Calvinists and Catholics During Holland's Golden Age: Heretics and Idolaters. Christine Kooi 1107616557, 9781107616554

Table of contents :
Cover
Calvinists and Catholics during Holland’s Golden Age
Dedication
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1: War and Peace
REVOLT AND REFORMATION
THE PUBLIC CHURCH IN THE DUTCH REPUBLIC
THE GOLDEN AGE
THE SOCIAL WORLD OF HOLLAND’S GOLDEN AGE
2: Priests and Preachers
MISSIO HOLLANDICA
HERETICS AND IDOLATERS
3: Persecution and Toleration
1572–1620: CONFUSION
1620–1660: CONFESSIONALISM
AFTER 1660: COEXISTENCE
4: Converts and Apostates
CLERICAL CONVERSION
DISCIPLINE AND ERROR
CONVERSION AS MISSION
5: Kith and Kin
NEIGHBORHOOD
FAMILY
Conclusion
Bibliography
Archival Sources
Primary Sources
Secondary Literature
Index

Citation preview

Calvinists and Catholics during Holland’s Golden Age This book examines the social, political, and religious relationships between Calvinists and Catholics during Holland’s Golden Age. Although Holland – the largest province of the Dutch Republic – was officially Calvinist, its population was one of the most religiously ­heterogeneous in early modern Europe. The Catholic church was ­officially disestablished in the 1570s, yet by the 1620s, Catholicism underwent a revival, flourishing in a semi-clandestine private sphere. The book focuses on how Reformed Protestants dealt with this revived Catholicism, arguing that confessional coexistence between Calvinists and Catholics operated within a number of contiguous and overlapping social, political, and cultural spaces. The result was a paradox: a society that was at once Calvinist and pluralist. Christine Kooi maps the daily interactions between people of different faiths and examines how religious boundaries were negotiated during an era of tumultuous religious change. Christine Kooi is associate professor in the Department of History at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leiden’s Reformation, 1572–1620 (2000), and her articles have appeared in numerous journals including the Sixteenth Century Journal and Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte.

For René Vanhaelen, in memory of Ina Vanhaelen-van Vliet

Calvinists and Catholics during Holland’s Golden Age Heretics and Idolaters

Christine Kooi Louisiana State University

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107023246 © Christine Kooi 2012 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2012 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Kooi, Christine. Calvinists and Catholics during Holland’s golden age : heretics and idolaters / Christine Kooi. p.  cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-02324-6 (hardback) – isbn 978-1-107-61655-4 (paperback) 1.  Netherlands – Church history – 17th century.  2.  Calvinism – Netherlands – History – 17th century.  3.  Reformed Church – Netherlands – History – 17th century.  4.  Catholic Church – Netherlands – History – 17th century.  I.  Title. br905.k66  2012 274.92’06–dc23    2012006882 isbn 978-1-107-02324-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

page vii ix

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1. War and Peace 2. Priests and Preachers 3. Persecution and Toleration 4. Converts and Apostates 5. Kith and Kin Conclusion

1 16 44 90 130 175 215

Bibliography Index

225 243

v

Acknowledgments

The experience of Catholics in the Dutch Republic has interested me since graduate school, when I wrote a seminar paper on the subject for the late John Michael Montias. Eventually, I set out to investigate the ­question more thoroughly, focusing particularly on the relationships between Catholics and Calvinists in Holland. Many years later, this book is the fruit of that investigation. Nobody researches and writes in a vacuum, of course, and so I have many people to thank for helping me along the way. Archivists and librarians in the Netherlands and Belgium provided invaluable aid, especially Mevrouw H. A. van Dolder-de Wit, archivist of the Hervormde Gemeente of Gouda, who graciously allowed me to consult the consistorial minutes of that congregation’s seventeenth-century predecessors. The time I spent working with her in the consistory chamber of the storied Sint-Janskerk in Gouda ranks among the high points of my archival experience. Audiences in such far-flung places as Amsterdam, Leiden, Berlin, Geneva, New York, Miami, Toronto, Vancouver, and Raleigh were among the first to hear the results of my research, and I am grateful for their commentary and feedback; I am equally grateful to my hosts in all those venues. The writing was begun with the generous support of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, a fine home for scholars in the leafy suburbs of The Hague that I highly recommend to anyone looking for a peaceful place to think and write. Final completion of the manuscript was facilitated by a fellowship from the ATLAS program of the Louisiana State Board of Regents. Numerous fellow toilers in the historical vineyard also contributed to the shaping of this book. My particular thanks go to Charles Parker of vii

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Saint Louis University and my colleague Victor Stater of LSU for their thorough readings of an early version of the manuscript. Thanks to them, it is a better book, although of course all mistakes that remain are entirely my own. LSU colleagues and friends Maribel Dietz and Margherita Zanasi helped me with some challenging Latin and Italian translations, while Sue Marchand and Paul Paskoff provided important help on the tortuous path to publication. At Cambridge University Press, Emily Spangler has proven to be a generous and supportive editor. My thanks also go to Cambridge’s anonymous readers for their criticisms and suggestions. I am grateful to the Board of Syndics of Cambridge University Press for adding this book to their venerable list of scholarly works on early modern Europe. René and Ina Vanhaelen were my gracious hosts during many months spent researching in the Netherlands. It saddens me that Ina did not live to see the final fruits of that research, this book about relationships, because relationships were something she held very dear in her own life. I think she would have liked to read it.

Abbreviations

AAU AHGG ARG BBH BMGN CA GAD GHA KA KB NA NHA NHG OBC OKN OSA RAL SAA SAD UA ZE

Archief voor de geschiedenis van het aartsbisdom Utrecht Archief Hervormde Gemeente Gouda Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte Bijdragen voor de geschiedenis van het bisdom Haarlem Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden Classicale Acta Gemeente Archief Delft Groene Hart Archieven Kerkenraadsacta Koninklijke Bibliotheek Nationaal Archief Noord-Hollands Archief Archief Nederlands-Hervormde Gemeente Archief Oud-Bisschoppelijke Clerezij Archief Oud-Katholieke Kerk Nederland Oud-Synodaal Archief Regionaal Archief Leiden Stadsarchief Amsterdam Stadsarchief Dordrecht Het Utrechts Archief De zeventiende eeuw

ix

Introduction

In 1667, Cosimo de Medici, heir to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, embarked on a grand tour of Europe, mostly at his father’s urging, in order to escape his unhappy marriage to a cousin of French king Louis XIV.1 Prince Cosimo’s travels took him to, among other places, the province of Holland in the Dutch Republic, where he famously visited the aging painter Rembrandt van Rijn in Amsterdam.2 Religion apparently interested Cosimo at least as much as art, for his secretaries recorded in their travel journals that their lord also visited numerous churches in the metropolis. On Christmas day in 1667, Cosimo first attended mass in a Jesuit oratory, then proceeded to attend a Reformed church service, and concluded the day with subsequent visits to Mennonite, Lutheran, Socinian, and Remonstrant churches.3 To this progress through the city’s ecclesiastical geography was later added an extensive tour of a Jesuit house church. The visitors noted the exterior, which looked like every other house on the street, and marveled at the interior, which, at the top of a long stairwell, included a proper Catholic worship space containing an altar as well as an organ and other musical instruments. The priests present were dressed in secular clothing and explained that all activities within the house took place privately.4 That such an arrangement Harold Acton, The Last Medici (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p. 102. Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 265–268. 3 De twee reizen van Cosimo de’ Medici Prins van Toscana door de Nederlanden (1667– 1669). Journalen en documenten. ed. G.J. Hoogewerff. (Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1919), pp. 56–59. 4 De twee reizen, p. 206. 1 2

1

2

Introduction

was possible in ostensibly Reformed Holland was, to the diarists, clearly noteworthy, as was the sheer variety of confessional options available for their prince to sample. This degree of religious diversity was not something they could encounter at home. The fact that early modern Holland (and the wider Dutch Republic of which it was the largest province) was religiously fragmented did not make it unique. The splintering of medieval Latin Christendom by the Protestant Reformation led to the spiritual division of virtually all the lands in the northern half of Europe in the 1500s.5 From a modern perspective it is difficult to imagine how strange and frightening this change must have been to a civilization that had been unified in faith and church for nearly a millennium; in this respect, the Reformation truly ended the Middle Ages once and for all. By the close of the sixteenth century, every land from the Alps northward identified with an official church, yet also harbored religious minorities who were tolerated or persecuted to a greater or lesser degree. In this regard, the officially Reformed Dutch Republic was no different from its neighbors Catholic France, Anglican England, or Lutheran Denmark, to name just a few. How this novel situation – religious disunity – would work itself out was entirely a matter of local circumstances. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a bewildering array of local, multiconfessional convivencias developed in the sundry corners of Europe despite the best efforts of political and ecclesiastical elites to impose conformity. European polities tried, in manifold ways, to accommodate, manage, or even eliminate religious minorities within their populations; nevertheless, complete religious conformity proved to be a political and clerical fantasy rather than a reality throughout the early modern era. What is interesting about the Dutch case, especially the province of Holland, was not so much the fact of its multiconfessionalism as the peculiar circumstances that attended it. War was endemic to Europe in the sixteenth century, but only in the Low Countries did war lead (unintentionally) to the creation of an entirely new state – the Dutch Republic, or United Provinces. The accidental, improvised nature of this new state’s political and ecclesiastical settlement resulted in a strange hybrid, a polity that was strongly decentralized yet dominated by one province – Holland – and a religious identity that was officially Reformed yet demographically pluralist. The Republic’s decentralized, confederate political structure Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Viking, 2003), pp. 307–336.

5

Introduction

3

ensured that the management of this religious ­pluralism was entirely a matter of local jurisdiction. In most communities, particularly in the province of Holland, local political leaders opted to accommodate pluriformity rather than to impose conformity. It was both the suppleness and the success of this accommodation, which resulted in fairly harmonious confessional coexistence across society, that contemporary observers either praised or denounced as “toleration.” Religious toleration is a concept with its own historiography, initially of a Whiggish, triumphalist flavor, celebrating its emergence as a key liberal value of the modern West.6 This earlier literature was mostly concerned with the idea of toleration, as it was perhaps most famously articulated by the English philosopher John Locke, rather than its ­praxis.7 More recently, scholars of early modern Europe have turned from intellectual history to examining the actual experience of religious pluralism, reframing the discussion around the phenomenon of coexistence among confessional groups. How, they ask, did people of differing faiths living in the same communities get along or fail to get along with each other?8 This is what the editors of a recent conference volume on the subject have called the “pragmatics of diversity” – that is, the day-to-day challenges confronting European Christians of various plumage as they learned to live with each other in the wake of the fracturing of Latin Christendom.9 Their approach, to which this study subscribes, views early modern European religious history not through the teleological lens of the inevitable triumph of toleration, nor through the theoretical lens of intellectual history in which the abstract idea of toleration slowly gained ground among European elites, but instead through the more mundane lens of practical social and political realities. The value-laden abstraction of “toleration” has been laid aside in favor of more neutral descriptors

A recent example of this kind of historiography is Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 7 Heiko A. Oberman, “The Travail of Tolerance: Containing Chaos in Early Modern Europe,” in Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, eds. Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 13–31. 8 This historiography has been concisely and admirably surveyed in Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 6–13. 9 Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe, eds. C. Scott Dixon, Dagmar Freist, and Mark Greengrass (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 19; Randolph C. Head, “The Transformations of the Long Sixteenth Century,” in Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment, eds. John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. 95–106. 6

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Introduction

such as “coexistence” or “diversity.” How, in other words, did adherents of different churches have to accommodate and adjust to living in close proximity to each other? This stress on practical coexistence, of which toleration may be said to be a part, has led scholars to examine various local circumstances of what has been called “interconfessional conviviality.”10 Keith Luria and Gregory Hanlon, for example, have uncovered the rich complexity of relationships between Catholics and Huguenots in seventeenth-­century France, while across the border in Germany, the multiconfessional ­populations of various imperial cities have been similarly investigated by such historians as Etienne François, Peter Lang, Peter Wallace, and Paul Warmbrunn.11 In the case of England, Alexandra Walsham has revealed just how complicated and intricate Protestant attitudes toward Catholics were, amounting to something as oxymoronically potent as “charitable hatred.”12 Howard Louthan has charted the search for religious coexistence in Central Europe.13 All of these monographs reveal just how complicated and multifaceted the delicate choreography among different confessional groups was within the crowded communities they shared. Whatever the official hostility between confessions, ­believers developed a host of social and cultural mechanisms  – often unofficial, tentative, informal, ad hoc, yet nevertheless effective  – that allowed them to live Willem Frijhoff, “The threshold of toleration: Interconfessional conviviality in Holland during the early modern period,” in Embodied Belief. Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), p. 39. 11 Keith Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-Modern France (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2005); Gregory Hanlon, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Etienne François, Die unsichtbare Grenz. Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg 1648–1806, trans. Angelika Steiner-Wendt (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1991); Peter Lang, Die Ulmer Katholiken im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe: Lebensbedingungen einer konfessionellen Minderheit (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1977); Peter G. Wallace, Communities and Conflict in Early Modern Colmar: 1575–1730 (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1995); PaulWarmbrunn, Zwei Konfessionen in einer Stadt. Das Zusammenleben von Katholiken und Protestanten in den Paritätischen Reichsstädten Augsburg, Biberach, Ravensburg und Dinkelsbühl von 1548 bis 1648 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1983). Much of the literature on different multiconfessional arrangements has recently been surveyed by Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For the most recent overview, see the essays in A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, ed. Thomas Max Safley (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 12 Walsham, Charitable Hatred, p. 2. 13 Howard Louthan, The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 10

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5

and work among each other without undue harm to either ­community ­cohesion or confessional integrity. These mechanisms  – discourses, ­languages, boundaries, identities, customs, habits, attitudes, and spaces – permitted interconfessional conviviality of varying degrees to flourish across multiconfessional Europe. This conviviality, however, was not in any way a proto-Enlightenment victory of religious equality; it was fragile, evolving, improvised, unpredictable, and acutely sensitive to larger political, social, and cultural pressures. Conviviality could and did collapse when greater political forces required it. Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and its attendant dispersal of much of France’s Huguenot population, is probably the most famous example of the vulnerability of early modern Europe’s multiconfessional arrangements. Toleration was neither inevitable nor permanent, and confessional coexistence retained its discontents. What follows is a particular case of early modern European confessional coexistence, a series of essays highlighting various aspects of the relationships between Calvinists and Catholics in the Dutch province of Holland from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. The case of Holland is interesting, at least in part, because it was so conspicuous; in few other regions of Europe was the religious heterogeneity of the population so obvious, so seemingly unregulated, and so diverse. More than one perplexed foreign observer remarked with  – variously  – surprise, admiration, envy, or derision on the bewildering and sometimes cacophonous multiconfessionalism of Holland’s towns.14 In the wealthy, teeming cities and towns of early modern Holland, where only one church was officially recognized, it was nevertheless possible to be a Calvinist, Catholic, Mennonite, Lutheran, Arminian, or a member of one of any number of small sects. It was also permissible not to adhere to any church at all. These were astonishing facts in a time and place that thought corporatively and that valued harmony above all other social virtues, whose conventional wisdom assumed that difference led only to discord. This study focuses on the province of Holland, specifically drawing on sources from its six biggest cities: Amsterdam, Leiden, Haarlem, Delft, Gouda, and Dordrecht. Holland was the largest of the Dutch Republic’s seven provinces, as well as its economic dynamo. Holland had been the North’s economically dominant province since the later Middle Ages, and Hans Bots, “Tolerantie of gecultiveerde tweedracht. Het beeld van de Nederlandse tolerantie bij buitenlanders in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw,” BMGN 107 (1992): 657–669.

14

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Introduction

by the early 1600s its maritime location allowed it to become the major entrepôt of world trade throughout most of the seventeenth ­century.15 At the same time, the province’s population swelled as immigrants, mostly from the Spanish Netherlands, moved into its towns and financed or labored in its textile industries. The spectacular economic growth and success of the Dutch Republic’s commercial and manufacturing sectors was a phenomenon largely confined to the province of Holland. This economic dominance is reflected in the revenue quotas each province was obliged to pay to finance the national government; Holland’s quota was always at least 55 percent during the seventeenth century.16 Most of the dazzling economic and cultural ascendancy that is popularly associated with the Dutch Golden Age was in fact confined largely to the province of Holland. In addition, Holland was religiously the most diverse of the seven provinces.17 With neighboring Utrecht, Holland had the largest Catholic minorities within its town populations, running anywhere from 8 percent to 20 percent. The remaining five provinces, by contrast, had much smaller Catholic populations that were much less conspicuous confessional minorities.18 The Catholic presence was more palpable in an everyday sense in Holland than it was in much of the rest of the Republic. Because of this, the available historical source material on Catholics is richer in Holland than in any other province except perhaps Utrecht. The complicated dynamics attending the relationship between Catholics and Calvinists in Holland were therefore not necessarily representative of the Dutch Republic as a whole, because each province had the constitutional right to regulate its own religious affairs. The mercantile regents who controlled Holland established a largely, if not consistently, tolerationist regime. Their laissez-faire approach allowed Catholics to exercise their faith within generally clear parameters.19 Governments in other provinces were not always as accommodating. Some of the towns in Gelderland and Overijssel, for example, took steps in the seventeenth Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 307–318. 16 Israel, The Dutch Republic, p. 286. 17 For a brief synopsis of the religious character of early modern Holland, see P. H. A. M. Abels, “Tussen gewetensvrijheid en kerkelijke dwang: Religie in Holland,” in Geschiedenis van Holland, eds. Thimo de Nijs and Eelco Beukers (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), pp. 287–329. 18 Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 380–381. 19 Willem Frijhoff quite rightly refers to this as “connivance.” Frijhoff, “How Plural were the Religious Worlds of Early Modern Europe? Critical Reflections from the Netherlandic Experience,” in Living with Religious Diversity, p. 33. 15

Introduction

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century to limit the access of their Catholic inhabitants to the rights of ­citizenship, for various political reasons of their own.20 Precisely because of this local regulation of religious questions and all the variegation attending it, it is extremely difficult to make assertions about the character of multiconfessionalism in the Dutch Republic as a whole without qualifications. More historical spade work on confessional relations in other provinces must be done, and is being done, before we can paint a portrait of interconfessional relationships in the Republic in broad strokes with any degree of confidence.21 This study will, therefore, confine itself to the province of Holland, where the complexity of the interactions between Catholic and Calvinist was most problematic and most dynamic.22 In particular, it focuses its examination on the relationships between Reformed and Catholic denominations, which were, of course, only two of the multiple confessions that could be found in Holland’s society in the seventeenth century. Confessional coexistence in Holland was, to be sure, not limited to two churches. Arguably, a fuller picture of religious coexistence in Holland would emerge if relationships among all of the province’s confessional groups were considered. The various Mennonite congregations, for instance, were an important social presence in most of Holland’s towns, and their members played significant roles in the province’s booming economy. Available quantitative evidence suggests that in some cities, such as Haarlem, Mennonites outnumbered Catholics in the first part of the seventeenth century.23 The Reformed church, especially in the late 1500s and early 1600s, often viewed the Mennonites as rivals and directed a fair amount of invective and polemic in their direction, much of which was returned in good measure.24 By the 1610s, however, Maarten Prak, “The politics of intolerance: citizenship and religion in the Dutch Republic (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries),” in: Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, eds. R. Po-Chia Hsia and H.F.K. van Nierop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 159–175. 21 See, for example, recent work on Utrecht’s Catholics: Bertrand Forclaz, “The Emergence of Confessional Identities: Family Relationships and Religious Coexistence in SeventeenthCentury Utrecht,” in Living with Religious Diversity, pp. 249–279. 22 For a useful overview of multiconfessionalism in the entire Netherlands, see Jesse Spohnholz, “Confessional Coexistence in the Early Modern Low Countries,” in A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, ed. Thomas Max Safley (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 47–73. 23 Joke Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie. Stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1578–1620 (The Hague: Hollandse Historische Reeks, 1989), p. 104. 24 S. Zijlstra, Om de ware gemeente en de oude gronden. Geschiedenis van de dopersen in de Nederlanden 1531–1675 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000), pp. 340–357; W. Bergsma, “Gereformeerden en doopsgezinden. Van concurrentie tot gedwongen acceptatie,” Doopsgezinde bijdragen 20 (1994): 129–156. 20

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Introduction

Reformed interest in the Mennonites waned considerably, as the public church became preoccupied with more palpable threats in the form of the Arminians and a revived Catholicism. In addition, the self-segregating discipline of the various Mennonite communities, who tended to use up a lot of energy fractiously arguing points of doctrine among themselves, appears to have led them to eschew confessional confrontations as the century wore on. Likewise, the Lutherans – the smallest and statistically least significant of all of Holland’s confessions – received scant attention from the Reformed church after the turn of the seventeenth century, as did the Remonstrants once they were drummed out of the public church.25 The relationship between Holland’s Calvinists and Catholics, however, was heavily charged with conflict because they were at precise theological odds with each other. The central issue of contention was which of the two was the true church. Since at least late antiquity, the Catholic church had claimed through the papal primacy a universal authority over all Christian souls, an authority buttressed by scripture and maintained by tradition. Its sacraments, particularly the mass, provided the means by which God’s grace was offered for the redemption of sinners.26 As far as the Catholic church was concerned, the Reformed church was, of course, one more variant of the malignant heresies that arose out of the Protestant Reformation. The Reformed church, in turn, by embracing the central tenet of sola scriptura, saw no legitimate scriptural basis for the Catholic church’s authority or teachings. Its Belgic Confession insisted that the marks of the true church were the preaching of the Gospel, the pure administration of the sacraments, and the disciplining of sin. The false church, continued the creed, followed its own ordinances rather than God’s, administered sacraments improperly, and persecuted those who lived holy lives. “These two churches,” the confession added, “are easily known and distinguished from each other.”27 The Catholic church saw the Reformed as distorted and heretical; the Reformed saw the Catholic church as corrupted and idolatrous. This contest over which church was the truly valid one lay at the heart of the two confessions’ ongoing relationship with each other throughout the early modern era. A second reason the relationship between Holland’s Catholics and Calvinists was so fraught with antagonism was the fact that they had, in effect, traded places in the 1570s. In that decade, rebels invaded Holland Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 374–375. MacCulloch, The Reformation, pp. 10–34. 27 “Confessio Belgica,” in De Nederlandse belijdenisgeschriften, ed. J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink (Amsterdam: Ton Bolland, 1976), pp. 124–126. 25 26

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and forced the province to defect to the revolt against Spain. With that defection came the disestablishment of the Catholic church in the province, which was the price the rebel regime had to pay to secure the support of Reformed Protestants. Thus, Reformation came to Holland escorted by revolt. Before 1572, the Catholic church had been the only legitimate religion, and the Calvinists were an illegal sect. Within a few years, this situation was precisely reversed: The Reformed gained political ascendancy as the only publicly allowed church, and Catholic worship was outlawed. Therefore, the relationship between Calvinist and Catholic in Holland was politicized in a way that relationships among other confessions were not. The dislocations and shifts that came with the loss and gain of political legitimacy proved to be integral to the sorting out of the mechanics of Calvinist-Catholic coexistence in Golden-Age Holland. Simply put, the Calvinists had won and the Catholics had lost. The Reformed church believed it had won a significant victory over idolatry and superstition, and the Catholic church found itself usurped and persecuted by heresy. Therefore, at the most formal, public level, the relationship between the two confessions was antagonistic. This hostility was expressed in harsh polemic and vicious invective, by Reformed lobbying for the enforcement of anti-Catholic statutes and by the Catholic mission’s relentless proselytizing. In the polarized, confessionalized atmosphere of post-­Reformation Europe, these two churches could seldom be indifferent to each other; arguably, each one’s identity was to a great degree bound up in its rejection of the other. Paradoxically, however, it was the very same revolt, or at least its political consequences, that forced Calvinist and Catholic in Holland to coexist with one other. The republican, confederate regime that the revolt established in Holland placed political authority very much in the hands of local civic magistracies.28 These powerful urban regents superintended religious affairs with a firm hand and tried (with a fair amount of success) to control religious pluralism rather than eliminate it. Thus, they allowed for Catholic worship within carefully prescribed parameters, but they also placed checks on the Reformed church’s ability to exercise autonomous authority. This carefully managed accommodation of all churches, including the privileged one, allowed for a basically peaceful coexistence among confessions. This confederate regime has been persuasively analyzed by J. L. Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).

28

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Introduction

This managed multiconfessionalism provided not only a society where otherwise hostile confessions could live side by side; it also permitted a high degree of interaction between adherents of different faiths. The booming economy and growing towns of Holland during the Golden Age encouraged economic and social traffic of all kinds, and, as we shall see, adherents of all confessions actively participated and cooperated in them without much regard for religious difference. Calvinists and Catholics lived and worked with each other; they befriended each other; they married each other; and they did all this during one of the most religiously polarized eras of European history. Small wonder outside observers found Holland so perplexing. Examined on its face, the case of early modern Holland’s Calvinists and Catholics indeed appears paradoxical: How were two faiths, one favored and the other displaced, that were so implacably hostile toward each other able to coexist in comparative peace? In the past few years, historians of early modern Europe have begun to explore relations between disparate social groups through the explanatory lens of socially constructed boundaries and boundary making.29 Keith Luria uses a formulation of “sacred” boundaries between Catholic and Huguenot in seventeenthcentury Poitou. Three different types of boundary arrangements, from the blurry to the negotiated to the rigid, characterized and facilitated interconfessional relations there.30 By creating such arrangements – that is, by establishing where the limits lay – French Catholics and Calvinists could find agreed-on ways to deal with each other. In a suggestive essay, Jesse Spohnholz recently speculated on the ways such boundary models might be applied to the case of the Low Countries, especially the border between the public church and private, tolerated faiths.31 This study, however, is less interested in what separated confessions than in interactions between them. Divisions appear to have mattered less to most early modern Hollanders than getting along with each other. It therefore suggests that it might be more useful to conceptualize ­confessional coexistence in Holland as taking place not across different boundaries but instead at different levels – or more precisely, within different metaphorical spaces. Implicit in the notion of coexistence, after all, François, Die unsichtbare Grenz, p. 15; Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 1–24; Kathryn A. Edwards, Families and Frontiers: Re-Creating Communities and Boundaries in the Early Modern Burgundies (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 2–6. 30 Luria, Sacred Boundaries, pp. xxvii–xxx. 31 Spohnholz, “Confessional Coexistence,” pp. 61–73. 29

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is the sharing of space. Holland’s Catholics and Calvinists had to inhabit the same space. That inhabited space was, of course, both physical and material. However, in terms of understanding their relationships and traffic with each other, it might also be fruitful to think of them as dealing with each other in more abstract kinds of spaces, ones that were cultural, social, or even psychological.32 In this study, “spaces” are not concrete locations, but instead serve as metaphors for arenas of interaction. In seventeenth-century Holland, we can identify at least three such metaphorical spaces where Calvinists and Catholics interacted. The most obvious, and thus most familiar, space was the confessional one – that is, the arena of religious difference and antagonism where beliefs conflicted, which was common to all of early modern Europe and was brought to Holland on the heels of the Reformation. Within this realm, brought about by the splintering of Latin Christendom, confessional hostility was normative and expected. Although the Reformed church in Holland had a monopoly on the public exercise of religion, the province’s pluralism meant that some confessional friction was inevitable. In confessional space, Reformed Protestants and Catholics in Holland denounced and condemned each other in the harshest language possible, and extreme polarization appeared the norm. In this space, the Reformed church pressed the provincial government for rigorous application of anti­Catholic persecutory laws, and the Catholic church in turn dedicated the fullest amount of its resources and energies to its proselytizing mission against heresy. It was in this realm that each church competed for converts and condemned apostates. It was filled with vitriolic discourse and bitter malediction, as each church painted a rhetorical portrait of the other that served to distinguish its own confessional and ecclesiastical identity. In other words, confessional space allowed for the sharpening of theological differences, which in a religiously pluralist society all confessions believed was necessary to distinguish one church from another. It was the arena of interaction between the Catholic and Calvinist churches. A second space within which Holland’s Calvinists and Catholics coexisted was a civic one. In this space, in their communities, they lived in This is not the same thing as the notion of sacred space recently examined in the intriguing book of essays edited by Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Sacred space examined in that volume generally refers to actual, physical locations such as churches, cemeteries, shrines, and the like. In the Dutch Republic’s case, virtually all sacred space was controlled by the Reformed church, and Catholics had little hope of access to it. The present study uses the term “space” as a cultural construct rather than an actual location.

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close proximity to one another and were directly subject to the oversight and regulation of powerful town magistracies. This civic space was greater than both churches, including the Reformed church, which presided over public religious expression.33 Here, in contrast to their rhetorical violence toward each other within confessional space, they coexisted without excessive turbulence or disorder. Here, people interacted with each other without much reference to religious difference. In contrast to confessional space, which was largely rhetorical and cultural, civic space was social, political, and sometimes physical; it was the arena of interaction between two communities, as opposed to two churches. Civic space was ruled by the regents’ tolerationist regime, which translated religious life into public and private spheres. The Reformed church monopolized the common, open religious spaces and structures of the community; Catholics and other confessions were relegated to a private, invisible sphere of domestic devotion. This space witnessed its occasional frictions and conflicts, and the Reformed church would protest loudly to authorities when it perceived Catholics violating that public-private boundary by allowing “idolatry” to appear in the open. The government would at times step in to manage the relationship between the two churches, but peaceful coexistence prevailed throughout most of the seventeenth century. Finally, we can see confessional coexistence occupying a private space. It was the arena of interactions among individuals – the world of work, neighborhood, and family. This space was largely characterized by conviviality and ecumenicity, although conflict certainly arose on occasion. In this space, people who might in practice harbor an abstract objection to each other because of their religious allegiances often got along despite those allegiances. Personal relationships of varying kinds  – neighborhood, work, or kinship – succeeded because of a deliberate willingness to ­overlook what in another space would be an unbridgeable chasm. Family life, fraught as it often was with conflict, could, however, be subject to added stresses brought on by confessional difference, so confessional acrimony could characterize this space, as well. Conceptually compartmentalizing confessional co-existence into these varied metaphorical spaces provides an analytical framework for the apparently bewildering juxtapositions of conflict and harmony that attended the relationships between Calvinists and Catholics in early modern Holland. These three spaces allowed for the coexistence of varying relationships Frijhoff, “How Plural,” p. 46.

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between churches, communities, and individuals. These spaces were by no means mutually exclusive; the boundaries among them were malleable and porous, and relationships between Calvinists and Catholics cut across all of them. Churchmen and congregants expected the confessional sphere to be the rancorous domain of religious polemic and competition for converts. Magistrates also insisted that civic space was theirs to govern, but ordinary folk expected to manage their dealings with each other in private space. The paradoxes in this arrangement appear less puzzling when we realize that this is what early modern people did to survive and to get along – accept theological difference while at the same time looking past it. It may not have seemed intellectually consistent, but it was socially practical. Religion as it was lived was not the same thing as religion as it was professed, in this or any other era. This study will examine how the different spaces of confessional coexistence between Reformed Protestants and Catholics operated and overlapped in seventeenth-century Holland. Toleration, as a social virtue celebrated by past observers and scholars, is part of the story, but not the only part. Instead, this work focuses on relationships, especially as they manifested themselves across the multifarious spaces of confessional coexistence. Thus, at times, those relationships will appear exceedingly poisonous, and at other points they will seem remarkably amicable. How Holland’s Calvinists and Catholics got along or failed to get along as churches, bodies of believers, competitors, compatriots, neighbors, and families forms the core question at the heart of this work. It uses a variety of sources, especially ecclesiastical ones such as the acts of Reformed consistories and the correspondence of the Holland Mission, to present a large number of instances illuminating how Holland’s Calvinists and Catholics got along or failed to get along during the Golden Age. Confessional coexistence in Holland was an evolutionary phenomenon, and the toleration of Catholic worship by political and religious authorities was never a static thing during the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This study posits three phases in this evolution: an initial period of ecclesiastical muddiness and confusion, as Holland’s political and church elites worked out their religious settlement between 1572 and 1620; a subsequent period to 1660 of increased confessionalism, as both churches sharpened their religious identities against the backdrop of heightened war with Spain and Reformed attacks and complaints against Catholic activity reached its highest pitch; and the period after 1660, when confessional passions largely subsided and a reasonably harmonious coexistence prevailed.

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Chapter 1 establishes the context of war and peace for confessional coexistence in Holland from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. War gave Holland its independence (as part of the Dutch Republic) from the Habsburg Empire, and informed much of its history during the Golden Age. It explains how the combination of sixteenth-century revolt and reformation created an anomalous, improvised new state with an equally makeshift ecclesiastical settlement. Religious matters came under local jurisdiction, and freedom of conscience was proclaimed as a right. The Reformed church enjoyed tremendous privilege as the public church, but it was closely supervised by civic magistracies, who turned a blind eye to Catholic worship as long as it did not disturb communal peace. The chapter further describes the social and cultural world of Holland’s Golden Age, which witnessed dizzying economic expansion along with a notably open discussion culture that provided a relatively benign arena where religious differences could be expressed and aired. Chapter 2 examines the relationship between Holland’s Catholics and Calvinists at the ecclesiastical level. This occurred primarily in confessional space, where religious conflict and division predominated. Specifically, it underscores the need for priests in the Holland Mission to work “under the heretical yoke,” that is, in the midst of a sea of heresy, and how this in turn further confessionalized seventeenth-century Dutch Catholicism. It goes on to analyze the Reformed response to the Mission and its efforts to offer sacramental and pastoral care to the Catholic faithful. In this confessional space, the relationship between Catholics and Calvinists was at its most formally bellicose and acrimonious. This chapter examines some of the rhetoric preachers and priests on each side directed at each other and how that rhetoric in turn served confessional formation. Chapter 3 considers the question of toleration and persecution. Here we enter the civic space of confessional coexistence, as local magistracies attempted to regulate religious affairs and mediate between the two confessions. A variety of mechanisms and tactics arose to secure a reasonably smooth management of confessional differences. A crucial part of the process of toleration included town magistracies establishing and articulating boundaries between public and private space; that is, where Catholic devotion could be practiced and where it could be seen. In effect, this process of toleration created a privatized Catholic religion in Holland. Chapter 4 assesses still another type of relationship found between Catholic and Calvinist in confessional space: competitors for souls. In a multiconfessional society that allowed freedom of conscience, conversion

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(or apostasy, depending on one’s point of view) from one church to the other was eminently possible. This chapter explores a number of cases of conversion, both of clergy and laity, and how each confession reacted to the potential gain or loss such actions represented. In particular, it tries to figure out people’s motives for changing their religious identity, especially among layfolk. The tolerationist regime created by Holland’s rulers allowed for the creation of a kind of marketplace of religious identities that made switching confessional allegiance relatively easy. Finally, Chapter 5 explores the most intimate and least documented relationships of all: those among individual Catholics and Calvinists. Interpersonal interaction between members of both confessions was unavoidable in Holland’s crowded towns, and in this private space of work, neighborhood, and family, a kind of personal toleration generally reigned. However, confessional difference could still be a sensitive issue, particularly in regards to marriage and children. Both confessions preferred not to see confessional mixing within families and did their best to discourage it, but it remained a continuing issue that had to be dealt with in Holland’s multiconfessional population. For many of Holland’s ordinary lay Christians, confessional difference proved no barrier to ordinary, everyday intercourse and conviviality. Confessional coexistence was an intricate and multifaceted phenomenon. No single type of relationship between Reformed Protestants and Catholics in Golden-Age Holland predominated; coexistence was instead a congeries of connections, interactions, affinities, conflicts, and conjunctions happening at many levels and in many spaces. That all this could take place largely without violence or social breakdown required, variously, connivance, patience, accommodation, force, persecution, usable fictions, and even toleration. Catholics and Calvinists in Holland could both hate each other and live with each other and even marry each other, all at the same time. Their relationships were as complicated as human life itself.

1 War and Peace

The reality of a public church that maintained a strict orthodoxy but included only a minority of the population made Dutch society, under its Calvinist exterior, extremely variegated. J. J. Woltjer1

The brethren of Dordrecht were fed up. For the past decade, these Reformed worthies, men of impeccable Calvinist orthodoxy in an already orthodox city, had watched with increasing dismay as “papists” practiced their unspeakable idolatries more and more brazenly within the walls of Holland’s oldest town. Despite their repeated complaints, the preachers and elders noted with exasperation that the sheriff and the burgomasters were still doing nothing to stop the alarming rise of Catholic activity within the city. Now, in the mid-winter of 1637, they could contain themselves no longer. On 19 February they addressed a long letter of complaint to the “honorable, wise, most prudent lords” of Dordrecht, which catalogued the baleful effects of popish superstition on the ­spiritual health of the city and nation and by implication, rebuked the magistrates for allowing it to flourish. The remonstrance began on a righteous note, reminding the burgomasters of the biblical injunction that commanded all guardians of Christ’s flock to protect his lambs: God demands of them “no heavier, no higher, no more perilous and precious a commission than the watch of shepherds over the souls of the people.”2 The Reformed consistory, the J. J. Woltjer, “Revolt of the Netherlands,” in Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), vol. 3, p. 428. 2 SAD NHG, KA, 19 Feb. 1637. 1

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preachers and elders of God’s Word in Dordrecht, was finding this charge ­increasingly impossible to fulfill, unless the city’s Christian magistracy – whom it pointedly described as “foster-fathers of Christ’s church” – joined it in this effort. The brethren assumed the town government had just as much spiritual obligation to protect “true” religion as its ecclesiastical leadership did. This, they implied, the government was not doing. The result was “unbounded license.” In lachrymose terms, the brethren described their grief and pain at witnessing the spread of superstition in the city, at the “intolerable impudence” of the papists unchecked by law or sanction. At least two Catholic priests – one of them a Jesuit no less – lived in town like wolves among the sheep and openly ­presided over Catholic conventicles. Their “altars of Baal” were multiplying, where they celebrated their “idolatrous mass . . . not secretly but in public, not by night but by clear day, not with a small but rather a notable and considerable number of people.” All this under the scandalized eyes of the good Reformed burghers of Dordrecht. These “mass-priests” laughed at the church and the law, boasting they “made things good” with the sheriff with payoff money and mocking the anti-Catholic placards issued by the States of Holland. More alarmingly, the remonstrance hinted darkly, these Papists also seemed to enjoy the favor of “notable” persons in the city.3 As if all that were not enough, the Catholics also employed more ­sinister means to insinuate themselves among the townsfolk. Their klopjes  – unmarried Catholic women who lived together in common households, described in the petition as “a new sort of beguine”  – were trying to seduce innocent children and servants away from true religion into popery. They crept into homes and tried to shake the faith of defenseless souls on their sickbeds. Likewise, priests tried to sneak into sick people’s houses to offer them last rites (or “oil them,” as the brethren put it). One priest even had the temerity to enter the house of a Reformed deacon while he and his wife were at church and try to convert their housemaid.4 All these excesses, the preachers and elders sighed, had brought their patience to an end. The Papists were upsetting the Reformed congregation, so much so that the consistory feared that anti-Catholic mob violence might break out if timely action were not taken. The town government had to do its civic and patriotic duty. We are at war with the tyranny of Spain, the consistory reminded the magistracy, which wishes to rob us of true Christian religion: Do not let such idolatry and superstition nestle in 3 4

SAD NHG, KA, 19 Feb. 1637. SAD NHG, KA, 19 Feb. 1637.

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the “bosom and heart of our dear fatherland.” A Christian government must root out this “evil gangrene and devouring cancer.” Enforcing the anti-Catholic placards was necessary and godly work, the brethren concluded piously, and they urged the magistrates to step in and zealously protect Christian souls from this most serious and deadly peril.5 The consistory was understandably nervous. Since the early 1620s, Dordrecht’s Reformed leaders had registered repeated warnings about the spread of Catholic worship within the population; indeed, they were not wrong. Since 1602 at least one priest had been living and working semi-secretly within the city; by 1629 the number had grown to three.6 They operated under the supervision of the Holland Mission, an underground network of clergy directed by a papally appointed Apostolic vicar, whose goal was the restoration and maintenance of Catholic worship inside the officially Protestant Dutch Republic. Throughout Holland  – the Republic’s largest province – this organization had been doing precisely what Dordrecht’s Calvinists complained about: celebrating the sacraments, offering pastoral care, and winning souls for Catholicism. Worse still, the ongoing war with Spain had taken a sobering turn since the summer with the enemy’s successful incursions across the Republic’s southern and eastern borders.7 Since in their minds Spanish tyranny and Catholic belief were one and the same, the Reformed brethren feared menace abroad was being matched by subversion at home. Danger aside, what bothered the Reformed equally as much was the sheer effrontery of the Catholics in their midst. The consistory’s remonstrance to the town government fairly overflowed with shrill indignation over the Papists’ stouticheden or impudence: They had the ­audacity to flout the placards and trespass into the public, ­communal spaces that the Reformed regarded as exclusively their own. This ­brazenness incensed the preachers and elders in particular. It was one thing to have Catholics practicing their idolatries privately away from public view; it was quite another to have them flaunted under the noses of respectable Reformed Christians. Since 1573, the open practice of Catholicism had been outlawed SAD NHG, KA, 19 Feb. 1637. Fred van Lieburg, “Geloven op vele manieren,” in Geschiedenis van Dordrecht van 1572 tot 1813, eds. Willem Frijhoff, Hubert Nusteling, and Marijke Spies (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998), p. 299; John Paul Elliott, “Protestantization in the Northern Netherlands, A Case Study: The Classis of Dordrecht 1572–1640,” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1990), p. 304. 7 Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 529–530. 5 6

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in Holland – subsequent placards had reiterated this ban. The Reformed Protestants of Dordrecht (a city whose reputation for Calvinist orthodoxy made it the ideal site for the National Synod of 1618–1619, which had hounded Arminians out of the Reformed church) believed with some justification that the revolt against Spain and the Reformation had won them the public sphere. That sixty years after this triumph Catholics would try to insinuate their way back into communal life offended them on any number of levels: doctrinal, cultural, and psychological. Superstition and idolatry were bad enough, but it was this impudence the brethren repeatedly proclaimed intolerable. It posed troubling questions about the permanence and depth of the Reformed victory, about the Reformed church’s security within Dutch polity and society, about the civil authorities’ commitment to “true” religion, and – not least – about the potential competition for souls that a revived and semi-tolerated Catholic church might encourage. Dordrecht’s Reformed Protestants – like the rest of their fellow believers in Holland – found themselves – despite all their victories and privileges – in danger of becoming one more confession in a multiconfessional society. They were living in a society whose outstanding religious characteristic was not Protestantism but pluralism. The creation of a new state, known eventually as the Dutch Republic or United Provinces, out of the upheavals of reformation and revolt was an outcome unique in sixteenth-century Europe. The rebellion of the Low Countries against their sovereign Philip II of Spain – led by an uneasy coalition of political and religious insurgents – had ultimately won the independence of the seven northern Netherlandish provinces, who in turn forged an equally uneasy confederation among themselves. The resulting republic – especially Holland, its richest and most populous province – enjoyed a period of dazzling economic, political, and cultural success in the seventeenth century that later became known as its Golden Age  – most famously associated with the luminous paintings of Rembrandt and Vermeer. Travelers to the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century marveled at its prosperity, its literacy, its freedom. To many contemporary observers this seemed to be an exceptional society, not least because of its peculiar religious stamp. What at first glance seemed to be an ostensibly Reformed Protestant state – with its stripped-down churches whitewashed of ornament and its black-clad preachers declaiming from the pulpit – was on closer inspection teeming with all manner of denominations and sects, Christian and even non-Christian. Refugees from Europe’s various confessional wars seemed to find a haven in the crowded cities and towns of the Dutch Republic. The British tourist James Howell

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reported that the street where he lodged had “as many religions as there be houses . . . the number of conventicles exceeds the number of churches here.” The country may call itself the United Provinces, Howell noted, but when it came to religion “there’s no place so disunited.”8 To some observers, such confessional pluriformity verged dangerously on irreligion. Jean Baptiste Stoupe, a Swiss Reformed officer in the army of Louis XIV that invaded the Republic in 1672, sniffed disapprovingly that “any heresiarch” could publish and teach and profess there: “You already know that besides the Reformed there are Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Brownists, Independents, Arminians, Anabaptists, Socinians, Arians, Enthusiasts, Quakers or Tremblers, Boreelists, Armenians, Muscovites, Libertines and others whom we could generally call Seekers, because they seek a religion and they do not profess any of those that are established.”9 That every sectary from Arminian to Armenian could find sanctuary in this country made the Republic either exemplary or notorious, depending upon the observer. René Descartes proclaimed that in no place on earth did one feel so free.10 The English diplomat Sir William Temple concluded in the 1670s that the effects of the Republic’s relatively high degree of religious liberty were largely benign: “Religion may possibly do more good in other places, but it does less hurt here.”11 His compatriot Owen Feltham, however, took a darker view of “their boundless toleration, which shews they place their Republic in a higher esteem than Heaven itself . . . the decrees of heaven and sanctions of the deity, any one may break uncheck’d, by professing what false religion he please.”12 Whether their judgment was positive or negative, all foreign observers agreed that few states seemed to match the Dutch Republic in its degree of religious heterogeneity. The Dutch Republic was, to be sure, a formally Reformed Protestant state. Not long after the maritime provinces of Holland and Zealand Quoted in C. D. van Strien, “British Travellers in Holland during the Stuart Period,” (PhD dissertation, Free University of Amsterdam, 1989), p. 148, n. 70. 9 J. Stoupe, La religion des hollandois, Representée en plusiers lettres écrites par un Officier de l’Armée du Roy, à un Pasteur et Professeur en Theologie de Berne (Paris, 1673), pp. 43, 111. 10 Hans Bots, “Tolerantie of gecultiveerde tweedracht. Het beeld van de Nederlandse tolerantie bij buitenlanders in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw,” BMGN 107 (1992): p. 659. 11 Sir William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, ed. George Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 107. 12 Owen Feltham, A brief Character of the Low Countries under the States (London, 1677), p. 53. 8

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first broke away from Habsburg control in 1572, the Reformed church had gained ascendancy as the new state’s only public church, officially sanctioned by the government and given a monopoly over the common religious life. Use of formerly Catholic ecclesiastical property lay in Reformed hands, the Republic’s military and prison chaplains were Reformed, and the Reformed church’s preachers were paid out of publicly administered funds. National days of celebration and mourning were presided over by Reformed divines. The princely dynasty of Stadholders, the semi-sovereign line of the pater patriae William the Silent and his descendants in the house of Orange, were all professing members of the Reformed church.13 At the same time, the regents who ruled the cities that dominated the Republic compelled no one to join the public church, and Reformed consistories set dauntingly high standards for membership – including submission to church discipline and formal profession of faith. Consequently, the membership of the Dutch Reformed church comprised only a plurality of the populations of the Republic’s major towns throughout the seventeenth century.14 This variegation included chiefly Mennonites, Lutherans, and of course the Catholics who so vexed the Dordrecht consistory. Under the inexorable momentum of victorious reformation the Catholic mass had been outlawed in Holland since 1573, and the Catholic clergy and religious had been pensioned off or exiled. Nevertheless, a portion of the province’s inhabitants remained loyal to the old church. During the Golden Age that portion usually numbered about 10 percent to 15 percent of the population of Holland’s major cities, a sizable minority who were a recognized and distinct presence in civic life.15 The clergy of the Holland Mission  – charged by the Tridentine Catholic church with serving the Dutch Catholic faithful  – and the religious orders provided this confessional community with the sacraments and pastoral care in closed settings such as house chapels, hidden churches, warehouses, and barns. As long as Catholic worship took place within this private sphere, civic magistrates and law officers generally if inconsistently permitted it. A. Th. van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen: Kerk en staat ten tijde van Maurits en Oldenbarnevelt (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), pp. 13–33. 14 Alastair Duke, “The Ambivalent Face of Calvinism in the Netherlands, 1561–1618,” in Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), pp. 269–273. 15 For estimates on Catholic numbers in various Dutch cities, see Israel, The Dutch Republic, p. 380. 13

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None of this sat very well with the strictest Calvinists, whose ­theology taught them to oppose “false” religion and “popery” wherever they found it. It was in opposition to this false religion and what they considered its corruptions that many of their ancestors and fellow believers had suffered persecution, exile, and even martyrdom, and the idea that its adherents might be allowed to persist in their idolatries in the “new Israel” of the Dutch Republic was – as the aggrieved Dordrecht brethren insisted – intolerable. Reformed complaints against the toleration of Catholicism were loud and long and would remain so throughout most of the Golden Age. For their part, Dutch Catholics found themselves living under what their prelates called the “heretical yoke.”16 The government of the new state guaranteed them freedom of conscience, but they could no longer express or exercise their beliefs in any public space. They were tolerated in the barest sense of being suffered and forborne. At the best of times, Dutch Catholics led a relatively unmolested confessional life with private worship in peaceful relation to public authorities; at the worst of times, they endured fines and penalties, imprisoned priests and interrupted meetings. Their status and security varied from town to town and from one time period to the next; inconsistency was a key factor in their relationship with the wider polity and society. Confronted with a regime that supported the most aggressive of all the Protestant heresies the sixteenth century had produced, the Catholic faithful – second-class citizens though they were – persevered and in many cases flourished. Thus were heretics and idolaters (to use their commonest epithets for each other) forced to live with each other in the Dutch Republic during the Golden Age. “Toleration” is perhaps too loaded or too optimistic a term to describe this state of affairs, with its presentist overtones of approval and inclusion; certainly Dutch Catholics never called it that, and Dutch Calvinists were not  – at least openly  – ever welcoming of them. Willem Frijhoff has suggested the more neutral phrase “confessional coexistence” to characterize the particular forms of accommodation that Dutch Catholics and Reformed worked out and negotiated with each other during the course of the seventeenth century.17 Toleration See, for example, “Twee verslagen over de toestand der Hollandse Missie van de Apostolische vicaris Philippus Rovenius aan de infante Isabella,” ed. P. Placidius, AAU 68 (1949), p. 231. 17 Willem Frijhoff, “Dimensions de la coexistence confessionelle,” in The Emergence of Toleration in the Dutch Republic, eds. C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden: Brill, 1997), p. 217. 16

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was usually one component of this coexistence, but not always. This was indeed a coexistence that had to be continually arranged and adjusted; for Catholics it was a process rather than a condition. The relationship between Catholics and public authorities – both political and ecclesiastical – was protean and fluid, subject to the ebb and flow of national and local politics.18 The quality of that coexistence ranged from hostile to indifferent to accommodating depending on which space – confessional, civic, or private – it found itself in. From the Catholic point of view it was not something that could be relied upon. This delicate confessional choreography between Catholics and Calvinists across multifarious spaces became one of the most singular features of the religious culture of Holland’s Golden Age.

Revolt and Reformation The particular nature of the Dutch Republic’s religious settlement – especially the relationship between Calvinists and Catholics – arose directly from the circumstances of the Protestant Reformation and the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain.19 The exigencies of war and peace, rebellion and independence, religious dissent and confessionalism all contributed to the emergence of a new state that was at once Protestant and multiconfessional. This tumultuous sixteenth-century prelude would account for many of the peculiarities of the Golden Age’s political and religious culture and leave a lasting stamp on early modern Dutch polity and society, as did the spectacular political and economic boom that followed. This context of war and peace is critical to understanding the complicated range of relationships that evolved between Holland’s two leading confessions. The Reformation in the Netherlands came early and stayed long. Within a few years of Martin Luther’s original protest in 1517 his writings were circulating in the Low Countries. The central government of Emperor Charles V reacted sharply and swiftly; the Protestant Reformation’s first martyrs were executed in Brussels in 1523, the first of over 2,000 Christine Kooi, “Paying off the Sheriff: Strategies of Catholic Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age,” in Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, eds. R. Po-Chia Hsia and H.F.K. van Nierop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 88. 19 Nicolette Mout, “Staat und Calvinismus in der Republik der Vereinigten Niederlande,” in Territorialstaat und Calvinismus, ed. Minrad Schaab (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1993), p. 89. 18

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people in the Netherlands to be executed for heresy over the course of the sixteenth century. As James Tracy has observed, the Habsburg Netherlands became a “zone of struggle” between a government intent on eradicating heresy and a population unconvinced of the legality of religious repression.20 The central government’s vigorous persecution of religious dissenters became one of the formative experiences of Dutch Protestantism.21 The prosecutorial regime of the Habsburgs succeeded in keeping Protestantism in the Netherlands scattered, diffuse, defensive, and largely unorganized until the growth of the Reformed movement in the 1560s. It was these dissenters, inspired in part by John Calvin’s vision of a Christian church reformed and restored, who proved most successful in sustaining their communities “under the cross” in the face of severe juridical prosecution. Their zealous commitment to doctrine and discipline enabled them to persevere; indeed, to the most militant among them their experiences of repression and eventually exile validated the rightness of their cause. Coinciding with this religious dissent  – which engaged only a tiny minority of the population  – was a much wider political discontent in the Netherlands with Habsburg rule. The efforts of Charles V and more especially his son Philip II to centralize and streamline central governance over seventeen quite diverse provinces ran into stubborn local opposition. Provinces, cities, and estates that had enjoyed various kinds of political, legal, and fiscal autonomy since the later Middle Ages – known collectively as the “privileges” – protested loudly against any action that diminished their right of self-government. The particularist prerogatives of the local nobility and town councils who saw themselves as the natural governors of the region collided with a rationalizing royal policy carried out by Habsburg regentesses in Brussels. In a political culture where authority was local, the aggrandizing strategies of the king – which included not only governmental reorganization but also the suppression of heresy – seemed especially tyrannous and barbarous. The most radical opponents of the king believed that their very liberty was at stake.22 The causes of liberty and religion became wedded in open rebellion against Philip II’s government in the 1560s. The subsequent suppression by Philip II and the duke of Alba scattered the Calvinists into exile and James D. Tracy, “Erasmus, Coornhert and the Acceptance of Religious Disunity in the Body Politic: A Low Countries Tradition?” in Emergence of Toleration, pp. 60–61. 21 Alastair Duke, “The Netherlands,” in The Early Reformation in Europe, ed. Andrew Pettegree (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 142–165. 22 Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 129–154. 20

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forced the political opposition into armed insurgency. William of Orange cobbled together an uneasy alliance of political and religious insurgents. His armed forces booked their first success in 1572 with the capture of the northern maritime provinces of Holland and Zeeland. These two regions formed the core of what eventually – over the next dozen years or so – would become a new state, the Dutch Republic.23 Reformed Protestants had spent their years of exile in Germany and England planning for their return, designing a new, restored Christian church whose congregations would be governed by consistories of preachers and elders and whose doctrines would be determined by provincial and national synods.24 This hierarchical conciliar system would assure the Dutch Reformed church both local autonomy and national uniformity. The Reformed church’s twin stresses on discipline and doctrine – on life and belief – were central to its understanding of its place and function in the temporal world. The church existed not just to proclaim “true” religion but also to create a godly society. The Reformed movement believed the Roman church had forfeited this admonitory and exhortative role in public life with its descent into abuse and corruption – in effect, it was a church that had lost its discipline.25 For the Reformed, part of the restoration of the church was the restoration of its status as an overseer of the common civil life. To that end, it insisted that its political allies hand over Holland’s churches for their exclusive use, a demand to which Orange – who hoped for a religious peace between confessions – reluctantly but ultimately acquiesced to once his forces were in control of southern Holland.26 The disestablishment of the Catholic church in Holland began with a physical assault, a fact that would influence Dutch Catholic identity throughout the Golden Age. When William of Orange’s rebel troops  – the Beggars  – occupied the major towns of Holland in the spring and summer of 1572, violence  – both iconoclastic and anticlerical  – was a common result. From the start they targeted Catholic clergy and property; soldiers plundered churches and monasteries and attacked priests Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 68–142. Andrew Pettegree, Emden and the Dutch Revolt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), pp. 147–187. 25 See, for example, Calvin’s “Reply to Sadoleto” of 1540 in The Protestant Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand (New York: Harper, 1968), pp. 153–178. 26 J. C. Boogman, “De overgang van Gouda, Leiden, Dordrecht en Delft in de zomer van 1572,” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 57 (1942): 81–112; Alastair Duke and Rosemary Jones, “Towards a Reformed Polity in Holland, 1572–78,” in Revolt and Reformation, pp. 199–209. 23 24

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and religious. “These days one hears of nothing but plundering, burning, stealing, ­hanging and murdering,” bemoaned brother Wouter Jacobsz – an Augustinian canon from Gouda  – in his journal in September 1572,  “God has abandoned us.”27 There were numerous instances of churches despoiled, altars desecrated, clerics abused and killed in cruel and gruesome ways. Dutch Catholics would long retain the memory of this violence, and a martyrological tradition developed around those early victims of heresy. Later Catholic chroniclers such as Petrus Opmeer painted a dolorous portrait of those turbulent days: With great exertion and violence [the Calvinists] began to desecrate God’s churches and set them afire, overturning altars, treading on the blessed sacrament, smashing the pictures of saints into pieces, burning the solemn missals of the church, stealing the church’s goods, melting down the consecrated chalices and patens and using them for godless purposes, appropriating priestly vestments for themselves and their soldiers, digging up the bones and ashes of dead Christian souls, razing monasteries or inhabiting them themselves, assaulting and violating the holy daughters of the church.28

The twin onslaughts of revolt and reformation left Catholicism in Holland reeling. Friar Wouter Jacobsz painted a grim picture of the Beggar armies’ assault on the church in 1572 in his diary: “God’s temples were destroyed, the holy images were broken, God’s servants, priests, religious and honest Catholics despised, hunted, despoiled and horribly murdered and finally also the worship of God and the holy sacraments obstructed, slandered and scandalously abused.”29 Brother Wouter had a tendency to record uncritically every rumor of Beggar atrocities he heard, so his diary is often a compilation of hysterical exaggerations, but it does convey vividly the Catholic church’s beleaguered sense of assault in the initial phase of Holland’s overgang to independence and Protestantism in the early 1570s. Christians under the Turks, he exclaimed, were better off than Catholics in Holland.30 Among both clerical and lay Catholics there was a widespread and palpable feeling of physical threat. Stories abounded in Catholic circles of the horrible crimes perpetrated by fanatical Calvinist soldiers. The parents of Catrina Pieters, fearing rapacious soldiery, hid their young daughter in a stall Dagboek van Broeder Wouter Jacobsz (Gaultherus Jacobi Masius) Prior van Stein, ed. I. H. van Eeghen (Groningen: Wolters, 1959), vol. 1, pp. 4, 13. 28 Petrus Opmeer, Martelaars-boek, ofte historie der Hollandse Martelaren, welke om de Christen Catholijke Gods-dienst . . . sijn omgebragt (Antwerp, 1700), vol. 2, p. 9. 29 Dagboek, I. H. van Eeghen, ed., vol. 1, p. 3. 30 Dagboek, I. H. van Eeghen, ed., vol. 1, p. 49. 27

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outside Leiden; the girl promised to dedicate her life to God if He would protect her, and indeed she later became a klopje or spiritual virgin in Haarlem.31 Another Leiden Catholic despairing at the heretical ungodliness infecting his city tried to escape over the city wall, only to drown in the moat; the Beggar soldiers displayed his corpse inside the town for several days, where it was desecrated and mocked.32 In Amsterdam – which was in Spanish hands until 1578 – Wouter Jacobsz encountered dozens of clerics and religious driven from their homes and monasteries and completely undone by anticlerical violence. Both clergy and laity fled to Catholic areas still under Spanish control or in the Holy Roman Empire. Another future klopje, Lucretia Dirkxdr, escaped to Louvain with her family when their native Dordrecht fell into Protestant hands.33 The leader of Gouda’s Franciscans was ignobly forced to escape to Utrecht disguised as a peasant carrying a basket of rape cakes.34 The notorious martyrdom of nineteen Gorcum clerics in late 1572 at the hands of the Beggar commander Lumey only reinforced Catholic panic and despair.35 The anticlerical attitude of the Beggar soldiers was summed up by a graffito seen in Amsterdam just before the city’s surrender to the revolt in 1578: “Eat papists, shit monks and wipe your ass with canons.”36 The war in Holland left its Catholic population completely terrorized.37 The assault on Catholic belief was not only violent but blasphemous; in every town in Holland Catholics saw their sacred spaces expropriated and despoiled. For the Calvinists, the physical spaces of worship had to be “cleansed” of Catholic vestiges before they could be used for the proper worship of God. In Gouda, all consecrated altars were removed from the churches except in the principal Sint Janskerk, where soldiers played dice on the high altar.38 A 1578 report informed Ottavio Mirto Frangipani – the papal nuncio in Cologne – that Calvinist heretics had taken over and desecrated the Chapel of the Holy City in Amsterdam, Catharina Jans Oly, “Leven van ‘Maechden van den Hoeck,’” Bibliotheek, Museum Catharijnaconvent, no. 92 B 13, vol. 1, fol. 40v. 32 Dagboek, I. H. van Eeghen, ed., vol. 1, p. 193. 33 Oly, “Leven van,” vol. 1, fols. 231v–233r. 34 Dagboek, I. H. van Eeghen, ed., vol. 1, p. 161. 35 J. L. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme in Noord-Nederland in de 16e en de 17e eeuw (Amsterdam: Urbi et Orbi, 1947), vol. 1, pp. 494–495. 36 Dagboek, I. H. van Eeghen, ed., vol. 2, p. 709. 37 A point vividly underscored by Henk van Nierop, Treason in the Northern Quarter: War, Terror, and the Rule of Law in the Dutch Revolt, trans. J. C. Grayson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 38 Dagboek, I. H. van Eeghen, ed., vol. 1, p. 311. 31

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a  miraculous shrine; the nuncio’s correspondent noted with a certain grim satisfaction, however, that God had avenged this sacrilege by visiting death upon a number of Calvinist ministers who attempted to preach there.39 An outraged Wouter Jacobsz reported that a company of Lumey’s soldiers took over Leiden’s Pieterskerk and behaved in it “as if it were a distillery.”40 To devout Catholics, such blasphemies were not merely attacks on the church but shocking assaults on the body of Christ itself. The violence of the 1570s left Catholics in Holland disheartened, disoriented, and bewildered, with their clergy scattered and their church completely ripped from its moorings. With such an inauspicious start, any future possibility for confessional survival – let alone coexistence – seemed highly unlikely. Militant Calvinists who had spent years in exile followed closely on the heels of the Beggars’ takeover in Holland. Many loyalists within civic patriciates had fled, and the advent of new anti-Spanish regimes in the town magistracies permitted returning Reformed Protestants to set up their own congregations and consistories. The insurgent States of Holland  – meeting in Dordrecht in July 1572 – decreed at the insistence of William of Orange that both Protestants and Catholics would enjoy free exercise of religion in the province.41 Orange intended this policy of religious peace to hold together the tenuous coalition of rebels; the small but zealous Calvinist party within the rebellion was increasingly alienating the political wing of the opposition, much of which had always remained Catholic. The Calvinists’ rejection of religious accommodation and their insistence on confessional dominance in the towns where they had established congregations would eventually help to fray the rebel alliance.42 Throughout the course of the 1570s, it became clear that Orange’s hoped-for religious peace between Protestants and Catholics in Holland’s cities was untenable. This was due in part to the military situation; the possibility of Spanish reconquest of Holland in this period was quite real, further radicalizing both rebel troops and Calvinist congregations. These Romeinsche bronnen voor de kerkelijk-staatkundigen toestand der Nederlanden in de 16de eeuw, eds. G. Brom and A. H. L. Hensen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1922), pp. 254–255; Wouter Jacobsz relates a similar tale in Dagboek, vol. 2, p. 733. 40 Dagboek, I. H. van Eeghen, ed., vol. 1, p. 101. 41 R. C. Bakhuizen van den Brink, “Eerste vergadering der Staten van Holland (19 juli 1572),” in Van Hollandsche potaard. Studien en fragmenten (Brussels: De Lage Landen, 1943), pp. 201–228. 42 Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 178–205; Parker, Dutch Revolt, pp. 142–168; J. J. Woltjer, “De vredemakers,” in Tussen vrijheidsstrijd en burgeroorlog (Amsterdam: Balans, 1994), pp. 64–88. 39

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groups associated Catholicism with Spanish sympathy and thus with treason. Assaults on Catholic clergy and sackings of churches continued unabated; large numbers of priests and religious fled to Spanish-held areas. Some magistracies tried to quell conflict by closing all the churches in their cities, but the usual outcome of this was that the Reformed eventually reestablished their regular worship while the Catholics did not.43 The radical Calvinist minority had effectively forced reformation in the cities of Holland within a year of their takeover through revolt. In February 1573, the States of Holland formally outlawed the celebration of Roman Catholic sacraments throughout the province, a ban that remained in place until French emancipation in 1795.

