Prince, with his wife on his arm, and followed by the ladies and
gentlemen of his family, was going to the dining-room. William the
Silent was dressed upon that day, according to his usual custom, in
very plain fashion. He wore a wide-leaved, loosely-shaped hat of dark
felt, with a silken cord round the crown--such as had been worn by the
Beggars in the early days of the revolt. A high ruff encircled his
neck, from which also depended one of the Beggars’ medals, with the
motto, ‘_Fideles au roy jusqu’ a la besace_,’ while a loose surcoat
of gray frieze cloth, over a tawny leather doublet, with wide, slashed
underclothes, completed his costume. Gérard presented himself at the
doorway, and demanded a passport. The Princess, struck with the pale
and agitated countenance of the man, anxiously questioned her husband
concerning the stranger. The Prince carelessly observed that ‘it was
merely a person who came for a passport,’ ordering, at the same time, a
secretary forthwith to prepare one. The Princess, still not relieved,
observed in an undertone that ‘she had never seen so villainous a
countenance.’ Orange, however, not at all impressed with the appearance
of Gérard, conducted himself at table with his usual cheerfulness,
conversing much with the burgomaster of Leeuwarden, the only guest
present at the family dinner, concerning the political and religious
aspects of Friesland. At two o’clock the company rose from table.
The Prince led the way, intending to pass to his private apartments
above. The dining-room, which was on the ground floor, opened into
a little square vestibule, which communicated, through an arched
passageway, with the main entrance into the courtyard. This vestibule
was also directly at the foot of the wooden staircase leading to the
next floor, and was scarcely six feet in width. Upon its left side,
as one approached the stairway, was an obscure arch, sunk deep in the
wall, and completely in the shadow of the door. Behind this arch a
portal opened to the narrow lane at the side of the house. The stairs
themselves were completely lighted by a large window halfway up the
flight. The Prince came from the dining-room, and began leisurely to
ascend. He had only reached the second stair, when a man emerged from
the sunken arch, and, standing within a foot or two of him, discharged
a pistol full at his heart. Three balls entered his body, one of which,
passing quite through him, struck with violence against the wall
beyond. The Prince is said to have exclaimed in French, as he felt the
wound, ‘O my God, have mercy upon my soul! O my God, have mercy upon
this poor people!’
“These were the last words he ever spoke, save that when his sister,
Catherine of Schwartzburg, immediately afterwards asked him if he
commended his soul to Jesus Christ, he faintly answered, ‘Yes.’ His
master of the horse, Jacob van Maldere, had caught him in his arms as
the fatal shot was fired. The Prince was then placed on the stairs for
an instant, when he immediately began to swoon. He was afterwards laid
upon a couch in the dining-room, where in a few minutes he breathed his
last in the arms of his wife and sister.
“The murderer succeeded in making his escape through the side door,
and sped swiftly up the narrow lane. He had almost reached the
ramparts, from which he intended to spring into the moat, when he
stumbled over a heap of rubbish. As he rose he was seized by several
pages and halberdiers, who had pursued him from the house. He had
dropped his pistols upon the spot where he had committed the crime,
and upon his person were found a couple of bladders, provided with a
piece of pipe, with which he had intended to assist himself across
the moat, beyond which a horse was waiting for him. He made no effort
to deny his identity, but boldly avowed himself and his deed. He was
brought back to the house, where he immediately underwent a preliminary
examination before the city magistrates. He was afterwards subjected
to excruciating tortures; for the fury against the wretch who had
destroyed the father of the country was uncontrollable, and William
the Silent was no longer alive to intercede--as he had often done
before--in behalf of those who assailed his life.”
The tortures that the man endured prior to his speedy execution are
unmentionable.
“William of Orange,” continues Motley, “at the period of his death,
was aged fifty-one years and sixteen days. He left twelve children.
By his first wife, Anne of Egmont, he had one son, Philip, and one
daughter, Mary, afterwards married to Count Hohenlo. By his second
wife, Anna of Saxony, he had one son, the celebrated Maurice of Nassau,
and two daughters, Anna, married afterwards to her cousin, Count
William Louis, and Emilie, who espoused the pretender of Portugal,
Prince Emanuel. By Charlotte of Bourbon, his third wife, he had six
daughters; and by his fourth, Louisa de Coligny, one son, Frederic
William, afterwards _stadtholder_ of the Republic in her most palmy
days. The Prince was entombed on the 3rd of August at Delft, amid the
tears of a whole nation. Never was a more extensive, unaffected, and
legitimate sorrow felt at the death of any human being.”
