There will be many readers of The Historian whose knowledge of the 16th Century is wide and deep. This article is designed to fill in some of the corners to the map of that warravaged century, and to focus on a man, William of Nassau, who fought the battle of the Reformation, not so that he could destroy one religion or another, but to try to get people to accept that everyone could worship in their own way, and should tolerate the beliefs of others. In the process this man built a nation out of a group of people living on the watery lands at the delta of the Rhine and the Maas; he and his brothers and his sons finally, over a period of eighty years, freed themselves and their countrymen from the King of Spain and his successors.