The Public Church in the Dutch Republic The outlawing of Catholic worship left the Reformed Protestants with a monopoly on collective religious life in the province of Holland and eventually the rest of the Dutch Republic. The open practice of any faith other than Reformed Christianity was formally prohibited. Ecclesiastical property and wealth was secularized by the authorities for exclusive Reformed use. The Dutch Reformed church became the new state’s public church; this was not the same thing as a state church. Although enforced confessional uniformity was a political commonplace in early modern Europe, the government of the Republic proposed no such arrangement. Unlike England under the Elizabethan settlement, no citizen of the Republic was obliged to join its public church. Reformed church membership was not necessarily even a requirement for public office; indeed, in the 1570s and 1580s Reformed consistories often complained how few magistrates joined the “true” church. The Dutch Reformed church was privileged, to be sure, and enjoyed the sanction of local, provincial, and national government, but it never became completely identifiable with the state, let alone the nation.44 Nevertheless, as the new public church it assumed many of the collective and communal functions of the Catholic church that it had supplanted. Unlike its predecessor, however, it was forced to coexist with religious groups whose beliefs it often violently objected to. See, for example, Leiden; Christine Kooi, Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leiden’s Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 32. 44 James D. Tracy, “Public Church, Gemeente Christi, or Volkskerk: Holland’s Reformed Church in Civil and Ecclesiastical Perspective,” in Die Reformation in Deutschland und Europa: Interpretationen und Debatten, eds. Hans R. Guggisberg and Gottfried G. Krodel (Gütersloh: Verlagshaus, 1993), pp. 487–510. 43

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The result was a period of considerable ecclesiastical muddiness between the years 1572 and 1620, when the religious identity of both the public church and Holland as a whole remained confused. This was largely due to the peculiar nature of the Republic’s religious settlement (such as it was), which evolved out of the exigencies of war. In 1579, the Union of Utrecht committed the rebelling provinces to common cause against the Habsburg regime; over time, it became the foundational ­document of the new independent state – the closest thing to a constitution the Dutch Republic could ever claim – even though that was never its intended purpose.45 The Union stipulated two conditions regarding ­religion: (1) that freedom of conscience for all inhabitants was guaranteed; and (2) that the regulation of religion was entirely in local (i.e., provincial) hands.46 The first clause was a result of both the reaction against the Habsburg inquisitorial regime and of the religious tensions among the insurgents themselves  – a variant of William of Orange’s efforts to secure a religious peace between Catholics and Protestants in the rebelling areas. The second was in part a continuation of a pre-Revolt political tradition of provincial sovereignty and decentralized government (in both state and church), and in part a concession to keep the shaky rebel coalition intact. As it turned out, the decidedly ad hoc nature of the Union of Utrecht suited the oligarchs who controlled the Republic both temperamentally and politically; regents could feel satisfied that they had fulfilled the Reformation’s promise of spiritual liberty while at the same time maintaining a sharp eye on local religious activity. It also meant, however, that the public church’s place within Holland’s society and polity remained unsettled until the National Synod of Dordrecht in 1618–1619. The precise nature of the relationship between church and state  – the Reformed church and the Dutch Republic  – remained ambiguous throughout the early modern period, especially in the province of Holland. The provincial government did not take on a strongly religious identity. As Alastair Duke wrote, “insofar as these [provincial States and magistracies] had a coherent religious policy, it stemmed from their fear J. C. Boogman, “The Union of Utrecht: Its Genesis and Consequences,” BMGN 94 (1979): 377–407; A. Th. van Deursen, “Between Unity and Independence: The application of the Union as a fundamental law,” Low Countries Historical Yearbook 14 (1981): 50–64. 46 “Treaty of the Union,” Texts Concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands, eds. E. H. Kossmann and A. F. Mellink (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), esp. pp. 169–170. 45

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of Spain . . . their wish to maintain harmony in the local community, and their understanding of the demands of commerce.”47 The civic regents who ruled Holland (and who in turn dominated the leadership of the Republic) were committed to the new state’s Protestant identity, but would probably have preferred a national or state church on the Anglican model – one that embraced the entire population and thus would function as a source of social unity and harmony.48 On the other hand, local elites’ experience of the Habsburgs’ anti-heresy policies left them with a permanent distaste for religious coercion. The political culture of the new state definitely preferred not to exercise constraint in the name of faith, though this would happen on occasion. The conscience proviso of the Union of Utrecht, which declared flatly that “each individual enjoys freedom of religion and no one is persecuted or questioned about his religion,” had originally been devised to attract Catholics to the cause of rebellion, but it also came to reflect the broader attitude of Holland’s political elites.49 The regents of the city of Leiden reiterated more than once that they had fought the war against Spain for the sake of liberty (haec libertatis ergo) as well as religion.50 In practical terms, this translated into a general assumption of freedom of conscience; though there was a single public church, people were free to believe what they liked in the privacy of their hearts and homes as long as it did not trouble the social order. Thus, one could profess Catholicism but not practice it. The policy of freedom of conscience was of course a necessary corollary to the lack of religious coercion; if there was no enforcement of uniformity then pluralism had to be permitted, albeit closely managed.51 For its part, the Dutch Reformed church evinced an ambivalent attitude toward political authority. This was a religious movement that had begun and indeed flourished in the face of state persecution. The constant threat of repression at the hands of political authority in the period before 1572 had forced Reformed Protestants to cultivate a habit of clandestinity and self-reliance. These habits proved hard to break even after the Reformed church’s official legitimation in Holland in 1572. Most of Holland’s Calvinists insisted on the church’s essential autonomy from worldly authority; according to the most zealous church leaders, Duke, “Ambivalent Face,” Reformation and Revolt, p. 272. J. J. Woltjer, “De politieke betekenis van de Synode van Emden,” in Tussen vrijheidsstreit en burgeroorlog, p. 109. 49 “Treaty of the Union,” Kossmann and Mellink, eds., p. 170. 50 Kooi, Liberty and Religion, p. 29. 51 Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic, pp. 81–89. 47 48

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congregations should determine their own membership and leadership and exercise moral discipline without political interference. The government – in the case of Holland this meant primarily civic magistrates and town councils – according to this view was at most a partner with the Reformed church in the creation of a godly society; it helped to promote true religion by supporting the true church but had absolutely no right to meddle in ecclesiastical affairs. The public church, according to the Calvinist definition, expected governmental sanction but rejected governmental intrusion. This did not mean that magistrates and preachers did not get along – in Delft and Dordrecht, for example, relations were quite amicable – but a certain wariness on both sides remained. Another legacy of the era of persecution was the Calvinists’ insistence that the Reformed church was an exclusive, voluntary community. The household of faith admitted only the sanctified, those who professed their faith and submitted to ecclesiastical discipline. That the public church’s membership comprised only a minority of the population did not bother the most orthodox; they had never equated success with numbers. For them, quality was much more important than quantity; if anything, the smallness of their numbers only reinforced their sense of being salvifically distinct from the rest of the world. Despite the Holland regents’ desire for an open, national church the Calvinists balked at removing these standards of membership, which they regarded as essential to maintaining the church’s purity and honor as the body of Christ. The communion of saints was not to be sullied or dishonored by permitting unexamined, unrepentant souls to stream unchecked into its congregations. The church conceded on the issues of baptism and marriage, opening these rituals to nonmembers as a public good, but entrance to the household of faith remained unequivocally restricted. No matter how much the Reformed church wanted the goodwill and cooperation of Holland’s regents, it refused to compromise on what it saw as a principle central to its very identity. However, because it was the public church its preaching was open to all who would listen. There was a category of churchgoers known as liefhebbers or “sympathizers”  – people who attended the sermons and worship but stopped short of membership, who for whatever reason were unwilling to profess their faith publicly and submit to church discipline.52 How many of such folk there were is unknown; perhaps as large as or larger than the number of members. Often they were quite committed to the Reformed church, but on their own terms rather than those of Van Deursen, Bavianen, pp. 128–131.

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consistories. Or they may have been samplers or “shoppers” of churches, who attended services in any number of churches available in Holland’s multiconfessional landscape, not just the Reformed. The presence of liefhebbers may have made it easier for church members themselves to sample other churches on occasion. The differing visions of the public church – magisterial and Calvinist – translated into several decades’ worth of controversy in Holland in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Confessional confusion was the order of the day as the public church struggled to establish its identity in the new state in the half century after 1572. In such cities as Leiden and Gouda in the 1570s and 1580s, conflicts erupted between consistories and magistrates about the degree of autonomy the public church should enjoy, particularly in the areas of governance and discipline. The most ardent Calvinists insisted that the regents support the public church fully and otherwise leave it alone. A minority faction within the Reformed leadership in Holland advocated a more accommodating approach, supporting a closer relationship with the state and a more open church membership; it joined with some regents in denouncing what it called “Genevan discipline.” To some of the more latitudinarian politicians who ran Holland’s cities and its provincial States, this discipline was all too redolent of the Catholic inquisition – a term that in the province’s political culture was code for religious and political tyranny. In Leiden, the magistracy clashed with the Calvinists about the appointment of elders to church leadership and its support of the moderate preacher Caspar Coolhaes.53 Likewise, the town council of Gouda ran into Calvinist protest and opposition when it supported Hermanus Herbertsz, a minister of similarly moderate views on discipline and doctrine.54 The prevailing view among the regents of Holland in the late 1500s was that the precisian Calvinists were potentially dangerous fanatics who stirred up trouble and undermined their authority; this view was confirmed for them in 1587 by the uncovering of the conspiracy of the Earl of Leicester, whose Calvinist supporters plotted to overthrow several town councils in Holland and Utrecht. As far as the rulers of Holland were concerned, the public church – precisely because of its privileged status – required state supervision. The controversies surrounding the identity and status of the public church continued for the next two generations after 1572; it was the Kooi, Liberty and Religion, pp. 55–89. C. C. Hibben, Gouda in Revolt: Particularism and Pacifism in the Revolt of the Netherlands 1572–1588 (Utrecht: HES, 1983), pp. 123–129.

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national Synod of Dordrecht in 1618–1619 that finally affirmed the precisian Calvinist character (in terms of doctrine and structure) of the Dutch Reformed church. The dissenting Arminians  – who made up perhaps 10 percent of church membership  – had among other things championed a public church subordinated to state authority; the Synod ejected them from the Reformed church. The expulsion of the ecclesiastical Arminians coincided with the downfall of their political allies in Holland at the hands of the Orangist faction led by the Stadholder Maurice of Nassau, son of William of Orange. The States party, led by the land’s advocate and regent Johan van Oldenbarnevelt – one of the architects of the Republic  – and his allies in the Holland towns had favored the Arminians over the Calvinists, truce with Spain over war, and provincial autonomy over centralized government. Their Orangist opponents wanted continued prosecution of the war against Spain, Calvinist dominance in the public church, and a stronger role for the Stadholder in the national government at Holland’s expense. With the Synod of Dordrecht, the Dutch Reformed church retained its Calvinist orthodoxy and became associated with the Orangist party throughout the subsequent political history of the Dutch Republic.55 The Reformed church remained an exclusive confession, yet reconfirmed its role as the land’s only public church – a demographic minority with a monopoly on the public worship of God.56 The initial period of confessional confusion that began with Holland’s defection to the revolt in 1572 came to an end by 1620. An exclusivist Calvinist public church and a host of tolerated private religions would characterize Dutch religious culture for the rest of the early modern era. The Dutch Republic would be at once Protestant and pluralist, and Holland would be one of its confessionally most variegated provinces. A permanent part of that variegation was the province’s Catholic population, which was able to survive the onslaughts of the late 1500s and even profit from the confusions of the early 1600s. The ecclesiastical and political regime that emerged out of the Republic’s initial controversies by 1620 both protected Catholic belief and constrained Catholic practice; it offered both toleration and persecution. Perhaps it was not so surprising that an accidental state would ultimately produce such an ambiguous religious settlement. Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 450–465; Van Deursen, Bavianen, pp. 227–274. J. J. Woltjer, “De plaats van de calvinisten in de Nederlandse samenleving,” ZE 10 (1994): 17.

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The Golden Age Nevertheless, the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic – despite its ­initial ecclesiastical troubles – retained its Calvinist façade. The publicly sanctioned, official confessional identity of the Republic was Reformed Protestant. The coup of Maurice of Nassau and the expulsion of the Arminians from the Reformed church at the Dordrecht Synod settled the issue of church-state relations in the Republic  – the bitter and divisive controversies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries never reappeared after 1620. Local magistracies would continue to superintend the Reformed church as a public body. The public church was institutionally autonomous – it would never become an arm of the state, as happened in Lutheran Germany – but was at the same time fully ­dependent on the government for its material well-being and political stature. Relations between local and provincial governments and Reformed consistories and synods would generally remain cooperative – for example, in such matters of common concern as the relief of the poor.57 In Holland, over time the Reformed church would take on the role of a lobby, variously pressing town governments and the States of Holland to legislate and enforce its vision of a godly commonwealth.58 Part of the Reformed church’s exhortatory agenda included the disposition of Holland’s other religious confessions. Reformed synods, classes, and consistories repeatedly complained about the activities of Mennonites, Lutherans, Arminians, and Catholics, reserving special venom for the latter two groups. Lutherans – aside from some sporadic attempts at suppression in a few Holland towns in the period 1585– 1605  – were generally too small in number to receive much sustained attention.59 Initially, the Reformed church perceived the Mennonites as confessional rivals, but as the latter splintered off into various sects and congregations the public church limited its concern with them primarily to cases of mixed marriages, particularly where the baptism of children was involved.60 The expelled Arminians eventually regrouped into small, independent Remonstrant congregations, and in the immediate Charles H. Parker, The Reformation of Community: Social Welfare and Calvinist Charity in Holland, 1572–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 155–188. 58 P. H. A. M. Abels and A. Ph.F. Wouters, Nieuw en ongezien: Kerk en samenleving in de classis Delft en Delfland (Delft: Eburon, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 119–123. 59 Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 374–376. 60 S. Zijlstra, Over de ware gemeente en de oude gronden. Geschiedenis van de dopersen in Nederland 1531–1675 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000), pp. 344–350. 57

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wake of the Dordrecht Synod Reformed denunciations of them would be ­particularly strident. However, by the 1630s these attacks too would taper off as the Remonstrants’ perceived threat diminished. By the second half of the seventeenth century, Reformed vitriol toward Lutherans, Mennonites, and Remonstrants had largely disappeared. Not so with the Catholics. Reformed hostility to Catholicism – grounded in a theology that the Roman church was irretrievably corrupt – persisted throughout the century. Again and again, consistories and synods echoing the Dordrecht brethren cited in the opening of this chapter hectored the municipal and provincial governments of Holland to enforce the placards against Catholic activities. They objected strongly to the fact that the Counter-Reformation Holland Mission was allowed to operate within the province’s borders to tend the faithful and win converts. The synod of South-Holland persisted in its complaints about “popish impudence” well into the 1680s and 1690s, long after it had stopped paying attention to any of the other tolerated confessions.61 For the most sectarian Calvinists, Catholics represented the old order  – the spiritual and political regime that they had rejected. At least at a rhetorical level, Catholicism was the one confession among the many thriving in the Republic the Reformed church refused to allow any equanimity. Anti-Catholicism appeared to be bred into the Dutch Reformed church’s very bones and to be an integral part of its identity. The years between 1620 and 1660 saw a heightened confessionalism, as both Calvinists and Catholics established their identities and the boundaries between them grew more sharply delineated. The response of Holland’s political leaders to Calvinist demands for the suppression of Catholic worship – for an end to toleration – varied according to time, place, and circumstance. A great deal depended on the politics of the moment, as the new state grew in economic prosperity and took its place among the great powers of Europe. As a result, foreign affairs could affect the security of the Catholic community. The war with Habsburg Spain – temporarily halted by the Twelve Years Truce of 1609–1621 – continued until 1648, and as long as it was prosecuted the charge – however specious – that Catholics were a potential fifth column inside the country could be leveled at them. Indeed, as we shall see, some of the heaviest persecutions of Catholics in Holland took place during the final decades of the war after the expiration of the truce. Acta der particuliere synoden van Zuid-Holland 1621–1700, ed. W. P. C. Knuttel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1915, 1917), vol. 5, pp. 569–570 [1686], vol. 6, pp. 477–479 [1698].

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In addition to the Republic’s increasingly complicated international relations, another factor affecting the disposition of its Catholic population was the new state’s own internal political dynamics. The Republic was more a fidgety alliance of seven sovereignties than a unified nation. In contrast to other European states where increasing centralization was the normative political paradigm, the lines of authority in the Republic ran from the bottom up, from town governments to provincial states to the States-General.62 It had been that way in the region since the Middle Ages. The great theme of the political history of the Dutch Republic through the Golden Age was a continuation of the issue that had sparked the revolt against Habsburg Spain, even after peace came in 1648: The inherent and ongoing friction between local and central political power. In the course of the seventeenth century, this contest would take on a number of political incarnations, but the powerful urban regents of Holland could almost always be counted on to stand firmly on the side of keeping power – including the power to regulate religious affairs – close to home. The Holland regents who controlled the Republic were products of a late-medieval urban political culture that valued negotiation, deliberation, and consultation. The revolt against Spain had reinforced their fierce commitment to local privilege and self-government and deep suspicion of any infringement on those rights. Their particularism was the most potent force in the province’s political culture, and the economic and political dominance of Holland in the national government over the other six provinces ensured the polity would remain confederate, decentralized, and – in the minds of foreign observers – mystifyingly inefficient. The zenith of this particularist ideology’s influence was reached during the “stadholderless era” of 1650–1672 when the regime of “true freedom”  – presided over by Holland’s grand pensionary Johan de Witt  – governed the Republic very much in the interests of its most powerful province.63 Starting around 1660, we can see a general slackening of confessional tensions between Catholics and Calvinists as a more benign coexistence prevailed. The ideologues of “true freedom” called for greater toleration of all religious groups, much to the dismay of the public church: “It is evident,” wrote one of De Witt’s most articulate supporters, “that all people, especially Christians . . . ought to be far from compelling, Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic, pp. 2–3. Herbert H. Rowen, Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland, 1625–1672 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 4–7; Israel, Dutch Republic, pp. 700–795.

62 63

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either by spiritual or bodily punishment, those that for want of light and ­persuasion are not inclined to go to the public church, to do any outward act, or to speak any words contrary to their judgment . . . .”64 Such liberal sentiments reflecting Holland’s mercantile elites’ interest in commercial openness explain why Holland was more tolerant than the other six provinces in regards to Catholics. In the provinces of Utrecht, Overijssel, and Gelderland, legal measures were taken by some towns in the seventeenth century to bar Catholics from citizenship.65 These eastern regions had not experienced the same degree of Golden Age prosperity as the West, and Holland remained distinctive among the Republic’s provinces for its latitude toward non-Calvinist confessions, especially Catholics. Locality was always a central factor in the Republic’s political and economic dynamics and key to its religious culture, as well. This study closes with the year 1672, an arbitrary but nonetheless symbolic ending date. For in that year the Hollandocentric regime of “true freedom” was brought down with the Catholic king Louis XIV’s invasion. This was a notable moment in the religious history of the Dutch Republic. As the armies of the Sun King and his ally the princebishop of Münster overran the eastern provinces that summer – pressing on Holland from as nearby as Utrecht  – attempts at recatholicization followed in their wake. In some occupied areas, invading armies returned Catholic churches appropriated by the Reformed regime in the previous century and allowed Catholics to exercise their faith freely and openly. French troops came up to the eastern edges of Holland’s border, and there was widespread panic as rumors of Catholic triumph flew.66 Meanwhile, the leadership of the Holland Mission – especially the Apostolic vicar Johannes van Neercassel – hoped that the occupation by the most Christian king of France signaled the beginning of the long-awaited reconversion of the Netherlands to the true church. The great symbolic moment came on July 9, 1672, when the French prelate Cardinal de Bouillon reconsecrated the cathedral in Utrecht  – the ancient episcopal see of the pre-Revolt northern Netherlands – for Catholic worship. In a bit of reverse iconoclasm, the pulpit and benches Pieter de la Court, “The Interest of Holland,” in The Low Countries in Early Modern Times, ed. Herbert H. Rowen (New York: Walker, 1972), p. 208. 65 Prak, “The politics of intolerance,” pp. 159–175. 66 See, for example, the diary of the Amsterdam militiaman Lucas Wetering, in “Een dagboek uit het ‘Rampjaar’ 1672,” ed. J. F. Gebhard Jr., Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 8 (1885): 45–116. 64

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were removed, and the mass was celebrated there the following day.67 For the first time in roughly a century, a Catholic ­sacrament was publicly performed in the principal church of a major city of the Dutch Republic. Despite the panicked horror of the Reformed ecclesiastical leadership at this development and the fervent dreams of Neercassel and his confreres in the Holland Mission, the Catholic moment under French auspices was, in the end, only a moment. By the following year, the stadholder William III had successfully mobilized an anti-French coalition that drove the Sun King’s armies from the Republic. The threat of Catholic resurgence and Counter-Reformation receded with them. The year 1672 had indeed been a disastrous year, but the Dutch Republic and its religious settlement remained intact. In the final refulgent decades of the Golden Age, the public church stayed Reformed, and Catholics continued in their status as a second-class, more or less tolerated confessional community. Peaceful coexistence prevailed.

The Social World of Holland’s Golden Age The political and social upheavals caused by war and peace, the ongoing contest between partisans of local and central authority, explosive economic growth and its attendant dislocations, and the tensions between the western maritime provinces and the eastern landward provinces revealed that the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century was very much a work in progress. The polity of the Republic  – especially its principal province Holland  – was a product of the ongoing negotiation and interplay of various factions, interests, and constituencies among regent elites.68 This protean quality puzzled outside observers, for whom the United Provinces seemed neither fish nor fowl – sometimes like a quasimonarchy with its stadholderate; sometimes more like a merchant oligarchy with republican proclivities. The same held true for its religious culture: It seemed on one level to be a Calvinist state and society, yet its crowded cities  – particularly in Holland – hosted a panoply of different religious groupings, allegiances, and sects. Confessional coexistence in Holland was, like the province’s J. den Tex, Onder vreemde heren. De Republiek der Nederlanden 1672–1674 (Zutphen: Terra, 1982), pp. 37–39; Angela Vanhaelen, “Utrecht’s Transformations: Claiming the Dom through Representation, Iconoclasm and Ritual,” ZE 21 (2005): 354–374. 68 Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic, pp. 57–69. 67

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political configuration, a result of continuous negotiation, deliberation, and circumstance across different cultural and social spaces. This was especially true for Holland’s Catholics because their status depended on a wide variety of factors: the course of the war against Spain, the attitudes of local authorities, the political back and forth between states and stadholder, the relationship of the public church with the government. It was neither constant nor consistent, but hazy, muddled, and subject to disruption, renegotiation, and readjustment. There was no predictable pattern to the political, social, or religious climate in which Holland’s Catholics found themselves worshiping. In different spaces of interaction, they could live with their Protestant neighbors in unremarkable daily life or be subject to occasional harsh rhetorical attack or judicial persecution, or conditions could fall somewhere in between. Toleration such as Catholics in Holland experienced was not a condition but a process; to live in a society both Protestant and pluralistic was the ongoing paradox to which they continually had to adapt. The world in which most of Holland’s Catholics lived between 1572 and 1672 was on the whole urban, crowded, literate, mercantile, sociable, mobile, and prosperous. Thanks to exponential economic expansion in both trade and manufactures, Holland’s cities grew enormously in this period, swelled by prosperity and immigration.69 The province’s affluence, economic innovation, and liberty attracted merchants, entrepreneurs, immigrants, opportunists, laborers, and refugees of all types from across Europe.70 Amsterdam was a world emporium and metropolis, but the province’s other major towns – Leiden, Haarlem, Delft, Dordrecht, and Gouda  – also enjoyed a proportionate economic success. In these rapidly growing urban environments, the full range of early modern social ranks could be found – from well-heeled patricians occupying elegant canal houses to hardscrabble itinerant laborers and beggars living in wretched squalor. Between these two poles lay a vast middling sort – artisans, painters, tradesmen, merchants, notaries, shopkeepers, skippers, teachers, preachers, professionals – who made up the demographic heart Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 668–673; for Holland specifically, see Milja van Tielhof, “Een open economie, in voor- en tegenspoed. De economische ontwikkeling van Holland,” in De Geschiedenis van Holland, eds. Thimo de Nijs and Eelco Beukers (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), vol. 2, pp. 135–171. 70 Jan Lucassen, “Holland, een open gewest. Immigratie en bevolkingsontwikkeling,” in Geschiedenis van Holland, vol. 2, pp. 192–206. 69

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of the cities.71 It was these burghers who gave Holland’s towns much of their social and cultural flavor. Burghers were, as one historian has written, “the very embodiment of civic society.”72 They possessed enough education, literacy, and disposable income to form a substantial portion of the market for the flood of cultural commodities such as books, cheap prints, paintings, pamphlets, and broadsides that inundated the Dutch economy.73 Virtually all confessions could be found among this burgerij, not least Catholics. These middling groups were eager participants of what has been called the Dutch Republic’s “discussion culture” – its inclination to debate and deliberate in person or in print the great political and religious issues of the day. Conversation and meetings were integral parts of the Republic’s political and social structures, and public debate was a lively feature of the new state’s discursive culture. Relatively lax censorship laws permitted an efflorescence of cheap pamphlets and prints to flood the marketplaces of Dutch cities. Many of these pamphlets discussed public issues in dialogue form – a conversation among passengers whiling away the hours on a slow-moving tow barge. Virtually everything, it seemed, was open to discussion. Religious questions also came under conversational review, as pamphleteers did not shy away from issues of confessional difference or antagonism.74 Much of the printed invective that Calvinists and Catholics launched at each other in the seventeenth century may be seen as one particular facet of this broader discussion culture – one of the spaces in which they interacted. The comparative openness of the Republic’s discursive culture within its public sphere would go a long way toward smoothing the potential frictions of a society so strikingly divided by religious allegiance. Discussion and deliberation were necessary, for this was a social world that thought corporatively. One belonged to a family, neighborhood, club, guild, profession, church, city – to some larger group that afforded one a sense of identity, belonging, and security. To work and live within a community, conversation and negotiation were absolutely necessary. This associative urge meant that Holland’s towns often seemed to be collections of guilds of artisans and merchants, civic guards, neighborhood De Vries and Van de Woude, The First Modern Economy, pp. 562–564. Maarten Prak, The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 159. 73 J. L. Price, Dutch Society 1588–1713 (London: Longman, 2000), pp. 183–185. 74 Willem Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, 1650. Hard-won Unity. Dutch Culture in a European Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 220–225. 71 72

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block associations, chambers of rhetoric, scientific and musical societies, and, of course, religious groups.75 Such groups could exercise a fair degree of social control over their members. It was this confusion of interests and communities  – sometimes competing, sometime complementary  – that civic magistracies and town councils had to balance and manage in their paramount obligation to maintain municipal harmony and order. Thus, Holland’s urban society  – much like its polity  – was a product of negotiation and conversation. Sociability became one of the principal means political elites employed to preserve the political and social order, and it predominated in civic space. One of the communities some Hollanders chose to identify themselves with was, of course, confessional. Catholics were a distinct and recognized subculture within urban populations, as were Mennonites, Lutherans, and even Arminians. Catholic Hollanders came from all social ranks. In some cities – such as Delft and Haarlem – they gathered in particular neighborhoods, and they took full advantage of Holland’s social and cultural openness to form their own informal associations, networks, and institutions of mutual help and support. Without the resources of an open hierarchy to back them, these Catholic communities were forced to become self-reliant, organizing educational and charitable arrangements for their ­children and their poor. Another one of the principal tasks of the lay Catholic community was to support the clergy of the Holland Mission in its semi­clandestine efforts to provide regular sacramental and pastoral care. The Mission relied heavily on the wealthiest Catholic families in Holland for much of its operation, including kloppen or klopjes – Catholic lay women who took no vows but lived together as if in an order. Since Catholicism had become a private religion, this meant housing and transporting priests, providing and maintaining spaces in homes and warehouses for gatherings and worship, and paying off law officers with recognition money to leave congregations in peace. Allegiance to their confessional identity sometimes demanded substantial initiative, commitment, and resources from Catholic layfolk.76 All of this occurred privately and at local initiative. Through the efforts and energies of its laity, Catholicism became, in effect, just another one of the many private associations that characterized seventeenth-century Holland’s social and cultural life. See, for example, Gabrielle Dorren, Eenheid en verscheidenheid. De burgers van Haarlem in de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam: Prometheus, Bert Bakker, 2001), pp. 67–92. 76 Charles H. Parker, Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 149–189. 75

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At the same time, Holland’s Catholics were members of a larger political and social environment, where they coexisted with Reformed Protestants at any number of different and overlapping spaces. In the confessional and civic spaces created out of the province’s ambiguous ecclesiastical settlement, their religious activities were proscribed, and they endured the formal belligerence of the public church and the occasional hostility (and more frequent connivance) of local magistracies. Yet in these same spaces Catholics and Calvinists competed for souls as rivals. In a more private space, at a more quotidian level – away from official confessional and public worlds – Catholics and Reformed Protestants could be antagonists and competitors, but also colleagues, neighbors, friends, and even family. The possibility of self-segregation in the congested urban world of seventeenth-century Holland was unlikely; no confessional blocs developed in this period that could insulate one religious community from another, as happened in the nineteenth century. Between 1572 and 1672, the province’s two largest confessions would brave the vicissitudes of war and peace, persecution and toleration, prosperity and poverty in close proximity to one another. In this post-Reformation world, pluralism was the order of the day and – absent any regimes of conformity – Calvinists and Catholics, heretics and idolaters (as they sometimes called each other) had to negotiate a modus vivendi of confessional coexistence. They had to find the spaces within which they could comfortably interact with each other. Much to their chagrin, the Dordrecht brethren who complained so vehemently about the Catholic presence in their midst found little satisfaction with the magistracy; Catholic “impudence” continued on as it had before.

2 Priests and Preachers

What is this but the building of the altars of Baal next to the temple of the true God of Israel? Synod of South-Holland, 1636

In 1604, a complaint reached the ears of the regional Reformed classis of Dordrecht from the preacher of the twin villages of Hooge and Lage Zwaluwe about a former monk living in the vicinity named Goswinus Johannis. It seemed that Goswinus, who was married to a former beguine with whom he had two children, was taking it upon himself to cross the frontier into North Brabant in the mornings to celebrate mass with local Catholics. Then in the afternoons he crossed the border back into Holland and proceeded to preach and baptize in the Reformed manner in Zwaluwe.1 The classis investigated the matter and learned that Goswinus had indeed been legitimately ordained a priest in the former diocese of ‘s-Hertogenbosch and had served in various parishes in Flanders and Holland before the defection of Holland to the revolt. He told the investigators that he preached against clerical celibacy, the doctrine of purgatory, and papal authority, but for the doctrine of good works and the legitimacy of the seven sacraments. The brethren of the classis immediately forbade him from further preaching, since he was clearly not authorized to do so by the Reformed church or the Catholic hierarchy. With some understatement, Goswinus allowed that he himself was “not certain Classicale Acta 1573–1620. Particuliere synode Zuid-Holland. II. Classis Dordrecht 1601–1620, ed. J. Roelevink (The Hague: Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 1991), p. 158.

1

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in his feelings,” and agreed to give up his self-appointed dual function as priest and preacher.2 The peculiar case of Goswinus Johannis, a cleric who tried to bridge Holland’s sectarian divide by acting as both priest and preacher, was exceptional, but it was indicative of the confessional confusion that prevailed in the first decades following the province’s realignment to the cause of revolt and reformation in 1572. Such was the general ecclesiastical murkiness of Holland in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that no one confessional group appeared to predominate. To be sure, the Reformed church enjoyed a privileged public monopoly, but its membership was limited to a minority of the population – as little as 10 percent in the late 1580s, according to one contemporary estimate.3 Its relationship to public authority was by no means clear; it quarreled with civic magistrates about church autonomy and lobbied the States of Holland for the general reformation of society. Nor was there complete internal consensus about its teachings and doctrines, as the Arminian controversy would eventually reveal. If the Catholic church in Holland suffered from the chaos of disestablishment in the period between 1572 and 1620, then its Reformed counterpart grappled with the disorders inherent in building a church from scratch.4 Confessional confusion reigned in this period. With no state authority forcing religious conformity of one type or another, the confessional situation became remarkably fluid. There was no mass movement to one particular church; the majority of Hollanders in this period seem not to have attached themselves to any confession at all. Boundaries between churches were especially porous in these early years after the province’s defection to the cause of rebellion. In 1582, for example, a few scant years after Amsterdam succumbed to the revolt, the Reformed consistory of that city learned to its consternation that a former Catholic priest had been attending the Lord’s Supper in their church without having done any profession of faith beforehand. When confronted, the ex-priest confessed ignorance of the requirements of membership and agreed to submit to proper procedures for joining the church.5 Classicale Acta 1573–1620. Classis Dordrecht 1601–1620, pp. 251–253. Cited by Alastair Duke, “Ambivalent Face,” in Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (London: Hambledon, 1990), p. 269. 4 Alastair Duke, “The Reformation of the Backwoods: the Struggle for a Calvinist and Presbyterian Church Order in the Countryside of South-Holland and Utrecht before 1620,” in Reformation and Revolt, pp. 227–268. 5 SAA NHG, KA, 22 Nov. 1582. 2 3

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In such an uncertain set of circumstances – where so many religious choices abounded – it became incumbent on Holland’s churches to establish precisely who they were. This was especially true for the public church because it was, despite the demurrals of its most prominent divines, a “new and unseen thing.”6 It also turned out to be equally true for the disestablished Catholic church, toppled from its centuries-old ­status as the church universal and forced to carry on in a shadowy, quasi-legal subculture. Both churches had to form clear confessional identities. In doing so, they also established the most immediate and obvious arena in which they confronted each other – confessional space. In this space, beliefs were articulated, identities sorted out, images and self-images were sharpened and clarified – and all this was done largely through a process of sectarian polemic and antagonism. Confessional space was the arena where Catholic and Calvinist interacted with each other as churches, and the relationship was mutually hostile. This process of confessional formation was happening all across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A generation after the feverish initial rebellions of the Protestant reformers, the various dissenting churches – and the Catholic church in reaction – began to settle down into establishments that labored to delineate precisely what it was they believed and taught; in other words, what they confessed. They had to become, in the words of a leading scholar, “internally coherent and externally exclusive communities.”7 Such processes of internal confessionalization could take many years and were heavily influenced by local conditions. Additionally, in religiously heterogeneous regions such as the Dutch Republic, confessional formation served the vitally important function of establishing differences between churches. In the case of Holland after 1572, its two largest religious communities  – Reformed and Catholic  – had to fashion distinct confessional identities while in close proximity to each other. How each church dealt with the other became an integral part of its sense of identity. This task fell largely to Classicale acta 1573–1620 VII: Provinciale synode Zuid-Holland. Classis Delft en Delfland 1572–1620, eds. P. H. A. M. Abels and A. Wouters (The Hague: Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 2001), vol. 1, p. 314. 7 Heinz Schilling, “Confessional Europe,” in Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, eds. Thomas A. Brady Jr., et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1995), vol. 2, p. 641. Schilling has tied confessionalization to issues of state-building and modernity, but this study follows more closely the notion of internal confessionalization; that is, the creation of identity and boundaries (Konfessionsbildung), as first articulated by Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Enstehung der Konfessionen: Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1965). 6

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clergy, priests, and preachers, who tried to instruct and discipline their believers to recognize correct belief and reject falsehood; each side had to paint the other as both wrong and dangerous. This era of confessionalism began around 1620, after the Reformed had consolidated their doctrine and membership at the Synod of Dordrecht and the Holland Mission really started to spur a revival of Catholic communities. At the most formal, institutional level of this confessional space, the official attitude between Reformed and Catholic churches in Holland was one of antagonism and hostility. Along the spectrum of relationships between Catholic and Reformed in Holland, those between priests and preachers and the confessional identities they embodied would prove to be among the most volatile.

Missio Hollandica The very fluidity of ecclesiastical affairs in Holland after 1572 – which so debilitated the Catholic church initially – would in the long term aid in its restoration. The relative weakness of the public church, its ambiguous place in the new polity, the refusal of government to impose one faith, the vicissitudes of the war against Spain – all these factors created an environment that permitted Catholicism to reorganize itself structurally and spiritually. After the early years of violence and repression, the theater of the war moved out of Holland, and Catholics found themselves in a situation where they could – however haphazardly and unevenly – regroup. By the 1580s and 1590s, a committed core of the faithful formed the nucleus of a revitalized Catholic community. Their need for sacramental and pastoral care stimulated the training and placement of clergy in the form of the Holland Mission. Reports from the field suggested to the church hierarchy that the missionary potential of the region was great. “The Catholic religion in Holland flourishes even more in secret [occultamente] than if it were public,” enthused papal nuncio Ottavio Frangipani in 1591.8 Visiting missionaries clearly saw a hunger for the old church. “The harvest is abundant,” wrote the Jesuit priest Joannes Bargius to his superiors in 1594, “there are easily thirty Catholics for one real heretic . . . if the priests were allowed to celebrate together publicly, the temples would be full.”9 8 9

Romeinsche bronnen 16e eeuw, p. 405. “Verslag van den visitator Joannes Bargius,” in F. van Hoeck, Schets van de geschiedenis der Jezuieten in Nederland (Nijmegen: Delcker & VanderVegt, 1940), p. 365.

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Both lay and clerical Catholics in Holland were indeed able to ­resurrect a functioning devotional life from the ruins of their church toward the close of the sixteenth century. In all of Holland’s major cities there were reports of Catholic activity. The Reformed consistory of Delft complained to the magistracy in late 1582 that the mass was being celebrated secretly in private homes.10 A fire in the home of Leidener Geryt Roelofsz in 1589 accidentally revealed various instruments and ornaments for the mass that had been hidden there.11 In the 1590s, the aldermen (schepenen) of Haarlem heard a number of cases of individuals attending or hosting Catholic gatherings.12 At least two Jesuit fathers were active in Dordrecht in the 1590s.13 In 1591, in otherwise latitudinarian Amsterdam, a priest discovered celebrating mass was promptly dragged through the street and jailed.14 By the end of the century, Gouda’s Catholics were in the habit of paying recognition money (400 guilders per year per priest) to the city’s sheriff in order to be left alone in their gatherings.15 Such examples indicate a modest yet widespread revival of Catholic worship and practice throughout Holland after the interruptions of war and sectarianism in the immediate aftermath of the province’s defection to the side of revolt. The ecclesiastical fortunes of Holland’s Catholics in the period 1572– 1672 may be divided into two phases. From 1572 to about 1610, the Catholic community suffered painful disestablishment, a widespread lack of pastoral care and sacramental worship, and general disarray and harassment. By the first decade of the seventeenth century, however, the ­beginnings of restoration and rejuvenation were evident as the Holland Mission, superintended by its first Apostolic vicar – Sasbout Vosmeer – established ­stations of ambulant priests in the major cities and towns of Holland and the other provinces.16 From roughly 1610 down through the rest of the ­century, the Mission expanded in organization, numbers, and ­effectiveness – successfully reviving and reinvigorating the clerical, sacramental, and GAD NHG, KA, 19 Nov. 1582. RAL SA II, no. 16, Aflezingboek F, 4 Dec. 1589, fol. 6v. 12 Joke Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie. Stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1578–1620 (The Hague: Hollandse Historische Reeks, 1989), p. 75. 13 Af-beeldinghe van d’eerste eeuwe der societeyt Jesu voor ooghen ghestelt door de duytsnederlantsche provincie der selver societeyt (Antwerp: Plantijn, 1649), p. 592. 14 Gijsbertus Hesse, “Pater Arnoldus ab Ischa, Minderbroeder,” BBH 32 (1909): 358–359. 15 “De ontwikkeling van het kerkelijk leven in Gouda vanaf de Hervorming,” in Gouda. Seven eeuwen stad. Hoofdstukken uit de geschiedenis van Gouda (Gouda: Oudheidkundige Kring “Die Goude,” 1972), p. 291. 16 For more on Vosmeer’s career, see W. L. S. Knuif and R. G. R. Smeets, “Sasbout Vosmeer,” AAU 41, 43 (1915, 1917): 321–407, 135–192. 10 11

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ecclesiastical system upon which Catholic worship depended and through which ­salvation was possible. In the seventeenth century, Catholicism in Holland reconstituted itself as a minority confessional subculture in a formally Reformed state and society, placing priests among the preachers. It “re-formed” its church in the most profound sense.17 What the Holland Mission provided this revival was clergy; its job was to supply priests among the preachers. In 1592, Pope Clement VIII granted supervision of the Catholic faithful in the northern Netherlands – the territories under the old archbishopric of Utrecht – to nuncio Ottavio Frangipani, who in turn appointed Sasbout Vosmeer of Delft Apostolic vicar over the region. The Apostolic vicar became in effect the chief prelate of a shadowy ecclesiastical hierarchy, superintending the secular clergy at work in the provinces of the Dutch Republic, answerable initially to the papal nuncio in Cologne and later to the internuncio in Brussels.18 His flock was the dispossessed Catholics of Holland and the other six provinces who lived – as the hierarchy was wont to say – sub jugo haereticorum, under the yoke of heretics. Vosmeer and his successors fulfilled a variety of functions as Apostolic vicars: bishop, supervisor, administrator, arbitrator, liaison to Rome, pastor, and not least, missionary. Nearly all of the vicars saw themselves as successors to the archbishop of Utrecht, though in practice none of them bore this title and none wielded the full authority of such a position; their powers were delegated by the papal nuncios.19 The ambiguities of their ecclesiastical status and authority would over the years lead to a number of jurisdictional problems, such as conflicts with the regular clergy – especially the Society of Jesus – and in the eighteenth century would precipitate a full-blown schism in the Dutch Catholic church that persists to the present day.20 On the general development of the Apostolic vicariate, see Charles Parker, Faith on the Margins Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 30–35. 18 L. J. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme in Noord-Nederland in de 16e en de 17e eeuw (Amsterdam: Urbi et Orbi, 1947), vol. 2, pp. 15–16; P. W. F. M. Hamans, Geschiedenis van de Katholieke Kerk in Nederland (Brugge: Tabor, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 246–247. 19 Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme, vol. 2, pp. 22–23; Mathieu G. Spiertz, “Priest and Layman in a Minority Church: The Roman Catholic Church in the Northern Netherlands 1592–1686,” in The Ministry: Clerical and Lay, eds. W. J. Shields and Diana Blackwood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 287. 20 Gian Ackermans, Herders en huurlingen. Bisschoppen en priesters in de Republiek (1663–1705) (Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 2003), pp. 257–303. The product of this schism, the Old Catholic Church in the Netherlands, today has a membership of about 10,000. 17

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In the first years of the seventeenth century, however, the principal task of the Apostolic vicar was to bring some clerical order to Catholic worship in the Dutch Republic. Without priests, the sacraments could not be performed. Catholics had of course been receiving pastoral and sacramental care from those priests who had stayed in Holland after 1572 and from itinerant missionaries, but it was irregular and scattered. The Mission intended to replace the defunct ecclesiastical structures of Dutch Catholicism with an ambulant priesthood whose job was to restore a semblance of regular parish ministry in Catholic communities. All this had to be done in a political environment where the sacraments were illegal, the privileged church was hostile, and a large portion of the population seemed to be confessionally indifferent. The Holland Mission had to distinguish itself from all the other confessions Holland was teeming with while at the same time avoiding the negative attention that might arise from excessive sectarianism. The Mission’s leaders recognized that confessional formation had to take place, if not entirely secretly, then at the very least discreetly. A decade into his vicariate – while in Rome in 1602 – Vosmeer drew up a report – the “Insinuatio” – which described to the pope the state of Catholic worship under the Republic’s heretical regime.21 The tone of the “Insinuatio” is by turns dolorous, optimistic, and selfserving. Recounting his early work in and around his hometown of Delft in the 1580s, Vosmeer described a Catholic population bereft of order, direction, and resources  – “a people without a leader, sheep without a shepherd” – where the few remaining priests hardly dared celebrate the sacraments and where less scrupulous regular clergy presided over irregular marriages and permitted the faithful all kinds of liberties. Those clerics who had stayed in Holland despite the persecutions of the 1570s were often aged and of varying capability. A few mercenary priests offered the sacraments only in return for payment; worse still, some lay persons were successfully masquerading as clerics. It was clear that the faithful desperately needed priests. The difficulties caused by “false brothers and idle Catholics” were certainly grave, and only served to inflame the hostility of the Calvinists, not to mention other heretics such as Anabaptists, Lutherans, and Libertines.22 Yet Vosmeer assured Rome there was reason for hope. He had put a stop to the worst abuses among the clergy, and he was encouraged by the “Insinuatio status provinciarum in quibus haeretici dominantur,” ed. G. Brom, AAU 17 (1889): 151–179, 457–472. 22 “Insinuatio,” pp. 155–158. 21

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number of youth – even those of heretical parents – who sought to join the true church or who even wished to enter the priesthood. Institutions to train such future missionaries were being established in Cologne and Louvain.23 The exercise of Catholicism was beginning to grow “noticeably” despite the placards. Pious families engaged in private devotions in the tranquility of their homes, where many kept oratories.24 Thousands of devotional books circulated throughout the region. Vosmeer had seventy secular priests missionizing in the Republic; they in turn were aided by a variety of lay helpers, who read homilies and led prayers in their absence, helped care for the poor, and guarded Catholic gatherings.25 Vosmeer described with great enthusiasm and some exaggeration the efforts of Willem Coopal – vicar-general of the still-intact Haarlem chapter – disguised as a farmer, fisherman, or merchant and at considerable peril of arrest and prosecution to minister to “thousands” of the faithful scattered about the towns and villages of Holland.26 In glowing terms, the Apostolic vicar related the heroic efforts of such priests as they offered the eucharist, catechized children, supported the poor, exorcized demons, attended the sick and dying, comforted believers, and won new converts to the true church. Their missionary labors and exploits, he boasted, equaled and even surpassed those recorded in the works of the ancient church fathers.27 Vosmeer seems to have seen himself as the commander of a guerilla army, bringing order and discipline to a chaotic and ragtag band of clerics, winning the hearts and minds of the local population in the face of a powerful and malevolent regime. Discipline of both clergy and laity was a key component in the process of confessional formation. To that end, he offered a prescription for the qualities of the ideal missionary priest who worked successfully inter haereticos. Obedience was foremost: He must work within the lawful confines of the Mission and remember that he works for God and not himself. He must live and work humbly, not rejecting the counsel of wise laymen; an attitude of prudence and patience would reap great rewards for the Mission.28 The ideal priest was therefore both pious and cautious, an exemplary figure who inspired the faithful and persuaded the uncertain, but who at the same time would On the formation of clergy for the Holland Mission, see Parker, Faith on the Margins, pp. 69–111. 24 “Insinuatio,” pp. 157, 160–161. 25 “Insinuatio,” pp. 156–157. 26 “Insinuatio,” pp. 162–163. 27 “Insinuatio,” p. 165. 28 “Insinuatio,” pp. 174–179. 23

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not arouse the ire of heresy and thereby endanger the work of the church. Himself the target of attempts at arrest and incarceration, Vosmeer was exquisitely aware of how closely in proximity to its enemies the Mission’s work of restoration had to take place. Such were the ideals and aspirations of the Holland Mission at its inception. In order to secure continued support from Rome and the hierarchy, Vosmeer  – in all his Counter-Reformation fervor  – deliberately limned in the “Insinuatio” a tableau of great challenges but still greater rewards. The opportunities to keep and even win souls for the Catholic faith in this heretical republic were abundant enough to make a great missionary effort worthwhile, especially if – as Vosmeer hoped – the King of Spain’s armies won the region back. As its founding father, he set the tone and agenda of the Mission and launched it; for the rest of the century, his successors would continue the equally arduous task of resuscitating and maintaining Catholic devotional practice in Holland. His immediate successor – Philip Rovenius (1614–1651) – in particular did much of the heavy institutional lifting, solidifying the structural elements of the Mission into something resembling the Catholic parish life that the revolt had destroyed.29 The most active centers of the Mission in Holland were in Haarlem – where the pre-revolt chapter survived and had a sometimes prickly relationship with Vosmeer’s new mission  – and Delft. However, during the first decade of the seventeenth century Vosmeer assigned clergy to a regular “station” (statie)  – a central urban base where each priest resided and from where he ministered to Catholics in the surrounding region – in all of the major towns of the province. The more populous cities such as Amsterdam and Leiden had multiple stations. The station system proved to be quite successful: In 1602, Vosmeer had seventy secular priests working in the entire Republic; by 1616, his successor – the energetic organizer Philip Rovenius  – supervised 200 clergymen, and the number would peak at about 350 toward the middle of the century. Alongside the Holland Mission, the regular orders – especially Jesuits and Franciscans  – established their own missions in the first quarter of the century, and by the 1640s made up another 140 or so missionaries in the Republic.30 Relations between the Mission and the regular orders grew periodically tense over issues of jurisdiction and hierarchy – especially the Parker, Faith on the Margins, pp. 34–35; W. L. S. Knuif and J. de Jong, “Philippus Rovenius en zijn bestuur der Hollandsche Zending,” AAU 50 (1925): 1–401. 30 Spiertz, “Priest,” p. 291. 29

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orders’ general tendency to ignore the vicars’ authority – as well as over deeper doctrinal questions of how to deal with and live amongst heresy.31 Despite these squabbles – which festered throughout the seventeenth century – both secular and regular priests, working in Holland’s towns and countryside, successfully rebuilt a rudimentary but functioning parochial system that offered sacramental and pastoral care to local Catholics on an at least somewhat regular basis. In time, seminaries were established just outside the Dutch Republic in the Catholic territories of Cologne and Louvain to create a clerical corps, schooled along Tridentine disciplinary lines, for precisely this purpose.32 By 1620, early modern Dutch Catholicism was entering a period of tremendous growth not only in terms of numbers but also in terms of organization and effectiveness. Holland’s Catholic church, despite its technical illegality, became more structured, formal, and distinctive; in short, the Holland Mission was making it more confessionalized. The gradual establishment of the Mission’s quasi-parochial system meant (at least in the minds of the prelacy) that Holland’s Catholics were distinguishing themselves from the province’s ecclesiastical confusion of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, fashioning their identity as a distinct confessional community amidst the many religious subcultures populating Holland and the rest of the Republic. In the long term, Dutch Catholicism would successfully navigate its forced transformation from universal to confessional church. The priests of the Mission and the regular orders who served Catholic congregations in Holland’s towns dealt with all the usual responsibilities, chores, and problems of parochial life in addition to the more singular challenge of negotiating their way through a society at once Protestant and multiconfessional. They were required to send reports from the field back to their superiors. The Apostolic vicars and provincial superiors would in turn compile this information into broader mission reports addressed to the nuncios and to Rome. In the process, these reports created a particular image of the overall missionary effort – one of heroism, sacrifice, and success. Like Vosmeer’s original “Insinuatio” of 1602, they attested to the multiplicity of challenges and questions facing priests as they recreated a parochial system in Holland, but more pertinently to their triumphs as they toiled in the vineyard of the Lord (to use one of Parker, Faith on the Margins, pp. 42–43; Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme, vol. 2, pp. 156–157. 32 Parker, Faith on the Margins, pp. 77–97. 31

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their favorite metaphors) in an otherwise heretical environment. Over time, the image that emerged from these narratives was of a mission at once embattled and flourishing, of dauntless priests braving the “storms of persecution” to bring the sacraments to the faithful. Some of this involved an impressive amount of work. The regular orders in particular were good at faithfully recording the quantitative fruits of their labors. The Jesuit Lodewijk Makeblijde reported 600 conversions and 200 marriages during his first six years working in the city of Delft (1611–1617).33 In a report dated 1674, Willem Herinx, prefect of the Franciscan mission, reported that his priests in one Amsterdam station had in a single year (Easter 1671 to Easter 1672) baptized 116 children, gave extreme unction to 130 gravely ill parishioners, solemnized 20 marriages, reconciled 7 lapsed believers to the church, converted 10 heretics, heard numerous confessions, and distributed countless eucharistic devotions. Likewise, an equally industrious Leiden Franciscan in 1672 baptized 46, gave extreme unction to 70, solemnized 27 marriages, converted 5 heretics, and reconciled 4. During the year before, one of his confreres in Gouda baptized 57, married 8 couples, gave last rites to 38, converted 10 heretics, and catechized 200 children. At the conclusion of his report, which also related similar statistics for nine other cities in Holland and Friesland, Herinx tidily and modestly (“unless computation fails me”) summed up the numbers: more than 650 converted to Catholicism, at least 4,500 given last rites, nearly 390 reconciled to the church, and more than 2,550 baptized between the years 1671 and 1673.34 The veracity of such figures is of course impossible to ascertain, but they do point to the prodigious efforts made by priests to minister to the Catholic faithful. To be sure, success was not always measured in quantitative terms. The reports emphasized the depth of the missionary effort as well as its breadth. Successful missionaries not only ministered to their flocks but cared for them as well. Such ministrations often led to joyful transformations of souls. A Jesuit report of 1663 described the reconciliation of a longtime, notorious drunkard to the church in Gouda. Known locally as “first among drinkers,” according to the Jesuit’s relation, the man was tormented by demons with thoughts of ending his life. Friends and clergy alike had tried for years in vain to make him mend his ways. Finally, several klopjes persuaded him to visit a Jesuit oratory, where he implored L. Loosen, Lodewijk Makeblijde (1565–1630). Hymnen en gezangen (Zwolle: Tjeenk Willink, 1964), p. 30. 34 “Zes Missie-verslagen uit de tweede helft der zeventiende eeuw,” ed. R. Post, AAU 64 (1940): 283, 286, 289, 302. 33

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the aid of Saint Xavier. One of the Jesuit priests showed him sacred relics, and with sighs and tears the sinner exclaimed, “I am wholly unworthy to touch the edge of such holy relics.” Hearing this, the Jesuit took him to a private chamber where he gently led the sinner through an examination of his life and a confession of his sins. He confessed anew several days later, resolved firmly to improve his life and joyfully received the eucharist for the first time in many years. The local Jesuit fathers had worked similar such reformations with fornicators and adulterers as well as drunkards many times, the report added.35 Such emotional triumphs reflected the depth of feeling among Catholic clergy, who believed of course that Christian souls were at stake. Ensuring proper pastoral care was one of the central tasks of the Mission, a task the clergy took extremely seriously. Proper worship required priests, and the missionaries repeatedly underscored their success in delivering the sacraments so necessary for Catholic devotional life. Priests related with pride how frequently and faithfully they provided the sacraments: “To maintain and increase the devotion of the faithful I have offered the Holy Mass all the days of the year, except for illness or other legitimate hindrances,” reported one Haarlem Franciscan in 1656.36 Such sedulousness was what made the revival of Catholic devotion in Holland possible, the missionary reports emphasized over and over. Mission reports concentrated primarily on describing the work of the clergy, so the Catholic laity remained largely anonymous in these accounts. Nevertheless, the missionaries were also struck by the devotion and fortitude of the Catholics they encountered in Holland. “With joy I saw a thousand countryfolk meet together at nighttime for the sacraments,” the Apostolic vicar Philip Rovenius wrote to the hierarchy after a visit to Holland in 1620.37 Petrus a Matre Dei, a Carmelite missionary working in Leiden in the middle of the seventeenth century, marveled at the dedication of the Catholics to whom he ministered. Destitute of all exterior trappings of religion, “without altars, without temples, without free priests, without organs, without psalters or sacred music,” they nevertheless gathered together in secret places such as bedchambers and attics and derived more “Zes verslagen over de werkzaamheden door de Jezuieten der Hollandsche Missie verricht,” ed. R. Post, AAU 58 (1934): 21. 36 “Verslagen, door de eerw. Paters Minderbroeders in de jaren 1656 en 1657 ingediend bij den praefectus missionis te Keulen,” ed. W. F. Elsen, AAU 2 (1875): 92. 37 Romeinsche bronnen voor den kerkelijken toestand der Nederlanden onder de Apsotolische Vicarissen 1592–1727. I: 1592–1651, ed. J. D. M. Cornelissen (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1932), p. 270. 35

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consolation from the sacraments than if they lived in a free province.38 Rovenius found the Catholic population’s fervent and pious response to a papal jubilee proclamation in 1635 “extraordinary.”39 Faithful Catholics in Holland, he wrote to Archduchess Isabella in Brussels in 1630, tolerated a great deal of deprivation.40 Lay devotion made Holland and the rest of the Republic fertile ground for the missionaries. In his descriptions of the work of his clergy, Rovenius captured the spirit of the Holland Mission, writing in tones both hopeful and triumphant. In 1617, he recorded the gratifying fruits of the Mission as the priests tended to those Catholics so long deprived of sacramental care: . . . daily we see many running back to the womb of the church, abjuring heresy, making restitution, condemning all the evils and perils of this world as long as they save their souls . . . [they] present themselves ready for everything as long as they are taught what is proper to believe and to do . . . It is wonderful to see large numbers of mothers demanding baptism for their infants, adults who had been baptized by the heretics requesting sacramentals or even baptism . . . others asking to renew their marriages which had been contracted by heretical ministers, all returning joyfully home . . . .41

The Mission thus found an enthusiastic reception among Holland’s faithful, especially in the 1620s and 1630s, after so many years of dislocation and difficulty. Decades of living under the yoke of heresy had left Catholics starved for proper ecclesiastical nurture. As Rovenius noted, the need for pastoral solicitude was great, and the confessionalizing efforts of the Mission bore great fruit. If the reports from the clergy back to its leaders repeatedly struck a triumphant note, then the other major theme running through them was the danger that their undertaking involved. To function as a Catholic priest in a Protestant environment was an undertaking fraught with peril, according to reports. The missionary descriptions abound with tales of subterfuge, disguises, narrow escapes, threats, arrests, chases, fines, imprisonments, assaults, ambushes, and all manner of legal and confessional persecution. Priests were portrayed as tending to the faithful amidst a Petrus a Matre Dei, Clara relatio missionis Hollandicae et provinciarum confoederatim . . . anno 1658, ed. Richard Reisberman (Rotterdam: T. Hendriksen, 1891), p. 45. 39 “Vier Missie-verslagen van 1625 tot 1645 door Rovenius te Rome ingediend,” ed. G. Brom, AAU 18 (1890): 3. 40 “Twee verslagen over de toestand der Hollandse Missie van de Apostolische Vicaris Philippus Rovenius aan de infante Isabella,” ed. P. Placidus, AAU 68 (1949): 247. 41 “Verslag over de Hollandsche Missie ten jare 1617,” ed. G. Brom, AAU 17 (1889): 472. 38

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host of perils – arrest, fines, incarceration, exile. The Zoeterwoude ­pastor Maarten van Velde, for example, was lionized as a martyr in Catholic ­history prints after he succumbed to wounds incurred during a brief incarceration in 1639.42 To bring true religion to lands under the heretical yoke demanded a high degree of heroism, dedication, and resolve. The hostility of the Reformed church and of political authorities could be, according to mission accounts, furious and unremitting if no longer as immediately violent as it was in the 1570s. The Franciscan missionary Arnoldus ab Ischa witnessed with distress the arrest of a Catholic priest in Amsterdam in 1591; as the latter was escorted under guard over the street he was jeered by onlookers: “What rabble, what frenzy, what fury one saw in the Calvinists!”43 In 1602, Sasbout Vosmeer wrote, “In the beginning plundering [of churches] was done by soldiers; afterwards also by judges.”44 This comment referred to the fact that much of the persecution of Catholics in Holland in the seventeenth century was juridical in nature  – edicts and placards spurred on by heretical preachers. It was manifestly clear to Vosmeer that the Calvinists wanted nothing less than the extirpation of the Catholic religion; confessional space was dangerous, indeed. The fury of heresy towards the true church was ceaseless, as far as the Holland Mission was concerned. According to Apostolic vicar Philip Rovenius, the Mission experienced “daily” interruptions of divine services, imprisoned and exiled priests, an unceasing onslaught of harassment and persecution.45 His successor, Jacobus de la Torre, simply called the Protestant regime an “inquisition.”46 The Society of Jesus felt Reformed antagonism most keenly, and recognized that they excited particular Protestant ire – the heretics, one report related, taught their children to hate the Jesuits more than any other missionary.47 The Leiden Carmelite Petrus a Matre Dei noted wearily that in their bitterness the “pseudo-reformed” bestowed upon Catholics a variety of vulgar honorifics: “idolaters, papists or popes, anti-Christs, worse than Jews, sons of the Paul Dirkse, Begijnen, pastoors en predikanten. Religie en kunst in de Gouden Eeuw (Leiden: Primavera, 2001), pp. 122–123. 43 Quoted in Hesse, “Pater Arnoldus,” p. 359. 44 “Insinuatio,” p. 161. 45 “Vier Missie-verslagen,” p. 20. 46 “Relatio seu descriptio status religionis catholicae in Hollandia etc quam Romae collegit et exhibuit Alexandro Septimo et cardinalibus Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, Jacobus de la Torre,” ed. A. van Lommel, AAU 10 (1882): 118. 47 “Relatio visitationis missionis S.J. in Hollandia a Pe Guilielmo Bauters,” ed. A. van Lommel, AAU 6 (1879): 242. 42

