A Masterless Man

On 19 March 1702, William III died unexpectedly at Kensington Palace, having caught pneumonia after an unfortunate fall from his horse. Romeyn paid due attention to the king's demise in several prints, but his output was smaller and more restrained than it had been seven years previously, when Mary Stuart had died: two issues of Esopus in Europa, an allegory representing the city-maiden of Haarlem ‘clad in mourning’, and a news print of William's funeral procession (fig. 14.1). After lionizing the Prince for three decades, this might seem small beer, but it was in tune with the prevailing mood in Holland. Only days after William's death, the States of Holland announced that the stadtholderate would be left vacant, causing a profound change in the politics of the Dutch Republic. The loss of his master also had serious personal repercussions for Romeyn.

In his hometown, the new political reality almost immediately led to bitter factional strife in the Vroedschap, where a large minority of fifteen members contested the decisions of the remaining seventeen. The leader of the opposition was Willem Fabricius, who had never been re-elected as burgomaster since serving in 1688 and had since been shunted to minor offices. Romeyn sharply felt the effects of his patron's isolated position. After 1702, the States of Holland never re-elected him as liegeman on the Kennemerland bench, despite the fact that Fabricius, in his capacity as high-bailiff, doggedly continued to put his name on the list.

An even more alarming and damaging consequence of his loss of protection was the publication, immediately in 1702, of a second edition of the infamous novel ‘The Curious Life of the Bolognese Dog’. The text was unaltered, the only difference being that the Amsterdam-based publisher Philip Verbeek now unashamedly put his imprint on the title page. Verbeek was a minor player in the Amsterdam book market. Having entered the guild as a bookbinder specialized in shagreen bindings (segrijnbinder), he mainly worked in collaboration with other publishers. In 1699, he had made his publishing debut with Cervantes’ Don Quixote in a translation revised by Gotfried van Broekhuizen.