He left eleven children—­a son and daughter by the first wife, a son and daughter by Anna of Saxony, six daughters by Charlotte of Bourbon, and an infant, Frederic Henry, born six months before his death.  The eldest son, Philip William, had been a captive in Spain for seventeen years, having been kidnapped from school, in Leyden, in the year 1567.  He had already become so thoroughly Hispaniolized under the masterly treatment of the King and the Jesuits, that even his face had lost all resemblance to the type of his heroic family, and had acquired a sinister, gloomy, forbidding expression, most painful to contemplate.  All of good that he had retained was a reverence for his father’s name—­a sentiment which he had manifested to an extravagant extent on a memorable occasion in Madrid, by throwing out of window, and killing on the spot a Spanish officer who had dared to mention the great Prince with insult.

The next son was Maurice, then seventeen years of age, a handsome youth, with dark blue eyes, well-chiselled features, and full red lips, who had already manifested a courage and concentration of character beyond his years.  The son of William the Silent, the grandson of Maurice of Saxony, whom he resembled in visage and character, he was summoned by every drop of blood in his veins to do life-long battle with the spirit of Spanish absolutism, and he was already girding himself for his life’s work.  He assumed at once for his device a fallen oak, with a young sapling springing from its root.  His motto, “Tandem fit surculus arbor,” “the twig shall yet become a tree”—­was to be nobly justified by his career.

The remaining son, then a six months’ child, was also destined to high fortunes, and to win an enduring name in his country’s history.  For the present he remained with his mother, the noble Louisa de Coligny, who had thus seen, at long intervals, her father and two husbands fall victims to the Spanish policy; for it is as certain that Philip knew beforehand, and testified his approbation of, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, as that he was the murderer of Orange.

The Estates of Holland implored the widowed Princess to remain in their territority, settling a liberal allowance upon herself and her child, and she fixed her residence at Leyden.

But her position was most melancholy.  Married in youth to the Seigneur de Teligny, a young noble of distinguished qualities, she had soon become both a widow and an orphan in the dread night of St. Bartholomew.  She had made her own escape to Switzerland; and ten years afterwards she had united herself in marriage with the Prince of Orange.  At the age of thirty-two, she now found herself desolate and wretched in a foreign land, where she had never felt thoroughly at home.  The widow and children of William the Silent were almost without the necessaries of life.  “I hardly know,” wrote the Princess to her brother-in-law, Count John, “how the children and I are to maintain