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devil, germ of Satan, and so-called offspring of hell.”48 In times of national crisis, missionaries noticed that the Calvinists were quick to assign blame to Catholics – one Franciscan friar in Amsterdam reported in 1665 that some “arrogant” preachers there were attributing the outbreak of war with Münster and England to the government’s toleration of Catholic worship.49 The Catholic missionaries saw in the Calvinists a venomous and lethal opponent, a perception encouraged by the voluminous amount of hostile rhetoric the Reformed church volleyed in their direction, and confirmed by the legal prosecutions to which they were sometimes subjected. Whether or not that perception was objectively true, it was the image the Mission constructed for itself and in which it operated through most of the seventeenth century. Such a self-image of martyrdom and heroism, as part of the Mission’s process of internal confessionalization, lent validation to the true church. Within the bellicose environment of confessional space, the missionary priest had to be, as one report put it, “an earnest toiler in the vineyard of the Lord.”50 Mission priests were expected to exhibit dedication, devotion, energy, and piety. The reports frequently used adjectives such as “zelus” and “bonus” and “probus” to describe the most successful pastors. In his mission report of 1622, the Apostolic vicar Philip Rovenius praised all the priests under his supervision (with two or three exceptions) as men of “uncorrupted life and upright faith.”51 Such diligence was prized by prelates and congregations alike. When their beloved priest Alexander van Lamzweerde was suspended by Sasbout Vosmeer in 1607 for officiating at an irregular marriage ceremony, Leiden’s Catholics protested loudly. They wrote letters to Vosmeer insisting that Van Lamzweerde was an honorable man and tireless shepherd to his flock. The petitioners limned him as “a mirror of virtue and piety,” a pastor of exemplary solicitude and devotion, especially in difficult times: “the three years he has served the altar here have borne great fruit; indeed the Catholics have increased in unbelievable numbers because of Lamzweerde’s fruitful sermons. The danger he suffered while tending those persons whom God Almighty has afflicted with plague, is unspeakable . . . .52 Petrus a Matre Dei, Clara relatio, p. 37. Romeinsche bronnen voor den kerkelijken toestand der rooms-katholieke Kerk in den Nederlanden onder de apostolische vicarissen, 2: 1651–1686, ed. R. R. Post (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1941), p. 322. 50 Romeinsche bronnen 1592–1651, p. 606. 51 “Descriptio status in quo nunc est religio catholico in Confoederatis Belgii-provinciis anno 1622,” ed. A. van Lommel, AAU 20 (1889): 355. 52 UA OBC, no. 8, Adriaen Stalpaert and Hendrick vander Key to Vosmeer, 22 April 1607. 48 49

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In 1644, a number of Amsterdam Catholics petitioned the provincial head of the Capuchin order not to recall two beloved priests, for their labors, piety, and exemplary lives in this particular vineyard had over the years yielded a “great harvest” of souls reconciled to the church.53 The most beloved priests were valued for both their pastoral and missionary gifts. Praiseworthy pastors were important not only as examples to the faithful but also to the heretics; they were vital to the propaganda purposes of the Mission. The Society of Jesus, for example, was especially adept at this kind of public relations. Throughout the seventeenth century, the order produced chronicles, elegies, and necrologia extolling the heroic achievements of its fathers in Holland, accounts designed both to encourage and energize clergy and laity alike.54 In addition to probity and piety, clerics in the Holland Mission believed they needed to demonstrate great prudence, as Sasbout Vosmeer had originally recommended. A high degree of canniness and courage was necessary to administer sacramental care clandestinely and unmolested. Referring to the older generation of priests who worked in Holland immediately following the overgang of the 1570s, the Utrecht canon Joannes Wachtelaer (Vigilius) wrote Vosmeer in 1613 that they had taught their successors in the Holland Mission an important lesson from the gospel: “in the midst of wolves to keep the cunning of serpents yet not to lose the innocence of doves.”55 Discretion was an important virtue because subterfuge was sometimes (though by no means always) a necessary tactic in the Mission’s efforts to maintain a functioning sacramental system. As a contemporary Jesuit history put it, “The Holland [Mission] is never without capture or the threat of it; one must always move furtively and operate secretly like a thief in the night.”56 In some cases, discretion entailed taking precautions to disguise the operations of the Mission; for example, sending encoded messages. Sasbout Vosmeer, who oversaw the Mission largely through epistolary means, would occasionally camouflage his correspondence. Letters between him and his brother Tilman sometimes referred to a bishop as “father” or to the pope as “grandfather.”57 A particularly wily example of such camouflage can be found in a 1602 letter from the Amsterdam priest Romeinsche bronnen 1592–1651, p. 744. Gerrit vanden Bosch, “Over de doden niets dan goeds? Zeventiende-eeuws elogia en necrologia van jezuïeten in de Hollandse Zending als bronnen voor religieuze mentaliteitsgeschiedenis,” Trajecta 6 (1997): 337. 55 Quoted in Reisberman, p. 72. The biblical reference is Matthew 10:16. 56 Af-beeldinghe, p. 591. 57 See, for example, UA OBC, no. 440, Sasbout Vosmeer to Tilman Vosmeer, 30 Sept. 1589. 53 54

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Anthonius van Oirschot, reporting to Vosmeer about the recent capture and imprisonment of the Haarlem vicar Albert Eggius. In an atmosphere of heightened risk, when mail could be intercepted, Van Oirschot couched his letter in language that made him sound like a Protestant. On the pretext of describing a particularly bad outbreak of plague in Amsterdam, the priest wrote: There are many papists, citizens and inhabitants here who say that this great scourge and plague have come over this city because about four months ago a papist priest named Elbert was caught and imprisoned in The Hague, whom I assume is not known to you; if this is true, I hope that the same papist will be freed and we will be rid of this plague . . . and furthermore I hear that in jail he leads a life of daily prayer and fasting that makes such an impression on the common folk that everyone talks about it in the carriages and barges; those who had gone to see him to mock him come away impressed, admitting that he is a wise and good man and that they don’t have such a one among their own preachers.58

Under the cover of sectarian vocabulary, this Catholic priest was able to convey to the Apostolic vicar both Eggius’s condition in prison and the effect his capture was having on public opinion, especially among Protestants. He also drew a not very subtle comparison between the faithful Catholic priest and less impressive Reformed preachers. Van Oirschot neatly inverted the language of intolerance into a cloak of protection.59 The use of these kinds of codes extended to lay Catholics, as well. In 1605, a Dordrecht Catholic complained to Sasbout Vosmeer about plans to remove the popular priest Lambertus Feyt from that city; using the argot of Holland’s mercantile culture, he expressed the disappointment of the whole “company” at the prospective departure of their “factor” from whom all the “partners” expected more and more “profit,” and feared that it would take a long time before his replacement enjoyed as much “credit” among them as he had. “I was also greatly saddened,” the correspondent added, “for in my private affairs I regarded him as a very special friend, even as my own brother.”60 Generally, such linguistic disguises only appeared during periods when the threat of persecution seemed greater, such as in the late 1500s and early 1600s, when the Mission was still establishing itself. As the seventeenth century wore on UA OBC, no. 5, Anthonius van Oirschot to Sasbout Vosmeer, 15 Sept. 1602. Christine Kooi, “Paying Off the Sheriff,” Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, eds. R. Po-Chia Hsia and H.F.K. van Nierop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 98. 60 UA OBC, no. 6, F. F. to Sasbout Vosmeer, 17 May 1605. 58 59

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and the status of Holland’s Catholics stabilized, the need for writing in such codes became less pressing. Another tactic prudent priests employed was to travel and work in disguise. By the late sixteenth century, the States of Holland prohibited Catholic clergy from wearing clerical vestments, though this statute was enforced with varying degrees of effectiveness. In the early seventeenth century, the popular Leiden priest Pouwels Claesz de Goede, for example, occasionally walked openly through the city streets in his clerical garb, undisturbed except for the insults of children.61 Nevertheless, over time dressing as laymen became a requisite part of the priests’ way of life.62 As they went about their rounds, missionaries costumed themselves as peasants, merchants, sailors, or fishermen. The Haarlem priest Willem Coopal once famously disguised himself as a woman to escape a village sheriff outside the town of Schiedam.63 Jesuit missionaries working in North-Holland dressed as doctors while ministering during outbreaks of plague.64 Like the confiscation of the churches in the 1570s, this proscription against vestments was part of the stripping away of the physical and material presence of the Catholic church. In theory it rendered the presence of Catholic priests in Holland invisible. Violating that boundary between visible and invisible got clerics into trouble; the vicar-coadjutor Zacharias de Metz, for example, was banned from Amsterdam in 1660 for routinely appearing on the doorstep of his residence wearing his episcopal habit and pectoral cross.65 Keeping Catholicism out of the public eye also extended to the realm of worship. The reports of the clergy constantly reiterated the need to confine Catholic practice to private, hidden spaces, painting a portrait of liturgical and sacramental displacement and clandestinity. Having been stripped of monasteries, churches, and cathedrals since 1572, Holland’s Catholics had to worship in chapels and oratories hidden in private homes or outside in the remoter parts of the countryside. The ambulant nature of the Mission meant that the faithful often had to travel to the sacraments, and the priests in turn had to journey to J. D. Frenay, “Aanteekeningen betreffende de Leydsche pastors sedert ‘De Hervorming’ tot aan ‘De Herstelling,’” BBH 1 (1873): 255–257. 62 J. C. van der Loos, “De kleeding der priesters in het Hollandse kerkdistrict,” BBH 58 (1940): 417. 63 Van der Loos, “De kleeding,” p. 417. 64 Alfred Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus dans les anciens Pays-Bas (Brussels: Lamertin, 1926), vol. 2, p. 431. 65 M. G. Spierz, L’Église catholique des Provinces-Unies et le Saint-Siège pendant la deuxième moitié du xvii e siècle (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1975), p. 46. 61

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bring the sacraments to them; the Apostolic vicars regularly reported ­consecrating large numbers of portable altars.66 In the early years of the Mission, when the risk of persecution appeared greater, gatherings of the faithful were kept small – Vosmeer reported in 1602 that Catholics often met in spaces that accommodated at best a few dozen worshipers.67 House churches gradually became the norm as Catholic worship moved into a largely private, domestic sphere. The Leiden Carmelite Petrus a Matre Dei, for example, described with a certain degree of wonder a house chapel inside an aristocratic estate outside Rotterdam that “because of the size of the place I can call a church.”68 This domestication of devotion was a fact of life that the Mission accepted, albeit grudgingly. In his long report of 1656, the Apostolic vicar Jacobus de la Torre noted resentfully that Catholics in Holland worshiped under all manner of constraints while Jews were allowed to attend their synagogues unimpeded.69 Nor was it a guarantee of safety, the reports made clear; celebrating the sacraments in a private chapel did not protect the Dordrecht Jesuit Ignatius Smidt and his flock from being harassed by crowds outside, and he was forced to install a guard at his doorway.70 For the missionaries, the privatizing of worship was but further evidence of the constraint and limitation within which they operated. The mission reports continually reiterated and reinforced a central component of the priests’ self-perception and the image they presented to Rome – that they lived and worked under a repressive regime of heresy. As its confessional profile became more sharply defined by the early decades of the seventeenth century, Catholicism in Holland presented itself as more mission than church. To be sure, the Reformed church was not idle in the face of a revived and increasingly confessionalized Catholic church. Reformed clergy had an enormous political and social advantage in serving the public church, in that they had a much freer hand in denouncing and condemning their confessional antagonists. Indeed, the expectation on the part of the Reformed bodies – classes and consistories – who examined and called preachers was that, in addition to a thorough scriptural knowledge, such men would also excel at refuting the “enemies of truth” in Philip Rovenius consecrated 156 such altars in 1635; “Vier missie-verslagen,” p. 2. “Insinuatio,” p. 157. 68 Petrus a Matre Dei, Clara relatio, p. 52. 69 “Relatio seu descriptio,” pp. 126–127. 70 “Relatio visitationis Reverendi Patris Thomae Dekens provincialis provinciae FlandroBelgicae S.J.–anno 1656,” ed. A. van Lommel, AAU 3 (1876): 55. 66 67

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sermon and catechesis.71 A substantial portion of the earliest generation of Reformed preachers themselves came out of the ranks of the Catholic priesthood and were familiar with what they had rejected. As the century progressed and the demand for an academically trained clergy rose, students of theology received thorough training in polemic and the refutation of “error,” including Catholic doctrine.72 Indeed, polemic between the two churches would occupy a central role in their relationship within confessional space.

Heretics and Idolaters The Holland Mission clergy’s self-image of embattlement was further nursed and augmented by their position vis-à-vis their confessional counterparts in the public church, the Reformed preachers. For the conciliar hierarchy – consistories, classes, synods – that made up the leadership of the Reformed church, the very presence of Catholic priests on Holland’s soil was an affront to true religion. In their minds, the province of Holland had decided for godly reform with the rebellion of 1572; the fact that unreformed belief and idolatrous superstition had survived and, worse still, flourished was both a grave insult and mortal threat to the cause of reformation.73 Consequently, even after Holland and the other provinces joined that cause, the Calvinists within the Reformed church continued, loudly and persistently, to decry Catholic missionary activity throughout the seventeenth century. The bitter Protestant polemic of protest and opposition to the Roman church that had begun in the sixteenth-century Reformation born out of the experience of repression and exile was, in the seventeenth century, translated into an equally passionate and virulent anti-Catholic rhetoric that formed an important part of the culture of the Reformed church. Their rhetorical onslaughts on Catholic belief A. Th. Van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen. Kerk en kerkvolk ten tijde van Maurits en Oldenbarnevelt (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), pp. 34–68; G. Groenhuis, De Predikanten: De sociale positie van de gereformeerde predikanten in de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden voor 1700 (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1977), pp. 163–170. 72 P. A. M. Geurts, Voorgeschiedenis van het Statencollege te Leiden (Leiden: Brill, 1984), pp. 3–7; Van Deursen, Bavianen, pp. 34–39; Willem Otterspeer, Groepsportret met dame. Het bolwerk van de vrijheid: de Leidse universiteit 1572–1672 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2000), pp. 168–179. 73 A similar mindset developed among England’s Protestants by the seventeenth century. See Peter Lake, “Anti-popery: the Structure of a Prejudice,” in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642, eds. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London: Longman, 1989), pp. 72–77. 71

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and activity became a familiar theme within the Republic’s diverse and freewheeling discussion culture.74 This rhetoric is worth exploring, for it articulated the Reformed church’s image of Catholicism and also reflected that church’s sense of itself as a confessional community. It also represented one part of the complex relationships between Catholics and Calvinists in Holland’s Golden Age; in the confessional space created by the European Reformation they viewed one another as idolaters and heretics. This rhetorical relationship of public antagonism did not necessarily mirror the reality of CatholicProtestant interactions in daily life, but it did become an essential feature of the public religious culture of Holland and the rest of the Dutch Republic, a culture whose other major characteristic was – paradoxically enough – pluralism. This public hostility between priests and preachers served the confessional ends of both churches by creating a clear boundary between truth and error or, more viscerally, between “us” and “them.” Condemning Catholicism as “idolatry” or “superstition” permitted the Reformed church to demonstrate its rejection of ecclesiastical corruption, while labeling the Reformed as “heretics” allowed the Holland Mission in turn to claim the authority of ecclesiastical tradition.75 Idolatry was distorted faith while heresy was false faith, and both were equally pernicious in the minds of contemporaries. Antagonism and the polemic that went with it thus affirmed confessional identity.76 The establishment of distinct identities was essential in a society where, as outsiders noted, all manner of religious attachment could be found. The caustic quality of their anti-Catholic rhetoric signaled the degree to which Reformed Protestant leaders identified themselves in terms of Christine Kooi, “‘A Serpent in the Bosom of Our Dear Fatherland’: Reformed Reaction to the Holland Mission in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Low Countries as a Crossroads of Religious Beliefs, eds. Arie-Jan Gelderblom et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2004): 165–176. Polemic was an integral part of the confessionalization process in Europe generally; see Robert W. Scribner, “Preconditions of Tolerance and Intolerance in Sixteenth-Century Germany,” in Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, eds. Robert W. Scribner and Ole Peter Grell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 45–46. On sixteenthcentury rhetoric generally, see Peter Matheson, The Rhetoric of the Reformation (London: T. T. Clark, 1998), pp. 1–26, which concentrates on Lutheran pamphlet literature. 75 For a general discussion of the polemical uses of “superstition,” see “Introduction,” in Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe, eds. Helen Parish and William G. Naphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 14–15. 76 D. Jonathan Grieser, “Confessionalization and Polemic: Catholics and Anabaptists in Moravia,” in Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J., eds. Kathleen W. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 133–134. 74

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opposition to the old church. For them, Catholicism was not just ­simply another confession among many; it was precisely this church they believed had been in such desperate need of reformation. Now that they lived in a Protestant state, they expected to see the last remnants of this corrupted and discredited church rooted out and eradicated. Indeed, one of the Dutch Reformed church’s founding documents, the Belgic Confession of 1561, had as one of its tenets the assumption that a godly commonwealth would eradicate “all idolatry and false religion in order to overthrow the kingdom of the Antichrist.”77 A confession so rooted in the theological rejection of “idolatry” could not look upon idolatry’s perceived survival in the new commonwealth with any degree of equanimity. Reformed theology insisted that the church of Rome had strayed from its scriptural origins, had invented new sacraments and ceremonies and laws, had followed its own will instead of God’s, and was hopelessly corrupted by its (or more precisely, the popes’) desire for power. It was idolatrous because it directed the Christian’s devotion away from God.78 It worshiped idols, particularly the eucharistic host, rather than God. Such a false church, founded on a disordered understanding of the worship of God, could not help but aid the Anti-Christ, and pious Christians had to resist it with all their might. Hence, the steady stream of invective against Catholicism that flowed from Reformed quarters right from the start of the public church’s establishment in the 1570s. The fear of popery (and the fear of Spanish tyranny associated with it) registered early in the annals of the public church. The first synodal gathering of Holland’s Reformed leaders, held in Dordrecht in 1574, expressed concern about lingering Catholic practices such as funeral sermons that might lead to the “perils of superstition.”79 In a similar vein, the national synod held at Middelburg in 1581 rejected kneeling at communion so as to avoid the “danger of idolatry [of the host],” a reflection of the Reformed rejection of the Catholic understanding of the mass as a recreation of Christ’s sacrifice.80 Vestigial Catholic devotion remained a problem for local Reformed authorities already preoccupied with the nuts and bolts of church building in the latter decades of the sixteenth century. With “Confessio Belgica,” p. 141. Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 195–224. 79 Acta van de Nederlandsche Synoden der zestiende eeuw, ed. F. L. Rutgers (Utrecht: Kemink, 1889), p. 142. 80 Oude kerkordeningen der Nederlandsche Hervormde Gemeente, ed. C. Hooijer (1563– 1638) (Zaltbommel: Joh. Noman, 1865), p. 212. 77 78

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a shudder of revulsion, the provincial synod of South-Holland resolved in 1583 to complain to the bailiff of Rijnland about Catholic activity around the former chapel of Wilsveen, a late-medieval devotional site. Surely he could do something about the “pilgrimages and similar horrible [gruwelicke] superstitions” that persisted there.81 Preachers appointed as inspectors by the Rijnland classis in 1586 were instructed to keep a particular eye on local priests who were trying to “charm” certain ailing souls who believed they had been bewitched – “such horrors” had to be remedied.82 In 1588, the Leiden sheriff Foy van Brouchoven, a Reformed church member, discovered a number of Catholic sacramental objects hidden in a private home; in his formal indictment of the homeowner, he made no effort to conceal his disgust at uncovering these devices of “superstitious, popish, sickening idolatry . . . .”83 Reformed antipathy to Catholicism had an almost organic, visceral quality. A Calvinist widow in Leiden, who in 1597 complained to the magistracy about her Catholic neighbors, described them as “members of the devil [lidmaten des duvels]” who endangered every “member of Christ [lidtmaet Christi].”84 Idolatry, a snare of the devil, was a threat to the health of the body of Christ. The viscerous reaction of the most sectarian Calvinists to Catholic practice revealed the extent to which they identified themselves according to their rejection of a discredited but still dangerous set of beliefs and practices. To their dichotomous way of thinking, religion and superstition were opposites – truth and falsehood, good and evil. The intensity of Reformed complaint against Catholics increased markedly in both volume and passion after the turn of the seventeenth century, due in part to the reinvigoration of Catholic worship by the Holland Mission. At all levels, the Reformed church complained repeatedly to political authorities about the proliferation of Catholic missionary efforts in the early seventeenth century. The increased activity of Catholic priests and layfolk was an open secret in the crowded towns and cities of Holland, and the outrage of Reformed divines grew accordingly. Acta der Provinciale en Particuliere Synoden, gehouden in de Noorderlijke Nederlanden gedurende de jaren 1572–1620, eds. J. Reitsma and S. D. van Veen (Groningen: Wolters, 1893–1894), vol. 2, p. 220. 82 Classicale acta 1573–1620 V: Particuliere synode Zuid-Holland. Classis Leiden 1585– 1620, Classis Woerden 1617–1620, eds. M. Kok et al. (The Hague: Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 1996), p. 20. 83 “superstitieusche paepsche misselicke afgodderije” RAL RA, Crimineel vonnisboek no. 3, 8 June 1588, fols. 149–151v. 84 Christine Kooi, “Popish Impudence: The Perseverance of the Catholic Faithful in Calvinist Holland, 1572–1620,” SCJ 26 (1995): 77. 81

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The Reformed consistory of Dordrecht, for instance, requested in 1603 that their burgomasters remove a large stone cross in the city cemetery because sometimes “superstitious” people kneeled down before it.85 Their fears of an infestation of popery were evident a few years later when the same consistory registered alarm at rumors that the Catholic mass was “breaking in here.”86 In early December 1607, the brethren of Delft groused to their magistrates that upcoming Saint Nicholas Day festivities would only lead to “the maintenance of the old papist superstitions.”87 Likewise, the consistory of the South-Holland village of Stolwijk near Gouda complained to the local bailiff in 1613 about the “superstition” of local Catholic women who kneeled to pray on the church floor at their relatives’ graves during worship services.88 Registering formal disapproval of open displays of Catholic “superstition” was one of the obligations the public church assigned to itself, as a way of contrasting its truth to Roman error. Church leaders were well aware that informal arrangements with town governments offered Catholic priests a fair degree of latitude in their efforts to missionize. In 1606, the South-Holland synod meeting in Gorcum declared that no priests should be allowed to practice their “popish exercises” on “Holland’s soil” and resolved to petition the StatesGeneral about priests being allowed to live “freely” in towns after paying contribution money to civic officials  – this “cover” permitted them to spread their superstitions “to the injury of the religion and of the land.”89 Holland’s Reformed consistories noted with consternation an increased influx of priests, in particular the much-detested Jesuits, both in their cities and throughout the land in general.90 In their eyes, political leaders appeared reluctant to enforce the placards. The resurgence of “idolatry” in the form of the Holland Mission clearly left the public church feeling threatened; accordingly, it lobbied public authorities for greater protection from the dangers Catholicism posed. Reformed rhetoric against Catholicism reached its highest pitch during the confessional era between 1620 and 1660. This was due to factors both SAD NHG, KA, 29 May 1603. SAD NHG, KA, 6 July 1606. 87 GAD NHG, KA, 5 December 1607. 88 Van Deursen, Bavianen, pp. 394–395. 89 Acta der provinciale en particuliere synoden, gehouden in de Noordelijke Nederlanden gedurende de jaren 1572–1620, eds J. Reitsma and S.D. van Veen (Groningen: Wolters, 1894), vol. 3, p. 251. 90 See, for example, SAA NHG, KA, 17 April 1608. 85 86

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inside and outside the public church. Internally, the Arminian ­controversy plunged the Reformed church into a decade’s worth of bitter theological and ecclesiological infighting during the years after 1609. This deeply charged and emotional debate over the nature of God’s predestination split Reformed churchmen and congregations  – the invective that each side hurled at the other, from pulpits and in pamphlets, surpassed antiCatholic rhetoric in its violence and derision. This fraternal conflict, with its attendant popular violence and ecclesiastical schism, proved to be far more damaging to the public church than any putative threat of popery.91 Reformed records that once contained denunciations of superstition and idolatry were now instead filled with attacks on Arminianism. Even the Holland Mission was aware that it had benefitted from the Reformed preoccupation with internal debates; Rovenius reported to Rome in 1617 that the discord among the Reformed was prompting many disgusted souls to turn to the old church, and was also easing the repressiveness of the regime toward Catholics.92 The schism within the public church paralleled and fed the growing political conflict between the parties of the stadholder Maurice of Nassau and the land’s advocate Johan van Oldenbarnevelt for the leadership of Holland and the young Dutch Republic. Not until after the Arminians were ejected from the church at the National Synod of Dordrecht in 1619, signaling the victory of Calvinist orthodoxy within the Dutch Reformed church, and after their political counterparts were removed from the government, could the Reformed return their attention to their older confessional antagonists.93 The cessation of controversy within the Reformed church allowed its leaders to renew its attacks on its external enemies. The ecclesiastical confusion that had prevailed before 1620 was now succeeded by an era of sharpened confessional awareness. A related external development was the resumption of the Dutch Republic’s war with Spain in 1621 with the expiration of the Twelve Years Truce. The military campaigns of Maurice of Nassau and his brother Frederick Henry in the southern Netherlands during the 1620s and 1630s and the protracted peace negotiations of the 1640s were followed closely by the Reformed church which saw in these events a continued contest over the fate of true religion.94 The return to open hostilities J.L. Price, “The First Modern Society? The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century,” Dutch Crossing 23 (1999), p. 16. 92 “Verslag over de Hollandsche,” p. 459. 93 Van Deursen, Bavianen, pp. 227–345. 94 Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 477–505. 91

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with Europe’s greatest Catholic empire once again reminded Reformed leaders of the mortal threat that Catholicism posed. The end of internal strife and the return of external conflict thus combined to cause the Reformed church to renew loudly its anti-Catholic confessional identity in the 1620s. This polemical re-entry into confessional space continued throughout the course of the war over the next thirty years. The end of the Twelve Years Truce and resumption of hostilities, for example, prompted the provincial synod of South-Holland in 1621 to lobby the States-General to eradicate once and for all remaining public signs of Catholicism such as the tolling of church bells for the dead, crosses on coffins, and ornaments in churches.95 A few years later, as the course of the war shifted in Spain’s favor, the synod turned up the temperature of its rhetoric: it feared that “God’s wrath, which one sees unleashed terribly over these lands,” was the consequence of the continued toleration of popery. Priests had the run of the towns, where they daily entered homes and performed the mass “and other idolatries.”96 Clearly, the plague of superstition was infesting the Republic: By the late 1620s, the synod warned that the contagion had insinuated itself everywhere, carried by priests and especially klopjes, leading “to the sorrow of many righteous hearts, to the offense of the weak, to the seduction of the simple, to the increase in popish impudence and to the rise of error.”97 The tone of the Reformed church’s anti-Catholic polemic became increasingly apocalyptic as the military fortunes of the Republic lay in the balance. Starting in the 1620s, a steady drumbeat of Reformed complaints about Catholic “impudence” would resound for the next thirty or so years; so much so that it became a characteristic feature of the public church. By loudly and repeatedly lobbying the authorities at all levels to do something about papist license, the Reformed were also reiterating that they were the only legitimate church and that their doctrinal purity stood in sharp relief from the old, disestablished church. Faced with a multiconfessional society, they embraced anti-Catholicism as a marker of identity, even when it was clear time and again that the authorities did little to relieve their concerns. From their perspective, Holland’s rulers were excessively, even dangerously tolerant. Calvinist polemicists were determined not just to persuade political elites that toleration endangered the Acta der particuliere synoden van Zuid-Holland 1622–1700, ed. W. P. C. Knuttel (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1908), vol. 1, p. 22. 96 Acta Zuid-Holland, vol. 1, pp. 146–147. 97 Acta Zuid-Holland, vol 1, pp. 277–278. 95

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country but to sway public opinion, as well. Over the course of the next twenty years, Reformed sectaries – both individuals and church ­bodies – issued numerous anti-Catholic pamphlets and broadsides. Certain themes in this literature occur again and again: toleration was leading to license, Catholic priests were abusing the placards to lure away simple souls, Catholicism was a foreign power threatening the security of the Republic, the honor of God and his true church were being mocked by the proliferation of Catholic practice, the nation was in danger of losing its Reformed identity. Toleration, in short, was undoing all the work and sacrifice of revolt and reformation. National and international political circumstances again stoked the fires of sectarianism. The Stadholder Frederick Henry’s successful campaigns against Spain in the 1630s reinvigorated Reformed dreams of Protestant victory, while his quarrels with some Holland regents over leadership of the Republic rekindled old suspicions about the Reformed bona fides of the province’s urban ruling classes. The long and tortuous negotiations culminating in the Peace of Westphalia, ending the Dutch Revolt, also stirred confessional passions. By mid-century, the clash between the Stadholder William II and the Holland regents plunged the Republic into its most acute political crisis since 1618. Reformed leaders supported the Orangist cause, viewing the regents as insufficiently confessional and excessively latitudinarian in their religious thinking.98 In this increasingly charged atmosphere, the Reformed consistories, classes, and synods of Holland petitioned, lobbied, and hectored local and provincial government with increasing frequency to do something about the spread of Catholicism in local communities. They were in effect trying to insert the hostility that characterized their relationship with Catholics in confessional space into civic space, as well. Like the 1637 petition of the Dordrecht consistory cited in the beginning of the preceding chapter, their gravamina emphasized both the danger posed by Catholic practice and the sheer offensiveness of it. In 1636 the South-Holland synod took the unusual step of publishing one of its remonstrances to the States of Holland in pamphlet form; decades of lobbying the government had not produced the desired reforms. Warning against “the violent and wanton encroachment of popish idolatry” into the cities and countryside of south Holland, the pamphlet repeated and elaborated upon fifteen years’ worth of accumulated complaints about Catholic activity. The language of the pamphlet was rich with Old Testament allusions, as befitted a confessional Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 506–546, 595–609.

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community that identified so strongly with the Jews of ancient Israel. The ministers of the synod bemoaned the presence of Catholic worship spaces in their cities: “What is this but the building of altars of Baal next to the temple of the true God of Israel?”99 The fruits of reformation, the pamphlet concluded, should not be the joining of “the true God with the idol [den waren Godt met den Afgodt].”100 In 1644, the Reformed consistory of Amsterdam likewise supplicated their burgomasters to rid the city of idolatry, “a spiritual whoredom which especially angers God.” Invoking the two unimpeachable cultural authorities of the seventeenth century – the Bible and classical antiquity – the Amsterdam preachers and elders reminded the city fathers that whenever the Israelites conquered a new land or city, God sternly commanded them to destroy all idols. In a similar manner, God-fearing Roman emperors such as Constantine and Theodosius had purged the temples of pagan idols and their priests.101 The municipal government of Amsterdam, so ran the inference, could hardly do anything less. If the idolatrous nature of Catholicism was one of the major themes of Reformed polemic by the mid-seventeenth century, then another was its insolence. Popery was not only wrong, it also gave offense. Holland’s anti-Catholic placards, however, applied only to worship and not belief – exercising the Catholic faith was illegal, but adhering to it was not. Accordingly, the Reformed church increasingly focused its rhetoric on Catholic violations of those placards. Time and again, Calvinist ecclesiastics complained about the “impudence” and “license” of Catholic priests, who flouted the placards by administering the sacraments and offering pastoral care to their congregations. The toleration of Catholic worship – indeed, the flourishing of it in the first half of the 1600s – was a fact that Reformed divines had a great deal of difficulty countenancing. Catholic intrusions into the public religious sphere the Reformed church was supposed to monopolize sparked repeated outrage. Theirs was the public church, they insisted, because it was the true church; intrusions of false religion polluted that public space. As the 1636 synodal remonstrance put it, the Papists were not content just to practice their idolatries in secret “here and there in corners” but instead brazenly worshiped “publicly in the light of day, in sight of everybody . . . to the Tweede remonstrantie tegens den gheweldigen ende moedt-willigen inbreuck der paepscher afgoderye/soo in steden als ten platten lande van Zuydt-Hollandt (‘s-Gravenhage, 1636), Kn. 4447, p. 10. 100 Tweede remonstrantie, p. 36. 101 SAA NHG, KA, 31 April 1644. 99

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deep distress of thousands of pious patriots.”102 Toleration was leading to license; the land was in danger of falling victim to its own freedoms. Christian magistrates were supposed to protect the souls of their citizens from “false doctrine, heresy and idolatry,” but instead the Republic was becoming “a confused Babel of all kinds of sects.”103 In 1643 at the SouthHolland synod, the representatives of Gouda warned darkly of a sinister plot by Catholics to undermine Reformed resolve; with their attacks on the Reformed church, Roman priests were introducing “looseness, neutrality, yes, even libertinism in doctrine and morals and thereby preparing the way for the restoration of popery, or at least to a syncretism, moderation and intrigue with the same . . . .”104 Catholic priests were like guests who have abused their host’s hospitality, the South-Holland synod opined; they manipulated toleration in order to spread superstition. This in a land the Reformed considered theirs – “the true reformed religion is always and for all time and for all true lovers of the fatherland the foremost support (next to the government) of this state . . . .”105 At one point, some of the Reformed even considered reaching out to their Protestant brethren; sometime in mid-century, the South-Holland synod drew up a memorandum exploring the unaccustomed idea of joining with other “evangelical” churches (presumably the Lutherans) to fight the “Roman Anti-Christ.” Their differences on doctrine, the memorandum argued, did not reach the “fundaments of faith,” and were not as numerous as “some quarrel-hungry theologians maintain.”106 The common goal of defeating popery might thus subsume Protestant sectarian differences. Nothing seems to have come from this effort at half-hearted ecumenism, but it does underscore just how dangerous some Reformed divines considered Catholicism to be, that they would be willing to join with their Protestant rivals in opposition to it. Virtually every consistory in Holland complained repeatedly of “­popish impudence” in the middle decades of the century. Klopjes particularly exercised the Haarlem preacher Samuel Ampzing, who lamented that they walked openly in their distinctive habits, as if “they lived in papist cities and lands.”107 In Amsterdam, Papist conventicles were “practically public.”108 Tweede remonstrantie, p. 7. Tweede remonstrantie, pp. 24–25. 104 Acta Zuid-Holland, vol. 2, p. 243. 105 NA OSA, no. 465, pp. 7, 13. 106 NA OSA, no. 464, p. 303. 107 Samuel Ampzing, Suppressie vande vermeynde vergaderinge der Jesuwyteszen door Urbanus VIII by den gedoge Gods Paus van Romen: met eenige poëtische-theologische bedenkingen (Haarlem, 1632), p. 3. 108 SAA NHG, KA, 15 July 1638. 102 103

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In 1636 Dordrecht’s Calvinists, whose anti-Catholic fervor was e­ xceptionally vehement, petitioned the States of Holland at length about Catholic activity.109 The principal complaint of the remonstrance was that in Dordrecht Catholic priests were getting “more and more impudent” (hoe langher hoe stouter) than ever before. They had the temerity to celebrate “their idolatrous mass daily in various houses, not secretly but in public, not by night but by clear day, not with a small number but with great crowds, sometimes as much as one hundred people, not only citizens but also households, more than once at the risk of uproar among the populace, and doing this without supervision or oversight from the citizens or also of the sheriff, carrying their books and preaching-stools under their arms.” Once again, the visibility of Catholic worship, the crowds it drew, the flaunting of liturgical paraphernalia openly under the eyes of godly burghers, was what stuck in the consistory’s craw. The Catholic missionaries were not obeying the rules of coexistence; they did not simply reside in the city as private citizens, but were known openly as “Roman ecclesiastical priests” whose friends were bold enough to warn the burgomasters that should their clergy be banned from the city, “notable families” from the Catholic community would leave as well. The missionaries and their klopjes insinuated themselves into households, preying on the weak and the ailing to seduce them away from true faith. The remonstrance then linked this audacity to the Republic’s current travails on the battlefront, insisting that “these Roman adherents, through such license, are more and more bastardized and estranged from our fatherland and its welfare, becoming so hispanized [gespaenjoliseert] that we have not only with our own eyes seen but with our own ears heard the pleasure and gladness they expressed when all of Holland’s Israel felt extreme grief at the enemy’s incursion into the Veluwe [in Gelderland], as if their salvation lay with our downfall and total destruction.” As worldly powers established by God, the remonstrance gravely concluded, the city’s government would eventually have to answer to a higher authority. In short, the fact that popery was visible was almost as bad as the fact that it existed at all. Reformed leaders more or less reconciled themselves grudgingly to the government’s toleration of Catholic belief during the course of the seventeenth century, but blatant manifestations of superstition they still fiercely denounced. Reformed hostility to Catholicism was SAD NHG, KA, 20 Jan. 1636; all the quotations following in this paragraph and the next are from this document.

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unremitting and constant in Holland’s confessional space; it could be equally harsh within the overlapping civic space controlled by the province’s magistracies. The 1636 pamphlet of the South-Holland synod even struck a patriotic note: thousands of “pious patriots” whose forefathers had sacrificed blood and goods to be freed from popish tyranny and to see true religion preached in the churches were grieved at the spread of idolatry throughout the land.110 The sheer visibility of Catholicism was seen as an intrusion into the civic sphere. In many cities, for example, Catholic folk streamed in from the countryside, parking their wagons openly in the market squares and then going to attend mass in a house church, scandalizing the local burghers.111 Priests resided openly in many cities, where their presence was well known to the magistrates; these “vassals of the Roman court” did not keep themselves “modest and still,” but rather traveled the entire land performing their idolatries.112 In one city, the Catholics had their house church next to the town hall, within the very earshot of the local aldermen; in another, they had the temerity to refuse to open the door of their church to the local sheriff and his deputies.113 Klopjes and priests insinuated themselves into families and households. In one town, the Catholics even staged devotional plays to seduce the simple.114 Worst of all, when pious citizens walked to services on Sundays carrying their Bibles and stools, the local Catholics would openly taunt and mock them in the streets, telling them that by going to the public church they were treading the steps to hell.115 The Dordrecht consistory learned to its consternation that at the recent funeral of one of the city’s notables “the superstitions of popery were publicly committed, that before the very eyes of the magistrates and sheriff candles stood burning by the body.”116 In Haarlem, reports reached an appalled consistory in late 1644 of Catholic gatherings in a house near the homes of two burgomasters and a preacher, taking place practically under their noses.117 The open sale of crucifixes and paternosters in the city market infuriated the Gouda consistory in 1646.118 Manifestations of superstition even invaded the churches on occasion; the Amsterdam Tweede remonstrantie, p. 7. Tweede remonstrantie, p. 7. 112 Tweede remonstrantie, p. 13. 113 Tweede remonstrantie, p. 15. 114 Tweede remonstrantie, p. 9. 115 Tweede remonstrantie, p. 13. 116 SAD NHG, KA, 11 March 1638. 117 NHA NHG, KA, 27 December 1644. 118 AHGG, KA, 20 September 1646. 110 111

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consistory objected in 1645 when it learned that the organist of the Old Church had revived an old, pre-Reformation Christmas tradition during one of his evening concerts: placing a creche on the altar and inviting people to come sing carols and “rock” the baby Jesus.119 The scandalized Delft brethren complained of popish images and prints hanging openly for sale in a local bookshop.120 Crosses or candles on coffins, kneeling at gravesides, processions, Catholic symbols on signboards – all such visible, material traces of Catholicism were particularly noisome to Reformed churchmen, and classes and synods objected to them time and again. Their visceral revulsion at what they saw as the physicality of idolatry remained as strong as ever; the Dordrecht elders complained about the “the blasphemous celebration of the papist mass, in which the tabernacle of God is insulted, when they present the great and glorious Son of God, King of Life, our Savior in the form of a wafer and piece of bread, that can be spoiled and violated by worms and vermin.”121 As long as such evidence of idolatry was so conspicuous their Reformed land would not look completely Reformed – it reminded Calvinist divines that the reformation of soul and society was a process at best uncompleted and at worst endangered. It also reminded them, more bitterly, that the Protestant magistracy that the revolt against Spain had won them evinced a barely lukewarm enthusiasm for such godly reformation. They feared the toleration of idolatry would lead to the state’s ruin, for it had aroused God’s wrath, “because the papists are tolerated in this land, because they register their names and addresses and under that freedom enter homes daily and perform masses and other idolatrous services, and seduce the simple more and more, making the subjects reject not only the true religion but also their lawful government . . . from this connivance comes tolerance, from tolerance comes possession and finally tyranny will result.”122 By tracing an arc from toleration to tyranny, the South-Holland synod both articulated and explained Reformed insecurities during the 1620s. The consistory of Amsterdam made a similar point in 1644; it wrote a long, doleful petition to that city’s burgomasters about the “exorbitances” of the Papists. In it, the brethren noted the contrast between their forefathers of the late sixteenth century – who had tried to suppress Catholicism wholesale  – and their own generations’s SAA NHG, KA, 12 January 1645; B.H. Klönne, “Amstelodamensia. Het kinderke wiegen in de Oude Kerk,” De Katholiek 104 (1899): 262–274. 120 GAD NHG, KA, 31 August 1640. 121 SAD NHG, KA, 8 February 1666. 122 Acta Zuid-Holland, vol. 1, pp. 146–147. 119

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laxity towards Catholic activity: “the zeal has cooled, we have become tepid and nearly frozen.” As if to illustrate that very diminution of ardor, the bulk of the consistory’s complaint focused in fact on the visibility rather than the presence of Catholicism in their midst: an “army” of klopjes in the streets; a city full of priests, Jesuits, and monks who do not keep “modest and still” but perform their idolatries openly and walk the streets in their vestments; the comings and goings to mass of large groups of lay Catholics as well as pilgrims visiting the city’s old medieval shrines; the granting of municipal citizenship rights to the popular priest Leonard Marius. What these Reformed worthies recited was a litany of impudences; time and again Catholics ignored the boundaries that public authorities (both political and religious) had legally and theoretically confined them to. Most tellingly, they complained that Catholics in Amsterdam behaved as if they had complete freedom and the Reformed belonged to an outlawed religion.123 The picture that the Amsterdam consistory painted was of a parallel religion, operating alongside and nearly as openly as the Reformed church. This fact may have galled the consistory more than any other. The perceived failure of the Amsterdam magistracy to enforce any legal constraints had allowed Catholicism in the city to function not only openly but competitively; in short, idolatry had penetrated civic space. The blame for all these troubles the South-Holland synod placed squarely at the feet of the corruption and the tolerationist practices of the governing authorities. The “accursed greed” of law officers allowed the Papists to “purchase the committing of their idolatries” through recognition money.124 Magistrates deliberately turned a blind eye to Catholic gatherings, and the Catholics benefitted from that toleration without fear of losing it  – worshiping as freely as if they lived in a popish land  – while Reformed preachers in the Spanish Netherlands suffered persecution. “How mistaken is our charity,” the synod lamented, when preachers are treated worse than priests.125 The magistrates’ notions of freedom rested on distorted foundations: Who would have believed, the synod noted despairingly, that the freedom God had once granted these lands would devolve into “nothing more than a liberty of speech, churches against churches, setting up altar against altar, preaching whatever one wants, slandering the Reformed religion . . . .”126 Liberty as the SAA NHG, KA, 31 March 1644. Tweede remonstrantie, p. 8. 125 Tweede remonstrantie, p. 21. 126 Tweede remonstrantie, p. 25. 123 124

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Reformed understood it was freedom from the tyranny and ignorance of ­superstition and idolatry and the freedom to worship God correctly and biblically. Instead, the freedom that currently prevailed in Holland was really license; any person could preach whatever he wished and mock the true church in the process. The Catholics exploited this confused state of affairs to the full. Toleration, as far as the Reformed were concerned, was a distortion of liberty and had little to do with the promises of the Revolt and Reformation. Worse still, it actively militated against those promises by undercutting the status and authority of the true church. As a result, the public church was in danger of becoming just one more sect among the many that governmental toleration had allowed to proliferate. The Reformed church felt the competition from these myriad religious subcultures keenly, especially the Catholic church. Its response to that perceived rivalry was to remind state and citizen where the lines between confessions and the lines between what was supposed to be openly allowed and privately secluded should be drawn. In the impudence of the Papists, in their violations of the public-private boundary, the Reformed perceived a grave menace to their privileged status as public church. Religion was the most important “pillar” (colomne) of the state, the authors declared, and had to be protected from falsehood and attack.127 The honor of the church and by extension the honor of God must not be mocked.128 Reformed leaders also feared that the attractions of a visible Catholicism would seduce innocent or simple souls. The easy enticements of idolatry and superstition, according to this line of thinking, always beguiled weak minds. Apostasy was a continuing threat; the unthinking acceptance of even vestiges of Catholic practice, the South-Holland synod opined in 1626, only feeds and strengthens superstition.129 Popish impudence was not only offensive, it was also dangerous. The Dordrecht consistory described Catholicism as “a serpent . . . in the bosom of our dear fatherland.”130 Hence, the Reformed church’s insistent, repeated demands to civil authorities – from sheriff to States – that all public traces of Catholic activity be vigorously suppressed. The responsiveness of such authorities varied widely of course, so the public church resolved to counter the blandishments of popery aggressively. In good Reformed fashion, church divines regarded preaching as their principal weapon in this battle. The

Tweede remonstrantie, p. 37. Tweede remonstrantie, p. 9. 129 Acta Zuid-Holland, vol. 1, p. 190. 130 SAD NHG, KA, 8 February 1666. 127 128

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classis of Amsterdam reminded its ministers to “preach against popery, disprove thoroughly its principal arguments, refute completely its circulated books, visit households often, and if possible, confront the priests or at least the papists.”131 Preachers had to make clear to their listeners that the attractions of idolatry were an illusion; as the South-Holland synod put it in 1651, “in the sermons one should paint the naked horrors of popery before the eyes of the congregation, warning them to be on their guard.”132 Words written as well as spoken were to be employed in this campaign; the Amsterdam classis resolved that “short and concise tracts against popery be written and be distributed to every congregation, who through the reading of them will be armed with weapons not only to reject evil but to shut the mouths of opponents.”133 Prayer, catechization, and the lobbying of public authorities completed the arsenal of words that the Reformed employed to counter the temptations of idolatry. Their response to the confessional challenge posed by Catholicism in their midst was thus chiefly rhetorical. This war of words became ingrained and subsumed into the larger “discussion culture” of the Republic, where conflicts and disagreements among plural groups in society found expression (and sometimes resolution) in open, public debate.134 The hostility that marked Holland’s confessional space found an outlet (and arguably, a release) in the relatively wide-ranging discursive culture that ­characterized the province’s cultural life. In the second half of the seventeenth century the Reformed’s rhetorical antagonism to Catholicism became more muted. Anti-Catholic sentiment remained strong in Reformed circles, but the tone of what they called their “old and ancient” complaints suggested that they understood that their efforts were increasingly futile.135 At a meeting of the synod of South-Holland in 1658, the classis of Delft sighed that despite sixty years of protests, the States continued to do nothing about Catholics.136 Reformed remonstrances to the government about Catholic activity started to sound almost plaintive: In 1665, the synod expressed a fervent wish “out of their innermost hearts and with sighs to God” that a SAA NHG, CA, 3 October 1639. Acta Zuid-Holland, vol. 3, p. 235. 133 SAA NHG, CA, 3 October 1639. 134 Willem Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, Bevochten eendracht. Nederlandse cultuur in Europese context (The Hague: Sdu, 1999), pp. 218–224. 135 Acta Zuid-Holland, vol 4, pp. 254–255. 136 Acta Zuid Holland, vol. 4, pp. 75–76. 131 132

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“sovereign and effective political solution could be employed to pluck out these dangerous weeds.”137 After 1660, much of the fire in their complaints dwindled as an era of general, grudging coexistence seemed to take hold. The recorded frequency of complaints at ecclesiastical gatherings about popery diminished. The pensionary Johan de Witt’s regime of “true freedom,” which ruled the Republic without a stadholder between 1650 and 1672, was largely unsympathetic to anti-Catholic lobbying by the Reformed church, the great war against Catholic Spain had come to an end, the Republic was enjoying the zenith of its prosperity, and the public church was discovering new theological enemies in the guise of Cartesians, Socinians, and Spinozists.138 Perhaps the Reformed were growing resigned; an undertone of disillusionment crept into their protestations. A few years later, the classes of South-Holland complained to the same synod “out of their innermost hearts and with sighs to God” about popish impudence.139 The intensity of their sectarianism was as strong as it had ever been, but Reformed divines seemed to be reaching the bitter conclusion that their years of anti-Catholic lobbying were bearing little fruit: “And further [the classes] complained out of a deep feeling in their souls about the daily growth and increase in the soul-, church-, land- and all-destroying idolatry of popery, not wishing other than that once and for all an energetic zeal would rise up for the banning, prevention or at least disruption of the same.”140 The exasperation evident in this synodal complaint from 1664 indicated the Reformed leaders’ unstated recognition that Catholic belief and practice would remain tolerated within Holland’s polity and society; no great effort at suppression was forthcoming from the government. Idolatry would not be stopped, and pluralism would remain the dominant religious characteristic of their promised land. The Reformed church’s rhetorical anti-Catholicism succeeded in sharpening its confessional profile but otherwise had little practical result. By century’s end, preachers still found themselves having to accept the priests in their midst. Perhaps they had grown resigned to the political reality that Holland’s regents were willing to sacrifice the defense of true religion upon the altar of public order. The Catholic priests working in the Holland Mission during the seventeenth century did not themselves indulge in widespread public polemic against the Reformed church. Given the official illegality of their activities, Acta Zuid-Holland, vol 4, p. 352. Israel, Dutch Republic, pp. 637–645. 139 Acta Zuid-Holland, vol. 4, p. 352. 140 Acta Zuid-Holland, vol. 4, p. 319. 137 138

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to do so would have caused difficulties; their vicars from Sasbout Vosmeer onward advised them to work discreetly. They were, however, rhetorically supported by the large amount of anti-Reformed propaganda produced by the Catholic hierarchy in the southern Netherlands, usually from presses in Antwerp or Brussels.141 Catholic books and pamphlets produced in the south did in fact circulate widely in the Republic’s relatively open publishing market. Much of this was devotional literature – missals and the like – but some of it was also anti-Reformed polemic and satire by such Catholic writers as the playwright Joost van den Vondel and the poet Jan Vos.142 On a few occasions, the Apostolic vicars themselves published apologetical literature. Despite Reformed complaints, the States of Holland and the States-General seldom exercised censorship of Catholic books or printers.143 Nevertheless, the missionaries working in Holland were not really in a position to answer directly the hostile rhetoric of the Reformed church. They could of course preach to their own congregations about the dangers of heresy, but they had no equivalent public platform from which to counter Reformed accusations of superstition and idolatry. This did not mean, however, that the Catholic leadership of the Holland Mission did not develop its own rhetorical portrait of its opponents. Indeed, it matched its Reformed counterparts in confessional space in constructing a useful ideological image of its adversaries. This image reinforced Catholic identity and solidarity in a sometimes hostile environment. As such, it became an integral part of the internal confessionalization of the Catholic church in Holland by drawing very clear distinctions between itself and other churches – especially its chief antagonist, the Reformed. If “idolatry” became a Reformed codeword for Catholicism, then Dutch Catholics, following the rest of the Counter-Reformation church, had their own blanket term to dismiss their confessional antagonists: heresy. They lived, after all, “under the yoke of heretics” or in lands “ruled” or P. Polman, “Roomse en antiroomse strijdliteratuur uit de dagen der Republiek,” Studia Catholica 12 (1936): 89–104. For a specific example of one of Antwerp’s more prolific polemicists, see Joep van Gennip, “Een roomse strijder met pen en preek. De Antwerpse controversist Cornelius Hazart S.J. (1617–1690),” Tijdschift voor Nederlandse Kerkgeschiedenis 10 (2007): 100–109. An exhaustive list of such literature can be found in Bibliotheca Catholica Neerlandica Impressa 1500–1727 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954). 142 Willem J. C. Buitendijk, Het calvinisme in de spiegel van de Zuidnederlandse literatuur der Contra-Reformatie (Groningen: Wolters, 1942), pp. 68–77. 143 Ingrid Weekhout, Boekencensuur in de Noordelijke Nederlanden. De vrijheid van de drukpers in de zeventiende eeuw (The Hague: Sdu, 1998), pp. 98–100. 141

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“occupied” by heretics. The Calvinists were heretics because they had rejected the authority of the true and ancient church; the label underscored the basic illegitimacy of Reformed Protestantism. By breaking allegiance with the universal church, the Calvinists had demonstrated both error and obstinacy. They were heretics not only because they were wrong but also because they were rebellious. Heresy was therefore an act of betrayal, of infidelity toward the true church. This rhetorical stance echoed the Reformed charge that Catholics were insolent, and indeed both sides hurled similar invective at each other. Each side was wrong and each was disobedient; what differed was each side’s conception of where ultimate religious truth and authority lay. For its part, the Holland Mission never ceased to emphasize the illegitimacy of the Reformed church and the regime that supported it. In the early years after 1572, a common Catholic epithet for the Reformed was “beggars” (geuzen). This was of course the sobriquet that the original aristocratic leaders of the Revolt had adopted in the 1560s as an ironic badge of pride, but their opponents continued to use it as a term of abuse for the troops under the command of William of Orange.144 In his diary, Brother Wouter Jacobsz often employed the word, usually when he was recounting a particularly gruesome tale of military atrocity. Long after the theater of war had moved out of Holland, the political connotations of “­beggar” remained in Dutch Catholic discourse. In 1592, for example, Sasbout Vosmeer’s father Michael wrote his son from Delft warning him that plans were afoot among politicians in The Hague to apprehend him; Sasbout’s name had come up in discussions in the home of “an important beggar (een groote guese).”145 Over time the term evolved in popular Catholic parlance into a synonym for Reformed Protestants in general; one of Vosmeer’s correspondents sought guidance about whether Catholics were permitted to attend “beggar” weddings.146 The biography of the Haarlem klopje Ida Goverts described her Delft father as “a beggar and from a very heretical family”; another spiritual maiden successfully prevented her mother from attending the “beggar church.” Still another account has a klopje’s father having some of his children baptized “in the beggar manner (op syn gues)” and others baptized Catholic.147 At least in the first half of the seventeenth century, “beggar” was a common term lay Catholics often Henk van Nierop, “Edelman, bedelman. De verkeerde wereld van het Compromis der edelen,” BMGN 107 (1992): 1–27. 145 UA OBC, no. 1, 2 July 1592. 146 UA OBC, no. 2, 6 August 1595. 147 Oly, vol. 3, fols. 312r, 358r, 338r. 144

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used amongst themselves to refer to their Reformed ­adversaries. Its use seems to have died out, though, by the time the war against Spain drew to a close. “Beggar” was a term associated with an older, more polarized era, when confessional passions ran much hotter than they did amidst the growing prosperity and social stability of the Golden Age. It was a wartime label that lost much of it relevance once the war ended. The heretical epithet, however, was used much more commonly by the Holland Mission throughout the period. The correspondence and reports of the Mission all uniformly referred to their confessional opponents as “heretics.” This term was used without much elaboration or nuance; the Protestant Reformation was but the latest chapter in the universal church’s long history of dealing with theological opposition.148 The Catholic furrier and sometime poet Hermanus Verbeeck of Amsterdam, for example, traced the lineage of the Calvinist heretics back to the ­medieval Albigensians.149 Every faithful Catholic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries knew who the heretics were and that they should be shunned as much as possible.150 A catechism of the 1620s defined heresy as “great errors and falsehoods that the devil adorns with plausibility.” One could recognize heretics because they destroy churches, altars, statues, and cloisters.151 Thus, their denunciations of “idolatry’ were one of the telltale marks of their heresy. Calvinist heresy posed a mortal threat to true religion and the divine authority of the church. In the confessional arena, Catholic sectarians denounced their antagonists with the same vocabulary as their Calvinist counterparts. The Catholic chronicler Franciscus Dusseldorpius likened Protestant heresy to a “cancer” and a “serpent.”152 Calvinism was also insidious; Catholic leaders suspected that the Reformed diaconates established by the early seventeenth century in most Holland towns to provide relief to the poor were attempts to buy the loyalty of less fortunate Similar themes could be found in French Catholic polemic against the Huguenots; see Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 36. 149 Hermanus Verbeeck, Memoriaal ofte mijn levensraijsinghe, ed. Jeroen Blaak (Hilversum: Verloren, 1999), p. 25. 150 Johann Gamberoni, Der Verkehr der Katholiken mit den Häretikern. Grundsätzliches nach dem Moralisten von der Mittes des 16. bis zur Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Brixen: Weger, 1950), p 46. 151 Christiaen van den Berghe, Catholycke Catechismus ofte kort onderwys van de Christelycke leeringhe (Den Bosch: Jan Scheffer, 1629), pp. 18, 21. 152 Uittreksel uit Francisci Dusseldorpii Annales 1566–1616, ed. R Fruin (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1893), p. 169. 148

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Catholics and recruit them into the heretical fold.153 In his “Insinuatio” of 1602, the Apostolic vicar Sasbout Vosmeer underscored the sinister, conniving nature of the “heretical ministers”: wherever they gained the upper hand they stood poised to introduce theocracy. He further added darkly, “It is well-known to me that the ministers of the heretics have, besides their synods, a book of ordinances and doctrines, which they are eager to introduce wherever they prevail. These take entirely the form of the Genevan tyranny and would displease most of the regents.”154 The Catholic catechism taught its readers that these heretics were “wolves” and “snakes” who were especially dangerous because they pretended to be Christians.155 The same organic and bestial metaphors peppered each side’s depiction of the other. Furthermore, the Calvinists were obstinate; indeed, the label “heretic” implied rebellion against proper spiritual authority. While the Calvinists accused the idolaters of rejecting the authority of the new regime’s ecclesiastical polity, Catholics accused the heretics of denying the divine authority of the universal, apostolic church. This church had a pedigree, rooted in scripture and centuries of tradition, the Reformed could not hope to match. The Apostolic vicar Johannes van Neercassel wrote in 1670 that a Calvinist can never be certain because his sect can rely on no infallible authority. As for the doctrine of sola scriptura, this was no comfort to simple, unlettered people, Neercassel opined; for ordinary Reformed folk there was no assurance.156 The Catholic convert Petrus de la Faille called predestination a “hard and comfortless doctrine.”157 Converts to Catholicism, such as the former Reformed preacher Petrus de la Faille, often cited their reading of the ancient church fathers as a reason for their change of heart.158 As for the claim of reforming the church, the Leiden Carmelite Petrus a Matre Dei dismissed his confessional rivals as “pseudo-reformed,” who had not cleansed the churches of idolatry but instead had profaned them by stripping them of sacred altars and ornaments.159 Time and again Catholic writers reiterated the Parker, Faith on the Margins, p. 229. “Insinuatio,” p. 161. 155 Van den Berghe, pp. 18–20. 156 Joan Baptiste van Neercassel, Bevestigingh in’t geloof, en troost in vervolgingh (Brussel: Françoys Foppens, 1670), pp. 23–24. 157 Bekeeringe van P. de la Faille, predikant te Koudekerk, uyt de Calvinissche ketterye, tot het H. Katholyk geloof, der H. Katholyke Roomsche Kerke door het lesen der Oudvaders (Antwerp: P. J. Pays, 1764), pp. 15–16. 158 Bekeeringe van P. de la Faille, pp. 1–2. 159 Petrus a Matre Dei, Clara relatio, p. 16. 153 154

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fundamental illegitimacy of the Reformed Church; it was an innovation masquerading as a return to the original church. Proof of Protestantism’s heresy could be found in its inherently schismatic nature, thundered the Franciscan missionary Arnoldus ab Ischa in a 1595 sermon: “they are never united: instead they fight with each other with such bitter hate that every state, every land, yea almost every city suffers from divided faith and religion, the one banning, cursing and maledicting the other . . . .”160 The much-vaunted internationalism of the Reformed movement did not impress the Franciscan. Were the Calvinists more unified, he asked rhetorically: “Not at all, and therefore they too are not Christ’s disciples or his church. I will not relate how different the Calvinists in France are from the Calvinists in England, and so forth. You see it here in the Netherlands with the Calvinists in Holland and Utrecht, lands and cities that border each other . . . one party of Calvinists refuses to go to church with the other party of Calvinists . . . ..”161 The internecine squabbles that plagued the Reformed church in its first decades were proof of its inherent disorder and illegitimacy. Some Catholic writers twisted anti-Catholic polemic on its head by suggesting that the new ecclesiastical order was itself corrupt. The Flemish pamphleteer Arnout van Geluwe, who had lived for a time in Holland, claimed that the Reformed clergy were venal and demanded exorbitant payments for everything they did. They only visited ailing church members who were wealthy, and they expected a good meal and a glass of wine in return.162 For propaganda purposes, anti-clericalism was clearly a two-way street. In general, the image of Reformed preachers in Catholic quarters was one of zealous, merciless sectaries who substituted a harsh ecclesiastical regime for true spiritual authority, who taught false doctrine and heretically scorned centuries of ecclesiastical and political tradition. Their erroneous beliefs had caused them to overthrow legitimate monarchical authority. They were therefore traitors in both the religious and the temporal senses of the term. Being a disestablished, minority church, however, required Catholicism to maintain a delicate relationship with the heresy by which it was surrounded. Continued public Reformed hostility meant that whatever toleration Dutch Catholics may have enjoyed was at best unreliable. The leaders of the Holland Mission urged the faithful to have as little to do with the Hesse, “Pater Arnoldus,” p. 377. Hesse, “Pater Arnoldus,” p. 380. 162 Arnout van Geluwe, Kort verhael van een achthienjarighe Hollantsche reyse, ghewandelt van een vlaemsch boer (Antwerp, 1650), p. 9. 160 161

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heretics as possible, but recognized that in a crowded society like Holland’s complete segregation was not feasible. Priests and preachers in particular were to avoid each other. In his “Insinuatio,” the Vicar Sasbout Vosmeer had cautioned his missionaries to refrain from traffic with their opponents. They must act modestly and circumspectly, not trusting heretics, avoiding disputations with them – although if they did find themselves drawn into debate they should simply reiterate Catholic eucharistic doctrine and avoid invective.163 Confessional space was best trod exceedingly lightly. His successor Rovenius likewise counseled priests to persuade more by example than by confrontation.164 Still, priests expected that a certain degree of engagement was unavoidable and that they should know their enemy. Surviving library inventories of seventeenth-century Dutch priests suggest that many of them owned works by Protestant authors.165 The Carmelite Petrus a Matre Dei reported in 1657 that some missionaries trained their most promising catechism pupils in the forensic arts of disputation with Protestants.166 Likewise, in the later seventeenth century, some seminarians trained at the Collegio Urbano in Rome, the missionary school of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, where they learned to live and work in a hostile environment.167 Even if it did not seek out confrontation in the confessional arena, the Mission tried to prepare for it. Reformed leaders, on the other hand, seem from early on to have at least considered the idea of engaging in direct disputations with their clerical rivals. Formal disputations originated in medieval universities, and such occasions were common in Protestant intellectual and academic culture; in the 1570s and 1580s, for example, Reformed preachers staged a number of disputations with the freethinking humanist Dirck Volkertsz Coornhert.168 Already, at the national synod of Middelburg in 1581, the question arose whether to engage Catholics and Mennonites in public debates; some of the delegates apparently believed that such a formal exchange of views would win the Reformed Church more “Insinuatio,” pp. 175–177. J. Visser, Rovenius und seine Werke. Beitrag zur Geschichte der nordniederländischen katholischen Frömmigkeit in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1966) pp. 59–60. 165 Willem Frijhoff, “Vier Hollandse priester bibliotheken uit de zeventiende eeuw,” Ons Geestelijk Erf 51 (1977): 205. 166 Petrus a Matre Dei, Clara relatio, p. 101. 167 Gian Ackermans, “Propagandisten in de Missio Hollandica,” Trajecta 6 (1997): 233, 238. 168 Marianne Roobol, Disputation by Decree. The Public Disputations between Reformed Ministers and Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert as Instruments of Religious Policy during the Dutch Revolt (1577–1583) (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 61–66. 163 164

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adherents.169 In the early 1590s, various classes in North-Holland where numerous Catholics lived again raised the subject of disputes with priests “to confront them once and for all,” but their provincial synod, perhaps sensing that this might stir up confessional passions rather than resolve differences, declined to pursue the idea.170 Twice more during the course of the seventeenth century delegates to the South-Holland synod floated the proposal during periods when frustration with Catholic license and government inactivity was particularly high – in 1639 and 1651. In both instances it considered the suggestion of disputations along with a host of other tactics such as printing anti-Catholic works, frequent house visitations, more aggressive preaching, and generally increased vigilance against Catholic superstition.171 Despite ministerial discussions and clerical preparation, there is very little record of actual debates between priests and preachers in Holland during this period.172 During the Twelve Years Truce, there were cases of northern Reformed preachers crossing the opened border to hold debates with Catholic priests in the Spanish Netherlands. Disputations also seem to have occurred more frequently in the southern Generality Lands conquered by the Stadholder Frederick Henry, where Reformed preachers found themselves missionizing to an overwhelmingly Catholic population. The Reformed consistory of the North-Brabant village of Halsteren north of Bergen-op-Zoom, for example, authorized a series of debates in 1630 between one of its ministers and a local Premonstratensian priest, largely at the instigation of the wife of the local sheriff. The debate bogged down on the theological question of transubstantiation, and neither side came away convinced.173 A Jesuit working in Rotterdam in the 1630s reportedly preached semi-public polemical sermons attended by some Protestants and which resulted in at least one conversion.174 Acta van de Nederlandsche synoden der zestiende eeuw, Rutgers, F.L., ed (Utrecht: Kemink, 1889), p. 415. 170 Acta der Provinciale en Particuliere Synoden 1572–1620, vol. 1, pp. 161–162, 164–165, 216. 171 Acta Zuid-Holland, vol. 2, pp. 216–217; vol. 3, p. 234. 172 A contemporary Mennonite pamphlet described a debate between Catholics and Mennonites in Haarlem in 1614. P. J. A. Nissen, De katholieke polemiek tegen de Dopers. Reacties van katholieke theologen op de doperse beweging in de Nederlanden (1530–1650) (Enschede: Quick Service Drukkerij, 1988), p. 215. 173 Th. A. Fafié, “Dispuut tussen de Norbertijn Mattheus de Beer en de gereformeerde predikant Nathan Vay in 1630,” Analecta Praemonstratensia 6 (1985): 52–63; Charles de Mooij, Geloof kan bergen verzetten. Reformatie en katholieke herleving te Bergen op Zoom 1577–1795 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998), pp. 270–271. 174 A. H. L. Hensen, Het Roomsch-Katholieke Rotterdam (Rotterdam: W. Nevens, 1906), p. 77. 169

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In the province of Holland, however, where the Reformed church held the institutional and legal upper hand, evidence of disputations is scant. The Reformed classis of Amsterdam complained in 1619 of Catholics in Hilversum taunting local Reformed church members into having debates with them.175 A Jesuit chronicle of 1669, in what might have been an instance of hagiographical fancy, claimed that before their murder in Brielle in 1572 the Franciscan martyrs of Gorcum were forced by their captors to debate a Reformed preacher. This was because, the chronicler explained, “beggar preachers were never at ease with their consciences and always tested the truth with debates, even with each other.” Supposedly the argument came down to the authority of the Bible; the Franciscans declared that its authority derived from the church, a position the preacher was unable to rebut.176 In a few cases, some Reformed church members who were flirting with Catholicism told their consistories they were interested in hearing from both sides. In 1630, Weijntge Vlacken of Gouda suggested to the elders anxious to win her back that they hold a disputation with some Catholics in her presence; the consistory seems to have declined.177 The Leiden consistory in 1639 offered to re-educate the stubborn apostate Maritgen Jansz in the beliefs of the true church, even in the presence of the priest who originally “misled” her.178 Reformed church members were also behind the 1656 debate between the Leiden preacher Petrus Cabeljau and Christiaen Vermeulen, a priest in the nearby village of Stompwijk.179 Several Leiden congregants had gone to Stompwijk to hear Vermeulen’s sermons and view the celebration of the eucharist. They asked him if he could prove the truth of the mass; he said he could do so from the Bible. The Leideners then asked their preacher, Cabeljau, if he would be willing to discuss doctrine with Vermeulen in their presence. Cabeljau reluctantly agreed, and after much back and forth about time and place, the minister journeyed to Stompwijk and met the priest in the latter’s study amidst onlookers from both faiths. After still more argument about how many witnesses should be present, the disputation got underway. For the next nine hours, until evening fell, the two clerics discussed and disputed the Bible and the SAA NHG, CA, 8 April 1619. Cornelis Hazart, Kerckelycke historie van de geheele werelt (Antwerp: Michiel Cnobbeert, 1669), pp. 105–106. 177 AHGG, KA, 10 August 1630. 178 RAL NHG, KA, 24 June 1639. 179 On Vermeulen, see J. C. van der Loos, “De pastoors der statie Soeterwoude na de Hervorming. Christianus Vermeulen 1639–1658,” BBH 27 (1903): 126–154. 175 176

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church fathers, without anyone apparently coming away convinced or converted. Vermeulen invited Cabeljau to stay the night, but the preacher had no desire to remain overnight in a house “that crawled with klopjes and other such folk,” so he departed.180 More such colloquies may have taken place between priests and preachers; Holland was a crowded province, and Calvinist and Catholic normally ran into each other in the bustle of daily life. A Reformed deacon in Haarlem complained of being accosted by a young priest in his town quarter; the priest spoke slanderously and insolently of both the Bible and Reformed ministers.181 The Amsterdam consistory reported that a priest and two lay Catholics had impudently walked in and out of one of the city’s Reformed churches during service “giggling and laughing.”182 A few years later, the same consistory learned that some of the city’s Catholics were holding their own disputations (the record does not indicate whether non-Catholics were present) where they discussed various points of doctrine, sometimes in groups of forty or fifty at a time; at consistorial urging the burgomasters put an end to them.183 Such face-to-face disputations were extremely rare instances of confessional space – which was largely cultural – becoming physically located and embodied. These encounters aside, the formal relationship between priests and preachers in Golden Age Holland seems to have been one largely of distance. Officially, they condemned each other as idolaters and heretics and hurled large amounts of sectarian invective against each other. It could hardly have been otherwise in a post-Reformation age where religious schism taught committed Christians to think confessionally, and in a young state that chose to identify itself at least partially in opposition to the old church. In this confessional space clergy on both sides had the greatest stake in the maintenance of that sense of difference. The Holland Mission could hardly have survived and flourished without that polemical armor, and the Reformed church had anti-Catholicism bred into its very bones. The competing images and narratives that each side constructed of itself and of its antagonist served to preserve a sense of religious identity in the face of the other. Thus, priests and preachers created rhetorical and institutional cultures that reinforced the confessional divide. Within Petrus Cabeljau, Stompwycker Handelingen, oft aenteyckeningen van D. Petrus Cabeljau, aengaende ‘t gepasserde tusschen hem en Christiaen Vermeulen, roomsch mispriester op den 2 junij 1655 (‘s-Gravenhage, 1655), pp. 2–4, 8–11, 43. 181 NHA NHG, KA, 22 September 1654. 182 SAA NHG, KA, 7 September 1645. 183 SAA NHG, KA, 6 April, 4 May 1651. 180

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this most direct, ecclesiastical, and clerical space the relationship between Catholics and Calvinists in Holland was one of hostility. However, their violence towards each other was linguistic rather than physical; indeed, this rhetorical violence may have served as an outlet for antagonism that made physical attack less necessary.184 In the confessional arena these two churches and their respective clergies were officially enemies. The likes of the priest and preacher Goswinus Johannis, blithely crossing confessional space to minister to both faith communities, was not to be seen again in seventeenth-century Holland.

