On saturday, 19 September Samuel and I visited the Paleis Het Loo in Apeldoorn, a former royal palace built by the stadhouder Willem III, who, along with his wife Mary II, became co-ruler of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland following the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Glorious Revolution saw Mary's father King James II overthrown by Parliament and sent into exile and solidified parliamentary government in England and eventually in its overseas colonies such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as well. (Paradoxically, however, this event may have made inevitable the rebellion of the American colonies not quite a century later.) The city of Williamsburg, Virginia, restored in the last century to its colonial appearance with Rockefeller money, is named for this Willem, as is the College of William and Mary. Our family visited Williamsburg in 2008.
Paleis Het Loo was built between 1684 and 1686 and was designed by Jacob Roman and Johan van Swieten. Its last royal resident was Princess Margriet, younger daughter of Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard. She lived there until 1975. After renovations it was opened as a museum in 1984 under the jurisdiction of the Dutch state.
The gardens covering the grounds of Paleis Het Loo are little short of spectacular. A feast for the eyes as we walked through them.
If you zoom in on the page below, you will recognize the Wilhelmus, the national anthem of the Netherlands:
In the course of our drive, we made an impromptu stop at Radio Kootwijk, an Art Deco-style communications building housing a transmitter enabling the Netherlands to communicate with its overseas territories. Opened in 1923, the initial mode of communication was Morse Code. Queen Wilhelmina made the first telephone call in 1929 to Bandung, in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.
The building is surrounded by fields of heather, a plant not often seen in our corner of the world.
In the evening Samuel and I attended a mannenzang at the Grote Kerk in Nijkerk. This and the following day's worship at the same church will be the subject of my next post in this series.
Next: Mannenzang and sunday worship
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