The Prince of Parma had refused fifty crowns. It was far less costly to promise a fortune after an assassination than to advance the preliminary charges. The man standing before him bore neither the mien nor the letters of recommendation of a captain; he was an obscure clerk from Franche-Comté, possessed of a monstrous design and slender means. Yet Balthazar Gérard asked for very little in proportion to the service tendered: merely the money required to approach William of Orange and strike him down.
The promise held; the purse remained closed. According to the documents consulted by the historian John Lothrop Motley, the councillor d’Assonleville assured Gérard that the reward would devolve upon his heirs should he not survive. Such foresight lent the enterprise an almost domestic character. The death of a prince was being prepared with the punctilious caution of an inheritance.
D’Assonleville had stipulated another condition: in the event of apprehension, Gérard was on no account to compromise the Prince of Parma. This injunction outlined from the outset two profoundly unequal fates. Upon the clerk would fall the approach, the shot, the flight, and, should he be taken, the interrogation; the great lords would preserve the latitude to hold themselves entirely aloof from the business. They had encountered men before who accepted an earnest without ever fulfilling their word. Such experience had made them thrifty, though no less eager to profit by a murder. Gérard consented to depart without the requested aid, announcing that they would soon hear of him.
Gérard hailed from Vuillafans. A staunch Catholic, he regarded William as the paramount obstacle to the restoration of Spanish authority and of his religion in the Low Countries. The ban pronounced by Philip II had furnished this hatred with a public invitation. It did not create every assassin; it supplied them with a sovereign in whose name they might act, and a bounty they might claim. Gérard professed to be moved solely by zeal. His requests for money, however, were no less exact.
He had previously been employed in Luxembourg under a secretary to Governor Mansfeld. There, he had procured impressions of official seals. This petty theft laid the groundwork for a larger deceit. He intended to present these impressions to Spain’s adversaries as a serviceable instrument for their agents; to lend credence to the offer, he would feign Protestantism long enough to be welcomed among Protestants. A counterfeit service was to purchase genuine access.
In the spring of 1584, his design assumed the form of a memorial delivered to the Prince of Parma’s representatives. Therein, Gérard set forth the role he meant to enact: the son of a persecuted Calvinist, himself devoted to the Reformed faith, seeking refuge and patronage. At the same time, he solicited absolution for the theft of the seals. That conscience, so scrupulous over a stolen stamp, encountered no such impediment when it came to extinguishing a life. It had already enrolled assassination among the ranks of meritorious deeds.
In Delft, the clerk accordingly took the name of François Guyon. He attended divine service, carried the requisite books, and spoke the idiom of the community whose favour he courted. The minister Villiers granted him an audience. The matter of the seals even brought him to France in the retinue of Noël de Caron; Gérard had not desired this diversion, yet it subsequently provided him with the means of returning bearing tidings that William could by no means disregard.
The Duke of Anjou was dead. The messenger conveyed the dispatches to Delft and was admitted, on the eighth of July, into the prince’s bedchamber. William was abed. He sought intelligence concerning the deceased’s final hours; he received it from a man who had spent months contriving how to come within his reach. The security of great persons is sometimes overthrown by the thirst for information: a letter may unbar what a weapon could never have forced.
On this occasion, Gérard was unarmed. He answered, then withdrew. His initial success came to nothing: the prince remained alive, and the would-be assassin returned to the courtyard. There he surveyed the grounds. A halberdier took note of his lingering presence; the indigent traveller explained that he lacked decent shoes and hose to attend the sermon. The appeal reached William, who commanded that he be given money.
According to Motley’s account, Gérard purchased two pistols from a soldier on the following day. The fifty crowns denied by Parma had thus found their substitute in the alms of the man he was to slay. The succour granted to the supposed refugee financed his crime. It remained only to bring the prince once more within range, and this second encounter was not to be an idle one.
On the tenth of July, before the midday repast, Gérard requested a passport. William gave orders that it be prepared. Louise de Coligny, his consort, looked upon the man with apprehension, as the historian relates. The meal took place; the burgomaster of Leeuwarden dined with the family. Within the house, the visitor had a pretext for waiting. A promised document prolonged his presence without arousing suspicion.
Toward two o’clock, William left the dining hall and moved toward the staircase. Gérard stepped from his place of concealment and discharged his piece at point-blank range. A single pistol sent three balls into him. The prince collapsed; he was borne back into the room he had just quitted. The words of prayer attributed to him were recorded after the murder. They cannot diminish the brutal abruptness of the rupture: a conversation, a dinner, a step across one’s own threshold, and then all that gathers in haste around a man beyond the reach of help.
Gérard fled through a side door. He had planned his egress as carefully as his entrance, intending to reach the ramparts and leap the moat. His flight was cut short before the passage. Pages and halberdiers seized him; the city denied him the time to become a herald of victory.
Before the magistrates, he declared his true name and confessed his deed. He penned his own confession. He avowed the service of God and the King; the interrogations sought likewise to uncover the encouragements he had received and the promises exchanged. Torture accompanied this inquiry. Depositions obtained under such duress cannot transmute every detail into certainty, yet the prior overtures made to d’Assonleville belong equally to the correspondence examined by Motley.
On the fourteenth of July, Gérard was put to death following a sentence of extreme cruelty. Justice sought to make of the murderer’s body an answer to the prince’s death. It could undo neither the fatal shot nor the covenant entered into on the opposing side of the war.
The family received its recompense. Lands and titles replaced the promised specie; the deed condemned in Delft became, in the state papers of the King of Spain, a service worthy of lasting gratitude. Gérard had failed to make good his escape. Yet upon this final clause of the bargain, his patrons did not leave him unpaid: the assassin was dead, but the debt survived him.