In the fall of 1774, during the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the relief of Leiden from its Spanish siege, the noted naturalist, artist and poet Johannes le Francq van Berkhey gave a public recitation of his long dramatic poem Het verheerlijkt Leyden (âLeiden Exaltedâ), in which he sang, with considerable bombast, the praises of the cityâs past and present.1 In one particularly melodramatic section, he offered a passionate retelling of the siege and relief of 1574. One of its passages extolled Leidenâs saviours and excoriated its besiegers:
The siege and relief of Leiden, he assured his spellbound audience, had nothing to do with religion; heroic Leideners of all confessions had valorously defended their city from Spanish troops in the dark days of 1574. The Netherlandsâ enemies were âhated and cursedâ because of their tyranny, not their Catholicism. The âLeiden stampâ, the poet insisted, tolerated no religious coercion but instead demanded freedom. Leiden stood for liberty; for two centuries its siege and relief had been lionised and mythologised as haec libertatis ergo.
Le Francq van Berkhey, an outspoken Orangist and a member of the Reformed Church, naturally associated his winning side with freedom. He insisted in his overwrought verse that the city of Leiden was a paradise of religious freedom,
This chapter examines the principal consequence of the Reformation for early modern Leiden: the emergence of a religiously diverse population in uneasy relationship with the privileged Reformed Church, superintended by a magistracy willing to maintain this diversity but also intent on preserving civic harmony. That religious diversity would in turn complicate human interactions in the city in ways not anticipated in the Middle Ages. The Reformation confronted Leiden, along with the rest of Protestant Europe, with a novel phenomenon: a multiconfessional population. Now polities had to manage populations that were divided along confessional lines; the spiritual unity of medieval Christendom was replaced by multiple confessional Christianities that were more often than not hostile to each other. Recent scholarship has emphasised how widespread this state of affairs was, as well as its manifold political, social and cultural repercussions. Historians such as Benjamin Kaplan and Nicholas Terpstra have examined how nearly all early modern European governments, which had their own official confessional identities, had to contend with religious minorities. The official responses to this diversity could range from suppression to toleration. Socially, multiconfessionalism forced the dispersion and migration of large numbers of European Christians. For the Dutch Republic more specifically, scholars such as Judith Pollmann and Charles Parker have painted a compelling portrait of the accommodation of religious diversity, especially with regard to Catholics, as a protean and tangled mix of public antagonism with private accommodation. Toleration there was a process, not a condition. What Le Francq van Berkhey celebrated as a triumph of harmony among Leideners of different religious stripes was in fact the complicated result of two centuries of both official and informal political and social interaction.4
1
The religious diversity of Leidenâs population had been a fact of life since 1572. The very wars that had brought Spanish armies to besiege the city in 1573â1574 were also directly responsible for the variegated and complicated religious landscape in which Le Francq van Berkhey and his fellow eighteenth-century Leideners of all confessions lived. When, in the summer of 1572, the rebels against the Habsburgs took over the city and its royalist magistrates fled, the new regime joined the cause of revolt against the Habsburg central government, and also by extension joined the cause of reformation.5 In exchange for its support of the rebellion the Reformed Church had within a year secured from the city government the sole right to worship openly as the public church (a French-speaking Walloon Reformed congregation was given a church building about a decade later). All other non-Reformed Christian confessions (at that time principally Catholics, Mennonites and Lutherans) were not forced to join the public church, but they were also not allowed to worship God in public, only in spaces designed to look like private dwellings. The law guaranteed them freedom of conscience, so they could believe as they wished, but they could not express those beliefs in any sort of public space. This would remain the case in Leiden until French revolutionary armies brought complete religious emancipation to all the inhabitants of the Dutch Republic in 1795. Therefore, during the entire lifespan of the Dutch Republic, from the Revolt to the Revolution, Leiden had one official church and a host of tolerated congregations.
