Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578-1620

"This has a very different scope to the previous study because it’s a local study. That’s one of the reasons why I chose it. Because, in the Netherlands, or the Dutch Republic as it was known in the 17th century, towns played a very important role. To be fair, Utrecht was not the most dynamic of towns in that period. It had been the most important city during the Middle Ages, but the centre of gravity shifted to the west during the 16th and 17th centuries. But still, it was an important place in the 17th century. I selected this book because it gives a very detailed, but also a very intimate picture of another aspect that has made the reputation of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century, and that is its religious toleration, or presumed toleration, we should perhaps say. Normally, the story that you get about toleration is that the Dutch Calvinist, or the Dutch Reformed Church as it was known in the 17th century, was a minority church and therefore it could not impose its ideas on the rest of the population. What is interesting about this book is that it adds an important dimension to that story, namely that the Calvinists were internally divided into two major groups. The Calvinists in the title of this book were the people who wanted to adhere very strictly, and if necessary by shedding a lot of their potential support, to the teachings of Calvin. For them, orthodoxy was more important than popularity. The Libertines, on the other hand, were a group of people, also within the Calvinist church, who said, ‘if we want to persuade substantial numbers of our fellow Dutch men and women, we need to be more liberal, if you will, and perhaps not insist on every tiny detail of Calvin’s teachings.’ They favoured a much more open and popular church in the Netherlands, to which they were hoping a majority of the population might eventually adhere. “Toleration is a dirty word in the 17th century” We have to understand the situation around 1600. There was, next to the Catholics and the Calvinists, a large group of people who were simply indifferent, who identified as Christians, but who did not want to commit to one or the other faith, because they perhaps didn’t really understand all the fine details of theology that the others were fighting about. Or, even if they did, they were not interested. These people wanted to see a sort of broadly defined Christianity put in place, and they wanted the fighting to stop. In their minds, the fighting was the result precisely of people digging too deeply into all these fine theological details. So there was a constituency up for grabs, as it were, and the Libertines in Utrecht, mainly from the upper classes, were saying, ‘let’s do this.’ Those people were also interested in that broad outcome from a public order point of view, because they were aware how in many countries, including Germany and France, religious conflicts very easily evolved into outright civil war. To some extent the Dutch Revolt, too, was a civil war. They had had enough of that, and they didn’t want any more. What the book demonstrates is that in this conflict the Calvinists win the battle, but the Libertines win the war, because the settlement that grows out of it is one in which there is a certain amount of toleration because the state is reluctant to persecute people. The Catholics would have been sceptical about the concept of toleration in this context, but still, they more or less could do what they wanted to do. They had to do it as a sort of ‘open secret’. It’s a little bit like the so-called coffee shops in the Netherlands nowadays. Soft drugs are illegal, but everybody knows the coffee shops are tolerated. They even pay taxes, even though they officially cannot buy cannabis anywhere. No questions are asked about how they get it. Something similar happened with Catholicism in the Dutch Republic. You could be a Catholic openly because there was freedom of conscience. They weren’t allowed to come together in churches that were visibly churches. But everybody knew where the hidden churches were. Absolutely. In England in the 17th century, you could expect a knock on the door if you didn’t come to the Church of England services regularly. Louis XIV kicks all the Protestants out of France in 1685. Already in the Middle Ages, Jews are forced to convert in Spain, and so on, and so forth. That’s not the case in the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, there are two very open synagogues. And actually the informal head of state, Stadtholder William III of Orange, who becomes King of England a little later, participates in the opening ceremony of one of those synagogues. The invasion of England in 1688 is funded by Jewish bankers. He has a lot of Jews in his entourage. Yes. Toleration is a dirty word in the 17th century. Nobody wants that. No. It was seen as the least harmful scenario. Only gradually do people say, ‘well, maybe it’s not so bad’—particularly in the merchant community. They are in favour of it because intolerance is bad for business. Spinoza is a very exceptional person in the 17th century, whose views are actually not acceptable. His works are banned. But interestingly, his publisher is at the same time the official city publisher in Amsterdam. And, of course, people were aware of this. He pretends that Spinoza’s books are printed in Hamburg. But it’s an open secret in Amsterdam that he is the actual publisher."