Boer History1707 at the Cape of Good Hope: Kattendyk Letter, Libertas, d’Ableing Administration, and Le Boucq’s Church Crisis
Arrests of Du Pré and Van Brakel, and Arbitrary Heemraden — February–March 1707
The open conflict of 1706 still held the country districts when the new year opened. Landdrost Johannes Starrenburg continued his hunt for the burghers sentenced on the 9th of August 1706 for contumacy, who had fled to the Twenty-four Rivers after the failed night march to the Kuilen. Those sentenced in absentia had been Hercules du Pré, Jacobus van Brakel, Guillaume du Toit, Cornelis van Niekerk, Martin van Staden, Jan Elberts, and Nicholas Elberts. On the 4th of February 1707 Starrenburg succeeded in arresting Du Pré and Van Brakel, who were sent on board the Mauritius packet. A month later Du Toit was also arrested. [3] [7]
During the same weeks governor Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel dismissed the heemraden and other officers who had been elected in the legitimate manner, and arbitrarily appointed creatures of his own to the vacant places. Later liberty narrative put the same winter campaign more broadly: armed men had been sent into the outlying country districts of Stellenbosch and Groenberg; the courts of heemraden had been abolished and replaced by friends of the Castle clique. Yet the spirit of the people remained unbroken, and the women were as determined as the men not to submit to measures enacted in defiance of the law while their delegates were already on the way to Holland. [3] [7]
Those seizures kept the Mauritius packet in Table Bay at the very moment when the homeward-bound fleet from Batavia and a ship from Europe were about to change the balance of the quarrel. The governor’s nominees in the country offices, and the three contumacy prisoners held for embarkation, still stood as symbols of an administration that had treated memorial politics as sedition. Starrenburg’s last reports from the district still spoke of mutineers constantly reviling him and of only a Masaniello wanting to produce an open outbreak—language that would soon travel with him when the fiscal put him on a homeward ship. [3] [7]
The arrests of Du Pré, Van Brakel, and Du Toit thus closed a chase that had begun with the contumacy sentences of 9 August 1706 and the Stellenbosch defiance of 18 September. For a few more weeks the Castle could still fill offices and hold prisoners; Amsterdam’s sealed letter was already at sea. In the same year the burgher Ignace Maré (Ignatius; also entered as Marees), married at Cape Town on the 7th of February 1706 to Susanna van Vuuren, was granted permission by governor Van der Stel to live at Drakenstein—a quiet civil grant issued while the same governor’s landdrost was still hunting the contumacy men of the previous August. [3] [8]
Jan Rotterdam’s Return and Private Letters of a Favourable Decision — Early 1707
At this juncture the homeward bound fleet arrived from Batavia, and in one of the ships was Jan Rotterdam, who returned to the colony in triumph. The governor-general and council of India had taken no notice whatever of the charges made against him by the Cape authorities, but had treated him with exceptional kindness and given him a free passage back. A ship also arrived from Europe and brought letters to some of the burghers informing them that their case had been decided favourably by the directors. As yet no official despatches had been received, but private correspondence already told the settlement that Amsterdam had condemned the governor’s course. [3]
Of the four burghers sent to Europe in 1706, one, Jan van Meerland, had died on the passage home. The others, on arriving at Amsterdam, had presented to the directors the memorial which Adam Tas had drawn up. The charges made by the Cape authorities had already been received, as had the governor’s denial of some of the statements and explanation of others. In a matter of this kind the Company needed promptitude as well as justice: it had numerous and powerful enemies always watching for an opportunity to arraign it before the States General, and a charge of oppression of free Netherlanders in one of its colonies would be a formidable weapon. A commission of investigation had therefore been appointed without delay, and the documents laid before it. [3] [7]
That commission’s report condemning the governor and those who acted with him was the basis of the letter the settlement still awaited in official form. Later summary of the same Amsterdam enquiry stressed that there was no sham committee, no hushing up, and no white-washing of the accused: the charges against Van der Stel and his associates were found too grave to overlook, and the people of Holland—attached to free institutions and determined to foster them in the colonies—would not countenance half measures. Private letters in early 1707 already carried that verdict to Table Bay; the sealed despatch on the Kattendyk would make it irreversible. [3] [7]
