The marriage had been more amicable than princely marriages arranged for convenience often prove.

The letters of the Prince to his wife indicate tenderness and contentment.

At the same time he was accused, at a later period, of "having murdered her with a dagger." The ridiculous tale was not even credited by those who reported it, but it is worth mentioning, as a proof that no calumny was too senseless to be invented concerning the man whose character was from that hour forth to be the mark of slander, and whose whole life was to be its signal, although often unavailing, refutation.
Yet we are not to regard William of Orange, thus on the threshold of his great career, by the light diffused from a somewhat later period.

In no historical character more remarkably than in his is the law of constant development and progress illustrated.

At twenty-six he is not the "pater patriae," the great man struggling upward and onward against a host of enemies and obstacles almost beyond human strength, and along the dark and dangerous path leading through conflict, privation, and ceaseless labor to no repose but death.