Thorbecke, the Outsider on the Voorhout

Johan Rudolf Thorbecke was born in Zwolle in 1798, the son of a tobacco merchant whose business kept collapsing. The family was Lutheran in a country run by the Reformed church, and Zwolle sat well outside the province of Holland where power lived. He studied partly in Germany, came back steeped in German philosophy, and spent his early career as a professor in Ghent and then in Leiden.

Almost nobody found him easy. Contemporaries described a man who was certain he was right and saw little reason to pretend otherwise. Flattery was beyond him, which in nineteenth century politics came close to a disability. King Willem the Second, who by his own account turned from conservative to liberal in a single night in 1848, is said to have distrusted him personally while handing him the country.

He died in The Hague in 1872. For a man whose name is welded to the Dutch constitution, the city took a remarkably long time to honour him here. The monument on the Lange Voorhout, by the sculptor Thom Puckey, was unveiled only in 2017.