The year 1795 was the turning-point in Bilderdijk’s life.  He had been brought up in unswerving faith in the cause of the house of Orange, was a fanatic monarchist and Calvinist, “anti-revolutionary, anti-Barneveldtian, anti-Loevesteinisch, anti-liberal” (thus Da Costa), a warm supporter of William the Fifth, and at the entrance of the French in 1795 he refused to give his oath of allegiance to the cause of the citizens and the sovereignty of the people.  He was exiled, left the Hague, and went to London, and later to Brunswick.  This was not altogether a misfortune for him, nor an unrelieved sorrow.  He had been more successful as poet than as husband or financier, and by his compulsory banishment escaped his financial difficulties and what he considered the chains of his married life.  In London Bilderdijk met his countryman the painter Schweikhardt; and with this meeting begins a period of his life over which his admirers would fain draw a veil.  With Schweikhardt were his two daughters, of whom the younger, Katherina Wilhelmina, became Bilderdijk’s first pupil, and, excepting his “intellectual son,” Isaak da Costa, probably his only one.  Besides her great poetic gifts she possessed beauty and charm.  She fell in love with her teacher and followed him to Brunswick, where she lived in his house under the name of Frau van Heusden.  In spite of this arrangement, the poet seems to have considered himself a most faithful husband; and he did his best to persuade his wife to join him with their children, but naturally without success.  In 1802 the marriage was legally annulled, and Frau van Heusden took his name.  She did her best to atone for the blot on her repute by a self-sacrificing lovableness, and was in close sympathy with Bilderdijk on the intellectual side.  Like him she was familiar with all the resources of the art of poetry.  Most famous of her poems are the long one ‘Rodrigo de Goth,’ and her touching, graceful ‘Gedichten voor Kinderen’ (Poems for Children).  Bilderdijk’s verses show what she was to him:—­

     In the shadow of my verdure, firmly on my trunk depending,
     Grew the tender branch of cedar, never longing once to leave me;
     Faithfully through rain and tempest, modest at my side it rested,
     Bearing to my honor solely the first twig it might its own call;
     Fair the wreath thy flowers made me for my knotted trunk fast withering,
     And my soul with pride was swelling at the crown of thy young blossoms;
     Straight and strong and firmly rooted, tall and green thy head arises,
     Bright the glory of its freshness; never yet by aught bedimmed. 
     Lo! my crown to thine now bending, only thine the radiant freshness,
     And my soul finds rest and comfort in thy sheltering foliage.