Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age

Calvinism and Religious Tolerationin the Dutch Golden Age

Dutch society has enjoyed a reputation, or notoriety, for permissivenessfrom the sixteenth century to present times. The Dutch Republic in theGolden Age was the only society that tolerated religious dissenters ofall persuasions in early modern Europe, despite being committed to astrictly Calvinist public Church. Professors R. Po-Chia Hsia and Henkvan Nierop have brought together a group of leading historians from theUSA, the UK, and the Netherlands to probe the history and myth ofthisDutch tradition of religious tolerance. This collection of outstandingessays reconsiders and revises contemporary views of Dutch tolerance.Taken as a whole, the volumes innovative scholarship offers unexpectedinsights into this important topic in religious and cultural history.

. - is Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of European andAsian History at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author oreditor of eight books on early modern Europe, including In and Outof the Ghetto: JewishGentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early ModernGermany (Cambridge, ) and The World of Catholic Renewal, (Cambridge, ).

is Professor of Early Modern History at the Univer-sity of Amsterdam and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for the Studyof the Golden Age. He is the author or editor of a number of books onEuropean and Dutch history, including The Nobility of Holland: FromKnights to Regents, (Cambridge, ).

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Calvinism and ReligiousToleration in the DutchGolden Age

Edited by

R. Po-Chia HsiaPennsylvania State University

and

Henk van NieropUniversiteit van Amsterdam

PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (VIRTUAL PUBLISHING) FOR AND ON BEHALF OF THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia http://www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 2002 This edition Cambridge University Press (Virtual Publishing) 2003 First published in printed format 2002 A catalogue record for the original printed book is available from the British Library and from the Library of Congress Original ISBN 0 521 80682 8 hardback ISBN 0 511 02070 8 virtual (netLibrary Edition)

Contents

Notes on contributors page vii

Introduction -

Dutch religious tolerance: celebration and revision .

Religious toleration in the United Provinces:from case to model

The bond of Christian piety: the individual practiceof tolerance and intolerance in the Dutch Republic

Religious policies in the seventeenth-centuryDutch Republic

Paying off the sheriff: strategies of Catholic tolerationin Golden Age Holland

Sewing the bailiff in a blanket: Catholicsand the law in Holland

Anabaptism and tolerance: possibilities and limitations

Jews and religious toleration in the Dutch Republic

v

vi Contents

Religious toleration and radical philosophyin the later Dutch Golden Age ()

The politics of intolerance: citizenship and religionin the Dutch Republic (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries)

Select bibliography Index

Notes on contributors

is Professor of Early Modern History at the Free Uni-versity in Amsterdam. He is the author of many books, including Lasociete neerlandaise et ses gradues, : une recherche serielle sur lestatut des intellectuels (Amsterdam, ), Wegen van Evert Willemsz.:Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf (Nijmegen, ),and : Bevochten eendracht (The Hague, ).

is Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies inPrinceton.Hismany publications includeDutch Primacy in World Trade, (Oxford, ),The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall() (Oxford, ), and Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy andthe Making of Modernity (Oxford, ). He won the Wolf-son Literary Prize for History in . He is a Fellow of the BritishAcademy and a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.

. is Professor of Dutch History at University CollegeLondon. He is the author of Calvinists and Libertines: Confession andCommunity in Utrecht, (Oxford, ) for which he wonthe Philip Schaff Prize and the Roland Bainton Prize in History andTheology.

is Associate Professor of History at Louisiana StateUniversity and the author of Liberty and Religion: Church and State inLeidens Reformation, (Leiden, ).

is Professor of EarlyModernHistory at theUniversityof Amsterdam and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for the Studyof the Golden Age. His publications include The Nobility of Holland:From Knights to Regents, (Cambridge, ) and Het verraadvan het Noorderkwartier: oorlog, terreur en recht in de Nederlandse Opstand(Amsterdam, ).

- is Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of European andAsian History at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author or

vii

viii Notes on contributors

editor of eight books on early modern Europe, including In and Out ofthe Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early ModernGermany (Cambridge, ) and The World of Catholic Renewal, (Cambridge, ).

is Lecturer in Modern History at the University ofOxford and Tutor at Somerville College, Oxford. She is the authorof Religious Choice in the Dutch Republic: The Reformation of ArnoldusBuchelius () (Manchester, ) for which she won the KeetjeHodshon Prize for History of the Hollandsche Maatschappij derWetenschappen.

is Professor of Economic and Social History at the Uni-versity of Utrecht. His publications include Gezeten burgers: de elite ineen Hollandse stad, Leiden (Dieren, ) and Republikeinseveelheid, democratisch enkelvoud: sociale verandering in het Revolutietijd-vak, s-Hertogenbosch (Nijmegen, ).

is Reader in the Research Centre for Religion andSociety at the University of Amsterdam. His publications includeTheology, Biblical Scholarship and Rabbinical Studies in the SeventeenthCentury: Constantijn LEmpereur (), Professor of Hebrew andTheology at Leiden (Leiden, ) and Religieuze regimes: over gods-dienst en maatschappij in Nederland, (Amsterdam, ).

is Lecturer of the History of Christianity at the Universityof Amsterdam and the author of Haarlem na de Reformatie: stedelijkecultuur en kerkelijk leven, (TheHague, ) andArmenzorg inFriesland : publieke zorg en particuliere liefdadigheid in zes Friesesteden: Leeuwarden, Bolsward, Franeker, Sneek, Dokkum en Harlingen(Hilversum, ).

was Research Fellow at the Fryske Akademy inLeeuwarden. He is the author of Het geleerde Friesland een mythe?:universiteit en maatschappij in Friesland en Stad en Lande ca. (Leeuwarden, ) and Om de ware gemeente en de oude gron-den: geschiedenis van de dopersen in de Nederlanden (Hilversum,).

1 Introduction

Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia

Defending himself against criticisms that he was making war on his fellowco-religionists, Colonel Jean-Baptiste Stouppe, the Reformed Swiss com-mander of LouisXIVs troops inUtrecht during the occupation of ,retorted that the Dutch were not at all Reformed. It is well known . . . thatin addition to the Reformed, Stouppe wrote in his tractOn the Religion ofthe Hollanders (), there are Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Brownists,Independents, Arminians, Anabaptists, Socinians, Arians, Enthusiasts,Quakers, Borelists, Muscovites, Libertines, and many more . . . I am noteven speaking of the Jews, Turks, and Persians . . . I must also report onan enlightened and learned man, who has a great following . . .His nameis Spinoza. He was born a Jew and had not swore off allegiance to theJewish religion, nor has he accepted Christianity. He is a wicked and verybad Jew, and not a better Christian either.

His criticisms aside, the Netherlands were indeed a Calvinist country,albeit tolerant of numerous religious communities, a fact celebrated in ourvisions of aDutchGoldenAge butmuch decried by contemporaries, evenby those who enjoyed toleration. Consider the case of the Anabaptists,the most persecuted religious community during the early decades of theReformation. In his preface to the Martelaers Spiegel Hans de Ries() lamented the languor of his fellow Mennonites. Contrastingthe fervour of their forebears who were hunted down for their faith, DeRies chastised the Mennonites of his day for being cold and carelessin religious matters. He saw a community preoccupied with temporalaffairs: the oxen must first be checked and the field inspected before onecan come to the heavenly celebration. Wickedness is changed into pompand splendor; goods are multiplied, but the soul is impoverished; clotheshave become expensive, but interior beauty is gone; love has grown coldand diminished, and quarrels have increased. Such was the price for Cited in Willem Frijhoff, Hollands Gouden Eeuw, in De gouden delta der Lage Landen.

Twintig eeuwen beschaving tussen Seine en Rijn (Antwerp, ), p. . Martelaers Spiegel der Werelose Christenen . . . , published in Haarlem, ; cited in BradS. Gregory, Salvation at Stake. Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge,MA, ), p. .

Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia

religious toleration, as the last Mennonite martyr died in in thenorthern Low Countries. In fact, the Mennonites found themselves ina new state and society, where religious toleration enabled a gradualprocess of economic and cultural assimilation.

This new state, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, emerged outof the revolt against Spain in an alliance that guaranteed freedom ofconscience; in the Union of Utrecht (), the rebel provinces agreedin article that nobody shall be persecuted or examined for religiousreasons. Not everyone concurred. From the beginning of the discus-sion on religious plurality in the Netherlands, the Calvinist Church vehe-mently opposed any official status for Catholicism, a position shared byother Protestant leaders during the long war with Spain, when Catholicsremained a potential source of rebellion inside the new Dutch Republic.Anti-Catholic legislations remained in force throughout the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, but their enforcement, as the contributionsby Henk van Nierop and Christine Kooi show in this volume, wassporadic and uneven. The central paradox of the Dutch Republic isthis: the existence of a confessionally pluralistic society with an offi-cial intolerant Calvinist Church that discriminated against Catholics, butwhose pragmatic religious toleration elicited admiration and bewilder-ment in ancien regime Europe and whose longevity surpassed the perhapsmore tolerant religious regime of the sixteenth-century PolishLithuanianCommonwealth.The Netherlands in the Golden Age were a remarkable society. Not

only did the different Christian confessions carve out social and polit-ical spaces in the Republic, Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews also trans-formed Amsterdam into the centre of Jewish life in northern Europeduring the seventeenth century. Individuals found porous boundaries.Consider the following examples: a Portuguese Jewish philosopher turnedagnostic (Benedict Spinoza, ); a Mennonite poet converted toCatholicism (Joost van den Vondel, ); and a poetess abandon-ing the Reformed Church for Rome, sending her sons to be educatedin Leuven (Anna Roemersdochter Visscher, ). That religiouspluralism flourished in a polity with an official Calvinist Church madethis story of toleration even more remarkable. How does one explain the See Alastair Hamilton, Sjouke Voolstra, and Piet Visser (eds.), From Martyr to Muppy.

