by Mike Dash
The first Anabaptists firmly believed it fell to them to build this new Jerusalem, and their faith thus led them inexorably into conflict with the civil authorities of western Europe. Several bloody attempts were made to seize control of this city or that, and in 1534 thousands of members of the church streamed into the Westphalian town of Münster, expelled all nonbelievers, and held the place for 16 months. The reprisals were appalling; when the Anabaptist “kingdom” eventually fell, every defender capable of bearing arms was slaughtered, together with hundreds of women and children. A similar fate befell the members of another party, 40 strong, who stormed the town hall in Amsterdam in the hope of sparking a revolution there, while in Friesland—already a great stronghold of the faith—another group of 300 radicals was besieged within an old Cistercian abbey that its members had fortified and proclaimed their own Jerusalem. After the walls had been systematically leveled by artillery fire, the male survivors were hung or beheaded on the spot, and their women taken to the nearest river to be drowned.
Before the siege of Münster and the attempted seizure of Amsterdam, most Dutch cities had tolerated the presence of Anabaptist sects within their walls. Afterward, the new faith was fiercely persecuted everywhere. The Anabaptists had revealed themselves as dangerous revolutionaries who actively opposed the lay authorities wherever they encountered them and insisted that they owed no allegiance to any earthly lord. In Münster, they had gone so far as to overthrow the natural order, holding all property in common and dispersing food and possessions to each according to his need. Toward the end of the siege, indeed—when the men of the town were greatly outnumbered by the women—their leaders had even introduced a system of polygamy. The Anabaptists thus naturally attracted the radical, the violent, and the dispossessed, men who were fully prepared to achieve their aims by force. They were a genuine danger to the state.
Radical Anabaptism never recovered from the fall of Münster. Many of its leaders were killed or driven into exile, and their place was taken by men who were prepared to coexist with other Protestants and even Catholics. These pacifist Anabaptists could trace their roots back to the earliest days of the movement, and they had always existed side by side with the revolutionaries. Now, led by a Frisian preacher by the name of Menno Simmons, they came to predominate. The Mennonites opposed the use of force to achieve their aims and did not seek to overthrow the state. By the middle of the sixteenth century they had become so successful that Mennonism and Anabaptism had become synonymous, and persecution of the sect became gradually less severe. True, even in Leeuwarden the Mennonites were never granted real freedom of worship, and they were not allowed to proselytise or hold civic office. But by the time Jeronimus was born, the faith was no longer a barrier to success in most professions.
Nevertheless, revolutionary Anabaptism had not been altogether extinguished by the fall of Münster. A large group of surviving radicals flocked to the banner of a man named Jan van Batenburg, who saw nothing wrong in robbing and killing those who were not members of his sect. When Van Batenburg was captured and executed in 1538, the surviving Batenburgers turned themselves into a band of robbers and infested the Dutch border with the Holy Roman Empire for another dozen years. After that, the sect fragmented into several increasingly extreme and violent groups, the last of which persisted until 1580. In that year, the surviving radicals fled east and found their way to Friesland, where they concealed themselves among the local Mennonites and disappeared from view some 15 years before Jeronimus was born.
Cornelisz, we know, once claimed that he had never been baptized. The archives of Haarlem show that his wife, Belijtgen, was a Mennonite. Taken together, these two facts suggest that he was born to Anabaptist parents and remained a member of that church into early adulthood. But it is much less likely that he himself had faith in Menno Simmons’s teachings. He married a Mennonite girl, and so he—and therefore his parents—probably did profess to be Mennonites themselves. But most Mennonites were baptized between the ages of 18 and 23, whereas Cornelisz reached the age of 30 without undergoing the ritual. This may indicate that he had become disillusioned with the church and left it altogether, but it could also be interpreted as a sign that he and his parents had picked up elements of the Batenburger’s teachings. It is just possible that the apothecary’s family may have been one of those that made its way to Friesland after the collapse of the last Anabaptist robber-bands, and quite likely that Cornelisz heard the radicals’ beliefs discussed during his youth in the province. In time, he would demonstrate an apparent familiarity with their ideas concerning righteous killing and the communality of property and women. But this religious influence, which surely helped to shape his childhood, seems to have been tempered in adulthood. The reason for this is unclear, but if Jeronimus did attend a Latin school, he would have been exposed to humanism and the works of ancient philosophers and encouraged to think for himself.
By the time Cornelisz set off for Haarlem, then, other voices and other thoughts had probably begun to make their mark on him. And when he got there, he soon discovered that his new home was far removed from the provincial narrowness of Bergum and Leeuwarden. Haarlem was a place where wealthy men pursued religious and philosophical inquiries largely free from the attentions of the Dutch Reformed Church. If one knew the right people, introductions could be arranged to certain circles where radical and even openly heretical ideas were freely discussed. Working on the Grote Houtstraat and dealing with some of the most influential people in the city, Jeronimus was in an excellent position to make such acquaintances. And it seems this is precisely what he did.
