William of Orange, at the departure of the King for Spain, was in his twenty-seventh year.  He was a widower; his first wife, Anne of Egmont, having died in 1558, after seven years of wedlock.  This lady, to whom he had been united when they were both eighteen years of age, was the daughter of the celebrated general, Count de Buren, and the greatest heiress in the Netherlands.  William had thus been faithful to the family traditions, and had increased his possessions by a wealthy alliance.  He had two children, Philip and Mary.  The marriage had been more amicable than princely marriages arranged for convenience often prove.  The letters of the Prince to his wife indicate tenderness and contentment.  At the same time he was accused, at a later period, of “having murdered her with a dagger.”  The ridiculous tale was not even credited by those who reported it, but it is worth mentioning, as a proof that no calumny was too senseless to be invented concerning the man whose character was from that hour forth to be the mark of slander, and whose whole life was to be its signal, although often unavailing, refutation.

Yet we are not to regard William of Orange, thus on the threshold of his great career, by the light diffused from a somewhat later period.  In no historical character more remarkably than in his is the law of constant development and progress illustrated.  At twenty-six he is not the “pater patriae,” the great man struggling upward and onward against a host of enemies and obstacles almost beyond human strength, and along the dark and dangerous path leading through conflict, privation, and ceaseless labor to no repose but death.  On the contrary, his foot was hardly on the first step of that difficult ascent which was to rise before him all his lifetime.  He was still among the primrose paths.  He was rich, powerful, of sovereign rank.  He had only the germs within him of what was thereafter to expand into moral and intellectual greatness.  He had small sympathy for the religious reformation, of which he was to be one of the most distinguished champions.  He was a Catholic, nominally, and in outward observance.  With doctrines he troubled himself but little.  He had given orders to enforce conformity to the ancient Church, not with bloodshed, yet with comparative strictness, in his principality of Orange.  Beyond the compliance with rites and forms, thought indispensable in those days to a personage of such high degree, he did not occupy himself with theology.  He was a Catholic, as Egmont and Horn, Berlaymont and Mansfeld, Montigny and even Brederode, were Catholic.  It was only tanners, dyers and apostate priests who were Protestants at that day in the Netherlands.  His determination to protect a multitude of his harmless inferiors from horrible deaths did not proceed from sympathy with their religious sentiments, but merely from a generous and manly detestation of murder.  He carefully averted his mind from sacred matters.  If indeed