On 15 April 1853, twelve gentlemen solemnly presented a petition to King William iii during his annual audience at the Royal Palace in Dam Square in Amsterdam. Several weeks earlier, Pope Pius ix had announced that the Dutch Catholics would no longer be governed as a mission area, but would have a regular system of church governance. Within a few days of the news being announced, the country was in uproar. This, numerous pamphlets, leaflets and news-sheets asserted, was a conspiracy by Rome. The Netherlands was to be handed over to the Jesuits and the liberty for which they had fought tooth and nail in the Eighty Years’ War would be abolished. The government, led by Thorbecke, had kept a cool head in the storm and refused to take action against the papal decision: ‘Nothing should have been done, we had no right to do anything’. Indeed, the new constitution that had been introduced in 1848 guaranteed freedom of religion. The House of Representatives had either resigned itself to it or endorsed it. Across the country, however, petition movements arose in which around 200,000 people – to put this in perspective, the Netherlands had a population of around 3 million, 80,000 of whom had the right to vote for the House of Representatives – asked the king to prevent this in some way or another. The question, however, was whether the king could do anything, given the provisions of the constitution.

The twelve men, led by the pastor and poet Ter Haar, presented William iii with the petition which had been signed by 51,431 people in Amsterdam, partly collected in the Nieuwe Kerk located next to the Royal Palace in Dam Square. The petition stated that civic and religious liberty was ‘a fruit of the Reformation’. The Dutch had fought hard for this liberty, whereby ‘an indomitably Protestant character had been etched on our History’. According to Ter Haar and his people, however, Rome saw ‘the mainly Protestant Netherlands as a colony ripe for total re-conquest’. This would lead to ‘grave clashes’ between Protestants and Catholics and, with this, ‘threatening disasters and dangers for the State itself’.