CAPÍTULO III. EL REMOLCADOR CONVENCIONAL COMO PUNTO DE
3.1 Descripción general del remolcador convencional
The show-process in which Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the Grand-Pensionary of the States of Holland and true political leader of the Republic, had been found guilty led to his execution on May 13 of the year 1619. Tellingly, this was only four days after the international Synod of Dordt had had its final meet- ing. In this Synod the orthodox Counter-Remonstrant parties, supported by stadholder Maurits, had gotten the upper hand. After Oldenbarnevelt’s removal they had every opportunity to clear the Republic of what they considered to be religiously impure. Many people were intimidated, har- assed, arrested, blackmailed, or banned, and a considerable number were threatened with the rack. Some were tortured severely; others were executed or imprisoned and found themselves in circumstances that would surely lead to their death. For instance, because of his Remonstrant or Arminian preaching in the Republic, one Johannes Grevius had earned a lifelong sentence, to be served in the Amsterdam prison. Given the circumstances and with his constitution he would have survived no more than a few years of imprisonment at best. Moreover, before his imprisonment Grevius had been tortured severely. It led him to write one of Europe’s first elaborate treatises against the use of torture, Tribunal reformatum, in 1624.76 He could not have written it, however, had he not been freed.
In mid-August 1621 one of the officially banned ministers, Dominicus Sapma, tried to free two of his colleagues: the aforementioned Grevius and Samuel de Prince. Both were imprisoned in the Amsterdam tuchthuis, the house of correction, punishment, or discipline. Sapma’s first attempt failed. Just a little later, and by mere coincidence, Sapma was recognized
76 Johannes Grevius, Tribunal reformatum in quo sanioris et tutioris justitiae via judici christiano in processu criminali commonstratur, reiecta et fugata tortura. The work was originally published in 1624, but I will be quoting from the 1737 edition with the same title. Early studies on Grevius are Johannes Janssen, History of the German People After the Close of the Middle Ages, and Alec Mellor, Un chef d’oeuvre méconnu: les ‘tribunal reformatum’ de Grevius (1624). On Grevius’ case also see: Jan Pieter de Bie and Jakob Loosjes, Biographisch woordenboek van protestantsche godgeleerden in Nederland. Deel 3.
while walking in the streets of Amsterdam and immediately imprisoned himself. Yet, he managed to escape disguised in the clothes of his wife, Grietje Ulbes, who had come to visit him and now had to stay in prison. This allowed Sapma to continue his attempts to free his friends—helped, this time, by companions, copied keys, and ladders.77 A third attempt was successful, and a little later his wife was released without much ado. There is a contemporaneous song about the escape, called ‘On the salvation of Samuel de Prince and Johannes Grevius’.78 The song not only rejoices in the escape of both men from the Amsterdam prison, it considers their escape an intervention from God, who, from now on, will teach the Counter- Remonstrants to no longer ‘tyrannize’ the country.79
After his escape from prison, Grevius would flee to Germany, where he would write his treatise against torture. The text was revolutionary because, among other things, it related the unacceptability of torture not to its false purpose in the context of witchcraft, as in the previous century, but to a form of political rule.80 Grevius had been denied access to all sorts of literature in prison. He was allowed, however, to study law, especially Roman law, and this had brought him to the heart of a matter that was both personally and politically vexing. It was personal because he had been through torture and political because torture, to him, was the inevitable outcome of a distinct way of organizing the political domain, like a household, or dominium.81 The
77 More on Sapma and his process can be found in J.G. van Dillen, ‘Documenten betref- fende de politieke en kerkelijke twisten te Amsterdam (1614–1630)’. For a detailed and at times hilarious report of the various escapes, see Jan Wagenaar, Amsterdam, in zijne opkomst, aanwas, geschiedenissen, voorregten, koophandel, [etc.], pp. 478–80. Aside from the two Remonstrant ministers, a third man escaped, a Jesuit from Brussels, as well as two others of yet other religious convictions—all from groups who had helped in the escape.
78 In the original: ‘Op de verlossinge van Samuel de Prince, ende Johannes Grevius’; see also A.Th. van Deursen, Bavianen en Slijkgeuzen, pp. 320–321.