So passed the greatest man that little Holland ever did or ever will
produce. His ashes lie in a vault in the Nieuwe Kerk of Delft, together
with those of thirty-five other princes and princesses of the House of
Orange, the last being King William III, father of the present Queen,
who died on November 23rd, 1890. Above the vault stands the handsome
and imposing marble monument to William the Silent, worked by the
de Keysers, begun by the father in 1616 and finished by the son. A
translation of the Latin epitaph of the Prince reads as follows:
In honor of God Almighty and for an eternal memorial of William of
Nassau, Prince of Orange, father of his fatherland, who valued the
welfare of the Netherlands more than his own interests or those of
his family; who twice, and principally at his own expense, collected
powerful armies and led them into the field under the command of the
States; who averted the tyranny of Spain; called back and restored
the true religion and the ancient laws; who at last left the nearly
regained liberty to be confirmed by his son, Prince Maurice, heir to
the virtues of his father; the truly pious, prudent and invincible
hero, whom Philip II, King of Spain, that terror of Europe, feared,
but could neither subdue nor intimidate, but killed with gross
perfidiousness by the hand of a hired murderer, the United Provinces
have ordered this to be erected as an eternal memorial of his merits.
Motley’s phraseology with regard to the Prince’s attributes and
ambitions cannot be improved upon.
“His firmness was allied to his piety. His constancy in bearing the
whole weight of a struggle, as unequal as men have ever undertaken, was
the theme of admiration, even to his enemies. The rock in the ocean,
‘tranquil amid raging billows,’ was the favorite emblem by which his
friends expressed their sense of his firmness. From the time when, as a
hostage in France, he first discovered the plan of Philip to plant the
Inquisition in the Netherlands, up to the last moment of his life, he
never faltered in his determination to resist the iniquitous scheme.
This resistance was the labor of his life. To exclude the Inquisition,
to maintain the ancient liberties of his country, was the task which he
appointed to himself when a youth of three-and-twenty. Never speaking
a word concerning a heavenly mission, never deluding himself or others
with the usual phraseology of enthusiasts, he accomplished the task
through danger, amid toils, and with sacrifices such as few men have
ever been able to make on their country’s altar.”
Truly, Wilhelmina has an illustrious ancestor.
VI
THE HAGUE AND SCHEVENINGEN
A Dutch saw has it that you “make your fortune in Rotterdam,
consolidate it in Amsterdam, and spend it at The Hague.” I am not so
sure about the veracity of the first two clauses, but you can certainly
spend it at The Hague.
The Hague is at once the most beautiful and the most expensive city
in Holland. It is the Paris, the Washington, the Berlin of the
Netherlands all in one. Like Paris, it is so overflowing with history
and art that it would take a small book to tell of it all in detail;
like Washington, it is beautiful, and the official residence of the
chief executive of the nation and the diplomatic corps, but not half
so expensive; like Berlin, again it is just as beautiful and twice as
expensive. It is the magnetic pole of the American tourist in Holland,
and it takes pains to cater in many ways to his whims and fancies,
not to mention his pocketbook, and thus hold his patronage. Half the
town speaks English and most of the remaining half understands it. Its
people are obliging and courteous and seem to take a personal interest
in making your stay one of pleasure and instruction as they do in
no other city in Europe. In The Hague I have tried to explain to an
obtuse conductor, in smatterings of German, Dutch, and English, where I
wished to get off the car, and half a dozen fellow-passengers, finding
a stranger in difficulty, have chimed in without the least solicitation
and untangled my knots of pantomime with real Dutch verbiage.
