REVOLT OF THE CALVINISTS
Larry the Cat,
Religious Convictions of Calvinist Ministersr
Seventeen studies in national history,
On 23 October 1987, I. Schöffer retired as professor of national history at Leiden University with a speech on reaching the age of sixty-five. On the occasion of this retirement, P.B.M. Blaas, J.C.H. Blom, J.R. Bruijn, C. Fasseur, J.A.F. de Jongste and M.E.H.N. Mout compiled this collection of studies in national history by Professor Schöffer. The selected texts provide an impression of the author's historiographical versatility.
They are grouped around four themes: the Republic of the United Netherlands (Our second period; Did our Golden Age fall into a period of crisis?; Protestantism in flux during the Revolt of the Netherlands; La stratification social de la République des Provinces Unies au XVIIe siècle; The Batavian myth during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), the twentieth century (The Dutch confessional parties 1918-1939; The political system of the Netherlands and social change; The hangover from the liberation; Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands; Hendrik. Prince of the Netherlands), the history of the Jews in the Netherlands.
(The Jews in the Netherlands: the position of a minority through three centuries; Abraham Kuyper and the Jews; A history of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands 1940-1945; Weinmar, reb, an affair of long duration) and nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography (The lectures of Thorbecke and Fruin; Jan Romein and the history of the Netherlands; Pieter Geyl. The strange ways of fame).
Only 5 to 10 % of all Roman Catholics priests went over to the new Protestant Church, and this small minority was most certainly not of the best quality.
New people, convinced Protestants, had to fill the many vacated positions in the Church and had the hard task of winning over old parishioners, who would never have hesitated to follow the lead of their own priest if he had gone over, but who otherwise remained sitting on the fence for a long time, Soon Protestantism lost its initial goodwill with the wider public. The hazards of the Revolt, its extension into a kind of civil war, kept people away from the Church; testantism introduced reforms which could not make it very popular either. Their could have decided quickly if things had been settled quickly.
Moreover, Pro-critical of the old Church and its clergy, to be hostile to pope or bishops, to object to persecutions was one thing; to swallow Protestantism, with all its consequences, something else. Old parishioners saw their dear church or chapel robbed of its cherished ornaments and altars. They had to give up their mass and confession, their choirs and church festivities. Without romanticizing the appeal of the old Church, and while admitting that within one and certainly two generations old customs and traditions could be utterly forgotten, one must recognize that the weight of tradition was a heavy one.
The first generation was confronted by the choice between something old and dear, warts and all, and something new and fresh but strict and strange small group of Protestant preachers and members of the new Church did not get the full support of secular authorities that they expected and thought they deserved. The magistrates had often decided to join the revolution for quite other than religious motives; they felt themselves sometimes bullied into submission to a policyof protestantization they had never intended. And most certainly they did not want to bestow on the ministers of the official Church more power than they already had.
With the exclusive use of all ecclesiastical buildings, with the promise to finance the new Church out of the means of the secularized church properties, with the decisions on paper to ban all other Churches and sects, the secular authorities thought they had gone a long way already. They did not go back on their decisions, for they had themselves become too far committed to the Reformation by the act of secularization; but they did not want to go one step further. A Test Act was never accepted by the Dutch magistrate. For contract of marriage each citizen could get legal recognition not only in the church but equally in the town hall. Capital punishment for religious reasons was definitively abolished - in this case in complete agreement with the church authorities
Secular authorities were, moreover, negligent in enforcing the official decrees. It is well known how within most towns of Holland a whole system of extraordinary taxation developed by which Dissenters, Catholics and (later on) Jews could buy themselves out of the prohibitory regulations. Quite openly they could organize their Churches, hold their services of worship, and even in the end build their own churches as well. The old idea that only members of the official Church should be allowed to take an official position in government was loosely applied. It is understandable that in the eyes of the Protestant ministers this relationship with the state became a constant magistrates thought it completely logical that they should keep an eye on the Church and hold a firm control in their hands.
Church finances remained a state affair, and the ministers could always be reprimanded in the town hall for sermons displeasing to the secular authorities. Distance between magistrate and Church developed not merely in terms of economic and political matters, but also in the cultural sphere. Not being supporters of astrict, dogmatic Protestant Church from the start, the wealthy burghers and patricians soon disliked the rigid application of Protestant, and particularly Calvinistic, doctrines within the Church. Times of persecution had encouraged individualism.
The Protestant principle of the significance of personal experience and individual conscience seemed to be contradicted by a strictly dogmatic Church. Older traditions of Christian humanism and Erasmianism, with their stress on good personal behaviour and toleration, were strong. Political expediency helped the idea of tolerance, as also did commercial interests. And so the governing classes, in their more tolerant,comprehensive attitude, could not appreciate the rigid but deeply religious convictions of Calvinist ministers and their followers.
Small wonder that the Dutch Reformation was therefore extremely slow in its progress and only partly successful in the end. How could it have been succesful at all?
