Not everyone was willing to sleep rough on the streets of The Hague just to get a glimpse of the queen’s hand waving in the window of the golden carriage. For those slackers, bleachers had been set up, well back of the barricades, so that they could sit in reasonable comfort and view the procession from a higher, more distant vantage point. The whole route was lined with police in dark uniforms with high-vis stripes across the chest. These stood closest to the barricades, backs turned to the procession, facing the crowd. They were reinforced by an inner layer of security consisting of military, in modern uniforms, backs to the crowd, facing the queen as she rolled by.
The procession that moved through all this was a historical mishmash. Many of the soldiers flanking the carriages, and the officers and dignitaries walking, or riding horses, alongside of it, were dressed as their forebears might have been two hundred years ago when the Dutch monarchy in its modern form had been instituted, post-Napoleon. So, a lot of knee breeches, white stockings, gold braid, and the kinds of hats usually seen on the heads of admirals in old movies. But many who walked in the procession—for it never moved at anything more than an easy walking pace—simply wore modern, albeit very formal, clothes. This included Willem who was in his blackest suit. He had not spoken to Queen Frederika today, nor would he have expected or wanted to. This would have meant that something had not gone according to plan. He had personally seen to the hasty arrangements for Ruud’s last-minute check-in. This was unusual but hardly unheard of, and was, in the end, really just the system working as it was supposed to.
He knew what it was that was on Ruud’s mind, since it had been on Willem’s mind too, and he very much liked Ruud’s solution. As a matter of fact, he liked it so much that it had, paradoxically, ratcheted up his own anxiety level. They had a fix worked out for the whole situation with T.R. and Pina2bo and all that. It only required the queen reading certain words from a piece of paper. That accomplished, people might then still criticize her for having gone to Texas at all. But she could dissociate herself, and by extension the government, from what T.R. was up to, by saying that she had only gone there on a fact-finding mission; and having acquainted herself with the facts, wholeheartedly concurred with the government’s position. Then this whole thing would be behind them.
All this would happen in less than half an hour’s time. But it seemed half a year to Willem, who, now that a solution was within his grasp, felt impatient with the slowness of horse-drawn transport. He longed in a strange way for the days of COVID when they had eschewed the antique carriage and the horses in favor of gray Audis. He bridled his impatience and tried to enjoy the walk. It was a nice enough day, though too hot. Not as hot as Texas, thank god. The crowds who turned up for this thing were overwhelmingly pro-royal, and so just walking among them and listening to their cheering and singing was a balm to his soul, torched as it was by late-night encounters with trolls, lunatics, and nefarious bot networks on the Internet.
During the foam disaster at Scheveningen, a photo had gone viral of the queen in a tent scrubbing down a plastic folding table with a rag and a spray bottle. This had become iconic, probably because it was an apt callout to the old stereotype of Dutch women scrubbing steps, sidewalks, and anything else that was not able to run away from their hygienic fervor. But at the same time it was modern, and nicely re-contextualized into this sudden and astonishing disaster. It was Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia manifesting in her Saskia avatar: the farmer’s wife. So people had printed up large copies of that picture to put on signs and banners, and some had even laminated the full-body life-sized image onto foam core so that, from place to place along the route, it looked as if “Saskia” were standing there scrubbing the galvanized steel railings of the barricades. Garlands of orange flowers and cardboard crowns adorned some of these.
It would have been a little weird, a little wrong, if 100 percent of the spectators had been pro-royal and pro-government, and so protest banners were interspersed with the fan art. Up on the highest rows of the bleachers, signs in a more deprecatory vein could be seen thrust into the air. Some took issue with specific policies of Ruud’s government. Others denounced the whole idea of having a monarch. Others yet were just incomprehensible.
All perfectly normal. But Willem took care to read them and to take discreet pictures. The great majority reflected positions of minority parties or pressure groups with which he was already familiar. But he didn’t want to be blindsided by anything new.
As the procession came around a bend, entering the home stretch for the Binnenhof, he spied a row of protesters—or at least he assumed they were protesting something—who had staked out a few meters of space on the uppermost tier of a bleacher and deployed a banner made from a couple of bedsheets joined together. It read, simply, ZGL. Next to that was a crude cartoon—some sort of animal. Primitive heraldry.
Willem had never heard of the ZGL, though something about it did stir a faint memory. The “Z” immediately made him worry that it stood for “Zionist” something or other, and fringe groups obsessed with Zionism always went straight to the top of his list of nutjobs to worry about. So he snapped a picture.
As they got into the immediate district of the Binnenhof, the crowds peeled away and the procession trundled over a canal bridge and squeezed through a couple of narrow, ancient gates. Then it disassembled itself in a highly programmed way. There was music, if fifes and drums qualified. The whole point of all this was for Queen Frederika to enter the Ridderzaal, and it was of the essence that she go in last. Willem pulled his credentials out of his pocket and used these to enter through a side door. He found his seat in the Ridderzaal while the band was playing and the ceremonial stuff was happening out front. He’d thereby skipped a lot of preparatory ceremony. While they’d been hoofing it through the streets, the president of the Senate had banged his gavel and opened Parliament with a little speech in which he’d introduced the various cabinet members in attendance as well as representatives of Aruba, Curaçao, and St. Maarten—remnants of the Dutch Empire that still looked to Frederika as their head of state.
Moments after Willem arrived, the doors opened, the queen was announced, and everyone stood up. A brass fanfare played and she was escorted in by the Speaker of the House. She made her way up the aisle, nodding to various notables she recognized along the way. She climbed a few steps up a rostrum to the actual throne. This was just an inordinately large, slabby chair with an overhanging canopy of carved Gothic stuff. Everyone sat down, the room got quiet, and she read the speech, word for word.
It started with a moment of silence for the victims of the recent foam disaster: eighty-nine in all.
Traditionally the speech began with a summary of major events during the past year, especially insofar as those might bear on the budget. This one was no exception. It would have seemed odd to open with a mention of the Scheveningen disaster and then pivot away from climate change, and so that was the first general topic covered in the speech.
As everyone in the room knew perfectly well, there were no new moves that could really be made in the political dance around climate change. All the parties in the governing coalition, and most of those in the States General, agreed that the climate was changing and sea level rising and that humans had something to do with it. The farther right one stood, the more likely one was to insist that the danger was overblown, and to resist any proposed actions that the government might take in the way of emissions reduction, carbon capture, and so forth. This was a losing battle, and had been for a long time, but it gave the right-wing fringe parties political currency that they could spend elsewhere. Their bitter denunciations of governments’ heavy-handed meddling in free markets got them nowhere when it came to actually influencing public policy, but it raked in votes from conservative citizens and money from like-minded donors, which they could take advantage of in other areas, such as clamping down on immigration and making everything perfect for the Netherlands’ twenty-five remaining farmers. All the major parties, in and out of the coalition, agreed that man-made climate change was real and that its significance was huge, especially for the Netherlands. They differed only in their estimation of how extreme the government’s response to it should be.