when in 1534 he at length officially changed his faith and 'reformed' the
churches of Nassau-Dillenburg he did it with moderation and provoked no
serious protest. Also, it would seem, he did not abandon the Catholic
Church for gain, for the Catholic Church owned little of value in Nassau-
Dillenburg. His Lutheranism was genuine and personal, if not exactly
passionate.

The fourth decade of the sixteenth century was a stormy moment at which
to be born into the European world. The unsolved Protestant problem was
tearing the political framework to shreds, and the Peasants' Revolt had left
Germany raw and bitter. The voice of religious mania mingled with that of
the wretched and oppressed. In the year of young William's birth the
religious communism of the Anabaptists spread chaos in the Netherlands.
But while princes fought for the spoils of the Church and the recurrent out-
cry of the people was recurrently stifled, while the Anabaptist republic at
Munster was crushed by the imperial troops and the theocracy of Calvin at
Geneva was founded and flourished, the Count and Countess of Nassau-
Dillenburg were occupied in bringing up their family.

The surviving children of both their marriages amounted to seventeen in
all: a healthy, noisy, handsome brood. In order to provide them with suit-
able companions their parents converted their castle into a select school
for the children of the nobility. It was a happy, peaceful place in which to
grow up in that stormy time, a backwater remote from the hubbub of
international politics, where principles of right and truth and justice could be
taught to these young members of the ruling class, without the embarrass-
ment of daily practical contradiction outside the schoolroom. Life at
Dillenburg was pious, regulated and simple. Ponies, dogs and children
thronged the courtyards across which from time to time the head master of
the school, the learned and easy-tempered Justus Hoen of Gelnhausen,
padded on slippered feet; music tinkled from inner rooms where solemn
little girls sat at the virginals, or learnt with their brothers and cousins how to
go through the steps of the necessary dances. Juliana presided over all,
upright and handsome, innocent alike of vanity and coquetry, carrying her
pregnancies with pride under the folds of her homespun gown, her greying
hair hidden wider the spotless linen coif of a housewife. She taught the girls
to sew and spin and embroider, to cook and distil and make up the homely
remedies -- from herbs plucked in the castle garden -- which the dietetic
habits of the time rendered essential. She cannot have been so directly con-
cerned in the instruction of her sons, but since her husband was much harassed
with the management of his lands and she was a woman of character, her
influence on all her children was predominant. A devout Lutheran, believing in

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