Dumas, Alexandre – The Black Tulip
Dumas, Alexandre – The Black Tulip
Chapter 1
A Grateful People
On the 20th of August, 1672, the city of the Hague, always
so lively, so neat, and so trim that one might believe every
day to be Sunday, with its shady park, with its tall trees,
spreading over its Gothic houses, with its canals like large
mirrors, in which its steeples and its almost Eastern
cupolas are reflected, — the city of the Hague, the capital
of the Seven United Provinces, was swelling in all its
arteries with a black and red stream of hurried, panting,
and restless citizens, who, with their knives in their
girdles, muskets on their shoulders, or sticks in their
hands, were pushing on to the Buytenhof, a terrible prison,
the grated windows of which are still shown, where, on the
charge of attempted murder preferred against him by the
surgeon Tyckelaer, Cornelius de Witt, the brother of the
Grand Pensionary of Holland was confined.
If the history of that time, and especially that of the year
in the middle of which our narrative commences, were not
indissolubly connected with the two names just mentioned,
the few explanatory pages which we are about to add might
appear quite supererogatory; but we will, from the very
first, apprise the reader — our old friend, to whom we are
wont on the first page to promise amusement, and with whom
we always try to keep our word as well as is in our power —
that this explanation is as indispensable to the right
understanding of our story as to that of the great event
itself on which it is based.
Cornelius de Witt, Ruart de Pulten, that is to say, warden
of the dikes, ex-burgomaster of Dort, his native town, and
member of the Assembly of the States of Holland, was
forty-nine years of age, when the Dutch people, tired of the
Republic such as John de Witt, the Grand Pensionary of
Holland, understood it, at once conceived a most violent
affection for the Stadtholderate, which had been abolished
for ever in Holland by the “Perpetual Edict” forced by John
de Witt upon the United Provinces.
As it rarely happens that public opinion, in its whimsical
flights, does not identify a principle with a man, thus the
people saw the personification of the Republic in the two
stern figures of the brothers De Witt, those Romans of
Holland, spurning to pander to the fancies of the mob, and
wedding themselves with unbending fidelity to liberty
without licentiousness, and prosperity without the waste of
superfluity; on the other hand, the Stadtholderate recalled
to the popular mind the grave and thoughtful image of the
young Prince William of Orange.
The brothers De Witt humoured Louis XIV., whose moral
influence was felt by the whole of Europe, and the pressure
of whose material power Holland had been made to feel in
that marvellous campaign on the Rhine, which, in the space
of three months, had laid the power of the United Provinces
prostrate.
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Dumas, Alexandre – The Black Tulip
Louis XIV. had long been the enemy of the Dutch, who
insulted or ridiculed him to their hearts’ content, although
it must be said that they generally used French refugees for
the mouthpiece of their spite. Their national pride held him
up as the Mithridates of the Republic. The brothers De Witt,
therefore, had to strive against a double difficulty, —
against the force of national antipathy, and, besides,
against the feeling of weariness which is natural to all
vanquished people, when they hope that a new chief will be
able to save them from ruin and shame.
This new chief, quite ready to appear on the political
stage, and to measure himself against Louis XIV., however
gigantic the fortunes of the Grand Monarch loomed in the
future, was William, Prince of Orange, son of William II.,
and grandson, by his mother Henrietta Stuart, of Charles I.
of England. We have mentioned him before as the person by
whom the people expected to see the office of Stadtholder
restored.
This young man was, in 1672, twenty-two years of age. John
de Witt, who was his tutor, had brought him up with the view