Behind those three survivors at Amsterdam stood the lobbying of Henning Huising (also Huizing). Castle-period portrait later called the failure to stop him sailing the governor’s capital blunder: the wealthy free burgher spent his money lavishly while lobbying in East-India House, and his personal appearance before the Seventeen was crowned with the desired results. The directors’ letter recalling Willem Adriaan was the fruit of that appearance as much as of the written memorial. Rotterdam’s free passage from Batavia, and the private European letters of a favourable decision, were the first public signs at the Cape that the blunder had already taken effect. [3] [9]
The Kattendyk Delivers the Seventeen’s Letter — 16 April 1707
On the 16th of April 1707 the Kattendyk from Texel cast anchor in Table Bay, and her skipper, in presence of witnesses as he had been instructed to do, delivered to the governor a letter from the Assembly of Seventeen dated the 30th of October 1706. The letter announced that governor Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel, the secunde Samuel Elsevier, the clergyman Petrus Kalden, and the landdrost Johannes Starrenburg were removed from office and ordered to proceed to Europe with the first opportunity. The governor’s brother, Frans van der Stel, was to betake himself to some place outside of the Company’s possessions. Later Castle portrait recorded that the letter reached the colony in April 1707 and gave rise to great rejoicing among the settlers. [3] [7] [9]
The burghers were acquitted of conspiracy; the three sent to Europe were restored to their homes at the Company’s expense; and orders were given that if any were in prison in the colony they should be immediately released. It was announced that Louis van Assenburgh, who had previously been an officer in the army of the German Emperor, had been appointed governor, and Johan Cornelis d’Ableing, recently commander at Palembang, secunde. In case neither of these should arrive in the colony at an early date, the administration was to be assumed by the independent fiscal Johan Blesius and the other members of the council of policy acting as a commission. [3] [7]
The ceremony of delivery—skipper before witnesses, sealed letter from Texel—was itself part of the directors’ design. The Assembly of Seventeen had not left room for a private reading or a delayed acknowledgment. Within hours the fiscal, charged to carry out their instructions, held the legal authority that the governor had used for more than a year against the memorialists. The political structure of the Van der Stel clique—governor, secunde, landdrost, and Cape clergyman—was struck down in a single despatch; the settlement’s next months would be spent executing that order, not debating it. [3]
Two days before the Kattendyk’s skipper performed that ceremony, the newly arrived clergyman Engelbertus François le Boucq (Franciscus in the directors’ appointment) had already written from the Cape to the Classis of Amsterdam. The political letter and the church letter thus crossed in the same April week: one ending the governor’s authority, the other opening a quarrel that would disturb Table Valley through the remainder of the year. [3] [8]
Tas Freed and Libertas Named; Starrenburg Shipped; Kalden Ceases — April–May 1707
The Mauritius packet had not sailed when the letter arrived, and the fiscal, who was directed by the Assembly of Seventeen to carry out their instructions, at once set at liberty the five burghers Adam Tas, Jacob Louw, Jacobus van Brakel, Hercules du Pré, and Guillaume du Toit. The first named henceforth called his farm Libertas, to signify that freedom had been won, or, as he wittily explained to inquirers as to the meaning of the term, to denote that Tas was free. The place is still so called. He had been held nearly fourteen months—imprisoned without trial for more than a year, in the sharper phrasing of later liberty narrative—since the armed arrest at Stellenbosch on the morning of Sunday 28 February 1706. [3] [7]
Next morning the council of policy met. It was resolved that the administration should be transferred to the fiscal and others on the 15th of May, if the newly appointed secunde, who was on his way out, should not arrive before that date. It was Sunday, and the Rev. Mr. Kalden preached twice in the church. During the week an arrangement was made by which the Rev. Messrs. Le Boucq and Hendrik Bek (also Beck) should conduct the services on alternate Sundays at the Cape, and Mr. Kalden ceased to officiate. Starrenburg, whose last report was that the mutineers were constantly reviling him and that only a Masaniello was wanting to produce an open outbreak, was sent by the fiscal on board a ship returning to Europe. An officer named Samuel Martin de Meurs was appointed to act provisionally as landdrost. [3]
The April–May sequence thus stripped the recalled administration of its last instruments of coercion in reverse order of their use: prisoners released while the Mauritius still lay in the bay; landdrost embarked for Europe; Cape pulpit taken from Kalden; council minutes fixing a transfer date if d’Ableing did not arrive. What remained of the governor’s authority was a caretaker tenure until the new secunde took the books. Tas at Libertas, Louw free, Du Pré, Van Brakel, and Du Toit off the packet—the country party’s imprisoned names of 1706 were again at large before the winter. [3] [9]
