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 ourselves according to the honour of the house.  May God provide for us in his bounty, and certainly we have much need of it.”  Accustomed to the more luxurious civilisation of France, she had been amused rather than annoyed, when, on her first arrival in Holland for her nuptials, she found herself making the journey from Rotterdam to Delft in an open cart without springs, instead of the well-balanced coaches to which she had been used, arriving, as might have been expected, “much bruised and shaken.”  Such had become the primitive simplicity of William the Silent’s household.  But on his death, in embarrassed circumstances, it was still more straightened.  She had no cause either to love Leyden, for, after the assassination of her husband, a brutal preacher, Hakkius by name, had seized that opportunity for denouncing the French marriage, and the sumptuous christening of the infant in January, as the deeds which had provoked