79 Camerata Trajectina, Bavianen en Slijkgeuzen: Liederen van Remonstranten en Contra- Remonstranten uit het begin van de 17de eeuw (Globe 6031, 1995); see the site of ‘Nederlandse liederenbank: http://www.liederenbank.nl/bronpresentatie.php?zoek=10844&lan=nl (visited March 2017). In the original the phrase is: ‘het tiranniseeren sal Hy u verleeren…’. The album is called Bavianen en Slijkgeuzen in an explicit reference to the famous study, from 1974, on the violent conflict in daily life between Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants by A.Th. van Deursen. Counter-Remonstrants were mocked as ‘slijkgeuzen’ (‘mudbeggars’) following 1612, when their meetings had been prohibited in Rotterdam and they were forced to move outside of town, to places that could be reached only through muddy pathways. Later ‘bavianen’ or ‘baboons’ became a popular nickname for Arminians because the two words sound similar in Dutch, and monkeys had been considered devilish since the Middle Ages.
80 On this, see Helen Parish, ed., Superstition and Magic in Early Modern Europe, especially Brian P. Levack’s chapter ‘The Decline and End of Witchcraft Prosecutions’, pp. 336–72. 81 Grevius, Tribunal, Lib. 1, caput II, par. VI, VII, VIII, pp. 23–29.
two combined, torture and slavery, should be rejected in principle since Christians, being free, could not tolerate torture any more than slavery, or so Grevius argued. This brought in more than a few ambiguities, however. Studying Roman law had brought Grevius to respect it, but at the same time the coincidence of dominium, slavery, and torture formed part and parcel of the Roman legacy also in terms of Roman law.
Such ambiguities around the Roman paradigm were not idiosyncratic. They defined more general attitudes towards the Roman paradigm in the Dutch Republic, which were both similar to and different from the ones in England. As Quentin Skinner has argued, the issue of slavery was mainly dealt with in the context of authors propagating the republican freedom of citizens. At the same time, however, especially in the case of Thomas Hobbes, the notions of slave and slavery would become softened into those of servant and servitude, and become a paradigm for political obedience, or subjection, the price to be paid for a sovereign’s safeguard against disorder.82 In this context Skinner contended that ‘one of the deepest divisions in modern European thought’ was the division between ‘the neo-Roman theory of freedom and self-government, […] and the modern theory of the state as the bearer of uncontrollable sovereignty’.83 Yet, he could only state this while silently accepting the fact that the Roman propagators of republican freedom were masters of households themselves, with slaves. Moreover, he could only state this by ignoring the fact that Thomas Hobbes was an equally avid reader of Roman texts, which allowed him to postulate the ‘sameness of dominion and subjection’.84
The conceptual conflation of political power with dominium was as ‘neo-Roman’, then, as the republican renaissance. In terms of its political and ethical configuration the Roman heritage was ambiguous per se. It mixed the tradition of the republican freedom of citizens with the tradition of slavery and imperial mastery by Caesarean rulers, which was translated to the rule of popes who considered themselves, legally, as the inheritors of imperial rule. This ambiguity specifically bothered the Dutch Republic, with its quasi-imperial, colonial expansion.85 Much like those opposing the so-called tyrannical rule of the sovereign in England, the Republic and Amsterdam considered themselves to be the inheritors of Rome’s republican
82 On the two different ways of dealing with the issues of slavery and freedom on the one hand and servitude and subjection on the other, see Quentin Skinner, ‘On the Liberty of the Ancients and the Moderns’.
83 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, p. 9. 84 Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, p. 324.
liberties and virtues. However, the glory of Rome built up from scratch also provided the paradigm for the Republic’s own unexpectedly glorious and quasi-imperial status. Rome’s paradigm of imperial rule was impressive. Yet it also turned subjects into, politically speaking, un-free subjects, or ‘slaves’, and this proved more difficult to swallow, or had to be downright rejected. The political issue, moreover, easily shifted to a religious one, since Rome had also become shorthand for the Catholic Church, which was regarded by many in the Dutch Republic as a tyrannical power in itself. Yet, it was considered by others, such as Vondel and Grotius, as the only paradigm that could save Europe from sectarian strife and ruin.
At stake, then, in this chapter is the way in which the Dutch Republic staged itself in relation to, specifically, Roman history in the double sense of the word: classical Rome and Catholic Rome. To some the Republic should be positioned in the context of the translatio imperii, the way in which history could be periodized on the basis of the transfer of power from one empire to another.86 Whereas churchfather Jerome had originally sketched the transfer of power from the Babylonian, to the Persian, to the Macedonian and finally the Roman empire, the medieval question had become who would be the next imperial power, with in the sixteenth and seventeenth century the Habsburg empire, of course, as a first candidate. Yet, the small Republic had beaten that vast empire, and Amsterdam now seemed to rule the waves. The translato imperii is clearly a narrative construct and, in the Christian worldview, one of allegorical prefiguration. With all this in mind, the questions at stake were: was the republican baroque a response to those who wanted to theatrically stage and legitimate a so-called imperial transfer, or did it emphasize the dramatic and disruptive powers of a free Republic?