The fencing club run by a certain Giraldo Thibault in Amsterdam was typical of the philosophical talking-shops that would have attracted Cornelisz. The club was located in a fashionable area of the town, and its habitués were mostly young, unmarried, very wealthy members of the city’s ruling class. They generally came to Thibault daily, ostensibly in the hope of mastering his fashionable technique. But for many of the members the club’s real attraction was that they could relax and mix informally with their peers, far from the ears of parents, wives, or ministers of the church. The salon was a fine place to meet interesting new friends. Thibault knew everyone worth knowing in the city, and his club was popular with artists, doctors, and professors as well as with the sons of wealthy burghers. One member of the fencing master’s circle was Cornelis van Hogelande, who was professor of philosophy at the University of Leyden and also a leading alchemist. Thibault’s brother-in-law Guillermo Bartolotti was the second-richest man in the Republic and had long been a major investor in the VOC. Another frequent visitor to the club was Johannes van der Beeck, one of the finest of Dutch painters; a sometime resident of Haarlem, he was better known by the Latin version of his name, “Torrentius.”
Thibault himself was a good deal more than a mere swordsman. Many of his pupils revered him as a philosopher as well, and he and his friends are known to have discussed many of the topics that fascinated the humanists of the day. Talk in the salon ranged from alchemy and Greek philosophy to magic and mythology. The apparently unremarkable fencing club thus served as a conduit through which many new and revolutionary ideas found their way into the very heart of the Dutch Republic.
It is unlikely that Jeronimus himself was a pupil of Thibault’s. He probably lacked the social standing required to gain entry to such an exclusive group. But he certainly had connections with some of the master swordsman’s acquaintances, and, through them, he became familiar with some dangerous philosophies. These he seems to have absorbed and combined with the radical Anabaptist precepts he had picked up in his youth to create a strange, intensely personal creed—one that was not only explicitly heretical, but potentially murderous as well.
The man who linked Cornelisz to Giraldo Thibault’s circle was Torrentius the painter. Jeronimus knew him in Haarlem, and though it is impossible to say with any certainty where or when they met, they did live in close proximity to each other, the apothecary i
n the Grote Houtstraat and the painter only 200 yards away in a house on the Zijlstraat. Cornelisz and Torrentius also had several acquaintances in common—Jacob Schoudt, whom Jeronimus used as his solicitor in his pursuit of Heyltgen Jansdr, had known the painter well for years, and Lenaert Lenaertsz, a well-respected local merchant, was very close to both of them. Apothecaries also sold many of the materials that artists needed for their work—white lead, gold leaf, turpentine—so it is possible that Torrentius acquired his supplies from Cornelisz. By the late 1620s the two men knew each other well enough for Jeronimus to be described as a disciple of the painter.
It was, without question, a potentially dangerous relationship for a newcomer to Haarlem to engage in, for Torrentius was a controversial figure throughout the Dutch Republic. He had been raised as a Catholic, even working for a while in Spain; and by 1615, back home in the United Provinces, he had acquired a reputation as a lively but dissolute companion who spent freely on fine clothing and roistering in the many taverns of the Dutch Republic. A bill that he and a group of friends ran up at the inn The Double-Crowned Rainbow, in Leyden, came to the staggering total of 485 guilders—more than 18 months’ wages for a reasonably well-to-do artisan at that time. Part of this sum, at least, must have been incurred in paying for the services of women; the painter often claimed that adultery was not a sin and bragged that he had half the whores of Holland at his personal disposal.
In truth, many of the province’s rich young men behaved in much this sort of way. But Torrentius was notoriously indiscreet, which made his activities unusually risky. Riotous living and consorting with prostitutes were severely frowned on by the church authorities and could easily attract the censure of otherwise well-disposed acquaintances. In Torrentius’s case, plenty of shocked witnesses could testify to the artist’s loose morals. His marriage, to a well-brought-up young girl named Cornelia van Camp, had been a disgrace; the couple quarreled violently and when the union finally collapsed, Torrentius had gone to prison rather than pay for his wife’s upkeep. The nudes and mythological scenes he painted also made him suspect, but it was the drunken conversations he indulged in, in the back rooms of taverns up and down the province, that particularly concerned his family and friends. On one occasion Torrentius and his company were heard to drink a toast to the devil. On another, in a Haarlem hostelry, they drank first to the Prince of Orange, next to Christ, and finally to the prince of darkness. A Leyden man named Hendrick van Swieten, who had been lodging in the same tavern, was reportedly so shocked he feared such blasphemy might cause the building to sink into the ground.
Deeply incriminating though it was, such evidence actually paled beside the tales that were told in Haarlem concerning Torrentius’s apparently preternatural skill as an artist. The painter, it was popularly supposed, was actually a black magician who freely admitted that his masterpieces were not produced by human hands. Rather, it was claimed, he simply placed his paints on the floor next to a blank canvas and watched while supernatural music played and his paintings magically created themselves. Others whispered that Torrentius often went for walks alone in the woods south of Haarlem, where he was understood to converse with the devil. When he was seen purchasing black hens and roosters in the market, it was said he needed them as sacrifices to Beelzebub. Ghostly voices had been heard coming from his studio.