Huguenot private business moved in the same weeks. On the 13th of May 1707 Jean Parisel, according to his will of that date born at Willebeck, about three hours from Paris, and arrived in 1688 in the Oosterlandt, instituted as his heir the agriculturist Jean Durand of Drakenstein. The will sits between Kalden’s last Cape Sundays and d’Ableing’s arrival—ordinary testamentary business in a settlement that had just seen its political prisoners walk free. [8]
d’Ableing Arrives and Takes Over the Administration — May–June 1707
Johan Cornelis d’Ableing, the newly appointed secunde, arrived on the 6th of May 1707. He was a nephew of the recalled governor Van der Stel, and, under pretence that the books required to be balanced, postponed taking over the administration until the 3rd of June. The recalled officials could not then leave for Europe before the arrival of the next homeward bound fleet. From the 8th of June 1707 d’Ableing stood as acting head of the government, a kinsman’s caretaker tenure while Van Assenburgh, named in the Seventeen’s letter, was still on the passage out. [3] [9]
From the vast quantity of contemporaneous printed and manuscript matter relating to the complaints against Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel, the views of the directors and of the colonists concerning the government of the country and the rights of its people can be gathered with precision. In the Netherlands at that period representative institutions of the modern kind were unknown, yet the people were free in reality as well as in name. There is not a word expressing a wish on the part of the burghers for an alteration in the form of government; what they desired was merely that the administration should be placed in honest hands, and that their rights should be respected. [3] [7]
d’Ableing’s kinship with the recalled governor made the delay over the books politically awkward even if administratively plausible. Later Castle portrait judged that the intermediate administration had done nothing to dispel the ugly mood of the colonists, and that the secunde’s handling of the church quarrel precipitated by Le Boucq—suspending the dominie and denying him access to his own church—was exactly the wrong thing to do in a time of growing consciousness of the rights that free men should enjoy. Through the remainder of 1707 the recalled officials waited in the settlement for the next homeward fleet, still servants of the Company and still in receipt of salary. [3] [9]
The caretaker months were meant to steady the colony, not to reopen the case. Van Assenburgh had been named governor in the October letter; d’Ableing’s work was to hold the books, keep the council sitting, and execute the Seventeen’s farming and church instructions until the new governor arrived. The ex-governor with his friends was still living at the Cape. That proximity, and the secunde’s blood-tie, left the country party watchful even after Tas walked free. [3] [9]
Vergelegen Resumed and Company Servants Barred from Farming — 1707
The directors desired to have at the Cape a large body of freemen in comfortable circumstances, loyal to the Fatherland, ready and willing to assist in the defence of the colony if attacked, enjoying the same rights as their peers in Europe, and without much diversity of rank or position. They stated clearly that the closer the equality between the burghers could be preserved the more satisfactory it would be to them. Positive orders were issued that large tracts of land, upon which several families could obtain a living, were not to be granted to any individual. [3] [7]
In giving directions concerning Vergelegen (“Far-Situated”), near present-day Somerset West, they stated that as its grant by the commissioner Wouter Valckenier to the governor had never been reported to them, they resumed possession of the ground. The large dwelling house upon it, being adapted for ostentation and not for the use of a farmer, must be broken down; the late governor could sell the material for his own benefit. The other buildings and improvements could be fairly valued and the amount paid to Mr. Van der Stel, or he could break them down and dispose of the materials if he preferred. The ground must then be divided into four farms, and each be sold separately by auction. An estate such as Vergelegen would by many later observers be considered useful as a model—Van der Stel had imported choice vines, plants, and trees and tilled the ground with unusual skill—but the directors held that one large farm owned by an individual and cultivated chiefly by slave labour could not be of the same advantage to the infant colony as a number of smaller ones, each in possession of a sturdy European proprietor. [3] [4] [9]
