14

William of Nassau had been born in Germany, the son of a poor and minor nobleman; it was only the unexpected death of a cousin that made him Prince of Orange. When he fled from Alva he went back to Dillenburg, where he had been born and grown up, to the home of his parents, where his younger brother now was count.

The castle was centuries old. His mother had kept a school there for young noblewomen; as a boy he had shared his ponies with them. From the window of the hall he looked out over the vineyards and hayfields west of the castle and saw an orderly world, where things were laid out in rows and tended by the seasons, a world full as a shell of its nutmeat, with no room for change.

He leaned on the window’s wide stone edge and wondered if the Dutch would change.

All Europe was laughing at him. He had stolen away from his army in the dead of the night, because he could not pay them and they were threatening to take him prisoner and hold him to ransom. His own wife made a cuckold of him with stablemen and shopkeepers. What right had he to think he could save the Dutch?

He turned his back to the window and looked around the hall. The furniture here was older than he was, older than his father and his grandfather, heavy square pieces of oak, time stained nearly black. On the floor were rush mats, except at the end by the hearth, where the family was accustomed to sit; there an ancient carpet was spread carefully on the floor flagging. Here he had learned his lessons at his mother’s side, reading from the Bible, writing letters on a slate with a piece of chalk. Here he knew what he was: a humble man.

He went up the stairs to the next floor, to the room where he and his brothers had slept as children. Here they had said their prayers at night—Lutheran prayers, because his parents were devout Lutherans; only when he went to Brussels to become the Prince of Orange, at the age of nine, had they consented to let him be baptized a Catholic, because otherwise he would not have entered into the great inheritance. Standing in the doorway of the long low-raftered room, he wondered now at their reasoning. If they had truly believed in their faith, why would they have been willing to see a darling child give up his salvation for a great name and a heap of treasure?

They were Lutheran still. It was Luther’s Bible that rested on the table by the bed at the far end of the room—the bed where William of Orange was now to spend his nights.

He remembered battling his brothers with pillows in this room, before their mother came to tuck them into bed; remembered solemn oaths, taken in the moonlight through the window, to keep faith. To small boys faith was only a word. He had not argued when they told him henceforth he would have to go to Mass.

He turned from the room and climbed the stairs again, steps worn hollow in the middle, too narrow and steep for safety. At first the Mass had delighted him—the pomp, the ritual—as his new clothes delighted him, his fine new horses, his wonderful new palace, his new friends with their long magnificent names. He had learned the new confessional with enthusiasm. But when he had it learned and there was nothing else new in it, he lost his pleasure in it, and at the same time he could not find the way back to the faith his parents had taught him.

Slowly he resumed climbing the stairs into the highest part of the castle. The steps were so treacherous that no one came here anymore, except on one occasion: perhaps it was the very arduousness of the climb that kept alive the tradition that when a countess of Nassau was to be delivered of her children, she should be led up here, into this ancient room beneath the roof of the castle. He went into the room where he had been born and stood in the middle of it. The sunlight flooded in the three windows and filled the room. There was nothing else, save an old bed and a little table all hacked and chopped with knives. He and his brothers had gone at it with their belt knives one day, and his mother had threatened to whip him for it because he was the oldest. His father had said, “No, let them be. I did so myself when I was their age.”

Here he had been born, in this little room no finer than the hovel of a peasant in the field.

That was honest. That was true. So he had learned, in the years in Brussels, attending on the Emperor, going to Mass, dancing with elegant ladies, carrying messages, waiting politely behind his master, lest his master need a pen, a book, a napkin. All those manners were the husks of life, the outward appearances; life itself was of another nature entirely.

He had found that in the Dutch people, busy at their work, at their games and dances, their hands stained with their earth, their faces brown from the sun, people like his parents. The people who cheered him in the streets, who made up poems in his honor, who loved him from the moment he appeared among them, a foreign boy, shy and frightened, come to be their prince.

He laid his hand on the table, where he and his brothers had cut the edge into deep notches.

He could give up now, and no one would think him less. They all thought very little of him anyway, after his humiliations in the field. He could stay here in Dillenburg and live out his life in peace.

If he went back, what was there? Death, surely, and dishonor, and humiliation. The King of Spain was his lord. To war against him was the oldest crime, Lucifer’s crime. Thus would many see what he did.

There was another ancient crime, particular to the wild tribes who had settled in this region and become the Germans and the Dutch, the only capital crime in ancient times: to flee from the field of battle.

He thought of the Dutch, their mild, kindly ways, their tolerance, their natural optimism. Nothing seemed more at odds with these people than the Spanish and the Inquisition. They would resist, in their ways, because it was their nature; and because it was their nature, the Spanish would destroy them.

Out through the window he looked on the warm green fields of Dillenburg, the neat cottages, the spire of the church, as he had from the hall window; but from this height he could see beyond all this tidy order. He saw beyond to the wildness that surrounded it, the thickets and trees and stretches of meadow that lay to the west. That way was the Netherlands. Even as he looked his heart quickened. He knew he would not desert them. No one else would come to their help, but he would, although he knew it meant his death.

“I will keep faith,” he said, low voiced. In that voice he and his brothers had sworn childish oaths, long ago, in this room. Now he swore an oath to the distant wildness, to the horizon, to the tormented lands beyond. “I will keep faith. We shall die together, you and I. I will come back.”