These accounts, and others, may well have been greatly exaggerated; Torrentius himself always claimed that many of his controversial comments had been meant as jokes. But, even so, there is little doubt that by the standards of the day, he was a heretic. Torrentius insisted, for example, that there was no such place as hell, arguing that it was ridiculous to suppose there was, since it was well known there was nothing beneath the ground but earth. He told friends the scriptures were nothing but a collection of fables—a useful tool for keeping the population in check. He was overheard describing the Bible as “the Book of Fools and Jesters.” He even mocked the suffering of Christ.
So far as Torrentius’s critics were concerned, these views proved the painter was no Christian. Many believed he lived his life according to the precepts of Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher who wrote that true happiness is to be found in the pursuit of pleasure, and certainly his activities in Holland’s taverns suggest an acquaintance with the Epicurean worldview. But for all this, Torrentius was not an atheist. He was, if anything, a Gnostic—a believer in the ancient heresy that God and Satan are equal in strength, and that the world is the creation of the devil. Like all Gnostics, the painter held that each man had a divine spark within him, which was suppressed by sin but could nevertheless be reanimated while he was still on Earth; indeed, he hinted to one correspondent that he himself had successfully completed this quasi-alchemical operation.
This was without question an intensely heretical philosophy. During the Middle Ages, thousands of people had gone to the stake for such beliefs, and even in the Dutch Republic of the 1620s, such views could be enough to earn a man a death sentence. Yet Torrentius apparently believed himself to be too well connected to run afoul of the church or the civic authorities. He openly discussed Gnostic philosophy with his friends.
Jeronimus Cornelisz came to share several of Torrentius’s thoughts and may well have picked up a number of his views in discussion with the freethinking painter. Like Torrentius, the apothecary did not believe in the existence of hell. Like him, he saw merit in the Epicurean way of life. But Jeronimus went further than his friend in some respects, holding to philosophies that even Torrentius could not agree with. Where he came across such ideas remains a mystery; it may be that they, too, had been discussed at philosophical salons such as Thibault’s fencing club, though the apothecary could also have heard them in his youth in Friesland. All that is certain is that they made even the Gnostic heresy seem harmless in comparison.
Cornelisz’s central belief, it seems, was that his every action was directly inspired by God. “All I do,” he explained to a handful of trusted acquaintances, “God gave the same into my heart.” It followed that he himself lived his life in what amounted to a state of grace. This was an intensely liberating philosophy, and one that would have shocked any God-fearing Calvinist to the core. Taken literally, it implied that the apothecary was incapable of sin. If each idea, each action, was directly inspired by God, then no thought, no deed—not even murder—could truly be described as evil.
Twisted and simplistic though it might have seemed to any orthodox Christian, Jeronimus’s strange philosophy had a long tradition. Its proper name is anti-nomianism, the idea that moral law is not binding on an individual who exists in a state of perfection. No other creed—not the Jewish faith, nor even the Muslim—held quite so much terror for the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Church, for no other philosophy was quite so dangerous to the established order.
The antinomian philosophy had existed in Europe since at least the early thirteenth century, when a group called the Amaurians began preaching it in Paris, mixed with the teachings of Epicurus. Similar beliefs cropped up again in Germany a century later, where a sect known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit emerged, eventually spreading throughout central Europe. On this occasion they persisted well into the sixteenth century.*7
The Brethren divided humanity into two groups—the “crude in spirit” and the “subtle.” Those who failed to cultivate and ultimately release the divine potential that lay within them would always remain crude, but those who absorbed themselves in it could become living gods. As one historian of the movement explains:
“Every impulse was experienced as a divine command; now they could surround themselves with worldly possessions, now they could live in luxury—and now too they could lie and steal and fornicate without qualms of conscience, for since inwardly the soul was wholly absorbed into God, external acts were of no account . . . . The Free Spirit movement was, therefore, an affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it amounted to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation.”
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Not every member of the sect exercised his license to cheat and steal. The founders of the movement taught that perfect happiness was most likely to be found in quiet contemplation. But in truth the Free Spirit was generally perceived, even among its adepts, as a movement of anarchy and self-exaltation. As such it was vigorously persecuted and never had a large number of adherents, even in its German heartland. From time to time the Catholic Church seems to have hoped that the sect had been stamped out altogether. But antinomianism was too potent a philosophy to be repressed for long. Although the Brethren of the Free Spirit vanished around 1400, their ideas found their way into the Low Countries under the guise of “Spiritual Liberty.” A sect of this name was crushed in Antwerp around 1544, and the surviving Libertines fled from Flanders. Some of them turned up in Tournai and Strasbourg. Others vanished altogether. It seems at least possible that a few went north into what became the Dutch Republic.
Cornelisz, then, was apparently a Libertine—though not a very good one, for he ignored the more spiritual aspects of the faith in favor of the promise of complete freedom of action. In this he resembled Torrentius, his friend and teacher, and the two men might well have gone on enjoying their philosophical debates indefinitely had the painter not at last attracted the attention of the Dutch authorities around 1625. From then on, however, Torrentius found himself fighting for his freedom and his life. Labeled a heretic, hounded by both church and state, he became the first of Giraldo Thibault’s circle to be persecuted for his beliefs. The thoughts and views of his acquaintances became of increasing interest to the authorities as well.
