This is a hair-raising story and, potentially, a gripping bit of history. The first Head of State ever to be killed by a nutter with a handgun, thereby bringing European politics into the modern age with a bang, was William the Silent, ruler of what is now the Netherlands and (rather reluctant) champion of Dutch Protestantism and Nationalism against the Spanish Hapsburg Emperor, who had advertised a reward to anyone who would assassinate him. The 1584 murder had the effect of making rulers all over Europe more jumpy and paranoid than they were already, hardened battle lines between Catholic and Protestant, heightened xenophobia and religious prejudice and, incidentally, signalled the arrival onto the world stage of the handgun as the assassin’s weapon of choice.

So there's a good tale to be told here. Unfortunately, this is one of the most frustrating and irritating books I've read for a long time.

The fault lies in the telling. Lisa Jardine, professor at London University and a media figure of some fashion – and co-editor of the Making History series, of which this is the second book - will not tell the story straight, and is so desperate to make it seem relevant that she trips over herself trying to concoct dubious parallels with modern events. There are, obviously enough, plenty of genuine and possibly illuminating parallels which make this obscure bit of 16th century mayhem seem extremely up-to-date, but these are ignored in favour, it seems, of whatever burning issue happened to be in the papers at the moment of writing.

She starts her story with the early life of William, who gained his nickname “The Silent” through a prudent tendency to keep his religious views to himself. A minor German noble, he became heir to the hereditary Principality of Orange (which seems to have been of virtually no interest to him) as a result of intensive horse-trading between his father and the Emperor. One condition of the deal was that young William be removed from his Lutheran family and raised a Roman Catholic at the Imperial court in Antwerp. As a result the Emperor nominated him Stadtholder of the Dutch Netherlands, presumably in the belief that William was a safe pair of hands for the continuation of Catholic Spanish hegemony. He was wrong, and felt the disappointment bitterly.

Not much of a freedom fighter, William was a painstaking diplomatic negotiator, who spent the best part of fifteen years patiently arranging minor compromises, preparing the ground for limited religious tolerance and a deal which would have permitted both Calvinist and Roman Catholic forms of worship within the Dutch territories. This plod towards sanity was swept away by opposing tidal waves of fanaticism and religion-as-an-excuse-for-acting-appallingly: anti-Catholic and iconoclastic riots incited by itinerant Calvinist preachers, and the invasion and persecution instituted in response by the Emperor’s bloodthirsty commander, the Duke of Alva. The Duke definitively lost whatever hearts and minds were in the balance by, amongst other things, ordering the massacre of all the inhabitants of Naarden, from newborns to geriatrics, apparently because he wanted to scare the neighbouring towns into surrender in time for the Christmas break.

We then get a description of the murder of William, followed by a brief essay on the assassin’s background, in which we discover that Professor Jardine has visited his family home in Burgundy but not a great deal else. We hear little about the trial, but are given full details of his appalling end, tortured to death in public over four successive days, presented in a verbatim report of the time which a misleading authorial footnote turns from horror into black comedy. The strappado, with which he was tormented on the first day, cannot really involve the victim’s arms being “torn out of their sockets” as she glosses it, if the cutting off of his hands on days two and three was to have more than symbolic point. (Actually, as a quick look in the dictionary confirms, the victim’s shoulders are dislocated but remain attached).

We then get an essay on the technical development of the wheel-lock pistol and its representation in the art of the time (mainly English art: nothing about Dutch, Spanish, or indeed Burgundian depictions, which might be more apropos), after which we hop back in time to 1582, with William alive and well but about to get a bullet through the jaw in an earlier assassination attempt.

Then we dash forwards to the reaction to his death in England – Elizabeth I, as a leading Protestant monarch, was watching events closely - where we find out about early English attempts at gun control, and a case in which the accused was supposedly plotting to bring a pistol into the Queen’s presence.

It’s all very busy, seemingly aimed at readers with the attention span of a gnat and no sense of historical events earlier than yesterday lunchtime(an unlikely readership for any history book, even one by someone who appears on Thought for the Day), and means that a number of questions are not so much unanswered as unaskable within her narrative.

Here are a few: Given the near-success of the attempt of 1582, why was security around William so poor two years later that the assassin was not only able to bring the gun into the royal presence, but actually buy one from a fellow servant at the court? What can have been in the assassin’s mind? He must have known that he could not escape the horrible end the legal system awarded him: was he really, as Professor Jardine implies, motivated purely by the financial reward offered by the King of Spain (an offer which she reprints in full and describes, both anachronistically and inaccurately, as a fatwah)? We hear none of the details of the trial and the judicial torture which preceded it, except that he is said (though we are not told by whom) to have maintained his silence, like Iago, other than to state that he was happy with what he had done.

Instead, we hear a great deal of supposed parallels with present day events. The main one is, bizarrely, between the pistol-wielding 16th century assassin and the modern-day suicide bomber, to which Jardine keeps on returning. But how is this illuminating? The differences are far more significant than the similarities. Both kill, true, but although suicide bombing has sometimes been a method of targeted assassination (of Rajiv Gandhi, for instance), it is far more commonly used as a weapon of general terror and mayhem against a population at large. Furthermore - as the name suggests - suicide bombers do not ordinarily survive the attack, while assassins often do (think of Robert Kennedy, John Lennon, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan). This is not a trivial point, as their survival for trial may sometimes appear inconvenient to interested parties. In modern times, Lee Harvey Oswald, gunned down by Jack Ruby before he could stand trial for the murder of JFK, has spawned a host of conspiracy theories which look good for another 40 years at least. In 1582 the failed assassin of Prince William was stabbed to death on the spot by onlookers, including the heir to the throne. One may infer either that he had some interest in silencing the man, or equally that he was carried away by anger at seeing his father hurt- but his immediate disappearance into his chambers, apparently to destroy documents, seems questionable to say the least.

It's a pity that this strange and resonant story is so badly handled, so trivialised and so garbled. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, "I've had a great read, but this wasn't it."