This wide degree of religious diversity in Leiden was a direct result of the Reformation, which was by far the most important event in the religious history of early modern Leiden.6 Before 1520, Leiden, like the rest of Latin Christendom, had been spiritually united by baptism in the Catholic Church; there was, in effect, no religious diversity in medieval Leiden, at least institutionally. Paganism was a dim memory of the early Middle Ages, and heresy was uncommon. For at least five hundred years all Leideners belonged to the same universal spiritual community, the corpus christianorum of the medieval Catholic Church. All Leideners were baptised Catholics; in the fifteenth century the cityâs ecclesiastical infrastructure grew rapidly to three parishes, St Peter, St Pancras and Our Dear Lady, as well as at least fifteen cloisters. The sixteenth century shattered this unity. It is difficult to overstate how transformative the Protestant Reformation was for early modern European society and culture; the spiritual uniformity that had once defined medieval Latin Christendom
In 1572 the fortunes of war made reformation permanent in Leiden when the political rebels, the Beggars (Geuzen), took over the city in June of that year. The Reformed Protestant militants (disparaged by their opponents as âCalvinistsâ) who had joined the insurgency demanded the right to worship freely as the price of their support; within a few months they secured control of all three parish churches, the Pieterskerk, Hooglandse kerk and Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk, with the help of anti-Catholic violence perpetrated by Beggar troops.11 The leader of the rebel coalition, Prince William of Orange, laboured hard to broker a religious peace (religievrede) in the insurgent towns so that some sort of confessional coexistence could be worked out, but this hope withered in the face of Reformed militancy, which insisted on the suppression of Catholic âidolatryâ. By the spring of 1573 the public celebration of Catholic sacraments had been outlawed in Holland. Leiden, like nearly every other town in the province of Holland, became officially and publicly a Reformed city.
From 1572 to 1795, therefore, Leiden, like all other Dutch towns, was publicly Reformed, but this officially unified façade masked a much more diverse private reality. As one early seventeenth-century traveller to the city observed with some wonder, âevery Sunday here there is open preaching in three Dutch, one French, one English, one Lutheran and about three Mennonite churches.â12 Reformed Leideners were always the largest confessional group during the republican era, likely achieving majority status sometime in the
This demographic reality presented the civic government of early modern Leiden with a novel and thorny problem: how to manage religious diversity. In this matter they received some guidance from the 1579 Union of Utrecht, a treaty of military alliance between the Netherlandish territories rebelling against the Habsburgs, lands that eventually formed the independent Dutch Republic. This treaty provided a provisional confessional arrangement that became over time the Republicâs functioning ecclesiastical settlement. Article 13 of the Union stipulated that consciences were free but the ability to worship was not, and it gave local authorities the power to superintend religious affairs.15 Thus, in Leiden, as in other rebel-held cities, the Reformed Church enjoyed the status of the privileged, public church, but no one was compelled to join it. All other burghers â those who were not Reformed â were free to believe as they wished or even to adhere to no church at all. Freedom of conscience prevailed; freedom of worship did not. The current consensus among historians is that religious toleration, as the Dutch Republic practiced it, was a protean, complicated and tenuous process.16
What Le Francq van Berkhey celebrated as a triumph of liberty, then, non-Reformed Leideners experienced as a regime of toleration.17 This regime was intended to manage confessional coexistence, and so it created a peculiar
Lokhorstkerk, where the Waterlander Mennonites worshipped
SOURCE: ERFGOED LEIDEN EN OMSTREKEN, HVOL_HS0263
2
The regime of toleration had its origins in the Netherlandsâ tumultuous experience of religious change in the sixteenth century. One of the defining characteristics of the Netherlandish Reformation was the very harsh Habsburg reaction to it; nowhere else in Europe were so many people tried and put to death for heresy.18 So the impetus to tolerate confessional minorities on the part of the Dutch Republicâs urban regents was partly ideological: because of the Habsburg governmentâs harsh anti-heretical judicial regime religious coercion did not sit well in regions long used to their own legal privileges, hence the clause protecting freedom of conscience in the Union of Utrecht. Another part of the impetus was theological: whatever theocratic pretentions it may have had, the Reformed Church refused to play the role of national church, instead insisting on high standards for membership in conformity with its teachings about moral discipline. The Reformed were the privileged, public church because of its truth rather than its universality. Only a minority of the population joined the church initially. Though privileged, the public church was still a minority among minorities, at least until the second half of the seventeenth century. A third factor was practical: if there was to be no forced religious conformity, and if the public church admitted only a select few as members, then local authorities were faced with the task of policing relationships among the various confessions, public and private, to ensure civic harmony and order. A regime of toleration, in which both privileged church and religious minorities were to be carefully superintended, became the only workable ecclesiastical settlement for the cities across the Dutch Republic. Religious diversity was managed rather than suppressed.