A Historical Introduction to Cultural Assimilation Processes of a Religious Minority in theNetherlands: the Mennonites (Amsterdam, ).

M.E.H.N. Mout, A Comparative View of Dutch Toleration in the Sixteenth and EarlySeventeenth Centuries, in C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G.H.M. PosthumusMeyjes (eds.), The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic (Leiden/New York/Cologne, ), p. .

Introduction

juxtaposition of Calvinist hegemony and religious toleration? The historyof the Sephardim inAmsterdamprovides an instructive example. Cominginitially in the s as Portuguese merchants and Christian converts, theso-called New Christians, Sephardic Jews in fact, were welcomed by theRegents of Holland but were strongly opposed by the Reformed clergy.When the conversos reverted to the open practice of Judaism, reaction fromthe ReformedChurch was fierce. The predikantAbrahamCoster attackedthe Sephardim as an unclean people who sought to build a public syn-agogue in which they can perform their evil and foolish ceremonies andspew forth their gross blasphemies against Christ and his holy Gospels,as well as their curses against the Christians and Christian authorities.

Moreover, almost from the beginning of their settlement in Amsterdam,Protestant groups sought out the Jews for debates and conversion. In Hugh Broughton, the English pastor of the separatist community inMiddelburg, wrote a polemic in Hebrew against Judaism. There weremany attempts to convert the Jews in the seventeenth century, especiallybetween and . Provocations and opposition aside, the Jewishcommunity flourished because of the protection of the regents, who ig-nored most of the complaints of the Reformed clergy. What matteredto the regents was social peace; the pragmatism guiding magisterial pol-icy stipulated that the Jewish community maintained internal disciplineand kept watch over its own boundaries. By providing for their own poorand by strictly prohibiting the circumcision of Christian converts, theAmsterdam Jewish community maintained a stable relationship with theregents of the city that became the model for Jewish toleration in the restof the Republic.Social discipline and religious toleration, it would seem, went hand in

hand in the Dutch Republic, unlike the case in the Holy Roman Empire,as Peter vanRooden argues in his contribution on attitudes towards Jews.

A linchpin in this arrangement was poor relief. By requiring the differentreligious communities to take care of their own poor, the regents effec-tively carved up Dutch society into clearly recognisable pillars (zuilen),to use a term from later Dutch sociology, with sharply marked boundariesbetween the larger civil sphere and the separate religious spheres, as JokeSpaans argues in her essay. This genius in mapping social topography en-sured that religious and civil identities were anchored in separate spaces,

Cited in Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation. Conversos and Community inEarly Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, IN, ), p. .

R.G. Fuks-Mansfeld,De Sefardim in Amsterdam tot . Aspecten van een joodse minderheidin een Hollandse stad (Hilversum, ), pp. .

On social discipline and confessional conformity in Central Europe, see R. Po-ChiaHsia,Social Discipline in the Reformation. Central Europe (London, ).

Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia

which allowed for a nuanced articulation of the individual, the commu-nal, and the civil in different representations. Expressions of loyalty tothe House of Orange, for example, enabled all religious communities,including the Jews and Catholics, to celebrate a common patriotism, inspite of the unequal legal and civil status enjoyed by the different reli-gious groups. Religious plurality was thus predicated upon a rigorousand vigilant patrolling of boundaries, undertaken by individuals, com-munities, and above all by the civil authorities. Order and discipline,therefore, laid the foundations for religious pluralism. The search for or-der propelled inner journeys of religious crossings, as was the case withArnoldus Buchelius (), who evolved from Catholic to Libertineand finally to Counter-Remonstrant, as Judith Pollmann shows in hercontribution. The private and the public coexisted in the easygoing so-ciability of Buchelius with those not of the Calvinist Church and in hisdoctrinal intolerance of other religious communities. The constructionof the vast grey zone of freedom between the private and the public,where different religious and immigrant groups must interact in daily life,was the work of civil authorities, who rigorously censored confessionalpolemic and defamations that could lead to disturbance of social peace.

It was the case in with Cornelis Buyck, brewer and deacon of theCalvinist Church in Woerden, who insulted his Counter-Remonstrantpastor as a false minister and a liar, and who was fined the enormoussum of fl. (a workers annual wages); it applied to Hans Joostenszoonand his wife, Mennonites who converted to Judaism, and who in turnconverted an elder of the Reformed Church in Grosthuizen, who were allthree arrested, sentenced to die, and pardoned to exile in ; and itwas particularly true for those who confounded all religious boundariesby calling into question the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, as thefollowers of Spinoza and Descartes in Holland experienced at first handthe limits of toleration, as Jonathan Israel reminds us in his chapter.Toleration, nevertheless, has served the Netherlands well. Visitors to

the Republic in the seventeenth century associated religious pluralismwith economic prosperity; and the image of an open society in an age ofreligious conformity has shaped Dutch self-image down to our day, asBen Kaplan argues in his essay.

Willem Frijhoff gives an incisive analysis to this process in his Dimensions de la coex-istence confessionnelle, in C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G.H.M. PosthumusMeyjes (eds.), The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic (Leiden/New York/Cologne, ), pp. .

Frijhoff, Dimensions de la coexistence, p. . Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, p. .

Introduction

Our collection of essays focuses on the making of this toleration in theDutch Golden Age, on the structure, contingency, agency, mechanism,and limitations of religious pluralism and toleration. Drawing togethervastly divergent research interests and perspectives, our volume offersfour conclusions and themes in the history of religious toleration: theyconcern periodisation, local diversity, the techniques of toleration, andcomparative history.

Phases in the making of religious toleration

First, the making of religious toleration in the Dutch Republic seemsto have evolved over three distinct phases. The first period, c. to, was characterised by the attainment of Calvinist hegemony withinthe rebellious provinces. While claiming only about per cent of thepopulation of the north as full members, the Reformed Church achievedthe status of official church ( publieke kerk), while the doctrinal and ec-clesiological conflicts between Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrantsended up in the triumph of the more restrictive wing of Calvinism withthe Synod of Dordrecht. During this first period, the most restrictiveanti-Catholic legislations were enacted, although the Twelve Years Trucein the war with Spain gave Catholics a reprieve in the actual enforcementof the edicts. The formation of theMennonite community and the arrivalof Sephardic Jews also made this initial period one of tremendous socialchange in the Netherlands, as the new society absorbed not only differentChristian and Jewish communities, but immigrants from Iberia, France,the southern Low Countries, England, and Germany.A second period, c. to , coincided with the Golden Age of

the Dutch Republic. A pragmatic and successful model of a pluriconfes-sional society evolved in the Netherlands, where a strong civil authority,especially in Holland, kept the peace between a hegemonic ReformedChurch and the other religious communities. The separation betweenprivate and public spheres, the continued repression of Catholics duringthe span of the war and the beginning of Catholic missions launched fromthe south, the open toleration of the Jewish community, and the economicand cultural assimilation of the Mennonites characterised the success ofreligious toleration. Yet the limits of toleration were also clearly manifestin the repression against anti-Trinitarians, deists, agnostics, and atheists.The third period spanned the eighteenth century until the end of the

old Republic. The making of a system of religious pluralism was com-plete, resulting in a pillarized society of separate communities underthe watchful supervision of a strong civil authority. Improvements in the

Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia

rights of Catholics represented the most significant development in a so-ciety where they still constituted nearly one-half of the population.

Local diversity

The chapters collected in our volume demonstrate the existence of greatdifferences in religious toleration among towns, regions, and provincesin the Dutch Republic. Historians have long been aware of the predomi-nance of Holland and Amsterdam in the economy, culture, and politicsof the Netherlands. This was not the same for the history of religioustoleration. The story of the Sephardim in the early modern Republic,for example, largely unfolded in Amsterdam; and the Amsterdam re-gents have been hailed in particular as exemplary of the liberal and tole-rant attitude of the Dutch Republic. Yet it was the Amsterdam regentswho cracked down on the followers of Spinoza and Descartes in the lastdecades of the seventeenth century. Like all civil magistrates, the regentsin Amsterdam were above all concerned with discipline and stability. Ifsocial peace was achieved with toleration in the towns of Holland, a diffe-rent consideration guided the civil authorities in the eastern provinces ofUtrecht and Overijssel. Maarten Prak argues that in towns dominated byguilds, such as Arnhem, Deventer, Nijmegen, Utrecht, and Zwolle, theReformed Church exercised far greater political pressure and achieveda more repressive hegemony vis-a`-vis minority religious communities.Catholics, for example, were excluded from guild membership and citi-zenship until the eighteenth century. By moving away from Holland, weimmediately acquire a very different picture of society and religion in theDutch Republic. We must constantly remember the sovereignty of theindividual provinces and the importance of local custom in the newUnited Provinces.

Techniques of toleration

The most visible technique in favour of religious toleration was writing.During the early modern period, the Netherlands produced the mostsignificant works in religious toleration and liberty; the names of Hugode Groot, Coornhert, Wtenbogaert, and others come readily to mind.Toleration and plurality provided the theme for the formation of a textualand intellectual community that crossed religious boundaries. In additionto Remonstrant writers, members of other religious communities alsodefended liberty of worship; the importance of this textual tradition for

Johan E. Elias, Geschiedenis van het Amsterdamsche regentenpatriciaat (The Hague, ).

Introduction

one religious community is shown by Samme Zijlstra in his analysis ofMennonite ideals of toleration.Litigation represented another technique in the struggle for toleration.

