th. The
sentence was literally executed on the 14th of July, the criminal
supporting its horrors with the same astonishing fortitude. So calm were
his nerves, crippled and half roasted as he was ere he mounted the
scaffold, that when one of the executioners was slightly injured in the
ear by the flying from the handle of the hammer with which he was
breaking the fatal pistol in pieces, as the first step in the
execution--a circumstance which produced a general laugh in the crowd--a
smile was observed upon Balthazar's face in sympathy with the general
hilarity. His lips were seen to move up to the moment when his heart was
thrown in his face--"Then," said a looker-on, "he gave up the ghost."

The reward promised by Philip to the man who should murder Orange was
paid to the heirs of Gerard. Parma informed his sovereign that the "poor
man" had been executed, but that his father and mother were still living;
to whom he recommended the payment of that "merced" which "the laudable
and generous deed had so well deserved." This was accordingly done, and
the excellent parents, ennobled and enriched by the crime of their son,
received instead of the twenty-five thousand crowns promised in the Ban,
the three seignories of Lievremont, Hostal, and Dampmartin in the Franche
Comte, and took their place at once among the landed aristocracy. Thus
the bounty of the Prince had furnished the weapon by which his life was
destroyed, and his estates supplied the fund out of which the assassin's
family received the price of blood. At a later day, when the unfortunate
eldest son of Orange returned from Spain after twenty-seven years'
absence, a changeling and a Spaniard, the restoration of those very
estates was offered to him by Philip the Second, provided he would
continue to pay a fixed proportion of their rents to the family of his
father's murderer. The education which Philip William had received, under
the King's auspices, had however, not entirely destroyed all his human
feelings, and he rejected the proposal with scorn. The estates remained
with the Gerard family, and the patents of nobility which they had
received were used to justify their exemption from certain taxes, until
the union of Franche Comte, with France, when a French governor tore the
documents in pieces and trampled them under foot.

William of Orange, at the period of his death, was aged fifty-one years
and sixteen days. He left twelve children. By his first wife, Anne o