In September 1531, Juliana von Stolberg and her new husband, Willem the Rich, rode through the heart of Germany’s Westerwald countryside into the tiny village of Dillenburg, nestled at a bend in the River Dill. Willem, a quiet and unambitious lesser nobleman, who was not rich in anything but children,[1] never attained great fame. Nor was Dillenburg likely to be known beyond the borders of western Germany.
To Dillenburgers, the five-centuries-old Nassau castle that dominated the hill above the village stood as a massive artistic reminder of the ever present influence of the noble family that lived in its plain halls, tilled its gardens, and hunted in the neighboring forests. Here villagers received gainful employment, a place of worship, herbal healing, and protection from marauding warlords.
In neighboring districts, the Nassau family exerted considerable influence. Juliana ran a school for noblemen’s children.[2] Her herbal cures often found their way to other regions. She gained a reputation for her pious Court Ordinances, which regulated everything from hours for meals to acceptable manners of speaking and dressing, to mandatory attendance at daily Bible readings and prayers.
In 1534, Willem became one of the first noblemen to openly proclaim his household Lutheran under the German Peace of Augsburg. This meant declaring all his subjects for Lutheranism. On the side of their hill, he built the first parsonage expressly designed for a Protestant minister.[3] Politically, Willem’s wisdom was highly respected throughout western Germany. Rulers from surrounding areas came to him, and later to his son Jan, for counsel and help in settling disputes.
Still, no one ever dreamed of Dillenburg as a center of worldwide influence.
Then in 1544 an apparently insignificant event changed all that. Willem’s nephew, Rene van Chalon, died childless on a French battlefield. In his will, he left his land holdings in the Low Lands[4] and those of his wife in the Orange district of France to eleven-year-old Willem, the oldest of Willem and Juliana’s five sons.
In order to claim his inheritance, the young Willem had to remain under the tutelage of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Living as lord of his palace in Breda, Willem also spent much time in Brussels, where he was educated in all the fine points of becoming an influential Catholic prince.
A favorite of Charles V, the charismatic, fun-loving young nobleman from Dillenburg bore the title of Willem van Oranje. Not only was he governor of several cities and provinces of the Low Lands, but he was appointed to high positions in the military and political advisory councils of the government as well. Willem had every reason to expect to live the luxurious life of a pampered prince, dedicated to pleasure, military duties, and his family. Handsome, attractive to women, and a bit vain, he was prepared to enjoy a lifetime of power and accolades.
But his upbringing in Dillenburg would not allow him to see his dreams come true. Soon after the emperor abdicated his powers to his son, Philip, and to his brother Maximillian, Willem learned that King Henry of France and the newly crowned King Philip of Spain had agreed to completely wipe out all forms of religious heresy, using the Spanish military troops now quartered in the Low Lands.[5] Philip sent Willem back to his landholdings with instructions to promptly execute all dissenters.
Willem was horrified. From his mother he had learned that no person should be forced to pay for religious convictions with his life.[6] His early training left him totally incapable of approving, either as active participant or silent onlooker, any plan that condemned thousands of virtuous men and women to massacre. Instead, he warned the men whom he’d been instructed to execute to flee. From that day on, he incited Lowlanders to resist the intrusion of Spanish troops on their soil.
For years Willem labored to save the lives of his subjects while at the same time maintaining a semblance of loyalty to Philip, his sovereign. But both Philip and the Lowlanders were intractable. Gradually, across the countryside and in the halls of Willem’s own castle at Breda, under the leadership of his brother Ludwig and a group of Lowland noblemen, a revolt took shape.
In 1567, the Duke of Alva was sent to the Low Lands to carry out an incredible death sentence pronounced by Philip. In the spirit of the infamous Inquisition that had ravaged Spain and Portugal, the document targeted the entire population (three million people) of the Low Lands, with the exception of a few persons named, as hopelessly tainted with heresy and deserving of extermination.
Seeing that his own life was at risk, Willem took his belongings and household and fled to Dillenburg. From the drafty rooms of the old family castle, he issued pamphlets, explaining the cause of the revolt and begging Lowlanders to support him in it. He commissioned Ludwig as commander of the revolt and traveled across Germany and France, selling his own personal belongings and imploring fellow noblemen to donate funds for the effort.[7]
Dillenburg became the gathering place for men of renown who sympathized with the revolt to plan their strategies.[8] Some became his spokesmen, carrying messages back and forth to leaders in the beleaguered provinces. Ludwig and others launched the first battles in the revolt but with little real success.
From Dillenburg, on August 31, 1568, Willem finally wrote an official declaration of war against Alva. Then he left the sanctuary of Dillenburg, mustered troops, and crossed the Maas River into the Low Lands to engage Alva in battle. When this attempt failed, he returned to Dillenburg, where he gained new strength for the fight ahead. For the next four years, Dillenburg remained the center of discussion and planning for the politics that would one day change the way Europeans ruled themselves.
In 1584, Willem was assassinated.[9] Not until forty years later did Willem’s son Maurice fight the final battle in the revolt that robbed Philip of his sovereignty in the Low Lands. The emerging nation became a refuge for those who wanted to think and worship according to their conscience. The rest of Europe and the developing Americas followed suit.
Unnoticed and unheralded at that pivotal point in history, Dillenburg was silently exerting an undreamed-of influence on the western world. For the way Europeans looked upon the right to dissent in religious opinions would never be the same after the Nassau brothers dared to champion the cause that their mother, Juliana von Stolberg, taught them to hold precious.
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1 Willem the Rich had fifteen children of his own from two marriages, in addition to four of Juliana’s by her first marriage. All but one, who died in infancy, were raised to adulthood.
2 Willem and Juliana were dedicated to improving education for both boys and girls. She ran the school up until the year before her death at the age of seventy-four.
3 While the old castle no longer stands, there is a tower monument to the House of Nassau. The church and parsonage are still there for the visitor to see, though not open to public viewing.
4 Land including modern Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
5 When, on a peace mission in the presence of both kings, Willem heard of these plans, he gave no outward sign of his inner outrage but went home and tried to find ways to prevent them from being enacted. This remarkable feat of self-control earned him the nickname Willem the Silent, by which he has been widely known ever since.
6 Juliana’s father, Count Botho III von Stolberg, was unusually tolerant for his times. He had witnessed Martin Luther on trial at the Diet of Worms in 1521. While he never became Lutheran himself, all of his children did so, with his blessing.
7 According to one estimate, sixty-five percent of all monies that kept the revolt going came from the Nassau family, thirty-four percent came from Protestant nobles and German Protestants, and one percent came from Netherlanders. The Golden Age, Bob Haak.
8 A visitor to Dillenburg’s hill can still look at a spreading linden tree, which tradition says was the site of at least one such strategizing session.
9 He was the fourth and last of the Nassau brothers to die in the cause. Adolph was killed in the Battle of Heiligerlee in 1568. Ludwig and Hendrik died in Mook-Heide in 1574. Only Jan survived and served as head of the Nassau household in Dillenburg until his natural death in 1606.