It was the town governmentâs obligation, therefore, to manage the religious diversity of Leiden during the republican era in the interest of municipal peace and order.19 Insofar as the magistracy could be said to have had a religious policy, this was it: to make sure that all of the cityâs religious groups got along, or at least co-existed, with each other relatively peacefully so that civic harmony would not be disrupted. And in one particular respect this regime was a success: there were only a handful of instances of interconfessional violence in Leiden during the republican era. The period 1572â1574 first brought sectarian violence to the city in the form of war, when soldiers in the Beggar
A second period that saw sporadic confessional violence came in the 1610s, when the Arminian controversy divided the Reformed Church between Gomarists and Arminians. Gomarist passions against the minority Arminians, especially their ministers, ran so high that in 1610 the gerecht, the college of burgomasters and aldermen that ran the cityâs daily affairs, imprisoned four Leideners for assaulting them and then issued a stern order admonishing burghers to live peaceably with each other despite âdifferent persuasions in religionâ (verscheyden gesintheyt in religie).21 Seven years later, when the religious discord caused by the Arminian controversy grew even worse, a mob that gathered in front of city hall for the annual 3 October celebration hurled insults and stones at the companies of hired troops (waardgelders) contracted to guard the pro-Arminian magistracy. The troops fired over the heads of the mob but killed one person; the gerecht called in the civic militia to restore order.22 A third instance of sectarian violence took place in 1655, when a fistfight between Reformed and Catholic Leideners broke out on the city docks over news about the Catholic persecution of Protestants in the duchy of Savoy.23 These kinds of incidents were more the exception than the rule. Violence between people of different confessions in Leiden was largely confined to a smattering of incidental episodes; in terms of this goal, the prevention of interconfessional violence, the regime of toleration may be deemed a success.
3 The Public Church
The regime of toleration required that all confessions came under the city fathersâ watchful eye, and that included the privileged Reformed Church. If anything, it was the public church that took up most of the Leiden magistracyâs energy and attention in the arena of religious policy during the republican era. This was, to be sure, mostly due to the Reformed Churchâs novelty; it had only achieved legitimacy in 1572. Thanks to the Revoltâs confiscation of church property, it had replaced the old medieval Catholic Church with an unfamiliar ecclesiastical organisation featuring a wholly new theology, liturgy
The immediate issue was church governance. In the pre-Reformation era, the city fathers had exerted some influence on the appointment of parish priests, and so they expected this medieval tradition of collaboration with the church to continue. Already from its beginning in the 1570s, Leidenâs Reformed leadership and its municipal leadership had had sharply different understandings of what the new public churchâs place should be in the larger civic community. The burgomasters expected that the new public church would assume the traditional universal role of the former, now disestablished church: that it would serve as the spiritual home for all Leideners, and would submit itself to the authority of the municipal government. The most zealous âCalvinistsâ (as their opponents called them) on the Reformed consistory (its ruling council of ministers and elders), however, required a profession of faith and submission to moral discipline as conditions of membership; they also insisted on the churchâs autonomy from any worldly control or supervision. The issue came to a head in 1579 over the selection of that yearâs new elders to the consistory; the consistory did not provide the names of its nominees to the magistracy before announcing them publicly, and the magistrates retaliated by refusing to endorse them. This initial dispute plunged Leidenâs Reformed congregation into nearly two years of bitter controversy and, for a time, even schism, and forced the intervention of Prince William of Orange and the States of Holland.24 Ultimately both sides agreed to an âArbitral Accordâ that allowed the magistracy the right of final approval of consistorial candidates, but the bitterness and distrust lingered.
A generation later, in the 1610s, the public church again became embroiled in controversy, this time over the teachings of the Leiden professor Jacob Arminius. The supporters of the Arminian understanding of salvation, who were in the minority, sought protection from the magistracy, and so once again the autonomy of the public church came into contention.25 For a second time
No one may deny that the magistrate is appointed by God for the defense of the pious and the chastisement of evil. So also may no one deny that sometimes wolves in the guise of shepherds may slink into the churches (â¦). [The magistrate] must always make lawful acquaintance of the persons that men will place as shepherds in the church or sheepfold of Christ, in order to prevent the lambs of Christ from being ruled by wolves.26
The magistracy, according to its own understanding, was tasked with defending the public church in the interests of all its members. In particular, this included guarding the church against dangers from within, from the wolves who threatened the flock. And in these militant Calvinists, Van Hout and his colleagues in the gerecht perceived a potential threat to civic harmony. The Calvinists were men, they feared, who were intent on setting up a new kind of religious tyranny, replete with âinquisitionâ and the coercion of consciences. Having just recently rejected the authority of the Catholic Church in the previous decade, Leidenâs magistrates reacted warily to the Calvinistsâ claims to being an autonomous church that accepted magisterial support but rejected magisterial supervision. For their part, the militant Reformed, especially the minister Pieter Cornelisz, having endured decades of harassment and persecution from civil authorities before their legitimation in 1572, were in turn equally
In the long term, Leiden during the republican era would come to an ecclesiastical settlement that worked largely to the magistracyâs advantage. By 1620, after the National Synod of Dordrecht had ejected the Arminian minority and imposed Calvinist orthodoxy in the Reformed Church, Leidenâs church and town hall had worked out an arrangement: although full membership in the public church, which included partaking in the sacrament of communion, remained subject to consistorial examination and discipline, all Leideners were welcome to attend services and preaching. Likewise, the public church was willing to baptise and marry non-members, if somewhat grudgingly, though Leideners could also marry in the town hall.27 Church governance would be subject to magisterial oversight, especially the calling of ministers and elders. In this way the Reformed church fulfilled its status as a civic church while keeping its disciplinary function over its membership, and the magistracy continued to supervise while granting the Reformed congregation a degree of autonomy. Consistory and magistracy would have no more serious conflicts with each other for the rest of the history of the Dutch Republic; the Reformed Church had in effect been tamed of its earlier bristly defiance. The price it paid to be the cityâs privileged church was acceptance of magisterial supervision, an arrangement that, over the long term, served it well; as noted earlier, close to three-quarters of Leideners had professed Reformed Protestantism by the early nineteenth century.
