William the Silent

On C. V. Wedgwood's William the Silent

In 1568 William, a prominent local noble, led an army into the Netherlands to liberate his people from the Spanish king Phillip II. Two centuries later, George Washington would later be praised for simply keeping an army together during his revolution, but William would fail to do even that. His Spanish opponent simply avoided battle and, denied any success, William's money ran out and his army evaporated before the year was up.

At this point William could have ended as a minor footnote in history. Bankrupt and cut off from his allies, he worked mostly in vain to garner support for another attempt. A few years later, though, Spanish excesses would rekindle the revolt in the northern provinces and it was William's flag that they raised. The war for independence would ultimately last 80 years, and while William wouldn't live to see most of it he was the one who kept them alive by the slenderest of threads in the first few years--both by military means and by a decency in politics & administration that made the revolting areas far more orderly and just than the Spanish administrated provinces.

In Wedgwood's book, William himself comes across as a mix of the medieval and the modern. Raised to rule in a feudal state, he felt it natural that he would lead other men and also that he should serve a monarch--to such an extent that after he broke with the Spanish king, he went looking for another one. But he had an egalitarian streak that seems entirely anachronistic, a beacon of tolerance in the middle of the reformation, and humanitarian attitudes even in war during an unapologetic era. Ultimately the feudal attempts would all fail--indeed, his more traditional allies Egmont and Horn, who couldn't bring themselves to break definitively with the king--would be executed by the Spanish for having questioned the king. But the modern attitudes would lay the foundation for the Dutch state.

For those unfamiliar with her work, Wedgwood herself is a great writer, a historian doing "popular" (e.g., not academic) history in the '50s; she reminds me a bit of Barbara Tuchman. The book spends a lot of time on personality and narrative, the social issues that get more emphasis in contemporary history are only illustrated through attitudes of the players. And while I think diligently researched it's also sparsely footnoted, which you may count as a feature or bug--I count it as a bug, but probably my only complaint with the entire book.