The Black Tulip

The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas
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.
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 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