Adding to the complexity of the place and role of the Reformed community within Leidenâs ecclesiastical and political landscape was the presence of the University in the city, starting in 1575. By the seventeenth century the University of Leiden was emerging as one of the most important academies in Protestant Europe. In particular it became a centre of Reformed theology, training future preachers for the Dutch Republic and beyond. And theological disputes could be a source of headaches for the Leiden city government. Several of its earliest, most staunchly Calvinist theologians on the faculty, such as Lambertus Danaeus and Adrianus Saravia, got embroiled in church controversies about discipline in the 1580s and left the faculty under a cloud.28
The attendant political controversy led the stadtholder Maurits of Nassau, who favoured the strict Calvinists, to purge the Leiden magistracy of its Arminian supporters in a coup in 1618.30 In the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Dutch academic establishment was plagued by disputes between supporters of the liberal theologian Johannes Cocceius in Leiden and his stricter counterpart Gisbertus Voetius in Utrecht. The Leiden magistracy supported the Cocceians in church and university, a stance with got them in trouble with the court of the Prince of Orange, which supported the Voetians, in the 1750s.31 The University added greatly to the cityâs renown, but squabbles among its theological scholars would prove to be a thorn in the side of the magistracy throughout the republican period.
4 Managing Confessional Minorities
If the public church, with all its attendant privileges and protections, was subject to magisterial oversight, then confessional minorities were monitored equally carefully. Although the Leiden magistracy declared itself committed to freedom of conscience, it did not hesitate to constrain the cityâs private, subaltern religious communities when it believed they were troubling civic tranquillity or disobeying ecclesiastical edicts. For these communities the regime of toleration was truly a regime, a system of (often unarticulated) rules and constrictions intended to confine their religious activities to private spaces. They were tolerated â in the barebones, early modern sense of that word â by a government that could take away their liberties if it so chose. Toleration was a relationship of power, not of liberty, and as such could be protean and unpredictable. The Leiden magistracy could and did exercise its legal authority over religious minorities when it saw fit to do so.
This could be a rather bumpy process, because the magistracy effectively made up its own rules for enforcing ecclesiastical policy as it went along, and
[anyone who does not want to join the public church] may live his belief freely, enjoying the freedom of the fatherland in the stillness of his home without anyoneâs aggravation, without any interrogation to endure, but at the same time it is not permitted that three or four persons set up a religion as they see fit, with services and the use of public preaching, the celebration of the sacraments, the collection and distribution of alms and such practices, with no other goal but uproar and disturbance of the peace (â¦)35
For Leidenâs city fathers, the crux of the problem was not belief but praxis. Leideners were free to believe as they wished in private, a metaphorical space
Freedom did not extend beyond the confines of oneâs dwelling; as soon as collectivities and communal spaces became involved, and as soon as outsiders could noticed religious activity, then the magistracy could impose its mandate for order. It was the magistracyâs obligation to oversee and protect these common civic spaces, for these spaces lay, in effect, under the jurisdiction of the regime of toleration.37 Thus, according to their own thinking, the magistrates were correct in imposing a ban on Lutheran worship in the city, for as long as that worship caused upheaval it endangered public space. The temperamental Lutheran preacher Bernard Muykens resisted the ban, however, and continued to preach privately, prompting the gerecht to take further drastic action by expelling him from the city in early 1596. As the town sheriff escorted Muykens through the city gate, the Lutheran preacher loudly and repeatedly denounced âthe tyranny of the Calvinistsâ.38 As far as he was concerned, the blame for his plight lay with his confessional rivals.
The competition for souls among the various confessions was another dynamic of the religious diversity of early modern Leiden. As long as the regime of toleration allowed non-Reformed Christians to worship privately within the city walls, and as long as the public Reformed Church set high standards for membership, some rivalry among the cityâs different confessions was perhaps inevitable. Nevertheless, the cityâs Reformed leadership frequently complained to the city fathers about the activities of non-Reformed Leideners and the challenge those groups posed to the authority of the âtrueâ church, especially when other confessions tried to lure away church members. Sometimes the magistracy heeded those complaints, as was the case for the Lutherans in the 1590s, but their compliance was not automatic. The magistracy enforced the regime of toleration as it saw fit.