[Illustration: Snapshots here and there. The Dutch maiden is a
miniature of her mother, and she is taught cleanliness and thrift from
the time she begins to learn the meaning of words]
But, being the tourist center that it is, it has naturally developed
the old familiar nuisance to be found in all cities of its ilk in
Europe: the piratical parasite who stands in ambush behind the hotel
porter as you start out in the morning and tags along halfway to your
destination, shouting an incessant “Do you vont a guite, sir? Do you
vont a guite?” You will find him in almost every part of the town, but
his particular lair is in the lee of the picture galleries. Either by
instinct or by abnormal powers of observation he knows that the average
tourist whose time is limited will make a bee line for the nearest
picture gallery before he has even had an opportunity to unpack his
grip. So here near the galleries the guide awaits the coming of his
prey. If you succumb to his prattle, all is lost, save the hope that he
may soon run out of things to show you. But an excellent entertainment
for a party of, say, four or five is to club together and hire a
guide, let him take you whither he will, and, during the process, keep
him under a rapid fire of questions so foolish and insipid that
it will tax his ingenuity even to answer them incorrectly--as, you
may remember, Mark Twain and his friend overwhelmed their guide in
Genoa. This is the only way to obtain value received with--more often,
without--respect to the guide, for his sense of humor is proverbially
null and void and affords a vulnerable target.
And a wonder it is to me that some of these “old master” centers do not
consider us Americans the most appreciative of art of any people in the
world. They must think that we are picture and cathedral crazy--and I
have no doubt they do, and snicker up their sleeves in lieu of a less
ill-mannered outburst. Granted that in itself it is an education to see
the famous pictures--I admit that there are other things in the world
just as wonderful as old paintings, many of which are of notoriously
poor draughtsmanship but have become famous merely from the fact that
the paint still retains its luster after three hundred and some years.
We pay too little attention to the life of the cities and the traits of
their peoples as they are found to-day.
But I digress. This is not a lecture on the marvels or fallacies of art.
The site of The Hague was originally a hunting-park owned and operated
by the Counts of Holland who used to come over frequently from Haarlem
to hunt their deer. From this fact it derived its Dutch nomenclature,
’S Graven Hage, meaning “the Count’s inclosure.” The allurements of
the place must have been to the detriment of official business in
Haarlem, for they felled most of the trees with which it was overgrown
and transferred thither the seat of government about the middle of the
thirteenth century. Beginning with Maurice of Nassau in 1593, it became
the official residence of the _stadtholder_ of the Republic.
Having been thus honored as the capital of Dutch statesmanship in
the early days, the main historical curiosity in The Hague is the
Binnenhof, a group of ancient buildings where the _stadtholders_ lived
and worked and had their being and tried to dissolve frequent plots
for their own extermination. Here William II, Count of Holland and
afterward elected Emperor of Germany, built a castle in 1250, which,
forty years later, was enlarged and fitted up for a permanent residence
by his son, Floris V. At the east of the Binnenhof stands the old
gabled and turreted Hall of the Knights, erected at the time of Floris
and recently restored and put into use for legislative purposes.
But those days, however glorious from the point of view of national
advancement, were also the days of plot and intrigue, and there is
scarce an historical building in Holland but might tell its tale of
a tragedy. On the 13th of May, 1619, the seventy-two year old prime
minister of the nation at the time, Jan van Oldenbarnevelt, was put
to death on a scaffold erected in the Binnenhof “for having conspired
to dismember the States of the Netherlands, and greatly troubled
God’s church,” according to Maurice of Orange, whose displeasure he
had incurred. The learned Grotius, scholar and statesman and the
then senator from Rotterdam, who was arrested at the same time as
Oldenbarnevelt for alleged conspiracy with him, was sentenced to
prison for life in the castle of Loevenstein, near Gorinchem. Happily,
however, with the help of his wife, he effected means of escape ere he
had been confined a full year.
Hard by the Binnenhof stands the old Gevangenpoort, now containing a
morbidly interesting collection of guillotine blocks that have seen
their grewsome service, neck twisters, back breakers, and other such
unhappy instruments of torture, which recall, all too vividly, perhaps,
the days when they were wont to be put into actual and frequent use
in that same tower. In the tower, too, they will show you some of
the dark, musty old dungeons, used for the former incarceration of
political prisoners. Their names, written in blood by many of the
victims, can still be traced upon the walls. Here also is where, in
1672, Cornelius De Witt, falsely accused of plotting against the life
of William III, and his brother John, who had unwisely hastened to the
tower to intercede in his behalf, were put to their horrible deaths by
the gullible mob of citizens, who, believing in the guilt of Cornelius,
had assembled in the neighborhood to make a demonstration against him.
