From the Gorkum Martyrs to William the Silent

Another victim of religious hatred, William the Silent was shot to death by the French Catholic Balthasar Gerard on July 10, 1584. Lisa Jardine, author of The Awful End of Prince William the Silent, describes his death:

As William turned and made to ascend the stairs, Balthasar Gérard, an agent recently recruited to provide intelligence on the activities of the enemy Spanish troops under the command of the Prince of Parma, stepped forward from the assembled company. Pointing a pistol at William’s chest, he fired at point-blank range. He had loaded his single-barrel handgun with three bullets. Two passed through his victim’s body and struck the staircase wall; the third lodged in William’s body ‘beneath his breast’. The prince collapsed, mortally wounded. He was carried to a couch in one of the adjoining rooms, where his sister and his distraught wife tried to staunch the wounds, to no avail. William the Silent died a few minutes later.

In the ensuing pandemonium, the assassin dropped his weapon and fled, pursued by Roger Williams and others from among the party of diners. Gérard was apprehended before he could escape over the ramparts behind the royal lodgings. Cross-questioned on the spot (and, one imagines, brutally manhandled in the process), he ‘very obstinately answered, that he had done that thing, which he would willingly do if it were to do again’. Asked who had put him up to the attack, he would say only that he had done it for his king (the Spanish king, Philip II) and his country; ‘more confession at that time they could not get out of him’. Questioned again under duress later that night he told them that he had committed the murder at the express behest of the Prince of Parma and other Catholic princes, and that he expected to receive the reward of twenty-five thousand crowns widely advertised in Philip II’s denunciation of Orange as a traitor to Spain and a vile heretic.

As awful an end this was, the fate of the assassin was more awful, as Jardine continues:

Subjected to extreme torture, Gérard steadfastly insisted that he had acted alone, refusing to name any co-conspirators or to implicate anybody else to whom he might have spoken in advance of his intended action. This act of assassination was, it appeared, the deed of a solitary fanatic, a loner with an intense commitment to the Catholic Church and a faithful upholder of the legitimacy of the rule of Philip II in the Netherlands, and so it was reported in the many broadsheets and pamphlets which circulated the news rapidly across Europe.

This website describes the torture, and the description is not for the faint-hearted:

The regicide was beaten immediately after his capture, then subjected to a variety of cruelties, from wet leather boots which, when heated, both crushed and burned the feet, to daily floggings while hanging on a post outside the jail.

And, finally, he was executed four days per this sentence after his crime on July 14, 1584 :

It was decreed the right hand of Gerard should be burned off with a red-hot iron, that his flesh should be torn from his bones with pincers in six different places, that he should be quartered and disembowelled alive, that his heart should be torn from his bosom and flung in his face, and that, finally, his head should be taken off.

Awful violence, then and now, even to read! This assassination stunned Elizabeth I, adding to her fears that Catholic agents could be plotting to kill her. No wonder she and her government reacted so cruelly to the Babington plot, although she did have to order that the second round of conspirators were executed a little less horribly.

Franciscan Martyrs of Gorkum, South Holland

On Saturday, July 12, the Franciscans of England will celebrate several martyrs during the Recusant era and the Popish Plot crisis. Today, Franciscans (and Dominicans) in the Netherlands and Belgium remember the Gorkum martyrs, brutally tortured and executed by Calvinist pirates against the wishes of Prince William of Orange. From Catholic Exchange:

On July 9, 1572, nineteen priests and religious were put to death by hanging at Briel, the Netherlands. They had been captured in Gorkum on June 26 by a band of Calvinist pirates called the Watergeuzen (sea-beggars) who were opposed to the Catholicism of the Spanish princes of the country.

During their imprisonment, the priests were tortured, subjected to countless indignities, and offered their freedom if they would deny the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the primacy of the pope. Despite a letter from Prince William of Orange ordering their release and protests from the magistrates of Gorkum, the men were thrown half-naked into the hold of a ship on July 6, and taken to Briel to be killed in the presence of a Protestant nobleman, Admiral Lumey, who was noted for his hatred of Catholicism. Their bodies, mutilated both before and after death, were callously thrown into a ditch.

The scene of the martyrdom soon became a place of pilgrimage. Accounts of several miracles, performed through the martyrs’ intercession and relics, were used for their beatification. Most of their relics are kept in the Franciscan church at Brussels to which they were secretly conveyed from Briel in 1616.

The 19 martyrs, canonized by Pope Pius IX on June 29, 1865, are:

1.     Leonard van Veghel (born 1527), spokesman, secular priest, and since 1566 pastor of Gorkum

2.     Peter of Assche (born 1530), Franciscan lay brother

3.     Andrew Wouters (born 1542), secular priest, pastor of Heinenoord in the Hoeksche Waard

4.     Nicasius of Heeze (born 1522), Franciscan friar, theologian and priest

5.     Jerome of Weert (born 1522), Franciscan friar, priest, pastor in Gorcum

6.     Anthony of Hoornaar, Franciscan friar and priest

7.     Godfried van Duynen (born 1502), secular priest, former pastor in northern France

8.     Willehad of Denemarken (born 1482), Franciscan friar and priest

9.     James Lacobs (born 1541), Norbertine canon

10. Francis of Roye (born 1549), Franciscan friar and priest

11. John of Cologne, Dominican friar, pastor in Hoornaar near Gorkum

12. Anthony of Weert (born 1523), Franciscan friar and priest

13. Theodore of der Eem (born c. 1499–1502), Franciscan friar and priest, chaplain to a community of Franciscan Tertiary Sisters in Gorkum

14. Cornelius of Wijk bij Duurstede (born 1548), Franciscan lay brother

15. Adrian van Hilvarenbeek (born 1528), Norbertine canon and pastor in Monster, South Holland

16. Godfried of Mervel, Vicar of Melveren, Sint-Truiden (born 1512), Franciscan priest, vicar of the friary in Gorkum

17. Jan of Oisterwijk (born 1504), canon regular, a chaplain for the Beguinage in Gorkum

18. Nicholas Poppel (born 1532), secular priest, chaplain in Gorkum

19. Nicholas Pieck (born 1534), Franciscan friar, priest and theologian, Guardian of the friary in Gorkum, his native city

The church alluded to in the Catholic Exchange article is St. Nicholas Church in Brussels, not too far from the Grand Place. The martyrs' reliquary is a large rectangular case decorated with their images on the sides, and events of their arrest and martyrdom on the lid. The relics had been transferred originally to a nearby Franciscan friary which was suppressed during the French Revolution (1796), and then moved to St. Nicholas; the gilded bronze reliquary was created in 1870 for the relics. 

Prince William the Silent might have ordered the Calvinist pirates to release the Catholic priests, demonstrating mercy, he was not accorded the same justice as King Philip II of Spain declared him an outlaw and promised a reward for his assassination. Balthasar Gerard wanted the reward and shot the Prince of Orange to death on July 10, 1584, 12 years and one day after the Gorkum martyrs were hung. Gerard was captured, tortured, and brutally executed--obviously not receiving the reward he sought.