Let us not forget that, however great the odds against them, the true Protestants had at least the advantage of possessing the official Church. Some decrees upholding the monopoly of this Church may have been neglected, but the church autorities did not forget them and they succeeded in keeping them alive. After all, the other Churches were discriminated against in one way or another, and the financial basis of the official Church was at least more settled and secure than that of any other religious community. With this limited support of law and authority the official Church could manage, and did manage, as best it might. In particular, the use of social and material pressure on the socially lowest and weakest classes brought results in the end. Education and charity were the most profitable means in the process of protestantization.
Next to the church, schools, orphanages and poor-houses became the centres for conversion. So the slow process could go on. After forty years of hard work, the Protestant Church in the provinces of Holland and Zeeland, the earliest to be drawn into the rebellion, could claim the success at least of having tipped the balance in favour of Protestantism, when approximately fifty per cent of their population had ceased to consider themselves Roman Catholic. It was only about 1650 that the Republic as a whole reached the same proportion. From then onwards the process slowed down: by the end of the eighteenth century the proportion reached about sixty per cent.
When looked at regionally, the map showed many shades of Protestant and Roman Catholic as well as sharp contrasts between them. The countryside of South Holland, the isles of Zeeland, the whole of Drente, for example, had become almost completely Protestant. North Holland and Utrecht showed a much more mixed situation, with many a village or estate still Roman Catholic. Parts of the Republic, on the other hand, that were conquered by the troops of the rebels at a later stage of the Eighty Years War, like eastern Overijssel, North Brabant and Limburg, were firmly recatholicized before that conquest and could not be won for the Reformation any more.
Locally, the situation could be extremely varied. Where the old Church had been particularly weak in its clergy or pre-Reformation position generally, where the old Revolt, or where civil autorities kept strictly to the official decrees in favour of the pastoral care of the Roman Catholics had been neglected for a long while before the new Church, village or region could become Protestant almost to the last man. But where the old Church had had a good score in the past, or where the civil authorities secretly taken over organization and pastoral care soon after the revolution, there were lax in their support of the new Church, or where the Counterreformation had pockets of Roman Catholicism remained, notwithstanding its setbacks.
A combination of two factors worked in that direction. But I think all this does not fully explain the ultimate success of the Reformation. The Reformation was a result of the Revolt. The development of the Revolt influenced the Reformation as well. In the course of the Revolt, and by its influence, Protestantism in flux gradually congealed into a specific type of Church. From the very beginning of the Revolt Calvinists had been powerful-driving Protestants.
They had prepared themselves for their difficult task by hard work and ingenious organization in times of persecution and exile, before 1572. It was logical that they should take the lead in organizing the official Church left empty by the old clergy. The Calvinists had the advantage over all other Protestant groups of a strict and clear discipline, a well-defined doctrine, a good system of church government. And therefore, although originally many other shades of Protestantism were represented in the official Church, the Calvinist ascendancy was strong.
Other Protestants might feel themselves at home in this Church in the hope that doctrine and discipline would relax when times would bring more peace and quiet. But the reverse happened: while the state of war so long remained extremely tense and uncertain, the Church increased its discipline and pushed more steadily than ever the Calvinist doctrines. While outwardly the Church fought for protestantization, inwardly a process of Calvinization took place.
Under the stress of Revolt, stubbornness, strength and purposeful single-mindedness prevailed over ideals of tolerance, compromise and wide variety within the Church 18. Thus the course of the Revolt had a very important influence on the character of a Church which was slowly growing and hardening internally. Instead of resulting in a quick and decisive victory, the Revolt became a protracted civil war, which the rebels were in danger of losing. Down to the fifteen-nineties, for more than twenty-five years, the Revolt remained an extremely risky affair
The antagonists were really very unequal in this struggle. On the one side was a small group of rebellious towns, linked only loosely to each other, with a great many internal divisions. On the otherside stood the strong international power of the Habsburg, firmly established in Spain and Austria, backed by an immensely rich colonial empire, disposing of the crack troops of Europe, having all legal rights against the rebels on its side. So the Revolt of the Netherlands went through a series of near-defeats which baffled participants and onlookers, The years 1572, 1573, 1574 and again 1584-1585 and 1587-1588 brought utter defeat pretty close.
They could be relied upon never to give in, their Church formed the centre of the church. In these critical times the Calvinists were the rocks on which the Revolt had to be real resistance. All others, Roman Catholics in particular, were suspect; they could become spies or traitors, and their preparedness to accept compromise or capitulation formed a constant danger. In this steam-heat of crisis only the hardest iron did not melt. Discipline and efficiency made up for small numbers. Even more important became the jewish book of numbers, as the inner certainty of the Calvinists, their dogmatic self-confidence, an intolerance very often narrow-minded but extremely powerful in times of dismay, when much force was needed to stick it out. The whole first generation of rebels, even those who by nature and position were not in full sympathy with everything Calvinism stood for, were in some way inspired by this inner strength.