Protracted lawsuits against anti-Catholic placards in Texel and Hoorn,for example, reflected the strong legal culture in the Netherlands and theavailability of institutional recourse for minority groups to contest theapplication of repressive legislation. In fact, Catholics employed manytechniques to counter religious persecutions, resorting to bribery, ap-pealing to noble patrons, and counting on the laxity of local magistrates.The key to this contest was the struggle for equal civil rights by minor-ity religious groups, which were eventually achieved by the end of theeighteenth century. A decentralised country with archaic constitutionsand fragmented political authorities was not likely or inclined to imposereligious conformity.

The Netherlands in comparative perspective

Finally, we would like to propose, more as a theme than as a conclu-sion, the importance of comparing religious plurality and toleration inthe Dutch Republic with other societies in the early modern period.While the intellectual traditions have been studied in the larger Europeancontext, a comparative social and political history of religious plural-ism and toleration in early modern Europe has yet to be written. Despitescepticism of the depth of toleration in the Netherlands, the DutchRepublic compared favourably to her neighbours. English Catholics,French Protestants, and suspect Judaisers in Spain and Portugal all en-dured far harsher treatments than their Dutch counterparts. Even in theHoly Roman Empire, where religious peace between the Christian con-fessions was established in and , and where Jewish communitiesfound protection among princes and magistrates, pathways through re-ligious boundaries bristled with far more dangerous obstacles than inthe Netherlands. To investigate the social and political context for re-ligious pluralism is not to deny the achievements of the new Republic.By delineating the structures of toleration and by probing its limits, wecan come to appreciate even more the achievements of a pragmatic andunsystematic arrangement that gave lustre to the Dutch Golden Age.

See C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes (eds.), The Emer-gence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic (Leiden/New York/Cologne, ).

SeeMarijkeGijswijt-Hofstra (ed.),Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid. Afwijking en tolerantiein Nederland van de zestiende eeuw tot heden (Hilversum, ).

2 Dutch religious tolerance: celebrationand revision

Benjamin J. Kaplan

When foreigners visit the Netherlands today, certain items seem invari-ably to stand on their touristic agenda: the Rijksmuseum, Anne Frankshouse, a boat ride through the canals. One of the more remarkable itemsis a walk through Amsterdams red light district, where, on a typical sum-mer evening, in addition to the clientele, thousands of foreigners throng men, women, couples, even families. Such districts are not usually on theitinerary of respectable tourists, but in Amsterdam a promenade thereserves a purpose: foreigners are invited to wonder at the tolerance or, ifyou prefer, permissiveness that prevails in the Netherlands. In the samedistrict but during the daytime, the Amstelkring Museum extends essen-tially the same invitation. The museum preserves Our Lord in the Attic,one of the roughly twenty Catholic schuilkerken, or clandestine churches,that operated in Amsterdam in the latter half of the seventeenth century.Nestled within the top floors of a large but unremarkable house namedTheHart, Our Lord does not betray its existence to the casual passer-by it has no tower, no stained-glass windows, no crosses on the outside and, but for the museum banner that hangs today on the buildings frontfacade, one could easily pass by it unawares. In its day, though, its exis-tence was an open secret, like that of the other schuilkerken. Its discreetarchitecture fooled no one, but did help to reconcile the formal illegal-ity of Catholic worship with its actual prevalence. Today, the museumsguidebook (English version) presents the church as a token of the liber-alism of the mercantile Dutch in an age of intolerance.

Around the world, Dutch society is famous for its tolerance, whichextends to drug use, alternate lifestyles, and other matters about whichmost industrial lands feel a deep ambivalence. But whence comes thattolerance, that liberalism? The guidebook hints at two answers. One isthat tolerance promotes commerce and thus is profitable; the other isthat the Dutch are simply a liberal, that is, tolerant, people. Toleranceis represented as smart economics, but also as a national trait a virtue

Amstelkring Museum: Our Lord in the Attic (n.p., ), first page.

Dutch religious tolerance: celebration and revision

by most peoples account, a vice by others, but either way as somethingrooted in the history, customs, and very character of the Dutch people.The Dutch, in other words, do not just practise tolerance: by their ownaccount and others, they are tolerant; it is considered one of their definingcharacteristics.

This is nothing new: Dutch tolerance was already proverbial in theGolden Age, though the tolerance then under discussion extended onlyto religions. Indeed, as early as the sixteenth century, in the crucible oftheir Revolt against Spain, the Dutch with Hollanders in the vanguard began to define themselves as an especially, even uniquely tolerant peo-ple. That identity was cemented in the Golden Age, when Calvinists,Catholics, Mennonites, and a host of other religious groups lived peace-fully alongside one another. In our own century, the same notion ofDutchness has expanded beyond the religious, just as the concept of tole-rance itself, rooted in the religious dilemmas of early modern Europe, hascome to be applied to all forms of otherness.Logically, the argument that the Dutch practise tolerance because they

are tolerant is nothing but a tautology, unless one believes in nationalcharacter as an autonomous, causal force in history, which few scholarsdo today. As a cultural construct, though, the argument continues tofunction as a powerful expression of national identity. In that capacityit provides a standard of behaviour against which the Dutch judge theirsociety and government severely sometimes, for example as concernspolicy towards the ethnic minorities come in recent decades to live in theNetherlands. It also provides a framework for the interpretation of Dutchhistory. But here the problems begin, for the essentialising of Dutch

Hans Bots, Tolerantie of gecultiveerde tweedracht. Het beeld van de Nederlandse toler-antie bij buitenlanders in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw, Bijdragen en Mededelingenbetreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (), ; W.W.Mijnhardt, De geschied-schrijving over de ideeengeschiedenis van de e- en -eeuwse Republiek, in W.W.Mijnhardt (ed.), Kantelend geschiedbeeld. Nederlandse historiografie sinds 1945 (Utrecht/Antwerp, ), p. ; B. van Heerikhuizen, What is Typically Dutch? Sociologists inthe s and s on theDutchNational Character,Netherlands Journal of Sociology (), ; R. van Ginkel, Typisch Nederlands . . .Ruth Benedict over het nation-aal karakter van de Nederlanders, Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift (), , ;Ernest Zahn, Regenten, rebellen en reformatoren. Een visie op Nederland en de Nederlanders(Amsterdam, ), pp. ; Herman Pleij, Hollands welbehagen (Amsterdam, ),pp. .

On the complex relations between social practice and cultural identity, and problems ofterminology, seeWillemFrijhoff, Identiteit en identiteitsbesef. De historicus en de span-ning tussen verbeelding, benoeming en herkenning, Bijdragen enMededelingen betreffendede Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (), .

See, for the Netherlands, Rob van Ginkels careful examination of twentieth-centuryideas and discussions concerning Dutch national identity and character: Rob vanGinkel, Op zoek naar eigenheid. Denkbeelden en discussies over cultuur en identiteit inNederland (The Hague, ).

Benjamin J. Kaplan

tolerance has for centuries involved mythologising, encouraged anachro-nism, and served partisan causes. In this way it has long obscured ourunderstanding of religious life in the Dutch Republic. Today it does thesame, but in a twofold manner: not just by propagating but also by pro-voking reactions, some of them exaggerated, against such mythologising,anachronism, and partisanship.Themythologising began early. In the sixteenth century, Netherlanders

justified their Revolt against Spain most frequently as a conservativeaction in defence of their historic privileges, or liberties. As JuliaanWoltjer has pointed out, only some of those privileges had a firm basis inlaw or fact, and what they entailed was not always crystal clear. Even thefamous jus de non evocando, perhaps the most frequently cited privilege ofall, was capable of varying constructions: while most people agreed thatit guaranteed that a burgher accused of a crime would not be tried bya court outside his province, opinions differed as to whether it assignedto local municipal courts sole and final jurisdiction in such cases. Eitherway, the privilege conjured up a time when cities and provinces had en-joyed judicial autonomy, and therein lay the true power of the privilegesgenerally: to evoke an idealised past against which the present could bejudged. However vague their positive content, no one mistook the privi-leges negative import as an indictment of, and justification for resistanceto, the Habsburg governments unwelcome initiatives and innovations.Foremost among the latter were the efforts of Philip II to introduce whatthe Dutch, with great effect if little accuracy, called the Spanish Inquisi-tion: an institutional structure for suppressing Protestantism, reformingthe Catholic Church, and imposing Tridentine orthodoxy on the peo-ple of the Netherlands. Such a programme entailed gewetensdwang, theforcing of consciences, on a massive scale.But if gewetensdwang was new and contrary to the privileges, was its

opposite, freedomof conscience, then part of a hallowed past? That was atleast the vague implication, mademore plausible by the fact that believersin the old Catholic faith as well as converts to Protestantism resisted thegovernments religious policies. Still, given that the variety of religiousbeliefs spawned by the Reformation was scarcely older than the placardsoutlawing them, it took some legerdemain to construe the privileges asguarantors of freedom of conscience. Nevertheless, a few writers of theperiod did so explicitly. Two anonymous pamphlets dating from appealed to the Joyous Entry of Brabant, the oath taken since by

J.J. Woltjer, Dutch Privileges, Real and Imaginary, in J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann(eds.), Britain and the Netherlands, vol. : Some Political Mythologies (The Hague, ),pp. ; James D. Tracy, Holland Under Habsburg Rule . The Formation of aBody Politic (Berkeley, ), pp. .


each new duke of Brabant by which he swore to do no violence or abuseto any person in any manner.

This word in any manner, expressly highlighted [wtstaende] in the Joyous Entry,excludes any kind of violence or abuse, be it to property, body, or soul, so that theking is bound by virtue of the Joyous Entry to leave every person in possession oftheir freedom, not only of property or body but also of soul, that is, of conscience.

