of making him a good citizen. Loving his country better than
he did his disciple, the master had, by the Perpetual Edict,
extinguished the hope which the young Prince might have
entertained of one day becoming Stadtholder. But God laughs
at the presumption of man, who wants to raise and prostrate
the powers on earth without consulting the King above; and
the fickleness and caprice of the Dutch combined with the
terror inspired by Louis XIV., in repealing the Perpetual
Edict, and re-establishing the office of Stadtholder in
favour of William of Orange, for whom the hand of Providence
had traced out ulterior destinies on the hidden map of the
future.
The Grand Pensionary bowed before the will of his fellow
citizens; Cornelius de Witt, however, was more obstinate,
and notwithstanding all the threats of death from the
Orangist rabble, who besieged him in his house at Dort, he
stoutly refused to sign the act by which the office of
Stadtholder was restored. Moved by the tears and entreaties
of his wife, he at last complied, only adding to his
signature the two letters V. C. (Vi Coactus), notifying
thereby that he only yielded to force.
It was a real miracle that on that day he escaped from the
doom intended for him.
John de Witt derived no advantage from his ready compliance
with the wishes of his fellow citizens. Only a few days
after, an attempt was made to stab him, in which he was
severely although not mortally wounded.
This by no means suited the views of the Orange faction. The
life of the two brothers being a constant obstacle to their
plans, they changed their tactics, and tried to obtain by
calumny what they had not been able to effect by the aid of
the poniard.
How rarely does it happen that, in the right moment, a great
man is found to head the execution of vast and noble
designs; and for that reason, when such a providential
concurrence of circumstances does occur, history is prompt
to record the name of the chosen one, and to hold him up to
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Dumas, Alexandre – The Black Tulip
the admiration of posterity. But when Satan interposes in
human affairs to cast a shadow upon some happy existence, or
to overthrow a kingdom, it seldom happens that he does not
find at his side some miserable tool, in whose ear he has
but to whisper a word to set him at once about his task.
The wretched tool who was at hand to be the agent of this
dastardly plot was one Tyckelaer whom we have already
mentioned, a surgeon by profession.
He lodged an information against Cornelius de Witt, setting
forth that the warden — who, as he had shown by the letters
added to his signature, was fuming at the repeal of the
Perpetual Edict — had, from hatred against William of
Orange, hired an assassin to deliver the new Republic of its
new Stadtholder; and he, Tyckelaer was the person thus
chosen; but that, horrified at the bare idea of the act
which he was asked to perpetrate, he had preferred rather to
reveal the crime than to commit it.
This disclosure was, indeed, well calculated to call forth a
furious outbreak among the Orange faction. The Attorney
General caused, on the 16th of August, 1672, Cornelius de
Witt to be arrested; and the noble brother of John de Witt
had, like the vilest criminal, to undergo, in one of the
apartments of the town prison, the preparatory degrees of
torture, by means of which his judges expected to force from
him the confession of his alleged plot against William of
Orange.
But Cornelius was not only possessed of a great mind, but
also of a great heart. He belonged to that race of martyrs
who, indissolubly wedded to their political convictions as
their ancestors were to their faith, are able to smile on
pain: while being stretched on the rack, he recited with a
firm voice, and scanning the lines according to measure, the
first strophe of the “Justum ac tenacem” of Horace, and,
making no confession, tired not only the strength, but even
the fanaticism, of his executioners.