XIV
Gelderland
From Deventer to Apeldoorn is simply a matter of a quarter of an hour in a railway carriage which now darts past so many fields of grain, now past so many fine old woods and terraced summer homes that the effect upon the tourist is kaleidoscopic—like being shot through a Christmas wreath.
Apeldoorn is a beautiful little city, very much unlike what might be expected of Holland, since its canals are few and its windmills at a premium. Its streets remind one more of those of an English village. Its outskirts and environs are freely sprinkled with attractive country homes and villas belonging to that class of Hollanders that passes its time, for one purpose or another, hovering in the neighborhood of royalty, for near by at Het Loo the Queen is wont to summer. The town’s two parks, named appropriately Oranje and Wilhelmina, present effects in landscape gardening incomparable with those of almost any other parks in Holland, and the broad avenues that lead out to Her Majesty’s palace are barely surpassed in beauty even by the Old Way from The Hague to Scheveningen. Like the spokes of a wheel their shaded roadways stretch straight as a die, with the palace of Het Loo as their common hub.
Pensions and private villas are as thick in and about Apeldoorn as seventeen-year locusts. Each has its velvety lawn; each its variegated flower garden. Apparently the town boasts of everything to make the lives of its summer residents one blissful dream of being some day bidden to dinner or tea at the dazzling white palace at the end of the avenue. I imagine the sanitary arrangements of some of the summer homes of these pseudo patrons of royalty must be primitive in the extreme. This may or may not be a criterion by which to judge the others, but, as I drove by the estate of one of Apeldoorn’s nabobs, a maidservant appeared upon the second-story balcony and emptied the contents of a pocket folding rubber bath tub full upon the lawn in front—anything but a discreet exhibition, to say the least about it.
Het Loo, or The Grove, was the favorite palace of Wilhelmina’s father, William III, and of his grandfather, William I, the first King of the Netherlands. A steam tram operates upon rather uncertain schedule between the railway station at Apeldoorn and Het Loo, but a much more pleasant method of consuming the time, if only between trains, is to drive by carriage out the long avenue, returning through the parks of Apeldoorn.
The peasants of the surrounding country are of purely agricultural proclivities, and their land seems more like real farm land than the lower level portions of the Netherlands. Apeldoorn itself lies in the district known as the Veluwe, a territory between the Yssel and the Zuyder Zee, in places as much as three hundred feet above the level of the ocean and, with few exceptions, the highest in Holland. Parts of it, however, are so sandy and sterile that the ground is available after complete fertilization mainly for the cultivation of tobacco.
Zutphen, a few miles below Apeldoorn, was the first city in the east to offer any speakable resistance against the Spaniards during the war of independence, and there still stands the gateway, called the Nieuwstadtspoort, through which Don Frederic of Toledo, the son of the notorious Duke of Alva, forced an entrance into the town on the 16th day of November, 1572. Mons and Mechlin having been captured and promptly sacked, Alva had repaired to Nymwegen, leaving Don Frederic to conquer the provinces in the north and east—preferably by force, for they were a bloodthirsty lot, those Spaniards. A seeming lack of patriotism on the parts of the cities which had already submitted, too enthusiastically perhaps, to the Spaniards, gave these international marauders little excuse to resort to their usual heinous methods of effecting subjugation.
When Zutphen, therefore, offered a feeble and half-hearted resistance against the troops of Frederic of Toledo, and the fact was reported to his father, the commander in chief and arch brigand of the whole depredating crew, he promptly sent orders to his son to enter the city and kill every man and burn every house to the ground. According to Motley, “the Duke’s command was almost literally obeyed. Don Frederic entered Zutphen, and without a moment’s warning put the whole garrison to the sword. The citizens next fell a defenseless prey; some being stabbed in the streets, some hanged on the trees which decorated the city, some stripped stark naked and turned out into the fields to freeze to death in the wintry night. As the work of death became too fatiguing for the butchers, five hundred innocent burghers were tied two and two, back to back, and drowned like dogs in the river Yssel. A few stragglers who had contrived to elude pursuit at first, were afterwards taken from their hiding-places and hung upon the gallows by their feet, some of which victims suffered four days and nights of agony before death came to their relief.”