GUILLAUME GROEN

See also:

• VAN

VAN PRINSTERER (1801-1876)  , Dutch politician and historian, was born at Voorburg, near the Hague, on the 21st of August 18or . He studied at Leiden university, and graduated in 1823 both as doctor of literature and LL.D . From 1829 to 1833 he acted as secretary to King William I. of Holland, afterwards took a prominent part in Dutch home politics, and gradually became the leader of the so-called anti-revolutionary party, both in the Second Chamber, of which he was for many years a member, and outside . In Groen the doctrines of Guizot and Stahl found an eloquent exponent . They permeate his controversial and political writings and historical studies, of which his Handbook of Dutch History (in Dutch) and Maurice et Barnevelt (in French, 1875, a criticism of Motley's Life of Van Olden-Barnevelt) are the principal . Groen was violently opposed to Thorbecke, whose principles he denounced as ungodly and revolutionary . Although he lived to see these principles triumph, he never ceased to oppose them until his death, which occurred at the Hague on the 19th of May 1876 . He is best known as the editor of the Archives et correspondance de la maison d'Orange (12 vols., 1835-1845), a great work of patient erudition, which procured for him the title of the " Dutch Gachard." J . L . Motley acknowledges his indebtedness to Groen's Archives in the preface to his Rise of the Dutch Republic, at a time when the American historian had not yet made the acquaintance of King William's archivist, and also bore emphatic testimony to Groen's worth as a writer of history in the correspondence published after his death . At the first reception, in 1858, of Motley at the royal palace at the Hague, the king presented him with a copy of Groen's Archives as a token of appreciation and admiration of the work done by the " worthy vindicator of William I., prince of Orange." This copy, bearing the king's autograph inscription, afterwards came into the possession of Sir William Vernon Harcourt, Motley's son-in-law .