On the social utility of polemic, ee Matheson, The Rhetoric of the Reformation, pp. 9–10.

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3 Persecution and Toleration

In fact, tolerance (the attitude) takes many different forms, and toleration (the practice) can be arranged in different ways. Michael Walzer, On Toleration1

According to the eighteenth-century priest and chronicler Ignatius Walvis, Catholics in his home town of Gouda had found practicing their faith to be a sometimes expensive proposition. Among Holland’s towns in the early 1600s, Gouda had a reputation for permissiveness in religious matters. That tradition of de facto toleration ended by 1620, however, after the Stadholder Maurice of Nassau had purged the town government of all but the most reliable supporters of religious and political orthodoxy.2 From then on, according to Walvis’s chronicle, Gouda’s bailiff (baljuw), Anthony Cloots, demanded more and more payments of so-called recognition money from the resident priests who served the city’s Catholic community. Paying out this combination of fine and bribe to local law officers was a familiar enough practice to Gouda’s Catholics, who had been doing it for the last thirty years (to the tune of some 400 guilders per year), but Cloots was aggressive and intemperate in his demands, harassing the local priest Petrus Purmerent repeatedly.3 With the appointment Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. xi. P. H. A. M. Abels, “Van ketternest tot bolwerk van rechtzinnigheid,” in Duizend jaar Gouda. Een stadsgeschiedenis, eds. P.H.A.M. Abels et al. (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), p. 433. 3 GHA, Archief van de Oud-Katholieke Parochie van de H. Johannes de Doper, no. 597, [Ignatius Walvis], “Goudsche en andere daartoe dienende katolieke kerk-zaken door I. W. pastoor van der Goude anno 1709,” fol. 28v. I am grateful to the Old Catholic Church parish of Saint John the Baptist in Gouda for permission to consult and cite 1 2

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of the zealous and sectarian Anthoni van der Wolff as the new bailiff in 1631, the perturbation of Catholics grew still worse. This judicial harassment continued until 1644, when Van der Wolff and four local priests negotiated an arrangement of 700 guilders per year in exchange for toleration.4 Walvis attributed this change of heart to superstitious anxiety on Van der Wolff’s part: Not long before the bailiff had broken up a secret mass; at a dinner party the next day he mockingly drank wine out of the eucharistic chalice, only to discover later that night that he had blood in his urine, “a condition that plagued him the rest of his life.”5 Things quieted down for a few years, but the respite proved temporary; by 1649, Van der Wolff was demanding still more money, fining the priest Willem de Swaan an extra 100 rijksdaalders for hosting a conventicle in his home. Such an uproar within the Catholic community followed that Gouda’s burgomasters – worried about civic tranquility  – felt obliged to step in, and insisted that priests and bailiff adhere to the original agreement of 1644. Arbitration by the town government proved, however, to be of temporary effectiveness. Sporadic harassment of Gouda’s Catholics lingered on for the next decade, until another monetary agreement with the bailiff, reached at the town government’s instigation in 1657, finally brought police interruptions of Catholic services to an end.6 The back and forth between Catholics and law officers in Gouda during the seventeenth century points to a key feature of early modern Dutch religious toleration: It was a process rather than a condition. The relationship between Catholics and Reformed in civic space – the physical and social communities where they lived side by side – was a delicate and fluid set of circumstances that was sensitive to the ebb and flow of national and local politics and dependent upon the goodwill (or lack of it) on the part of local authorities, Reformed consistories, and immediate neighbors. This process of toleration and accommodation was continually subject to disruption, negotiation, change, or evolution; it could not be counted upon. Civic space was where Calvinists and Catholics encountered each other as communities rather than as churches. The freewheeling and violent rhetoric that characterized this manuscript. On Walvis himself, see Caspar Gijzen, “Ignatius Walvis (1653–1714). Verdediging tegen de vijanden van de Oud-Bisschoppelijke cleresie in handschriften en pamfletten,” De Schatkamer 6 (1992): 11–36. 4 Walvis, fols. 39r, 42r, 64v, 68r. 5 Walvis, fols. 66v–67r. 6 Abels, “Van Ketternest,” p. 443.

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confessional space could have no counterpart here, lest the social ­fabric disintegrate completely. Therefore, magistracies were responsible for managing religious coexistence within this civic space, and they could do it inconsistently and haphazardly. There was no predictable pattern to the social, political, and religious climate in which Holland’s Catholics found themselves living and worshiping after 1572. Sometimes they, like other dissenting religious groups, enjoyed a degree of liberty that astonished contemporaries; conversely, sometimes the persecution of religious minorities in Holland mirrored the harshness of other, more sectarian European regimes. Generally, the situation settled down somewhere in a gray middle ground “between the poles of toleration and repression,” as one historian put it.7 Or, as another scholar observed, the Dutch Republic was too tolerant to force Catholics to become Protestants, but not tolerant enough to permit Catholics completely free exercise of their faith.8 Whatever sufferance Catholics experienced in this civic space was subject to constant renegotiation and readjustment; inconstancy was a permanent feature of their condition within the communal spaces they occupied. That very fluidity makes the term “toleration” problematic. In its modern incarnation the word has taken on connotations of inclusion and approval. It has perhaps become too value-laden or teleological; we may well agree with Willem Frijhoff that the muddled and protean religious situation in the Dutch Republic might be better served by a more neutral and less Whiggish descriptor such as “coexistence.”9 Whatever freedoms Holland’s Catholics enjoyed the regime bestowed reservedly and with no hint of approbation, while from the Reformed perspective these freedoms implied altogether too much acceptance on the part of the state. Toleration, then, was in the eye of the beholder. In its stricter and more early modern sense, however, “toleration” means forbearance or sufferance; permitting what might not in fact be approved of. This more patronizing connotation comes closer to describing early modern Dutch Catholics’ relationship to public authority  – both temporal and ecclesiastical – within civic space, though it does not capture that relationship’s shifting and malleable nature. Toleration could be a question Michael A. Mullett, The Catholic Reformation (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 169. P.W.F.M. Hamans, Geschiedenis van de Katholieke Kerk in Nederland I: Van missionering tot herstel van de hierarchie in 1853 (Brugge: Tabor, 1992), p. 269. 9 Willem Frijhoff, “The Threshold of toleration,” in Embodied Belief. Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), p. 48. 7 8

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of degree.10 The Dutch Republic “tolerated” its Catholic citizens in that it allowed them to worship within certain parameters and did not force them to convert to Reformed Protestantism. Toleration, in this sense, was a power relationship. The Reformed church, which despite its public status was itself a minority confession with its own complicated relationship to the state, had to accept this toleration, but it did so uneasily. The mechanics of this kind of confessional accommodation, so conditionally bestowed and so unfavorably regarded, were very complex indeed. Civic space would prove to be the most unsettled arena in which Catholics and Calvinists existed. The Dutch Republic was both celebrated and vilified by contemporaries (including many of its own citizens) as a haven of religious toleration. The cultural construct of “tolerant Holland” has continued down to the present age of prostitution and soft drugs, though it has been tested by the recent rise of militant Islamic radicalism. It is not the aim of this chapter to argue for any essentialist understanding of the religious culture of the Dutch Republic, that it was somehow intrinsically more tolerant than any of its neighbors, though that image has persisted through the centuries.11 Instead, it will explore some of the dynamics of religious coexistence within Holland’s civic spaces; in this civic space, toleration and persecution are not so much political or social values as two possible tactical responses to this society’s prevailing fact of life – its multiconfessionalism. Understood this way, “toleration” sheds its modernist overtones and functions instead as a term to describe mechanics rather than ideologies. That is not to say that the early modern era did not have its dreamers: Some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century minds imagined utopias where religious comity and liberty prevailed. In the late sixteenth century, many of Holland’s urban regents had hoped that the formal transition to Reformed Protestantism would result in a new public and non­confessional Christian church open to all citizens, but the more sectarianminded leadership of the Reformed church thwarted any such efforts.12

Willem Frijhoff, “Religious toleration in the United Provinces: from ‘case’ to ‘model,’” in Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, eds. R. Po-Chia Hsia and H.F.K. van Nierop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 28. 11 On the history of this cultural construct, see Benjamin J. Kaplan, “‘Dutch’ religious tolerance: celebration and revision,” in Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, pp. 8–26. 12 James D. Tracy, “Public Church, Gemeente Christi or volkskerk: Holland’s Reformed Church in civil and ecclesiastical perspective,” in Die Reformation in Deutschland und 10

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Dutch humanists such as Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert and Hugo Grotius may have dreamed of an open, harmonious, and pluralistic Christian society, but they were in the distinct minority in an age that believed that social harmony was best preserved by spiritual conformity. There was a wide-ranging debate about religious toleration among Dutch scholars, philosophers, jurists, and theologians during the Golden Age, but this theoretical discussion never found its counterpart in actual practice.13 The toleration that Holland’s Catholics were granted scarcely resembled what these visionaries had in mind. The humanists’ vision of toleration as a philosophic ideal remained just that, an ideal. Because of the ­confessional polarizations bred by the sixteenth-century Reformation, toleration was regarded as a “loser’s creed,” as Andrew Pettegree has put it; a plea by dispossessed religious minorities for protection.14 As the losers of the Dutch revolt and Reformation, Catholics in Holland found themselves the objects of a haphazard, unideological, and limited religious accommodation meted out by powerful urban magistracies. This was what passed for toleration in their world. The Dutch Republic was an accidental state, the unforeseen consequence of revolt and reformation; it was born as an alliance of separate provincial sovereignties and retained a deeply confederate character throughout its history. What few national legal-constitutional structures it developed were decentralized and attenuated. Religious policy hardly existed in any sort of systematic way. The 1579 Union of Utrecht stipulated only two conditions to the new commonwealth’s religious regime: freedom of conscience and local regulation of church affairs.15 These two religious provisions were grounded in considerations both ideological (freedom of belief, local rights) and practical (preserving the alliance of rebels by delegating thorny religious problems to localities). In turn, these two stipulations in the Union – originally designed for a wartime Europa: Interpretationen und Debatten, eds. Hans R. Guggisberg and Gottfried G. Krodel (Gütersloh: Verlagshaus, 1993), pp. 487–510. 13 Jonathan Israel, “The intellectual debate about toleration in the Dutch Republic,” in The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic, eds. C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G. H. M. Posthumous Meyes (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 3–36; Samme Zijlstra, “‘T geloove is vrij’: De tolerantiediscussie in de Noordelijke Nederlanden tussen 1520 en 1795,” in Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid. Afwijking en tolerantie in Nederland van de zestiende eeuw tot heden, ed. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra (Hilversum: Verloren, 1989), pp. 41–67. 14 Andrew Pettegree, “The politics of toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572–1620,” in Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, eds. Robert W. Scribner and Ole Peter Grell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 198. 15 Texts Concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands, eds. E.H. Kossmann and A.F. Mellink (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 169–170.

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alliance – provided the skeletal constitutional framework within which the Dutch Republic’s religious pluralism would be managed for most of its history. The Union of Utrecht was as close as the Republic ever came to a religious settlement, and it served as the basis for how coexistence was managed in civic space. On the books, Holland’s laws concerning Catholics hardly appeared tolerant. In 1573, after a brief flirtation with a religious peace between Reformed and Catholic in the months immediately following the provinces’ defection to the revolt, the States of Holland issued a placard which forbade any exercise of the Catholic faith on pain of fines, imprisonment, or banishment, thereby establishing the Reformed church’s monopoly on public religious expression. Any gathering of Catholics, lay or clerical, was outlawed, and the sacraments were not allowed to be celebrated at all.16 The ban on meetings was primarily political in intent, to forestall any potentially treasonous, pro-Spanish conspiracies from developing among disaffected adherents of the old church.17 Over the next half-century or so, this original placard – which was ultimately applied to the entire Republic  – would be refined and elaborated upon as particular issues arose, but in essence it effectively disestablished the Catholic church by banning any manifestation of it from the common life and spaces of society. Under the new regime, Holland’s Catholics were stripped not only of ecclesiastical property, structures, and personnel, but also of the possibility of worshiping together. The guarantee of freedom of conscience permitted them to believe privately as they wished, but their right to act on or express those beliefs was completely proscribed. Their religion had, in effect, been privatized. The public-private distinction suggested by the anti-Catholic placards points to a key feature of confessional coexistence in early modern Holland: It was predicated on an implicit cultural assumption that life and society possessed both public and private attributes.18 Political W. P. C. Knuttel, De toestand der Nederlandsche Katholieken ten tijde der Republiek (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1892), pp. 1–7; Charles H. Parker, Faith on the Margins Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 9–10. 17 Henk van Nierop, “Catholics and the Law in Holland,” in Calvinism and Religious Toleration, p. 106. 18 This was not the same thing as the Enlightenment “public sphere” so famously theorized by Jürgen Habermas, and subsequently analyzed by a whole raft of historians of the eighteenth century; see Harold Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians,” Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 158–182. A theoretical construct closer to the Holland regents’ thinking is that of Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT 16

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authorities in Holland understood that it was their task to superintend that public realm – that is, civic space – in the interest of the common good while permitting as much personal liberty as possible in the private, interior domain of conscience and belief. These notions (much like the frequently used term “conscience”) remained ill-defined; where the public began and the private ended was almost never explicitly mapped out or delineated. The home conceivably could be construed as a zone of privacy, yet most Dutch homes of the period, for example, had both public and private rooms – the former open to visitors and the latter restricted to family.19 Local law officers had the right to enter private homes if they suspected Catholic conventicles were being held in them. The definition of public and private rested on criteria both numerical – the group versus the individual – and visual – what could be seen by others.20 These criteria became more clearly articulated only over time and with experience, and even then they remained fluid concepts. This official interdiction of Catholic worship  – its banishment from civic space – afforded Holland’s ruling powers the opportunity to maintain the usable fiction that in their communities Catholicism did not really exist, because it was invisible to the common eye.21 This fiction was congenial to the regents because, in the first place, it permitted them to proclaim a kind of spiritual unity among their citizens without having to go through the messy process of actually imposing such a unity. Secondly, it placated  – to a certain degree  – the Reformed ecclesiastics and their congregations who claimed the Dutch Republic as a godly commonwealth dedicated to true religion. The intolerant laws of the Republic’s government were designed for regulating civic space  – they did not necessarily match the underlying social reality. Even the Apostolic vicar Sasbout Vosmeer recognized that the sharpness of the placards was Press, 1988), pp. 17–20, which posits the emergence of conscience as a private realm in response to the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See also Jesse Spohnholz, “Confessional Coexistence in the Early Modern Low Countries,” in: A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, ed. Thomas Max Safley (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 68–72. 19 John Loughman and John Michael Montias, Private and Public Spaces. Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Houses (Zwolle: Waanders, 2000), pp. 22–30. 20 R. E. Kistemaker, “The Public and the Private: Public Space in Sixteenth- and SeventeenthCentury Amsterdam,” in The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age, eds. Arthur K. Wheelock, jr. and Adele Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), p. 17. 21 On the political fiction of the public sphere, see Mah, Journal of Modern History, p. 168.

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intended primarily to placate zealous Reformed preachers.22 Catholic worship was relegated to a nominally invisible sphere of household and home. Thus, on its face, the Republic was like any other contemporary European state, dedicated to the political commonplace that religious uniformity was essential for the well-being of the land. In reaction to the passions of the Reformation, seventeenth-century European political doctrine extolled the shibboleth of conformity, yet virtually all states found themselves dealing with religious minorities of varying complexions within their populations.23 It would take a far more radical era than the seventeenth century to discredit the ideal of religious conformity, or at least to abandon the habit of paying it lip service. In this regard the Dutch Republic – by sanctioning and favoring only one confession – was no different than any of its neighbors. Practically speaking, for Holland’s Catholics the public stance of intolerance on the part of the government meant that persecution was always a possibility and sometimes a reality. In the best of circumstances, they experienced toleration in Holland as the absence of active judicial prosecution, certainly never as full-fledged religious liberty. The principle of freedom of conscience did not guarantee freedom of worship. It sounded generous and noble in magisterial declamations, but it still did not permit Catholic worship in any form. Catholic Hollanders could not be persecuted for their faith, but they could be prosecuted for actions arising from that faith. To them this was hardly liberty of conscience, which required access to the salvific grace provided through the sacraments; how much more would Holland’s Catholics grow in virtue if they enjoyed true freedom of conscience, the Leiden Carmelite missionary Petrus a Matre Dei wryly noted.24 As far as their prelates were concerned, Holland’s Catholic faithful always remained sub jugo haereticorum – under the yoke of heretics – notwithstanding the Republic’s proclamations of liberty of belief.25 “Insinuatio status provinciarum, in quibus haeretici dominantur,” ed. G. Brom, AAU 17 (1889),” p. 160. 23 For Catholic minorities in the Dutch Republic, see Christine Kooi,“Sub Jugo Haereticorum: Minority Catholicism in Early Modern Europe,” in Early Modern Catholicism: Minority Catholicism in Early Modern Europe,” in Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J., eds. Kathleen W. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 147–162. 24 Petrus a Matre Dei, Clara Relatio missionis Hollandicae et provinciarum confoederatum … anno 1658 (Rotterdam: Hendriksen, 1891),p. 48. 25 “Twee verslagen, over de toestand van de Hollandse Missie van de apostolische vicaris Philippus Rovenius aan de infante Isabella,” ed. P. Placidus AAU 68 (1949), p. 231. 22

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More than one prelate noted with bitterness that Jews and Muslims enjoyed more liberty in Holland than Catholics.26 In Holland’s civic spaces, Catholics found themselves subjected to what might be termed a regime of toleration.27 The legal status of Holland’s Catholics looked, therefore, irretrievably grim. Another legal fact of life for them, however, was that enforcement of the placards was entirely in local hands, and this enforcement could differ widely and unpredictably from place to place. The possibilities for persecution or toleration depended heavily on the sympathy (or antipathy) of local town councils and law officers; on the sectarian zealousness of local Reformed consistories; on the often complicated relationship between the public church and the local government; on the conduct of local Catholic priests and congregations themselves; and of course on shifting national (and sometimes international) political winds. This political decentralization and its many variables make it ­difficult to generalize about the state of toleration of Catholics in one ­province – Holland  – let alone for the entire Dutch Republic. On the whole, in Holland the placards were loosely applied; as the great nineteenth­century Dutch historian Robert Fruin noted, this overall laxity created a situation of general impunity for Catholics, but also one of uncertainty.28 Much depended on both time and place. Of the great cities of Holland, Amsterdam and Haarlem had reputations for being the most tolerant, while Dordrecht was the least hospitable; Gouda, Leiden, and Delft fell somewhere in the middle. As we saw with the relationship between priests and preachers across confessional space, there was also a general chronological pattern: Between the 1570s and 1620, the revolt against Spain, ecclesiastical disarray, and the Arminian controversy in the public church prevented much prosecutorial energy from being directed at Catholics, who by the early 1600s were successfully rebuilding their parochial life thanks to missionary efforts. It was in this initial phase that the boundaries between public religion and private faith were first haphazardly mapped out. Anti-Catholic feeling and measures reached a peak roughly between the years 1620 and 1660, after the settlement of the Arminian conflict and the resumption of war with Spain, “Vier missie verslagen, van 1635 tot 1645, door Rovenius te Rome ingediend,” ed. G. Grom AAU 18 (1890), p. 21. 27 A term used by Walzer, On Toleration, pp. 14–36. 28 Uittreksel uit Francisci Dusseldorpii Annales 1566–1616, ed. R. Fruin (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1893), p. cxiv. 26

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and prompted also in part by the successes of the Holland Mission. In this second phase, with the public-private parameters established, it was easier for the public church, which had gotten its own house in order, to monitor Catholic activity and alert the authorities to perceived infractions of the religious settlement. Finally, in the second half of the seventeenth century an overall relaxation of persecution and hostility toward Catholics prevailed, due in part to the end of the long war with Spain and to general economic prosperity as well as a general deflating of sectarian preoccupations as generations passed. Caution is in order, however, for within these very broad outlines there were countless variations. Locality was central to early modern Holland’s political and social culture, and it is in examining these local variations that we will gain a better understanding of the complicated interfusion of persecution and toleration within the province’s civic spaces.

1572–1620: Confusion War breeds misery, dislocation, and confusion, and the armed revolt of Holland against Spain, which was as much civil war as insurrection, was no exception. It is important to remember how violently Catholicism was wrenched from its moorings when the war came to Holland in the 1570s. The bitter experience of persecution, martyrdom, and exile that a decade earlier had so galvanized Dutch Calvinists was now visited upon Dutch Catholics; for the most committed among them, the experience of war was one of persecution and displacement. That displacement was both literal  – their eviction from the churches  – and figurative  – their expulsion from the public sphere. Thereafter followed several decades of disarray, turmoil, and retrenchment. Visiting Delft and its environs in 1583, the Apostolic Vicar Sasbout Vosmeer reported that “the situation is miserable; there is hardly any faith, religion exists only in name.”29 A Dutch Catholic living in Augsburg, learning of the difficulties afflicting his coreligionists back home, wrote sympathetically to them in 1580 that “you live amidst a cunning and false enemy, who day and night pursues you like poor lost sheep.”30 The first immediate consequence of revolt and reformation for Holland’s Catholics was desolation. As late as 1608, Quoted in Richard Reisberman, Bijdragen voor de geschiedenis van de RoomschKatholieke Kerk in Nederland (Rotterdam: H. T. Hendriksen, 1888), p. 7; B. A. Vermaseren, “Sasbout Vosmeer en het voormalige kapittel van Sion in 1592,” AGKKN 23 (1981): 192–193. 30 UA, Collectie Rijsenberg, no. 10, Brief van D. P. C. te Augsburg, 27 Sept. 1580, fol. 1. 29

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some of Holland’s political leaders remained convinced that Catholicism would eventually die out within a generation.31 To be sure, the confessional confusion in Holland was general in the 1570s; no one anticipated that the new regime of 1572 would turn out to be the nucleus of the new state that flourished so vibrantly in the seventeenth century. What was to become the independent Dutch Republic was still very much a work in progress in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, and the precise religious identity of this nascent polity remained equally murky well into the 1600s.32 At the local level, in the powerful cities that drove Holland’s economy and dominated its polity, ecclesiastical politics played themselves out in a variety of sometimes contentious ways.33 The evolving relationship between the new regime and the public church proved exceedingly tangled, and would not be resolved in any meaningful way until the national Synod of Dordrecht in 1618–1619. This complicated relationship in turn directly affected the status and circumstances of non-Reformed Christians, especially Catholics. The antiCatholic placards were part of the price the new regime paid for the support and sanction of the Reformed church, but their mechanisms and implications were worked out only over the course of several decades, as the parameters of public church and private religion were determined and delineated by local authorities. Central to this evolution was the paradox of the “public church” itself, which was unique in early modern Europe.34 With its control of ecclesiastical structures, its financial support from the government, its monopoly on public religious expression, the Reformed church assumed – on one level – the mantle of the new regime’s official, privileged confession. Civic space was, however superficially, dominated by the public church. However, not only was no citizen compelled to join this confession (thanks to the principle of freedom of conscience), the church itself placed very steep R. Fruin, “De wederopluiking van het katholicisme in Nederland, omstreeks den aanvang der xviie eeuw,” in Verspreide geschriften (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1901), vol. 3, p. 249. 32 J.L. Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 84. 33 C.C. Hibben, Gouda in Revolt: Particularism and Pacifism in the Revolt of the Netherlands 1572–1588 (Utrecht: HES, 1983); Joke Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie. Stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1578–1620 (The Hague: Hollandse Historische Reeks, 1989); P.H.A.M. Abels and A. Ph.F. Wouters, Nieuw en ongezienKerk en samenleving in de classis Delft en Delfland 1572–1621 (Delft: Eburon, 1994); Christine Kooi, Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leiden’s Reformation, 1572–1620 (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 34 Maarten Prak, The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 208. 31

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obstacles to membership. Thus, entry into the public church – the only confession with the right to worship openly  – was at once purely voluntary and extremely difficult. Consequently, until roughly the middle of the seventeenth century, most inhabitants of the Dutch Republic did not subscribe to its official church; it was a “public” church only in the sense of what it preached (“true” religion) rather than whom it included. The Reformed church’s publicness was purely a function of its teachings; because it deemed what all other confessions taught as “false,” their adherents of necessity had to retreat into the interior arena of conscience. Conscience, which the Republic’s political elites had declared inviolate, belonged therefore to the private domain. The anti-Catholic laws protected the public monopoly of the Reformed church; to permit other confessions to act openly was to question implicitly the rightness of the privileged church, which was part of the “visible” social and political order of the new state.35 The public church’s honor – and by extension the honor of the government that supported it – was to be defended by the placards.36 Yet the paradoxical exclusivity of that public church and the refusal of the government to coerce consciences meant that some sort of accommodation of other confessions was necessary for the orderly functioning of society. Confessional confusion was the order of the day, as no one church could claim the loyalty of most of the population.37 Indeed, many of Holland’s inhabitants appear to have been unchurched in these early decades.38 Others may have followed political expediency and simply conformed to the new order – “they went to bed at night as Catholics and woke up in the morning as heretics,” as the klopje Grietgen Phoppen disparagingly put it.39 In the fifty or so years it took the rulers of Holland to puzzle out their relationship to the new and anomalous public church, they also had to determine their disposition toward those who

Peter van Rooden, Religieuze regimes. Over godsdienst en maatschappij in Nederland 1570–1990 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1996), p. 25. 36 James. D. Tracy, “Public Space. Restriction of Non-Calvinist Religious Behavior in the Province of Holland, 1572–1591,” in Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History, eds. Robert J. Bast and Andrew C. Gow. (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 110. 37 Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic, p. 84; Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), p. 363. 38 P.H.A.M. Abels, “Tussen gewetensvrijheid en kerkelijke dwang,” Geschiedenis van Holland. Deel II: 1572 tot 1795, eds, Theo de Nijs and Eelco Beukers (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), pp. 299–302. 39 “Uit de levens der ‘Maechden van den Hoeck’ te Haarlem,” ed. J. J. de Graff, BBH 17 (1891): 260. 35

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stood ­outside it, particularly those belonging to that confession which the new church had so directly and forcibly usurped. In the chaotic decades after Holland’s defection to the cause of rebellion and the issuance of the placards, Catholics labored to conserve some semblance of worship. Revolt and reformation drove Catholicism in Holland underground, relegating it to private spaces and intimate gatherings. It was prudent to be as unobtrusive as possible; Wouter Jacobsz reported in the 1570s that in Gouda, the faithful discreetly practiced devotions in cemeteries in the early morning on holy days or in quiet corners of the large Sint Janskerk when the Calvinists were not using it.40 Everywhere in Holland’s towns and cities, those priests who had not fled discreetly offered the sacraments in hidden spaces and private homes. Such clandestine activity further enraged their confessional opponents, who in Delft threatened to destroy any home in which they discovered the mass had been celebrated.41 The newly established public church was freshly vigilant: In 1574, its first province-wide synod resolved to report to authorities any priests discovered conducting secret marriages or baptisms; and in 1586, the national synod meeting in The Hague even proposed that the government do away with pensions for former priests and nuns entirely, since many of them still seemed to be encouraging Catholic worship.42 The threat of persecution seemed quite real to the handful of priests working in Holland during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. According to the Gouda chronicler Ignatius Walvis, it was in the first couple of decades after 1572 that priests endured “the hottest fury of persecution.”43 The Haarlem authorities, for example, prosecuted a number of priests and layfolk for unauthorized gatherings, though their motives appeared to have been largely political; they feared that Catholic conventicles might be used as cover for subversion against the new order.44 In 1592, the papal nuncio Frangipani reported that Sasbout Vosmeer was being sought by magistrates in both The Hague and Delft. Around the same time in Haarlem, law officers invaded the homes of several klopjes Dagboek van Broeder Wouter Jacobsz., ed. I.H. van Eeghen (Groningen: Wolters, 1959– 1960), vol. 2, p. 669. 41 Dagboek, vol. 2, p. 265. 42 C. Hooijer, Oude kerkordeningen der Nederlandsche Hervormde Gemeente (1563– 1638) (Zaltbommel: Joh. Noman, 1865), p. 110; Acta van de Nederlandsche synoden der zestiende eeuw, ed. F.L. Rutgers (Utrecht: Kemink, 1889), pp. 544–545. 43 GHA, Archief van de Oud-Katholieke Parochie van de H. Johannes de Doper, no. 597, [Ignatius Walvis], “Goudsche en andere daartoe dienende katolieke kerk-zaken door I. W. pastoor van der Goude anno 1709,” fol. 43r. 44 Spaans, Haarlem, pp. 75–80. 40

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under the care of the priest Nicholas Cousebant; while searching these homes they missed an interior room functioning as an oratory where a priest was preparing mass for an assembly of congregants. Frangipani ascribed the near miss to divine intervention.45 The overall impression is that the governments of Holland’s major towns enforced the placards entirely as they pleased. Much also depended on the disposition of local law officers. In 1588 and 1589, the sheriff of Leiden, Foy van Brouchoven, twice raided one of that city’s many hofjes, small residences, usually twelve or so in number, contiguously arranged around a rectilinear courtyard, where former beguines were hosting Catholic conventicles (“idolatry”) in their homes. Labeling Catholic worship as idolatrous perhaps made it easier for him to justify his actions to the magistracy, which was relatively lax in enforcing the placards; these were in fact the only recorded instances of legal persecution of Catholics in Leiden in the period before 1620.46 Likewise, the magistracies of Delft and Gouda applied the placards at best lightly and sporadically in these years.47 In the late 1590s, Gouda’s generally tolerant magistracy bowed to pressure from the States of Holland and prosecuted some priests; even while doing so the magistracy tried to assure local Catholics that “we do not wish to force anyone’s conscience and wish to allow you to exercise your religion.”48 Reports by nuncios back to Rome on the situation in Holland mirrored the unpredictability of circumstances: In 1591, the nuncio Frangipani told his superiors that “our religion” was thriving among the ordinary folk of Holland, yet a year later he was recounting in detail specific instances of judicial harassment of priests.49 Even during these years of uncertainty, it was clear that the machinery for confessional accommodation in civic space was already starting to fall into place. As early as 1582, the Haarlem humanist Dirk Coornhert – a vocal champion of absolute religious liberty – observed incipient tolerationist regimes taking shape in Holland’s towns: “Once it became evident Romeinsche bronnen voor den kerkelijken toestand der Nederlanden onder de Apsotolische Vicarissen 1592–1727, ed. J.D.M. Cornelissen, I: 1592–1651 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1932), pp. 2–3. See also Dalmatius van Heel, Nicolaas Wiggers van Cousebant als seculier priester 1555–1603 en als minderbroeder 1602–1628 (Haarlem: St. Jacobs Gasthuis, 1928), p. 39. 46 Kooi, Liberty and Religion, p. 182. 47 Abels and Wouters, Nieuw en ongezien, pp. 129–133; Abels, “Ketternest,” pp. 418–422. 48 UA OBC, no. 3, Gerrit Vermeij to Sasbout Vosmeer, 30 March 1598. 49 Romeinsche bronnen voor de kerkelijk-staatkundigen toestand der Nederlanden in de 16e eeuw, eds. G. Brom and A.H.L. Jensen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1922), pp. 414–415; Romeinsche bronnen 1592–1651, pp. 2–3. 45

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that the religion seen as false could not be rooted out without great harm to the common good, wise men have always managed things in such a way that, with town magistrates looking the other way, two contrary churches are permitted, until such time as the majority of men will have changed their views.”50 Notwithstanding Coornhert’s suspicion that toleration was merely the first step to forced conversion, he also recognized that the motives behind such accommodation were practical rather than ideological. The cost of “rooting out” idolatry  – which the Calvinists demanded – was too great; in this political culture, “managing” was the preferred method for dealing with confessional difference, lest civic space be disrupted entirely. One of the mechanisms of this management was a transaction that came to be called “recognition money.” The practice of Catholic priests or congregations paying out yearly sums to local law officers to keep them from disturbing Catholic gatherings began in this early period of confessional adjustment and consolidation. Some of the money changing hands included the punitive fines prescribed by the placards, but there came to be a dimension of bribery added to it. Local Catholic communities were in effect buying toleration, and more than one sheriff or bailiff lined his pockets by extorting exorbitant sums from them. Writing much later in 1652, the missionary cleric Godefridus Loeff explained to his superiors how this process worked: The Catholic congregation  – usually represented by a priest – negotiated an arrangement with the local law officer, agreeing to an annual sum that would be paid – often in installments – to the sheriff so that he would “shut his eyes” to any Catholic gatherings.51 Money, in essence, lent Catholic meetings the invisibility required by the placards. By the early seventeenth century, the law officers of most of Holland’s major towns had concluded such arrangements with their Catholic communities; recognition money became a regular – not to say mundane – practice, part of the landscape of confessional accommodation.52 Gouda’s Catholics were negotiating recognition money amounts (in a local tavern) with their sheriff as early as 1598.53 By 1610, Catholic priests in Leiden were working out a “compact” (foedus) with that city’s Quoted in James D. Tracy, “Erasmus, Coornhertand the Acceptance of Religious Disunity in the Body Politic: A Low Countries Tradition?” in The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic, eds. C. Berkvens-Stevelinck et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1997), p. 59. 51 “Godfried Loeff in en over de Hollandsche Missie ten jare 1652,” ed. G. Brom, AAU 24 (1897): 329. 52 L.J. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme in Noord-Nederland in de 16e en de 17e eeuw (Amsterdam: Urbi et Orbi, 1947), vol. 1, pp. 461–476. 53 UA OBC, no. 3, Gerrit Vermeij to Sasbout Vosmeer, 11 April 1598. 50

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sheriff.54 Even in strongly Calvinist Dordrecht, Catholics boasted that they paid money to the sheriff to “make things good.”55 It was, to be sure, a practice easily open to abuse, and no guarantee – as the anecdote opening this chapter demonstrated – that Catholic communities would actually be left in peace. Each time a new law officer was appointed, the sums might have to be renegotiated, as was also often the case each time a new priest settled in town. Additional fines could still be imposed on lay Catholics who attended or hosted secret conventicles. For sheriffs, the arrangement could be quite lucrative; the Delft priest Lodewijk Makeblijde complained that that city’s sheriff was using the recognition money he collected to expand his home and brewery.56 Greed made for a shaky basis for toleration; the temptation to demand more money was sometimes hard to resist, as the case of the bailiff of Gouda illustrates. Recognition money brought home to Holland’s Catholics just how unstable the toleration they received at the hands of the authorities could be. The practice of paying out recognition money does afford some insight into how authorities were developing and articulating their understanding of the public and private contours of their multiconfessional communities. What these payoffs were “recognizing” was the presence within civic space of a private Catholicism – one of belief and praxis. Or, perhaps more specifically, they tacitly acknowledged that some sort of praxis had to accompany belief for that belief to mean anything at all. The criterion of visibility became central in making this distinction; worship that was not visible to the collective eye (here represented by civil power) was relegated to the private realm. By allowing authorities to look the other way or shut their eyes, recognition money made invisibility in civic space possible through official connivance. Catholic worship was then deliberately not seen, creating an artificial but workable invisibility; authorities were willing not to look. Recognition money “managed” religious difference by carving out a place for Catholics as a confessional subculture, by allowing them to be officially unseen within civic space. For their part, Catholics understood the ambiguities of this period as Holland sorted itself out confessionally. They had been assaulted and disenfranchised and driven into a sacramental life of semi-clandestinity, to be sure, but they also recognized opportunities within their disestablishment. UA OBC, no. 10, Rombout van Medenblik to Vosmeer, 14 Sept. 1610. SAD NHG, KA, 20 Jan. 1636. 56 Abels, Nieuw en ongezien, p. 133. 54 55

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Those who dealt most directly with civil authorities were aware of how the public-private distinction was evolving and how it shaped official attitudes toward Catholic activity. In 1589, a Dordrecht Catholic related to Vosmeer that a local priest’s encounter with the sheriff “went better than I had hoped.” The priest had to hand over some devotional books to the officer, but the latter also told him “that we can allow Catholics to read what they like inside their homes but we cannot permit [these books] to be taught in the schools.”57 Prelates noted that the traumas of disestablishment and persecution had in some respects strengthened the Catholic community. “The Catholic religion in Holland flourishes more in secret than if it were public,” observed the nuncio Frangipani in 1591; the need for discretion, which included the posting of lookouts near worship spaces, offered a kind of ambagious protection by making it harder for sectarian “spies” to infiltrate Catholic gatherings.58 Even Sasbout Vosmeer  – never one to minimize the perils among which the Holland Mission operated  – related an incident in 1602 when he was detained by two magistrates after they found him with an armful of catechisms. When Vosmeer told them who he was, they exchanged glances and quietly let him depart through a rear exit.59 The inconsistencies inherent in leaving confessional regulation to local authorities created many opportunities for looking the other way; indeed, this localization was the determining factor in providing the toleration within civic space that allowed Catholicism in Holland to persevere and eventually flourish. By 1612, the Brussels nuncio Guido Bentivoglio concluded that “the implementation of the edicts … is in reality not as strict as we had originally feared.” Instead, he noted, the fortunes of local Catholic communities varied from place to place, depending on both the size of the local congregations and whether local authorities were well-disposed toward Catholics or not.60 This impression was confirmed in a 1616 missionary report cataloguing the numbers and status of Catholics in the major towns of the north. In Holland, the cities of Gouda, Leiden, and Haarlem offered the most liberty to Catholics; Delft and Amsterdam less so; and Dordrecht least of all. The decisive factors in determining the disposition of local Catholic communities, according to this report, were size and magisterial attitudes.61 UA OBC, no. 1, Corn. Goudanus to Vosmeer, 31 Dec. 1589. Romeinsche bronnen 16e eeuw, p. 405. 59 “Insinuatio,” pp. 168–169. 60 Romeinsche bronnen 1592–1651, p. 187. 61 “Brevis descriptio status, in quo est ecclesia catholica in partibus belgii ab haereticis occupatis Ao. 1616,” ed. A. van Lommel, AAU 1 (1875): 208–226. 57 58

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The confessional situation in the period before 1620 was uncertain enough that some Catholic Hollanders may have even harbored the hope that restoration and religious freedom might be theirs again in the foreseeable future. A Leiden Catholic named Dirck Claesz Bodt, for example, drew up a will in 1598 that confidently set aside part of his estate for the payment of requiem masses for himself and his mother in that city’s Pieterskerk church, once the Catholic religion had been returned to Holland.62 The vagaries of international politics may have encouraged some, as well. In the midst of negotiations for what became the Twelve Years Truce between the Republic and Spain, an unidentified group of Dutch Catholics petitioned Archduke Albert  – ruler of the Spanish Netherlands – in 1607, describing in dolorous terms the many persecutions which they suffered, but at the same time asking him to press for freedom of religion for Catholics in the north as a necessary condition for any peace settlement.63 A group of Poor Clares from Delft who lived in exile in Hainault asked Sasbout Vosmeer in 1608 if they might “still hope to return to our cloister.”64 The discord between Arminians and Gomarists that raged within Reformed congregations in the 1610s may also have sparked some hope for restoration; in 1617, the Brussels nuncio Lucio Morra wrote to Rome that two cities in the Republic controlled by the Arminian faction were “tacitly” permitting Catholics freedom of worship. The conflict might well lead to a schism that could improve the position of Catholics permanently, he added hopefully.65 In retrospect, such longings may have appeared unrealistic, but during that first generation after the defection of Holland to the cause of revolt and reformation the ecclesiastical, political, and confessional situation was nebulous enough and the reflorescence of Catholicism vigorous enough to permit some to hope or imagine a possible restoration of complete Catholic worship. Not until well after the turn of the century did most Reformed consistories even begin to pay more serious and sustained attention to Catholic activity in their midst. Individual church members straying into popery was a danger they had been vigilant about from the beginning, but only starting around the years 1605–1610 did consistories take more UA OBC, no. 15, Notarial act dated 25 July 1600. Romeinsche bronnen 1592–1651, pp. 117–118. Archduke Albert did his best to lobby for his coreligionists in the truce negotiations, but met with little success. See Paul Arblaster, “The Archdukes and the Northern Counter-Reformation,” in Albert and Isabella 1598– 1621. Essays, eds. Werner Thomas and Luc Duerloo (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), p. 88. 64 UA OBC, no. 9, Delft Poor Clares to Sasbout Vosmeer, 7 Oct. 1608. This letter is printed in Dalmatius van Heel, “De Clarissen van Delft,” BBH 51 (1934), pp. 397–399. 65 Romeinsche bronnen 1592–1651, p. 218. 62 63

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consistent account of the position and status of the Catholic subcultures that existed within their communities.66 That account-taking consisted principally of reminding the authorities of their obligation to enforce the placards. Between 1605 and 1608, the consistories of Haarlem, Dordrecht, Amsterdam, and Delft all issued complaints to their law officers or magistrates about Catholic gatherings and masses taking place inside their cities’ walls.67 The reflowering of Catholic sacramental life under the aegis of the Holland Mission was starting to draw their attention. A handful of similar complaints were registered in the following decade,68 but by that time the public church in Holland was completely embroiled in the Arminian controversy. Convulsed by this conflict – the most serious crisis it endured during the history of the Republic – the Reformed church had little energy left over for confronting confessional rivals.69 Only after the Arminians had been safely drummed out of the public church and Calvinism affirmed as its reigning orthodoxy could Reformed worthies address themselves more fully to the “idolatry” among their neighbors in civic space.

1620–1660: Confessionalism The second quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed the continued ascent of the Dutch Republic economically and politically across the early modern European firmament. With the coup of 1618, the Stadholder Maurice of Nassau was firmly in control of the government of the Republic and of Holland in particular, and he was supported by a public church purged of all dissidents. The war with Habsburg Spain resumed in 1621; under Maurice and his successor Frederick Henry, the major fighting was waged in the borderlands between the Republic and the Spanish Netherlands, with the long conflict finally coming to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Münster in 1648. Dutch mercantile energies were coming to dominate the world trading system, and a vibrant new artistic and intellectual culture was blossoming amidst increasing The exception was Delft, whose Reformed consistory in 1582 already petitioned its magistracy about masses being celebrated secretly in the city; GAD NHG, KA, 19 Nov. 1582. 67 NHA NHG, KA, 4 Dec. 1605; GAD NHG, KA, 29 May 1606, 17 Dec. 1607; SAD NHG, KA, 6 July 1606, SAA NHG, KA, 17 April 1608. 68 GAD NHG, KA, 9 Jan. 1612; NHA NHG, KA, 28 Sept. 1616, 13 June 1618. 69 For an overview of the conflict, see A.Th. van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen. Kerk en kerkvolk ten tijde van Maurits en Oldenbarnevelt (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), pp. 241–274. 66

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prosperity, especially in the urban west. After overcoming some initial military and commercial setbacks in the 1620s, the Dutch Republic was, by the close of this period – as Jonathan Israel has succinctly put it – “in triumph,” and not just on the battlefield.70 The “Golden Century” was well under way. This was also a period when confessional boundaries among the Republic’s believers became more clearly delineated, or least there were increased efforts to define them more carefully. Internal confessionalization allowed each church to articulate its orthodoxy more carefully, thereby also making external heresies more identifiable. With this confessional evolution, Holland’s different religious groups sought to make manifest their doctrinal differences from each other, with the goal of distinguishing true religion from false.71 Calvinists and Catholics did not simply condemn each other, but further sought to differentiate themselves from one another; by 1620, both were firmly established in confessional space. Emerging from the national Synod of Dordrecht, the public church assumed a more sharply confessional profile. Gone were the internal conflicts and ambiguities of the early decades; fifty years after its initial establishment, the Reformed church affirmed its essentially Calvinist doctrine and polity. With Arminians and dissenters safely ejected from it, the Dutch Reformed church enjoyed for the first time a basic theological conformity; it had, in effect, created an orthodoxy. The earlier debates about the public church’s proper and exact relationship to the state were never truly resolved, but instead faded with time and familiarity. What had been a “new and unseen thing” in the 1570s had found its settled place in the political and cultural establishment by the 1620s. Membership in the public church reached a comfortable plurality of the population during this period. New churches were constructed – designed for the first time with the specific requirements of Reformed preaching and worship in mind while at the same time reflecting the serene and solid aesthetics of northern urban classicism.72

Israel, The Dutch Republic, p. 506. This internal confessionalization was not the same as the political model that prevailed in the Holy Roman Empire, for in the Dutch case the state played virtually no role in the formulation of confessional orthodoxies. State formation was not tied to confessional formation. See Olaf Mörke, “‘Konfessionalisierung’ als politisch-soziales Prinzip? Das Verhältnis von Religion und Staatsbildung in der Republik der Vereinigten Niederlande in 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” Tijdschrift voor sociale geschiedenis 6 (1990): 31–60. 72 Christine Kooi, “Religionis ergo: The Religious Images of Early Modern Leiden,” ZE 22 (2006): 38. 70 71

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Like its Reformed counterpart, Catholicism in Holland also assumed a greater commitment to confessional difference. The Holland Mission, with great post-Tridentine zeal, was by 1620 successfully building up a functioning sacramental and quasi-parochial life for its faithful. The master organizer Philip Rovenius – apostolic vicar from 1614 to 1651 – superintended from his residence in Utrecht a cadre of nearly 500 missionary priests who ministered across the Republic. By mid-century, the major religious orders – Jesuit, Franciscan, Dominican, Carmelite – were fielding missionaries, as well. The majority of priests worked and resided in the provinces of Holland and Utrecht, where they had the greatest freedom to maneuver and where Catholics were most numerous. The major cities of Holland contained substantial Catholic minorities who comprised anywhere from 5–15 percent of their respective municipal populations. Thanks to the Mission and the regular orders, most of these layfolk could count upon more or less regular access to the sacraments in multiple fixed locations within their cities, usually inside house churches. Catechetical instruction was generally available to their children, and communal funds supported their poor. The combination of a well-trained cadre of priests steeped in the revitalized Catholic piety of the Counter-Reformation and a loyal and energetic laity anxious to exercise its devotion regardless of political strictures created a vital and resilient confessional community. Despite the official constrictions of the placards, Catholics in Holland in the early Golden Age had recreated for themselves a working, if private, parochial system.73 As long as this system operated outside the common spaces of municipal life – that is, where they either could not be seen or could be easily ignored  – magistracies generally allowed it to function unhindered. As we saw in the previous chapter, once its own house was put in order by 1620, the Reformed church turned its confessional eye toward the tolerated churches, with particular focus on the Catholic mission. By the 1620s, the war with Spain had recommenced and the Holland Mission was successfully reviving Catholic worship; the Reformed establishment saw a threat to the newly won orthodoxy of the public church and its privileged position in the Republic in such developments, and its anti-Catholic rhetoric stepped up accordingly. In doing so, the Reformed church was participating eagerly in what might be called the culture wars of the mid-century Dutch Republic. Around 1650, a cluster of events and trends – political, economic, cultural – prompted social and political For the building of the Holland Mission, see Parker, Faith on the Margins, pp. 26–46.