That this interpretation might seem rather far-fetched did not escape theauthor of either pamphlet, but in its support both cited a treaty betweenBrabant and Flanders concluded in (and published, as a timely re-minder, in ), in which the vague phrase in any manner is glossed tomean in soul, body, or property. Contrary to what some people think,says one of the pamphlets, it is a wonder to see how careful our ances-tors always were to preserve and to retain the enjoyment of this right,freedom of conscience, which until the arrival of the Inquisition we al-ways enjoyed. Even more remarkably, both pamphlets go on to equatefreedom of conscience explicitly with freedom of worship. Not eventhe Inquisition could stop people from believing what they wished; thefreedom which it took from us, therefore (so the argument went), musthave been the right to profess our beliefs publicly and to worship God inaccordance with them.Thus by anachronism religious tolerance took on the aura of an an-

cient custom. Once gained, that aura did not readily fade. Eighteen yearslater, Cornelis Pieterszoon Hooft, burgomaster of Amsterdam, thoughtit entirely plausible to tell his fellow regents that it was in accordancewith the ancient manner of governing this land and this city that theybear with each others mistakes in matters of faith and not disturb anyperson on account of religion. In , Pieter de la Court representedwhat he perceived as a decline in religious tolerance as a departure fromthe original maxims of his province.

Some of its apologists, however, represented the Revolt as a fightnot just for specific freedoms, plural, but for freedom, singular and

Anon., Een goede Waerschouwinghe voor den Borgheren, ende besonder dien vanden leden vanAntwerpen/ Datsy hen niet en souden laten verlockenmet het soet aengheuen vande bedriechlyckeArtijkelen van peyse/ onlancx ghecomen van Cuelen (n.p., ), fo. r.

Anon. (eenen goede[n] liefhebber des vreedts), Een Goede vermaninge aen de goedeborghers van Bruessele/ dat sy souden blijuen in goede eendracht/ ende niet treden in partij-schap teghen malcanderen om eenighe saecken (Ghent, ), fo. . Cf. Anon., Letterenvan Verbande tuss. Brabant ende Vlaenderen, ghedaen ende besloten int Jaer 1339 (Delft,); P.A.M. Geurts, De Nederlandse opstand in de pamfletten (Utrecht, ),pp. , .

Gerard Brandt, Historie der Reformatie, en andre kerkelyke geschiedenissen, in en ontrent deNederlanden, vols. (Amsterdam, ), vol. , p. .

Pieter de la Court, The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republic of Holland(New York, ), p. .

Benjamin J. Kaplan

abstract. Jacob vanWesembeeke, Pensionary of Antwerp, played a crucialrole in developing this argument. In he described the people of theNetherlands as having always been not just lovers, in the manner com-mon to other peoples, but special and extremely ardent advocates, ob-servers, and defenders of their ancient liberty and freedom. William ofOrange, for whom Wesembeeke worked for a time as propagandist, tookup the theme, characterising Netherlanders as exceptional lovers andadvocates of their liberty and enemies of all violence and oppression.

Both men attributed a religious dimension to the liberty so cherished,Wesembeeke speaking reverently, for example, of the anchienne liberteau spirituel of the Netherlands. Thus the Dutch devotion to religiousfreedom was given a basis in national character as well as custom.That character took on a sharper profile over the course of the Revolt,

especially after the return of the southern provinces to the Spanish fold.Northerners Hollanders in particular increasingly appropriated tothemselves the special love of freedom once more widely conceded.

One way they did so was through the myth of the Batavians, which hadbeen circulating since the s but gained enormous cultural promi-nence from the s. Histories, dramas, and paintings celebrated thisancient Germanic tribe, known chiefly from the writings of Tacitus, asancestors of the contemporary Hollanders and founders of their polity.Virtuous, industrious, pious, and clean, paragons of a simple decency,the Batavians appear in works like Hugo Grotius Liber de AntiquitateReipublicae Batavicae () above all as fiercely independent. The taleof their struggle for autonomy from Rome was taken to prefigure theHollanders own struggle with Spain and predict its happy outcome.

In another work, the Parallelon Rerum-Publicarum Liber Tertius (writtenaround ), Grotius compared the formerly Batavian, now Hollandicpeople to the ancient Athenians and Romans. The former emerge as su-perior in almost every respect to the paragons of civilisation venerated

Ch. Rahlenbeck (ed.), Memoires de Jacques de Wesembeke (Brussels, ), p. . Cf.Martin van Gelderen (ed.), The Dutch Revolt (Cambridge, ), p. xiii.

Quoted in Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt (Cambridge, ), p. ; cf. Catherine Secretan, Les privile`ges, berceau de la liberte(Paris, ), p. .

Secretan, Les privile`ges, p. . See E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and W.R.E. Velema (eds.), Vrijheid. Een geschiedenis van devijftiende tot de twintigste eeuw (Amsterdam, ).

Hugo de Groot, De Oudheid van de Bataafse nu Hollandse Republiek, ed. G.C. Molewijk(Weesp, ); I. Schoffer, The Batavian Myth during the Sixteenth and SeventeenthCenturies, in J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann (eds.),Britain and the Netherlands, vol. :Some Political Mythologies (The Hague, ), pp. ; Simon Schama, The Embar-rassment of Riches. An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, ),pp. ; Marijke Spies, Verbeeldingen van vrijheid: David en Mozes, Burgerhart enBato, Brutus en Cato, De Zeventiende Eeuw (), .


by Renaissance Europe. This experiment in comparative ethnology rep-resents the Revolt as a fight by the Hollanders for the freedom of theirsouls as well as of their bodies, and exults in theHollanders combinationof piety and tolerance:

This [Reformed] religion . . .we maintain with a rare constancy and we spread itas we extend our territory. . . .We prescribe it without forcing it on anyone [zonderhem af te perssen], and those who take no pleasure in it with us we consider worthymore of pity than of punishment. We have no commands to give to the humanheart; we torture no souls. Let each one believe what he can; in this regard toolet be inviolate [ongeschonden].

The reverse side of such self-congratulation was the anxious xenophobiadirected at Calvinist refugees from the southern provinces. This emotionpervaded towns like Leiden and Utrecht, where such refugees comprisedone-third or more of the membership of the Reformed Church, but wascommon enough elsewhere. Southern Calvinists were accused of anintolerance that mirrored that of the Spanish and was equally pernicious.Their opponents said that the Calvinists form of church governmentmerely replaced the old Spanish Inquisition with a new Genevan one,and that their violent efforts to suppress Catholicism, having fatallyundermined the Revolt in the south, now threatened to do the same in thenorth. The story of Gents Calvinist theocracy was referred to frequently,in tones of dark foreboding. A famous speech delivered in byBurgomaster Hooft encapsulates much of this thinking. Occasionedby the excommunication and imprisonment of Goosen Vogelsang, amaker of velvet, it was a tirade against the influence of foreigners, bywhich Hooft meant Calvinist refugees from the south, within the DutchReformed Churches. The management of affairs, Hooft argued, shouldbe in the hands of persons of a prudent, steady, and peaceable dispo-sition, which qualities, I believe, prevail more among the natives thanamong those who have come here to live from other lands. These foreignministers and elders, trying to impose on the natives an alien orthodoxy

Hugo Grotius, Parallelon Rerum-Publicarum Liber Tertius: de moribus ingenioque populo-rum Atheniensium, Romanorum, Batavorum, ed. J. Meerman, vols. (Haarlem, ), vol. , p. . See also Christian Gellinek, Hugo Grotius (Boston, ), pp. ; E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier, Grotius, Hooft and the Writing of History in the DutchRepublic, in A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands, vol. :Clios Mirror. Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands (Zutphen, ), pp. ;H. Kampinga, De opvattingen over onze oudere vaderlandsche geschiedenis bij de Hollandschehistorici der XVIe en XVIIe eeuw (The Hague, ), pp. , , , , .

Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines. Confession and Community in Utrecht, (Oxford, ), pp. ; Christine Jane Kooi, The Reformed Community ofLeiden, , PhD thesis, YaleUniversity (), especially pp. ; Joke Spaans,Haarlem na de Reformatie. Stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, (The Hague,), p. .

Benjamin J. Kaplan

and, more importantly, an alien demand for orthodoxy, show that theydo not know the nature of the land and its people; Hollanders, declaredHooft, are accustomed, like the Bereans, to examine Scripture forthemselves. Hooft ignored the fact that few of the Reformed Churchesin the north were ever completely dominated by southerners, and thenonly briefly. He remained silent about the extremism of some of his ownlandsmen.In the seventeenth century, Remonstrants developed further this strat-

egy of branding intolerance a foreign vice and imputing an innate tol-erance to the Dutch. In his Kerckelijcke Historie, Johannes Wtenbogaerthailed the Revolt against Spain as a fight for the pure Gospel and forfreedom of conscience. To these two causes, he suggested, the Dutch hadbeen devoted since the beginning of the Reformation and so remained especially Hollanders who, whatever their persuasion (excepting theRoman and Genevan heretic-hunters and -burners, and those who sup-port them), do not like the burning of books under any circumstances.

Of course, no one needed reminding who the most outspoken cham-pions of religious tolerance were in contemporary Holland. In effect,Wtenbogaert was claiming the Dutch character to be inherentlyRemonstrant in its religious sensibility. His narrative of the Reformationbolstered such claims by highlighting the continuity between his ownpartys beliefs and those of the first Dutch reformers.

Other Remonstrant authors adopted the same strategic use of histor-ical narrative, but located the origins of Dutch Protestantism not in thes, as didWtenbogaert, but earlier, with Erasmus of Rotterdam. It wasGrotius who, in his Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae Pietas (), firstmade the case for the broad popularity of Erasmian piety in the Habs-burg Netherlands; he who first represented the Remonstrants as the heirsof this Netherlandish tradition, tracing a continuous chain of influencesfrom the great Christian humanist, via the so-called Libertines of thelate sixteenth century, to his own party. As has been shown, the facts

Brandt, Historie der Reformatie, vol. , pp. , . Joannes Wtenbogaert, Kerckelijcke Historie, Vervattende verscheyden Gedenckwaerdigesaeken, In de Christenheyt voorgevallen, van Het Jaer vier hondert af, tot in het Jaer sestienhondert ende negentien. Voornamentlijck in dese Geunieerde Provincien (Rotterdam, ),p. .

