William of Orange was but fifty-one years of age when his life was thus prematurely ended, and though he had been much aged by the cares and anxieties of a crushing responsibility, his physicians declared that at the time of his death he was perfectly healthy and that he might have been spared to carry on his work for many years, had he escaped the bullets of the assassin.  But it was not to be.  It is possible that he should be reckoned in the number of those whose manner of death sets the seal to a life-work of continuous self-sacrifice.  The title of “Father of his Country,” which was affectionately given to him by Hollanders of every class, was never more deservedly bestowed, for it was in the Holland that his exertions had freed and that he had made the impregnable fortress of the resistance to Spain that he ever felt more at home than anywhere else.  It was in the midst of his own people that he laid down the life that had been consecrated to their cause.  As a general he had never been successful.  As a statesman he had failed to accomplish that union of the Netherlands, north and south, which at one triumphant moment had seemed to be well-nigh realised by the Pacification of Ghent.  But he had by the spirit that he had aroused in Holland and its sister province of Zeeland created a barrier against Spanish domination in the northern Netherlands which was not to be broken down.

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CHAPTER VI

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC

At the moment of the assassination of William the Silent it might well have seemed to an impartial observer that the restoration of the authority of the Spanish king over the whole of the Netherlands was only a question of time.  The military skill and the statecraft of Alexander Farnese were making slow but sure progress in the reconquest of Flanders and Brabant.  Despite the miserable inadequacy of the financial support he received from Spain, the governor-general, at the head of a numerically small but thoroughly efficient and well-disciplined army, was capturing town after town.  In 1583 Dunkirk, Nieuport, Lindhoven, Steenbergen, Zutphen and Sas-van-Gent fell; in the spring of 1584 Ypres and Bruges were already in Spanish hands, and on the very day of William’s death the fort of Liefkenshoek on the Scheldt, one of the outlying defences of Antwerp, was taken by assault.  In August Dendermonde, in September Ghent, surrendered.  All West Flanders, except the sea-ports of Ostend and Sluis, had in the early autumn of 1584 been reduced to the obedience of the king.  The campaign of the following year was to be even more successful.  Brussels, the seat of government, was compelled by starvation to capitulate, March 10; Mechlin was taken, July 19; and finally Antwerp, after a memorable siege, in which Parma displayed masterly skill and resource, passed once more into the possession of the Spaniards.