BOOKS.

WILLIAM THE SILENT.*

IT was no light task to which Miss Putnam set herself, viz., to write a life of the great Stadtholder of the Netherlands, William the Silent, to depict fully and clearly the essentially human characteristics of the "moderate man of the sixteenth century," and to rescue his humanity from the mounds of dust and rubbish, the ashes of bygone political warfare and intrigue, which gathered about his life. Further, the materials out of which the modern historian has to select those which are ad rem are in quantity almost overwhelming. Miss Putnam made pilgrimages, in the course of her scholarly investigation, to Breda, Dillenburg, and other places intimately associated with the history of William of Nassau, and ransacked published and unpublished archives.

His fall biography," she says, "is still unwritten, and might easily be compiled on the scale of the latest life of Lincoln. In truth, that is the only form in which justice could be done." Under such circumstances, it was not easy to decide upon what scale the present work should be written. "In my own efforts to tell a consecutive tale in the very words of the hero and his contemporaries, the result has been, perhaps, a running series of pictures arranged in somewhat a [sic] kaleidoscope fashion, rather than a narrative written currente calamo, but these glimpses are authentic phases of the subject- matter, though they may not be the whole truth."

It was a difficult task, and Miss Putnam's success has been but partial. There is too much detail, and there is not detail enough, in the volumes before us. The pictures lack definite- ness from too much, and yet not wholly judicious, compression ; so that not a few pages meant to serve as connecting and ex- planatory links in the narrative—the setting, so to speak, of the actual letters—are too often little else than a weary catalogue of political events, battles, local rebellions, diplomatic perfidy, &c., in which it is difficult to retain the thread, and to see whither things are tending. Such pages remind us of the reliable, but extremely dry, pages of much of Bright's History of England, which in distant days used to be so suggestive of pemmican. In this confused mass of detail the letters of the Prince of Orange, of his brothers Louis and John, and, later, those of his eldest daughter, are welcome and refreshing oases. It was no doubt as difficult as it is beyond the imagina- tion of any one who has never plunged into the dusty work of historical research and begun to dig below the surface, to know exactly what to leave out, seeing that William the Silent's whole life was spent in the atmosphere of politics, and that in not a few cases the threads of his private and public life were inseparably intertwined. But still, after making all due allowance, the reader is left with a wish that Miss Putnam had been more chary of the setting, or, at any rate, put it more into solution, and, as it were, precipitated its most salient features. There is much in the book that is deeply interesting ; but the reader is too apt to be unable to see the wood for the trees. One wishes that the history of the Netherland struggle could have been written by Thucydides.

• William the Silent, Prince of Orar,gel the Moderate Man of the Siateenth Century, The Story of his Life us told from his men Letters, from those of his Friends and Enemies, and from Official Documents. By Ruth Putnam. 2 vo'a. -New York: Putnam. 1145. Many of the letters which Miss Putnam here quotes are published in English for the first time. On the whole, she followed the lead of Motley in his Dutch Republic for the general course of events. It is not, however, a slavish, adherence. On the contrary, Miss Putnam has made a most extensive use of original contemporary material, in German, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Latin. The chief writers used— and very full references are given in the footnotes of almost every page—are Arnoldi, Bor, Brandt, Hoofd, De in Huguerye, Van Meteren, Van Orlers, De la Pise, Pontus Payen, Strada, Lettenhove, and Renon de France ; and, above all, the collected correspondence of William the Silent, and othez archives in the voluminous editions of Gachard and of Groen van Prinsterer. These writers have been consulted in a scholarly and critical manner,—the only one who is really impartial being, in Miss Putnam's judgment, IL Gachard, the late archivist of the Kingdom of Belgium. This is hardly the place to attempt to criticise the wearisome details of sixteenth-century political intrigue, concerning which Miss Putnam has collected together so much valuable material,— material which will serve as a handy guide to the historian of the future. Much pleasanter would it be, did space permit, to quote at length from such letters as throw any light upon the characters and motives of the main and subordinate actors of that great sixteenth-century drama,—upon Philip of Spain and his lieutenants, Margaret of Parma, Cardinal Granvelle (a most obnoxious person, whose portrait fully bears out his reputation), Alva, Requesens, Don John ; upon the genesis of the "Beggars," the judicial murders of Egmont and Horn in 1568, the relief of Leyden in 1574 by William's. fleet, when they cut the dykes and let the sea cover miles of corn-land and meadows; upon William the Silent (so-called not from any habitual taciturnity, but because he had the policy to hold his tongue when the French King, Henry II., divulged unawares an important State secret to him while still a youth); his family the Nassaus ; his brave and strong- souled mother, Juliana of Stolberg ; his brothers Louis and John,—John, the real head of the Nassans at Dillenburg, the most generous, affectionate, and long-suffering of younger brothers; the unhappy Anne of Saxony, the second of William the Silent's four wives, and her blunt, straight- forward grandfather and uncle, the Landgraves of Hesse.