This paragraph is indebted to the insights of Charles H. Parker, To the Attentive, Non-partisan Reader. The Appeal to History and National Identity in the Religious Disputesof the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands, Sixteenth Century Journal (), .Cf. also D. Nauta, De Reformatie in Nederland in de historiografie, in P.A.M. Geurtsand A.E.M. Janssen (eds.), Geschiedschrijving in Nederland, vol. : Geschiedbeoefening(The Hague, ), p. .

HugoGrotius,OrdinumHollandiae acWestfrisiae Pietas, ed. Edwin Rabbie (Leiden, ),p. .


of the matter were much more complicated. Erasmus influence in theNetherlands was as diffuse as it was pervasive, and the inclination to viewethical behaviour as the essence of Christianity did not necessarily owe itsinspiration to him. Dirck Coornhert, Hubert Duifhuis, Caspar Coolhaes,and other religious leaders known as Libertines were inspired by spiritu-alist and Protestant teachings at least as much as by humanist ones. AndJacob Arminius certainly did not derive from Erasmus his position onpredestination. By constructing retrospectively such a line of influence,however, Grotius gave his own religious party a venerable genealogy. As anative Hollander, uniquely eminent scholar, and champion of a purifiedChristianity, Erasmus was the perfect father-figure for a religious move-ment intent on portraying itself as autochthonous, popular, and distinctlyDutch. Gerard Brandts Historie der Reformatie stands as a masterfulelaboration of the same historical schema. It represents Erasmus notjust as a bona fide Reformer, but as the wisest and most importantin all Europe: This man led freedom into the Christian church / . . . /A Rotterdammer teaches the world Reformation. For Brandt, as forGrotius, the historic popularity of Erasmus in the Netherlands impliedthat the Remonstrant faith had the sympathy of the Dutch people and thereligious tolerance by which it survived their support. By Brandts day, italso conveyed a message about the legitimacy of the political patrons oftolerance, the pro-States, anti-Orangist party. Remonstrant viewpointsdominated Dutch historiography to the end of the Republic and even

G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes, De doorwerking van de Moderne Devotie met name bijde Remonstranten, in P. Bange et al. (eds.), De doorwerking van de Moderne Devotie.Windesheim (Hilversum, ), pp. ; M.E.H.N. Mout, Limits andDebates. A Comparative View of Dutch Toleration in the Sixteenth and EarlySeventeenth Centuries, in C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G.H.M. PosthumusMeyjes (eds.), The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic (Leiden/New York/Cologne, ), pp. ; Benjamin J. Kaplan, Hubert Duifhuis and the Nature ofDutch Libertinism, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis (), ; Kaplan, Calvinists andLibertines, chapter ; Bruce Mansfield, Phoenix of His Age. Interpretations of Erasmus c. (Toronto, ), chapter ; J.C.H. Blom and C.J. Misset, Een onvervalschteNederlandsche geest. Enkele historiografische kanttekeningen bij het concept van eennationaal-gereformeerde richting, in E.K. Grootes and J. den Haan (eds.), Geschiede-nis godsdienst letterkunde. Opstellen aangeboden aan dr. S.B.J. Zilverberg (Roden, ),pp. ; Carl Bangs, Arminius. A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Grand Rapids, MI,), pp. et seq.

Deez heeft de vrijheit in de Christen kerk geleidt / . . . / Een Rotterdammer leerdtde werelt Reformeren: Brandt, Historie der Reformatie, vol. , caption to the portraitof Erasmus, between pp. and . Cf. Peter Burke, The Politics of ReformationHistory: Burnet and Brandt, in A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (eds.), Britain and theNetherlands, vol. :Clios Mirror. Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands (Zutphen,), pp. ; S.B.J. Zilverberg, Gerard Brandt als kerkhistoricus,Nederlands Archiefvoor Kerkgeschiedenis (), . The historical schema of Remonstrant historianPhilip van Limborch was essentially the same; cf. Pieter Jacobus Barnouw, Philippus vanLimborch (The Hague, ), pp. , .

Benjamin J. Kaplan

beyond, thanks partly to the influence of the Collegiant Jan WagenaarsVaderlandsche Historie ().

Proclaiming themselves the heirs of the original Dutch Reformationand the bearers of a genuinely Dutch Protestantism, Remonstrants foundit natural to pray not just for their own welfare but for that of the entireDutch fatherland. According to Peter van Rooden, the Remonstrantswere the first group of dissenters to celebrate the national days of fast-ing, prayer, and thanksgiving (bededagen) decreed by the States-General,adopting the custom as early as . Remonstrant ministers like SimonEpiscopius proclaimed that God had bestowed his blessing on the DutchRepublic and allowed it to prosper as a reward for the religious toler-ance practised by its government. By the end of the seventeenth century,Mennonite and Lutheran congregations commonly celebrated the sameoccasions with similar prayers. In the eighteenth century, the differentdenominations even competed to display the greatest patriotism. All ofthem attributed the special divine status of the land in part to its tolerance,which allowed their churches to function.

That hundreds of foreigners who visited the Republic remarked on itsreligious tolerance is well known; indeed, by the late seventeenth centurythe Netherlands clearly stood for tolerance in the minds of foreigners,just as it does today. From the s, if not earlier, the itinerary of foreigntourists conventionally included a sampling of churches and synagogues;guidebooks, a genre that developed later in the century, pointed them tothe same. Like modern tourists, visitors took aesthetic pleasure in the artand architecture; by attending services they satisfied what we would callan anthropological interest in foreign customs and rituals (those of theJews and Quakers exercised a special fascination, accounts suggest); and,like todays tourist in the red light district, some of them also deriveda thrill from exposure to things forbidden at home. Savoured or con-demned, religious pluralism featured as a standard topos in their travel ac-counts, which, in this regard as in others, tended to conflate the Republicas a whole with Holland. Indeed, based sometimes on only a quick visit

See G.J. Schutte, A Subject of Admiration and Encomium. The History of the DutchRepublic as Interpreted by Non-Dutch Authors in the Second Half of the EighteenthCentury, in A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands, vol. :CliosMirror. Historiography in Britain and theNetherlands (Zutphen, ), p. ; L.H.M.Wessels, Jan Wagenaar (). Bijdrage tot een herwaardering, in P.A.M. Geurtsand A.E.M. Janssen (eds.), Geschiedschrijving in Nederland, vol. : Geschiedschrijvers(The Hague, ), pp. .

Peter van Rooden, Dissenters en bededagen. Civil religion ten tijde van de Republiek,Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (), . Although Van Rooden suggests that many Catholics probably celebrated the samebiddagen, it is unclear whether they expressed (or felt) the same gratitude as did Protestantdissenters for the nations tolerance.


to Amsterdam, German accounts made sweeping generalisations aboutDutch tolerance. In part, this was visitors seeing what they were preparedto see and reporting back what they themselves had read in earlier reports.C.D. van Strien has noted that English authors of travel accounts oftenborrowed heavily from the travel guides and earlier accounts they hadread. Such literature became a vehicle for the circulation of stereotypes.So did the periodical literature of the Enlightenment, which likewise re-presented the Dutch as an especially tolerant, freedom-loving people.

It was not just foreigners, though, who defined the Dutch as tolerant;rather, as we have seen, the definition originated among groups withinthe Netherlands for whom it had special, partisan meanings. If it becamepart of a more widely shared self-definition, it was not because all theDutch were happy about this characteristic of their society, only that theyacknowledged it and saw it as distinctive. Nor should this sense of collec-tive identity be equated with modern nationalism. Scholars have amplydocumented the ambiguities of the term nation in the early modernperiod and the continued strength of local and provincial loyalties. As inother spheres, so in the cultural Holland had a disproportionate influ-ence within the Republic and was able to project aspects of its own self-definition on the larger whole. Certain cities, like Haarlem and Gouda,consciously cultivated reputations for tolerance; others, like Dordrechtand Groningen, did not. Only towards the end of the eighteenth cen-tury did the notion emerge that each political nation should comprisea single, organically united, culturally and linguistically unique Volk. Aproduct of Herder and German Romanticism, the equation of nationand Volk gave new power and meaning to the notion of Dutch religioustolerance.

Julia Bientjes, Holland und der Hollander im Urteil deutscher Reisender (Groningen, ), especially pp. ; Bots, Tolerantie of gecultiveerde tweedracht,; Christian Gellinek (ed.), Europas Erster Baedeker. Filip von Zesens Amsterdam (New York, ); Marijke Meijer Drees, Andere landen, andere mensen. De beeldvorm-ing van Holland versus Spanje en Engeland omstreeks (The Hague, ), especiallypp. , ; R. Murris, La Hollande et les Hollandais au XVIIe et au XVIIIesie`cles vus par les Francais (Paris, ); C.D. van Strien, British Travellers in Hollandduring the Stuart Period. Edward Browne and John Locke as Tourists in the United Provinces(Leiden, ), especially pp. , , , , , ; and Madeleine vanStrien-Chardonneau, Le voyage de Hollande: recits de voyageurs francais dans les Provinces-Unies, (Oxford, ), pp. . See also Herman Meyer, Das Bild desHollanders in der deutschen Literatur, in Herman Meyer, Zarte Empirie. Studien zurLiteraturgeschichte (Stuttgart, ), pp. ; and the new anthology, Kees van Strien,Touring the Low Countries. Accounts of British Travellers, (Amsterdam, );Schutte, A Subject of Admiration and Encomium , pp. .

