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Tichelaer was well known to be a bad and untrustworthy character. On the unsupported testimony of this man, the Ruwaard, though indignantly denying the accusation, was incarcerated in the Gevangenpoort, to be tried by a commission appointed by the Estates.
"They are traitors!" cried Tichelaer, "but let us first take vengeance on those whom we have." John van Witt had been brought to the prison by a message supposed to have come from the ruart. In vain had his daughter conjured him not to respond to it. "What are you come here for?" exclaimed Cornelius, on seeing his brother enter. "Did you not send for me?" "No, certainly not."
His baffled judges heard him repeating Horace's ode: Just um et tenacem propositi virum. . . . At the end of three hours he was carried back to his cell, broken but indomitable. The court condemned him to banishment; his accuser, Tichelaer, was not satisfied. Before long, at his instigation, the mob collected about the prison, uttering imprecations against the judges and their clemency.
In the town of Dordrecht where the De Witt influence had been so long supreme his portrait in the Town-hall was torn to pieces by the mob and the head hung on a gallows. On July 24 he was arrested and imprisoned at the Hague on the charge brought against him by a barber named Tichelaer, of being implicated in a plot to assassinate the prince.
At Amsterdam, the house of the brave De Ruyter, the sole resource of the distressed commonwealth, was surrounded by the enraged populace; and his wife and children were for some time exposed to the most imminent danger. One Tichelaer, a barber, a man noted for infamy, accused Cornelius de Wit of endeavoring by bribes to engage him in the design of poisoning the prince of Orange.
Unfortunately for his reputation he was not content with a neutral attitude, but openly protected and rewarded the three chief offenders Tichelaer, Verhoef and Van Bankhem, all of them men of disreputable character.
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