No man is a hero to his valet, and few, perhaps, are likely to realise the melancholy truth of the adage more than those who have devoted themselves to historical research concern- ing the lives of some of the world's heroes. The man who- looms out of the petty circumstances of his age as a " great " man—a man born out of due time—a man who, as we say, lacked his proper meed of appreciation at the hands of his contemporaries—is but too often found, on closer acquaint- ance, to have had qualities which annoyed or alienated those contemporaries, or occasionally to have "done" things which those who knew him personally were bound to resent.. William the Silent did undoubtedly meet with much mis- understanding, and even unfounded misconstruction, from those who were themselves all too lacking in the qualities- which go to make up a far-seeing statesman. Bat, at the same time, some part at least of the rompement de tester which he experienced he really brought upon himself. Much has been made by some writers of his domestic misery as the husband of Anne of Saxony, and even Miss Putnam, who does to a certain extent excuse Anne- upon the ground of her hereditary drawbacks, is, we think, somewhat too caustic in her remarks upon the vexations which that unhappy being caused him. But there is never- theless, to our thinking, a good deal to be said in extenuation for Anne. William was a widower of twenty-eight when he married (for entirely diplomatic reasons of personal ambition) this headstrong—hereditarily headstrong—girl of seventeen, whose mind was none too well balanced even then. She was the daughter of "the great Elector," Maurice of Saxony, his only child and heiress, and all her money went into William's war-chest, on behalf of a cause in which she did not believe, and with which she felt no personal sympathy. Her health of mind and body was never very good, yet she was sub- jected to the strain of child-bearing three times within little over four years, after the troubles in the Nether- lands began, whilst William was unable to maintain her, and she was dependent for food and lodging for herself and her children and servants, upon the charity of William's brother

John, in the castle of Dillenburg, among a large crowd of women with whom she had little or nothing in common, where, in the absence of their men-folk, and the long lack of any intelligence concerning them and their for- tunes, there was little or nothing to do to. keep their minds from feeding on themselves and their own anxieties. Such a life must have tried the devotion of the moat unselfish wife and mother, the strongest brain and heart ; and poor Anne was constitutionally strong in nothing but unwholesome tendencies. She was repudiated by William in 1571 for unfaithfulness, which was, under the circumstances, scarcely to be wondered at ; her children were taken away from her, and for a few years she dragged out a miserable existence, ending her days in a dungeon, where, after the barbarous fashion of the time, insane persons were still at times immured. Here the poor woman was imprisoned, and fed through a slit in the wall, while, to add insult to injury, a preacher daily expounded to her "the true doctrine." She died raving mad in 1577. She was barely thirty-four. And the year after he had repudiated her, her ex-husband began to think about a new wife, Charlotte of Bour- bon. They were married in 1575, and she bore him six daughters in six years, and died of the shock produced on her by the dangerous but abortive attempt upon her husband's life by the assassin Jaureguy in 1582. The follow- ing year, only eleven months after Charlotte's death—a wife with whom he had been very happy—William, now in his fiftieth year, married his fourth wife, Louise de Coligny, the daughter of the great "Admiral of France," a widow of eight- and-twenty, by whom he had his fifteenth child. Twelve of the fifteen lived to grow up, three sons and nine daughters.

There is a pleasant little description of William and his brother, Louis of Nassau, from the pen of Brantome, one of the Huguenot chiefs, whom William visited in the summer of 1569, when his hopes were dim :—

" I had long interviews with the Prince of Orange in an alley in my garden. I found him a very distinguished person, quite to my taste, capable of discussing affairs well. He told me how ineffective was his army, laying the blame on his poverty and the strangers who bore him no love. But he had no intention of stopping in the middle of the way, and he would regain lost ground very soon. He had a very pretty manner, and was of an extremely good figure. Count Louis was smaller. I found him [the prince] sad, and he showed that he was weighed down by his ill-fortune. But Count Louis was more open in his coun- tenance, and seemed more joyous. He was considered more hardy and venturesome than the prince, and the prince wiser, riper, and more prudent." (I., p. 331.)