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elites to reconsider, re-examine, discuss, argue, and renegotiate the nature of this anomalous state born of the accidents of war and a perpetual constitutional work in progress. The end of the war with Spain in 1648; the brief but tumultuous stadholderate of William II (1647–1650); the shifting of the commercial economy in favor of Holland at the expense of the inland provinces and its resulting social dislocations; the growing influence and challenge of Cartesian philosophy among academic and intellectual elites; and increasing disputes within Reformed circles about the need for further reformation of individual and society all contributed to an acrimonious ideological atmosphere in which voluble and angry debate predominated.74 These discussions comprised a wide number of controversial subjects, many of them holdovers from earlier eras: where sovereignty lay in the Republic; the tetchy and complicated relationship between the regents and the stadholder; the economic and therefore political dominance of Holland over the other six provinces; the demobilization of the military; trade policy; the role of the public church in shaping social mores; the challenge of emerging natural philosophy to traditional religion; and, not least, the advantages and disadvantages of toleration. The political controversies would be resolved – at least for the next generation – with the death of William II in late 1650 and the Holland regents’ consequent recapture of sovereignty, a political victory crowned by the Great Assembly of 1651 – a meeting of all seven provinces convened by Holland to ratify its reassertion of central power. The Great Assembly debated political, military, fiscal, and religious questions and placed its imprimatur on the stadholderless republican regime the Holland regents had maneuvered into place immediately following William II’s death.75 With the Great Assembly, the Reformed church’s concerted lobbying of the state about toleration came to a climax. The synodal leadership sent a delegation of preachers to petition the Assembly to limit the toleration of Catholicism in order to protect both the Republic and the public church. Among other demands, the petition called for the banishment of all Catholic clergy from the land; the absolute forbidding of Catholic conventicles; the closing of klopje communities; the removal of all Catholics from public office; the outlawing of pilgrimages, schools, and secret passageways between Catholic houses; and the prosecution of all officials Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 595–609; Willem Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, 1650: Bevochten eendracht. Nederlandse cultuur in Europese context (The Hague: Sdu, 1999), pp. 17–50; J. J. Poelhekke, Geen blijder maer in tachtigh jaer. Verspreide Studiën over de crisisperiode 1648–1651 (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1973), pp. 35–60. 75 Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 702–713. 74

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who did not uphold the placards.76 It proved to be a futile exercise, for the delegates from Holland – who controlled the gathering completely – blocked passage of any further restrictions on what little religious freedom Catholics and other confessions enjoyed. If the public church harbored any hopes of a wholesale transformation of the Republic’s multiconfessionalism, these were dashed by the General Assembly. The latitudinarian policies of Holland’s regents party prevailed, and the regime of toleration remained in place. Generally speaking, the lobbying efforts of the Reformed church for civil authorities to prosecute Catholic activity were more likely to bear fruit at the local level than in grand national assemblies manipulated by unsympathetic Holland oligarchs. In the summer of 1643, bowing to synodal pressure, the Court of Holland charged four commissioners with a province-wide investigation of “conventicles and other impudent and excessive actions of the papists in violation of the placards of the land.”77 The report of one of these commissioners, Sebastiaen Francken, survives; his investigation covered regions that included Leiden and Gouda and their surrounding villages. He collected information by interviewing not only local preachers and sheriffs but priests and klopjes as well. When interrogating Catholic clergy, he used a stock set of questions: where they resided and with whom; whether they had registered with the sheriff in their place of residence; when and where and for how many they celebrated mass; how many marriages and baptisms they performed; whether they received their charge from the Apostolic vicar, did they took up collections at their conventicles; had they paid recognition money to the local law officer; had they catechized children; were they beneficiaries of wills and testaments.78 Of the spiritual maidens, he likewise asked a uniform set of questions: had they made solemn promises of chastity; where they lived and with whom; how they earned their livings; did they teach or catechize children; did they work for the priest.79 The questions Francken posed reflected the provincial government’s principal concerns regarding Catholics – those of order and authority. It wanted to ascertain whether the Catholic minority was minding the placards and worshiping within the confines of the private sphere as well as whether Knuttel, Toestand, pp. 257–259. “Bouwstoffen voor de kerkelijke geschiedenis van verschillende parochien thans behoorende tot het bisdom Haarlem,” ed. A. van Lommel, BBH 7 (1880): 340; Knuttel, Toestand, p. 151. 78 “Bouwstoffen,” BBH 7 (1880): 355–358. 79 “Bouwstoffen,” BBH 7 (1880): 366–367. 76 77

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its priests were acting on the commission or charge of a greater, perhaps alien, ­ecclesiastical ­hierarchy. As long as the war with Spain was raging, Catholic conventicles remained a subject of political concern, suspected of harboring agents of or sympathizers with the Republic’s enemies abroad. As he journeyed from town to town, Francken observed the private, domiciled world in which Holland’s Catholic worship took place: attics, back rooms, and sheds furnished with altars, discreet pathways linking one home to another. In most cases he was led to these places by the local sheriff or burgomaster; in many communities, local officials knew where Catholics worshiped or where the priest resided. On a farmstead in the village of Langeraar, he found a newly constructed building behind the farmer’s house, linked to it by a “dark, blind passageway”; the newer edifice housed priests and kloppen and also provided them with a library and two rooms furnished with altars for worship.80 Many of the worship spaces he inspected had been stripped of their ornamentation before his arrival. In the hamlet of Roelofarendsveen, inside one priest’s home he found an enormous worship space complete with galleries that he estimated could hold 2,000 people.81 To judge from Francken’s descriptions, the physical spaces which Holland’s Catholic subculture occupied were both numerous and generously equipped. The Catholicism he observed had been effectively privatized. In the responses to his questions that Francken recorded it became clear that Catholics in Holland were adept at negotiating the pitfalls of toleration and persecution. Again and again in his interrogations of Catholics he received answers that were evasive, vague, misleading, or simply untrue. A shoemaker who ran a shop on the same premises as the galleried hall in Roelofarendsveen, for example, told him that the galleries were actually lofts for the storage of seeds, hemp, and other farm supplies.82 One priest whom Francken suspected of being on an ambulant mission told him he was merely out in the countryside for a holiday, while another priest insisted he was in a particular village simply to practice his painting.83 Other priests admitted to celebrating sacraments, but tried to convey the impression that such occasions were informal, low-keyed, private affairs – they did not proselytize or convert anyone, just provided sacramental and pastoral care to those who asked for it.84 Lay Catholics “Bouwstoffen,” BBH 7 (1880): 368. “Bouwstoffen,” BBH 7 (1880): 372. 82 “Bouwstoffen,” BBH 7 (1880): 378. 83 “Bouwstoffen,” BBH 7 (1880): 343–344, 373. 84 “Bouwstoffen,” BBH 7 (1880): 382. 80 81

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whom Francken questioned often affected ignorance of or indifference to local priestly activities. Women he assumed were klopjes blandly insisted that they had not taken vows of chastity, or at least had not made such a promise to any person, and that they had taken children into their homes only to teach them sewing, not to catechize them. One woman “dressed like a klopje” told him that she was merely a “daughter who lives quietly [stillekens] on her own,” while another declared point-blank that she did not have to account to him for any promise she had made to God.85 This kind of dissembling and prevaricating was one of the many tactics Holland’s Catholics employed to manipulate the tolerationist environment in which they lived to afford themselves some confessional space.86 Polite fictions abounded. The overall impression Francken’s report gives of the relationship between Holland’s Catholics and the authorities is one of both obfuscation and defiance. A certain amount of subterfuge and cover-up was evident  – as hidden ornaments and evasive answers indicated – but at the same time a sense of self-assurance or obstinance that the government was unlikely to take any serious measures against them prevailed among Catholics. Catholic worship was generally admitted to, but there was also an implicit assumption that as long as they were discreet Catholics would be allowed some breathing space. Catholics in these communities understood and even manipulated their place in civic space, with the connivance of local authorities. Indeed, thanks to reports like Sebastiaen Francken’s the major conclusion of the Court of Holland’s overall investigation into the Catholic minority in 1643 was that the placards issued since 1621 had done little to curb or curtail Catholic “excesses” in the province.87 Which is not to say that local law officers did not try, to varying degrees, to enforce the placards. In most of the major cities of Holland, efforts by sheriffs or bailiffs to police the Catholic community through persecuting “popish impudence” reached a high-water mark between 1620 and 1660, in part due to pressure by the Court of Holland to enforce the placards more rigorously.88 The anxieties produced by the resumption of war after 1621 inclined governments at all levels to take political measures against Catholic communities, which were sometimes still suspected

“Bouwstoffen,” BBH 7 (1880): 383, 345. Christine Kooi, “Paying off the sheriff: Strategies of Catholic toleration in Golden Age Holland” Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, pp. 87–101. 87 Knuttel, Toestand, p. 155. 88 “Bouwstoffen,” BBH 8 (1880): 433–457; 9 (1881): 1–42. 85 86

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of harboring pro-Habsburg sentiments. The hierarchy of the Mission reported growing persecution in Holland during this decade.89 In 1622, the States-General, concerned about potential conspiracies among what they feared might be pro-Spanish Catholic sympathizers, issued a placard that required Catholic priests to register with their local magistracies and further ordered those magistracies to superintend more closely the activities of priests  – particularly Jesuits  – in their communities.90 By 1638, the Apostolic vicar Philip Rovenius grimly reported an ominous rise in “daily” disturbances of worship and harassment of Catholics and their priests.91 His successor, Jacobus de la Torre, painted an even darker picture of increased persecution and hostility overall across the Republic in his “Relatio” of 1656, although he also noted that it varied from place to place.92 As usual, the dynamics of toleration and persecution played themselves out most directly in civic space at the level of the town, and varied according to local circumstances. Of the six major cities of Holland, the governments of Leiden, Gouda, and Dordrecht enforced anti-Catholic placards most frequently, though not in any consistent fashion. Rovenius cited Leiden and Dordrecht particularly in 1630 as places of heavier persecution, though he himself was still able to visit parishes in Holland during this period.93 The governments of Amsterdam, Delft, and Haarlem, on the other hand, appeared less inclined to enforce the placards. In the case of Leiden, the Reformed consistory had long lobbied the town government to investigate Catholic activities, and the magistracy paid some heed. In 1621, for example, at the urging of the consistory, the magistracy of that city – newly purged of all but orthodox Calvinists after Maurice of Nassau’s 1618 coup  – collected the names of no less than eleven priests resident in the city.94 It further ordered local priest Rombout van Medenblik, a longtime resident, to desist from visiting Catholic layfolk in the St. Elizabeth hospital. It further forbade him to enter “any public houses” (eenige publycke huysen) in the city ever again, something he had hitherto been doing for years with no trouble at all.95 Judicial attacks on the Catholic community there peaked in the 1640s “Kort verslag van den toestand der R. C. godsdienst der voormalige Hollandsche Zending – 1629,” ed. A. van Lommel, AAU 13 (1885): 253. 90 Knuttel, Toestand, p. 122. 91 “Vier missie verslagen,” p. 20. 92 “Relatio seu descriptio status religionis catholicae in Hollandia etc.,” ed. A. van Lommel, AAU 11 (1883) pp. 120–125. 93 “Twee verslagen,” pp. 237–238. 94 Kooi, Liberty and Religion, p. 192 95 Kooi, Liberty and Religion, p. 192. 89

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and 1650s.96 In 1641, Sheriff Willem de Bondt searched a number of Catholic homes where conventicles were suspected to take place. In each case he found altars placed in attics or backrooms as well as passageways linking one house to another. After due deliberation, the city government decided despite “reason enough” for prosecution, to order the homeowners instead to remove all sacramental paraphernalia from their domiciles and wall up all passageways. Almost half a year later, the sheriff charged a handful of the offenders for failing to obey the court’s order, and the government fined them each 100 guilders.97 Among these offenders were the three sisters Van Santhorst, daughters of a well-known Catholic family who lived together as klopjes; in 1644 they were summoned a third time before the court for persisting in hosting conventicles. Their refusal to let the sheriff into their house while they hurriedly tried to hide evidence only compounded the offense. The sisters defended themselves by arguing that as modest and honorable women they could not permit the sheriff and his underlings simply to barge into their private chambers. The court, provoked by the sisters’ “disobedience” and “disdain,” sentenced all three women to six years’ banishment from the city.98 The city government rarely imposed such a severe penalty, especially on lay Catholics. Just a few years later, for example, a pair of klopjes in the same city charged with hosting gatherings were merely ordered to move to another neighborhood.99 The harshness of the punishment reflected the magistracy’s concern to quell any resistance to its authority rather than its regard for the anti-Catholic placards. The sisters’ continued defiance reflected badly on the magistracy’s ability to manage civic religious affairs. “Impudence” in this case posed a danger to the good order of the city that the magistrates superintended. To that end, they even asked the consistory – much to its delight – to report to them any rumors of Catholic conventicles in the city.100 The Leiden authorities’ greater interest in civic order than in confessional conformity was evident a decade later, by which time persecution Jan Wim Buisman, “Kerk en samenleving,” in Leiden. De geschiedenis van een Hollandse stad, ed. R. C. J. van Maanen (Leiden, 2003), vol. 2, pp. 141–142. 97 Documents published in J. D. Frenay, “Aanteekeningen betreffende de Leydsche pastors sedert ‘De Hervorming’ tot aan ‘De Herstelling’, BBH 3 (1875): 80–84. Also printed in: Stucken aengaende de catholycken onderdanen van de Staten van de Vereenighde Provincien van Nederlandt, Kn. 5135. N.p., 1644). 98 “Drie klopjes voor het Gerecht te Leiden,” ed. A. J. J. Hoogland, BBH 6 (1878): 69–76. 99 Aries van Meeteren, Op hoop van akkord. Instrumenteel forumgebruik bij geschilbeslechting in Leiden in de zeventiende eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 2006), p. 139. 100 RAL NHG, KA, 22 April 1644. 96

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had largely ended, as the city’s sheriff responded rather defensively to inquiries from the Court of Holland about his enforcement of the placards. Prosecution was difficult, he claimed, since the number of Catholics in the city was “very large,” and they had a network of informants who watched his officers’ movements and warned priests when raids were imminent. Other Catholics  – mostly older and from respectable families  – also hosted gatherings in their homes, but these were so small  – ten, twelve, perhaps twenty people – that neighbors did not even notice them and they “hardly deserve to be called conventicles.” They were too modest to be a nuisance, ran the implication, and therefore were ignored. Using the size of the Catholic population as a defense suggested that enforcement would tax not only police resources but also public order. Nevertheless, the sheriff claimed that law officers inspected suspicious Catholic homes quarterly, and thus Papist “excesses” were curbed more effectively in Leiden than any city in Holland – excepting perhaps Dordrecht, but the Catholic population there was so small that any comparison was meaningless, he added hastily.101 The duration and severity of harassment of Leiden’s Catholics in the 1640s and 1650s was enough to induce the Apostolic vicar to describe the state of affairs there as “monstrous.”102 The Carmelite missionary Petrus a Matre Dei, who served the city’s Walloon Catholics in the 1650s, likewise painted a dramatic picture of heavy persecution of himself and his flock, including tales of donning disguises and fleeing over rooftops to escape the clutches of law officers.103 It was clear that at mid-century, Leiden’s rulers were most anxious to assert their power over the city’s Catholic population, if only as a means of preserving civic order and respect for their authority. To do so required both persecution and toleration. That the city of Dordrecht had the reputation of being the most zealous in enforcing the anti-Catholic placards was not surprising. Its Reformed consistory had a particular predilection for Calvinist orthodoxy, and during this period the city was the closest of Holland’s towns to the frontier of the war against Spain – and thus felt more keenly than most the threat that a Spanish military advance posed. Even in such a staunchly Calvinist city, however, the magistracy’s tolerationist regime prevailed. In 1635, for example, the Reformed consistory there insisted that all priests be banned from the city. One of the magistrates replied “Bouwstoffen,” BBH 9 (1881): 30–32. “Relatio seu descriptio,” AAU 11 (1883): 87. 103 Petrus a Matre Dei, pp. 70–84; Joannes a Cruce Peters, “De ongeschoeide Carmelieten gedurende de Hollandse Zending (1648–1853),” Carmel 2 (1949): 51. 101 102

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that when the consistory had proposed a similar measure a few years earlier, eight “notable” Catholic families, having gotten wind of this, threatened to leave the city if they were left without priests. Under this pressure from socially prominent Catholic citizens, the magistracy had concluded that it was more prudent to issue stern warnings to the priests but otherwise leave them alone. The burgomaster indicated that the magistrates would treat this current petition in a similar manner.104 It was a remarkable admission for the Dordrecht magistracy to make, but keeping in line with the larger assumption among Holland’s political elites that civic harmony trumped confessional difference. Dordrecht was one of the province’s smaller major towns, and the departure of eight prominent families along with their assets and their prestige was clearly a prospect the city fathers wished to avoid. Thus could elite Catholics influence and manipulate the town’s regime of toleration; they understood their role in civic space very well. In the 1640s, however, the Dordrecht burgomasters began to superintend Catholic activity in the city more carefully.105 The town government may have felt some pressure from the provincial Court of Holland, which by the 1640s was insisting on more vigorous investigation and supervision of Catholic activities in the towns by law officers.106 Accordingly, in the 1640s the sheriff of Dordrecht, Jacob van Beveren, embarked on a sustained campaign of judicial harassment against the city’s Catholics, entering and searching homes where conventicles were suspected. He was so assiduous in his investigations that Johan van der Steen, the local dikereeve, and Margareta Oem, members of prominent Catholic families, formally protested to the town government about the sheriff’s harassment. In a written complaint dated 1653, the two charged that the sheriff had forcibly and repeatedly entered the homes of Catholic notables, breaking doors and shattering glass. On one occasion in 1646, they alleged, he and his deputies burst open the doors of Van der Steen’s house at four in the morning and immediately fined the twenty-eight people gathered there for attending a conventicle. Two years later, he barged into the dike-reeve’s home after seeing four women enter there, only to discover that they were Van der Steen’s wife, her midwife, and two friends – she was about to give birth. The shock to the mother purportedly caused the SAD NHG, KA, 20 Sept. 1635; see also John Paul Elliott, “Protestantization in the Northern Netherlands, A Case Study: The Classis of Dordrecht, 1572–1640.” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1990, pp. 311–312. 105 SAD NHG, KA, 8 Jan. 1641, 17 Jan. 1641. 106 Knuttel, Toestand, pp. 130–131. 104

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child to be stillborn. The document alleged that by the end of the decade, Dordrecht’s Catholics were so fearful of the sheriff that they felt obliged to halt their worship services altogether for a time. All these onslaughts had so upset the notable Catholic families of the city, the letter warned, that many were considering leaving. The complaint reminded the government that these honorable families had helped to build the city in ­centuries past, that the Union of Utrecht guaranteed freedom of conscience, and therefore their consciences and property should be left alone and no longer infringed upon.107 Dordrecht’s leading Catholic families traditionally relied upon their close ties to the city’s ruling elites to shield them from persecution, and they did not hesitate to exercise their social influence when the placards were so rigorously enforced; they were clearly adept at manipulating the tolerationist regime. They shared in the general magisterial understanding of the public-private boundary, and believed that it was to be found at the thresholds of their homes; the claim that their property was being violated thus added further weight to their appeal to their right to privacy. So assured were they of their right to worship privately that as a defense, they even called upon the conscience clause of the Union of Utrecht – a rare instance of this document actually cited as a guarantee of religious liberty. Such was the fluxible nature of toleration and persecution in seventeenth-century Holland that even in a town as staunchly Calvinist as Dordrecht, Catholics felt secure enough to issue a formal complaint when they believed their rights were under attack. Sheriff van Beveren clearly did not share their understanding of the private-public boundary – and no doubt suspected violations of it whenever groups of Catholics gathered  – but the very murkiness of this unspoken, implicit social and political line aided the Catholics in their quest for protection from legal harassment. For Dordrecht’s Catholics, their privacy was not a polite fiction at all but a liberty grounded in the fundamental laws and mores of their civic community. Like their coreligionists in Dordrecht and Leiden, the Catholics of Gouda endured an extended period of persecution between 1620 and 1660, though as the narrative opening this chapter suggests, its impetus may have been as much pecuniary as sectarian. As was the case in other Holland cities, Gouda’s magistracy was principally worried about civic peace and how Catholic conventicles might disrupt it.108 A round up of UA OBC, no. 182, report dated Oct. 1653. Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 478–505.

107 108

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priests in 1621 resulted in the banishment of one priest, fines for others, and the halting of Catholic services within the city for three months.109 In 1622, for example, the local Jesuit Petrus Maillart was captured and incarcerated in The Hague for two years on suspicion of conspiring against the Republic.110 Citing concerns about “sedition and uproar,” it empowered the city bailiff in 1629 to enter and inspect any home where he suspected Catholic worship was taking place.111 Like their Dordrecht coreligionists, Catholic Goudenaars knew how to adapt to circumstances of heightened hostility and tension. One method was to prevent law officers from crossing the public-private boundary at all. On at least one occasion in 1629, the bailiff was kept out of a house by force by the people gathered inside, and on another that same year the house’s occupants raised such a hue and cry that he was obliged to retreat.112 A particular target of the bailiff’s exertions was the zealous and popular priest Petrus Purmerent, who more than any other cleric was responsible for the rejuvenation of Gouda’s Catholic community in this period.113 Purmerent owned a complex of adjacent houses that included both his home and a house church; these were subjected to numerous searches by the bailiff during this period. Once in 1643, he was left standing and fuming on the doorstoop while one of the resident klopjes pretended to fumble with the key in order to give time for those inside to escape through back passageways.114 One evening around nine o’clock that same year, a gathering of Catholics got word of his impending arrival and proceeded to depart from the house, thereby demonstrating – the Catholic chronicler Ignatius Walvis wryly noted – that it was the hour for sleep rather than disturbance.115 Despite the bailiff’s repeated importunings and the fines imposed on Catholic clergy and laity in this period, the Gouda Catholic community was never permanently disrupted, nor was the legal perturbation very consistent. During the 1640s, even as persecution reached its height, the Reformed consistory of Gouda noted that some public manifestations of Catholicism were still being permitted. During the winter of 1646–1647, the consistory complained repeatedly to the burgomasters Walvis, fol. 15v. “De gevangenschap van P. Petrus Maillard, S.J., 1622–1624,” ed. F. van Hoeck, BBH 41 (1923): 236–255. 111 “Bouwstoffen,” BBH 49 (1932): 427. 112 Walvis, fols. 35v, 36r. 113 Xander van Eck, Kunst, twist en devotie. Goudse katholieke schuilkerken 1572–1795 (Delft: Eburon, 1984), pp. 25–29, 125–131. 114 “Bouwstoffen,” BBH 8 (1880): 434–437. 115 Walvis, fol. 65. 109 110

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about the open sale of Catholic crucifixes and paternosters in the city’s market, but the latter did nothing about it.116 The magistracy wanted the Catholics to keep quiet and the bailiff wanted to line his pockets, and once those goals were met persecution tapered off. By 1654, the Gouda bailiff could offer the Court of Holland little evidence that he was enforcing the anti-Catholic placards beyond interrogating a Jesuit who had come into the town to visit his parents.117 As was the case in Leiden and Dordrecht, legal persecution and harassment of Catholics in Gouda had effectively ended by 1660. As one of Gouda’s Reformed preachers bitterly noted in an anti-Catholic pamphlet published in 1658, everyone knew (polite fictions notwithstanding) that the “papists” had free run of the city.118 His suspicions were borne out in 1668, when the town council secretly resolved not to apply the placards with “rigor” and even instructed the city’s priests to schedule their masses discreetly around Reformed church services.119 Toleration remained negotiation. In contrast to Leiden, Dordrecht, and Gouda, the other major cities of Holland  – Amsterdam, Delft, and Haarlem  – persecuted their Catholic communities far less frequently and intensively in the period 1620–1660, though this was certainly not because of a lack of lobbying on the part of local Reformed church authorities. Of all the cities in Holland, the metropolis of Amsterdam  – with its much larger and much more cosmopolitan population – did least to enforce the anti-Catholic placards. Inhabitants of quite different religious coloration found ways of coexisting in what was a teeming and booming metropolis, and the city fathers had no wish to disrupt that prosperity.120 Many Catholic priests benefitted from kinship ties to leading regent families in the city, and the magistracy was inclined to let clergy off lightly as long as they did not make trouble. A certain amount of sympathy, perhaps rooted in common intellectual and social backgrounds, seems to have prevailed between Amsterdam’s patricians and its priests. In 1629, for example, the sheriff arrested the priest Leonard Marius, who pastored in the city’s Bagijnhof; the regents interrogated Marius, ascertained he was a man of learning

AHGG KA, 20 Dec. 1646, 10 Jan. 1647. “Bouwstoffen,” BBH 9 (1881): 18–19. 118 Jacobus Sceperus, Geschenck op geseijde St. Nicolaes Avont aen Allen Ingeseten van Gouda, welcke Godts Woort en waerheijt nevens haer Zaelicheijt lieffhebben en betrachten (Gouda, 1658), p. 1 119 Abels, “Van ketternest tot bolwerk van rechtzinnigheid,” pp. 445–446. 120 Willem Frijhoff, “Amsterdam in de Gouden Eeuw: het geloofsleven,” Jaarboek Amstelodamum 91 (1999): 78–103. 116 117

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and erudition, and allowed him to go home unmolested.121 Similarly, the priest Zacharias de Metz, coadjutor to the Apostolic Vicar and resident in the city, got off with a warning after he was arrested in 1660 for appearing publicly in his episcopal habit and pectoral cross.122 The Apostolic vicar Johannes van Neercassel enjoyed citizenship rights and had cordial relations with the town government until the French invasion of 1672.123 Catholics in Amsterdam may well have enjoyed the most hospitable civic space of all. The Amsterdam Reformed consistory railed against the city’s regime of toleration to little effect. In 1656, it catalogued in painstaking detail all sixty-two locations in the city where Catholics gathered. These sites operated with the least amount of subterfuge, their locations were common knowledge, worship within them could be heard on the streets.124 As the Reformed consistory’s complaints attested, the locations of Catholic worship spaces were common enough knowledge in the city, and little was done about them. One historian has argued that in the case of Amsterdam, historians cannot accurately speak of “hidden churches” (schuilkerken, a term commonly used by Catholic historians) so much as “house churches,” suggesting that they were in fact private rather than secret.125 Like their counterparts in other cities in Holland, the law officers of Amsterdam did occasionally indulge in raids on Catholic meetings or arrests of priests. One Jesuit account has the sheriff and his deputies surrounding a house church and trying to break its doors down; the pregnant wife of the homeowner pretended to go into labor with much crying and carrying on while the husband yelled frantically for a midwife. The sheriff was shamed or alarmed into withdrawing from the scene.126 Large, conspicuous gatherings of Catholics could also be targets: On the feast of Corpus Christi in 1641, the sheriff interrupted a gathering of Wim Tepe, XXIV Paepsche vergaderplaetsen. Schuilkerken in Amsterdam (Amstelveen: Luyten, 1984), p. 118. 122 Joke Spaans, “Stad van vele geloven 1578–1795,” in Geschiedenis van Amsterdam. Centrum van de wereld 1578–1650, eds. Willem Frijhoff and Maarten Prak (Amsterdam: SUN, 2004), p. 404; M.G. Spiertz, L’Église catholique des Provinces-Unies et le SaintSiège pendant la deuxième moitié du xviie siècle (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1975), p. 46. 123 H. A. Enno van Gelder, Getemperde vrijheid (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1972), p. 132. 124 SAA NHG, KA, 7 Dec. 1656. 125 S. A. C. Dudok van Heel, “Amsterdamse schuil- of huiskerken?” Holland 25 (1993): 8–10. 126 H. J. Allard, De Sint-Franciscus Xaverius-Kerk of de Krijtberg te Amsterdam 1654–1904 (Amsterdam: C. L. van Langenhuysen, 1904), pp. 16–17. 121

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500 Catholic worshipers and collected a considerable sum in fines.127 The ­evidence suggests, however, that this kind of judicial harassment occurred less frequently in Amsterdam than in Leiden, Gouda, or Dordrecht. Even in his bleak “Relatio” on the heightened state of persecution in Holland in 1656, the Apostolic vicar Jacobus de la Torre had to admit that Amsterdam was the great exception.128 Like Amsterdam, the cities of Haarlem and Delft appear to have had less of an appetite for the judicial harassment of local Catholics than Leiden, Gouda, and Dordrecht; as early as 1616, Philip Rovenius reported that Catholics, who were numerous, enjoyed a relatively high degree of toleration in both of these towns.129 Haarlem, with its surviving cathedral chapter and large concentration of klopjes or spiritual maidens, was the most important organizing center in the province for the Holland Mission. From the start, the canons of the Haarlem chapter were careful to cultivate amicable and cooperative relations with the city magistracy, who in turn allowed them relatively free rein to fulfill their pastoral and parochial duties within the city’s Catholic community.130 Priests dutifully registered with the civic authorities as prescribed by the placards, and they paid recognition money to the sheriff; for their pains, they were left largely alone by judicial authorities.131 To be sure, Haarlem’s Reformed consistory protested vociferously about magisterial toleration of popish impudence, especially the activities of the klopjes, but to little effect.132 Haarlem was also one of the few towns in Holland, along with Delft, that contained a distinctly Catholic neighborhood, clustered around the “De Hoek” community of spiritual maidens located on the Bakenessergracht.133 This was hardly a ghetto, and not all the city’s Catholics lived there, but it may have afforded Haarlem’s Catholics greater possibilities for shielding their activities from the public eye. Spaans, “Stad,” p. 404; R. B. Evenhuis, Ook dat was Amsterdam. De kerk der hervorming in de gouden eeuw (Amsterdam: W. Ten Have, 1967), vol. 1, p. 205. 128 “Relatio seu descriptio,” p. 120; Petrus a Matre Dei in his otherwise quite sectarian account agreed with this assessment of Amsterdam. See Petrus a Matre Dei, p. 69. 129 “Brevis descriptio,” pp. 219, 221. 130 Spaans, Haarlem, pp. 76–79. 131 Joke Spaans, “Levensbeschouwelijke groeperingen,” in Deugd boven geweld. Een geschiedenis van Haarlem 1245–1995, ed. G. F. van der Ree-Scholtens (Hilversum: Verloren, 1995), p. 216; Rovenius described in Haarlem a “moderate liberty, dearly bought from the sheriff there.” in “Vier missie verslagen, van 1635 tot 1645, door Rovenius te Rome ingediend,” ed. G, Brom, AAU 18 (1890), p. 8. 132 NHA KA, 5 March 1636, 13 June 1662. 133 Gabrielle Dorren, Het Soet Vergaren. Haarlems buurtleven in de zeventiende eeuw (Haarlem: Arcadia, 1998), pp. 18–19. 127

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Like Haarlem, the city of Delft was a center of missionary work and housed a comparatively large Catholic population. Like Haarlem, Delft also contained a distinctly Catholic neighborhood, the Papenhoek or “Papists’ Corner” was a small collection of Catholic residences centered around a Jesuit house church and school.134 Before 1620, Delft’s Catholics had had to contend with a sheriff who harassed their priests and raided their homes for mostly pecuniary reasons.135 In the 1620s, raids were directed chiefly at the Jesuit priest Lodewijk Makeblijde.136 In the 1640s and 1650s, the Reformed consistory of Delft, like its counterparts elsewhere in Holland, stepped up its rhetorical attack on Catholics and its lobbying of the municipal government. More than once, the city preachers and elders demanded that the burgomasters demonstrate their “Christian zeal” by suppressing Catholic license.137 In 1649, these complaints came to head with a formal four-point petition to the government asking for the silencing of priests, the closure of house churches and schools, and the dispersal of the klopje community housed in the Bagijnhof. The city fathers assured the consistory that they would warn resident priests and keep an eye on the spiritual maidens, but they refused to close Catholic churches.138 By the following year, the sheriff resisted calls for greater crackdowns on priests; he informed the consistory that the government had ordered him to tolerate priests resident in the city as long as they made no trouble.139 Like their confreres in Amsterdam and Haarlem, by mid-century the burgomasters of Delft made a deliberate choice for toleration in order to accommodate their Catholic burghers, despite Reformed protests. In the case of the latter two cities, this may have been because the relatively large sizes of their Catholic communities made accommodation an easier strategy than harassment in managing religious coexistence. Amsterdam’s population, meanwhile, was of such size and diversity (not just religiously) that toleration may have been

John Michael Montias, Vermeer and his Milieu: A Web of Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 176–177. 135 Abels, Nieuw en ongezien, pp. 131–135. 136 L. Loosen, Lodewijk Makeblijde (1565–1630). Hymnen en gezangen (Zwolle: Tjeenk Willink, 1964), pp. 36–37; M. A. Kok, “Het katholiek leven binnen de stad Delft in de jaren 1572–1650,” in De stad Delft. Cultuur en maatschappij van 1572 tot 1667 (Delft: Prinsenhof, 1981), p. 111. 137 GAD NHG, KA, 3 March 1642. 138 GAD NHG, KA, 21 Feb. 1649. 139 P. H. A. M. Abels, “Kerk en religie in het leven van Johannes Vermeer,” in De Hollandse samenleving in de tijd van Vermeer, eds. Donald Haks and Marie Christine van der Sman (Zwolle: Waanders, 1996), p. 73. 134

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the only viable option for keeping order. Political pragmatism trumped sectarian confessionalism in civic space. From these examples we can draw a number of conclusions about the dynamic between toleration and persecution in Holland in the years between 1620 and 1660. In the first place, it was episodic, as we also saw in the case of Gouda’s bailiff. Secondly, it was subject to numerous variables and pressures, such as the state of the war, lobbying by the public church, and the inclinations of local authorities. Thirdly, governmental motives for enforcing the anti-Catholic placards were varying – at the provincial level, Catholics were seen by some as a potential political threat to the Republic’s security, while local officials acted when they believed public order was threatened. Finally, the ebb and flow of toleration and persecution had little long-term effect on the overall fortunes of Holland’s Catholic minority, which was generally able to weather the “storms” of persecution (as the Leiden Carmelite Petrus a Matre Dei described them)140 and the ambiguities of toleration fairly successfully without undue damage to its communities. Indeed, the storm metaphor is an apt one; episodes of heavy weather blew in, caused some temporary disarray and consternation, and then quickly dispersed. Arguably, the increased number of raids, house searches, arrests, and fines that Catholics were subjected to between 1620 and 1660 was an indicator of how successful they had been in revitalizing their confession. They only received unwelcome legal and political attention when they had firmly reestablished themselves in the social landscape; despite Reformed objections, as a community they were firmly ensconced in civic space.

After 1660: Coexistence After reaching a high point in the 1640s and 1650s, judicial persecution of Catholics – raids, interrogations, arrests, fines – in Holland tapered off, with far fewer instances of it recorded during the remainder of the century.141 Catholics enjoyed greater personal liberty; it was easier for them to make religious pilgrimages across the Republic’s borders, for example.142 This was in part due to the more moderate political tone of the stadholderless regime of grand pensionary Johan de Witt, whose ideology of “true freedom” argued for greater toleration of religious minorities Petrus a Matre Dei, p. 62. Knuttel, Toestand, p. 83. 142 Marc Wingens, Over de grens. De bedevaart van katholieke Nederlanders in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Nijmegen: SUN, 1994), p. 27. 140 141

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in the interests of social harmony and economic prosperity. Nor did the ­accession of William III to the stadholderate in 1672 substantially change this policy; if anything, William III saw toleration as a means to encourage national unity in the face of the more serious external threat of an aggressive Louis XIV of France.143 This continuity of approach by two otherwise ideologically opposite regimes allowed for a climate where relatively peaceful coexistence became the norm among Holland’s confessions. Indeed, it seems likely that the heightened confessionalism in Holland during the period between 1620 and 1660 may have in fact helped to further that coexistence. By establishing sharp boundaries between confessions, Reformed and Catholic ecclesiastical authorities made their distinct identities clearer, both to themselves and to the general population. At the same time, by enforcing – with raids, fines, and arrests – the privileged position of the public church, political authorities made clear what space and status each confession could occupy in civic space.144 Thus a place for Catholic citizens, however private and circumscribed, was engineered by the government in order to assure the smooth working of a civil society.145 By 1660, both confessions understood clearly – both with each other and the civil power – which theological and which sociopolitical lines could not be crossed. Reformed Protestantism would monopolize the public sphere; Catholicism would find its locus in private life but would also become an accepted member of a pluralistic society.146 Rules and confines allowed coexistence to work in civic space. As their interest in judicial harassment and persecution waned, local magistracies grew more adept at fobbing off querulous consistories by promising action and then doing nothing. A good example of this approach can be found in Gouda in the late 1660s and early 1670s. Gouda’s Reformed consistory remained as sectarian as ever, protesting incessantly at the infractions of the city’s lively Catholic community, particularly the actions of the priest Cornelis de Jager. It was especially incensed over reports of De Jager and other priests and klopjes interfering in the lives of mixed Reformed-Catholic families. In late 1664, the brethren complained repeatedly to the town bailiff that De Jager was hosting Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 637–449. Parker, Faith on the Margins, pp. 46–58; Joke Spaans, “Religious policies in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic,” in: Calvinism and Religious Toleration, pp. 72–86. 145 Joke Spaans, “De katholieken in de Republiek na de Vrede van Munster,” ZE 13 (1997): 258–260. 146 Willem Frijhoff, “How Plural were the Religious Worlds in Early-Modern Europe? Critical Reflections from the Netherlandic Experience,” Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe, eds. C. Scott Dixon et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 50. 143 144

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unauthorized conventicles at a home on the Gouwekade.147 The bailiff investigated over several months, and then nearly a year later warned De Jager away from that residence.148 Within a few months, however, De Jager was at it again, and once more the consistory alerted the bailiff – then it also went straight to the burgomasters to demand a “conference” about Papist activities, particularly priests who tried to sow dissension in mixed marriages.149 The burgomasters promised to impose some order on the situation, but apparently little was done, for Reformed complaints continued through 1666 and into 1667.150 By early 1668, the brethren’s impatience led them to that tried-and-true recourse the written petition, calling for resolutions to suppress Catholic worship, formally delivered to the burgomasters who in turn thanked them for their efforts and promised to take action.151 Nine months later, the consistory were still awaiting word of an anti-Catholic ordinance from the magistrates; when none came, it drafted yet another remonstrance in early 1669.152 With still no response forthcoming, the consistory took to lobbying the town council, to whom the burgomasters were accountable, but the councillors told it to go through the proper channels; that is, the burgomasters themselves.153 Finally, in September 1670, more than two years after the initial request, the burgomasters published their resolution denouncing Catholic “excesses” such as meddling in mixed marriages, having babies secretly baptized, and trying to convert Reformed church members on their sickbeds. The language of the ordinance was mild, requiring priests and representatives of the Catholic community to present themselves to the burgomasters within eight days to give their assent to its strictures.154 This tepid rap on the knuckles was a long way away from an earlier era of raids, fines, interrogations, and banishments. What had been urgent questions of confessionalism and conflict a generation earlier had now evolved into the rather blander irritations of accommodation and boundary management. The Reformed’s chief objection was Catholic interference in its own sphere – the lives of its church members – and what they got from the magistracy was not the suppression of Catholic activity but the containment of it. The burgomasters’ AHGG KA, 16 Oct. 1664; 4 Dec. 1664; 11 Dec. 1664. AHGG KA, 29 Jan. 1665; 12 Nov. 1665. 149 AHGG KA, 11 Feb. 1666; 8 April 1666. 150 AHGG KA, 23 Sept. 1666; 18 Aug. 1667. 151 AHGG KA, 5 Oct. 1667; 15 March 1668. 152 AHGG KA, 6 Dec. 1668; 18 April 1669. 153 AHGG KA, 19 Sept. 1669. 154 AHGG KA, 9 Sept. 1670. 147 148

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response to Reformed lobbying was first to temporize and delay, and then to summon Catholic leaders and remind them of their obligation to abide by Holland’s ecclesiastical settlement by respecting confessional boundaries. Indeed, the Gouda magistracy’s commitment to accommodation was already evident in 1668, when the town council passed a secret resolution not to enforce the anti-Catholic placards rigorously, and even instructed resident priests to schedule their masses around Reformed church services.155 Such efforts to negotiate confessional difference and proximity were a tacit admission of a basic social reality of Holland’s cities: Reformed and Catholic had to live with each other within civic space, and magistracies were obliged to manage that coexistence. The regents’ sufferance of religious pluralism was an indirect admission that viable spiritual alternatives existed outside the public church; indeed, the Apostolic vicar Jacobus de la Torre would later argue that the placards allowing priests to register and reside in cities was in effect a tacit acceptance of the fact that Catholic sacraments would be celebrated there.156 That acceptance was a reminder to the public church that at least in theory its privileged status was subject to the goodwill of civil authority, and that it was just as much managed as every other confession in civic space. Persecution and toleration were means to cope with the basic multiconfessional fact of Holland’s civic space: persecution in the name of confessionalism established invisible but necessary boundaries, and toleration allowed those boundaries to be policed. Thus toleration and persecution were processes rather than conditions, tools and tactics with which Holland’s authorities parlayed their communities’ complicated and tetchy multiconfessional relationships. This regime of toleration more or less successfully managed religious coexistence within Holland’s civic space.157 Complete freedom and complete conformity were not options, so instead muddy and malleable compromises were worked out, satisfying neither Reformed nor Catholic sectarians. Sometimes violence – physical, judicial, rhetorical – attended these processes; sometimes they were accompanied by remarkable pragmatism and leeway. The evolution of the Reformed Abels, “Ketternest,” pp. 445–446. Poelhekke, Geen blijder maer in tachtigh jaer, p. 130. 157 This regime also worked successfully in neighboring Utrecht. When Catholics in that city were granted rights of worship equal to their Reformed neighbors under the French occupation in 1672, confessional relations grew more polarized than they had been under tolerationist policy. Bertrand Forclaz, “‘Rather French than Subject to the Prince of Orange:’ The Conflicting Loyalties of the Utrecht Catholics during the French Occupation,” Church History and Religious Culture 87 (2007): 509–533. 155 156

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Catholic relationship from confusion to conflict to coexistence mirrored the ­development of the Republic itself in the seventeenth century: an accidental state, barely practicable in the beginning, then convulsed by powerful internal struggles before achieving a measure of constitutional and political balance.

4 Converts and Apostates

Tis the fair of all the sects, where all pedlars of religion have leave to vent their toys, their ribbands, and phanatic rattles . . . . Owen Felltham, 16771

In the spring of 1625, the elders of the Reformed church of Dordrecht learned that a lifelong member of their congregation, Sara van Breen – the wife of a churchwarden – had been attending clandestine Catholic services in the town. When they confronted her with this charge, Sara admitted that she had indeed been going to mass with the local Catholics. She defended her actions by declaring that she believed that the Catholic religion preached true doctrine, “including transubstantiation.” Furthermore, she added pointedly, she found “more love and salvation” among the Catholics than among her own coreligionists.2 When the elders summoned her before them again a month later, she reiterated this point: What made her decide to change her church allegiance, she said, was “the behavior of many of the Reformed.” Apparently, her fellow congregants were not living lives as she thought Christians ought to, nor was she finding enough fellowship among them. As if to soften the implied rebuke, she added that as a woman she had little understanding of theology and could not therefore judge among the “multitude of opinions” concerning religion.3 Yet clearly she had discovered some degree of spiritual or Owen Felltham, A brief character of the Low Countries under the States (London, 1677), p. 53. 2 SAD NHG, KA, 24 April 1625; Christine Kooi, “Conversion in a Multiconfessional Society: The Dutch Republic,” in Konversion und Konfession in der Frühen Neuzeit, eds. Ute-Lotz Heumann et al. (Gütersloh: Verlagshaus, 2007), pp. 271–272. 3 SAD NHG, KA, 22 May 1625. 1

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emotional fulfillment among the Catholics of Dordrecht that she did not find among the Reformed, and had made her choice accordingly. In the late summer of 1672, the Reformed consistory of Delft learned to its consternation that a certain “obstinate Catholic” in town was preventing his wife, a Reformed church member, from attending worship. When they met a few days later, the Catholic husband told the consistory that his conscience had not permitted him to let his wife go to the Reformed services. Instead, he had devised a scheme whereby he proposed that his wife attend “his” church six times and then attend “her” church six times. If after trying out both congregations she still preferred Reformed worship, he would allow her to go to her own church. The consistory, anxious not to lose a churchgoer, rejected this proposal and threatened to drag the husband before “the law” if he actually carried out his plan. A few months later, reports reached the brethren that the husband had been allowing his wife to attend Reformed sermons, that he himself had been accompanying her, and that he was even finding Reformed worship “to his taste.”4 The Reformed community of Delft, it seemed, had won itself a convert. That Sara van Breen and this anonymous Delft Catholic could do what they did – that is, survey the range of faith communities available and then opt to reject one and join another – attested to the heterogeneous character of the religious culture of Holland during the seventeenth century. Not only could these individuals make religious choices, but there also existed an array of choices to be made. To be sure, local and provincial authorities privileged the Reformed church over all others, bestowing on it material and governmental sanction. The Republic’s common religious spaces were enclosed by whitewashed walls stripped of ornament and centered around carved wooden pulpits, from which black-clad preachers exhorted and declaimed Reformed doctrine. However, behind this Calvinist façade lay a considerable degree of religious diversity, where a multiplicity of confessions were accommodated to a greater or lesser degree. It was hardly surprising then, that Sara van Breen was left bewildered by the “multitude of opinions” that her society presented to her. Nevertheless, she was still capable of making a choice among them. As its Latin root convertere indicates, conversion is a “turning” from one thing to something else. In a religious context, it denotes the exchange of one set of beliefs for another; in a more sectarian formulation, turning from error to truth. In the history of Christianity there is, of course, 4

SAD NHG, KA, 29 Aug. 1672, 2 Sept. 1672, 2 Dec. 1672.

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a long tradition of conversion, starting with Paul on the Damascus road through Augustine of Hippo’s rejection of classical paganism down to the turnings of heart of the sixteenth-century reformers Luther and Calvin. The permanent splintering of medieval Christendom that resulted from the Protestant Reformation provided more opportunities for conversion than any time in recent Christian memory.5 Multiple churches with competing claims to the truth became a settled fact by the end of the sixteenth century, and what they competed for was the souls of believers. To be sure, not every believer in Christian Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had the opportunity to choose among churches, let alone the inclination to do so. Even so, it is clear that crossing confessional boundaries (once those boundaries had been more or less settled in Europe by the seventeenth century) happened often enough to make it a familiar phenomenon, if not quite a common one.6 The motives to convert ranged from the spiritual to the political to the material. Reasons for conversion might be heartfelt or they might be expedient: Christina of Sweden’s embrace of Rome (thereby losing a throne) or Henry IV of France’s same choice (thereby gaining one) to cite two more famous contemporary examples. To abandon one set of beliefs in favor of another in a world that valued harmony was a weighty act that could have all sorts of personal and social ramifications. Indeed, the Catholic husband cited by the Delft consistory wrestled with his conscience about letting his wife go to a church other than his own. Likewise, the consistory itself was prepared to take a very serious step: calling upon the coercive power of the magistracy to ensure that the wife would not be forced to leave her Reformed congregation. Clerical elites on all sides – invoking Christian tradition – tended to view conversion as a grave, momentous act not to be entered into lightly, lest one’s soul be put in jeopardy. As Keith Luria has noted, much was made of “true” conversions as opposed to conversions of opportunity or expediency, which were usually regarded as less than genuine. According to such models, Judith Pollmann, “A Different Road to God: The Protestant Experience of Conversion in the Sixteenth Century,” in Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, ed. Peter van der Veer (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 47–48. Or, as another scholar has put it: “In some sense the Reformation can be described as an experiment in conversion,” Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. x. 6 On the question of conversion in the early modern era, see the essay collections La conversion au XVIIe siècle. Actes du XIIe Colloque de Marseille (Marseille, 1983); and Konversion und Konfession in der frühen Neuzeit, eds. Ute Lotz-Heumann et al. (Gütersloh: Verlagshaus, 2007). 5

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there had to be an inner transformation accompanied by an unspecified degree of emotional and psychological torment in order for the conversion to be deemed authentic and, by extension, to have potential propaganda value.7 Conversion, or more specifically publicized instances of it, could thus serve to highlight and sharpen confessional dividing lines. Paradoxically, it could also blur those lines, particularly in societies like Holland’s where such boundaries were not officially policed by state authority. For ordinary layfolk, religious allegiance might be understood in less momentous terms than their clergy taught them. Our Delft Catholic husband, for example, entertained the notion that confessional lines might be open to negotiation or compromise, that his wife might sample, as it were, two different religious options and then be persuaded to choose the “right” one. Religious identity, ran the implication, might possibly be an individual choice whose major criterion was not doctrinal truth but personal preference. This attitude the Delft consistory rejected out of hand, yet not long afterward the same body was content to learn that the husband was attending Reformed services. The merits of crossing confessional boundaries were in the eye of the beholder, or perhaps more precisely, of the receiving church. One church’s convert could be another’s apostate. The decision to abandon one faith for another or one church for another was more likely where those confessional boundaries were most easily crossed. The Dutch Republic, with its ambiguous ecclesiastical settlement and multiconfessional population, provided an environment in which religious choice was eminently possible.8 As a polity that upheld the ideal of freedom of conscience among its public virtues, the province of Holland’s tolerationist regime fostered a religious culture where an array of churches was available to those seeking spiritual solace or identity. In such an environment there could be, as it were, competition for souls; this was still another dimension of Catholic and Calvinist coexistence that cut across both confessional and private space because it involved interaction between both churches and individuals. In confessional space, the Catholic-Reformed relationship could be one of rivals and competitors. Yet in private space, individual Christian believers could – without undue Keith Luria, “The Politics of Protestant Conversion to Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century France,” in Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, ed. Peter van der Veer (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 23–33. 8 An individual instance of this kind of confessional selection is elegantly described and analyzed in Judith Pollmann, Religious Choice in the Dutch Republic: The Reformation of Arnoldus Buchelius (1565–1641) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 7

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difficulty  – move from one religious allegiance to another, especially between the two most numerous churches – Reformed and Catholic. To be sure, the guardians of ecclesiastical purity on both sides – those who routinely denounced each other as heretics and idolaters – strove mightily to hinder this cross-confessional traffic, at least when it was not in their favor. A 1644 Reformed tract, for instance, claimed that priests would sooner have someone declared legally insane and incarcerated in a madhouse than allow a Catholic to convert to the Reformed church.9 Apostasy did not serve the interests of those who had a stake in the preservation of confessional difference, and both Catholic priests and Reformed consistories expended considerable effort and energy in keeping their sheep within the fold.

Clerical Conversion Conversion, however, did have polemical and propagandistic value, and it could serve confessionalizing interests. The confession which won the convert could point to this fact as confirmation of the truth of its teachings. Conversion could be a potent weapon in the rhetorical wars that dominated confessional space. Conversion narratives, particularly those of clergymen, were circulated throughout the seventeenth century to highlight the rightness of one church over the perfidy of the other.10 Both churches published such literature, but Catholic propagandists were especially adept at producing pamphlets triumphantly recounting the transformations of preachers into priests. Tracts printed in Antwerp or Cologne would elaborately describe a particular pilgrim’s progress from the heresy of the “pseudo-Reformed” to the truth of Catholicism. These were very much conversions depicted in the classic Augustinian style, of an individual soul seeing the light after much study and contemplation. Such stories, accompanied by liberal doses of polemic and piety, provide an illuminating if necessarily one-sided perspective on the phenomenon of Reformed-to-Catholic conversion in the Dutch Republic. In particular, they can tell us a great deal about how the Catholic church in Holland constructed its identity vis-à-vis its Reformed antagonists. Anatomie ofte Ontledinghe van ‘t verderffelijck Deseyn der hedendaechsche Paepsghesinde/ teghen kercke en poletie/ ende alle goede Inghesetene der Geunieerde Provintien, Kn. 5136 (Groningen, 1644), fol. A4v. 10 For an illuminating discussion of conversion narratives and the models they present, see Keith Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-Modern France (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), pp. 248–266. 9

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A prime example of this kind of literature is the 1628 pamphlet titled Bekeeringe van P. della Faille, which recounts the conversion of a Reformed minister to Catholicism.11 Petrus della Faille studied theology at the States-College in Leiden, where he trained to become a preacher. He spent many hours in the university library reading the works of various church fathers. To Della Faille, these writings seemed to support the doctrinal and historical claims of the Catholic church.12 As a result of his studies he began  – while serving as an ordained preacher in the South-Holland village of Koudekerk – to sermonize in early 1627 on the history and practices of the original apostolic church. From the pulpit he preached in favor of fasting during Lent, contemplation of Christ’s Passion, and kneeling in church, all decidedly un-Reformed practices. Summoned before the regional classis of Leiden to account for his words, he reiterated before the assembled preachers and elders there his belief in the authenticity of the Lenten fast, a position the classis condemned as “reeking of popery”; that is, without scriptural warrant.13 Eventually Della Faille gave up the pulpit; in his letter of resignation to the classis, he explained that he had never been content in the Reformed faith, that the more deeply he studied Reformed theology the more his conscience began to bother him, that his soul felt increasingly restless and burdened. He was especially disturbed by the doctrine of predestination, “a hard and comfortless opinion . . . it was scandalous and offensive to talk about it in the pulpit.”14 He had come to conclude that Catholic teaching was “correct and scriptural doctrine.”15 On Easter Sunday 1627, he was officially denounced by the classis from the Koudekerk pulpit; not long afterward, a mob gathered at his house, threatening to tear it down and kill him. Della Faille fled and wound up in Leiden, expecting to meet once again with officials from the classis. Instead the city sheriff’s deputy threw him in jail, where he languished for nine days. Eventually he was brought before the city magistrates for questioning. He openly declared himself to have become a convinced Catholic, which seemed to impress the city fathers: “The lords praised this forthright confession, promising that I would no longer be bothered, that no one’s conscience should be pressured and protesting that they did not wish to introduce the Spanish Bekeeringe van P. della Faille, predikant te Koudekerk, uyt de Calvinissche ketterye, tot het H. Katholyk geloo (Antwerp 1764). 12 Bekeeringe, pp. 1–2. 13 Bekeeringe, pp. 3–5. 14 Bekeeringe, pp. 14–16. 15 NA, CA Leiden, 22 March 1637. 11

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inquisition.”16 Della Faille was allowed to leave the city, and he made his way to Louvain, where he studied for the priesthood and later worked as a pastor in the Holland Mission. His conversion was thus cast as a drama of martyrdom as well as of belief; not only was Della Faille persuaded of the truth, he was also persecuted for it. A similar story was told in the 1663 pamphlet De bekeeringe ende Godt-vruchtigh leven van . . . Jacobus Augustinus Ouzeel, ofte den tweede Augustijn.17 Jacobus Ouzeel was born in Leiden in the 1610s to a Reformed family (in an aside, the author notes dryly that he was baptized by an apostate Franciscan who had become a Reformed preacher there). A talented pupil who excelled at school, he studied for the ministry.18 As he began his career as a young Reformed preacher, he grew increasingly bothered by a sense of spiritual “darkness and blindness,” prompted by his reading of the church fathers. Their works persuaded Ouzeel, as they had Petrus della Faille, of the rightness of the “true holy catholic church.” He then initiated discussions with local Catholic priests on points of doctrine and came away impressed by their arguments. Finally, the devotion of local Catholics moved him deeply; “thus was the heart of Jacob Ouzeel broken, melted and humbled, so that his eyes became sluices through which the brackish dew of his tears flowed.”19 Not long afterward he converted to the Catholic church. Rejected by his family and friends,20 he went to Louvain to study for the priesthood and eventually – like Della Faille – became a pastor in the Holland Mission. For a number of years after his departure from Holland, the Leiden consistory wrote him letters trying to persuade him to return to the Reformed fold. The consistory argued that the Catholic church and more especially the papacy were illegitimate institutions, but Ouzeel retorted that the Catholic church was in fact the true body of Christ because it was characterized by “antiquity, clarity, large numbers, miracles, sanctity, learning, purity, succession [and] piety.”21 In short, for this convert, Catholicism could boast greater moral, devotional, doctrinal, and ecclesiastical authority than its Reformed competitor. Bekeeringe, pp. 71–73. De bekeeringe ende Godt-vruchtigh leven van de Godt-soeckende ende seer geleerde Heer Jacobus Augustinus Ouzeel, ofte den tweede Augustijn (Antwerp 1663). 18 Ouzeel, pp. 7–9. 19 Ouzeel, pp. 16–17. 20 Though he seems to have kept contact, at least initially, with his mother, through whom the Leiden consistory relayed messages to him; see RAL NHG, KA, 1 May 1643. 21 Ouzeel, pp. 174–175. 16 17

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Naturally, the conversions of two such promising young Reformed divines were important propaganda victories for the Catholic side, which was quick to cast them in a distinctly Augustinian light in order to underscore their legitimacy. These narratives countered the Reformed claim to being the true church; on the battleground of authenticity, Catholic polemic gave no quarter. In both narratives the claim of authority plays a pivotal role in the decision to change faiths. Prolonged study, a key component of Reformed training, had paradoxically led both men to the same conclusion: the truth of Catholic teaching. Reformed intellectualism was being hoisted by its own petard. Scripture, history, and patristic wisdom, according to these accounts, all naturally supported the Catholic church’s ancient assertion that it alone was the true successor to the original apostolic church. This was an advantageous polemical tactic to use in a society where a plethora of Christianities of more recent vintage preponderated. In a multiconfessional society, competing faiths had to signal and emphasize their distinctiveness in order to attract potential adherents and converts. In this case, Dutch Catholic polemicists hurled the charge of innovation at the Reformed church, contrasting it with the ancient and apostolic traditions of their own. This appeal succeeded in the case of men such as Della Faille and Ouzeel for whom, as spiritually restless and intellectually curious clerics, the church they initially served had lost its authority and authenticity. In confessional space the competition for souls, especially among clergy, could be fierce indeed. Both pamphlets also emphasize the theme of conscience in the ministers’ conversions.22 Both men maintained that they were driven to this step by the burden of conscience, which had left them restive and dissatisfied in both their calling and their devotion. Conscience – a kind of psychological and theological restlessness – impelled them to consult scripture, to search the patristic literature, to seek out conversations with priests, and ultimately it convinced them that what they were preaching from the pulpit was wrong. Since they lived in a multiconfessional state that had officially declared individual conscience to be inviolate, this appeal to conscience was another useful weapon in the ongoing rhetorical contest The early modern conscience still awaits its monograph. See the essays in Harald Braun and Edward Vallance (eds.), Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe 1500–1700 (London 2003). For some recent insights, see Keith Luria, “The Power of Conscience? Conversion and Confessional Boundary Building in Seventeenth-Century France,” in Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe, eds. C, Scott Dixon et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 109–125.

22

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between the Republic’s two major confessions. The 1628 pamphleteer’s citing of the Leiden magistracy’s declared adherence to religious freedom in its meeting with Petrus della Faille was a clever tactic in these propaganda wars. As the author suggested, a free conscience, like prolonged study, would naturally and ultimately lead Christian souls back to the Catholic faith. Thus two of the cornerstones of the Protestant theological worldview – text and conscience – instead served in these narratives to bear out the authenticity of the Catholic church. These narratives underscore how well Catholic polemicists understood their antagonists, especially within the peculiar context of Holland’s crowded multiconfessionalism. The arena in which the Catholic Mission worked presented opportunities for winning souls that it was quick to grasp. The Reformed church – it understood – was not simply an enemy, not simply heresy, but also a rival. By the same token, these accounts exactly highlighted one of the consequences of Holland’s religious pluralism about which Reformed divines so often warned: The toleration, and thus proximity, of Catholic worship permitted exposure to all manner of apostate temptation. Jacobus Ouzeel, while still a Reformed minister, could observe Catholic devotion among his neighbors and could seek out Catholic priests; the outcome of his confessional interactions was precisely what Reformed ecclesiastics feared. Among the clerical corps of the Holland Mission, a number of conversions to Catholicism seems to have occurred in a similar fashion.23 For their part, Reformed polemicists also produced the occasional pamphlet trumpeting the conversion of a Catholic cleric to Protestantism, but these narratives were generally not told with the same vividness and feeling as their Catholic opposites. A fairly typical example of the Reformed approach was a pamphlet printed in Amsterdam in 1601 entitled De bekeeringe ende wederoepinghe/ die Louys du Bois van Rijssel . . . openbaerlick binnen Leyden gedaen heeft.24 The tract was mostly just a recitation of the convert’s (a former member of the Franciscan order in Dunkirk) profession of faith, rather than a description of the actual circumstances of his conversion. It read more as sermon than narrative. Its contents comprised a familiar Reformed litany of the ways in which H. J. Allard, “Bekeerlingen onder de geestelijkheid van ‘t Haarlemsche bisdom,” BBH 2 (1874): 276–301; 3 (1875): 89–96; 5 (1877): 179–192. 24 De bekeeringe ende wederoepinghe/ die Louys du Bois van Rijssel, (eertijts priester ende Predicker van H. Franciscus Orden binnen Duynkercke) openbaerlick binnen Leyden gedaen heeft den 1. Junij Anno 1601 op eenen sondach na de Predicatie (Amsterdam, 1601). 23

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biblical texts proved the essential falseness of the Catholic church. With its extended scholarly exegeses it was clearly designed to appeal to the intellect rather than the heart, which was a common characteristic of Reformed polemic in the seventeenth century.25 In any case, at least in the early years after 1572, the Reformed church in Holland appeared in fact hesitant to immediately embrace those ex-priests who expressed a wish to convert to the public church. The 1574 provincial synod at Dordrecht produced a long list of conditions before former Catholic clergy could be accepted into the church, including formal abjuration of Catholicism, renunciation of one’s vocation, a willingness to learn true doctrine and to submit to ecclesiastical discipline.26 Those priests who wished to go further and become preachers were more problematic still. The national synod held at Middelburg in 1581 decided that those priests “who abandoned their superstition, who wished to learn the truth and live honorable lives” must wait before being allowed to join the ministry “lest the church be put in danger.”27 A substantial number of the first generation of Reformed preachers who served in Holland in the last quarter of the sixteenth century had begun their clerical careers as priests before converting. Given the confessional confusion in Holland in those early decades, it is not surprising that the public church wished to introduce some regularity into the process or at least to keep disorderly or unsupervised conversions of clergy to a minimum. There were a number of recorded instances of Catholic clergy becoming Reformed preachers in the period after 1600. Perhaps the most well-known conversion was that of Jacobus Trigland (1583–1654), the prominent Reformed preacher and Leiden University theologian who had originally studied at Louvain and trained to serve as a priest in the Holland Mission. However, his doubts about the doctrine of good works ended his vocation before it even started. In the course of his intellectual wrestlings he became persuaded of the truth of sola fide, became a school rector, and eventually a Reformed minister. With the zeal of a convert, he entered into polemical pamphlet wars with the Remonstrants and in P. Polman, “Roomse en antiroomse strijdliteratuur uit de dagen der Republiek,” Studia Catholica 12 (1936): 96. 26 Acta der provinciale en particuliere synoden, gehouden in de Noordelijke Nederlanden gedurende de jaren 1572–1620, eds. J. Reitsma, and S.D. van Veen (Groningen: Wolters, 1893), vol. 2, p. 133. 27 Acta van de Nederlandsche synoden der zestiende eeuw, ed. F.L. Rutgers (Utrecht: Kemink, 1889), p. 436. 25

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his later career wrote a number of books on dogmatics as well as works attacking the papacy and on Dutch church history.28 The sources suggest that many clerical converts from Catholicism to Reformed Protestantism in the seventeenth century came from outside Holland, usually the southern Netherlands or the Holy Roman Empire. There was a small but notable traffic among Holland’s consistories, classes, and synods in financial subsidies for foreign Catholic clergy and religious who had come to the Republic to convert. Numerous requests for monetary support (often for theological studies) from erstwhile priests, monks, and nuns came to the attention of Reformed governing bodies. Dordrecht’s consistory gave three rijksdaalders to an Austrian priest studying at the university in Leiden, and a few years later considered helping a former nun from Paderborn until it learned she was accused of “godless words.”29 The consistory of Haarlem granted half a daalder to the ex-monk Cornelius Reyneri in 1613, while the Leiden consistory in 1634 commended two former Franciscans from Maastricht to its diaconate.30 When a former Augustinian monk from Calais appeared before the Leiden classis in 1607 wanting to study Reformed theology, the brethren questioned him carefully about his motivations; he replied that “the popish superstitions, especially transubstantiation, appalled him.” This was apparently the right answer, for the classis agreed to give him some financial support.31 The Amsterdam church received requests for help by former clerics from as far away as Spain.32 However, Reformed authorities were wary of what they suspected was conversion for purely pecuniary motives, such as the case of one Arnoldus van Horiclée, who claimed to be an apostate priest from Louvain and came to the SouthHolland synod in 1636 hat in hand with tales of harassment and even imprisonment by Catholic authorities and family members; the synod noncommittally ordered an investigation into his case without promising any financial support.33 Conversion among clergy was treated very seriously by both Reformed and Catholic churches; the conversion of a clergyman seemed to carry H. W. ter Haar, Jacobus Trigland (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1891), pp. 33–39. SAD NHG, KA, 25 Sept. 1659, 26 Nov. 1665, 3 Dec. 1665. 30 NHA NHG, KA, 19 May 1613; RAL NHG, KA, 8 Dec. 1634. 31 Classicale acta 1573–1620 II: Particuliere synode Zuid-Holland. Classis Dordrecht 1601–1620, Classis Breda 1616–1620, ed. J. Roelevink (The Hague: Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 1991), p. 200. 32 SAA NHG, KA, 4 Sept. 1670. 33 Acta der particuliere synoden van Zuid-Holland 1621–1700, ed. W.P.C. Knuttel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1909), vol. 2, pp. 98–99. 28 29

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more weight, more consequence than that of a lay person. For a shepherd to abandon one flock for another was a grave concern for all involved because such conversions struck closer to the heart of the confessional divide. A former Franciscan priest who had converted to the Reformed side and was scheduled to preach in the public church in Gouda in 1663 was reportedly so unnerved by a street encounter with jeering Catholic youths that he never even reached the pulpit.34 The seriousness of clerical conversion was why the Dordrecht classis so assiduously addressed the case of Otto Hattemius, a preacher in the village of Sint AnthoniePolder, in the early 1600s. Complaints circulated that Hattemius did not condemn Catholicism vigorously enough in his sermons and had actually said that “the difference between popery and our doctrine is not so great.”35 Hattemius defended himself to the classis by arguing that preaching true religion was enough defense against Catholicism; at the same time, he expressed a wish that such bloody wars had not been fought for the sake of religion.36 A few years later word reached the classis – perhaps not surprisingly  – that Hattemius was suffering a crisis of faith: certain doctrinal questions, such as the marks of the true church and the harrowing of hell, were troubling him. He claimed that the Reformed churches had also killed people in the name of religion, such as Michael Servetus and the Gorcum martyrs. “We conduct our affairs worse than the Spanish Inquisition,” he asserted.37 The classis suspended him from ministry, and eventually he converted to the Catholic church and moved to Antwerp.38 For a minister to express such doubt was potentially dangerous to the cohesion of his flock; in confessional space the church being converted from always bemoaned conversion as an error and tragedy. Confessionalism was not possible without clergy, and for a cleric initially committed to one confession to traverse the boundary between churches flew in the face of the identities those churches had so carefully constructed. In a multiconfessional society where religious choice was politically and culturally permitted, those boundaries were all the more important. GHA, Archief van de Oud-Katholieke Parochie van de H. Johannes de Doper, no. 597, [Ignatius Walvis], “Goudsche en andere daartoe dienende katolieke kerk-zaken door I. W. pastoor van der Goude anno 1709,” f. 86. 35 Classicale Acta 1573–1620. Classis Dordrecht 1601–1620, p. 255. 36 Classicale Acta 1573–1620. Classis Dordrecht 1601–1620, p. 257. 37 Classicale Acta 1573–1620. Classis Dordrecht 1601–1620, pp. 304–306. 38 F. A. van Lieburg, Repertorium van Nederlandse hervormde predikanten tot 1816 (Dordrecht: 1996), v.1, p. 88 (where he is listed as “Olivier van Hattem”). 34

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Discipline and Error The well-publicized conversions of troubled clerics such as Petrus della Faille and Jacobus Ouzeel were, to be sure, hardly typical. In a society with such a wide range of religious options, conversion in the classic sense – the dramatic or deeply thought turning of the heart or struggle of conscience as narrated by the accounts of Della Faille and Ouzeel – was less common among ordinary layfolk; nevertheless, there did seem to exist among the latter a willingness to engage in religious experimentation. If people’s consciences were indeed free, as the state decreed, and there were multiple churches all claiming the true path to salvation, then unavoidably some lay believers in Holland would weigh their choices before committing themselves to one particular creed. A few were willing to do exactly that. One of the unanticipated consequences of Holland’s pluriform religious culture and its political idealization of conscience was the emergence of a kind of competition for souls among the confessions within its society.39 Church authorities in both confessions were acutely aware of this; consistories and priests alike labored arduously to win converts and to reconcile apostates. The vast majority of church members, Catholic and Reformed, submitted to the disciplining mechanisms of their leaders and remained securely within the boundaries of their congregations. A handful, however, did not. In private space – in the realm of individual interaction – conversion became a personal choice. A few ordinary men and women traversed confessional lines, and some were not necessarily fazed by their churches’ exertions to retain their allegiance. Their numbers were not large: In Amsterdam, for example, the number of cases of church members cited by the Reformed consistory for contact with or interest in Catholicism numbered no more than 163 over the period 1572–1700, while in Delft 31 cases appeared before the consistory between the years 1572 and 1621.40 The evidence also suggests that the numbers of cases of Reformed church members summoned before Christine Kooi, “Converts and Apostates: The Competition for Souls in Early Modern Holland,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 92 (2001): 202–203. A similar situation obtained in neighboring, multiconfessional East Friesland in the Holy Roman Empire; see Nichole Grochowina, “Bekehrungen und Indifferenz in Ostfriesland im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Konversion und Konfession in der Frühen Neuzeit, eds. Ute Lotz-Heumann et al. (Gütersloh: Verlagshaus, 2007), pp. 243–270. 40 Herman Roodenburg, Onder censuur. De kerkelijke tucht in de gereformeerde gemeente van Amsterdam 1578–1700 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1990), p. 151; P.H.A.M. Abels and A.Ph.F. Wouters, Nieuw en ongezien. Kerk en samenleving in de classis Delft en Delfland 1572–1621 (Delft: Eburon, 1994), vol. 2, p. 63. 39

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consistories because of their interest in or conversion to Catholicism ­correlated roughly to the chronology laid out in this study. That is, during the initial phase of ecclesiastical muddiness of 1572–1620, only a small number of conversion cases appeared before church councils. In the confessional phase of 1620–1660, that number grew considerably. This was due to the increased organizational success of the Holland Mission as it sharpened its confessional profile and won new adherents. As the seventeenth century closed, however, and coexistence became the norm, conversion cases diminished as an issue of concern for consistories. Herman Roodenburg’s work on the Amsterdam consistory nicely illustrates this trend: Up to 1620, cases of church members straying into Catholicism averaged not quite 9 per year; between 1620 and 1680 they doubled to 18 per year, and then after this period tapered back to pre-1620 levels.41 The question of converts and apostates nevertheless remained a persistent one for Reformed church authorities throughout the seventeenth century. Consistorial acta from the Reformed congregations of the major cities of Holland in this period are a useful record of the ongoing effort to keep church members from converting to Catholicism or even associating with it. The public church was well aware of the competitive perils of Holland’s multiconfessional society, particularly from the Catholic church. Consistories labored arduously to reconcile apostates and wielded all their weapons of ecclesiastical discipline – interrogation, home visitation, public condemnation from the pulpit, probationary banishment from communion  – to ensure that professed church members did not stray into the snares of apostasy. Their disciplinary records afford insight into the phenomenon of cross-confessional traffic. The minutes of weekly consistorial meetings are often scanty, terse, and, as Judith Pollmann has shown, incomplete.42 Nevertheless, they do offer some evidence about how the public church perceived and reacted to those members who embraced or flirted with Catholicism. The minutes’ succinct reporting allows small glimpses into the beliefs of Holland’s everyday churchfolk and the multiconfessional world they inhabited. The consistories of the Reformed church regarded as one of their principal charges the supervision of the behavior and beliefs of professed church members. This ecclesiastical discipline was necessary  – so ran Reformed theology – to protect the purity of the sacraments and the honor .

