title: William the Silent: William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, 1533-1584
author: Cicely V. Wedgwood
description: The distinguished historian C. V. Wedgwood takes as her subject here the figure of William, Count of Nassau and Prince of Orange, who led the revolt of the Netherlands against the Spain of Philip II. The book is not only a masterpiece of biographical writing but a rich portrait of an age-a period of political, religious, and economic ferment that dramatically shaped the history of early modern Europe.
zlib_text: CICELY VERONICA WEDGWOOD (1910–1997) was born into an innovative and
  intellectual English family. Her father, a direct descendant of the potter
  Josiah Wedgwood, was the chief general manager of the London and North Eastern
  Railway and her mother was a novelist and travel writer. After success at
  Oxford, Wedgwood rejected an academic career and took up writing instead. She
  published her first history, _The Thirty Years War_ (1938), before her
  thirtieth birthday, and in the years that followed wrote a succession of
  chronicles of seventeenth-century Europe that made her one of the most popular
  and best-known historians in Britain. Her most important works include _The
  King’s Peace_ ; _The King’s War_ ; and _William the Silent: William of Nassau,
  Prince of Orange, 1533–1584_ , which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize
  for biography in 1944. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies,
  a Dame of the British Empire, and in 1969 became the third woman to be
  appointed a member o