5
The confessional sub-culture that suffered the greatest amount of Reformed venom was the cityâs Catholics. This was, to Reformed Protestants, precisely the church which had needed to be re-formed, and the fact that Catholic âidolatryâ and âsuperstitionâ were allowed to continue in the city after the regime change of 1572 grieved and enraged them considerably. Though Catholicism was disestablished, by the first quarter of the seventeenth century it had flourished in private spaces, thanks to the diligent efforts of both devoted lay Catholics and the priests of the Holland Mission, set up by Rome in 1592 to minister to the Catholic faithful in lands ruled by heretics (in partibus infidelium.)39 Throughout the early modern period, but especially during the seventeenth century, the Reformed Church in Leiden frequently hectored, petitioned and lobbied for the Leiden gerecht to do something about the persistence of Catholic worship inside the city. Technically the Republicâs placards outlawed any such worship, but Leidenâs regents, like many of their confreres across the country, usually looked the other way as long as that worship confined itself to the private sphere. By the mid-1600s, Leidenâs Catholics were meeting in some thirty or so different meeting places.40 This situation infuriated the cityâs Reformed consistory, which complained vociferously and recurrently about what it called âpopish impudenceâ (paapse stoutigheid). In addition to their objection to Catholic doctrine, the Reformed also feared that the priests of the Holland Mission were working actively to lure vulnerable believers away from the âtrueâ church; in short, they worried about Catholic competition.
The Leiden gerecht only heeded Reformed complaints about Catholic activity sporadically and irregularly at best. On a limited number of occasions throughout the republican period, the city sheriff, either on his own initiative or at magisterial direction, raided Catholic conventicles and arrested priests. Sometimes, as was the case with sheriff Lot Huigensz Gaal in 1612, the Catholics paid the law off either with substantial fines or recognition money.41 For a twenty-year period between the 1620s and 1640s, when the Dutch war with Spain resumed after the Twelve Yearsâ Truce and Catholics were tainted by their religious affiliation with the enemy, legal measures taken against them were stepped up. The then-sheriff, Willem de Bondt, who served between 1619
A good example of the sheriffâs sectarian zeal can be found in the case he brought against three Catholic spiritual maidens, or klopjes, in 1644. Klopjes or kloppen were Dutch Catholic laywomen who lived celibate lives in devout communities, as if they were members of a religious order. They often aided the priests of the Holland Mission in their sacramental and pastoral labours.43 The sisters Hendrine, Hester and Machtelt, all scions of the aristocratic Van Santhorst family, stood accused of maintaining in their home on the Breestraat an altar space before which âpapistical masses and other popish superstitionsâ were celebrated. In addition to that violation of the placards, the sheriff also charged them with breaking the municipal statute that forbade more than two klopjes to live together, as well as with physically preventing the entry of law officers into the house while they secreted away their sacramental objects.44 The sisters coolly responded to the charges by claiming that the only religious objects the sheriff could find in their home were candles and some paintings âhanging here and there, which we have never understood to be forbiddenâ.45 As for being kloppen, they blandly insisted they were just sisters living together, no different than âany other unmarried personsâ.46 To the charge that they refused the sheriff immediate entry into their home, they responded that they had been preoccupied with their ailing sister Machtelt, who âwould have been ashamed to have the gentlemen gather around her bedâ. Surely the sheriff could not fault them that as âhonourable daughtersâ they would do everything physically possible to keep any men, however honest, from coming into their bedrooms.47 By playing the card of female honour, adding a heavy dose of disingenuousness, the sisters Van Santhorst thus defended themselves against religious persecution. Nevertheless, they were banned from the city for six years for the crime of housing a hidden church (schuilkerk) on their premises.48 This was an unusually harsh penalty, and may have reflected the heightened political atmosphere in the closing years of the war with Catholic Spain, but it may also have reflected the magistracyâs insistence that its authority in all matters religious be obeyed.
