had had under him were raised, as he himself had been appointed their commander, by separate provincial commissions. Known to the outside world as one national army, the Dutch regiments were constitutionally far more distinctly separate levies than those bodies of cantonal militia which the Swiss are now slowly striving to weld into a federal force. Holland had no sooner openly pronounced against the prince, than her allies in the patriotic party in the Assembly, Groeningen and Overyssel, gave direct orders to their own regiments not to use arms against any other province of the federation. Zealand and Friesland presently followed the example, seeking the neutrality favoured by weaker spirits in all such national crises. Utrecht was paralyzed from action on either side; for although her Orange-governed States had moved their sittings from the hostile capital, so important was the latter to the province that its defection made it useless to count on the regiments siding with the Stadtholder. There remained, therefore, for him to rely on no more than his faithful Gelderland, with its handful of three thousand or four thousand troops, a force quite inadequate to do more than for the present guard his own person. Even the Swiss contingent of the army which had lately obeyed him did so no longer. There had long been, it should here be noticed, such a body in federal pay, raised chiefly in the canton of Berne, and quartered along the defensive southern frontier of the seven provinces which, at first held for reasons of a strictly military character, had grown to be the common care and property of all in peace as well as war. These regiments, having never known orders come to them except through the prince, might have been thought certain for his cause. But though mercenaries, the Swiss soldiers never forgot that they had come to a land which professed freedom as full as that won by their own forefathers. And when private instructions came from Berne that they were to remain strictly neutral in the, political conflict in the Netherlands, they made it known that neither party could reckon on their services for putting down the other. The patriots, in fact, felt for the time that matters were going their own way; and they were occupied in Holland with fresh proposals for striking at the hereditary powers of the Stadtholder, when a sudden act of violence by partisans on their side at once forced on open hostilities, and brought an ally to the prince's side no less able than Willing to give him the mastery over his adversaries.
On June 28th, 1787, the Princess of Orange, unaccompanied by her husband, was on her way to their château near the Hague. To reach this it was necessary to pass a cordon of posts formed by some of the provincial troops of Holland. But she had no armed escort with her. The prince himself had not been in any way outlawed, or officially declared the enemy of the province, which had simply by its legislature suspended him from his military offices. Nevertheless, a certain local commission of defence, formed no doubt of warm partisans of the popular cause, took on itself to consider the journey as either dangerous or illegal, and after roughly stopping the cortége, finally sent it back. It was a time of much hot blood on either side; and there is little doubt that the Prussian story is true, and that the officer charged personally with the unpleasant business behaved with great and needless violence. He is said, on his being refused admission to the princess‘s chamber, to have forced his way in with drawn sword, and remained until she left; and his subsequent act of suicide when his party succumbed to Prussian intervention, seems to show him either consciously guilty, or despairing of clearing his name of the charge laid on it.
The report of this act of violence no sooner reached the Hague than Prussia came upon the scene. Thulemeier, the ambassador, who was previously conducting, conjointly with the French plenipotentiary, an attempt at the difficult task of reconciling the prince with the recusant provinces, and had never ceased to show perfect deference to the claim of sovereign rights maintained by each of the latter, now took an altogether different tone. The injured princess was the sister of his king, Frederick William II., who had not long succeeded to the throne of what was already recognized as one of the most powerful, if not the very foremost, of the military monarchies of Europe. Moreover the sympathies of the king had all along been privately much more on the side of the Prince of Orange than those of his predecessor were, so far as had been known, in the earlier difficulties in his day of the Stadtholder with the provinces. If far more humane and liberal in his administration of home affairs than the great Frederick, his successor was certainly wanting in that breadth, or, as it might by some be judged, coldness of
