Anabaptists and Seventeenth-Century Arguments for Religious Toleration in Switzerland and the Netherlands*

Chapter 7 Anabaptists and Seventeenth-Century Arguments for Religious Toleration in Switzerland and the Netherlands*

Geoffrey Dipple

The city of Zurich occupies an ambiguous position in the early history of Anabaptism. The first adult baptisms of the Reformation occurred there in January 1525, making Zurich in effect the birthplace of Anabaptism. Yet the city also has the dubious distinction of leading the way in the persecution of Anabaptists, decreeing in 1526 that teaching Anabaptist doctrines would be punishable by death and executing its first Anabaptist martyr, Felix Manz, on 5 January 1527. Thereafter, Zurich, as well as a number of other Swiss cities, maintained consistent policies aimed at suppressing Anabaptism within their jurisdictions. The intensity of the resulting persecution ebbed and flowed. In Zurich it intensified during the 1580s and again at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries. And although Hans Landis, the last Anabaptist martyr in Zurich, was executed in 1614, less severe forms of persecution continued throughout much of the rest of the seventeenth century. In the Netherlands, too, Anabaptism was greeted initially with severe persecution. In 1531 authorities executed Sicke Freerks (also known as Snyder), the first Anabaptist martyr in the Low Countries. Persecution increased ex- ponentially with the Anabaptist seizure of the reins of government in neigh- boring Münster from 1534 to 1535 and with armed uprisings at Oldeklooster in March 1535 and in Amsterdam in May 1535. However, the Dutch rebellion against Spanish overlordship in the second half of the sixteenth century, to which Mennonites made significant financial contributions, opened the door to increased toleration and inclusion in Dutch society. By the seventeenth century they were benefiting in numerous ways from Article 13 of the Union of

* An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, October 2013, and a Dutch translation of that paper was published as “Nederlandse doopsgezinden en de doperse bijdrage aan religieuze tolerantie,” Doopsgezinde Bijdragen 39 (2013): 163–74.

Utrecht (1579), which granted freedom of conscience to residents of the United Provinces. In the early 1640s and again in the early 1660s, the different histories of persecution and toleration experienced by Swiss Anabaptists and Dutch Mennonites converged as wealthy Mennonite merchants in Amsterdam sought to intervene on behalf of their persecuted “brethren” to the south. Not only did individuals and churches from the Dutch Mennonite communities address authorities in Zurich, and later in Bern as well, directly on behalf of the Swiss Anabaptists, they also instigated letter-writing campaigns to the Swiss authorities involving anyone they perceived might have influence with them. Included among these were a number of governing bodies of both state and church, as well as some of the period’s most celebrated advocates of religious toleration. These activities mark an important, although largely unac- knowledged, stage in the vigorous debates about religious toleration carried on in the Netherlands, stretching from the dialogue between Justus Lipsius and Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert at the end of the sixteenth century to the writing of John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration at the end of the seventeenth. As we will see, the arguments developed by Anabaptist-Mennonite advocates of toleration tell us much not only about the toleration debates in the middle of the seventeenth century, but also about both the extent and the nature of the Anabaptist contribution to the broader development of religious toleration in the West. To understand the significance of these seventeenth-century appeals for toleration of Swiss Anabaptists one must appreciate their place in both the history of the development of religious toleration and the history of Anabaptism in early modern Europe. From both perspectives they have received scant attention. On the one hand, a recent wave of scholarship on religious persecution, toleration, and coexistence in early modern Europe has, for the most part, ignored the Dutch campaigns on behalf of the Swiss Anabaptists. On the other hand, although scholars of Anabaptism have focused on them in recent years, they have paid little explicit attention to where they fit into traditional assumptions about the Anabaptist contribution to the development of religious toleration in early modern Europe or into the growing literature on that process.1

1 In the last decade and a half, the central sources from these debates have been published: Philipp Wälchli, Urs B. Leu, and Christian Scheidegger, eds., with John D. Roth, Täufer und Reformierte im Disput: Texte des 17. Jahrhunderts über die Verfolgung und Toleranz aus Zürich und Amsterdam (Zug: Achius, 2010) (hereafter cited as Wälchli); and Jeremy Dupertius Bangs, Letters on Toleration: Dutch Aid to Persecuted Swiss and Palatinate Mennonites, 1615–1699 (Rockport, ME: Picton Press, 2004) (hereafter cited as Bangs). These publications, along with