With a large orange-coloured bow upon his hat, General Leopold van Limburg Stirum, the friend and chief fellow-conspirator of Van Hogendorp, suddenly appeared upon the public street. Slowly, with a crowd of admiring citizens behind him, he walked to the place where the militia waited. There he read a proclamation which Van Hogendorp had prepared beforehand: "Holland is free. Long live the House of Orange. The French rule has come to an end. The sea is open, commerce revives, the past is forgotten. All old partisanship has ceased to be, and everything has been forgiven." [Illustration: PROCLAMATION OF THE NEW GOVERNMENT] Then the proclamation went on to indicate the new form of government. There would be founded a state in which all men of some importance would be able to take part, under the high leadership of the Prince of Orange. The militia listened with approval, then with beating drums and waving the Orange colours, which had not been seen for almost a generation, the soldiers marched through the excited town directly to the city hall. The old flag of the republic was hoisted on the tower of the church nearby. Within an hour the news of this wonderful event had spread throughout the town. On all sides, from doors and windows and upon roofs, the old red, white, and blue colours mixed with orange appeared. Orange ribbons, still disseminating a smell of the moth-chest in which they had lain hidden for so many years, appeared upon hats and around sleeves, were waved on canes, and put around the collars of the domestic canines. Spontaneous parades of orange-covered citizens began to wander through the streets. The House of Van Hogendorp became the centre of all activity. In the afternoon of the same day Van Hogendorp and a number of his friends assumed the Provisional government, to handle the affairs of the state until the Prince of Orange should come to assume the highest leadership. So far, the conspirators had been successful. The French soldiers showed no desire to oppose this popular movement, but they were still present in their barracks and constituted an element of grave danger. But in the afternoon the fisherfolk of Scheveningen, ultra-Orangeists, began to hear of the great doings in The Hague and enthusiastically made up their minds to join. And when the influx of this proverbially hard-fisted tribe became known to the French they decided that their number of five hundred was not sufficient to suppress the popular excitement. Hastily they packed their belongings and marched away in the direction of Utrecht. But before they had been gone half an hour, some two hundred Prussian grenadiers deserted and returned to The Hague, where they were received with open arms, and where they joined the populace with loud hoorays for the Prince of Orange and the hospitable Dutch nation.