mez de
Silva, and Antonio Perez; and it was because the King believed they had
tricked him in the business, that Perez fell, and, when in exile, had
his life sought by some of his old master's assassins. Two Irishmen were
authorized to kill him, by Philip's Governor of the Netherlands, but
failed, and were hanged in London. Baron de Pinella tried to kill Perez
at Paris, was detected, and executed. As he had been himself an active
assassin, Perez could not well complain of these attempts; but they
illustrate the theory and practice of the powerful Spanish monarch.
Perez was one of those persons who labored to bring about the
assassination of William (the Silent) of Orange. Writing to Escovedo,
who was Secretary to Don John of Austria, then in the Netherlands, Perez
observes,--"Let it never be absent from your mind that a good occasion
must be found for finishing Orange, since, besides the service which
will thus be rendered to our master, and to the States, it will be worth
something to ourselves"; to which highly moral injunction Escovedo
replied,--"You know that the finishing of Orange is very near my heart."
There is something almost comical in this correspondence, considering
its circumstances: Perez urging upon the man whom he was soon to
assassinate the duty of procuring the assassination of the Prince of
Orange, to whose party in Europe he was destined erelong to join
himself. Philip has been suspected of having procured the death of his
half-brother, Don John of Austria, by poison; but in this instance he is
entitled at least to the Scotch verdict of _Not proven_. He did bring
about the assassination of his ablest enemy, the Prince of Orange,
though not until after failures so numerous as would have served to
discourage a man of less persistent mind. Five unsuccessful attempts to
kill the Prince were made in two years; the sixth was successful, that
of Balthazar Gerard, who shot the Dutch deliverer on the 10th of July,
1584, in his house at Delft. Like Booth, Gerard used the pistol, a
weapon that seems to have been invented for the promotion of murder. He
made a determined effort to get off, and might have succeeded, had he
not stumbled over a heap of rubbish. To all these attacks on Orange some
of the most eminent Spanish statesmen and soldiers of that time were
parties, and Spain was then the premier nation. The Prince of Parma, one
of the foremost men of a period in which there was an absolute glut of
talent, s