all these developments in consideration, Rochussen concluded that the meeting in De Harmonie should be considered subversive and a danger to the state; he let it be known that armed troops were ready to take control of the situation if need be. At 6 PM on 22 May, people were flocking to the club house, and by 7 PM it was packed. Van Hoëvell was quickly proclaimed to be president of the assembly. Soon after, though, the meeting became unruly and the shouts of a few led to a riot. In an increasingly unruly atmosphere, the protestors ousted van Hoëvell from his presidency as quickly as they had raised him to the position, after which he and others left the building. The protest fizzled out soon afterward. Resignation By mid-1848, van Hoëvell had become too controversial and perhaps too important to those who disagreed with the local government, and under pressure from the Governor-General he resigned his post on 19 July 1848. After a packed final service in the Willemskerk in August, he was sent off by "half the population of Batavia"; his final sermon, based on Epistle to the Hebrews 13:18–19, suggested that he hoped to return to the Indies. Later, he characterized the Governor-General as more powerful than the Dutch king: "he is the sun, at which all eyes are aimed; when he laughs, everyone laughs; if he looks serious, then the entire multitude frowns its face." Scholarship and other activities in the Indies In Batavia, he was an active scholar, publishing on linguistics, language, and history. In 1838 he founded a journal, ("Journal for the Dutch East Indies"), which he edited until 1862, and he edited and translated a fourteenth-century romantic poem written in the Jawi alphabet, the Syair Bidasari. He was chairman of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences and its president after 1845, and published a book on the colony's arts and sciences and one on the colony's history. Van Hoëvell traveled widely, studied languages and artifacts, and visited local Muslim rulers; he judged the threat of Islam to be much less insidious than the restrictions from the Dutch government or the danger posed by domestic Catholics. He was awarded with knighthood in the Order of the Netherlands Lion in 1847. He became a friend and correspondent of Eduard Douwes Dekker, who under the pseudonym Multatuli published Max Havelaar, the 1860 satire that exposed