Roodenburg, Onder censuur, p. 151. Judith Pollmann, “Off the Record: Problems in the Quantification of Calvinist Church Discipline,” Sixteenth Century Journal 33 (2002): 423–438.

41 42

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of the church; in turn, the church – through the consistory of preachers and elders – tried to instruct the faithful to live and believe according to scriptural prescriptions. Purity of belief was the church’s goal in teaching the Word of God.43 For believers to deviate from established doctrine was thus a matter of pressing concern; that they might lapse into Catholicism was the worst possible outcome, since this was precisely the church that the Reformed believed they had discredited once and for all. Their theology taught them that in the matter of conversion souls were at stake. The Reformed leadership’s concern extended even to those outside the church’s official orbit. Although the Reformed church in Holland did not generally missionize among nonmembers, it also did not care to lose even potential adherents to “superstition.” For example, the Haarlem consistory discovered in 1619 that Catholics and Anabaptists were sowing doubts among their congregation’s “­sympathizers” (liefhebbers)  – those who attended services but had not officially joined the church; the consistory considered appointing someone specifically commissioned to instruct these potential converts and to answer other sects’ libels against the public church.44 Consistories would investigate and pursue such cases over weeks, months, and sometimes even years in hopes of disciplining and reconciling those congregational members who strayed or lapsed into Catholicism. The consistory of Delft, for example, labored for six years – from 1648 to 1654 – on the case of the apostate pottery painter Pieter Tobias Stockholm. Rumors reached the Delft brethren that Stockholm was speaking against the Reformed church and was trying to persuade his wife and others to become Catholic.45 Years of negotiating by the consistory did not produce the desired result, nor did formal censure from the pulpit, and even then the brethren carefully consulted with the regional classis of Delfland in 1653 before taking the final step of excommunication.46 The classis in turn spent a further six months dealing with Stockholm before declaring him “incurable” and approving his excommunication.47 Another six Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 460–467; Graeme Murdock, Beyond Calvin: The Intellectual, Political and Cultural World of Europe’s Reformed Churches (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 76–81; on Dutch consistories specifically, see A.Th. van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen: Kerk en kerkvolk ten tijde van Maurits en Oldenbarnevelt (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), pp. 193–217. 44 NHA NHG, KA, 26 Nov. 1619. On liefhebbers, see Van Deursen, Bavianen, pp. 128–131. 45 GAD NHA, KA, 4 May 1648. 46 GAD NHG, no. 276, Censuurboek, fol. 48. 47 NA, CA Delfland, 3 Nov. 1653, 27 April 1654. 43

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months passed before the Delft consistory finally officially separated Stockholm from the public church.48 Excommunication was the recourse of last resort, however, and was rarely implemented; consistories always preferred to win believers back. Often, they treated such cases not so much as apostasy as error (dwaling), in the hope that errant church members were not lost permanently from the communion of saints. The consistorial minutes indicate an awareness among those individual congregants who came before the tribunal on suspicion of such “errors” that faith was a matter of personal decision. For some of them their choices were not errors at all, and some were quite stubborn in their newfound convictions. In 1621, the consistory of Haarlem confronted the tinsmith Jan Lubbertsz about his apostasy, which included having his youngest child baptized Catholic; he defiantly retorted that salvation could also be found in the Catholic church and, despite warnings about his imperiled soul, insisted that his name be stricken from the Reformed membership rolls.49 A disappointed Amsterdam consistory recorded in 1650 that the tailor Jan Barentsz stubbornly rejected all attempts at reconciliation and refused to be intimidated, declaring “that he did not wish to be bothered any longer by us, that he was not afraid of our excommunication and that the church should just go ahead and do it.”50 Such self-possession in the face of considerable consistorial pressure bespoke a certain confidence of conviction. The ultimate punishment – segregation from the public church – held no fear for those who had already chosen to separate themselves and join the Catholic church. Passions could indeed run high during such confrontations. Preacher Johannes Hallius of Amsterdam reported to his brethren in 1604 that when he tried to speak to Aeltgen Claes about her lapse back into her native Catholicism, she answered only with bitter and “unfriendly” words. A household servant, she had been baptized into and joined the Reformed church of Amsterdam in 1601, but later that same year reports reached the consistory that she had lapsed back into Catholicism and was publicly maligning the Reformed church. One of her slanders was so reprehensible that the aghast consistory actually noted down in the minutes: Aeltgen impudently claimed that the “godly teacher” John Calvin had once been openly punished by the magistrate of Geneva for buggery.51 This rumor had been circulating in the wider European Catholic world GAD NHG, KA, 4 May 1648, 9 May 1654. NHA NHG, KA, 6 January 1621. 50 SAA NHG, KA, 16 June 1650. 51 SAA NHG, KA, 13 December 1607; 30 December 1607. See also Roodenburg, p. 163. 48 49

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since the late sixteenth century, and presumably a priest had told Aeltgen the story or she heard it in the Catholic circles she associated with.52 The Dordrecht consistory spent the better part of a year trying to persuade the city coal-meter Steven Theunisz to return to the church, even though he insisted that he was completely at peace with his conversion and that he would “live and die” in his new faith. In a final meeting with the brethren, he belligerently refused to discuss the matter any further and stormed out of the consistory chamber.53 Likewise, Maerten Eeleman, confronted by the Leiden consistory in 1652 with his Catholic apostasy, replied to the assembly that “the more they approached him, the less they could expect.”54 Aegje Hagendijcks, who had been married to a Catholic by a priest and was thus cited by her consistory in Dordrecht, told the church sexton there in 1660 that the brethren could summon her six times, but she still would not come. Instead, they could strike her name out of the membership book.55 Such defiance  – the wish not to be bothered anymore by preachers or elders – indicated the limits of ecclesiastical discipline. There was only so much consistories could do to exercise control or persuasion over some church members; no combination of discussion, instruction, threat, or blandishment had any effect on those converts who simply wanted to be left alone. Why did some Reformed church members choose to convert to Catholicism? In rare instances consistorial minutes recorded  – usually in tantalizingly terse fashion – converts’ reasons for rejecting their old church and joining a new one. Certainly theology played a role in some cases. Roelof Jansz of Haarlem, for example, told his consistory in 1601 that he had converted because there were priests in town who had proven to him from the Bible that the “truth” had always resided in the Catholic church and not in the Reformed church.56 This was a neat manipulation of the core Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura. Aert Jansz told the Dordrecht consistory in 1609 that the “Romanists” held the true faith, and he recited all the core Catholic beliefs he held: papal supremacy, prayers for the dead, the efficacy of the eucharist, regular confession, and fasting on Fridays. When questioned more closely, he The rumor was most famously aired by the Catholic controversialist Jérôme Bolsec in his biography of Calvin published in 1577; Jérôme-Hermès Bolsec, Vies de Jean Calvin et de Théodore de Bèze par Bolsec (Geneva, 1835), p. 12. 53 SAD NHG, KA, 6 April 1623, 28 March 1624. 54 RAL NHG, KA, 20 Dec. 1652. 55 SAD NHG, KA, 15 Jan. 1660. 56 NHA NHG, KA, 18 March 1601. 52

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said theological disputation was for the learned and he wished to be left in peace.57 In 1639, the Leiden consistory interrogated Maritgen Jansz about why she had lapsed into popery. She answered that the Catholic religion suited her best. When asked what she objected to in the Reformed church, she replied that “in the sacrament of communion we [the Reformed] do not have the body and blood of Christ.” The consistory pressed her further on this doctrinal issue, but Maritgen said she was not there to debate theology or to profess her beliefs and fell silent. The consistory dismissed her after warning her to amend her ways, but also offering to teach her more about doctrine, even in the presence of the priest who had led her astray.58 In this case, transubstantiation was a factor in a decision to join the Catholics. Had a priest instructed Maritgen that this was a fundamental difference between Reformed and Catholic? Was the Reformed rejection of the real presence enough for her to find the Catholics more attractive? The fact that she returned to the Reformed church three months later – after marrying a church member – suggested that she had lapsed for other, perhaps more personal reasons, and had cited transubstantiation as something that had been taught to her.59 Unfortunately, the consistory’s minutes do not provide further information. The Gouda apostate Matthijs van Culenborch stoutly insisted to his consistory that his conversion was a matter of conscience, and further maintained “that he lived in a free land with freedom of belief.”60 In his case, we have a rare instance of religious choice being defended as a political right; Matthijs believed he was exercising one of his prerogatives as a citizen of a republic that guaranteed liberty of conscience. Motivations might also have as much to do with inclination as with conviction. Sara van Breen, cited in the beginning of this chapter, made it clear to her consistory that the Reformed church was not fulfilling her desire for fellowship. Likewise, the Amsterdam widow Dieuwer Bethels gave the consistory no other reason for her drift to popery than that “there was no love among us and great disorder in the church.”61 In 1667, the Gouda consistory asked Niesken Pieters Vermey why she had fallen into popery. She replied laconically that she had no particular objection to the Reformed church, but opined that one could find salvation in all religions, SAD NHG, KA, 5 March 1609. RAL NHG, KA, 24 June 1639. 59 RAL NHG, KA, 16 Sept. 1639. 60 AHGG KA, 23 May 1663, 4 Sept. 1664. 61 SAA NHG, KA, 3 Nov. 1650. 57 58

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including the Catholic.62 Here the Gouda ­brethren found ­themselves confronted with an ecumenism that left them distinctly uncomfortable; such a relativizing attitude was incomprehensible to those who viewed the world in confessional terms. Yet there were a few layfolk who had no apparent difficulty with multiple worship. A congregant in a village within the classis of Dordrecht, for example, told his minister that he had not meant anything wrong by attending the local Catholic conventicle as well as his own church; the priest was one of his neighbors, too, so why should he not also go to his services?63 A schoolteacher in the village of Kethel told the classis of Delfland in 1611 that he would happily receive instruction from them on eucharistic doctrine, since he was having similar discussions with local Catholic priests; a few months later, the classis learned that he had opted for Catholicism.64 Perhaps for some layfolk one confession was as good as another, and so multiconfessionalism for them simply offered a diverse plurality of opportunities to worship God.65 A frequent reason some individuals gave for having lapsed into popery was time spent abroad under Catholic regimes. Jan van Espen of Dordrecht, for example, tearfully asked that city’s consistory for forgiveness for his apostasy in 1606. He had once been a deacon in the Reformed community of Brussels, but after the Spanish reconquest of that city had gone back to attending mass. Having left the south and moved to Dordrecht, he was now sorry for his lapse and asked to be accepted back into “the lap of the congregation.”66 Guillaume Coster justified his lapses to the Leiden consistory in 1624 by explaining that he had lived for a time in “popedom” (“in ‘t pausdom”) and been pressed by a priest there to attend mass, to which in his weakness he had consented.67 Michiel Verbaren of Haarlem had professed his Reformed faith in 1637, then moved to Flanders for a time and lapsed into popery; thirty years later in 1668, he returned to Haarlem and asked the consistory there to forgive him, which it did.68 Elisabeth de Windt had once been a member of the Dutch Reformed church in London then later moved to AHGG KA, 10 Feb. 1667. Classicale Acta 1573–1620. Classis Dordrecht 1601–1620, p. 730. 64 Classicale acta 1573–1620 VII: Provinciale synode Zuid-Holland. Classis Delft en Delfland 1572–1620, eds. P. H. A. M. Abels and A. Ph. F. Wouters (The Hague: ING, 2001), pp. 474, 478. 65 Willem Frijhoff, “Dimensions de la coexistence confessionelle,” in Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic, eds. C. Berkvens-Stevelinck et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1997), p. 215. 66 SAD NHG, KA, 6 July 1606. 67 RAL NHG, KA, 5 Sept. 1624. 68 NHA NHG, KA, 3 Oct. 1668. 62 63

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Brussels; in 1603, she contritely admitted to the Amsterdam consistory that she had attended mass there and now asked for reconciliation.69 Forty years later, a certain Jan van Nutt appeared before the same consistory with a remarkable tale: He claimed that while living in Lisbon he had fallen into the hands of the Inquisition, which had forced him to profess the Catholic faith. Later he was “miraculously” delivered from the inquisitors and was now wrestling with his conscience, so he turned to the consistory for advice. The Amsterdam brethren, concluding he was sincere, agreed to let him return to the Reformed church.70 Generally such cases, even one as unlikely as the last cited, were treated leniently by consistories. They saw time spent in Catholic lands as a reasonable explanation for a lapse into error, and did not regard most of these backsliders as converts in the permanent sense of the word. It might perhaps be more precise to speak of degrees of conversion or simply of confessional expediency. Dutch Reformed church members who had lived under Catholic regimes and adapted to local circumstances, including attending local worship, returned to Holland expecting to restore their original confessional allegiance. If they showed satisfactory contrition, churches generally welcomed them back. Conversion for the sake of political or geographic expediency was not the most grievous form of apostasy in consistorial minds. Such leniency may also have been a tacit recognition on the part of Reformed authorities of the confessional realities of early modern Europe. For those church members who sojourned outside the Republic in Catholic states there was often no choice but to conform, and for them reconciliation with the Reformed church could take place with a decent minimum of contrition.71 The most common reason given to consistories for association with or conversion to Catholicism was family pressure. Men and women blamed their spouses for compelling them to attend Catholic sacraments or for keeping them from Reformed worship. In private space, conversion could spark considerable tension and conflict. Trijn Hendrickxdr of Delft, for example, had been forced by her husband, a “bitter papist,” to attend Catholic conventicles. She had now divorced him and asked SAA NHG, KA, 28 Aug. 1603. SAA NHG, KA, 10 Dec. 1643. 71 Which is not to say that such sojourns could not bring about permanent conversions. The klopje Mayke Terwe’s conversion to Catholicism began with her journey across the border to Brabant during the Twelve Years Truce in order to see the mass performed publically; “Uit de levens der ‘Maechden van den Hoeck’ te Haarlem,” ed. J.J. Graaf, BBH 19 (1891): 288–289. 69 70

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the consistory to be let back into Reformed communion.72 In 1658 Sara Claesdr, another Delft resident, had a similar excuse – through her husband’s “importunity” she had been coerced into frequenting Papist gatherings.73 The Leidener Magdaleentgen Warrebouts had been absent from Reformed communion for ten years because of her Catholic husband; in 1636, the Leiden consistory agreed to let her back into the public church after she had made appropriate confession.74 In 1642, the Haarlem consistory learned of several women with Catholic husbands who were being pestered by klopjes on the subject of religion. These spiritual maidens sometimes entered their houses, presumably with the husbands’ consent, and tried to persuade the wives to abandon their Reformed faith.75 Geertjen Hendricx of Gouda reported to her consistory in 1667 that her Catholic husband, Jan Claes de Swart, kept her from Reformed services with violence and abuse, even though when they married he had originally promised her that she could stay in her own church. Among other things, he denounced the Reformed as “beggar dogs” whose church had been started over ninety years ago by a renegade monk who wanted a wife. All those outside the Catholic church were doomed, he added, saying he had forced her into Catholicism because he did not wish to sleep with a damned woman. In the end, despite consistorial efforts, she opted to remain with the Catholic church in order to keep the peace at home.76 The absence of a spouse could be a problem as well: Haesgen Abrahams of Amsterdam began frequenting Catholic mass when her husband was off serving in the East Indies.77 Widowhood sometimes freed women to return to the Reformed fold. After her Catholic husband’s death in 1672, Janneke Theunis was welcomed back to communion in Haarlem’s Reformed congregation after twenty years’ absence; likewise, in 1656, the recently widowed Proontje Jans returned to Leiden’s communion table following a ten-year hiatus.78 Nor was it only husbands preventing their wives from attending the Reformed church; keeping the peace in a marriage ran both ways. The soldier Heindrick Menten told the Amsterdam brethren that it was for the sake of his wife that he had attended Catholic services and permitted his

GAD KA, 28 June 1649. GAD NHG, no. 276, f. 93. 74 RAL NHG, KA, 14 March 1636. 75 NHA NHG, KA, 15 April 1642. 76 AHGG KA, 13 Oct. 1667. 77 SAA NHG, KA, 3 June 1621. 78 NHA NHG, KA, 5 April 1672; RAL NHG, KA, 8 Sept. 1656. 72 73

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child to be baptized by a priest.79 A variation on this explanation was the case of Guillaume Gardyn, who, when the same consistory accused him of Catholic apostasy in 1642, retorted that the only reason he had joined the Reformed church in the first place was to win his wife, Anneken. He added that “if he had known then what he knew now,” he would have stayed Catholic.80 Other family members could also induce believers to stray; a lapsed Catholic named Belijtje Engels told the Delft consistory that she very much wished to join the public church, but that her mother, with the help of a klopje, was hindering her.81 Isabella, known as “the English woman,” told the Amsterdam consistory in 1657 that her son had induced her to join the Catholic church and that she intended to stay there.82 As long as they expressed regret or asked forgiveness, those who claimed they were victims of family coercion – like those who had lived in Catholic lands – were usually treated leniently by consistories. After some pro forma admonitions, usually exhortations to remain steadfast in the face of spousal or familial pressure, the brethren gladly received such apostates back into the household of faith. This forbearance on the part of Reformed authorities indicates an acknowledgment that in many instances they were dealing not so much with permanent, convinced converts as with waverers, dabblers, or even experimenters. In confessional space, conversion was a serious and weighty matter, but in private space it was clear to consistories that people converted to or flirted with other confessions for any number of reasons, personal, social, or theological. Those reasons could range from the lofty to the mundane, from doctrinal conviction to sojourns abroad to family pressure. For some, their adherence to one church or another might be temporary, contingent, and changeable. Not every traverser of church boundaries was a Paul or an Augustine or a Luther. Their forbearance further suggests how acutely aware Reformed leaders were of the range of possibly tempting confessional alternatives available to their congregants, particularly that of a rejuvenated Catholicism. Applying too heavy a disciplinary hand could (and did) drive some of the vacillating faithful away permanently into the arms of a welcoming Catholic mission. Thus consistories would go to considerable lengths to keep that from happening – from long, painstaking negotiation to intervening in marriages to proposing debates with priests on points of doctrine. SAA NHG, KA, 13 March 1664. SAA NHG, KA, 16 Jan. 1642. 81 GAD NHG, KA, 20 Nov. 1651. 82 SAA NHG, KA, 19 April 1657. 79 80

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Likewise, consistories were very forgiving when former members returned to the bosom of the public church after time spent associating with Catholics. The Delft brethren rejoiced in 1631 when Cryn Cornelisz told them that “God had opened his eyes so wide that he had a great distaste for popish superstition and promised to attend diligently the preaching of God’s Holy Word again.”83 A bad conscience about past Catholic associations kept the Leidener Jakemijnten Claes from attending communion despite her regular attendance at the sermons; in 1625, the Leiden consistory resolved to send one of its preachers to talk with her to help alleviate her sense of guilt.84 Priests and klopjes lured church member Adriaentje Mosis of Gouda to mass several times with promises of financial support in 1656, but when she begged forgiveness the consistory readily welcomed her back to communion in the public church (this was also a rare recorded instance of poor relief being used as a recruitment mechanism).85 Those lapsed congregants who came back to the fold with an appropriate amount of contrition were always readily embraced and admonished lightly. In a pluralistic social environment where defection to other religious communities was all too easy, consistories were sometimes careful to apply a light touch to those who had strayed into error but were willing to reconcile. It was always better to exercise discipline with some delicacy because for some vulnerable consciences it could act as a powerful – sometimes too powerful – instrument. The provincial synod of South-Holland was deeply disturbed in 1649 to learn of a Reformed woman who had been “half persuaded, half forced” to attend Catholic worship and then, tortured by guilt after confessing to her church leaders, had committed suicide afterward.86 In another case, the same synod considered the question from local church authorities of how to deal with an apostate elder from a rural congregation where censure would cause more upset than the original conversion; here the synod took a harder line, insisting that local sensibilities should in no way hinder the orderly exercise of ecclesiastical discipline.87 Cases of conversion to Catholicism suggested that there were indeed limits to the effectiveness of ecclesiastical discipline that Reformed consistories exercised. For a recalcitrant handful of apostates, the disciplinary GAD NHG, KA, 4 July 1631 RAL NHG, KA, 12 Sept. 1625. 85 AHGG KA, 16 Nov. 1656. 86 Acta Zuid-Holland, vol. 3, pp. 113–116. The minutes do not reveal where this happened. 87 Acta der Provinciale en Particuliere Synoden 1572–1620, vol. 3, p. 452. 83 84

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and penitential tools of the public church held no coercive power, ­especially when that church could not rely upon the state to impose confessional uniformity. Congregants were not passive recipients of consistorial will; church members could and sometimes did assert themselves as autonomous moral actors.88 Religious identity was for these souls a personal decision that no cleric or elder could meddle in. Such an attitude was perhaps easier for layfolk to maintain in a polity that allowed religious pluralism and safeguarded freedom of conscience, but research on church discipline in Reformed lands generally suggests that the overall results of church leaders’ efforts to reform the life and morals of their churchfolk were mixed at best.89 In the case of Holland, religious choice could act as an obstacle in the public church’s efforts to create a godly society. The limits of ecclesiastical discipline also revealed the limits of confessionalism; clerical leaders may have understood church membership in bounded, confessional terms, but that was not necessarily true for ordinary believers, at least some of whom saw lines between confessions as no impediment to finding a satisfying ecclesiastical home.

Conversion as Mission In contrast to the Reformed church, the Holland Mission was by its very definition a proselytizing body. Its principal goal was of course to provide sacrament and succor for those Hollanders who had remained faithful to the Catholic church, but rescuing souls from the snares of Protestant heresy became an important secondary arena of activity for the fathers of the Mission as well as those of the religious orders. Priests often wielded the weapon of conversion in confessional space quite effectively. One priest active in North-Holland early in the seventeenth century, for example, was described as zealous in his pastoral duties in part because of his success at converting “heretics from their unbelief.”90 This was in keeping with the spirit of the post-Tridentine Catholic church, which had made evangelization, both within Europe and without, so central to its ongoing program of reformatio.91 Among the seventeenth-century Apostolic vicars, Philip Rovenius – to judge from his reports to Rome – was the most Charles H. Parker, “The Moral Agency and Moral Autonomy of Church Folk in the Dutch Reformed Church of Delft,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 48 (1997): 46. 89 Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed, pp. 526–532. 90 “Uit de levens,” BBH 17 (1891): 298. 91 Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700 (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1999), p. 96. 88

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interested in this proselytizing work. Many Catholics in the Republic had been seduced away from their true faith, Rovenius concluded sadly in a 1617 report, in hopes of political or social advantage; nonetheless, he added, we ought to rejoice to see how so many daily run back to the “lap of the church” after abjuring their heresy.92 Indeed, two decades later in 1638, he proudly reported that the Mission had converted nearly 3,500 souls from heresy.93 Rovenius’s particular interest in conversion reflected the period during which he led the Holland Mission, 1614–1651; as its first great organizer he oversaw an enormous expansion of its labors, including regaining ground lost to the Reformation by winning souls to the mother church.94 He admonished his priests, however, that the best way to convert heretics was through prayer and exemplary behavior rather than through confrontation, and the would-be convert had to ask for instruction first; aggressive proselytizing might provoke unwelcome attention from local authorities.95 The religious orders who worked alongside the Holland Mission  – sometimes amicably but sometimes not  – likewise highlighted their work in converting heretics in their reports to their provincial superiors. Whereas the Mission concerned itself in the first place with continuity of pastoral and sacramental care, the orders  – particularly the Society of Jesus – were more avid evangelists.96 The leaders of the Jesuit, Franciscan, Carmelite, Dominican, and Augustinian missionaries active in the Republic made it clear in their accounts that their fathers labored tirelessly and energetically reconciling former heretics to the true church. Such reports often triumphantly listed numbers of converts as evidence of missionary success: 380 Protestants converted by their missionaries in the entire Dutch Republic in 1663 and 320 more the following year, Jesuit reports exulted.97 P. W. Herinx, prefect of the Franciscan province, handed in a dispatch to Rome in 1673 brimming with numbers: In the “Verslag over de Hollandsche Missie ten jare 1617,” ed. G. Brom, AAU 17 (1889): 1471–472. 93 “Vier missie-verslagen, van 1635 tot 1645, door Rovenius te Rome ingediend,” ed. G. Brom, AAU 18 (1890), p. 22. 94 L.J. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme in Noord-Nederland in de 16e en de 17e eeuw (Amsterdam: Urbi et Orbi, 1947), vol. 2, p. 7. 95 J. Visser, Rovenius und seine Werke. Beitrag zur Geschichte der nordniederländischen katholischen Frömmigkeit in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1966), pp. 59–60. 96 M.G. Spiertz, L’Église catholique des Provinces-Unies et le Saint-Siège pendant la deuxième moitié du xviie siècle (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1975), p. 13. 97 “Zes verslagen over de werkzaamheden door de Jezuieten der Hollandsche Missie verricht,” ed. R.R. Post, AAU 58 (1934), pp. 26, 39. 92

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preceding two years, his friars in Amsterdam converted ten heretics in one station and eighteen in another. Likewise, the Franciscan friars in Leiden included conversions in their dutifully quantified lists of labors for the year 1671: forty-six baptized, extreme unction offered to seventy, twentyseven marriages solemnized, five converted from “depraved heresy.” Still another Franciscan in Gouda recorded ten converts in each of the years 1671 and 1672.98 The Delft Jesuit Lodewijk Makeblijde claimed to have converted over 300 people in his first six years working in that city.99 This numerical stress was deliberate; the regular clergy found themselves in frequent competition, not to say conflict, with the secular priests in the mission field, and quantified successes were intended as evidence to the powers in Rome of the orders’ usefulness and effectiveness. As mission reports to Rome tended to be summaries painted with a broad brush, giving specific numbers could serve as a helpful persuasive tool in the contest for favor between secular and regular clergy. The quality of conversions was at least as if not more important as their quantity. Priests in the mission field assiduously sought out such converts within the communities in which they worked, and eagerly shared tales of converts renouncing their Reformed allegiances and turning or even apostates re-turning to the true church. Those accounts usually employed the tropes and themes of classic conversion narratives. One Capuchin friar, active in the coastal village of Noordwijk in 1629, described the conversion of a local Calvinist to the true church. He had been censured by the Reformed consistory, and his neighbors persuaded him to hear a Catholic service. The experience moved him to make his first general confession. The friar related how he turned the heart of this stubborn Calvinist with patient instruction. After the requisite instruction, the latter accepted “with tears” (cum lacrymis) his first communion.100 In a similar story, the same friar told of a local Calvinist who attended several Catholic conventicles out of curiosity. By his third visit, he and his family were in the priest’s arms, abjuring their heresy.101 As with traditional conversion narratives, the friar’s account underscored the emotional “Zes missie-verslagen uit de tweede helft van de zeventiende eeuw,” ed. R.R. Post, AAU 64 (1940), pp. 283, 286, 289. 99 L. Loosen, Lodewijk Makeblijde (1565–1630). Hymnen en gezangen (Zwolle: Tjeenk Willink, 1964), p. 30. 100 Romeinsche bronnen voor den kerkelijken toestand der Nederlanden onder de Apsotolische Vicarissen 1592–1727, ed. J.D.M. Cornelissen, I: 1592–1651 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1932), pp. 370–371. 101 Romeinsche bronnen 1592–1651, p. 371. 98

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authenticity of the change of heart. In 1592, the Apostolic vicar Sasbout Vosmeer received a report of a priest whose preaching gifts were so great that he convinced one zealous Calvinist, who had heard him and who had “hitherto not realized what Catholic belief was all about,” to join the true church immediately. 102 In this case, priestly eloquence was credited with bringing about a dramatic spiritual rebirth. It was of course officially illegal for Catholic priests to missionize in the Dutch Republic, and Reformed consistories were quick to protest to authorities if they discovered instances of proselytizing. Since it enjoyed no public venue in which to proclaim its message, the Holland Mission had to rely on less formal means to teach and spread doctrine among non-Catholics. Canny missionaries took advantage of teachable moments: A Jesuit in Friesland reportedly converted a woman after seeing her fascination with a statue of the Virgin Mary in her possession that had purportedly come from the famous captured Spanish silver fleet of 1628.103 Over time, the Mission developed and adapted strategies to contend successfully in the competition for souls without attracting unwelcome attention from authorities. One possible strategy was subterfuge: A chronicler of the Society of Jesus (never a group to underplay the heroism of its members) claimed that one of his confreres working in a thoroughly Reformed village in North-Holland in the early 1600s converted all but seven of its inhabitants. He did this by feigning serious illness, being charitably taken in by a local burgomaster, and proceeding to win the good will of the burgomaster’s family and the surrounding community.104 Trickery was probably a less fruitful and certainly riskier tactic than making good use of existing social, communal, and personal ties. Catholic priests in Holland were particularly adept at exploiting possibilities in the realm of family. Like its worship and pastoral care, the Holland Mission’s proselytizing took place in private space, usually among informal kinship networks. As we have seen, those who strayed away from the Reformed church often cited family as a reason for becoming Catholic. In the intimate lives of families, priests could be quite effective in their pursuit of converts. Mixed marriages sometimes provided opportunities for evangelizing. Like their Reformed counterparts, Catholic priests might intervene UA OBC, no. 441, 19 Jan. 1592. Herman Joseph Oldenhof, In en om de schuilkerkjes van Noordelijk Westergo. Katholiek leven in Frieslands noordwesthoek onder de Republiek (1580–1795) (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1967), p. 181. 104 Alfred Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus dans les anciens Pays-Bas. Vol. II (Brussels: Lamertin, 1926), p. 431. 102 103

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in such marriages in order to win a spouse over to the true faith. A husband or wife might enlist a priest to help persuade a partner to convert, or clergy might interpose themselves in a mixed marriage where a particular spouse seemed particularly vulnerable or susceptible to persuasion or pressure. For example, in 1650 a local Franciscan drove the Catholic wife of Reformed church member Filip Wouters of Gouda nearly to distraction by telling her that unless her husband converted and they were properly married according to the Catholic rite, the church would condemn her for living in sin and consider her offspring “whore’s children.” When Wouters’s wife told the friar that her husband would not permit it, the priest then held a “black pelt with two horns” over her head and declared that they would both go to the devil if they did not do what he said. The priest’s badgering, part appeal to female honor and part curse, was troubling his wife deeply, Wouters reported to the Gouda consistory.105 Psychological or emotional pressure usually played a part in such scenarios. In 1659, Trijntje Post complained to the Haarlem consistory about the “unbearable tyranny” of her Catholic husband, whose Jesuit confessor egged him on to stop his wife from attending Reformed preaching or communion.106 The ever-vigilant consistory of Dordrecht was able to convince its magistracy in 1651 to banish from the city the priest Cornelius Duck, a notoriously successful missionary, after he converted a Reformed church member with the connivance of her Catholic husband.107 A 1663 report to Rome spoke glowingly of a young convert named Susanna in the North-Holland town of Enkhuizen: through her Catholic husband’s intervention she had received such thorough instruction by Jesuit priests that she calmly endured a storm of opprobrium, threats, and blandishments by her Reformed relatives, some of whom included prominent local magistrates and ministers.108 Mixed marriages proved to be fertile ground in the competition for souls, as ecclesiastical watchdogs from both sides were very much aware. Another area of private space in which priests sought converts was among the ailing or dying. Both churches recognized the spiritual importance of these conditions and had institutions designed specifically to deal with them: The Catholic sacrament of extreme unction and the Reformed AHGG KA, 24 March 1650. NHA NHG, KA, 17 July 1659. 107 “Relatio seu descriptio status religionis catholicae in Hollandia etc.,” ed. A. van Lommel AAU 11 (1883), p. 63; SAD NHG, KA, 16 Feb. 1651. 108 “Zes verslagen,” pp. 33–34. 105 106

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office of sick visitor.109 The principal purpose of these ­institutions was to provide sacramental and pastoral care, but at a secondary level the sickbed could become a battleground where souls were lost or won. The experience of illness or mortality could bring about a frame of mind more receptive to the possibility of spiritual transformation, and Catholic priests lost few opportunities, surreptitiously or otherwise, to gain or reconcile an ailing soul to the apostolic church, even in extremis. This of course infuriated Reformed authorities, who regarded such actions as one more example of Papist perfidy. The Dordrecht consistory railed against local priests who insinuated themselves into the homes of sick people in order to “oil them.”110 In Haarlem, an ailing Reformed church member claimed to have been so pestered by a priest to receive unction that he finally had to be removed from his home in order to get some rest.111 In 1668, a skipper named Gabriel, whose wife and children remained Catholic despite his best efforts to change their minds, admitted to the Gouda consistory that when he was ill his spouse had brought a priest to his bedside for last rites, but he defended himself by asserting that he had been “weak and out of his senses” at the time.112 Reformed sick visitors often found themselves dealing with Catholic proselytizing around the sick beds of church members. The Delft consistory complained when it learned that one of its sick visitors was physically kept out the home of an unwell church member by a klopje, “even though he came there in his capacity as a public officer and had been expressly summoned by the wife herself.”113 Sick visitors, as Reformed church members, worked under consistorial supervision but were paid by municipal authorities, and the Reformed church deeply resented any Catholic interference with a public function it believed was reserved solely for them.114 The sick visitors of Amsterdam had a particularly difficult time of it. In 1639, Geritt Hendricksen reported on the obstructionist tactics of a local priest who used “every means” to keep him from a On the latter office see Johan de Niet, Ziekentroosters op de pastorale markt 1550–1880 (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 2006). For an insightful consideration of confession and medicine in early modern England, see Alexandra Walsham, “In Sickness and in Health: Medicine and Inter-Confessional Relations in Post-Reformation England,” in Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe, eds. C. Scott Dixon et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 161–181. 110 SAD NHG, KA, 19 Feb. 1637. 111 NHA NHG, KA, 4 Feb. 1650. 112 AHGG KA, 28 June 1668. 113 GAD NHG, KA, 20 Aug. 1651. 114 De Niet, Ziekentroosters, pp. 49–50. 109

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stricken female church member; indeed, the priest had gotten so far that the patient, who had previously been glad of Hendricksen’s visits, now refused to see him.115 A few years later his successor, Lambert Fijten, described a particularly obstreperous Catholic husband who refused to let him see his ailing wife even though she was a church member, calling him a “false teacher, troublemaker . . . and scoundrel.”116 In 1660, the sick visitor Jan Brouwer related to the Amsterdam consistory that a young woman reported to him that, against her wishes, a priest had been brought to her sickbed by her Catholic landlord; the consistory directed him to keep visiting her and bring the sheriff if necessary should the landlord become difficult.117 A 1663 Jesuit report described how an aged Calvinist in the South-Holland town of Oudewater, facing grave illness, sent for the Reformed preacher. His Catholic wife, however, also brought into the house a Catholic neighbor, who proceeded to argue theology with the minister at the sickbed. The preacher was utterly confounded and left the house. Shortly thereafter the old man asked for a priest, abjured his heresy, and not long after receiving last rites died “at peace.”118 Over the sickbeds or deathbeds of patients with wavering consciences, the competition for souls between Catholic and Reformed could perhaps be observed at its most conspicuous.119 Both confessions were acutely aware that at the edge of mortality, in the last possible moments, there existed a final opportunity to gain another convert to the true church. Souls at the edge of death were not spared the sectarian sensibilities of Holland’s two major confessions. In the intimate arena of family and household, the Catholic Mission employed another potent weapon – the klopjes. The laws of the Dutch Republic permitted no Catholic woman to join holy orders, but across the major cities of Holland communities of these unmarried Catholic laywomen could be found living together as “spiritual maidens.” As regards the Holland Mission, the klopjes primarily devoted themselves to supporting Catholic priests in their service to congregants. They functioned as housekeepers, catechizers of children, visitors to the sick and dying, custodians of house churches and altars, and caretakers of the poor. There were roughly 5,000 such women in the Republic by the end of the SAA NHG, KA, 9 June 1639. SAA NHG, KA, 8 March 1646. 117 SAA NHG, KA, 28 Oct. 1660. 118 “Zes verslagen,” pp. 26–27. 119 A. Th. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 290. 115 116

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seventeenth century, the majority of whom resided in the provinces of Holland and Utrecht. As spiritual successors to medieval beguines, they formed a distinctive presence within the Dutch Catholic confessional community and contributed significantly to its culture and identity.120 In addition to aiding priests in their pastoral and sacramental labors, however, the kloppen proved to be adept at assisting in the work of conversion. Their ambiguous status  – not officially recognized as religious women by either secular or canon law – and their gender meant that they were in some respects freer to circulate discreetly within the extended and overlapping networks of neighborhood and household that made up early modern social life. The ambulant nature of the Mission priests’ work meant that priests were not always readily available to Catholic communities, and though their relationship to clergy could be complicated,121 the spiritual maidens often stepped in to fill in the pastoral gap. Many of them saw proselytizing as one of their spiritual obligations. “Who can describe how many heretics’ hearts they lightened,” limned the biographer of the Amsterdam sister klopjes Maria and Johanna Wouters.122 Such devout women were eager to protect and promote the Catholic faith, and their pastoral work sometimes slid into missionizing. One Leiden Jesuit, for example, sent klopjes out into the surrounding countryside to scout out potential converts for him to instruct.123 More typically, spiritual maidens proselytized within their wider kinship networks, which could be quite extensive.124 “These pure ones edify their families by their pious example,” the Leiden Carmelite Petrus Matre a Dei wrote admiringly.125 Those families sometimes included nonCatholics, as well. According to the quasi-hagiographical biographies of the Haarlem klopjes living in the community De Hoek written by Tryn Jans Oly, some of these devout women succeeded in winning some of their relatives for the church. The mother of the klop Annetge Claes, for M. Monteiro, Geestelijke maagden. Leven tussen klooster en wereld in Noord-Nederland (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994), p. 55. 121 Gerrit vanden Bosch, “Pionnen op een schaakbord? De rol van klopjes in de belangstrijd tussen jezuïeten en seculiere priesters in de Republiek omstreeks 1609–1610,” Trajecta 9 (2000): 252–283. 122 “Uit de levens,” BBH 18 (1893): 121. 123 Monteiro, Geestelijke maagden, p. 105. 124 E. B. F. Pey, “De manuscripten van Trijn Jans Oly als bron voor een prosopografisch onderzoek naar de klopjes van ‘De Hoek’ te Haarlem van 1583–1651,” AGKKN 28 (1986): 138–160. 125 Petrus a Matre Dei, Clara Relatio missionis Hollandicae et provinciarum confoederatum . . . anno 1658 (Rotterdam: Hendriksen, 1891), p. 91. 120

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example, had so fallen under the spell of Reformed proselytizing that she decided one day to attend the Sunday sermon. With her cloak on her head and her stool under her arm, she proceeded to the public church. Seeing what she was about to do, her daughter Annetge tearfully begged her not to go. Her mother, moved by these pleadings, removed her cloak and threw down the stool, declaring, “Child, do not be afraid, for I will never go there in all my days.”126 Another klopje, Elysbeth Hendriks Verwer, managed to convert her sister – who was married to a Reformed elder no less  – as well as seven of her sister’s children, of whom one became a priest and two others became spiritual maidens.127 When the klopje Ida Goverts’s Catholic brother married a Reformed woman, Ida worked “day and night” converting both her sister-in-law and the latter’s ­mother.128 The Amsterdam klop Anna Barents secured the conversion of her parents, siblings, and uncle – all of whom had slid into heresy – through “devout prayer, good example and wise admonition.”129 While Oly’s accounts, written for devotional and inspirational purposes, tended to be exceptionally glowing, they do suggest that the presence of a klop within a family of mixed religious affiliations could be a powerful tool for the Catholic church in the competition for souls. Reformed church members often cited kloppen as instigators of discord within their households; mixed marriages could be particular targets. In 1671, for example, the Gouda consistory was alarmed to learn that klopjes tried forcibly to prevent a newly married Catholic woman from attending Sunday services in the public church with her Reformed husband.130 Several women in the Haarlem Reformed church who were married to Catholic men complained in 1642 of klopjes, with the connivance of their husbands, coming “time and again” into their homes and trying to lure them into abandoning their faith.131 Often, the presence of a klopje inside a home was prelude to the appearance of a priest. Some confessed to consistories that spiritual maidens had persuaded them to let a pastor into their homes, such as the Gouda church member Griet, who allowed a klop to invite a priest to her bedside when she was ailing.132 At Catharina Jans Oly, “Leven van ‘Maechden van den Hoeck,’” Bibliotheek, Museum Catharijnaconvent, no. 92 B 13, v. 3, 358r. 127 Oly, v. 2, 136v. 128 Oly, v. 3, 318r. 129 “Uit de levens,” BBH 18 (1893): 136. 130 AHGG KA, 1 Oct. 1671. 131 NHA NHG, KA, 15 April 1642. 132 AHGG KA, 11 May 1651. 126

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one point in 1650, the Haarlem consistory had to hold a special meeting to discuss the case of one church member who was harassed by kloppen on his sickbed. The maidens forced him to let a priest into his bedchamber, and in his weakness he allowed the priest to give him last rites. The klopjes’ importunings grew so belligerent that the man, despite his illness, had to be taken out of his house to get some peace.133 The Gouda classis expressed unhappiness at reports that kloppen, especially in the countryside, snuck into the bedchambers of ailing church members after they lapsed into unconsciousness.134 Klopjes were thought to focus their energies on members of their own sex in particular. In Delft, a beleaguered Margarita Jacobs, a converted former nun who lived in the city’s old beguinage, complained to the consistory in 1651 that the klopjes who also resided there would not leave her alone; they pestered her, insisted she marry before a priest, uttered scandalous opinions about the Reformed church, and at one point even assaulted her physically in their efforts to keep her from going to church.135 Josijn Carpentiers, confronted by the Gouda consistory in 1646, blamed her attendance at mass on the “deceitful company” of a klop who had “enticed” her to go.136 The classis of Leiden noted with concern in 1657 the maltreatment of a young woman in the village of Hoogmade, who had recently converted to the Reformed church from Catholicism; local klopjes openly jeered her in the streets to scare her away from attending services.137 The confessional belligerence of the spiritual maidens was something of a given in Reformed circles. The Dordrecht consistory, for example, complained of a “certain family,” presumably Catholic, whose one Reformed member was being constantly harassed by priests and kloppen.138 In Amsterdam, the consistory remonstrated to the magistracy in 1644 about two klopjes who had insolently interrupted the sermons being preached in the Nieuwe Zijds chapel.139 In their zeal, some NHA NHG, KA, 2 Feb. 1650. AHGG CA, 17 March 1632. 135 GAD NHG, KA, 20 Aug. 1651. 136 AHGG KA, 11 Oct. 1646. 137 NA OSA, CA Leiden, 6 Feb. 1657. 138 SAD NHG, KA, 11 July 1648. 139 SAA NHG, KA, 14 Jan. 1644. In the later Middle Ages this chapel had been a pilgrimage destination, home to a miraculous eucharistic host and focus of popular local Catholic devotion. The klopjes may have been in their own way trying to reassert the Catholic claim to the space. Bas de Melker, “Burgers en devotie 1340–1520,” in Geschiedenis van Amsterdam tot 1578. Een stad uit het niets, ed. Marijke Carasso-Kok (Amsterdam: SUN, 2004), pp. 263–270. 133 134

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spiritual maidens were clearly not afraid to use aggressive tactics in their ­proselytizing, especially with those souls who might be more susceptible to pressure; consistories constantly exhorted such individuals to remain steadfast in their faith in the face of this pressure. Reformed authorities regarded the kloppen as a persistent and pernicious threat. They recognized all too well that these laywomen could easily insinuate themselves into and operate relatively freely within the private worlds of household, kin, and neighborhood, spreading Catholic doctrine among family, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. By the 1620s, Reformed complaints to the government about spiritual maidens began in earnest. At its 1628 meeting, the provincial synod of South-Holland complained that “the number of klopjes – a certain order of house-beguine – is growing noticeably in various places . . . to the distress of many godly hearts, to the vexation of the weak, the seduction of the simple, and the increase of papist impudence.”140 The Haarlem preacher Samuel Ampzing composed a satirical poem targeted at the “dangerous swarm of kloppen” who brazenly walked the streets as if they “lived in popish cities and lands.” He singled out the Haarlem “swarm” in particular as akin to a nest of “crawling ants.”141 The Dordrecht consistory, never one to mince words, drew the most sinister analogy by pronouncing its city’s spiritual maidens “Jesuitesses.”142 A 1643 report on Catholic activities drafted by the Court of Holland described the kloppen as “unbelievably arrogant and [they] do more damage to our land and religion than all the priests . . . among other things they say we Reformed [Guezen] are all eternally damned, that all our churches were stolen, that our pulpits stand atop the devil’s head . . . they give money to children to lure them into popery . . . they cause much unrest, even more than the priests themselves . . . they easily entice away the confused.”143 By mid-century, the Reformed outcry against spiritual maidens reached its shrillest pitch, when the South-Holland synod claimed with wild exaggeration that there were 20,000 such women active in the Republic.144 Rumor alone was enough to set consistories on the hunt; when reports reached the Amsterdam consistory in 1654 that a certain Acta Zuid-Holland 1621–1700, v. 1, pp. 277–278. Samuel Ampzing, Suppressie vande vermeynde vergaderinge der Jesuwytessen door Urbanus VIII by den gedoge Gods Paus van Romen (Haarlem: Adriaen Roman, 1622), p. 3. 142 SAD NHG, KA, 10 Oct. 1651. 143 “Bouwstoffen voor de kerkelijke geschiedenis van verschillende parochien thans behoorende tot het bisdom Haarlem,” ed. A. van Lommel, BBH 7 (1880): 353. 144 Acta Zuid-Holland 1621–1700, v. 3, p. 243. 140 141

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young woman – the daughter of deceased church members – had been s­ pirited away and converted to Catholicism by a klop, the brethren immediately set out to investigate. The young woman, however, insisted that she had converted of her own volition. The brethren then went so far as to interrogate the klop herself, who denied leading anyone astray.145 A year later the same consistory looked into reports that church member Philip Fransen had secretly allowed klopjes into one of the city’s churches at night so that they could perform their “superstitions” at the gravestone of a Catholic pastor; Fransen denied doing any such thing.146 The spiritual maidens and their conduct clearly struck a nerve with Reformed leaders, who saw them as a particularly minatory arm of the larger Catholic conspiracy threatening their godly commonwealth, perhaps precisely because of the klopjes’ sex and anomalous position within the Catholic mission and community. Indeed, in an odd twist on the advantage gender lent to clandestinity, the wife of the zealously anti-Catholic bailiff of Gouda would aid her husband during the 1630s in his efforts to enforce the placards by disguising herself as a klopje in order to infiltrate Catholic gatherings at night.147 Placards specifically directed at kloppen first issued in the early 1640s reflected growing Reformed alarm at the effectiveness of their efforts as missionaries, though these were as haphazardly and inconsistently enforced as most of the other anti-Catholic laws.148 The public church’s increased outcry over klopjes reflected the heightened sensitivities of the period 1620–1660, as the two churches honed and sharpened their distinct confessional identities. Another arena in which the Catholic mission made efforts to proselytize was in the various public and semipublic institutions and offices found in most of the towns and cities of Holland. Here it tried to take advantage of the proximities inherent in civic space. Such municipal institutions included civic poor relief, schools, orphanages, hospitals, old men’s and women’s homes, and hofjes.149 The privacy created by the hofjes’ architectural design in particular allowed for an enclosed space in which a variety of largely unnoticed activities could take place. Naturally these activities included Catholic worship. The Faliedebegijnhof in Leiden, for SAA NHG, KA, 23 July 1654. SAA NHG, KA, 1 July 1655. 147 Walvis, f. 64v. 148 Eugenie Theissing, Over klopjes en kwezels (Utrecht: Dekker en Van de Vegt, 1935), pp. 186–192; Monteiro, Geestelijke maagden, p. 88. 149 Hans Martin Turck, Die Leidner Wohnstiftungen vom 15. bis 17. Jahrhundert (Aachen: Trans-Aix Press, 1989), pp. 209–210. 145 146

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example, repeatedly hosted Catholic conventicles in the late sixteenth century.150 Jesuit missionaries stationed in Delft kept a worship space in the apartments of that city’s Bagijnhof in the early seventeenth century.151 In 1663, the consistory there learned that the Catholic school housed in that same hofje planned to put on plays intended to “better entice the residents as well as outsiders with their superstitions.”152 The secluded and self-contained character of the hofjes perhaps made such missionizing initiatives more feasible. Catholic clergy themselves also founded hofjes in the seventeenth century in such cities as Gouda, Delft, and Haarlem to provide domiciles for the Catholic poor.153 These too became cloistered hubs of Catholic worship within their civic communities. Municipal hospitals and homes (gasthuizen) were also loci of Catholic activity. One Leiden widow named Madaleena complained bitterly to the Reformed consistory there in 1597 about the prevalence of Catholic worship in the St. Elisabeth gasthuis where she resided; the regentesses of the home – who were municipally appointed – allowed a priest to live there and celebrate mass, and Catholic holy days were observed there as well. According to Madaleena, the regentesses openly mocked and slandered the public church in front of the Reformed residents and even physically prevented the latter from attending church.154 A few decades later, the Leiden consistory complained about a Jesuit priest who had tried to “force” his way into the same gasthuis, presumably to minister and proselytize.155 Likewise, municipal orphanages could sometimes serve as targets of missionary efforts, especially if their personnel were confessionally mixed. The Dordrecht klopje Claertgen Heyndriksdochter, for example, was led to the true church as a young girl in part by a Catholic housemother working in that city’s orphanage.156 Reformed authorities reacted quickly to any hints of creeping Catholicism among the city’s parentless Christine Kooi, Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leiden’s Reformation 1572– 1620 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 182. 151 M.A. Kok, “Het katholiek leven binnen de stad Delft in de jaren 1572–1650,” in De stad Delft. Cultuur en maatschappij van 1572 tot 1667 (Delft: Prinsenhof, 1981), p. 111. 152 GAD NHG, KA, 15 Jan. 1663. 153 F. Smit, “Het hofje van Buytenwech te Gouda, in de jaren 1684–1713. Bijdragen tot de katholieke armenzorg in de 17e en 18e eeuw,” Publicatieserie Stichting Oud-Katholieke Seminarie 12 (1983): 5; J. J. Graaf, “Het Klauwshofje te Delft,” BBH 34 (1912): 80–133; Gerda H. Kuntz, Haarlemse hofjes (Haarlem: Schuyt, 1972), pp. 8, 55–56. 154 Kooi, Liberty and Religion, pp. 182–183. 155 RAL NHG, KA, 29 Jan. 1621. 156 “Uit de levens,” BBH 17 (1891): 275–276. 150

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and defenseless waifs. Haarlem’s municipal orphanage, to judge from consistorial records, was a continuing center of Catholic activity. In 1624, the Reformed consistory requested of the regents of the orphanage that an “abominable idolatry” – an image of a dove signifying the Holy Spirit  – be removed from the orphanage grounds.157 A few years later the brethren petitioned the civic magistracy to appoint regents of the orphanage who were safely Reformed.158 This request does not seem to have borne the desired result, since a decade later the brethren learned that two Catholic catechisms were found circulating in the orphanage; two women had given the books to some of the boys with the recommendation that they study them.159 Similarly, in Gouda children in the care of the city almshouse were discovered in 1657 to have been taken to Catholic mass a number of times.160 Catholics intent on proselytizing in such institutions might take advantage of the relatively lax (at least as regards religion) magisterial oversight of them. Reformed authorities, who expected public municipal institutions to uphold true religion and suppress idolatry, saw such attempts to influence innocent wards of the community as still more evidence of the dangerous consequences of magisterial toleration of Catholic worship in civic space. Another public office that sometimes got entangled in the competition between Reformed and Catholic was that of the city organist. Like the office of sick visitor, that of the organist was a civic one. Organists were paid by town governments to perform on the organs in the public church, though not during Reformed services. This arrangement reflected the Reformed rejection of the playing of instrumental music during the worship of God.161 In 1643 in Gouda, some Reformed congregants were angered to hear that the city organist, Mr. Heijndrick, was making music with “kloppen, popish priests, and papists,” accompanying them on the public church organ as they sang Catholic songs. He was summoned by the consistory, who informed him in no uncertain terms that he was not permitted “to accompany any papist religious person on the organ, nor to play any popish ditties and idolatrous hymns for them either.” It does not behoove a Reformed Christian, the brethren added, to make music NHA NHG, KA, 23 July 1624. NHA NHG, KA, 5 March 1636. 159 NHA NHG, KA, 15 July 1648. 160 AHGG KA, 3 May 1657. 161 Albert Clement, “Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck: een stadsorganist van wereldfaam tussen calvinisme en katholicisme,” in Een muziekgeschiedenis der Nederlanden, ed. Louis Peter Grijp (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001), pp. 182–189. 157 158

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with Catholics, since musical instruments are a “means for the execution of their superstitions and idolatries.”162 A few years later, reports reached the same consistory that on Saturdays some kloppen and “other hard papists” were singing and playing Catholic hymns on the church organ; it resolved to request that the magistracy make sure not to appoint a Catholic to the office of organist in future.163 In 1656, the Amsterdam consistory investigated repeated cases of the city organist  – Nicolaas Lossy, a Catholic – playing in “a papist manner” in the New Church to unusually large audiences; when it confronted the organist, he denied playing in any unusual way and blamed rumormongers, while the city sheriff reminded the consistory that only the magistracy had the power to decide what music was played in the churches.164 Reformed authorities worried about the power of music to lure susceptible souls into the Catholic church with its venerable musical traditions. Again, since the organist was a civic office, they insisted that it conform to the strictures of the public religion and not become a vehicle for the spreading of Catholic “superstitions.” This did not stop the Catholic community from trying to appropriate musical talent for its own worship and delectation; the city organist of Delft reported to one of the ministers that the Catholics there were trying very hard to persuade him to come play for them.165 The Catholic church, too, understood the power of music to sway hearts and minds. A further circumstance that the Catholic mission tried to exploit to its advantage in the competition for souls was the Arminian controversy that roiled the Dutch Reformed church in the second decade of the seventeenth century. Although the specific issue in dispute was a fairly abstruse point of theology  – what role if any human effort played in the process of salvation – the controversy grew into a larger, angry and sometimes violent contest over the character of the Reformed church and its relationship to the Dutch Republic’s larger polity and society. This debate in turn folded into wider political conflicts about the leadership of the Republic and the direction of its long war with Spain.166 The young state became deeply and bitterly divided over these issues, AHGG KA, 22 Oct. 1643. AHGG KA, 19 March 1648. 164 SAA NHG, KA, 24 Aug. 1656, 15 Oct. 1656; Evenhuis, vol. 2, pp. 93–94. 165 GAD NHG, KA, 5 March 1632. 166 On the theological controversy, see Van Deursen, Bavianen, pp. 227–297; for its political ramifications, see Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 421–432. 162 163

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and it is worth noting that the moment of greatest religious tumult and unrest in the Republic’s ­history concerned intra-church questions rather than confessional or sectarian ones.167 Ultimately, resolution to these various entangled crises would come with the Stadholder Maurice of Nassau’s usurpation of the government of Holland in 1618 and the national Synod of Dordrecht’s expulsion of the Arminians from the public church in 1619. National political leadership swung back into the hands of the stadholder (if only for another generation), and the public church fixed its identity as a homogeneous bastion of precisian Calvinist theology.168 The Holland Mission observed all this agitation among the heretics with interest; its reports back to Rome explained in detail the theological disagreement about the doctrine of predestination between the Leiden professors Jacobus Arminius and Franciscus Gomarus that had originally sparked the controversy.169 The Apostolic vicar Philip Rovenius reported confidently to Rome in 1617 that the turmoil among the Reformed could only help increase Catholic numbers as weary souls returned to the mother church.170 One of the by-products of the division within the public church was indeed disaffection within its membership. Disgust or weariness with discord led some members to forsake the Reformed church and seek spiritual satisfaction elsewhere, an easy enough thing to do in a multiconfessional society. A church member in Amsterdam, for example, who had been accused by his consistory of dalliances with popery, admitted to “uneasiness in his conscience” about “the difficulties troubling God’s church in these present days.”171 The leadership of the Catholic Mission reasoned that the heretics’ notorious disputatiousness could be used against them and for Catholic benefit. Both banished Arminians and disillusioned Reformed might be persuaded to find solace in the lap of the apostolic church. Indeed, five years later Rovenius claimed that some of the most educated among the Arminian party had joined the Catholic fold.172 Perhaps he was referring to such prominent Arminian intellectuals as the Leiden professor Petrus Bertius, who converted to Catholicism J.L. Price, “The First Modern Society? The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century,” Dutch Crossing 23 (1999) p. 16. 168 Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 433–465. 169 “Brevis descriptio status, in quo est ecclesia catholica in partibus belgii ab haereticis occupatis Ao. 1616,” ed. A. van Lommel, AAU 1 (1875), pp. 214–216. 170 “Verslag over de Hollandse Missie ten jare 1617,” ed. G. Brom, AAU 17 (1889): 459. 171 SAA KA, 25 Feb. 1616. 172 “Descriptio status, in quo nunc est religio catholica in confoederatis belgii provinciis anno 1622,” ed. A. van Lommel, AAU 20 (1893) p. 357. 167

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after fleeing to France in 1620.173 No figures exist for the actual ­numbers of Arminians who converted to the Catholic church, but during the first decade after the Synod of Dordrecht there was clearly an upsurge in conversions within Arminian lay circles, especially among political and intellectual elites.174 The papal nuncio in Brussels noted in a report to Rome that missionaries in the Republic were exploiting the discord among the heretics in order to “procure the advantage of those souls for our Catholic religion.”175 The Society of Jesus was among the quickest to seize the initiative; the energetic Jesuit Petrus Maillart was able to convert the children of a number of Arminians around 1620 in Gouda, a town where, until 1618, the Arminian party had dominated politically.176 In Rotterdam, his confrere Joannes Viering proved to be quite successful at drawing both Arminians and Gomarists into theological discussions, from which a number of conversions seem to have resulted.177 Such conversions served the larger apologetical point, that of the truth of Catholic teaching. For the Holland Mission, the Arminian controversy provided both opportunity and validation: It allowed Rome to harvest more souls for the true church, and it demonstrated for all to see the fundamental illegitimacy of the public church. A final weapon in the Catholic arsenal employed in the competition for souls was, simply put, the miraculous.178 Early modern Europeans, from peasants to scholars, had a lively sense of demons, witches, the occult, and the magical.179 There was of course a long tradition in the Catholic church of invoking supernatural powers and the priesthood’s ability to manipulate them (not least of which was the central miracle of the mass, the recreation of Christ’s sacrifice). When – as in the case of Holland – Catholics became a disestablished religious minority, wondrous events and signs L. J. M. Bosch, Petrus Bertius 1565–1629 (Meppel: Krips, 1979), p. 145. See also P. H. Winkelman, Remonstranten en katholieken in de eeuw van Hugo de Groot (Nijmegen: De Koepel, 1945), p. 138. 174 Rogier, v. 2, pp. 726–727. 175 Romeinsche bronnen 1592–1651, pp. 214–215. 176 Koninklijke Bibliotheek Brussels, Handschriften, no. 11991, Acta missionis hollandicae ab anno 1614 ad 1623, p. 323. 177 G. Scheerder, De Contrareformatie te Rotterdam. De Leeuwenstraatse statie van de paters Jezuieten 1610–1708–1800 (Rotterdam: Stichting Roterodamum, 1988), p. 23. 178 Christine Kooi, “Paying off the sheriff: strategies of Catholic toleration in Golden Age Holland,” in Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, eds. R. Po-chia Hsia and H.F.K. van Nierop (Cambridge: University Press, 2002), pp. 98–100. 179 Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 1–148. 173

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(or at least tales of them) offered them even more solace, ­reassurance, and legitimacy.180 Putting the magical powers of the true church to work against supernatural evil could only aid in the ongoing struggle against heresy.181 Miracles that accompanied conversion specifically validated the convert’s choice and could be potentially effective aids in persuading souls to abandon heresy. The first Apostolic vicar recognized this as early as 1602, when Vosmeer reported that priests successfully performing exorcisms on possessed heretics whose preachers had failed them were proving to be a powerful propaganda weapon.182 Nor was it only the credulous and unlettered who might prove susceptible to this kind of persuasion: Franciscans in Leiden, for instance, reported that the eminent Pieter Pauw – professor of medicine at the university there – converted to Catholicism just prior to his death in 1617, having been convinced that one of his incurable patients had experienced a miraculous recovery after crossing the southern border to visit the popular shrine to the Virgin Mary at Scherpenheuvel in Brabant.183 The hagiographer of the Delft priest Jan Stalpaert van der Wiele described how that cleric labored to convert the Reformed wife of a Catholic lawyer living in The Hague. She had given birth to several stillborn children; with her conversion, she and Van der Wiele prayed fervently that she would be loosed from this curse. She subsequently gave birth to a healthy baby, “and all those who knew about the affair believed that this child was gotten through his prayers.”184 On a similar occasion Van der Wiele prayed for the conversion of another Reformed wife. When she fell ill, she summoned the priest to her sickbed and converted “with her whole heart” just before her death; “without doubt God Almighty had heard the prayers of His loyal servant.”185 In a similar vein, the biographer of the klopje Neeltgen Jansdochter attributed her conversion of her Reformed sister to the spiritual maiden’s urgent prayers.186 In these cases the conversion itself functioned as the miracle, Willem Frijhoff, “La fonction du miracle dans une minorité catholique: Les ProvincesUnies au XVIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité 48 (1972): 151–178. 181 Hans de Waardt, Toverij en samenleving. Holland 1500–1800 (The Hague: Hollandse Historische Reeks, 1991), pp. 171–172. 182 “Insinuatio status provinciarum, in quibus haeretici dominantur,” ed. G. Brom, AAU 17 (1889), p. 167. 183 Cunibertus Sloots, De Minderbroeders te Leiden (Rotterdam: De Forel, 1947), p. 172. On Pieter Pauw see Willem Otterspeer, Groepsportret met dame. Het bolwerk van de vrijheid: de Leidse universiteit 1572–1672 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2000), pp. 170–172. 184 B.A. Mensink, Jan Baptist Stalpart van der Wiele. Advocaat, priester en zielzorger 1579– 1630 (Bussum: Paul Brand, n.d.), p. 211. 185 Mensink, Jan Baptist Stalpart van der Wiele, p. 216. 186 “Uit de levens,” BBH 19 (1894): 305–306. 180

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and it attested to the divine favor in which the true church in general and these servants in particular basked. Tales of the supernatural vindication of the Catholic church circulated widely in Holland. A pamphlet published in 1602 told of a serpent breathing fire in the sky over the North-Holland town of Edam after a group of drunken soldiers mocked Catholic ritual; the monster burned down dozens of homes but spared one in which local Catholics resided.187 In 1588, a priest working in the village of Laren southeast of Amsterdam reported his interview of three girls seemingly possessed by evil spirits. He discovered that in fact the spirit of the angel Gabriel resided in them; Gabriel warned that all souls must soon convert to the “old Catholic faith” because the Last Judgment soon would be at hand. Those who failed to convert would be “forever lost.” A hitherto mute child among the crowd of onlookers suddenly began to laugh for the first time, a further sign of the authenticity of the message.188 The Catholic annalist Franciscus Dusseldorpius recorded that a local servant girl had spotted the devil in the church pulpit in Gouda while the Reformed preacher was sermonizing.189 As unlikely as such tales may have seemed, for the devout among their Catholic audience and the impressionable among their Reformed antagonists they served to underscore the essential rightness of their faith and the urgent need to win souls for the true church. Those who abjured their heresy and embraced the Apostolic church were making the only correct choice, as such supernatural happenings attested. Indeed, Jesuit missionaries forced the issue when approached by non-Catholics for cures or exorcisms by insisting that the patient convert to the true church first before they would help them.190 Demonic possession, fire-breathing serpents, miraculous healings, sudden fertility – all these wonders helped to score victories in the competition for souls in confessional space.191

Een seer vremde, miraculeuse, vreeslijcke/ ende waerachtighe historie/ gheschiedt binnen de stadt van Edam/ gheleghen in Noort-hollandt/ den eersten sondach van den vasten/ des teghenwoordighen jaers 1602 (Antwerp: 1602). 188 Martien Parmentier. Geschiedenis van (oud-)katholiek Hilversum 1589–1889 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1989), p. 203. 189 Uittreksel uit Francisci Dusseldorpii Annales 1566–1616, ed. R. Fruin (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1893), p. 124. 190 Hans de Waardt, “Van exorcisten tot doctores medicinae. Geestlijken als gidsen naar genezing in Holland,” in Grenzen van genezing. Gezondheid, ziekte en genezen in Nederland, zestiende tot begin twintigste eeuw, eds. Willem de Blécourt et al. (Hilversum: Verloren, 1995), p. 102. 191 The same was true for civil war-torn France in the same period; see Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 3. 187

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Signs and wonders appealed to many in early modern society, not just Catholics. Certainly, the Reformed church had little hesitation in seeing portents in anomalous contemporary events, and more than one Reformed minister claimed to have prophetic visions.192 Reformed theology was alert to the workings of the devil in human affairs, and the public church called for heavy civil punishments for such phenomena as soothsaying, sorcery, witchcraft, and pacts with the devil.193 Reformed authorities understood clearly the allure of occult wonder-working, especially on susceptible souls, but they dismissed most priestly claims of magic or miracles as yet another instance of Catholic idolatry. In 1635, the classis of Haarlem registered bitter complaints at the Court of Holland about priestly activities in the countryside  – in particular, the uproar caused by a priest performing a public exorcism, to which he had even invited Reformed church members “in order to dazzle simple folk, where possible, with that make-believe.”194 Among other things, the priest questioned the devil about which was the true religion, the Catholic or the Reformed. He further asked the devil to confirm that Catholic prayers would drive him out of a person’s soul while Reformed prayers would allow him to possess a person’s soul.195 Such leading questions were presumably for the benefit of his Reformed onlookers. This performance went on, the classis noted with disdain, “with much attendant superstitions of holy water and candles.”196 All of this was designed to lure people from the Reformed church to the Catholic, or as the brethren more baldly put it, “from God to the devil.”197 The classis of Leiden found itself similarly preoccupied with rural magic, though in its case it was Catholic faith healers, whom it tried hard to get suppressed for fear of country folk being lured into the snares of popery.198 The relief from physical or spiritual afflictions that priestly magic seemed to offer was not a temptation the Reformed clergy could easily address or counter beyond appeals to scripture and denunciations of superstition, since Reformed doctrine largely treated issues of magic, demonology, and witchcraft as questions of church discipline, and of course did not ascribe to its clergy any equivalent supernatural John Exalto, Gereformeerde heiligen. De religieuze exempeltraditie in vroegmodern Nederland (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2005), pp. 202–203. 193 De Waardt, Toverij, pp. 165–167. 194 “Klachten der predikanten van de classis van Haarlem tegen de pausgezinden in Kennemerland Anno 1635,” ed. A. van Lommel, BBH 3 (1875): 434. 195 “Klachten,” p. 435. 196 “Klachten,” p. 434. 197 “Klachten,” p. 435. 198 Classicale Acta 1573–1620. Classis Dordrecht 1601–1620, pp. 20, 248. 192

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or miraculous powers.199 In the competition for souls, this could put Reformed preachers at a disadvantage in regards to their Catholic counterparts, whose traditions allowed for a greater range of possibility when it came to unearthly powers. The supernatural seemed to be very much on the side of the disestablished church. The eminent twentieth-century historian of early modern Dutch Catholicism L. J. Rogier observed that the second quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed a number of celebrated conversions to Catholicism among the Republic’s cultural and literary elites  – such as the poets and sisters Anna Roemers Visscher and Maria Tesselschade, daughters of a well-established Reformed merchant family.200 Many of these more famous converts – such as the playwright Joost van den Vondel – also stemmed from tolerated, non-Reformed confessions such as the Arminians and Mennonites. The rumored conversion of the prominent statesman and historian Lieuwe van Aitzema was enough to prompt the papal nuncio in Cologne to send hurried, joyful word to Rome in 1656.201 Rogier speculated that this small wave of conversions might be attributed to a certain fatigue within various Protestant circles with the bitter and seemingly unrelenting sectarianism that the Reformation had bequeathed to the Republic.202 That is certainly possible, though it might also be attributable to the resurgence and rejuvenation of Catholic faith and life that both the Holland Mission and Holland’s tolerationist policies helped to bring about in this period. Between roughly 1620 and 1660, the Catholic church, underground and semi-clandestine as it was, reached a point of enough vitality and vigor to offer an attractive religious choice to those inclined to forsake the public church. Cases of conversion occurred most frequently precisely during the decades when Holland’s two major churches proclaimed the confessional differences between each other most loudly. Perhaps this was because the choice between the two confessions was never more clear. Despite occasional incidents of judicial harassment and frequent and loud Reformed lamentations, the Catholic church in Holland won for itself a respectable showing in the competition for souls. De Waardt, Toverij, pp. 165–170. Rogier, v. 2, p. 729. See also Met en zonder lauwerkrans. Schrijvende vrouwen uit de vroegmoderne tijd 1550–1850, ed. R. Schenkeveld-van der Dussen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997), pp. 150–155, 171–174. 201 C. S. M. Rademaker, “Een bekeringbericht uit 1656. De godsdientige overtuiging van Lieuwe van Aitzema,” AGKKN 10 (1968): 208–209. 202 Rogier, v. 2, p. 729. 199 200

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This was a direct result of the multiconfessional society created in the wake of reformation, revolt, and Holland’s regime of toleration. Freedom of conscience and the minimal enforcement of religious placards allowed for what the English observer Owen Felltham in the mid-seventeenth century disparaged as “the fair of all sects.” Although most believers were content to remain in their own churches, a minority felt free enough to traverse confessional boundaries or even shop around in the confessional marketplace. In private space, conversion was a choice made based on individual inclination and circumstance. “If you be unsettled in your religion,” Felltham sneered, “you may here try all, and take at last what you like best.”203 In confessional space, Holland’s two largest confessions competed fiercely for those unsettled souls, a rivalry made all the more vehement by Calvinism’s usurpation of Catholicism in the province in the 1570s. In the multiconfessional civic space where Reformed and Catholic lived in close proximity to each other, crossing confessional boundaries was a familiar phenomenon, and this in turn stimulated competition between the two churches. The paradox of multiconfessionalism was that it made the boundaries between confessions, at least in the eyes of their guardians, that much more sacrosanct. Pluralism, which we moderns tend to see as an antidote to sectarianism, could also act as its catalyst.

