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After much talke and taking them up to my chamber, I did there after some discourse bring in any business of anger with John, and did before my father read all his roguish letters, which troubled my father mightily, especially to hear me say what I did, against my allowing any thing for the time to come to him out of my owne purse, and other words very severe, while he, like a simple rogue, made very silly and churlish answers to me, not like a man of any goodness or witt, at which I was as much disturbed as the other, and will be as good as my word in making him to his cost know that I will remember his carriage to me in this particular the longest day I live.
Cromwell had always wished for a closer union with the United Provinces and was averse to war. In the Dutch republic the States party, especially in Holland the chief sufferer by the war, was anxious for a cessation of hostilities; and it found its leader in the youthful John de Witt, who on the death of Adrian Pauw on February 21, 1653, had been appointed council-pensionary.
"Because of the trial." "The trial between Oxford and Witt. What's that got to do with me?" "They'll make you give evidence." "But I shan't give evidence. I've told Oxford I'll have nothing to do with it at all." "Suppose they make you? They can, you know, with a sub sub something, I forget its name. Then you'll have to go in the witness-box." "Me in the witness-box!" he murmured, undone.
He began calmly, colloquially, treating the jury as friends of his boyhood, and the judge as a gifted uncle, and stated in simple language that Whitney C. Witt was claiming seventy-two thousand pounds from the defendants, money paid for worthless pictures palmed off upon the myopic and venerable plaintiff as masterpieces.
The French are not yet joined with the Dutch, which do dissatisfy the Hollanders, and if they should have a defeat, will undo De Witt; the people generally of Holland do hate this league with France.
Be this as it may, the part that he now played was bitterly resented, not merely by the Orange partisans, but by popular opinion generally in the United Provinces, and it was never forgiven. The position of John de Witt in July, 1654, was a difficult one. The conduct of the council-pensionary in the matter of the Act of Exclusion was openly attacked in the States-General.
De Witt, in whose hands were all the threads of the negotiations, was perfectly aware that it would be useless to present such proposals to the States-General.
The Attorney General caused, on the 16th of August, 1672, Cornelius de Witt to be arrested; and the noble brother of John de Witt had, like the vilest criminal, to undergo, in one of the apartments of the town prison, the preparatory degrees of torture, by means of which his judges expected to force from him the confession of his alleged plot against William of Orange.
"I hope they soon get done with their Fourth of July celebration," remarked Bill Witt by way of a bit of subsea repartee. "That's the way they blow holes in their schweitzer cheese," ventured Mike Mowrey with a chuckle. It was decided to submerge a little deeper and then leisurely inspect the interior hull aft.
Some of the military operations of the States proving unsuccessful, the Orange faction endeavoured to persuade the people, that this reverse of fortune was owing to the want of a Stadtholder; and exhorted them to confer this dignity on the young prince, to be exercised, during his minority, by one of the family. This proposition was successfully resisted by De Witt.
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