Men like William of Orange and Johan van Oldenbarnevelt found personal support in the doctrine of predestination in their own hours of sorrow and distress, though they most certainly were never prepared to give in to any Calvinist pressure in political matters, and were quite willing to grant tolerance to other creeds if political interests required this.
The great test came in the period from 1578 till about 1590, when the Revolt passed through its grimmest and most difficult years. Just before that phase, the Revolt had looked very promising. In 1576 all Southern provinces, under the guidance of the Estates, in which all leading classes were represented - nobility, clergy and towns, - had decided to join the Revolt.
William of Orange went to Brussels to take over the government, and everything seemed to augur rapid and complete victory. Within two years, the rosy picture paled. Gradually the supporters of the general revolt dropped out: the high clergy of the old Church in some Southern provinces first, most of the noble men soon afterwards. Finally, the Spanish troops of the new governor, Parma, started to reconquer the rebel towns of the South, gradually moving to the North.
Once again, no doubt, religious divisions had a lot to do with this decline of the general revolt. The outward victory of Protestantism in the Northern provinces of Holland and Zeeland caused a great deal of distrust, many Catholics fearing the same in the other parts of the Low Countries. William of Orange tried to reassure his Catholic compatriots by promising not to allow the spread of Protestantism to other provinces.
But a solution on the lines of Cuius regio eius religio failed dismally. Calvinists and other exiled heretics returned hastily to their own towns and villages in the South and tried to repeat the surprise actions in which they had been so successful in the North in 1572. And in some places, in Ghent in particular, they got their way once more. But the Revolt lost its wider support in consequence²¹.
The rebels in the North, who had come out four years before the Revolt became general, soon found themselves back again in the old town strongholds of Holland and Zeeland. They observed how everybody seemed to fall away, one after another. Psychologically the greatest shock came in 1580, when the count of Rennenberg, stadholder of Friesland, Groningen and Overijssel, suddenly decided to surrender to Parma. Many a nobleman had done this already before Rennenberg, but his decision meant a very grave loss to the cause of the rebellion. With the north-eastern provinces handed over to the Spanish governor, Holland and Zeeland were strategically laid open to the enemy forces from the east. And the blow struck the harder because Rennenberg, only just before his 'betrayal', had signed the insurrectionary Union of Utrecht.
Here then was another proof of the unreliability of Roman Catholic allies, Rennenberg being one of the last leading Catholic noblemen to support the rebellion²². Thrown back upon the old resources of the early years of the limited revolt in the North, Calvinism seemed more than ever the only guarantee for the rescue of the young Republic. The Calvinists' own share in the failure of the general revolt was soon forgotten and did not count against them. The only thing that mattered now was to persevere. And so Calvinism won the day within the Church.
It even looked as if in the end it would win the State, had it not happened that a severe internal crisis, in which Leicester as governor of the rebels became involved, led to a definite decision by the civil authorities in Holland. The Calvinist victory in the Church was only accepted at the cost of submission to the secular power. But times changed at last. After 1590 the Revolt entered more secure waters. A regular war developed in which, it is true, ups and downs could not be avoided, but in which on the other hand a kind of security and of inner order in the Republic came into being.
The Twelve Years Truce strengthened its international position. And once again the Church started to shift and to change. The Calvinist imprint had in the meantime become indelible, but one could not expect everybody to stay forever in the strongly delineated discipline of a Church which, after all, had always pretended to embrace all Protestants and which therefore contained many zealous Protestants who had never accepted the Calvinist doctrine in all its implications.
In times of relative quiet, moreover, the magistrates were less eager to go on supporting the most dogmatic and intolerant Calvinists in the Church, in particular because they disliked any theocratic claim. During the Twelve Years Truce, a clash once more became inevitable. The strongest-minded Calvinists, for the very reason that in some of the Northern provinces protestantization had reached saturation-point, wanted to straighten out the last matters of doubt and dissension about a strict Calvinistic dogma, whereas others hoped to be able now to get things somewhat more loosely organized, more comprehensive and more tolerant.
In the end, in 1618, with the help of a coup d'état by Prince Maurice of Orange, the Calvinists won their struggle and a General Synod decided definitely now to base the official Church on a rigidly formulated Calvinist doctrine. But while this Calvinism had proved to be an indispensable support for the Republic at times of severe crisis during the Revolt, in the more peaceful times to come-times of great prosperity as well-it showed the weaknesses of its strength. The Calvinized Church seemed to be settling on too small a foundation to become a really representative Church of the whole community of the Republic.
The original roots of humanism, from which Calvinism too had drawn its sap, had dried up. Contacts with the educated governing classes withered away. When the forces of rationalism, of the 'scientific revolution', and finally of the Enlightenment began to work in the Republic, the Church (generally speaking) lived outside the mainstream of culture. And internally it tended to shrink as well. More tolerant ministers, Arminians and Remonstrants, were victimized by harsh measures of expulsion and banishment. A dreary stream of internal squabbles about Bible texts, about Sabbath. And so the official Protestant Church, while finally winning the majority of the population, did not succeed in becoming the cultural centre of the Dutch Golden Age.
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