The scale of that estate had been the heart of the burgher case. Contemporary and later accounts placed at Vergelegen a large dwelling, accommodation for servants, mill and tannery, wine and grain stores, lands bearing some four hundred thousand vines and thousands of fruit trees, and beyond the mountains cattle stations—some counts as many as fifteen—carrying on the order of eight hundred cattle and ten thousand sheep, worked almost entirely at the Company’s expense without the directors’ knowledge. One summary of the same establishment counted sixty servants and a hundred slaves on the place, with Company iron, wood, and the Company’s head gardener serving the governor’s private profit. Liberty narrative added that thousands of cattle and sheep were grazed on government lands without the directors’ consent or even knowledge, and that the family of Van der Stel had come to monopolise nearly all the trade with ships and with the officials of the garrison. The Seventeen’s order to resume, demolish the ostentatious house, and cut the ground into four auction lots was the institutional answer to that monopoly. [3] [4] [7]
For this reason Frans van der Stel was required to sell his property and remove to some country not included in the Company’s charter. The former governor Simon van der Stel was left in possession of his farm Constantia, but directions were given that upon his death the other land which he held should revert to the Company. Emphatic instructions were issued that for the future no servant of the Company, from the highest to the lowest, was to own or lease land in the colony, or to trade directly or indirectly in corn, wine, or cattle. Those who had landed property could sell it, but if they should not do so within a reasonable period, it would be confiscated. The burghers were not to be molested in their right to dispose of their cattle or the produce of their ground in any way that suited them. They were to be governed in accordance with law and justice. [3] [7]
On their part, the colonists claimed exactly the same rights as if they were still living in the Fatherland. They held that any restrictions to which the early burghers had agreed were of a temporary nature and affected only those who consented to them. In their opinion they had forfeited nothing by removal to a dependency, and the violence displayed by the governor toward Adam Tas and his associates was as outrageous as if it had taken place in the city of Amsterdam. They asserted undoubted right to personal liberty, exemption from arrest unless under reasonable suspicion of crime, admission to bail, speedy trial before a proper court of justice, and freedom to sell to any one—burgher or foreigner—except under special circumstances when restriction was needed for the good of the community, whatever their land produced after the tithes had been paid and the Company’s needs supplied. These claims were not challenged by the directors or even the partisans of the late governor, but were accepted by every one as unquestioned. The directors were fully aware that a colony of free Netherlanders was to be ruled in a different manner from a dependency inhabited by Asiatics. [3] [7]
Hermanus Bosman at Drakenstein and Church Arrangements — June 1707
The newly appointed minister did not reach the Cape until the 30th of March 1707. Mr. Bek then took charge of the Stellenbosch congregation, which had been for nearly three years without a clergyman, except once in three months when he had preached and administered the sacraments—the vacancy dating from the death of Hercules van Loon by his own hand on the 27th of June 1704. The directors had appointed Le Boucq clergyman of Drakenstein and given instructions that upon his arrival from Batavia Mr. Bek should be transferred to Stellenbosch. They had also given the council of policy permission to allow the French language to be used alternately with the Dutch in the church services at Drakenstein, if it should seem advisable to do so. [3]
The only circumstance of note during the few months that the secunde d’Ableing was at the head of the government, beyond the slow settling of the recall, was the violent conduct of the Rev. Mr. Le Boucq, which caused much disquiet in the community. That clergyman had arrived at the Cape at a time of clamour and strife, and instead of preaching peace at once became a promoter of further discord. He took side with the colonists, though there was no good object to be gained by his entering into party politics, since all that the burghers had contended for was secured. He was conversant with the Portuguese language, and could therefore have been of greater service in India than at the Cape, but as he was of quarrelsome disposition the authorities at Batavia were glad to get rid of him. [3]
Upon Mr. Le Boucq’s arrival at the Cape, the Rev. Mr. Bek had removed to Stellenbosch, that the new clergyman might enter upon his duties; but as soon as Le Boucq ascertained that there was neither church nor parsonage at Drakenstein, he declined to take up the work. Before any pressure could be put upon him, Mr. Kalden was suspended, and the government then decided that Messrs. Bek and Le Boucq should conduct the services at the Cape on alternate Sundays. After a little, the two ministers arranged between themselves that Le Boucq should take all the services at the Cape, Mr. Bek going occasionally to Drakenstein; and to this the government made no objection. [3] [8]
