Chapter 13 Integration vs. Segregation: Religiously Mixed Marriage and the “Verzuiling” Model of Dutch Society

Few paintings from the Dutch Golden Age are as familiar to so many people as Rembrandt’s group portrait, The Syndics of the Clothmakers’ Guild (1662) ­(figure 13.1). The syndics had the duty of assessing the quality of cloth sold in Amsterdam and ensuring that no shoddy wares were passed off as good. It was a duty with a moral edge, and Rembrandt’s painting exudes seriousness. Wearing a modest black with flat white collars, the five syndics, assisted by the hatless servant behind them, appear united in their common endeavor. One would never imagine from this image that they were divided from one another in any fundamental way. Yet we know that these five men belonged to four different confessions. The chairman, seated with the book directly before him, was Calvinist. The second man from the left, half-standing, was a Mennonite of the strict, Old Frisian variety, and probably a deacon of his congregation.

Figure 13.1 Rembrandt, The Syndics of the Clothmakers’ Guild, 1662 Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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The syndic on the far right was Remonstrant. The other two syndics, Jacob van Loon and Aernout van der Mye, were prominent Catholics who had semi-­ clandestine Catholic churches, so-called schuilkerken, in their homes. Isabella van Eeghen, who in 1957 uncovered the identities of these men, called them “a group of birds of very diverse plumage, who only in our Repub- lic could sit around one table in so brotherly a fashion in the middle of the seventeenth century.”1 Thanks to her research, Rembrandt’s painting has come to symbolize the religious toleration of Dutch society in its Golden Age, a so- ciety where, according to English ambassador William Temple, “differences in [religious] Opinion make none in Affections, and little in Conversation”; where people of different “live together like Citizens of the World, associated by the common ties of Humanity, and by the bonds of Peace….”2 Temple’s descrip- tion of the Dutch religious scene, like Rembrandt’s painting, conveys an image of the as a place where men like the syndics do not just coexist peacefully alongside one another, they live and work cooperatively together with one another. United by common interests, they share common tastes and values. Religious differences are relegated to the private sphere, where every individual enjoys freedom of conscience. People as they please, and the people with whom they worship aren’t necessarily the same ones they live next door to or do business with. According to Temple, it was “the force of Commerce, Alliances, and Ac- quaintance, spreading so far as they do in small circuits” that made “conversa- tion, and all the offices of common life, so easie, among so different Opinions.”3 In other words, in the intimate of Dutch towns and villages, peo- ple of different faiths got along because they were bound together by a dense net of economic, familial, neighborly and other ties. Constantly interacting in daily life, they were familiar and comfortable with one another. Temple was hardly the only foreign visitor to suggest that was the key to religious toleration in the Dutch Republic. His countryman James Howell remarked, “I believe in this street where I lodge, there be well near as many as there be houses; for one neighbour knows not, nor cares not much what the other is of….” Ellis Veryard descended from street-level to the household, suggesting that it was “very ordinary to find the man of the house of one opinion, his wife of another, his children of a third and his servants of one different from them all; and yet they live without the least jangling of

1 I.H. van Eeghen, “De staalmeesters,” Jaarboek Amstelodamum 49 (1957): 65–80, quotation 80. 2 William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (London, 1673), 182. 3 Temple, Observations, 183.