Thus, when Leidenâs Lutherans in the 1590s and its Catholics in the 1620s-1650s disrupted public order or defied magisterial authority, the gerecht had few scruples about applying the religious placards to forbid worship in order to keep the peace. The gerecht would constrain religious practice whenever it was perceived to cause a problem, but otherwise was inclined to manage the cityâs confessional coexistence rather than squelch it. In this sense, the religious minority the Leiden magistracy found most congenial and cooperative were the Mennonites or Doopsgezinden. To judge from their relative absence from early modern Leidenâs judicial or magisterial archives, they may well have proven to be the cityâs âmodel minorityâ, at least from the civic point of view. The Mennonites of the Dutch Republic, who were divided across at least four different congregations, mostly segregated themselves from the larger municipal society, worshipped quietly and privately, and did their best to draw as little attention to themselves as possible.51
Leidenâs Mennonites were no different in this regard, and they were fairly few in number, so the magistracy gave their beliefs as much legal and political leeway as it could. Thus any Mennonite who wished to become a citizen (poorter) of the city but could not swear an oath to do so because of his beliefs was allowed by the gerecht to make a solemn promise of loyalty instead.52
And so the regime of toleration, the Dutch Republicâs ecclesiastical settlement, took hold and matured in Leiden in the early modern period. Leideners of diverse faiths learned to live with each other, though the Reformed consistory continued to complain to the magistracy about the sufferance of other Christian congregations. And the consistoryâs disciplinary mechanisms would intervene vigorously when one of its own strayed into other confessions. When church member Maritgen Jansz reportedly began attending Catholic mass in 1639, for example, the preachers and elders summoned her to explain herself. She said she preferred the Catholic Church in part because in the Reformed Church the sacrament of communion did not have âthe body and blood of Christâ, a reference to the Catholic doctrine of the real presence in the eucharist. The consistory sternly warned her to mend her ways and offered to instruct her in doctrine, even in the presence of the priest who had tried to convert her. A few months later she returned to the Reformed fold after marrying another church member.55 Mixed marriages, which were not frequent but did occasionally happen, could help the Reformed cause, but they could also be problematic for the consistory if one spouse tried to lure the other away from the public church or when children were involved. In 1586 the consistory successfully called in the magistracy to intervene when Maeyken Robaes, the Mennonite wife of Reformed Church member Dionys van de Walle, fled to Delft and Haarlem with her child in order to prevent the infantâs baptism, apparently with the connivance of Leidenâs Flemish Mennonite community. The Leiden municipal court ordered the congregation to pay court costs as well as direct compensation to Van de Walle.56 This was a rare instance of the magistracy heeding consistorial complaints and taking direct legal action, mostly both to protect the fatherâs rights and to prevent further conflict between confessions.
6
For Leiden during the republican era, religious diversity meant the policing of religious difference. After its initial troubles with the Reformed Church, the city government of Leiden settled into a regime of toleration that superintended all religious communities, public and private, that would last until revolutionary armies invaded the country at the end of the eighteenth century and introduced far more radical confessional arrangements. Leiden was not exceptional in this regard; its trajectory of religious diversification was similar to that of cities across the Dutch Republic. Other major towns in the Republic had similarly variegated confessional populations, and all magistracies had to grapple with the challenges that diversity posed for municipal peace and concord. They all created their own versions of the regime of toleration, with varying degrees of enforcement of the religious placards. One distinctive aspect of Leidenâs experience, however, was the conflict over church polity that erupted after the Reformed Church was established in the 1570s; only the cities of Utrecht and Gouda had similarly intense battles over ecclesiastical autonomy with recalcitrant Reformed consistories. These towns became the exceptions that proved the rule of generally mutual collaboration between town magistracies and Reformed congregations.
The religious images of Leiden during the republican era were manifold, complicated and even contradictory. A superficial glance would suggest a solidly Reformed city, where the old medieval Pieterskerk and Hooglandse kerk and the resplendently new classicist (where the pulpit now stood central, as befitted Protestant worship) Marekerk (Figure 12.2) were bastions of Reformed worship, stripped and devoid of âidolatrousâ altars and images, where Godâs word was preached decently and in order. Another look would reveal a city publicly and ostentatiously committed to the principle of liberty, which had heroically withstood a tyrannical siege and welcomed religious refugees of many kinds, including English Separatists and French Huguenots. This was the Leiden celebrated by Johannes le Francq van Berkhey. A third examination shows the city as a centre of learned theology, home to one of the oldest universities in Protestant Europe.57 All of these images are, to a certain extent, true, but they are incomplete without also recognising the complicated religious diversity of the cityâs population in this era. An even closer look exposes a superficially Reformed city that was also home to significant confessional minorities, especially Catholics and Lutherans, all of which were carefully
Marekerk in the eighteenth century
SOURCE: ERFGOED LEIDEN EN OMSTREKEN, PV_PV23482
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Israel, Jonathan I. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477â1806. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Jones, Rosemary. âDe Nederduitse gemeente te Leiden in de jaren 1572â1576â. Leids Jaarboekje 66 (1974): 126â44.
Jongste, J.A.F. de. Om de religie of om de vrijheid: spanningen tussen stadhuis en kerk in Leiden na het beleg. Den Haag: SDU, 1998.