Huguenot church narrative supplies the detail of that refusal. Le Boucq had been appointed minister of Drakenstein, but when he found that there was no church, parsonage, or Dutch parish clerk he would not take up his duties. On the 14th of April 1707—two days before the Kattendyk’s letter reached the governor—he wrote to the Classis of Amsterdam that he had held a consistory meeting at Drakenstein, produced his credentials, and enquired about school and church, only to learn that there was no parsonage, sick comforter, Dutch parish clerk, or proper graveyard. The Cape government later told the Seventeen that it had appointed a Dutch sick comforter “in order to avoid new quarrels and cause no untimely commotion.” A later visitor described the Drakenstein church as badly built both inside and outside and more like a barn than a church. [8]
The Dutch sick comforter of Drakenstein had some time previously been transferred to the Cape, and the council now resolved to send some one else there. On the 8th of June 1707 Mr. Hermanus Bosman, sick comforter of the ship Overryp, was selected for the post—the appointment made upon the representations of Le Boucq himself, then already causing trouble to clergy and government. Thereafter Bosman conducted service in Dutch, and Mr. Paul Roux in French, at the houses of farmers at Drakenstein, except when the Rev. Mr. Bek went over from Stellenbosch. The congregation remained without a permanent clergyman; services continued in farmhouses and in a shed or barn of very homely appearance. In the same year the Rev. Mr. Bek, writing to governor Van der Stel, referred to Guillaume Loret of Nantes, a French refugee who nine years previously had been a Roman Catholic but had made public confession of the reformed religion. In August David du Buisson of Rochelle was married to Claudine Lombard, daughter of the refugee Pierre Lombard. [3] [8]
Le Boucq’s Sermon and Deposition of Church Officers — 28 August 1707
In the morning of Sunday the 28th of August 1707 the congregation of the Cape assembled in the church and listened to an exciting sermon prepared and read by the Rev. Mr. Le Boucq. He had chosen as text the first verse of the 29th chapter of Proverbs, and had previously given out the last two verses of the 149th psalm to be sung. According to his exposition, the saints were the burghers who had recently made a stand for freedom, and the noble who hardened his neck and was in consequence destroyed was the recalled governor Van der Stel. At the last election of church officers, Abraham Poulle, who was in the government service, had been chosen elder, and the burgher Jan Oberholster, who submitted quietly to the ruling of the authorities, had been appointed deacon. When the service was ended, the clergyman announced that these persons were deprived of their offices, and exhorted the congregation not to acknowledge them any longer. Cape narrative places that scene in the Cape church; a later Castle portrait locates the same public dismissal of two church officers in the Stellenbosch church. [3] [9]
This proceeding took most of the congregation by surprise, and caused great excitement to many individuals. One woman fainted, and was carried out of the church to the hospital. No member of the government or of the consistory anticipated anything of the kind, though they were accustomed to very eccentric acts of the clergyman. The members of the council of policy at once retired and held a consultation, after which they sent a request to Mr. Le Boucq not to conduct service in the afternoon—a request which he construed into an order. [3]
Next morning he sent a letter to the council, in which he asserted his right as a clergyman to depose elders and deacons without assigning any reason for doing so, and protested against interference by lay officials in spiritual matters. He followed this up by a letter on the 6th of September, in which he stated that he did not intend to perform service again until the council admitted his views to be correct. Thereupon the council suspended payment of his salary, and instructed Mr. Bek to assume duty at the Cape. Mr. Kalden was requested to assist in the emergency, and showed himself very willing to do so, by holding service occasionally so as to allow Mr. Bek to visit Stellenbosch and Drakenstein—an irony not lost on a settlement that had just seen Kalden removed from office by the Seventeen and now needed his pulpit again. [3]
Later Castle portrait treated d’Ableing’s decision to suspend the dominie and deny him access to his own church as the wrong stroke in a season when free men were newly conscious of their rights. Whether one acclaims that suspension or condemns it, it did not restore quiet. Le Boucq, already of quarrelsome reputation at Batavia, had turned the Cape pulpit into a second front of the memorial struggle after the political victory had already been won. [3] [9]
Maria Lindenhof’s Confinement and Le Boucq’s Litigation — Autumn 1707
