King Willem Alexander

King Willem Alexander was born only 135 years after Bilderdijk's death, but in this room, his official portrait symbolizes the poet's love for the House of Orange. As Bilderdijk wrote in the verse ‘Mijn leus’ (‘My motto’, 1784): ‘With heart, with mouth, with pen and right hand / Faithful to God, Orange and the Fatherland.’

William V was not a king, but ‘stadtholder’. Yet Bilderdijk wrote many hymns of praise to him as if he were a true monarch, just as he later enthusiastically welcomed William I. In the meantime, however, he had been a faithful servant of the Frenchman Lodewijk Napoleon, who had been made king of Holland by his brother, Napoleon. He also repeatedly praised the emperor himself, although he later saw him as 'French hellish scum' and a 'bloodhound'.

Was Bilderdijk a political ‘weather vane’? Was he guided by his hopes for financial support, according to the best French patronage traditions? Or did he assume that one must serve a monarch who has been enthroned by God, regardless of who it is? Historians still disagree.