Kaplan, Benjamin J. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007.
Kaplan, Benjamin J. âFictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europeâ. American Historical Review 107 (2002): 1031â64.
Knappert, L. De opkomst van het protestantisme in eene Noord-Nederlandsche stad. Leiden: S.C. van Doesburgh, 1908.
Knevel, Paul. Burgers in het geweer: de schutterijen in Holland, 1550â1700. Hilversum: Verloren, 1994.
Kolff, D.H.A. âLibertatis Ergo: de beroerten binnen Leiden in de jaren 1566 en 1567â. Leids Jaarboekje 58 (1966): 118â48.
Kooi, Christine. Calvinists and Catholics during Hollandâs Golden Age: Heretics and Idolaters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Kooi, Christine. Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leidenâs Reformation, 1572â1620. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
Kooi, Christine. Reformation in the Low Countries, 1500â1620. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Kooi, Christine. âReligionis Ergo: The Religious Images of Early Modern Leidenâ. De Zeventiende Eeuw 22 (2006): 35â41.
Kooi, Christine. âReligious Toleranceâ. In Cambridge Companion to the Dutch Golden Age, edited by Helmer J. Helmers and Geert H. Janssen, 208â24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Kossman, E.H., and A.F. Mellink, eds. Texts Concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Lommel, A. van, ed. âRelatio seu descriptio status religionis catholicae in Hollandia etc.â Archief Aartsbisdom Utrecht 11 (1883): 57â211.
Monteiro, Marit. Geestelijke maagden in Noord-Nederland gedurende de zeventiende eeuw. Hilversum: Verloren, 1996.
Nijenhuis, Willem. Adrianus Saravia (ca. 1532â1613): Dutch Calvinist, First Reformed Defender of the English Episcopal Church Order on the Basis of the Ius Divinum. Leiden: Brill, 1980.
Otterspeer, Willem. Groepsportret met een dame. Vol. 1: Het bolwerk van de vrijheid: de Leidse universiteit, 1575â1672. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2000.
Overvoorde, J.C. âUit de eerste jaren van de Luthersche gemeente te Leidenâ. Nederlandsch Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 15 (1919): 49â60.
Parker, Charles H. Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Pettegree, Andrew. âConfessionalization in North Western Europeâ. In Konfessionaliserung in Ostmitteleuropa: Wirkungen des religiösen Wandels im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, edited by Joachim Balcke and Arno Strohmeyer, 105â20. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1999.
Poelgeest, L. van. âCocceianen en Voetianen in Leiden: de Leidse kerkeraad en de beroeping van ds. J. van Spaan in 1754â. Leids Jaarboekje 81 (1989): 104â21.
Pollmann, Judith. Religious Choice in the Dutch Republic: The Reformation of Arnoldus Buchelius (1565â1641). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.
Poole, L.G. le. Bijdragen tot de kennis van het kerkelijk leven onder de Doopsgezinden, ontleend aan het archief der Doopsgezinde gemeente. Leiden: Brill, 1905.
Sloots, Cunibertus. De minderbroeders te Leiden. Rotterdam: Uitgeverij De Forel, 1947.
Spaans, Joke. De Levens der Maechden: het verhaal van een religieuze vrouwengemeenschap in de eerste helft van de zeventiende eeuw. Hilversum: Verloren, 2012.
Spaans, Joke. âViolent Dreams, Peaceful Coexistence: On the Absence of Religious Violence in the Dutch Republicâ. De Zeventiende Eeuw 18 (2003): 149â66.
Spohnholz, Jessse. âConfessional Coexistence in the Early Modern Low Countriesâ. In A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, edited by Thomas Max Safley, 47â73. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
Terpstra, Nicholas. Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Versprille, Annie. âHet Leidsche poorterschapâ. Leids Jaarboekje 36 (1944): 76â100.
Walzer, Michael. On Toleration. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
Wijhe, M. van. âLeiden in het begin der 17e eeuwâ. Leids Jaarboekje 20 (1926): 17â25.
Zijlstra, S. Om de ware gemeente en de oude gronden: geschiedenis van de dopersen in de Nederlanden. Hilversum: Verloren, 2000.
Groffie, âHet tweede eeuwfeest van Leidens ontzetâ; Honings, Geleerdheids zetel, 39â40.
Le Francq van Berkhey, Het verheerlijkt Leyden, 21 (own translation): âHun naamen, zoo geliefd, staan in ons hart geboekt, / Daar de andre, Neêrlands schrik, gehaat zijn, en gevloekt. / Denkt ook niet, dat mijn mond den Kerk-twist aan wil roeren, / En Roomsch, of Onroomsch in een haatlijk daglicht voeren: / De Leydsche Stempel duldt geenâ kerk-dwang in den rand, / Eischt Vrijheid voor ât Gemoed, de Wet, en ât Vaderland.â
Arpots, Vrank en vry, 102â3; Buisman, âKerk en samenlevingâ, 146.