F.M. Barnard, Herders Social and Political Thought (Oxford, ); Lewis W. Spitz,Natural Law and the Theory of History in Herder, Journal of the History of Ideas (), .

Benjamin J. Kaplan

According to the Romantics and their heirs, every Volk had a uniquespirit, or character. Generally the qualities attributed in the nineteenthcentury to the Dutch volksgeest, or volkskarakter, were the same ones at-tributed more than two centuries earlier: love of freedom first and fore-most, followed by virtue, tolerance, a deep biblical piety, industry, clean-liness, chastity (among women), and certain qualities of moderation andsteady temper captured by the term phlegmatic and by Dutch wordsdifficult to translate like nuchter and bedaard (against these, the most com-monly mentioned vices were greed, drunkenness, stupidity, and crude-ness). Explanations for these qualities to the extent that considered oneswere offered shifted a bit more. Early modern scholars had followed theancient Greeks in pointing to climate and soil as their chief causes. Warmor cold, wet or dry, the environment determined a peoples body type andcharacter. While the Dutch, then, shared many traits with other northernpeoples, Hollands cold and wetness, it was said, gave its dwellers specialqualities of soul and of mind. In the nineteenth century, the great lib-eral historian Robert Fruin raised two others forces to a level equal withenvironment: race and social conditions. By the first he meant partic-ularly to distinguish the Germanic from the Roman (that is, romance-language-speaking) volksaard; the latter referred to a peoples economicactivities. Commerce, dominant in the Netherlands, demands freedomof movement; it cannot suffer to be regulated or ruled and has theeffect of stimulating love of freedom in all domains, the religious as wellas the political. Fruin added cynically that such love did not necessarilytranslate into liberality, a willingness to grant others the freedom youdemand for yourself, citing as an example the way the Dutch ruled theircolonies. But his was a dissenting opinion, and even he did not pur-sue the thought consequently. If he had, he might well have cited theReformation as another example. Instead, he subscribed completely tothe Whiggish view of it as a glorious phase in the centuries-long strugglebetween two great forces, centralised tyranny and the spirit of civil andreligious liberty, as John Lothrop Motley put it. Both men, along withBakhuizen van den Brink and other liberal historians of the nineteenthcentury, projected onto the past the liberal Protestantism of their ownage. To them, freedom religious, civic, economic was an essential,

Grotius, Parallelon, vol. , pp. ; Meijer Drees, Andere landen, andere mensen, espe-cially pp. , ; Kampinga,De opvattingen over onze oudere vaderlandsche geschiede-nis, pp. . Among the Renaissance scholars who preceded Grotius in developing thisclimatological theory was the French political theorist Jean Bodin, unmentioned byMeijer Drees. See the modern translation: Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehen-sion of History (New York, ), pp. .

John Lothrop Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic (London, ), p. .


indivisible principle, and necessarily entailed religious tolerance. Historywas the story of its progress.

Liberal church historians, especially members of the Groningenschool of Protestant scholarship, applied the same thinking more speci-fically to the course of the Dutch Reformation. On the one hand, as anorthern Germanic people the Dutch were said to incline naturally toProtestantism, the religion of freedom. On the other, their unique traitswere said to give Dutch Protestantism distinctive qualities. Bernard terHaar wrote of the Reformation in the Netherlands that it proceeded en-tirely from the spirit of the people [volksgeest], and took, from its earliestbeginning, an independent course that was entirely in accord with thepeoples character [volkskarakter]. That character was tolerant, confi-dent in human freewill, and inclined to view sermon-on-the-mount ethicsas the essence of Christianity. Also writing around mid-century, PetrusHofstede de Groot portrayed Calvinism as a belief system imposed byforeigners on the Dutch people which disrupted and disturbed the natu-ral, genuinely Netherlandish development of the Christian spirit here.

In the evolution of that spirit, the Groningen school assigned to Erasmusa very special place. As Barend Glasius put it,

Erasmuss distinctive manner of thinking and acting, with respect to the refor-mation of the church, had its basis chiefly in his temperament and character asa Netherlander; and . . . reciprocally the great influence which he exercised onthe supporters of Reformation and the course of Reformation in our fatherland

Robert Fruin, Het karakter van het Nederlandsche volk, in Robert Fruin, Verspreidegeschriften, ed. P.J. Blok, P.L. Muller, and S. Muller, vols. (The Hague, ), vol. ,pp. (on liberality, p. ); Robert Fruin, Het antirevolutionnaire staatsrecht vanGroen van Prinsterer ontvouwd en beoordeeld, in Robert Fruin, Verspreide geschriften,ed. P.J. Blok, P.L. Muller, and S. Muller, vols. (The Hague, ), vol. , pp. ; Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, pp. , , , and passim; J.W. Smit, Fruinen de partijen tijdens de Republiek (Groningen, ), especially pp. , ; JohnPaul Elliott, Protestantization in the Northern Netherlands, a Case Study: The Classisof Dordrecht , PhD thesis, Columbia University (), pp. ; HerbertButterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, ). While in many ways theliberal historiography of the nineteenth century was a continuation and development ofthe Remonstrant/Staatsgezinde historiographic school of the Republic (represented byhistorians like Brandt, Van Limborch, and Wagenaar), Smit shows that Fruin departedsignificantly from this tradition in his appreciation for centralised governmental authority.

B. Glasius and H.M.C. van Oosterzee, Galerij van Nederlandsche geloofshelden voor deevangelie-waarheid (Tiel, ), especially pp. ; Petrus Hofstede de Groot, DeGroninger godgeleerden in hunne eigenaardigheid: toespraak aan zijne vroegere en tegen-woordige leerlingen, na vervulde vijfentwintigjarige hoogleeraarsbediening (Groningen, ),especially pp. .

Bernard ter Haar, De geschiedenis der Kerkhervorming, in tafereelen: een leesboek ter beves-tiging der protestanten in hun christelijk geloof (Amsterdam, ), p. .

Quoted in Nauta, De Reformatie in Nederland in de historiografie, p. , whose treat-ment of the nineteenth-century church historians I largely follow.

Benjamin J. Kaplan

seems to have resulted from the Netherlanders natural conformity with theircountryman.

Even before Erasmus, though, came Geert Groote, Wessel Gansfort, andthe Brothers of the Common Life; for Glasius and the others, these menand the movement with which they were associated, the Modern Devo-tion, expressed the first distinctly Dutch conception of Christendom andwere the true originators of the Dutch Reformation.

In the early twentieth century, the Leiden church historians FredrikPijper and Johannes Lindeboom brought a greater scholarly rigour to thestudy of the Dutch Reformation, but interpretatively they stood directlyin the tradition of the Groningen school. To denote the distinctly Dutchreligious movement he saw unfolding in the sixteenth century, Pijpercoined the label national-Netherlandic reform movement (nationaal-Nederlandse reformatorische richting), which Lindeboom later shortenedto Netherlandic-reformist (Nederlandse-reformatorische) or alternately tonational-Reformed (nationaal-Gereformeerd ). Both men saw the move-ment as essentially Erasmian in character and continuing in a straightline of influence down to the Remonstrants. They did not celebrateexuberantly, but they did maintain the same pantheon of Dutch re-formers as their predecessors, which included such figures as CornelisHoen, Anastasius Veluanus, Hubert Duifhuis, and Dirk Coornhert.

Lindeboom described the Niederlandisch Frommigkeitstypus that thesemen embodied as oriented towards the Bible (especially in its originallanguages), optimistic about human nature, and somewhat indifferent toceremonies; it strives, he said, for apostolic simplicity and for pure be-haviour more than pure doctrine. Hendrik Enno van Gelder continuedthe same historiographic tradition into the s. While dropping the na-tionalist terminology, he was unabashed in his anachronism: he explicitlypresented the same cast of characters as the most modern of their time,

Barend Glasius, Verhandeling over Erasmus als Nederlandsch Kerkhervormer (The Hague,), p. .

Petrus Hofstede de Groot, Johan Wessel Ganzevoort, op het negende halve eeuwfeest zijnergeboorte herdacht (Groningen, ); Ter Haar, De geschiedenis der Kerkhervorming, intafereelen; B. ter Haar, W. Moll, and E.B. Swalue (eds.), Geschiedenis der christelijke kerkin Nederland, in tafereelen, vols. (Amsterdam, ).

Fredrik Pijper, Geestelijke stroomingen in Nederland voor de opkomst van het remon-strantisme, in G.J. Heering (ed.), De remonstranten, gedenkboek bij het -jarig bestaander Remonstrantsche Broederschap (Leiden, ), pp. ; Fredrik Pijper, Erasmus ende Nederlandsche Reformatie (Leiden, ); Johannes Lindeboom, De confessioneele on-twikkeling der Reformatie in de Nederlanden (The Hague, ); Johannes Lindeboom,Erasmus Bedeutung fur die Entwicklung des geistigen Lebens in den Niederlanden,Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte (), ; Nauta, De Reformatie in Nederland inde historiografie; Blom and Misset, Een onvervalschte Nederlandsche geest .

Lindeboom, Erasmus Bedeutung, .


unconscious precursors of liberal Protestantism and of modern emanci-pation fromChurch supervision, conscious defenders of tolerance, some-times even of religious freedom. InThe Two Reformations of the SixteenthCentury (), Enno van Gelder elevated Erasmian humanism to its ul-timate status as not just a bona fide Reformation, but as the majorone of the sixteenth century, exceeding the Protestant Reformation in itsradicalism and long-term impact.

