his carnations at the dungeon of Vincennes, at the very moment when the former meditated his return to Rome, and the latter his escape from prison.
The judge summed up with the following dilemma:—
“Either Cornelius Van Baerle is a great lover of tulips, or a great lover of politics; in either case he has told us a falsehood, first, because his having occupied himself with politics is proved by the letters which were found at his house; and secondly, because his having occupied himself with tulips is proved by the bulbs, which leave no doubt of the fact;—and herein. lies the enormity of the case.—As Cornelius Van Baerle was concerned in the growing of tulips, and in the pursuit of politics at one and the same time, the prisoner is of a hybrid character, of an amphibious organisation, working with equal ardour at politics and at tulips, which proves him to belong to the class of men most dangerous to public tranquillity, and showes a certain, or rather a complete, analogy between his character, and that of those master minds, of which just now Tarquin the Elder and the Great Condé have been felicitously quoted as examples.”
The upshot of all these reasonings was, that his Highness, the Prince Stadtholder of Holland, would feel infinitely obliged to the magistracy of the Hague, if they simplified for him the government of the Seven Provinces, by destroying even the least germ of conspiracy against his authority.
This argument capped all the others, and in order so much the more effectually to destroy the germ of conspiracy, sentence of death was unanimously pronounced against Cornelius Van Baerle, as being arraigned, and convicted, for having, under the innocent appearance of a tulip-fancier, participated in the detestable intrigues and abominable plots of the brothers De Witte against