Kaplan, Divided by Faith; Terpstra, Religious Refugees; Pollmann, Religious Choice in the Dutch Republic; Parker, Faith on the Margins.
Jones, âDe Nederduitse gemeenteâ, 126.
Knappert, De opkomst van het protestantisme.
Kooi, Reformation, 189.
Duke, âBuilding Heavenâ, 75.
Kolff, âLibertatis Ergoâ.
Knappert, De opkomst van het protestantisme, 217.
Kooi, Liberty and Religion, 31â34.
Quoted in Van Wijhe, âLeidenâ, 20.
Kooi, Liberty and Religion, 194.
Van Eijnatten and Van Lieburg, Nederlandse religiegeschiedenis, 253.
âTreaty of the Unionâ, in Kossman and Mellink, Texts Concerning the Revolt, 169â70.
Spaans, âViolent Dreamsâ; Kaplan, Divided by Faith; Pollmann, Religious Choice in the Dutch Republic.
Kooi, âReligious Toleranceâ, 213â15. On the notion of a regime of toleration, see Walzer, On Toleration, 14â36; Spohnholz, âConfessional Coexistenceâ.
Kooi, Reformation, 195.
Spaans, âViolent Dreamsâ.
Jones, âDe Nederduitse gemeenteâ, 127â29.
Erfgoed Leiden en Omgeving (hereafter ELO), NL-LdnRAL-0501A, no. 17, f. 178v, Aflezingboek G (15 August 1610).
Knevel, Burgers in het geweer, 247â48.
ELO, NL-LdnRAL-0508, no. 3+15, f. 186v-187r, Crimineel vonnisboek (28 September 1655).
Kooi, Liberty and Religion, 55â89; De Jongste, Om de religie of om de vrijheid, 17â24.
Kooi, Liberty and Religion, 125â61. The Francophone Walloon Reformed congregation also abided by the Arbitral Accord and largely escaped the upheavals of the Arminian controversy; Fockema Andreae, âUit de geschiedenis van de Waals-Hervormde kerkâ.
Coornhert, Justificatie des magistraets, fol. Bvi.
Pettegree, âConfessionalizationâ, 113.
Fatio, Nihil pulchrius ordine; Nijenhuis, Adrianus Saravia, 46â109; Otterspeer, Het bolwerk van de vrijheid, 138â40.
Van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen, 243â55.
Israel, The Dutch Republic, 421â49.
Van Poelgeest, âCocceianen en Voetianen in Leidenâ; Otterspeer, Het bolwerk van de vrijheid, 365â88.
ELO, NL-LdnRAL-0501A, no. 47, f. 181v-183r, Gerechtsdagboek C (26 May 1595). The entire entry is printed in Overvoorde, âUit de eerste jaren van de Luthersche gemeenteâ, 51â56; Kooi, Liberty and Religion, 172â73.
Kooi, Liberty and Religion, 173â74.
Israel, The Dutch Republic, 374â75.
Overvoorde, âUit de eerste jaren van de Luthersche gemeenteâ, 52â53.
Kaplan, âFictions of Privacyâ, 1042â44.
Kooi, Calvinists and Catholics, 11â12.
Kooi, Liberty and Religion, 172.
Parker, Faith on the Margins, 112â89.
Sloots, De minderbroeders, 196.
Dusseldorpius, Uittreksel, 428.
Blok, Geschiedenis eener Hollandsche stad, 3:304â5.
Monteiro, Geestelijke maagden, 49â121; Spaans, De Levens der Maechden, 35â52.
Hoogland, âDrie klopjes voor het Gerechtâ.
Hoogland, 73.
Hoogland, 74.
Hoogland, 75â76.
Hoogland, 73. On hidden churches, see Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 177â83.
Van Lommel, âRelatio seu descriptio status religionis catholicaeâ, 87.
Kooi, Calvinists and Catholics, 117.
Zijlstra, Om de ware gemeente, 98.
Versprille, âHet Leidsche poorterschapâ, 99.
ELO, NL-LdnRAL-0501A, no. 46, f. 328v-329r, Gerechtsdagboek B (15 July 1593).
Le Poole, Bijdragen tot de kennis van het kerkelijk leven, 39â40.
ELO, NL-LdnRAL-0511B, no. 3, Kerkenraadsacta (24 June 1639 and 16 September 1639).
ELO, NL-LdnRAL-0508, no. 3+3, f. 56r-58v, Crimineel vonnisboek (27 September 1586).
Kooi, âReligionis Ergoâ, 35.