The remains of the brothers De Witt rest in the Nieuwe Kerk.
The Willem’splein, a large square a hundred yards or less to the east
of the Binnenhof, is the center of gravity of The Hague’s traffic and
street railway service. From here you may take an electric car to
almost any part of the city, and to the suburbs as well. In the center
of the plein stands the bronze statue of William the Silent, done by
Royer and erected in 1848, with the Prince’s motto, “Tranquil Amid
Raging Billows,” inscribed in Latin on the pedestal.
Facing the square on the west side stand the Colonial Offices and
the Ministry of Justice, while just off the northwest corner is the
Mauritshuis--the Louvre, the Corcoran Gallery, the Kaiser Friedrich’s
Museum of The Hague. Built in the early half of the seventeenth century
as a residence for the Dutch West India Company’s Governor of Brazil,
it now shelters what is probably the most notable collection of
paintings gathered under one roof in Holland, the gifts to the nation
of the different _stadtholders_.
The reputed gems of this collection are Rembrandt’s rather morbid of
subject, but admirably executed, “School of Anatomy,” and a large
animal painting by Paul Potter, known as “The Bull,” in which Potter
presents a collection of farm animals. Their owner, standing nearby,
appears to be nearly as large as the bull, which is the central figure,
and the bull, in turn, is just a shade smaller than the tree under
which the owner stands. Taken individually, the animals are painted in
a most marvelous manner, but with regard to composition I should think
the accomplished Potter would rather have been known by his smaller
animal pictures and his landscapes; eight of the best of the latter
now hang in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. “The Bull” was carried
off to the Louvre by the French at the time of the flight of the Dutch
_stadtholder_ in 1795, where it was awarded fourth place in point of
value. Originally purchased in 1749 for something like $300, Napoleon
restored it to the Dutch nation at a handsome profit for about $25,000.
The Mauritshuis also contains masterpieces by Holbein, Jan Steen,
Rubens, Van Dyke, Terburg, Vermeer, and other famous Dutch artists,
together with a Madonna by Murillo and some interesting royal portraits
by Velasquez.
Backing upon the Mauritshuis is the picturesque Vyver, a broad sheet
of water punctured here and there by the divings of ducks and swans.
Near the center of its south side it reflects the walls and towers of
the ancient Binnenhof, while on its north it is lined with many rows of
trees.
Not far from where the lofty spire of iron openwork of the Groote
Kerk--the scene of the wedding ceremony of Wilhelmina and Duke Henry
of Mecklenburg-Schwerin on February 7, 1901--serves as a conspicuous
landmark for strangers in the city, and facing a continuation of the
busy Hoogstraat, rises the unimposing royal palace, from the front
windows of which the Queen may look out upon an equestrian statue of
the father of her country, William the Silent. It is a palace that
gives the impression of having been built for comfort rather than
ostentation, and when the Queen is not in residence you may obtain
tickets of permission to be taken through by a servant, from a little
tobacco store near by.
None of the rooms of the palace is particularly striking as to
decorations and furniture, save one, and that is about the most
remarkable apartment of any palace on the continent. Floor, walls, and
ceiling, it is one solid mass of the most exquisitely carved teakwood,
given by the colony of Java as a wedding present to the Queen. You
will wonder little that it took upwards of thirty-five men seven years
to complete the job. There are gold and inlaid pieces of wonderful
workmanship in the cabinets that border the walls--presents from the
Javanese to the little Juliana--which add to the whole impression of
unalloyed richness welded together in perfect taste, without so much as
giving the hint of a “gingerbread” effect. In beautiful gardens at the
rear of the palace the Queen walks every morning with Juliana after
_déjeuner_ at eleven.
Farther along to the northwest is the fashionable residence section
of The Hague, with the Willem’s Park as its principal focus. In the
center of this park, in an open space called the “Plein 1813,” rises
a handsome national monument, unveiled in 1869 to commemorate the
restoration of Dutch independence by the expulsion of the French in
1813 and the return of the pristine exile, Prince William Frederic of
Orange, who landed at Scheveningen and ascended the throne of Holland
as king. Not far from here and still to the northwest, is the finest
modern picture gallery in Holland, the Mesdag Museum, presented to the
State by the modern Dutch artist, H. W. Mesdag, and his wife, in 1903.