Of course, in every age there have been groups who constructed Dutchreligious identity differently. During the Reformation, the Calvinist min-ister Reynier Donteclock made the Hollanders out to be natural-bornspiritualists; it was their nature and condition, he postulated, not tomake a work of religion hence their support in great numbers forhis foe, Coornhert. Usually, though, the different religious partiesclaimed theDutch character to incline naturally towards their own beliefs.The Counter-Remonstrant theologian Jacobus Trigland implied as muchin his Kerckelycke Geschiedenissen (), the alternate account of theReformation he offered as rebuttal to Wtenbogaerts Kerckelijcke Historie.Catholic authors used history similarly, not to claim that the Dutch weretolerant but to emphasise how ancient and deeply rooted the Catholicfaith was in their land. Such was the overarching purpose, for exam-ple, of Hugo van Heussens Batavia Sacra, sive Res Gestae ApostolicorumVirorum, Qui Fidem Bataviae Primi Intulerunt (). In the nineteenthcentury, both Calvinist and Catholic historians projected on to the pasttheir own, confessional visions of the modern Dutch nation. In the twen-tieth century, some historians have employed a similar essentialism toexplain the historic popularity of Anabaptism and Mennonism in theNetherlands. Pijper viewed the sixteenth-century Anabaptists as consti-tuting the left wing of his national-Netherlandic Reform movement.More recently, William Nijenhuis has declared that Anabaptism was atypically Dutch phenomenon and that two of the [Mennonites] mostimportant characteristics were in conformity with the Dutch character:individualism and a morality which tended towards legalism.

H.A. Enno van Gelder, Revolutionnaire Reformatie. De vestiging van de Gereformeerde Kerkin de Nederlandse gewesten, gedurende de eerste jaren van de Opstand tegen Filips II, (Amsterdam, ), pp. . Cf. H.A. Enno van Gelder, Vrijheid en onvrijheid in deRepubliek. Geschiedenis der vrijheid van drukpers en godsdienst van tot (Haarlem,), especially p. ; andH.A. Enno vanGelder, Humanisten en libertijnen, Erasmusen C.P. Hooft, Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis (), , .

H.A. Enno van Gelder, The Two Reformations in the Sixteenth Century. A Study of theReligious Aspects and Consequences of Renaissance and Humanism (The Hague, ).

Quoted in H. Bonger, Leven en werk van Dirk Volckertsz. Coornhert (Amsterdam, ),p. .

Pijper, Geestelijke stroomingen, pp. ; W. Nijenhuis, The Dutch Reformation, inJ.A. Hebly (ed.), Lowland Highlights. Church and Oecumene in the Netherlands (Kampen,

Benjamin J. Kaplan

It is the liberal vision ofDutch identity, though, that has prevailed in thetwentieth century, and still circulates widely. Some theologians continueto find meaningful the notion of a Dutch theologische volksziel, which theyconceive of as anti-dogmatic, humanistic, and ecumenical. More thana few specialists in religious history continue to explain the tolerance ofthe Dutch Republic as a product of the unique power of the Erasmianspirit in its progenitors homeland, and/or in terms of a Low Countriestradition. As for the most popular and widely read historians Huizinga, Romein, Schama they all project onto their broad screensvariants of the same vision. Even Schama sees the very soul of Dutchnational identity as Erasmian, and while he does not credit it directly forthe Republics tolerance, he does represent it as a unifying force that gavepeople of all religions, from the Catholic painter Jan Steen to the PietisticCalvinist Jacob Cats, a common ethos. Where Schama departs from hispredecessors is that, eschewing essentialism and teleology, he regardsDutchness not as a quality determined by race, climate, topography, oreconomics, but as a cultural construct, something the Dutch fashionedfor themselves in the early years of the Republic. And indeed, that is pre-cisely what they were doing when they defined themselves, among otherthings, as tolerant.

Recent decades, however, have seen a reaction set in against the cele-bration of Dutch religious tolerance; indeed, some scholars have sug-gested theDutchRepublic was not so tolerant after all. Jonathan Israel hasused some of the strongest language. The outlawing of Catholicism andelevation of Reformed Protestantism as the official faith of the Republicin the period entailed the decisive rejection of toleration bythe Dutch regent class. What prevailed thereafter and through the

), p. , critiqued in Otto de Jong, How Protestant are Mennonites?, in AlastairHamilton, Sjouke Voolstra, and Piet Visser (eds.), From Martyr to Muppy. A HistoricalIntroduction to Cultural Assimilation Processes of a Religious Minority in the Netherlands: TheMennonites (Amsterdam, ), p. . See the remark similar to Nijenhuiss in Jan enAnnie Romein, De Lage Landen bij de zee (Utrecht, ), p. .

E.g. A. van Beek, Het Nederlandse van de Nederlandse theologie, in S.C. Dik andG.W. Muller (eds.), Het hemd is nader dan de rok. Zes voordrachten over het eigene van deNederlandse cultuur (Assen, ), pp. .

For Erasmian spirit see e.g. Samme Zijlstra, Tgeloove is vrij. De tolerantiediscussiein de Noordelijke Nederlanden tussen en , in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra (ed.),Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid. Afwijking en tolerantie in Nederland van de zestiende eeuwtot heden (Hilversum, ), p. ; JamesTracy, Erasmus, Coornhert and the Acceptanceof Religious Disunity in the Body Politic. A Low Countries Tradition?, in C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes (eds.), The Emergence of Tolerancein the Dutch Republic (Leiden/New York/Cologne, ), pp. .

Johan Huizinga, Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century (London, ), pp. ; Romein, De Lage Landen bij de zee, pp. et seq.; Schama, The Embarrassment ofRiches, especially pp. , . On the modern continuation of this process of culturalconstruction, see Van Ginkel, Op zoek naar eigenheid.


entire seventeenth century was an ambivalent semi-tolerance . . . seethingwith tension. The case of Amsterdams Remonstrants exemplifies whatIsrael sees more broadly as the experience of the dissenting churches: thetolerance granted them was really, in his view, a form of concealed intol-erance, for by confining them to a single schuilkerk it condemned themto the status of a small and marginalised group. Outside the General-ity Lands, Catholics, whose number Israel believes has been exaggerated,formed inmost places an equally small and tamedminority. In her contri-bution to this volume, Joke Spaans suggests similarly that containment,not tolerance, was the policy of Dutch regents towards the non-Reformedchurches. In any event, the true test of tolerance, according to Israel, wasnot such rival churches at all but radicals who broke with traditionalChristianity altogether: Socinians, deists, and especially Spinozists, whoenjoyed scant freedom of expression and on occasion suffered direct per-secution. Only in the eighteenth century did a genuine tolerance, inspiredby the Enlightenment, come to prevail.Other scholars have denigrated what tolerance did exist by impugning

its motives. Sometimes they allow a word or two or a subtly disparag-ing tone to carry the whole weight of their judgement, as when MarijkeGijswijt-Hofstra uses the phrase knip-op-de-beurstolerantie. As she andothers point out, by facilitating commerce and immigration tolerance wasimmensely profitable. Regents saw its utility also in maintaining peaceand civil order. Of course, the Dutch themselves advertised the eco-nomic benefits of tolerance as early as the sixteenth century, though theirmore sophisticated discourses tended to bundle tolerance into a broaderpackage of advantageous freedoms. And peace and order, it shouldbe recognised,were codewords that referred to a specific status quowhosemaintenance was neither inevitable nor universally desired. To point outthe interests which religious tolerance served is only good history, but toreduce the reasons for its practice to those interests smacks of a reduc-tionism against which all the methodological insights of the last twentyyears counsel. Andrew Pettegree goes to an extreme in arguing that toler-ance was used as ruthlessly and cynically as persecution and intoleranceto further particular political ends. To the magistrates who promoted it,it had no value or meaning in itself; it served merely as a weapon orparty tool in their struggle for power with the ministers of the Reformed

Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall (Oxford,), pp. , , , .

MarijkeGijswijt-Hofstra, Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid, inMarijkeGijswijt-Hofstra(ed.), Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid. Afwijking en tolerantie in Nederland van de zestiendeeeuw tot heden (Hilversum, ), p. .

For an early example see Van Gelderen, The Dutch Revolt, p. xiii. De la Court, The TrueInterest and Political Maxims of the Republic of Holland, is the classic exposition.

Benjamin J. Kaplan

Church. It seems highly questionable, though, whether the forces ofintolerance were themselves always ruthless and cynical, never mind thesupporters of tolerance, of whom a majority never served in government.Moreover, if calls for tolerance were merely a stratagem requiring no con-viction, one would expect them to come equally from all who would havebenefited. Instead, the loudest, most insistent ones came from groupswho represented tolerance as one of their core principles: Libertines inthe earliest years of the Republic; Collegiants, Waterlander Mennonites,and, above all, Remonstrants later. Pettegrees revisionism would take usfrom extreme to extreme from an acceptance of such representationsas the whole story to a cynical dismissal of them altogether.An essay by Gijswijt-Hofstra offers clues to why such revisionism has

taken root among historians. It forms the introduction to a volume en-titled Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid (an appearance, or false sem-blance, of tolerance). Gijswijt-Hofstra does not deny the prevalence ofreligious tolerance in the Republic. She concurs, however, with the para-doxical judgement of Ernst Kossmann that tolerance itself is inherentlyintolerant, since in the very act of tolerating, a dominant group defines itsown behaviour or beliefs as normal and those of the tolerated as deviant.