William of Orange derived his title through the will of his

cousin Rene. Orange was a small independent principality of the Empire in the south-east of France,—the ancient Arausio. William never saw it, although he inherited the title and estates in 1545, when he was barely twelve years old, and he lived to the age of fifty-one, being assassinated

by Gerard in 1584. From the first, William seems to have merited the title of the " moderate" man. He was essentially for compromise, both in politics and religion, from his youth up. A real dislike of unconstitutional action was also engrained in him. To the very last moment—long after such a course had ceased to commend itself to his followers or friends—he clung to the fiction that he owed loyalty o Philip of Spain. It comes out in his public actions, again and again, that he wished to regard himself, even when in open arms against the Spaniards, as acting not

only in the best interests of, bat actually for, "the spider in the Escurial," who was supposed to be led astray by bad advisers, Granvelle, Alva, and the like ; and that these latter

were the real and only "rebels." Even in 1568 he had his standards inscribed "Pro lege, grege, rege." He was not one of the " Beggars " daring the Regency of Margaret of Parma, Philip's half sister, as his beloved brother Louis was ; on the contrary, he had dissociated himself from them, and had done all he could to discountenance their excesses at Antwerp and elsewhere, though he had approved of their petitions against the violation of the cherished rights and privileges of the Netherland towns as being perfectly constitutional. So, too, in religious matters he was personally a trimmer. Brought up as a Catholic from his twelfth year, in the Court of Mary of Hungary, Regent for Charles V., he insisted upon tolera- tion for the Protestants upon equal terms, not so much because he had any deep religions feeling himself, as because he saw the political wisdom and expediency of such a course.

Religion was to him a necessary function of national life, but the doctrinal differences between Catholic and Protes- tant, and b etween Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist, which three sects hated each other like poison, were trivial in his eyes. In later life, when, for reasons mainly of policy (but perhaps in part through the gracious and deeply religions influence of his noble-hearted mother, when he retired to Dillenburg, beaten and depressed) he formally renounced "noire vraie et ancienne religion," he still demanded equal tolerance for the Catholics. Apart from theology altogetherr he saw, long in advance of his age, that to contemplate men being burned for their opinion did the survivors harm awl not good. Herein, perhaps, quite as much as in what he did towards the establishment of Holland as a separate nation& entity in Europe—a work which he did not live to see &mom. plished*—lay his title to posthumous fame and reverence.

The two volumes contain twenty-three portraits, of which the most striking is perhaps that of William of Orange at the age of twenty-four. It is a face with an almost boyish outline, but thoughtful far beyond its years ; deep, serious eyes, high brow, aquiline, well-shaped nose, full, firm lips, cleft chin, and grave expression. The original of the por. trait was lost in the burning of Dillenburg Castle, but the copy from which this frontispiece is taken is a contemporar) one, and is preserved in the possession of the Hesse family at Cassel. There are in addition twenty-four other illustra tions, two maps, two genealogical tables, and seven facsimile signatures, &c.

There are a few provincialisms and slangy expressions suet as one is not unlikely to find in an American writer, but which we confess, seem to us beneath the dignity of a really serious piece of work. Should the book reach a second edition, we hope Miss Putnam will see her way to excising such expressions as "does not quite go down" (II., p. 61), "it was all up with their cause" (II., p. 33), "my brother has been feeling rather done up" (I., p. 91—this in translating ceremonious sixteenth- century correspondence), "row enough" (I., p. 133, for asses de desordre), and the omission of the article before the days of the week, and of the preposition before the days of the month. Such expressions as these, and the still worse "It makes me sick at the stomach," jar quite as much upon the non-American section of the English-reading public as the Americanisms "color," " 3d " (for third), and the division of a word—e.g., " prom-ise "—without regard to its etymology. The non-American reader is apt also to weary of the recurrent parallels from American history ; there are several references to Washington, John Brown, &c., in the body of the text, as, for instance, in Vol. I., p. 313, where we are told that "our gentle Washington swore." This kind of parallel, if given at all, should surely be relegated to the footnotes. In the text it is out of proportion, and therefore irritating. Paper and type are all that could be desired, though the proof-reader has been rather careless about the punctuation, and there are one or two more serious slips,—e.g., "Henry I." for "Henry IL," Vol. I., p. 55; and on p. 95 of Vol. I., " forty-five" letters from William to his first wife, Anne of Egmont, are mentioned as being extant ; while on p. 45 this number is given as "twenty-two." The binding is hardly worthy of the volumes.