A man of brilliant military attainments and the most experienced general in Europe at the time, but bubbling over with avarice and revengefulness, cruel and overbearing, Alva accepted the assignment with alacrity. “I have tamed people of iron in my day,” he was reported to have said contemptuously; “shall I not easily crush these men of butter?” When Alva, with his army, entered the Netherlands and took it upon himself, after much intrigue and conniving, to supersede the half-sister of his sovereign as governor of the province, the Prince of Orange retired to Dillenburg. Continued oppressions by the Spaniards later called him to arms with the French Huguenots as allies, and he set out betimes upon an unsuccessful campaign to liberate the southern provinces from their yoke of Spanish tyranny. Since that time he was ever an active revolutionist. In 1571 he championed the “Water Beggars,” by which name those insurgents who assisted their compatriots by sea were known, and one year later, having been invited by the provinces of Zeeland and Holland to command their troops against the Spaniards, he captured Middelburg, and later came to the successful rescue of the besieged town of Leyden. Soon after the formation of the famous defensive league known as the “Utrecht Union,” William was condemned to exile by Philip. The fact that the States-General defied the sovereign’s authority in this matter was the percussion cap that exploded the general uprising and the throwing off of Dutch allegiance to Spain in 1581. “Uneasy lies the head that wears”--the helmet of revolt, and from the time of his first attempt to achieve the success of his ambitious project, the life of no medieval ruler was ever more in jeopardy than was that of William of Orange. Within a period of two years five separate and distinct attempts to take his life had been perpetrated, and a sixth, albeit an abhorrently successful one, was about to follow--all of which were undoubtedly at the initial instigation of the Duke of Alva. Just across the canal from the Old Church at Delft still stands the house of William the Silent, now known as the Prinsenhof, where the tragedy took place. It is a low, two-story building with a red-tiled roof, formerly a cloister, but fitted up in 1575 as the residence of the Princes of Orange. Here came William, in the summer of 1584, to join his fourth wife, Louisa de Coligny, at the christening of their son, born in Delft the previous winter, who later became the celebrated governor, Frederic William. The door marked _Gymnasium Publicum_, opposite the tower of the church, leads through a courtyard to the staircase where the murder was committed; and in a dark corner of the wall at the foot of the steps the custodian will show you a hole made by one of the bullets that killed the Prince. The dining-room beyond, from which William had come to his death, is now a museum containing reminiscences of him.