William the Silent

Born into the House of Nassau on 24 April 1533, William became Prince of Orange in 1544 and spent his early career serving the Habsburgs at the court of Margaret of Parma, governor of the Spanish Netherlands. But centralisation of power and the persecution of Dutch Protestants turned him against his former masters, and he joined the uprising that would become the Eighty Years' War in 1568. The most politically capable of the rebels, he steered the Dutch through years of armed resistance against Spanish rule. In 1580 the Spanish king declared him outlaw; four years later, on 10 July 1584, Balthasar Gérard shot him dead in Delft. The war outlasted him by sixty-four years, ending in 1648 with formal independence for the United Provinces - the state he had fought to create and the ancestor of the modern Dutch monarchy he founded.