Felltham, A Brief Character of the Low Countries, p. 53.

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It is quite ordinary to find the man of the house of one opinion, his wife of another, his children of a third and his servants of one different from them all, and yet they live without the least jangling of dissension. An English Quaker living in Leiden, ca. 16501

In the autumn of 1669 in the town of Gouda, a Franciscan priest ­pressured Reformed church member Metje Stoffels to let him marry her to her Catholic husband in a proper church sacrament, telling her that otherwise they were living in “whoredom” and “fornication” and she was merely a “concubine.” Worse still, he told her that her husband’s soul was doomed unless they were married by a priest. The missionary was aided in his importunings by Metje’s Catholic mother-in-law, who helped him force his way into Metje’s house, ejecting in the process a cousin who was protesting the injustice of their actions. In spite of Metje’s objections, her marriage was solemnized by the friar.2 When word of this “violence” reached Gouda’s Reformed consistory, it immediately demanded that the burgomasters intervene. Aside from denouncing the Franciscan’s actions, it also insisted that the authorities censure Metje’s husband and motherin-law in particular for interfering with her religious faith, and that they force the husband to keep his original promise to have the child they were expecting baptized in the Reformed church.3 Less than a month later the contrite husband, summoned before the magistracy, agreed to these Quoted in C.D. van Strien, “British Travellers in Holland during the Stuart Period.” Ph.D. dissertation, Free University of Amsterdam, 1989, p. 148. 2 AHGG KA, 3 Oct. 1669. 3 AHGG KA, 10 Oct. 1669. 1

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stipulations and also consented to attend Reformed church services with his wife. The consistory, needless to say, was pleased with the outcome.4 Issues arising out of mixed marriages like this one played themselves out before church and civil authorities all over Holland during the Golden Age. Spouses of differing confessions could find themselves buffeted by conflicts and pressures in their marriages from both within and without. Interconfessional marriage was a specific instance of yet another aspect of Holland’s multiconfessional society: The presence of religious pluralism in simple everyday life. The challenges of confessional accommodation presented themselves not only in the very public and rarefied confessional and civic spaces of politics, ecclesiastical competition, conversion, and rhetoric, they also – and most directly – penetrated the private space of daily, ordinary social interaction. Accommodation of religious difference in this more mundane realm had to work itself out across and through the manifold, shifting, and overlapping boundaries of family, neighborhood, and work. One of the major consequences of Holland’s ecclesiastical settlement, which had coupled freedom of conscience with an exclusive public church, was that – like it or not – one’s co-workers, neighbors, relatives, parents, spouses, and even children could be adherents of a faith that was not one’s own (or adhere to no faith at all). This blunt fact of life demanded toleration of an altogether different order than could be provided by legislation, philosophy, or theology. Across the densely populated cities of Holland, the social fact of confessional pluralism implicitly asked each member of society how far he or she was willing to accept, ignore, or resist religious difference. People of different beliefs had to learn to live with each other, and a kind of multiconfessional sociability prevailed. This private space was where Holland’s Catholics and Calvinists interacted as individuals rather than communities or churches. Early modern communities across Europe valued stability, order, and harmony. Sociability was a key mechanism in enforcing these norms; it formed intricate and overlapping networks of relationships and associations among family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues.5 Communal success, prosperity, and peace depended on these mores being honored and upheld, and in many communities such differences as religious allegiance were deliberately overlooked or superseded by a strong commitment to AHGG KA, 31 Oct. 1669. For a discussion of stability and sociability in early modern towns, see Thomas Max Safley, Matheus Miller’s Memoir: A Merchant’s Life in the Seventeenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), pp. 84–96.

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the larger global value of social harmony. This social interdependence required a certain degree of mutual toleration on the part of individuals in their day-to-day, street-level interactions with each other, toleration that bridged the more abstract theological fissures that the Reformation had created.6 In Holland and elsewhere, local and often informal mechanisms of conflict resolution and mediation were established that allowed discord to be settled in ways that did no damage to the larger social fabric.7 Reformed consistories, for example, dedicated a substantial amount of their time and energy to mediating disputes among church members. So on the whole, the private daily response of early modern Hollanders to their multiconfessional communities was acquiescence. Despite the antagonistic rhetoric, ecclesiastical and clerical rivalry, deep theological differences, the competition for souls, anti-Catholic legislation, and occasional persecution, in private life ordinary Reformed Protestants and Catholics in Holland generally opted to get along with each other. They were, to be sure, led in this direction by provincial and local governments whose policies protected the individual conscience by creating for it a private sphere within which its liberty was guaranteed. In other words, the public-private distinction that Holland’s regents had fashioned in response to multiconfessionalism can be seen as a kind of social engineering that created not only a political accommodation of religious diversity but also allowed for a personal one.8 Thus the publically confessionalized face of Holland’s regime (which privileged the Reformed church and circumscribed all other churches) helped create a deconfessionalized private space. In other words, official confessionalism coexisted with everyday deconfessionalism. The political, economic, and social realities of seventeenth-century Holland enabled and even necessitated personal toleration. That personal toleration, like its political counterpart, was characterized by degrees of variegation and was contingent on time and place and circumstance. Flashpoints of conflict among neighbors and within marriages and families certainly did erupt, as they did in the case of Metje See for France, Gregory Hanlon, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 91–102. 7 Douglas Catterall, Community without Borders: Scots Migrants and the Changing Face of Power in the Dutch Republic, c. 1600–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 175–232; Aries van Meeteren, Op hoop van akkoord: Instrumenteel forumgebruik bij geschilbeslechting in Leiden in de zeventiende eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 2006), pp. 11–26. 8 Joke Spaans, “De katholieken in de Republiek na de Vrede van Munster,” ZE 13 (1997): 259. 6

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Stoffels. Confessional diversity may have in and of itself been a source of conflict, but often also appears to have been a contributing variable in the complicated and varied relationships among persons. The normal stresses that attend human interaction and family dynamics could easily be exacerbated by religious difference as well as by the disparity in status between the Reformed church and the Catholic community. Quarrels between neighbors, disputes among relatives, disagreements over the rearing of children could all be inflamed by the friction of confessional antagonism. The degree of religious tolerance or hostility or even indifference that was exercised varied from individual to individual and from group to group. This private space was perhaps the one least influenced by the three-stage chronology established at the beginning of this study; evidence of confessional sociability can be found in all three periods. It is worth noting, however, that religious authorities on both sides paid much closer attention to potential areas of conflict such as marriage and children during 1620–1660, when confessional tension in Holland was at its highest. Although, as we have seen, in confessional space Calvinists and Catholics directed a fair amount of rhetorical fury and verbal aggression at each other, society in seventeenth-century Holland was marked by strikingly little popular sectarian violence. Indeed, the most significant religious turbulence to afflict the Dutch Republic was intraconfessional: The conflict between Remonstrant and Counter-Remonstrant factions within the Reformed church led to mob violence in a number of cities in the 1610s.9 Aside from Beggar attacks on Catholic clergy during the early days of the revolt in the 1570s and a few isolated instances of antiCatholic riots and unrest provoked by the invasion of French king Louis XIV in 1672, there is scant evidence of violence between Reformed and Catholic Hollanders in this period. Political, social, and cultural mores and conventions insistent on social harmony proved far more powerful than theological division. Peaceful coexistence appears to have been the norm.10 Unfortunately for the historian of religious coexistence, concord leaves fewer traces than conflict. Cases of antagonism and struggle make it more easily into the documentary record than those of harmony and comity; it was only when authorities – ecclesiastical or civil – intervened J.L. Price, “The First Modern Society? The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century,” Dutch Crossing 23 (1999), p.16. 10 Joke Spaans, “Violent dreams, peaceful coexistence. On the absence of religious violence in the Dutch Republic,” ZE 18 (2002): 149–166. 9

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in relationships between individuals that those relationships might be memorialized in some way. If we were to rely only upon ecclesiastical sources our picture of relations between Holland’s Catholics and Calvinists would be very grim indeed. Priests and preachers had a vital interest in keeping confessional difference lively, and church historical records reflect as much. So while this hostility characterized the confessional space in which Reformed and Catholic coexisted, it was not characteristic of the private space of religious pluralism. Most laity had little investment in religious division, so we know less about their experience. The mundane, quotidian interactions between people of differing confessions in seventeenth-century Holland were often literally not noteworthy. Thus the historian is sometimes left to find more indirect sources of information, to infer from silences or to examine what those recorded exceptional cases tell us about the unrecorded norm. What follows is an impressionistic look at the social world of Holland’s multiconfessionalism, particularly focused on interactions between ordinary Catholic and Reformed. Much more systematic and intensive labor in local archives needs to be done by social historians before we will have a truly complete picture of the day-to-day social conduct of seventeenthcentury Hollanders in private space toward their kith and kin of differing beliefs.

Neighborhood Perhaps the most basic fact of everyday social life for most early modern Hollanders was proximity: Everybody lived near somebody else. Holland experienced sustained and explosive demographic growth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; its communities were among the most densely populated in early modern Europe, with the rate of urbanization in the province as a whole reaching 61 percent by 1675.11 Coupled with demographic density was the province’s religious diversity; throughout most of the Golden Age no single confession comprised a majority of the population. Though the numbers we have are at best rough estimates, Reformed church members typically made up a plurality of the population in a given town (at least through mid-century), with Catholics often coming in as the second largest confessional group and thus the single Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy. Success, Failure, and Perseverance in the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 61.

11

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Calvinists and Catholics during Holland’s Golden Age City

Reformed % of Population

Catholic % of Population

Amsterdam Delft Haarlem Leiden

30 25 20 30

14 9 (in 1635) 12.5 15 (in 1656)

biggest minority among the tolerated religions. Some very preliminary estimates of percentages for some major cities around 1620 have been made by a number of historians.12 These figures are by no means exact and are only intended to offer at most an approximate impression of the demographic ratios of Catholic to Reformed, which prove to be fairly consistent. The point is that in most of Holland’s towns Catholics formed a significant and visible subset of the population. Reformed townsfolk encountered Catholic townsfolk in their streets, neighborhoods, workplaces, and even families. This was even more probable given that there is little evidence of geographic self-segregation by confessional groups within Holland’s cities. Although the Catholic church officially enjoined its members to have as little interaction with heretics as possible,13 Catholics in Holland did not congregate into separate ghettos. Only in Delft and Haarlem may we speak of distinct Catholic neighborhoods of a block or two. In Delft, the Papenhoek or Papists’ Corner was a clutch of buildings inhabited by Catholic families centered around a Jesuit house church and school.14 Amsterdam: R.B. Evenhuis, Ook dat was Amsterdam. De kerk der hervorming in de gouden eeuw (Amsterdam: W. Ten Have, 1967), vol. 1, p. 130; Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), p. 380. Delft: P.H.A.M. Abels and A.Ph.F. Wouters, Nieuw en ongezien. Kerk en samenleving in de classis Delft en Delfland 1572–1621 (Delft: Eburon, 1994), vol. 1, p. 234, vol. 2, p. 138. Haarlem: Joke Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie. Stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1578–1620 (The Hague: Hollandse Historische Reeks, 1989), p. 104. Leiden: Christine Kooi, Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leiden’s Reformation 1572–1620 (Leiden Brill, 2000), pp. 212, 188. The issue of numbers is a complicated one that has sparked considerable debate. See among other works J. A. de Kok, Nederland op de breuklijn Rome-Reformatie (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1964); A. M. van der Woude et al., “Numerieke aspecten van de protestantisering in Noord-Nederland tussen 1656 en 1726,” Afdeling Agrarische Geschiedenis, Bijdragen 13 (1965): 149–180; Hans Knippenberg, De religieuze kaart van Nederland. Omvang en geografische spreiding van de godsdienstige gezindten vanaf de Reformatie tot heden (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1992), p. 248. 13 Johann Gamberoni, Der Verkehr der Katholiken mit den Häretikern. Grundsätzliches nach dem Moralisten von der Mittes des 16. bis zur Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Brixen: Weger, 1950), pp. 70–72. 14 John Michael Montias, Vermeer and his Milieu: A Web of Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 176–177. 12

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Likewise, Haarlem’s substantial community of spiritual maidens or klopjes, called In de Hoek, was concentrated on the Bakenessergracht, and Catholics bought and occupied many of the houses surrounding this community.15 Typically, Catholic households might be found clustered around or near a house church or priest’s home, providing it with some insulation against prying eyes or curious outsiders. It would be more accurate to speak of pockets of Catholic inhabitants dispersed through Holland’s crowded and teeming cities rather than of any systematic segregation. At the most mundane level of street and neighborhood, confessional integration was the general rule, and these confessional groups were in turn integrated with those who belonged to no confession at all. Neighborhood was a fundamental unit of municipal life in early modern Holland.16 The dense social traffic of its towns ensured a high degree of neighborly contact and interaction. Reformed and Catholic neighbors encountered each other daily. This state of affairs led ineluctably to what the historian Willem Frijhoff has called “interconfessional conviviality” or the “ecumenism of everyday relations.”17 A practical toleration obtained. The British tourist James Howell put it this way after a sojourn in the Republic during the first quarter of the seventeenth century: “I believe in this street where I lodge, there be well near as many religions as there be houses, for one neighbour knows not, nor cares not much what religion of the other is of . . . .”18 Indifference to or deliberate overlooking of sectarian allegiance was probably the most effective lubricant in social relations between Holland’s ordinary Catholics and Reformed Protestants. The bonds of neighborliness usually proved to be more compelling than theological differences of opinion. Neighbors had to learn to get along, regardless of the sectarian fulminations of their clergy.19 In many Dutch cities, neighborhood associations were responsible for security, public order, and sociability within a given set of city blocks, and they did not discriminate with regard Spaans, Haarlem, p. 95. Gabrielle Dorren, Eenheid en verscheidenheid. De burgers van Haarlem in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 2001), pp. 67–92. 17 Willem Frijhoff, “The threshold of toleration. Interconfessional conviviality in Holland during the early modern period,” in Embodied Belief. Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), pp. 39–40. 18 Quoted in Van Strien, p. 148, n. 70. 19 This was also true for England, a point made by William Sheils, “‘Getting on’ and ‘getting along’ in parish and town: Catholics and their neighbours in England,” in Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands, c. 157–1720, eds. Benjamin Kaplan et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), pp. 67–83. 15 16

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to religion; people of virtually all confessions participated in them.20 Likewise, most communal associations such as guilds, civic militias, and chambers of rhetoric made no issue of sectarian commitment among their members; the Catholic genre painter Jan Steen, for example, served for a time as the dean of Leiden’s Saint Lucas guild, and the Catholic poet Jan Vos had no difficulty being appointed a regent of the Amsterdam civic theater (Schouwburg) in 1647.21 Nor was confessional allegiance necessarily a hindrance to one’s social standing in the community. When the respected Haarlem klopje Margreta Cornelis died in 1610, her body was solemnly carried through the city streets to the city’s Grote Kerk for burial. It was escorted by the civic militia, which included some of the most prominent citizens of the town, hats doffed in respect “as if the corpse of a great princess had gone by.”22 Attendance at one another’s funerals was a normal feature of the Reformed-Catholic social landscape.23 Even those individuals who might otherwise have been thought to be particularly sensitive to or wary of religious difference appear not to have made a fuss where their neighbors were concerned. The fiery Calvinist elder Jacques Valmaer of Leiden, for example, was exiled from his native Flanders for his faith. He was ultimately beheaded in 1587 for conspiring to overthrow that city’s government for being insufficiently Reformed, and on the eve of his execution exhorted his wife not to let their children fall into the “idolatry of popery.” Yet despite such confessional zeal, he apparently had no objection to renting a house owned by the staunchly Catholic Van Veen family on Leiden’s most elegant avenue, the Rapenburg.24 Only a few houses down the same street, the retired priest Vranck Ottenz de Man rented a room to the young Frenchman Petrus Llewellyn Bogaers, “Geleund over de onderdeur. Doorkijkjes in het Utrechtse buurtleven van de vroege Middeleeuwen tot in de zeventiende eeuw,” BMGN 112 (1997): 336– 363; Herman Roodenburg, “‘Freundschaft, ‘Brüderlichkeit,’ und ‘Einigkeit’: Städtische Nachbarschaften im Westen der Republik,” in Ausbreitung bürgerlicher Kultur in den Niederlanden und Nordwestdeutschland, eds. T. Dekker et al. (Münster: Coppenrath, 1991), pp. 10–24; also Catterall, Community without Borders, pp. 194–206. 21 Yvonne Prins and Jan Smit, “De naaste verwanten van Jan Steen,” Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 51 (1997): 156; S. A. C. Dudok van Heel, “Jan Vos (1610–1667),” Jaarboek Amstelodamum 72 (1980): 31. 22 Catharina Jans Oly, “Leven van ‘Maechden van den Hoeck,’” Bibliotheek, Museum Catharijnaconvent, no. 92 B 13, I, fols. 38r–39v. 23 Judith Pollmann, “Burying the dead; reliving the past: ritual, resentment and sacred space in the Dutch Republic,” in Catholic Communities in Protestant States. Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570–1720, eds. Benjamin J. Kaplan et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 97–98. 24 Th. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer, C. Willemijn Fock, and A. J. van Dissel, Het Rapenburg: Geschiedenis van een Leidse gracht (Leiden, 1990), vol. Vb, pp. 403–405. On Valmaer’s involvement in the Leicester conspiracy, see Kooi, Liberty and Religion, pp. 118–120. 20

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Molineus, who had come to Leiden to study at the university and who eventually returned to his homeland to serve as a Huguenot ­preacher.25 The Apostolic vicar Johannes van Neercassel enjoyed cordial relations with Amsterdam’s Reformed patricians while he lived in that city in the 1660s.26 One suspects that many more such practical relationships could be found across all the communities of Holland. Indeed, encounters between adherents of different churches could even be the stuff of humor: The seventeenth-century joke collection of Aernout van Overbeke related a tale of a Reformed preacher entering a Catholic-owned cheese shop to sample the wares. The owner presented him with several nice cheeses to taste. Before partaking, the minister doffed his hat to say a quick word of grace in good Reformed fashion; the irritated shopkeeper immediately told him to put his cap back on if he was planning to make a meal out of his cheese.27 The private exercise of toleration prevailed in this pluralist society, and that contrasted vividly with its officially sectarian public face. Individuals of quite differing confessional stripe were neighbors, colleagues, associates, and friends. Even very ardent Calvinists might enjoy friendships with Catholics. The Reformed preacher Gerardus Schepens, a Dordrecht native who served pulpits in village churches in various parts of the province, reflected warmly in a memoir written later in his life in 1609 that he had known many dear friends, “not only among the true children of God, but even among the papists, even though I frankly disparaged their superstitions and false beliefs.”28 Popery was clearly no barrier to friendship. Judith Pollmann has examined the phenomenon of personal toleration in detail in her outstanding study of the Utrecht lawyer Arnoldus Buchelius. In his lifetime (1565–1641), Buchelius traveled a complicated spiritual path from his native Catholicism to a committed and zealous Calvinism. Yet this Reformed elder’s best friend was a Catholic, as was his sister, Maria.29 The bonds of friendship and a common Christian piety Het Rapenburg, vol. Vb, pp. 647–648. C. P. Voorvelt, “Enkele minder bekende facetten van het leven van de apostolische vicaris Johannes van Neercassel (1663–1686),” Trajecta 5 (1996): 45–46. 27 Aernout van Overbeke. Anecdota sive historiae jocosae. Een zeventiende-eeuws verzameling moppen en anekdotes, eds. Rudolf Dekker et al. (Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut, 1991), p. 140. This joke collection as a window into confessional relations is discussed by Frijhoff, “The Threshold of Toleration,” in Embodied Belief, pp. 57–60. 28 SAD, Archief Familie Balen, no. 20, “Memorien van mijn geslaecht geschreven den 2. desember 1609.” For a brief record of Schepens’s career, see F.A. van Lieburg, Repertorium van Nederlandse hervormde predikanten tot 1816 (Dordrecht, 1996), vol. 1, p. 219. 29 Judith Pollmann, Religious Choicein the Dutch Republic: The Reformation of Arnoldus Buchelius (1565–1641) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 169, 176. 25 26

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were more important to Buchelius in his relationships with friends and relatives than the potentially polarizing forces of confessionalism.30 Early modern people needed such relationships to survive, and in such a pluralistic social environment toleration of difference was a critical necessity.31 The poet, scholar, and diplomat Constantijn Huyghens was distinctly anti-Catholic in his attitudes and opinions, but this did not prevent him from having good relations with Catholics, especially fellow writers and scholars.32 The conversion to Catholicism of his friend, the poet Maria Tesselschade, in 1641 shocked him deeply to be sure, but even that he managed to get over eventually.33 Interconfessional friendships did carry the risk of discord, however; in 1654, the Dordrecht preacher Isaac Lydius reported that he was summoned to the sickbed of an ailing church member, at whose bedside his Catholic and Reformed friends were quarreling with each other about whether a priest should be brought in to offer spiritual comfort to the patient.34 In the countryside, where communities were smaller, the bonds of fellowship might prove even stronger; a Reformed preacher in the South-Holland village of Sprang reported to the classis of Dordrecht in 1619 that when he confronted one of his congregants about the latter’s habit of frequenting the local Catholic mass as well as the Reformed church, the congregant insisted that he did so out of a sense of neighborliness toward the local priest.35 Between individuals, amicable coexistence appears to have been the norm. However, for all its forcing of some sort of coexistence, proximity could of course also contribute to interconfessional tensions, and some of those frictions could be found in private space. Street encounters between Reformed and Catholic were occasionally unfriendly. The consistory of Amsterdam withheld communion from Theunis Theunisz in 1623 because he had brawled publicly with his Catholic neighbor, a rare recorded instance of actual physical violence between Reformed Judith Pollmann, “Public Enemies, Private Friends: Arnoldus Buchelius’s Experience of Religious Diversity in the Early Dutch Republic,” in The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age, eds. Arthur K. Wheelock, jr. and Adele Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), p. 185. 31 Pollmann, Religious Choice, p. 176. 32 H. A. Hofman, Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687). Een christelijk-humanist bourgeois gentilhomme in dienst van het Oranjehuis (Utrecht: HES, 1983), p. 98. 33 Mieke B. Smits-Veldt, Maria Tesselschade. Leven met talent en vriendschap (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994), p. 93. 34 SAD NHG, KA, 30 July 1654. 35 Classicale acta 1573–1620 II: Particuliere synode Zuid-Holland. Classis Dordrecht 1601–1620, Classis Breda 1616–1620, ed. J. Roelevink (The Hague: Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 1991), p. 730 (5–7 November 1619). 30

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and Catholic.36 Another exceptional episode of sectarian violence was reported in 1655, when Catholic and Reformed Leideners came to blows on a street near the city’s harbor over news that Huguenots were being persecuted in Savoy; the Leiden court banned one of the Catholic brawlers on account of the libelous insults about the Reformed church he had shouted during the fighting.37 A jeering crowd taunted and tormented a priest in the North-Holland village of Graft so much that he came out of his house and threw a rock at them.38 In the Utrecht village of Jutphaas, Reformed Protestants who encountered Catholics on the same footpath on their way to their respective churches quarreled over who had the right of way.39 Reformed church members living on the Keizerstraat in Gouda complained in 1662 about “insolent, scandalous” remarks about their church made by some of their Catholic neighbors.40 Disrespectful attacks on the legitimacy of one’s church almost always prompted complaints or conflict in a society where honor was considered a paramount social value. Some souls, to be sure, were more sensitive to proximity than others; the klopje Lucretia Dirkxdr was reportedly so pious in her Catholic faith that she got dizzy if she discovered there was a heretic merely in her vicinity.41 Clergy of both confessions were usually particular targets in these kinds of street-level encounters. The Leiden priest Pouwels Claesz de Goede endured taunts from onlookers when he walked the city’s avenues in his vestments.42 A converted former Franciscan scheduled to preach in the Reformed church in Gouda in 1663 was so unnerved by the raucous jeering of Catholic youths he encountered on the street that he was unable deliver his sermon.43 Some sectarians used everyday encounters as SAA NHG, KA, 29 June 1623. RAL, Oud-Rechterlijk Archief 3, Crimineel vonnisboek 15, 28 September 1655. The persecution of the Savoyard Protestants had been widely publicized in the Dutch Republic and sparked a number of acts of political solidarity, including charitable collections and days of prayer; see H. C. Rogge, “De vervolging van de Waldensen in 1655 en 1656,” Nederlandsch Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 2 (1903): 134–189. 38 A. Th. van Deursen, Een dorp in de polder: Graft in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1994), p. 98. 39 E. P. de Booy, De weldaet der scholen. Het plattelands onderwijs in de provincie Utrecht van 1560 tot het begin der 19de eeuw (Haarlem: Gottmer, 1977), p. 151. 40 AHGG KA, 7 April 1662. 41 Oly, vol. I, fols. 231v–233v. 42 J. D. Frenay, BBH 1 (1873): 255–256. 43 GHA, Archief van de Oud-Katholieke Parochie van de H. Johannes de Doper, no. 597, [Ignatius Walvis], “Goudsche en andere daartoe dienende katolieke kerk-zaken door I. W. pastoor van der Goude anno 1709,” fol. 86. 36 37

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opportunities for proselytizing. A Reformed deacon in Haarlem reported to the consistory about a confrontation he had with a Catholic in his neighborhood who spoke scandalously and insolently of the Bible and of the Reformed ministers.44 In 1630, the Dordrecht consistory investigated the case of a local Catholic tailor who was daily and loudly casting libelous aspersions on Reformed doctrine and preachers, much to aggravation of his Reformed neighbors.45 The same consistory was quick to alert the magistracy in 1650 when it heard reports of a Catholic priest aggressively trying to convert a church member “publicly on the street.”46 Margarita Jacobs, a former nun and Reformed convert, complained to the Delft consistory in 1651 that her Catholic neighbors in the Begijnhof were continually trying to keep her from attending church.47 In a similar vein, the Amsterdam consistory worried that the friends of Engeltgen Jacobs, who were “bitter enemies of the religion,” might prevent her from fully committing to the Reformed church.48 Consistories were all too aware of the potential dangers to the spiritual health of church members posed by the plethora of Catholic neighbors and associations in their immediate environment, and they kept a watchful eye on interconfessional interactions. When rumors reached the Amsterdam brethren that church member Maijke Seecken was seen in the company of a priest, they immediately inquired; she told them that he was not a priest but the son of a family with which she had once lived.49 In Haarlem in 1627, the consistory investigated the case of Maritghen Jacobs, whom several witnesses claimed to have seen receiving the sacrament at a Catholic conventicle on Easter Monday, the day after she had attended communion in the Reformed church. After three months of inquiry, the Haarlem brethren concluded that it had been a case of mistaken identity.50 Neighborliness might also get one into trouble: The Catholic pamphleteer Aernout van Geluwe claimed that one Delft spiritual maiden was imprisoned for three months and then banned from the city for taking pity on a destitute Reformed boy and giving him some clothing and food.51 One Amsterdam Reformed church member summoned before the consistory in 1589 to account for NHA NHG, KA, 22 Sept. 1652. SAD NHG, KA, 25 July 1630. 46 SAD NHG, KA, 15 Sept. 1650. 47 GAD NHG, KA, 20 August 1651. 48 SAA NHG, KA, 25 June 1648. 49 SAA NHG, KA, 6 August 1629. 50 NHA NHG, KA, 12 April 1627, 19 April 1627, 10 July 1627, 21 April 1628. 51 Arnout van Geluwe, Kort verhael van een achthienjarighe Hollantsche reyse, ghewandelt van een vlaemsch boer (Antwerp, 1650), p. 13. 44 45

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his marriage before a priest claimed that he was “driven by his friends [to do it] against his will.” The consistory replied that he should fear God more than people, an injunction some Reformed Hollanders found more easily said than done.52 Proximity also meant that the loci of Catholic worship were common knowledge in most communities, and this made the polite fiction of Catholic invisibility very fictional indeed. The crowded conditions of Holland’s towns meant that it was nearly impossible to worship completely in secret. By the second quarter of the seventeenth century, as the Holland Mission revitalized Catholic devotion, house churches (usually more than one) could be found in every community in Holland. Despite the official contention that these worship spaces were to be invisible – camouflaged behind residential façades – in any given town, everyone seemed to know where and what they were. When Sebastiaen Francken, an official of the Court of Holland investigating Catholic activity in South-Holland in 1643, brought his inquiry to Gouda it was resident Reformed preachers there who informed him of the exact addresses in town where he could find Catholic masses being celebrated.53 The Haarlem consistory complained in 1644 to the town government about Catholics meeting in large numbers in a house “under the very eyes of two burgomasters and some preachers living nearby.”54 In 1656, the consistory of Amsterdam famously inventoried all known “papist gathering places” in the city and came up with a list of no less than sixty-two locations. This was not merely a list of addresses, but also included the names of the priests who might be residing there, whether any klopjes lived with them, how frequently or regularly conventicles were held there (at one address only Friday mass was celebrated, for example), and whether those gatherings were large or small.55 Such a detailed level of knowledge of confessional rivals was possible because of the full integration of Holland’s Catholics among their non-Catholic neighbors; proximity made intelligence-gathering fairly easy. Catholic worship may have been private, but it was hardly secret or completely invisible. The Amsterdam list also noted a few instances where Catholic worship was being held SAA NHG, KA, 7 September 1589. “Bouwstoffen voor de kerkelijke geschiedenis van verschillende parochien thans behoorende tot het bisdom Haarlem,” ed. A. van Lommel, BBH 7 (1870), p. 350. 54 NHA NHG, KA, 27 December 1644. 55 SAA NHG, KA, 7 December 1656. This entry in the consistorial minutes is reprinted in I. H. van Eeghen, “De eigendom van de katholieke kerken in Amsterdam ten tijde van de Republiek,” BBH 64 (1957), pp. 268–277. 52 53

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in the vicinity of a magistrate’s house, a pointed reminder that those in a position to do something about popish impudence in fact seldom did anything at all. Magistrates generally took no action in response to such complaints. Propinquity may have made Catholicism less invisible and therefore more offensive to Reformed neighbors, but it does not seem to have appreciably increased the potential of systematic persecution, either. The close conditions that characterized Holland’s neighborhoods also extended to the realm of workplace and livelihood; economic intercourse among individuals knew no confessional boundaries. For a large part of the seventeenth century, Holland’s booming economy left the province rich in employment and investment opportunities, and we have little evidence of religious discrimination or collusion in the economic sphere. The prominent Gouda Catholic Gerrit Vermij expressed some reservations to Apostolic vicar Sasbout Vosmeer in 1609 about investing money entrusted to him in projects endorsed by the States of Holland, fearing it might cause “talk and scandal” for a well-known Catholic like himself to buy a stake in a heretical regime; as prosperity spread, such scruples seemed to have mattered less.56 Holland’s Catholics and Calvinists were colleagues as well as neighbors. The province’s hundreds of artisans’ guilds, for example, required all qualified tradesmen to be members irrespective of religious persuasion, although in some cases leadership positions might be reserved exclusively for Reformed Protestants.57 As guildsmen, both Reformed and Catholic were entitled to all the financial and social support their associations offered, including defraying the costs of illness and funerals and providing benefits to widows and elderly guild-brothers. In business transactions of all sorts, religious allegiance appears to have played little role. The Leiden professor of Hebrew and Reformed church elder Constantijn L’Empereur, a pillar of that city’s Reformed community, engaged a Catholic notary to draw up his will and testament in the 1630s.58 The Catholic poet Jan Vos found a patron for his occasional verse in the person of Amsterdam regent Joan UA OBC, no. 10, Gerrit Vermij to Vosmeer, 29 October 1609. Sandra Bos, “Uyt liefde tot malcander.” Onderlinge hulpverlening binnen de NoordNederlandse gilden in internationaal perspectief (1570–1820) (Amsterdam: IISG, 1998), p. 38. 58 RAL Oud-Notarieel Archief, Notaris Jan van Heussen, no 222, fol 71; no. 223, fol. 62; no. 224, fol. 60. For l’Empereur’s career, see Pieter van Rooden, Theology, Biblical Scholarship and Rabbinic Studies in the Seventeenth Century: Constantijn l’Empereur (1591–1648), Professor of Hebrew and Theology at Leiden (Leiden: Brill, 1989), pp. 184–229. 56 57

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Huydecooper, who stemmed from a strict Calvinist background.59 Visual art, the most conspicuous commodity of Holland’s Golden Age, likewise traversed the confessional line. The Catholic painter Pieter de Grebber of Haarlem received commissions for paintings to decorate the various palaces of the Stadholder Frederick Henry.60 His colleague and fellow Catholic Abraham Bloemaert of Utrecht taught Reformed apprentices in his studio.61 Such transactions were entirely typical of the Republic’s latitudinarian economic culture. Profit and livelihood subsumed confessional difference. Being in the employ of someone from a different church did run the risk (or promise) of conversion, however. A sister of the klopje Neeltgen Jansdr was left behind in The Hague when the rest of the family moved to Flanders; she worked as a servant in a Reformed household and, much to her family’s chagrin, soon abandoned her Catholic faith for the public church.62 On the other hand, the same biographer also saw the hand of God in the fact that another klopje’s father was converted to the old faith thanks to his conversations with a pious Catholic carpenter he had hired to work on his house.63 The proximity of working together could lead to associations and influences that might occasionally persuade someone to cross confessional lines. Motives could also be less than completely spiritual: The formerly Reformed glazier Huijbert Dircksz candidly told the Amsterdam consistory in 1678 that he had converted to Catholicism primarily to please his wife and to win and keep clients.64 Nor was there much reluctance to profit from one another’s confessional allegiances. Amsterdam’s premier printer Joan Blaeu, a Reformed church member, published large numbers of Catholic missals, Jesuit writings, breviaries, and saints’ lives, despite objections from that city’s consistory and warnings from its magistracy.65 In fact, the publishing of Catholic books by non-Catholic printers in the Republic seems to have Luuc Kooijmans, Vriendschap en de kunst van het overleven in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1997), p. 114. 60 Xander van Eck, Clandestine Splendour. Paintings for the Catholic Church in the Dutch Republic (Zwolle, Waanders, 2008), p. 94. 61 Marcel Roethlisberger and Maarten Jan Bok, Abraham Bloemaert and his sons (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1993), p. 574. 62 Oly, III, fol. 77r. 63 Oly, III, fol. 383v. 64 Herman Roodenburg, Onder censuur. De kerkelijke tucht in de gereformeerde gemeente van Amsterdam 1578–1700 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1990), pp. 157–158. 65 I. H. van Eeghen, “De Acta Sanctorum en het drukken van katholieken boeken te Antwerpen en Amsterdam in de 17e eeuw,” De Gulden Passer 31 (1953): 50–51. 59

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been fairly common, and the reverse case occurred, as well. Catholic devotional works published in the southern Netherlands found a lucrative market among Dutch booksellers.66 Religious scruple does not seem to have played much of a role in people’s efforts to eke out a living for themselves, something that irked Reformed authorities. In 1646, for example, the Reformed consistory of Gouda complained about the open sale of crucifixes and paternosters in the city’s markets, and then learned to its chagrin that some of the vendors were professing members of the Reformed congregation.67 The Amsterdam sculptor and architect Hendrick de Keyser, designer of two of that city’s Reformed churches and a member of its Reformed congregation, was taken to task by the consistory in 1613 when it learned he was commissioned to carve a statue of Saint John for a church in the city ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the heavily Catholic Generality lands, where, the consistory heard, it would be put to “idolatrous use.” As a result of this consistorial pressure, De Keyser abandoned the project altogether.68 In other instances economic transactions might lead to goodwill between confessions. The biographer of the Haarlem klopje Anna Sixtus van Emminga recounted how she hired a “heretical” craftsman to do some repairs on the organ in her house; during the extended period he came to work in her home, she made such a good impression on him and his wife that “they could not praise her virtue enough.”69 Respect, friendship, and toleration were all possible consequences of the countless economic interactions between Catholic and Reformed individuals across Holland during its prosperous Golden Age.

Family The social fact of neighborhood made it inevitable that early modern Hollanders would encounter and deal with those of differing religions, but even in the more intimate sphere of family life the province’s Th. Clemens, “The Trade in Catholic Books from the Northern Netherlands to the Southern Netherlands, 1650–1795,” in Le magasin de l’univers. The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the European Book Trade, eds. C. Berkvens-Stevelinck et al (Leiden: Brill, 1992), pp. 85–94. 67 AHGG KA, 20 September 1646, 20 December 1646. 68 SAA NA, KA, 19 December 1613. See also J. Z. Kannegieter, “Het St. Jansbeeld van het Bossche Oxaal,” Oud-Holland 49 (1942): 110–111. Generally, however, commissions to Reformed artists to ornament Catholic churches seem to have been rare; see Xander van Eck, “The artist’s religion: paintings commissioned for clandestine Catholic churches in the northern Netherlands, 1600–1800,” Simiolus 27 (1999): 70–94. 69 Oly, II, fols. 84v-85r. 66

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multiconfessionalism made itself felt. The nuclear family predominated in most Dutch households, and beyond that immediate circle most Hollanders of every social class could also rely on more elaborate networks of kinship for help and support as they progressed through their lives.70 Indeed, such relationships were considered absolutely necessary for both the survival of the family and the good ordering of society.71 There is considerable evidence that many families had members and relatives of varying confessions; religious conformity did not necessarily obtain even at the most personal levels of existence. Siblings, parents, children, and spouses might very well worship at different churches or hold fast to quite different beliefs. The multiconfessional family was a familiar feature of Holland’s social landscape in the 1600s. Whether or not this became a problem for family life depended of course entirely on the family. In some families, such differences were not much of an issue; kinship could and often did trump religion. The broad tolerance that characterized Holland’s private space could be found operating in the lives of its families. Or at the very least, religious divisions were ignored for the sake of family interest. Just ten years after the defection of his city Delft to the cause of revolt and reformation in 1572, for example, Jacob van Adrichem wrote a letter full of family news to his brother Christiaen Crusius, a priest who had once lived in the city but was now exiled in Cologne. Jacob wished the latter could return to Delft, and expressed a warm fraternal affection for him “even though we differ in religion [al sien wy divers van religie].”72 In a similar vein, another Reformed Delftenaar named Hendrick van der Burch pleaded with his Catholic sister Grietgen to return from Cologne and take care of him in his old age, arguing that “there are many people of your religion in this land who desire salvation and nevertheless do not leave it, serving God in their homes in all stillness without being bothered by anyone.”73 Religious difference, as far as Hendrick was concerned, should not stand in the way of familial obligation, especially since the society in which he lived seemed to him to be quite accommodating to religious dissenters. Donald Haks, Huwelijk en gezin in Holland in de 17de en 18de eeuw (Utrecht: HES, 1985), pp. 46–69. 71 Luc Kooijmans, Vriendschap en de kunst van het overleven in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1997), pp. 14–17. 72 UA OKN, Verzamelde stukken, inv. 455, Jacob Adriaensz van Adrichem to Christiaan Crusius van Adrichem, 16 June 1582. See N.C. Kist, “Christianus Adrichomius,” Nederlandsch archief voor kerkelijke geschiedenis 7 (1847): 202–208. 73 UA OKN, Verzamelde stukken, inv. 615, Hendrick Adamsz van der Burch to Grietgen Adamsdr, 30 May 1588. 70

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Multiconfessional families were not unusual, particularly in the first half of the seventeenth century before the boundaries between churches were more carefully drawn. A delegate from the Reformed church in Zurich to the National Synod of Dordrecht in 1618 found himself quartered in the home of a family that included a Catholic father and son, a Calvinist mother and daughter, an Anabaptist mother-in-law, and a Jesuit uncle, and the whole menage seemed to get along with each other and their Reformed guest without a hint of trouble.74 The future preacher Jacobus Trigland continued to live peacefully in the home of his Catholic parents for a time even after he had converted to the Reformed faith.75 The Utrecht Calvinist Arnoldus Buchelius expressed indignation when he learned that a cousin’s appointment to the West India Company was being hindered because of the latter’s Catholic wife.76 For many, the ties of blood mattered more than church loyalties. To be sure, in some families such differences in theological “opinion” did in fact lead to the janglings of dissension. Some relatives freely interfered in the religious lives of their kin. Those family members who were particularly partisan or zealous in their confessional allegiances could very well make trouble for those relatives who did not share them. In 1660, for example, Aefgie Jacobs Sagemans of Amsterdam apologized to the Reformed consistory for not answering an earlier summons it had issued to her; it turned out her Catholic brother, who had received the original message, had refused to relay it to her.77 The future klopje Josina Thomis, when she still lived in the house of her Calvinist sister and brother-in-law in Schiedam, strove mightily but unsuccessfully to convert them to her faith, and despite her residence there still managed to attend mass every day.78 The sectarian Catholic and future priest Fanciscus Dusseldorpius fastidiously refused to attend a Protestant cousin’s wedding in Leiden in 1596 because, as he told his uncle, the church hierarchy had forbidden Catholic participation in Reformed ceremonies, and in any case he could not allow himself to enter a “heretical synagogue.”79 The religious coloration of families could often be highly variegated and could directly influence their members’ spiritual progress. Another future klopje, Anna J. A. Wolfsenberger, “Antistes Breitinger’s Reise nach den Niederlanden, ein Kulturbild aus den Jahren 1618–1619,” Zürcher Taschenbuch 1 (1878), p. 144. 75 H. W. ter Haar, Jacobus Trigland (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1891), p. 35. 76 Pollmann, “Public Enemies, Private Friends,” p. 186. 77 SAA NHG, KA, 27 May 1660. 78 Oly, vol. I, fols. 30v–31r. 79 Uittreksel uit Francisci Dusseldorpii Annales, pp. xix–xx. 74

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Garbrantsdr of Hoorn, was born of good Catholic parents who died young; the orphaned Anna then went to live with a Reformed maternal aunt, and for years she regularly attended the Reformed church with her aunt, until her Catholic brother helped her convert back to their parental faith when she was in her early twenties.80 Religious allegiance could be susceptible to the pressures and exigencies of family life. Such cases of confessional discord within families often came before church authorities as spouses of mixed marriages or parents and children of different churches grappled with issues that arose out of the religious cleavages among them. Generally speaking, there were two major relationships within families where these kinds of troubles manifested themselves: Between husbands and wives and between parents and children. The normal stresses and strains attending these two categories of familial relationship were easily exacerbated and compounded by the frictions of multiconfessionalism. Religiously mixed marriages between Reformed and Catholic were not unusual in early modern Holland, though there is some question as to how frequently they may have occurred. Recent preliminary research has revealed that in the eighteenth century, when marriage records are more complete, they appear to have been comparatively rare –anywhere from 1 percent to 7 percent of total marriages recorded.81 Unfortunately, similar sources for the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are exceedingly scarce, so quantitative research on the subject for this period is very difficult. The best impression we have from spotty evidence was that such marriages were likely more common in this earlier period, but this remains at best an impression. The biographies of the Haarlem spiritual virgins, for example, which cover the period of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, recorded that many of these women were children of mixed marriages and remarriages; one klopje’s father married a Catholic and then two Mennonites successively, while another’s married two Catholics and then a Reformed Protestant.82 Given the confessional ambiguity and confusion that reigned during the period 1572– 1620, it is perhaps not surprising that people were more likely to seek out Oly, vol. I, fol. 245r. Benjamin J. Kaplan, “Integration vs. Segregation: Religiously Mixed Marriage and the ‘Verzuiling’ Model of Dutch Society,” in Catholic Communities in Protestant States, pp. 48–66; Bertrand Forclaz, “The Emergence of Confessional Identity: Family Relationships and Coexistence in Seventeenth-Century Utrecht,” in Living with Religious Diversity, pp. 249–266. 82 Oly, vol. I, fol 179r; vol. III, fol 157v. 80 81

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marriage partners without much regard to religious allegiance. Perhaps the ­apparent rarity of mixed marriages by the eighteenth century was the result of a kind of self-imposed segregation after the passions of the intensely confessional period in the middle of the 1600s. In any case, more interesting than the quantity of mixed marriages in early modern Holland was their quality. As still another variation on the theme of multiconfessional sociability  – perhaps the most intimate of all  – cases of marriage between Catholic and Reformed offer us further insight on how religious pluralism played itself out in private space during Holland’s Golden Age. Certainly there were no judicial barriers to interfaith marriage in the province of Holland. In 1581, the States of Holland issued an ordinance that offered prospective couples two choices with regard to getting married: They could marry either in the public church or before the aldermen at the town hall. Making marriage a public act was intended as a measure against the clandestine unions that had proliferated during the tumultuous years of the Revolt.83 Both the Reformed and Catholic churches recognized the civil legality of marriages before the magistrate, though each certainly expected its own adherents to seek solemnization of their unions in their respective churches, with the Tridentine church in particular insisting that no marriage involving Catholics could be regarded as canonical unless a priest performed the sacrament.84 The States of Holland forbade a second ceremony before a priest for Catholics who had already been wed either in the Reformed church or at the town hall; despite Reformed complaints, this placard does not seem to have been enforced very much.85 Interfaith couples could opt to marry at the town hall as a way of trying to avoid ecclesiastical interference, though of course church officials certainly took a lively interest in mixed marriages whenever one of their own adherents was involved. The overall attitude of both Catholic and Reformed ecclesiastical authorities toward interconfessional marriage was decidedly negative, as they both regarded such a step as leading to a dangerous mixing of faiths Manon van der Heijden, Huwelijk in Holland. Stedelijke rechtspraak en kerkelijke tucht, 1550–1700 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1998), p. 45. 84 H. F. W. D. Fischer, “De gemengde huwelijken tussen katholieken en protestanten in de Nederlanden van de XVIe tot de XVIIIe eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 31 (1963): 465–466. See also B. van Leeuwen, Het gemengde huwelijk. Pastoraalsociografisch onderzoek naar de huwelijken van katholieken met niet-katholieken in Nederland (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1959), pp. 2–29. 85 Spaans, Haarlem, p. 117. 83

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which could imperil souls.86 They assumed, probably rightly, that partners would influence each other, for good or for ill. Because of this they actively discouraged such unions, principally out of fear that members of their church would be persuaded by their spouses to join the rival confession, be it heresy or idolatry. In 1595, the Reformed consistory of Delft warned its congregation against embarking on mixed marriages performed at the town hall; it was a “vain hope,” church members were told, to expect to win one’s non-Reformed partner over to the true faith, especially for those “who are not aware of their weakness.”87 Consistories were fearful that the Reformed partner in the marriage, especially the wife, would eventually be swayed into embracing popery by his or her spouse.88 When the widow Tryn Schockmans, for example, asked an Amsterdam preacher in 1602 whether she should give her daughter in marriage to a “papist,” he strongly advised against it (she nonetheless allowed the marriage to take place, much to the consistory’s annoyance).89 The hierarchy of the Catholic church likewise officially took an uncompromising stand against mixed marriages, though it was not clear that the priests of the Holland Mission or of the religious orders always obeyed the Council of Trent’s prohibition against marrying Catholics to heretics. For the most part, the Apostolic vicars upheld Rome’s rejection of mixed marriage, though it remained for them a recurring and vexing question given the multiconfessional mission field in which they worked.90 Lay Catholics often found themselves caught between the strictures of Trent and the province’s civil laws, and frequently consulted their priests and the vicars for advice.91 The pressures put on interfaith couples by their respective churches could be considerable. Catholic priests often made it their business to persuade, cajole, harangue, or browbeat the Catholic partner in a mixed marriage to have his or her union solemnized according to church rite, though such an act was technically illegal and could easily arouse Reformed ire. Fischer, “De gemengde huwelijken,” p. 464; see also F. J. M. Hoppenbrouwers, Oefening in volmaaktheid. De zeventiende-eeuwse rooms-katholieke spiritualiteit in de Republiek (The Hague: Sdu, 1996), p. 70. 87 Wouters and Abels, Nieuw en ongezien, vol. 1, p. 245. 88 Van der Heijden, Huwelijk in Holland, p. 235. 89 SAA NHG, KA, 31 January 1602. 90 Benjamin J. Kaplan, “’For They Will Turn Away Thy Sons’: the Practice and Perils of Mixed Marriage in the Dutch Golden Age,” in Piety and Family in Early Modern Europe. Essays in Honour of Steven Ozment, eds. Marc Forster and Benjamin J. Kaplan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p 122. 91 Charles H. Parker, Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 59–67. 86

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The consistory of Amsterdam reacted with anger in 1639, for example, when it learned that a priest had convinced a church member to let him re-solemnize her marriage even though she and her Catholic husband had already exchanged vows in the Reformed church.92 Sometimes priests did not stop at the Catholic spouse; as we saw in the case of Metje Stoffels, a local Franciscan missionary applied both psychological and religious coercion on her – a Reformed Protestant – to get her and her husband to marry before a priest by both impugning her female honor and threatening damnation for her husband. The Gouda Franciscans seem to have been particularly interested in mixed marriages, and particularly aggressive in interfering with them; a few years earlier, another friar told a Gouda Reformed church member’s Catholic wife that her offspring would be cursed as “whore’s children” if they did not submit to the marriage sacrament.93 The friars may have regarded mixed marriages as part of their mission field. As early as 1621, the Gouda consistory was complaining to the city law officer about such importuning priests, but to little apparent avail.94 Catholic clergy in Holland for the most part continued to insist on performing sacramental marriages of interfaith couples throughout the seventeenth century, and it was not always easy for such couples to withstand clerical pressure. For their part, Reformed consistories were never happy about marriages between Reformed and Catholic, and they only reluctantly accepted the legitimacy of such marriages contracted at the town hall; they preferred that they be performed in the public church, if only to protect and encourage the Reformed partner. Reformed brethren stood ready to intervene in such relationships if they feared that a church member’s soul was imperiled. Interfaith marriage proved to be a major preoccupation of consistories as they policed their members’ interaction with Catholics. Of the nearly 300 disciplinary cases concerning Catholicism that came before the Amsterdam consistory between 1578 and 1700, for example, over 40 percent dealt with questions of mixed marriage.95 Consistories payed the greatest attention to the issue of mixed marriage in the middle third of the seventeenth century, correlating roughly with the confessional period (1620–1660) of Catholic-Calvinist relations in Holland. The spousal relationship, precisely because of its intimate power, was thought to have great influence on religious choice and conviction. Mere SAA NHG, KA, 17 November 1639. AHGG KA, 24 March 1650. 94 AHGG KA, 12 November 1621. 95 Roodenburg, p. 151. 92 93

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rumors were enough to send consistories into action; when word reached the Amsterdam brethren in 1587 that a church member named Jaepgen had not only married a Papist but that her new spouse was also forcing her to observe the Friday fast, they demanded an explanation from her. She denied it, and two months passed before the consistory satisfied itself that she was telling the truth.96 Ideally, consistories preferred to keep such marriages from happening at all, so when news reached them that a church member intended to wed a Catholic they were quick to intercede to prevent the marriage, to ascertain that the Reformed partner would in fact stay Reformed, or perhaps even to persuade the Catholic partner to join the public church. When the Gouda brethren learned in 1645 that church member Marijtjen Jans was planning to marry Willem Egbersz, a Catholic, they made him promise to abandon his church, attend Reformed services, and – most importantly – raise any children arising from the union as Reformed Protestants.97 Even mere hints of irregularities prompted consistories to act. In 1654, the Haarlem consistory confronted a church member with rumors that he had promised to marry his intended spouse before a priest; the member strenuously denied it and insisted he had only agreed to a marriage in the town hall. Seeking forgiveness from the brethren, he assured them that he would stay in the Reformed church.98 Aeltgen Jacobs reassured the Amsterdam consistory in 1642 that she had secured promises from her Catholic fiancé that he would leave her “free and unmolested” in her faith; the skeptical consistory replied that it would monitor her situation carefully.99 Mostly, consistories wanted pledges that the Reformed spouse would not abandon his or her church once the marriage took place. In the same congregation several years later, church member Annetie Tade confessed to the preachers and elders that she had agreed to marry a young Catholic man, but his parents were now insisting that she become Catholic herself; Annetie fervently promised the brethren that she would remain faithful to her church.100 A Catholic youth who had impregnated a church member told the Amsterdam brethren in 1659 that he was attending Reformed services and wished to marry in the public church; the consistory pressed him to do it as quickly as possible, both to forestall any lapse back into popery and to restore the mother’s honor.101 SAA NHG, KA, 30 April 1587. AHGG KA, 21 September 1645. 98 NHA NHG, KA, 13 January 1654. 99 SAA NHG, KA, 14 August 1642. 100 SAA NHG, KA, 7 February 1658. 101 SAA NHG, KA, 13 February 1659. 96 97

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Consistories often saw engagement periods between interfaith couples as windows of opportunity to keep from losing church members irrevocably. It was easier to prevent a marriage than to end one. In a case in 1671, the Amsterdam consistory cautioned a young woman whose fiancé had left the Reformed church and was now flirting with Catholicism not to rush into her marriage too precipitously. As far as consistories were concerned, the preferable if not ideal outcome was marriage in the public church, as a hedge against straying into other confessions. In particular, they tried to prevent priestly marriages whenever they could. When a couple that had been living together for years – including a sojourn in Catholic lands – came to the Delft consistory in 1584 asking to be recognized as husband and wife, the brethren agreed, as long as a Reformed preacher married them.102 Likewise, the Amsterdam consistory in 1659 registered its alarm when Tanneken Jansz, engaged to a Catholic laborer, reported that he insisted he would only marry her if she, too, became Catholic. The fiancé himself informed the consistory that he had no interest in becoming Reformed, but still wished to marry Tanneken; it was the local priests who were requiring him to marry according to the Catholic rite.103 Appealing to the municipal authorities in such cases generally had little effect, as Holland’s magistrates on the whole did little to enforce the placard against priestly marriages. Interfaith couples already married posed further dilemmas for church authorities. Most consistories assumed that Reformed wives in particular were vulnerable to spousal pressure. Rumors of a wife straying into Catholicism were enough to set them into action. As soon as the Amsterdam consistory, for example, heard tales in 1591 that Aeltgen Laembertsdr had married a Catholic, it sent two ministers to speak with her. She assured the preachers that in fact her new husband was “in no way an enemy of the religion,” since he attended church with her. Mollified, the consistory resolved to let the matter drop.104 The classis of Haarlem wrestled with the question of what to do when Catholic husbands forcibly prevented their Reformed wives from attending sermons and then barred Reformed preachers from entering their homes to speak with the wives.105 The Haarlem consistory resolved to complain to the burgomasters when it heard in 1659 that church member Trijntje Post’s Catholic husband, egged on by his Jesuit confessor, refused to let her attend either GAD NHG, KA, 10 December 1584. SAA NHG, KA, 23 January 1659; 30 January 1659. 104 SAA NHG, KA, 31 January 1591; 7 February 1591. 105 NHA NHG, CA Haarlem 3, 21 July 1621. 102 103