The shopping district of The Hague comprises the Hoogstraat and
its immediate vicinity, the Spuistraat and the Wegenstraat. The
narrow Spuistraat is always the most congested. Like the Hoogstraat
in Rotterdam and the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam, it is so thickly
patronized from four-thirty, say, until dark that vehicular traffic
through it is self-suspended for the sake of saving time; even the
pitiless Hague bicyclist is compelled to dismount and push his wheel
through it. At this late hour of the day the cafés are given over to
the cordially inclined and the coffee drinkers, who fill their favorite
rendezvous to the bursting point. As in Berlin, the Zoological Garden
at The Hague, with its café-concerts, is also a much frequented spot
for recreation, but, unlike the Berlin garden, the less said about its
zoology the better.
The beautiful old forest called the Bosch, lying just to the east of
The Hague, intersected with disused and, therefore, rather stagnant
canals, is the Versailles of Holland, and the “House in the Wood” is
its Trianon. But the Bosch is much more accessible to The Hague than
Versailles is to Paris, for an electric car will take you there from
the plein in fifteen or twenty minutes.
Erected in 1645 by Prince Frederic Henry of Orange for his consort,
the Princess Amalia of Solms, “The House in the Wood” latterly became
famous as the seat of the international peace conference which the
representatives of twenty-six different world powers held here in 1899.
The conference convened in the so styled “Orange Room,” an octagonal
hall lighted with a cupola, its walls and ceiling embellished with
allegorical scenes from the life of Prince Frederic, done in oils by
Dutch and Flemish artists. It is by far the most important apartment
in the palace. The other rooms contain some wonderful Japanese
embroideries, cabinets of elaborately and minutely carved ivories, rice
paper tapestries, porcelains, and other exquisite objects of Oriental
handcraft. It was here that the American historian, John Lothrop
Motley, wrote a greater part of his “The Rise of the Dutch Republic”
and a portrait of him hangs upon the wall of one of the rooms.
A short distance to the north of the forest will be erected the much
talked of Peace Palace for the International Court of Arbitration,
toward the cost of which Mr. Carnegie has promised to contribute a
million and a half.
But two miles from The Hague lies Scheveningen--Holland’s most
fashionable, most expensive, most diverting seaside resort--the
Atlantic City of the Netherlands. It may be approached by divers means:
by railway train, by electric car, by omnibus, or on foot. The two
principal and most popular routes served by the electric cars from The
Hague are the Old Way and the New. Both are tree shaded and attractive,
but the more tree shaded and attractive is the Old Way. The clinkers
with which the most of it is paved were put down as early as 1666.
Lined on the left with handsome summer residences and on the right with
a pretty park, the Old Way to Scheveningen, with its geometric rows of
stately trees, is undoubtedly the finest avenue in Holland.
Scheveningen, besides being a watering place of many merits and
numerous shortcomings, is a town of no mean importance as a fishing
port. Its fleet numbers two hundred or more _pinken_, or small fishing
boats, and their catch is sold at auction at the fishing harbor upon
arrival, as at Ostend.
The name of the place is a hard one for the English-speaking tourist to
pronounce, but he will not be far wrong if, in his apparent eagerness
to get there, he inquires of the genial head porter at the hotel in The
Hague the number of the car line that will take him to “Shave agin.”
He may slur over a syllable or two in the abbreviation, but the head
porter will make due allowance for at least a brave attempt to master
the word--which is something--and will direct him accordingly.
Instead of the old familiar seaside board walk, Scheveningen has its
stone paved Boulevard, a mile and a quarter long and eighty feet wide.
This is the promenade of the international hodgepodge of holiday
makers, augmented on a Sunday and in the evenings by giggling girls
and sober countenanced fishermen from the village. Invariably dressed
in their best Sunday-go-to-meetings, the most conspicuous feature of
the feminine attire is a wide shawl, often suggesting the Persian in
design, worn tight about the shoulders and reaching down to the waist
in the back. Of course the skirts are padded voluminously about the
hips, and the girls display at the temples many varieties of gilded
antennæ to hold their white caps securely.