book, 1066 and All That, by Sellar and Yeatman posed the memorable question: why was William of Orange? Lisa Jardine answers this question and also situates the Dutch Stadtholder (or governor-general). In the process, however, she somewhat overstates her case in this little book, but that does not take away from the liveliness and the novelty of her approach and analysis.

In July 1584, at his residence in Delft, Prince William of Orange was murdered by a Catholic fanatic with the help of a hand gun. This weapon, a new technological innovation in the field of arms, was becoming fashionable among the elites of Europe in the late 16th century. Jardine asserts that this was the first political assassination of a head of state by a hand gun.

Calling William a head of state might be stretching it a bit. He was born in Nassau in Germany in 1533, and he inherited from his father the modest title of Count of Nassau. He was given the small principality of Orange in southern France at the age of 11. Orange was a part of the Habsburg Empire and it was a gift of the Habsburg emperor Charles V to William, who thus became William of Orange, whose great grandson would become the king of England in 1689 as a result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

William I, whose murder this book describes, was known all over Europe as William the Silent. This sobriquet referred to his reticence. In French, he came to be called le tacitur- ne (the tight-lipped), in Dutch de Zwijger, which in English became ?the Silent?. Jardine?s comment on the nickname is telling: ?The sobriquet suggested an irritating tendency in the prince to hold back from expressing his true opinions and a reluctance to take sides. It turned out to be particularly inappropriate as an enduring nickname for a man renowned in his everyday conduct of affairs in private and in public for his eloquence and loquacity.?

William the Silent acquired a position in European affairs which was utterly disproportionate to his status as the ruler of a small Habsburg principality. History singled him out for leadership in the struggle of the Low Countries against the Habsburgs. This happened because of his marriage (his second) to Anna, the daughter of the staunchly Protestant Maurice of Saxony. The opposition of the Low Countries to the Catholic Church went back to Martin Luther and by the second half of the 16th century, the opposition had become open defiance under the leadership of William.

This leadership led to a price on his head being announced by Philip II of Spain, and eventually to his murder which was preceded by another attempt on his life in 1582. Jardine recreates in great detail and dexterity, the attempted murder, the assassination and the historical context in which they took place. She also has an interesting chapter on the hand gun and its introduction in Europe. But she falters a bit in her analysis of the aftermath. William?s murder created a paranoia in Elizabethan England but it is doubtful if it was, as Jardine claims, a turning point of history.