His intellectual faculties were various and of the highest order.  He had the exact, practical, and combining qualities which make the great commander, and his friends claimed that, in military genius, he was second to no captain in Europe.  This was, no doubt, an exaggeration of partial attachment, but it is certain that the Emperor Charles had an exalted opinion of his capacity for the field.  His fortification of Philippeville and Charlemont, in the face of the enemy his passage of the Meuse in Alva’s sight—­his unfortunate but well-ordered campaign against that general—­his sublime plan of relief, projected and successfully directed at last from his sick bed, for the besieged city of Leyden—­ will always remain monuments of his practical military skill.

Of the soldier’s great virtues—­constancy in disaster, devotion to duty, hopefulness in defeat—­no man ever possessed a larger share.  He arrived, through a series of reverses, at a perfect victory.  He planted a free commonwealth under the very battery of the Inquisition, in defiance of the most powerful empire existing.  He was therefore a conqueror in the loftiest sense, for he conquered liberty and a national existence for a whole people.  The contest was long, and he fell in the struggle, but the victory was to the dead hero, not to the living monarch.  It is to be remembered, too, that he always wrought with inferior instruments.  His troops were usually mercenaries, who were but too apt to mutiny upon the eve of battle, while he was opposed by the most formidable veterans of Europe, commanded successively by the first captains of the age.  That, with no lieutenant of eminent valor or experience, save only his brother Louis, and with none at all after that chieftain’s death, William of Orange should succeed in baffling the efforts of Alva, Requesens, Don John of Austria, and Alexander Farnese—­men whose names are among the most brilliant in the military annals of the world—­is in itself, sufficient evidence of his warlike ability.  At the period of his death he had reduced the number of obedient provinces to two; only Artois and Hainault acknowledging Philip, while the other fifteen were in open revolt, the greater part having solemnly forsworn their sovereign.

The supremacy of his political genius was entirely beyond question.  He was the first statesman of the age.  The quickness of his perception was only equalled by the caution which enabled him to mature the results of his observations.  His knowledge of human nature was profound.  He governed the passions and sentiments of a great nation as if they had been but the keys and chords of one vast instrument; and his hand rarely failed to evoke harmony even out of the wildest storms.  The turbulent city of Ghent, which could obey no other master, which even the haughty Emperor could only crush without controlling, was ever responsive to the master-hand of Orange.  His presence scared away Imbize and his bat-like crew, confounded the schemes of John Casimir, frustrated the wiles of Prince Chimay, and while he lived, Ghent was what it ought always to have remained, the bulwark, as it had been the cradle, of popular liberty.  After his death it became its tomb.