In other words, tolerance comes up far short of the mark when measuredagainst modern standards of equality and non-discrimination. In the sec-ond place,Gijswijt-Hofstra expresses great unease with the notion of whatshe calls de Nederlandse tolerantie, that is, Dutch tolerance in the sin-gular, even when limiting her consideration to the Republic. She arguesthat religious tolerance was a product largely of extensive regional andlocal autonomy within the Republic, and that so much variation existedin its quality and quantity that to speak of the Republic as tolerant isin itself misleading. This argument subtly conveys an animus against thenationalism that the notion of Dutch tolerance has come to embody.Finally, she criticises as excessive the sheer amount of attention given toreligious tolerance in the Republic. In her view, this fixation perpetuates amyth of the Dutch people as tolerant that obscures the actual intolerancedisplayed in the modern era, towards ethnic minorities in particular.These views resonate strongly with values prevalent in modern culture,

especially within the academy. Multiculturalism has raised standards ofnon-discrimination by exposing cultural biases that had gone unnoticed;

Andrew Pettegree, The Politics of Toleration in the Free Netherlands, , inO.P. Grell and B. Scribner (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation(Cambridge, ), longer quotation from p. .

Gijswijt-Hofstra, Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid, pp. . Note that Israel andKossmann use the term tolerance differently, the former to mean full equality andfreedom of public worship.


nationalism has yielded place to anti-nationalism, veneration of the pastto the deconstruction of historical myths. Beginning in the sixteenth cen-tury, a long succession of groups used the history of religious tolerationas a vehicle through which to define and legitimise their own identity.Distorting it through anachronism and teleology, they shaped that his-tory into something quite a-historical, the idea that the Dutch were bynature tolerant. That idea partakes indeed of the mythical. Formerly itinvited celebration; today it invites debunking. But, in debunking it, weshould remain conscious of the distortions our own ideological commit-ments might introduce.Misleading as it was to see in seventeenth-century tolerance the roots

of modern liberalism, it would be equally misleading to judge it by mod-ern standards. Ambiguous terminology makes it dangerously easy to doso: today the phrase religious tolerance implies religious freedom, whichwe define as a basic human right; it entails freedom of worship, religiousspeech, and assembly, and the legal equality of different religious groups.By contrast, until the Enlightenment to tolerate something meant merelyto souffrir, or grudgingly concede its existence. Tolerance, by its na-ture, attributed a basic illegitimacy to what was being tolerated, just asKossmann says. Thus, to cite but one example, the Discours sur la permis-sion de liberte, written in , contrasted tolerance to official sanction;urging that Protestants and Catholics should remain in the liberty whichthey possess either by permission or by connivance and tolerance, itequated tolerance precisely with that connivence by which non-Calvinistssubsequently were able to worship in the Republic. Adding to the confu-sion, scholars define tolerance variously as an ideology, attitude, patternof social behaviour, governmental policy, or legal structure. How muchtolerance they find in theRepublic seems to depend largely on their choiceof definition.Measuring degrees of tolerance, however, may not be the best way

to advance historical understanding. Instead of heaping praise or cast-ing aspersions, I would urge that we adopt, for the time being, a more

Kossmann has pointed out the same concerning all representations of the Dutch as aparticularly freedom-loving people. E.H. Kossmann, Freedom in Seventeenth-CenturyDutchThought and Practice, in Jonathan I. Israel (ed.),TheAnglo-DutchMoment. Essayson the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact (Cambridge, ), p. .

. . .demeurent en la liberte de laquelle ou par permission ou par connivence & toleranceils sont en possession. Quoted in Catherine Secretan, La tolerance entre politiqueet rhetorique, in C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes(eds.),The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic (Leiden/NewYork/Cologne, ),pp. . Cf. Philip Benedict, Un roi, une loi, deux foix: Parameters for the Historyof Catholic-Reformed Co-existence in France, , in Ole Peter Grell and BobScribner (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, ),pp. .

Benjamin J. Kaplan

descriptive approach, and that, instead of continuing to weigh religiousfervour against self-interest, we explore the many social and cultural di-mensions of confessional co-existence that have never received carefulstudy. In , Simon Groenveld argued provocatively that Dutch soci-ety was first verzuild (columnised) not in the late nineteenth century,as usually maintained, but in the seventeenth. By this he meant thatDutch society, in the period , was divided into comprehensive,largely self-contained religious blocks, each one endogamous, with itsown norms and values, charitable systems, educational institutions, andbusiness networks. Groenvelds conclusions were based on scant infor-mation and premature, to say the least. They raise, however, a host offascinating questions. How common were religiously mixed marriages?DidCatholics, Calvinists, andMennonites go to the same schools? Attendeach others weddings and funerals? Read the same books? Play the samemusic? Did they employ, do business with, give charity to one another?How did confessional co-existence work in practice? And how distinctivereally how unique in time and place were the accommodations and ar-rangements by which the different religious groups in theDutch Republicmanaged to live together? How Dutch, in other words, was Dutch re-ligious tolerance? Ironically, that question remains as unanswered as theothers.

Simon Groenveld,Huisgenoten des geloofs. Was de samenleving in de Republiek der VerenigdeNederlanden verzuild? (Hilversum, ).

3 Religious toleration in the UnitedProvinces: from case to model

Willem Frijhoff

The Republic of the Seven United Provinces offers the rather special caseof a state which called itself mono-confessional and Protestant while atthe same time organising the civic community along the lines of religioustoleration; this was sometimes from conviction and at other times frompolitical expediency. The tension between these two aspects of collec-tive life and its representation confessional co-existence in a state thatclaimed to be Calvinist explains the contrasting images of the UnitedProvinces that we find in both contemporary and more recent literature.The variety of solutions adopted in the different provinces, reputed to beautonomous where religion was concerned, adds still more to the opacityof the general picture.

Perceptions of religious diversity

Over the centuries, the Dutch Republic has forged for itself the solidreputation of being a model of religious toleration, in the European his-torical consciousness. However, on closer observation, we realise thatthis reputation is based on hindsight, at a time when there was a publiclyrecognised Church ( publieke kerk), with its rights and privileges, flankedby confessional groups possessing their own structure but condemned ei-ther to a secondary role or even to near-secret worship. At the beginning,the Dutch model was rather an a-typical solution to religious problemsthat were arising throughout Europe in similar terms. What is more, thismodel survived the internal evolution of the United Provinces; early inthe second half of the seventeenth century the provinces resolutely moved

Several of the paragraphs in this chapter have been published in W. Frijhoff, La tolerancesans edit: la situation dans les Provinces-Unies, in J. Delumeau (ed.), Lacceptation delautre de lEdit de Nantes a` nos jours (Paris, ), pp. . Translated from the Frenchby Mary Robitaille. Translation funded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts andSciences.

H. Bots, Tolerantie of gecultiveerde tweedracht? Het beeld van de Nederlandse tole-rantie bij buitenlanders in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw, Bijdragen en Mededelingenbetreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (), .

Willem Frijhoff

towards a confessionalisation which had proved its worth in neighbour-ing countries. The organic link between religious toleration and com-mercial prosperity was established as early as in Les Delices de laHollande printed fifteen times between and , not to mentiontranslations by Jean-Nicolas de Parival from Lorraine, a master of lan-guages, settled in Leiden. It became a cliche, often repeated by latertravellers, from Basnage to Montesquieu, from the Marquis dArgensonto Voltaire and Diderot, even while Dutch prosperity was undergoing se-rious and lasting setbacks. Praise for the Dutch model was then chieflyused to criticise intolerance at home and to offer an alternative whichseemed to have proved its worth in Holland.

Opinions can obviously diverge as to which term is the most apt toqualify the religious pluralism that existed in Holland in the seventeenthcentury, but the diversity itself was a unanimously established fact, avidlycommented on by contemporaries. However, diversity or pluralism doesnot necessarily mean toleration, which at the very least is the tacit admis-sion of this diversity as permissible. In fact, several degrees of tolerationcan be defined, which cannot easily be distinguished in the modern idiom:toleration in the active sense of the legal freedom to be different hardlyinvolved more than freedom of conscience; toleration in the passive senseof the term was more widespread: in other words, connivance with whatwas not allowed (conniventie or toelating), the non-application of legallyprescribed practice, and the will to turn a blind eye (literally oogluikingin Dutch). It is in this passive sense that toleration usually involved thefreedom of public worship.

But the toleration of dissident cults could go further, provided that theerring brethren always placed themselves in the same spiritual fraternitywith orthodoxy. As long as the socio-Christian order was not threatened,even militant Calvinists could put up with certain differences of opin-ion. Gisbert Voetius (), for example, professor of theology atUtrecht, a defender of Protestant orthodoxy with theocratic leanings,had several dissertations written on this subject. He made a distinctionbetween civil toleration (which included permissio and libertas exercitii )

M. van Strien-Chardonneau, Le voyage de Hollande: recits de voyageurs francais dans lesProvinces-Unies, (Oxford, ), pp. ; R. Murris, La Hollande et lesHollandais au XVIIe et au XVIIIe sie`cles vus par les Francais (Paris, ), pp. ;C.D. van Strien, British Travellers in Holland during the Stuart Period. Edward Browne andJohn Locke as Tourists in the United Provinces (Leiden/New York/Cologne, ); K. vanStrien, Touring the Low Countries. Accounts of British Travellers, (Amsterdam,); J. Bientjes, Holland und der Hollander im Urteil deutscher Reisender ()(Groningen, ). On Parival (c. ), see the article in the Nieuw NederlandschBiografisch Woordenboek (Leiden, ; reprint Leiden, ), vol. , cols. .

G. Voetius, Selectae disputationes theologicae, vols. (Utrecht, ), particularly vol. (), pp. , and vol. (), p. .

Religious toleration in the United Provinces

and ecclesiastical toleration, defined essentially as moderatio and mutuatolerantia, verdraeghsaemheydt in the idiom of the period. In this form,toleration was considered legitimate as long as peace, concord, and unityamong the different Christian confessions remained guaranteed on thebasis of mutual understanding.

People have often talked about the late appearance of the term tolera-tion as a concept of political philosophy in the writings of Locke (whoin rigorously divided civil society, to which one is obliged to belongand thus forced to accept i

Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age

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