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 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 constantobstacle 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
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