By the more violent members of the party which he had espoused, Mr. Le Boucq was now regarded as a martyr. He went about declaiming against the government and stirring up people’s passions until it was considered necessary to bring him to task. Certain language of his was reported to the government, upon which it was intended to bring a charge. The principal witness was Maria Lindenhof, daughter of a clergyman in Overyssel, wife of Henning Huising, and aunt of Adam Tas. Upon being questioned, she asserted that she had forgotten what he had said. The court of justice then decided to confine her for eight days to her own house, and then to place her under civil arrest if she did not in the mean time give correct evidence. She remained obdurate, and after eight days was confined in a suite of rooms in the castle. A petition for her release, signed by Tas, Grevenbroek, Van der Byl, and twenty-four others, men and women, was sent in, and after nine days’ detention in the castle the government thought it best to liberate her. [3]
The petition’s names linked the autumn church quarrel back to the memorial politics of 1705–1706. Tas, free and farming at Libertas; Van der Byl, long among the leading opponents of the governor; Grevenbroek and a score of men and women willing to put their names to a demand for Maria Lindenhof’s release—these were not a new faction but the same burgher network that had carried the case to Amsterdam, now intervening when the court pressed Huising’s wife as a witness against the quarrelsome clergyman they still regarded as their ally. Eight days in her own house and nine in the castle were a pale echo of Tas’s fourteen months, but the names on the petition showed that the country party had not disbanded when the Kattendyk letter was read. [3] [7]
Mr. Le Boucq next appeared before the court of justice as a litigant in a case with the Rev. Mr. Kalden, and, upon judgment being recorded against him, appealed to Batavia. There also the decision was against him. Through the remainder of 1707 the quarrelsome clergyman remained a standing source of disturbance in Table Valley while d’Ableing held the administration and the recalled officials waited for the next homeward fleet. Concord was not expected at the Cape so long as he remained. [3]
The autumn thus left two unsettled accounts beside the executed recall. Vergelegen still stood, its ostentatious house not yet broken down and its four lots not yet at auction; Le Boucq still walked Table Valley, salary stopped, pulpit closed to him, yet not embarked. d’Ableing’s books, Blesius’s fiscal authority, and Bek’s resumed Cape Sundays were the working government of the last months of the year. [3] [9]
Orders to Withdraw the Garrison from Mauritius — February 1707
In February 1707 instructions were received at the Cape to withdraw the garrison from the island of Mauritius, hitherto a dependency of the Cape Colony. The island was of hardly any use as a station for refreshment, and beyond a little ebony and ambergris it contributed nothing to commerce. The directors had come to the conclusion that it was not worth the cost of maintaining a large garrison, and that with a small garrison it was not secure. Of late years the Company had sustained severe losses there: during the night of the 9th of February 1695 the residency and magazines had been destroyed by a violent hurricane; in 1701 a pirate ship wrecked near the settlement had put two hundred armed men ashore, together with twelve English and thirty Indian prisoners out of captured vessels, forcing commander Roelof Diodati to sell them the Company’s packet at half price—sixteen pounds out of money saved from the wreck—to be rid of the unwelcome visitors. The master of those buccaneers was an old acquaintance, having been in the Amy when she was seized in Saldanha Bay. [3]
On the 15th of November 1707 the Company’s premises on the island were totally destroyed by fire, the books, records, and goods in the magazine being burned with everything else. When the intelligence of withdrawal reached the island, the burghers were found to be very averse to break up their homes, but as a matter of necessity nine heads of families elected to come to the Cape, the remainder preferring Batavia. The colonists were given the choice of removal to Java or the Cape. The Cape government’s work in 1707 was to receive the directors’ order, prepare the administrative winding-up of a dependency that had never paid its keep, and absorb the news of the November fire into the final abandonment. [3]
The Mauritius packet that had held Du Pré and Van Brakel in Table Bay in February thus bore the island’s name in the same year that the island itself was written off. Ebony, ambergris, a burned residency, and nine families choosing the Cape were the residue of a dependency the Seventeen no longer thought worth a garrison. In Table Valley the Kattendyk letter, the freeing of Tas and his companions, the naming of Libertas, the shipping of Starrenburg, and d’Ableing’s assumption of the administration executed the Seventeen’s verdict of 30 October 1706; the Vergelegen orders and the ban on Company servants farming fixed the economic lesson of the struggle; Le Boucq’s August sermon and the Lindenhof confinement showed how quickly church politics could reopen discord after the political victory. [3]