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church or communion.106 Some Reformed spouses appeared before ­consistories after many years’ absence from worship wanting to reconcile with the church; most claimed that their partners had forced them to stay away. Aefje Bruin of Leiden had been induced by her Catholic husband to attend mass repeatedly; however, she told the consistory there in 1643 that she would henceforth “steadfastly” go to the Reformed church, and it allowed her to return to the communion table.107 Jan Willemsz assured the Amsterdam brethren in 1615 that he had great hopes of winning over his new Catholic wife to the Reformed church, and swore that he would not be “seduced” by her into Catholicism.108 Consistories had to be content with such promises, but they often insisted they would monitor such unions carefully. They also demanded appropriate expressions of contrition from those spouses who had strayed and wished to be reconciled to the Reformed church; when Jacomijnten Claes confessed to the Delft consistory in 1626 that her conscience weighed on her because she had married in a Catholic ceremony in Flanders, the brethren replied that she had not shown enough regret for her error. Whereupon Jacomijnten fell to her knees and sobbingly begged their forgiveness; this display satisfied the brethren and they agreed to reconcile her to the congregation.109 Divorce or death, of course, released some from their mixed marriages. After divorcing her husband, a “bitter papist” who had forced her to attend Catholic conventicles, Trijn Hendrickxdr of Delft sought readmittance to the Lord’s Supper from the consistory in 1639; the consistory agreed to consider her request.110 The Leiden brethren happily welcomed back Proontje Jans in 1656, forced to stay away from the Reformed church for ten years but now “released” by the death of her Papist husband.111 Such a release could work both ways, however. The widow of church member Cornelis Claessen told the Dordrecht consistory in no uncertain terms in 1635 that she had only attended the Reformed church for her husband’s sake, and had always remained in her heart a Catholic, to which church she now planned to return.112 The Reformed father of the Haarlem klopje Aechge Baertesdr attended the Catholic church while his Catholic wife was alive, but returned to the Reformed church after her death and even NHA NHG, KA, 15 July 1659. RAL NHG, KA, 3 April 1643. 108 SAA NHG, KA, 18 June 1615. 109 GAD NHG, KA, 2 January 1626; 26 January 1626. 110 GAD NHG, KA, 28 June 1649. 111 RAL NHG, KA, 8 September 1656. 112 SAD NHG, KA, 6 October 1635. 106 107

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tried to convert his daughter.113 Physical absence, whether due to death or estrangement, was necessary before some Reformed spouses felt secure enough to return to the public church. On very rare occasions, consistories even counseled and encouraged separation or divorce when the difference in religion made the relationship untenable or when they believed that the Reformed partner’s allegiance to the “true” church might be seriously threatened. The consistory of Leiden, for example, readily granted church member Sara de Witte a letter of attestation in 1662 when she decided to leave her Catholic husband behind and move to Nijmegen because he had “tyrannized” her “cruelly,” suggesting possible physical abuse.114 Haarlem’s brethren advised Jan Franssen not to chase after his Catholic wife, who had left for Brabant and was not likely to return.115 The Reformed church in Delft, which had warned its congregants against mixed marriages back in the 1590s, took a particularly hard line in this regard. In 1610, the Delft brethren advised a church member whose estranged Catholic husband was living in Hainault and was asking her to come back to him to consider carefully whether she could live with him and still keep her religion; if not, she would be better off staying in Delft.116 In a similar case a few years later, the same consistory advised a church member that if he could not persuade his Catholic wife, also living in the Catholic south, to join him in Delft and leave popery behind, then he would do better to “leave father, mother, et cetera, according to Christ’s commandment than to act against his conscience.”117 If a confessionally clean conscience required a marriage to be ended or a relationship to be permanently estranged, then the Delft preachers had no hesitation in so advising, such was their fear of the perils of interfaith marriage. Not all partners in mixed marriages allowed themselves to be intimidated by ecclesiastical pressure. Some opted for tranquility in their households over confessional fidelity as the greater virtue. Domestic harmony could supersede spiritual loyalty. Barteltje Coers told the Amsterdam consistory in 1663 that she intended to follow her husband into popery, even though her conscience told her that “the truth” lay with the Reformed; despite warnings that it was a grave sin to act against conscience, she refused to promise that she would stay away Oly, vol. I, fols. 286v–296r. RAL NHG, KA, 14 April 1662. 115 NHA NHG, KA, 4 April 1621, 15 July 1621. 116 GAD NHG, KA, 18 October 1610. 117 GAD NHG, KA, 30 April 1612. 113 114

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from Catholic conventicles. She did not do so out of malice toward or dissatisfaction with the Reformed, she insisted, but because she feared her husband’s displeasure.118 Geertjen Hendricx of Gouda took a similar stance in 1670; she told the consistory there she had nothing against the Reformed church, but her husband was Catholic and she wished to keep the peace at home.119 Jannetge Stoffels likewise admitted to the Amsterdam consistory in 1665 that she was frequenting Papist conventicles, but not because she had any aversion to Reformed doctrine but because she could not live amicably with her husband unless she followed him into the Catholic church.120 These women deliberately chose to attend a church they believed to be wrong in order to please or mollify their husbands, a compromise that always disappointed ecclesiastical authorities who had little power to coerce them into coming back to their original church. Perhaps even more daunting to partners in mixed marriages than ecclesiastical interference was familial pressure. Priests and preachers were not the only parties concerned in interfaith marriages; relatives, especially parents and siblings, often involved themselves in such cases, as well. Marriage in early modern Holland, like the rest of Europe, was a family affair as well as a religious and social one. As we have seen, both Metje Stoffel’s mother-in-law and her cousin embroiled themselves, from opposite allegiances, in the question of her marriage before a priest. Geertken Lamberts admitted to the Amsterdam consistory in 1612 that she remarried before a priest after “prolonged persuasion” by her new husband and his mother.121 The religious difference between Reformed Amsterdammer Isabella Voet and her Catholic husband led to such serious conflicts in their household that her family eventually advised her to take her children and leave their home altogether.122 Even the hint of apostasy was enough to make some families wary about those who might join them by marriage. When the Utrecht merchant Andries van der Meulen contemplated suitable marriage partners for his daughter Elisabeth in 1605, he was troubled that one of the young men expressed some sympathy for the Catholic faith. After questioning him he found the would-be suitor too inclined to the “papist religion,” and his daughter eventually married SAA NHG, KA, 22 March 1663. AHGG KA, 3 April 1670; 24 April 1670. 120 SAA NHG, KA, 4 June 1665. 121 SAA NHG, KA, 26 January 1612. 122 Judith Hokke, “‘Mijn alderliefste Jantielief.’ Vrouw en gezin in de Republiek: regentenvrouwen en hun relaties,” Jaarboekje voor vrouwengeschiedenis 8 (1987): 55. 118 119

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someone else.123 Christiaen Jorisz van der Houve complained to the Apostolic vicar Sasbout Vosmeer in 1607 that his guardians, though they were Catholic, were urging him to select a wife “without distinguishing between beggars and other sects,” a prospect that weighed heavily on the young Catholic’s conscience.124 The Amsterdam consistory grew particularly alarmed in 1655 when it heard that a certain young Catholic man, seeking to marry a member of the Reformed church, had allowed a priest to induce both the prospective bride and even her father – who was also a church member – to become Catholic. The brethren immediately alerted the burgomasters, who banned the priest from the city. This was a rare instance of the provincial placard against priestly marriage being enforced.125 Another sensitive area of family life where confessional interaction might be brought to bear was the relationship between parents and children. Like marriage, this intimate and complicated bond could be fraught with all sorts of difficulty when accompanied by religious difference. Mixed marriage itself was one of the arenas in which the parent-child relationship played itself out. The confessional allegiances of one’s children or their spouses were often a deeply personal and emotional issue for mothers and fathers. Of course parents had a lively interest in the partners of their children, and consistories in turn did not hesitate to hold parents accountable when their offspring married Catholics. If a young Reformed Protestant married a Catholic, then it could be considered the parents’ fault. The consistory of Gouda, for example, took a burgomaster named Cool to task in 1622 for allowing his son to marry a Catholic girl. Cool claimed, rather improbably, that he had not really paid any attention to the matter, and contritely promised to be more vigilant next time one of his children married.126 Whether the brethren were satisfied with this explanation was not recorded. The possibility of a mixed marriage was enough to prompt consistories to summon parents to their chambers. The Delft consistory called church member Jan Hendricxsz on the carpet in 1591 because it had heard rumors that his daughter had married a “papist enemy of the Reformed religion”; Hendricxsz replied in some disbelief that since the young man went to hear the Reformed sermons, that rumor could not possibly be true.127 In 1637, the Amsterdam brethren blamed a mother for failing to prevent her daughter from marrying Kooijmans, pp. 32–35. UA OBC, no. 8, 26 May 1607. 125 SAA NHG, KA, 14 January 1655; 4 February 1655. 126 AHGG KA, 7 October 1622. 127 GAD NHG, KA, 20 May 1591. 123 124

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a Catholic in Antwerp, and as punishment barred the mother from the Lord’s Supper.128 Dircjen Cornelis admitted to the same consistory later that year that she had not been “careful” enough to prevent her daughter from running off with a Catholic man to Friesland to get married by a priest.129 Sometimes parents enlisted consistorial help when their children went astray, such as the Reformed parents of a young Dordrecht woman who had married a Catholic before a priest against their wishes; they asked the consistory there to lobby the magistracy to punish the priest for this violation of the placards.130 Children in general were objects of great confessional interest and contention, particularly those who were the issue of mixed marriages. Early modern Catholicism and Reformed Protestantism both understood that proper belief and devotion began at home, and that the family was the nursery of true religion. Mothers and fathers were primarily responsible for their children’s spiritual development and education, and whatever religious choices a son or daughter made as he or she matured were seen as a reflection on his or her parents. Parents’ responsibility for the spiritual welfare of their offspring began of course with baptism. The Catholic and Reformed church both agreed on the sacramental nature of the rite, which signaled the child’s entrance into the community of Christ and the divine grace that entry conferred.131 In the Dutch Republic, the Reformed church – because it was the public church  – baptized not just the children of members but nearly all the Christian children brought to its baptismal fonts. Reformed synods, prodded by the state, concluded as early as the 1570s that all Christian children had the right to be baptized regardless of the confessional disposition of their parents, for baptism signified the covenantal bond between God and Christendom. Church membership was to be determined by adult profession of faith rather than by infant baptism. Thus, the Reformed church had no difficulty recognizing the validity of baptisms by other confessions, including the idolatrous Catholic church, as long as the child had not been previously baptized. The States of Holland supported the public church in this regard by issuing placards forbidding rebaptism of children by Catholic priests.132 Rebaptism was to be avoided as blasphemous; indeed, the theology of both churches expressly SAA NHG, KA, 27 August 1637. SAA NHG, KA, 26 November 1637. 130 SAD NHG, KA, 14 August 1659. 131 Karen E. Spierling, Infant Baptism in Geneva: The Shaping of a Community, 1536–1564 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 3–7. 132 Spaans, Haarlem, p. 114. 128 129

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rejected it entirely.133 In 1614, for example, the classis of Delfland refused the request of a Reformed husband from the village of Overschie to have his eldest child rebaptized in the Reformed church after his Catholic wife had it baptized by a priest.134 It also naturally expected that infants of church members would be baptized in the Reformed church. As with marriage, the Catholic church recognized as canonically valid only those baptisms performed according to its own rites, but the Holland Mission appears to have avoided rebaptism. Still, each church preferred that infants from interfaith marriages be baptized according to its own rite, since the sacrament was not only a sign of grace but also an expression of allegiance to its own particular community of faith, or as they would put it, the true church. The baptism of a newborn infant from a mixed marriage could be a matter of fierce contestation between Catholics and Reformeds, clergy and laity alike, and was sometimes the stuff of serious family drama. According to Catholic doctrine, an infant had to be baptized as soon as possible after birth to ensure its salvation, and some Catholic partners resorted to drastic measures to ensure that this happened. In the summer of 1637, a Dordrecht Reformed church member named Spirinx, for example, discovered that his wife’s aunt had spirited his child away to a Catholic home where a priest was supposed to baptize it. Spirinx hastened over to the house to reclaim his child. At first it was not clear whether the priest had baptized the child or not, but upon further investigation the Dordrecht consistory learned that the priest had refused to do so because the child’s father was Reformed. Soon afterward, the child was safely baptized in the Reformed church.135 Even more dramatic was the 1654 case of the newborn daughter of Lijsbeth Vermeulen of Gouda. Her Catholic husband Cornelis Verijn, egged on by his siblings (“Show you’re the father,” they reportedly told him), had snatched the baby from her mother’s arms with such force that the swaddling clothes fell off. As the attending midwife screamed, “You child thieves! You’re stealing my child!” Verijn’s brother and sister brought the infant to a Catholic priest, who immediately baptized her.136 In Amsterdam in 1646, a stepmother took her stepdaughter’s newborn straightaway to be baptized by a priest, even though the midwife and the new mother, arising out of bed, tried A. Th. van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen. Kerk en kerkvolk ten tijde van Maurits en Oldenbarnevelt (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), pp. 136–139. 134 Classicale Acta 1573–1620 VII: Classis Delft en Delfland 1572–1620, p. 548. 135 SAD NHG, KA, 21 June 1637. 136 AHGG KA, 4 June 1654. 133

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to stop her.137 All three of these cases resulted in consistorial complaints to town magistracies, but to no great effect; civil authorities apparently regarded baptism, unlike marriage, as a less serious public concern. The States of Holland did issue a placard in 1594 forbidding emergency baptisms by midwives, but it is unclear how strongly this prohibition was enforced.138 Spousal relationships were sometimes severely tested by such conflicts. Some Catholic partners and relatives resorted to subterfuge in order to have an infant baptized by a priest. More than once, Holland’s Reformed consistories heard complaints from church members that their children had received a priestly baptism without their knowledge. Jan Gijsen of Amsterdam told his consistory in 1604 that his wife, who was not Reformed, instructed him to go wait at the Reformed church and she would arrange to bring the child to be baptized there; meanwhile, she enlisted the aid of a klopje to bring it to a priest for baptism.139 In 1659, Grietje Jacobs’s illegitimate child was baptized by a priest without her knowledge through the connivance of the sister of the baby’s Catholic father, despite the fact that he had attended the Reformed church in Amsterdam with Grietje.140 In other cases, spouses consented to Catholic baptism in order to maintain harmony within their households. More than one Reformed husband, like Abram Danielsz of Delft, defended himself before the consistory by claiming that he had allowed a Catholic baptism of his child in order to please his wife.141 The wife of Edward Billingsley, an Englishman living in Leiden, admitted to the consistory there in 1637 that she had allowed him to have their child baptized by a priest five days after its birth in order to keep peace with her husband.142 Some spouses claimed powerlessness, that their children were baptized by priests without their consent and there was little they could do about it. Such was the defense of Marij Jans of Amsterdam. Her husband had forced the issue, she told the consistory in 1601; the brethren, however, noted that she herself had carried the infant to the priest and so were not sympathetic.143 Franchois Braekman, recently arrived from Antwerp, told the same consistory in 1590 that his wife back in Brabant had had SAA NHG, KA, 21 June 1646. Abels and Wouters, Nieuw en ongezien, vol. 2, p. 147. 139 SAA NHG, KA, 13 May 1604; 20 May 1604. 140 SAA NHG, KA, 13 February 1659. 141 GAD NHG, no. 276, fol. 117. 142 RAL NHG, KA, 2 October 1637. 143 SAA NHG, KA, 21 February 1601. 137 138

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both their children baptized Catholic against his wishes.144 Heindrick Menten likewise admitted to the Amsterdam brethren in 1664 that he had brought his child to be baptized by a priest for his wife’s sake.145 Spousal pressure was a common excuse given to consistories for having infants baptized according to Catholic rite. Sometimes Catholic baptisms took place in interfaith families out of sheer ignorance or even indifference. Jenneken Pietersdr, wife of a Catholic skipper, expressed her regret to the Dordrecht consistory for her children’s Catholic baptism; when she confessed to knowing nothing about this particular point of doctrine, the brethren resolved to instruct her before the next Lord’s Supper.146 In Haarlem, the consistory learned to its consternation in 1643 that a church member had allowed her child to be baptized by a priest “without noticeable resistance from her” and despite the fact that she intended to remain in the Reformed church; clearly, some serious admonition was in order.147 Geert Pieters of Amsterdam had allowed some of her children to be baptized Reformed and some baptized Catholic; the consistory resolved to punish her “thoughtlessness and evil division of her children, some to God and some to idols [teen deel voor God ten deele voor den afgodt].”148 Yet, twenty years earlier the same consistory did not record any objection when the jeweler Adriaen van Breen, accused of allowing his Catholic wife to have their children baptized by a priest, promised that any future children from their marriage would be baptized by a preacher.149 Traditional Catholic beliefs about baptism, particularly the fate of unbaptized children, persisted well into the seventeenth century among the Reformed. The Amsterdam brethren admonished church member Maritie Wijnen in 1651 for bringing the newborn infant of a woman still in childbed to a priest to be baptized. According to the mother, Maritie had told her that the child would belong to the devil if it died unbaptized; Maritie herself told the consistory in her defense that she had feared that the child would die unsaved without baptism. The consistory kept her from communion as punishment.150 Having their child baptized by a priest was sometimes the first or most serious evidence consistories had that church members might be SAA NHG, KA, 23 August 1590. SAA NHG, KA, 13 March 1664. 146 SAD NHG, KA, 6 October 1585. 147 NHA NHG, KA, 22 September 1643. 148 SAA NHG, KA, 10 February 1656. 149 SAA NHG, KA, 10 May 1635. 150 SAA NHG, KA, 5 January 1651; 21 January 1651. 144 145

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converting to Catholicism. In 1599, the Haarlem brethren learned that church member Jan Pieters and his wife had had their child baptized Catholic, to the “great scandal” of the congregation; the parents obstinately refused to repent of their action and spoke disparagingly of the church and ministers.151 When the same consistory asked Roelof Jansz in 1601 why he had allowed his children to be baptized Catholic, he replied that he had become convinced of the truth of the Catholic church.152 The consistory of Gouda summoned Gijsbert de Keyser in 1631 after learning that his child had been baptized by a priest; when he appeared before the brethren a few weeks later, he declared to them that he had joined the Catholic faith.153 In such instances, priestly baptism served as a signal that a Reformed church member was irretrievably lost to the Catholic fold. Disputes over the confessional disposition of children did not stop with baptism. As sons and daughters grew, other questions inevitably arose, especially over the issue of schooling. After the Synod of Dordrecht in 1619, all schoolmasters – whether of municipal Latin schools or private schools [bijscholen]  – were supposed to be carefully vetted for sound Reformed credentials. That is, they were expected to subscribe to the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the canons of the Dordrecht Synod.154 Nevertheless, it was possible  – if illegal  – for Catholics both clerical and lay to run informal, private schools in many towns.155 The mother of klopje Weyntge Gerritsdr ran such a school in her home in Amsterdam in the late sixteenth century, but instruction there took place “secretly and at risk of peril,” according to her Catholic biographer.156 A register compiled in Delft in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries revealed thirty-six private schools operating within the city, a few of whose masters were Catholic  – such as the brother of the apostolic vicar Sasbout Vosmeer.157 A similar register in Haarlem NHA NHG, KA, 28 March 1599. NHA NHG, KA, 18 March 1601; 8 April 1601. 153 AHGG KA, 15 March 1631; 12 April 1631. 154 E.P. de Booy, De weldaet der scholen. Het plattelands onderwijs in de provincie Utrecht van 1580 tot het begin der 19de eeuw (Haarlem: Gottmer, 1977), pp. 13–16. See also Willem Otterspeer, “Discipline en kracht. Onderwijs en wetenschap in Holland,” in Geschiedenis van Holland, eds. Theo de Nijs en Eelco Beukers (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), vol. 2, pp. 331–342. 155 Leendert F. Groenendijk, “The Reformed Church and Education during the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic,” Dutch Review of Church History 85 (2005): 53–70. 156 Oly, vol. 3, fol 41r. 157 Abels and Wouters, Nieuw en ongezien, vol. 2, p. 380. 151 152

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listed three Catholic schoolmasters out of fifty-two in 1620, and eleven out of sixty-four in 1642.158 Placards issued in Holland and the rest of the Dutch Republic, in fact, forbade private schools run by those who refused to subscribe to the confessions and catechisms, but as with the rest of the anti-Catholic placards, local authorities in Holland enforced these haphazardly. For example, the priest Willem van Assendelft, a canon of the Haarlem chapter, ran a school in Leiden 1579–1591, to which nonCatholics also sent their children. The Court of Holland tried to prosecute him for it in 1588, but since Van Assendelft was a member of the university of Leiden, he was tried in its academic court, which allowed him to go free.159 Typically, a fine was the most severe punishment meted out to Catholics who operated schools.160 The Reformed church complained bitterly about such illegal schools, but they seem to have been fairly widespread in most of Holland’s cities, and magistracies often did not enforce the subscription requirement for those seeking permission to hold school in their cities. Priests and klopjes busied themselves in particular with religious instruction, catechizing being one of their most important obligations toward the young. In addition, the schooling of boys was necessary to find promising future candidates for the priesthood.161 The Holland Mission considered such instruction as absolutely necessary to protect children and youth from the sectarian temptations of the multiconfessional society of Holland, where it was potentially all too easy to stray from the old faith. The proximity of heresy was thought to pose a constant threat; as the biography of future klopje Anna Jorisdr put it, though as a girl she had to attend a “heretical” school for a time, nevertheless, “God preserved her” from becoming a Calvinist.162 The Leiden Carmelite missionary Petrus a Matre Dei singled out the klopjes in his mission report for their zeal and dedication to instill proper doctrine in S. Groenveld, Wezen en boefjes. Zes eeuwen zorg in wees- en kinderhuizen (Hilversum: Verloren, 1997), pp. 25–26. 159 P. A. M. Geurts, “Meester Willem van Assendelft, kanunnik-schoolmeester te Leiden (1579–1591) en het privilegium fori der Universiteit,” AGKKN 6 (1964): 28–54. 160 Marit Monteiro, Geestelijke maagden. Leven tussen klooster en wereld in NoordNederland (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994), pp. 88–89. 161 Joke Spaans, “Orphans and students: Recruiting boys and girls for the Holland Mission,” in Catholic Communities in Protestant States. Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570–1720, eds. Benjamin J. Kaplan et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 186–188. 162 Oly, vol. 1, f. 174v. 158

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their pupils.163 In Haarlem and Amsterdam, spiritual virgins ran girls’ homes (maagdenhuizen) where young Catholic girls were instructed in reading and writing as well as sewing skills. Throughout Holland, the klopjes became notorious in Reformed eyes for their pedagogical activities, which the leadership of the public church recognized was a covert effort to lure young innocents into the Catholic church. Klopjes who worked as teachers rapidly became the bane of many Reformed consistories’ existence. Consistories repeatedly complained to magistracies about spiritual virgins in their towns running schools and catechizing children. Despite the frequency of such complaints, they seem to have had little effect; the Gouda city government, for example, issued a decree in 1654 forbidding schooling by klopjes, but within three years consistorial complaints arose about it again.164 The Dordrecht consistory worried that such “secret schools” would seduce away the youthful and the ignorant.165 In Delft, civic magistrates assured the consistory in 1649 in response to the latter’s grievances that it would keep an eye on the town’s klopjes and try to prevent any of their schools from being established.166 The Amsterdam consistory despaired of any hope that the magistracy would enforce strictures against Catholic schools in their city.167 An added complication for consistories was the fact that some Reformed parents allowed their children to be educated in these private Catholic schools. Here again, Holland’s multiconfessionalism played a role; parents indifferent to confessional divergence had little objection to sending their sons and daughters to a Catholic teacher in order to receive basic instruction in reading and writing. When the consistories of Amsterdam and Gouda learned to their dismay – in 1643 and 1664, respectively – that some of their congregants were allowing their children to be taught by klopjes, they immediately took steps to admonish the parents involved for their laxity.168 Similarly, in 1657 the Amsterdam brethren learned that a “papist” schoolmaster had staged a play in the civic theater in which the children of church members participated; once again, parents were Petrus a Matre Dei, Clara Relatio missionis Hollandicae et provinciarum confoederatum . . . anno 1658 (Rotterdam: Hendriksen, 1891), p. 94. 164 AHGG KA, 12 February 1654; 8 March 1657. 165 SAD NHG, KA, 30 September 1627. 166 GAD NHG, KA, 21 February 1649. 167 Marieke van Doorninck and Erika Kuijpers, De geschoolde stad. Onderwijs in Amsterdam in de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam: Historisch Seminarium, 1993), p. 28. 168 SAA NHG, KA, 15 October 1643; AHGG KA, 30 October 1664. 163

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taken to task for allowing their children to consort with Catholics.169 The Dordrecht consistory was greatly concerned to learn in 1606 that some of its congregants’ children were actually being sent by their parents to the town of Breda, in the heavily Catholic Generality Lands, to be educated in convent schools there.170 In their quest to provide their children with adequate schooling, some parents in Holland clearly did not regard confessional difference as an obstacle. A more serious charge was the accusation that a few spiritual virgins actually removed boys and girls from their parental homes without permission and spirited them off to be raised as Catholics. Such a case occurred in 1639, when the Dordrecht brethren learned that a boy from Delft had been taken from his mother by a klopje and brought to their city in order to be converted to Catholicism. The consistory immediately notified its counterpart in Delft, which through its own investigations confirmed that the boy had been taken against his mother’s wishes. The authorities intervened, arrested the klopje, and took steps to return the boy to his maternal home.171 Such instances were rare and probably not encouraged by the Holland Mission, since the law often stepped in when parental rights were violated. When Tryntghen Simons, for example, complained to the Haarlem consistory in 1619 that her daughter had been seduced into Catholicism and then had gone missing, the brethren immediately alerted the magistracy.172 Similarly, the daughter of Goudenaars Grietjen Jansz and Daniel Danielsz went over to popery without her parents’ knowledge in 1660; she had disappeared from home four weeks earlier, so the consistory alerted the burgomasters, but they found no evidence that any crime or coercion was involved.173 The Holland Mission did not as a rule support the spiriting off of children for Catholic instruction, as such actions would bring unwelcome attention from civil authorities into the Catholic community. As children matured to adulthood they were, of course, legally free in the Dutch Republic to make their own confessional choices as their consciences dictated. That did not mean, however, that mothers and fathers would not try to influence those choices. A difference in confession between parent and child could sometimes lead to considerable SAA NHG, KA, 4 January 1657. SAD NHG, KA, 18 May 1606. 171 SAD NHG, KA, 8 September 1639, 29 September 1639; GAD NHG, KA, 19 September 1639. 172 NHA NHG, KA, 5 November 1619. 173 AHGG KA, 13 May 1660; 10 June 1660; 24 October 1660. 169 170

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familial acrimony, especially for unmarried daughters who still lived in parental households. The klopje Aechge Baertesdr of Haarlem had a Catholic mother and Reformed father, the latter of whom pushed her to convert to the Reformed church after her mother died. Aechge stood at the point of joining when her father himself passed away, and her mother’s Catholic friends persuaded her to embrace Catholicism.174 The future klop Weyntghe Pietersdr’s difference in confession with her father caused many unhappy scenes; her father, who had converted to Reformed Protestantism after his Catholic wife’s death, used every means he could, including threats and violence, to force his Catholic daughter to join the “Beggar congregation.” He managed to stop her receiving the sacraments, but the efforts of her confessor brought her safely back into the Catholic fold.175 From the perspective of the most zealous Catholics, tension and estrangement within families were sometimes an unavoidable price to pay in order to stay loyal to the true church. The klop Jannetge Cornelisdr found it painful to have a Reformed half-sister, the daughter of her father’s Reformed wife.176 Geertruyt van Veen, the Catholic daughter of Simon van Veen, a prominent lawyer who had abjured his Catholicism in order to serve as an official of the Court of Holland, was once found crying alone in a corner of her school because she was convinced that her father would die unreconciled to the church and be eternally condemned.177 Reformed parents often claimed that their adult children were being led astray by conniving Catholics. In 1651, the Delft consistory heard the case of Belijtje Engels, a former Catholic who wished to join the Reformed church but was being hindered by her Catholic mother with the aid of a klopje.178 The carpenter Hendrick Stoffelsz told the same consistory in 1628 that his grown daughter had been enticed by the Papists, and now he and her mother were no longer able to have contact with her.179 In rare instances, Reformed consistories helped adult children assert their confessional independence from their parents. In 1636 Henrickjen Willems, a Reformed church member wishing to leave the home of her Catholic parents who were forcing her to attend mass, consulted the Amsterdam brethren as to whether she would be forced to return to the parental Oly, vol. I, fols. 286v–296r. Oly, vol. I, fols. 303r–310v. 176 Oly, vol. 3, fol. 157v. 177 Oly, vol. 3, fol. 341v. 178 GAD NHG, KA, 20 November 1651. 179 GAD NHG KA, 1 September 1628. 174 175

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home if she tried to depart; the consistory indicated it would support her in her resolve to escape from their control.180 Saving a soul from the idolatries of popery, so the thinking ran, might entail creating some necessary conflict within families. Like their Catholic counterparts, the most ardent Reformed Protestants were prepared to risk familial discord in order to keep relatives safe from the perils of false religion. Private space, especially among families, could be fraught with conflict and division. It is worth repeating though that strife and conflict within confessionally mixed families are more easily found in the historical record than peace and harmony. For all the examples of discord just recounted, there may well be many more cases of relatives and families of divergent confessions coexisting amicably and without fuss, but we know vastly less about those latter cases. Ecclesiastical records for the period are at best partial, and tell us very little about those who were not professed members of a given confession.181 Given the overall cultural and political premium put on social harmony and the relative absence of religious violence, it is reasonable to conclude that the general peaceful coexistence among confessions that prevailed in Holland’s civic space predominated in its private space, as well. The Reformed and Catholic divines who guarded Holland’s ecclesiastical boundaries of course had an immediate stake in the maintenance of religious division, but for most ordinary layfolk confessional difference was little or no barrier to daily, unremarkable intercourse with neighbors, colleagues, bosses, customers, relatives, and friends. This is not to say that the society of seventeenth-century Holland was a paradise of toleration and acceptance, but rather that most Hollanders had learned when it came to kith and kin to live with their confessional pluralism, with all its usable fictions, ironies, paradoxes, and occasional conflicts. The social realities of their world and their political leaders encouraged them to do so, and despite the sectarian fulminations from some of their priests and preachers, they generally complied. Confessional coexistence ultimately required confessional sociability. The existence of a kind of private, quotidian toleration in Holland in the seventeenth century has prompted some scholars, most notably Simon Groenveld, to speculate whether the sociological model of “pillarization” – usually used to analyze nineteenth- and twentieth-century SAA NHG, KA, 13 March 1636. Judith Pollmann, “Off the Record: Problems in the Quantification of Calvinist Church Discipline,” SCJ 33 (2002), pp. 423–438.

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Dutch society – might reasonably be applied to the early modern Dutch Republic, as well.182 Pillarization theory described the population of the modern kingdom of the Netherlands between roughly 1850 and 1960 as self-segregated into different confessional and ideological pillars or blocs. Each pillar had its own schools, clubs, newspapers, political parties, hospitals, and such like institutions, and members of each pillar socialized, worked, and married predominantly within their own group.183 Groenveld has suggested applying this model further back into the past, arguing that after 1650 the movement toward confessional blocs first began in the Dutch Republic and that those blocs were securely in place by 1750. By the eighteenth century, most confessions had their own institutions of poor relief and education. In other words, perhaps the reason why confessional coexistence seemed to work in the Republic was because by the end of the seventeenth century its inhabitants were, in effect, already beginning to segregate themselves into like-minded subcultures, each of which inculcated its own particular norms and values. The pluriform religious character of Dutch society made pillarization one of its key sociological features long before the nineteenth century, Groenveld concluded.184 Recent research on the apparently low rates of interfaith marriage in the eighteenth-century Republic seems to buttress Groenveld’s thesis of increasing segmentation among confessional groups.185 In Groenveld’s argument the pivotal point is the turn of the eighteenth century, which falls just beyond the purview of this study, but it also hinges on an assumption that the increasing confessionalism of Dutch churches apparent during the course of the seventeenth century led inexorably to social segmentation among believers. While it was certainly true that the clergy of the various confessions had by mid-century drawn S. Groenveld, Huisgenotens des geloofs. Was de samenleving in de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden verzuild? (Hilversum: Verloren, 1995). 183 On pillarization in the modern Netherlands see J. C. H. Blom, “Onderzoek naar verzuiling in Nederland. Status quaestionis en wenselijke ontwikkeling,” in ‘Broeders sluit U aan’: Aspecten van verzuiling in zeven Hollandse gemeenten, eds. J. C. H. Blom and C. J. Misset (‘s-Gravenhage, 1985), pp. 10–29; Arend Lijphart, Verzuiling, pacificatie en kentering in de Nederlandse politiek (Amsterdam: De Bussy, 1986), pp. 27–67; Peter van Rooden, “Studies naar lokale verzuiling als toegang tot de geschiedenis van de constructie van religieuze verschillen in Nederland,” Theoretische Geschiedenis 20 (1993): 439–454. 184 Groenveld, Huisgenoten, pp. 70–73. 185 Kaplan, “Integration vs. Segregation,” pp. 48–66; Willem Frijhoff also sees increasing segmentation of confessional groups in Amsterdam in the later seventeenth century: Willem Frijhoff, “Amsterdam in de Gouden Eeuw: het geloofsleven,” Jaarboek Amstelodamum 91 (1999), p. 97. 182

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fairly distinct lines between churches (at least in their own minds), it was by no means clear that that sense of self-definition had also filtered down to the laity, at least in the period covered by this study. Ecclesiastical establishments had, to be sure, a lively interest and immediate stake in keeping the boundaries between them clear, but there is not a lot of evidence that layfolk in Holland’s Golden Age shared a similar attitude. What Groenveld saw as a gradual but increasing confessional segregation after 1650 may have been an institutional rather than personal phenomenon. Indeed, research by Joke Spaans suggests that the emergence of distinct confessional charitable institutions in the late seventeenth century (Mennonite and Jewish as well as Catholic) was primarily a response to local government pressure on the tolerated confessions to take better care of their own poor  – an early form of state-initiated social engineering rather than an internal impulse toward segregation.186 Within families, as we have seen, religious difference could be a point of contention, but it could also be a matter of indifference. Confessional allegiance was not the only marker ordinary Hollanders used to determine their relationships with each other but rather one of several, including family ties and economic interest. Enough evidence has not been uncovered thus far to create more than an impression, but it seems reasonable to believe that a sharp or deeply felt sense of confessional identity prevailed more widely among clergy than laity in Holland in the seventeenth century. Among ordinary persons within private space, confessional boundaries remained fluid in the late 1600s despite fervent clerical wishes that they not be so. An acute, divisive sense of religious difference – strong enough to lead one to prefer to consort as much as possible with one’s own kind – did not yet obtain in Holland’s society in the seventeenth century. Among kith and kin, a kind of convivencia among Holland’s Calvinists and Catholics still prevailed.

Spaans, “De katholieken in de Republiek,” pp. 253–260; idem, “Katholieken onder curatele. Katholieke armenzorg als ingang van overheidsbemoeienis in Haarlem in de achttiende eeuw,” Trajecta 3 (1994): 110–130. On the development of Catholic charitable institutions in Delft, for example, see Ingrid van der Vlis, Leven in armoede. Delftse bedeelden in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 2001), pp. 238–241.

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In the fall of 1623, a number of grievances came before the States of Holland from delegates from the northern part of the province regarding local Catholic activities. In one particular city, they complained that Catholics had built a large new house with an imposing second story “stuffed” with images and other objects necessary for “false religion.” That false religion was in turn so openly practiced there that, when outsiders came into town asking where the “papists” gathered, anyone on the street could tell them by just pointing a finger.1 The States referred the complaint to the Court of Holland for further investigation. On its face, this is just another example of the hundreds of remonstrances about Catholic “impudence” delivered by Reformed Protestants to Holland’s political leadership during the Golden Age. Read on another level, however, the 1623 petition nicely illustrates the multiple metaphorical spaces within which Catholics and Calvinists in Holland dealt with each other. First of all, the fact of the complaint itself attests to their relationship in confessional space, where churches interacted with each other – it was hostile and competitive. Secondly, the situation the complaint describes is illustrative of civic space, where within one municipality they lived in close and obvious proximity to each other as neighboring communities. Finally, we have multiconfessionalism operating within private space: When asked, local folk obligingly pointed out to visitors  – without fuss or fanfare – where their Catholic neighbors met to worship. In this one instance, we see exhibited the full spectrum of confessional 1

Particuliere Notulen van de vergaderingen der Staten van Holland 1620–1640, eds. J. W. Veenendaal-Barth et al. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), vol. 2, pp. 90–91.

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coexistence in Holland, from the antagonistic to the amicable. This was possible because early modern Catholic and Calvinist Hollanders interacted with each other in a variety of arenas – as churches, communities, and individuals. A kind of convivencia had evolved between Holland’s two major confessions in the seventeenth century that allowed for this spectrum, under the careful eye of local authorities charged with superintending religious affairs.2 It permitted a polymorphous coexistence characterized by both formal hostility and informal cooperation. The multifarious and imbricating spaces within which Calvinists and Catholics encountered each other made this possible. Thus, when the various types of relationships between them are held up to closer scrutiny, we see them operating across different arenas and at different levels, which sometimes intersected. The relationship between priest and preacher – that is, the clergy who embodied and personified two distinct churches – took place primarily in confessional space. Within this space the Reformed church and the Holland Mission excoriated each other as heresy and idolatry, respectively. Here, after some initial ecclesiastical fogginess, confessional difference was nurtured and cultivated with vehement and vitriolic language, as each church defined itself and disciplined its flock with an eye to the other. The Mission trained generations of priests who successfully brought pastoral care to the faithful under the heretical yoke, and the Reformed church repeatedly lobbied authorities about the threat of popery. The public church in effect tried to counter Catholic revival with rhetoric. The Mission eventually responded in kind, and each side painted a distinctive polemical portrait of the other. Demonizing each other served to create clear confessional boundaries; it contributed to each confession’s definition of itself. Polemic also provided a useful outlet for sectarian energies and passions that might otherwise lead to more destructive types of conflict. Rarely, priest and preacher might interact within civic space – in the communities they shared – usually in the form of debates or disputations. Both confessions, however, preferred to keep their physical distance from each other. Even more rarely, in private space, priests and preachers might be friends and colleagues, but as we have seen, the On the coexistence among different religious populations in Spain in the Middle Ages, see Convivencia: Jews, Muslims and Christians in Medieval Spain, eds. Vivian Mann et al. (New York: George Braziller, 1992). Of course that particular instance of managed coexistence broke down by the fourteenth century; see David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

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evidence for this kind of relationship is scant. Confessional space was where, in post-Reformation Europe, the two churches were expected to (and did) clash with each other, to do violence to each other’s claims to truth while touting their own. Another aspect of confessional coexistence – that of the vicissitudes of persecution and toleration – occupied civic space, where Catholics and Calvinists encountered each other as communities. Those civic spaces in which priests and preachers lived side by side were carefully policed by local magistracies whom Holland had charged with managing religious affairs. The legal and political status of the Catholic church was entirely under magisterial control, but magistracies also placed limits on how much autonomy the public church could enjoy. As we have seen, the toleration of Catholic worship within civic space was neither static nor predictable and could vary from place to place. The Calvinists may have called for more persecution and less toleration, but local town governments managed their Catholic populations according to their own political interests, first among which was social harmony. To this end they made an unofficial yet nevertheless real distinction between the public and the private within civic space. As long as Catholics confined their worship to that private, ostensibly invisible sphere, magistracies provided them a broad toleration; when Catholic activity intruded into the public sphere (and that boundary was never precisely delineated), legal prosecution could follow. External circumstances, such as the course of the war with Spain and relations between the government and the public church, also affected the degree of liberty Catholics might enjoy. Reformed complaints about that liberty reached a high point by the second quarter of the seventeenth century, but their complaints now focused on Catholic violations of these unspoken boundaries (“impudence”) rather than Catholicism itself. Generally, magistracies took these cavils with a grain of salt and continued to manage Catholic communities with tacit understandings and occasional legal force. In civic space toleration was a tool rather than a value, the fruit of connivance rather than ideology. Through such tools, public authorities strived to attain “cohesion in diversity.”3 One aspect of the Calvinist-Catholic relationship that overlapped both confessional and private space was the their competition for souls. In cities where perhaps up to half the population was not committed to a particular church, Holland’s religious culture wound up turning into a 3

Willem Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, 1650: Bevochten eendracht. Nederlandse cultuur in Europese context (The Hague: Sdu, 1999), p. 221.

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kind of ecclesiastical marketplace. Consciences were free and an array of choices existed, so individuals could shop around for a church. In addition, a small number of members from each church broke ranks and converted to the other confession, for reasons both principled and expedient. As much as each church welcomed converts it mourned apostates. The boundaries so carefully cultivated by the two churches in confessional space proved to be far more porous in private space; conversion was possible and did occasionally happen. For some layfolk ecclesiastical discipline had little effect. It was not at all difficult in Holland’s tightly packed towns for a person to find a Catholic gathering or attend the Reformed Sunday sermon. Occasionally, conversion stories, especially of clergy, were used as propaganda in the rhetorical war between the two confessions; paradoxically, the crossing of confessional boundaries could also serve to reinforce those boundaries. The Calvinist-Catholic relationship also occupied private space, where they interacted as individuals. Beyond the shrill universe of confessional polemic and within the walls of densely packed municipal communities, ordinary people had to live with one another in daily intercourse and interaction. Mutual toleration and forbearance were necessary components for the smooth operation of social traffic within this space. In the worlds of neighborhood, work, and family, confessional difference was often overlooked or ignored for the sake of cooperation. Family, especially in the delicate areas of marriage and children, could be subject to the frictions of confessional difference, and church authorities were quick to intervene when they believed ecclesiastical interests were at stake; however, on the whole a basic, quotidian harmony prevailed. Religious conflict was largely relegated to confessional space – sporadically manifesting itself within civic space – but within private space peaceful coexistence was the norm. Arguably, it was that very public confessionalism that privileged the Reformed church and merely tolerated all other churches that permitted this everyday deconfessionalism. Hostility between confessions was expected in post-Reformation Europe – Catholic and Calvinist would naturally denounce each other – but equally cherished values of community and sociability also prevailed. The traditional characteristics of Holland’s political and social culture with their emphasis on negotiation, discussion, and compromise proved capable of overcoming, or at least living alongside, the most ferocious divisions the region had experienced in centuries. Catholic and Calvinist Hollanders found different spaces in which to interact with each other in different ways that did not cause any undue fraying of the social fabric. In a culture that thought

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corporatively, private individuals were expected to subsume difference in the interest of public order. That things worked out this way was to many contemporary observers a perplexing phenomenon. Surely the furious, even murderous confessional passions of the sixteenth-century reformation and revolt in the Low Countries should have led to a clearcut either-or religious outcome rather than the muddled both-and arrangement of the Dutch Republic? This was the case in the southern Netherlands, where an aggressive CounterReformation effectively re-Catholicized what had originally been the heartlands of the Netherlandish Reformation.4 The Spanish Netherlands became a confessionalized state, where government and church actively cooperated to reinforce each other’s authority. Not so for the north. According to all early modern assumptions and expectations, the newly independent Republic was supposed to become a thoroughly Calvinist state, yet it did not. Indeed, in terms of religion, the Republic seems to have thwarted the ambitions of any number of groups; its political elites did not get the open, inclusive national church that they would have preferred and its Calvinist divines did not get the reformed commonwealth denuded of all but true religion that they longed for. The immediate result of revolt, reformation, and independence was a great deal of confessional murkiness. Instead of a confessional state, the reformation and revolt left the Republic a religiously pluralist society, with one official church and a host of tolerated faiths. In terms of its religious demographics, the new state was a collection of minorities. “The foreigner who wishes to understand our history begins with the assumption that the Republic was indisputably a Calvinist state and Calvinist land,” the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga noted wryly in the 1940s, “We Dutch know better.”5 The new state’s religious pluralism was most marked and conspicuous in its biggest and most powerful province. During an initial period between 1572 and 1620, religious and ecclesiastical confusion reigned as Holland’s new public church and political leadership tried to cope with the question of religious pluralism. Between 1620 and 1660, each church sharpened its confessional identity so that the choice between them was See, for example, Marie Juliette Marinus, De contra-reformatie te Antwerpen (1585– 1676): Kerkelijk leven in een grootstad (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1995), p. 10. See also James D. Tracy, “With and Without the Counter-Reformation: The Catholic Church in the Spanish Netherlands and Dutch Republic, 1580–1650,” Catholic Historical Review 71 (1985): 547–575. 5 J. Huizinga, Nederland’s beschaving in de 17e eeuw (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1984), p. 62. 4

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absolutely clear. This crystallization of identities in turn allowed for a subsequent era of more or less peaceful coexistence. Presiding over all of this, Holland’s political masters learned, haphazardly and over time, how to manage their province’s religious pluralism relatively effectively. They fashioned, much to the wonderment of contemporaries, a polity capable of tolerating a high degree of religious diversity. Why exactly this should be so was something of a puzzle. It is, of course, a chicken-and-egg sort of question: Was Holland tolerant because it was diverse, or was it diverse because it was tolerant? The answer is that both were true: The fractious splintering of Netherlandish Christianity in the late sixteenth century prompted authorities to accept religious difference as a fait accompli, but as time wore on this general stance of acceptance in turn encouraged the further diversification of the country’s religious profile, through both the immigration of refugees and the hardening of confessional boundaries among existing religious communities. Religious difference and its acceptance arose out of the particular circumstances of the Low Countries’ experience of revolt and reformation. The coupling of the public church and the principle of freedom of conscience in its religious settlement after independence was a direct result of the political compromises necessary to forge a successful coalition of anti-Habsburg rebels out of both Calvinists and Catholics. The initial confessional divisions among the population that had begun in the late sixteenth century necessitated an awkward coexistence among church groups, and in time – as generations passed – that coexistence grew less uncomfortable and more habitual. Furthermore, the complicated relationship between two tetchy polities, Holland’s regents regime and its public church, contributed to both the religious multiplicity of its society and the general acquiescence to it. Toleration became a necessity in a society where the privileged church rejected open membership and the government rejected religious coercion.6 A government committed to the principle of freedom of conscience and to local regulation of religion and an official church that rejected universal membership combined to foster an environment where religious difference persevered and even blossomed. Added to this was each church’s own evolving internal confessional formation, which further solidified those differences. To be sure, Holland’s Reformed divines would have scoffed at the suggestion that they might be encouraging religious diversity. Just because G. G. de Bruin, Geheimhouding en verraad. De geheimhouding van staatszaken ten tijde van de Republiek (1600–1750) (The Hague: Sdu, 1991), pp. 223–224.

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not everyone could or would join their church did not mean it did not preach true religion. They were the public church not because of the universality of their appeal but because of the rightness of their teachings. Their reading of the Bible and their experience of persecution taught them that God’s saints were but a handful on this earth; accordingly, they constructed a church that reflected that theological insight. At the same time, they fully expected that public authority, as Christian magistrates, would suppress all false religion and superstition. As we have seen, from its establishment onward through the seventeenth century, loud voices within the Reformed church repeatedly harangued authorities about their tolerationist policies toward other confessions, especially Catholicism. The fact that the public church itself – with its own peculiar polity and governance, with its bristly autonomy and exacting requirements – contributed to this multiconfessional state of affairs never seemed to occur to them. Being a minority, albeit privileged, confession also permitted the Reformed church to retain much of its ecclesiological autonomy; it largely governed itself, and never became an arm of the state they way the Lutheran or Anglican churches did. For its part, the Catholic church in Holland regarded the province’s multiconfessionalism with equal dismay, although it was that very multiconfessionalism that permitted it to survive at all. To be sure, the Holland Mission viewed its circumstances from the entirely opposite perspective than the public church’s: That of oppression rather than privilege. It saw itself trapped in a sea of heresy, buffeted by storms of persecution, tolerated only in the most condescending and conditional sense of the word. Thanks to an enormous investment of labor and energy, its mission was able to re-establish a viable and even vibrant system of worship for Holland’s Catholics, but only within the confines of a narrowly prescribed social space. Like its Reformed counterpart, the Catholic church in Holland had to confessionalize to survive; it had to distinguish itself clearly from myriad religious subcultures crowding the province’s multiconfessional landscape. Partly through its own energies both lay and clerical – and partly through connivance with local authorities, the Catholic church in Holland learned to coexist with heresy. It also understood, perhaps better than the public church, how much those local authorities controlled religious life, and so was adept at cultivating relationships with magistracies through such mechanisms as recognition money. Presiding over and refereeing the coexistence between Calvinist and Catholic were Holland’s political rulers. They were hardly a neutral party, to be sure, as they had formally sanctioned the Reformed church

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and disestablished the Catholic church in the 1570s. At the same time, they operated within a political system where all politics were truly local, where the particular interests of local communities were heeded, ­consulted, and respected and in many respects formed the backbone of wider provincial policy. This particularist tradition had a long political pedigree stemming back to the Middle Ages that neither independence from Habsburg rule nor the reform of the church fundamentally altered. Thus, when confronted with a very new problem – religious pluralism – the Holland regents’ response was to fall back upon the tried and true practice of allowing local communities to manage their own affairs; a familiar solution was employed to address a quite unfamiliar dilemma. Although there were province-wide placards issued restricting Catholic worship, enforcement was in local hands. City fathers found it was their job to create mechanisms by which these two hostile confessions could live side by side without causing damage to the wider community. Hence their division of religious life into public and private spheres; they managed multiconfessionalism by effectively compartmentalizing it. One church was granted a complete monopoly over collective, communal religious life and all others were relegated to the interior, domesticated, private world of conscience. In addition to the inviolability of that publicprivate boundary, the other major unspoken rule of Holland’s convivencia between Reformed and Catholic was that the boundaries between confessions themselves would be observed and respected. It was when these boundaries were violated that conflict usually arose. The Reformed church was quick to protest when it detected Catholic intrusions into its public sphere, and the Catholic church might also push back when it experienced unwarranted intrusions into the private world in which it had been tacitly allowed to worship. Local magistracies arbitrated these conflicts with a variety of means including both toleration and persecution, but always with an eye to the upholding of communal concord and local privilege. This solution to the question of how to manage multiconfessionalism proved to be remarkably successful. Peaceful coexistence between Catholic and Calvinist, between Papist and heretic, was the norm in Golden Age Holland, and what confessional violence there was almost entirely confined itself to the realm of rhetoric. Neither confession admitted to being satisfied with this state of affairs, of course, for each found the existence of the other in its midst to be an affront to true religion. The Reformed church continued to decry the sufferance of superstition in its proximity, and the Catholic church continued to mourn its subjection to heresy.

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Yet both were direct beneficiaries of Holland’s particularist solution; the Reformed enjoyed a privileged and protected social and cultural status within the wider polity, and the Catholic church was granted an arena in which it was able, within limits, to flourish. Arguably, Holland’s Catholic community might be considered the greater beneficiary of particularism, for in a wider time and place that saw religious disunity as dangerous to political and social concord, Catholicism nevertheless prospered under this particular heretical yoke. Such was the ambivalent legacy of the Reformation for Holland: Catholic and Calvinist there learned – perhaps to their mutual surprise – that they could coexist with each other in different arenas as antagonists, rivals, and, finally, neighbors. In a strange way that no one would have predicted from the Reformation’s long stay there, Holland found a way, however haphazardly and unintentionally, to make confessionalism serve pluralism.

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Index

Adrichem, Jacob van, 191 Aitzema, Lieuwe van, 173 Albert, archduke, 107 Ampzing, Samuel, 72, 163 Amsterdam, 61 churches in, 1, 187 consistory, 45, 71, 75–76, 88, 122, 142, 143, 163, 186, 196 magistrates, 121, 202 persecution in, 122 Antwerp, 80, 134, 141, 203, 205 Apostolic Vicars, 18, 49–50, 53, 80, 112, 195 Arminian controversy, 108, 167–169 Arminians, 19, 34, 35, 107, 168 baptism, 203–207 in mixed marriages, 204–206 Beggars, 25, 27, 28, 81, 178 Belgic Confession, 8, 65 Bentivoglio, Guido, 106 Bertius, Petrus, 168 Beveren, Jacob van, 118 Blaeu, Joan, 189 Bloemaert, Abraham, 189 Breda, 210 Brussels, 23, 24, 49, 56, 80, 148, 149, 169 Buchelius, Arnoldus, 183, 192 Cabeljau, Petrus, 87 Calvin, John, 24, 145 Capuchins, 59, 155 catechization, 78, 82, 83, 85, 112, 166

Charles V, 23, 24 Clement VIII, 49 coexistence, confessional, 3, 4–5, 7, 9, 10–13, 22, 37, 39, 43, 73, 92, 93, 95, 124, 126, 128, 133, 178, 212, 213, 216, 220–222 Collegio Urbano, 85 Cologne, 27, 49, 51, 53, 134, 173, 191 confessionalization, 46–47, 51, 53, 58, 64, 80, 109, 213, 221 conscience, freedom of, 22, 30, 31, 94, 95, 97, 119, 133, 138, 142, 147, 220 conversion, 131–133, 218 clerical, 134–141 convivencia, 2, 214, 216, 222 Coolhaes, Caspar, 33 Coopal, Willem, 51, 61 Coornhert, Dirck Volckertsz, 85, 94, 103 Court of Holland, 112, 114, 117, 118, 121, 163, 208, 211 Cousebant, Nicholas, 103 Delfland, classis of, 144, 148, 204 Delft, 42, 50, 52, 99, 124–125, 180, 191 consistory, 124, 131, 142, 144 magistrates, 124 Descartes, Rene, 20 diaconate, 82 discipline, ecclesiastical, 25, 33, 51, 139, 142, 143–145, 146, 151, 152, 196 discussion culture, 41, 64, 78 disputations, 85–88

243

244

Index

Dordrecht, 60 classis, 44, 141, 148, 184 consistory, 16–19, 73, 130, 140 magistrates, 16, 17, 117 National Synod of, 19, 30, 34, 35, 68, 100, 168, 192, 207 persecution in, 117–119 provincial synod held at (1574), 65, 139 Dusseldorpius, Franciscus, 82, 171, 192 Dutch Republic, 19, 20, 22, 25, 34, 37–39, 68, 92, 108, 213 reputation for tolerance, 19–20, 93 Dutch Revolt, 2, 9, 14, 19, 23, 37, 70, 75, 98, 194, 219 Edam, 171 Eggius, Albert, 60 excommunication, 145 Faille, Petrus della, 83, 135–136 Felltham, Owen, 20, 174 Franciscans, 27, 54, 55, 141, 154, 157, 170, 175, 196 Francken, Sebastiaen, 112–114, 187 Frangipani, Ottavio Mirto, 27, 47, 49, 102, 103, 106 Frederick Henry, 68, 70, 108 Friesland, 54, 156, 203 Frijhoff, Willem, 22, 92, 181 Fruin, Robert, 98 gasthuizen, 165 Gelderland, 6, 38 Geluwe, Arnout van, 84, 186 Generality lands, 86, 190, 210 Gorcum martyrs, 27, 87, 141 Goswinus Johannis, 44 Gouda, 33, 54, 90, 102, 112 classis of, 162 consistory, 126–127, 166, 175 magistrates, 33, 90, 91, 103, 119, 127, 128, 175 persecution in, 119–121 Graft, 185 Great Assembly, 111–112 Grebber, Pieter de, 189 Groenveld, Simon, 212–214 guilds, 182, 188 Haarlem, 42, 52, 123, 181 classis of, 172 consistory, 140, 144

magistrates, 123 The Hague, national synod in (1586), 102 Hallius, Johannes, 145 Hattemius, Otto, 141 heresy, 22, 52, 62, 64, 80, 82–83, 97 Herinx, Willem, 54, 154 Hermanus Herbertsz, 33 hofjes, 103, 124, 164–165, 186 Holland, 3, 5–7, 9, 11, 19, 34, 38, 44, 68, 87, 103, 212 society, 40–42, 179–181, 190 war in, 25–29, 99 Holland Mission, 14, 18, 21, 36, 42, 47, 48–50, 53, 56, 61, 79, 80, 84, 88, 99, 110, 123, 204, 210, 216, 221 conversion efforts by, 153–160 persecution of, 56–62 and regular orders, 52 Holy Roman Empire, 27, 140 house churches, 61, 62, 74, 110, 113, 116, 120, 122, 124, 187 Howell, James, 19, 181 Huizinga, Johan, 219 Huyghens, Constantijn, 184 idolatry, 22, 64, 65, 66, 71, 75, 78, 79, 103 Ischa, Arnoldus ab, 57, 84 Jager, Cornelis de, 126 Jesuits, 17, 48, 49, 54, 57, 59, 61, 67, 86, 87, 154, 156, 157, 159, 165, 169, 171, 198 Jutphaas, 185 Keyser, Hendrick de, 190 klopjes, 17, 27, 42, 54, 69, 72, 73, 74, 76, 81, 101, 111, 112, 114, 116, 120, 123, 124, 151, 152, 158, 159, 165, 166, 170, 181, 182, 185, 187, 189, 190, 192, 193, 207, 208, 211 community in De Hoek, 123, 160, 181 conversion efforts by, 150, 160–164 Reformed complaints about, 162–164 Langeraar, 113 Laren, 171 Leicester, earl of, 33 Leiden, 33, 66, 112, 182, 185 consistory, 115, 136, 140, 147 magistrates, 31, 33, 115, 135 persecution in, 115–117 L’Empereur, Constantijn, 188

Index liefhebbers, 32, 33, 144 Locke, John, 3 London, 148 Louis XIV, 1, 5, 20, 38, 126, 178 Louvain, 51, 53, 136, 139 Luther, Martin, 23 Lutherans, 8, 35 Maillart, Petrus, 120 Makeblijde, Lodewijk, 54, 105, 124, 155 Marius, Leonard, 76, 121 marriage, mixed, 149, 156–157, 161, 193–202, 213 Catholic position on, 194 children of, 202–203 divorce, 199–200 Reformed position on, 194 mass, Catholic, 8, 21, 48, 51, 65, 73, 74, 75, 87, 102, 130, 146, 150, 184, 199 Maurice of Nassau, 34, 68, 90, 108 Medici, Cosimo de, 1 Mennonites, 7–8, 35, 85 Metz, Zacharias de, 61, 122 Middelburg, national synod of (1581), 65, 85, 139 miracles, 28, 169–173 Morra, Lucio, 107 multiconfessionalism, 7, 10, 138, 174, 221 Neercassel, Johannes van, 38, 83, 122, 183 Oirschot, Anthonius van, 60 Oldenbarnevelt, Johan van, 34 Opmeer, Petrus, 26 organists, 167 orphanages, 165–166 Ouzeel, Jacobus, 136 Overbeke, Aernout van, 183 Overijssel, 6, 38 Papenhoek, 124, 180 particularism, 24, 37, 98, 106, 222, 223 Pauw, Pieter, 170 Petrus a Matre Dei, 55, 57, 62, 83, 85, 97, 117, 160, 208 Philip II, 24 pillarization, 212–214 placards, anti-Catholic, 9, 17, 18, 19, 29, 51, 57, 61, 71, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 103, 114–115, 121, 125, 198, 205, 208

245

polemic, 11, 63, 134, 137, 138, 139, 216 Catholic, 79–84 Reformed, 63–78 Pouwels Claesz de Goede, 61, 185 priests, 17, 21, 26, 29, 45, 49, 50–52, 53, 55, 58–59, 72, 73, 79, 98, 102, 113, 115, 136 public sphere, 19, 41, 126, 217, 222 Purmerent, Petrus, 90, 120 recognition money, 42, 48, 67, 76, 90, 104–105, 123 Reformation, 2, 8, 19, 23–24, 30, 63, 97, 132, 177, 219, 223 Reformed church, 7, 8, 14, 21, 25, 29, 36, 45, 63, 68, 77, 79, 93, 109, 144, 172, 203, 216 lobbying efforts, 35, 36, 66, 69, 70, 79, 108, 111, 215 relationship to state, 100–102 regents of Holland, 6, 9, 21, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 69, 70, 93, 96, 111, 112, 128, 198, 220, 221 Rijnland, classis of, 66, 135, 140, 162, 172 Roelofarendsveen, 113 Rogier, L.J., 173 Rovenius, Philip, 52, 56, 58, 68, 110, 123, 153, 168 ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 44, 190 Schepens, Gerardus, 183 Scherpenheuvel, 170 schools, 207–210 and klopjes, 208–209 sick visitors, 159 sola scriptura, 8, 83, 146 Spain, 17, 36, 68, 117 Spanish Netherlands, 6, 76, 80, 86, 107, 108, 140, 219 stadholders, 21, 34, 168 Stalpart van der Wiele, Jan, 170 States-General, 69, 80, 115 States of Holland, 17, 28, 29, 33, 35, 61, 80, 194, 203, 215 Steen, Jan, 182 Steen, Johan van der, 118 Stompwijk, 87 Stoupe, Jean Baptiste, 20 superstition, 19, 64, 66, 67, 68, 72, 74, 77, 164, 222 synod of South-Holland, 36, 67, 69, 70, 72, 76, 78, 86, 140, 152, 163

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Temple, William, 20 Tesselschade, Maria, 173, 184 toleration, 3–4, 22, 37, 40, 70, 71, 72, 77, 92, 106, 125, 177, 217 historiography, 3 regime of, 12, 15, 114, 119, 128, 133 Torre, Jacobus de la, 57, 62, 123, 128 transubstantiation, 86, 130, 140, 147 Trent, Council of, 21, 53, 110, 153, 194, 195 Trigland, Jacobus, 139, 192 Twelve Years Truce, 36, 68, 86, 107 Union of Utrecht, 30, 31, 94, 119 Utrecht, 6, 38 Valmaer, Jacques, 182 Veen, Simon van, 211

Velde, Maarten van, 57 Verbeeck, Hermanus, 82 Vermeulen, Christiaen, 87 Vondel, Joost van den, 80 Vos, Jan, 80, 182, 188 Vosmeer, Sasbout, 48, 49, 50–52, 57, 59, 83, 85, 96, 99, 102, 106, 156, 170, 188, 202 Wachtelaer, Joannes, 59 Walvis, Ignatius, 90, 102, 120 William II, 70, 111 William III, 39, 126 William of Orange, 21, 25, 28, 30 Wilsveen, 66 Witt, Johan de, 37, 79, 125 Wouter Jacobsz, 26, 27, 28, 81, 102 Zoeterwoude, 57