Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  The rulers of Leiden understood perfectly well the economic forces that made their city what it was. Their favorite artist was Isaac Claesz van Swanenburg, and in the middle of the 1590s they commissioned him to portray the source of the city’s wealth in a magnificent oil painting.

  Hanging today in the town’s museum, the picture shows the walls and windmills of Leiden at sunset, with above them St. Peter’s Church, situated in the quarter where Robinson and Brewster lived. In the left foreground we see an old lady clad in dowdy woolens, colored black, brown, and maroon. Van Swanenburg paints her shrinking backward, as if she were fading into the gloom. Front and middle stands a tall young woman, wearing a white tunic emblazoned with red crossed keys, the Leiden colors and coat of arms. She offers a welcome to a slim young girl who enters from the right. The young girl wears a bright green blouse and a billowing pink skirt. As graphically as anyone could wish, the scene explains the secret of Leiden’s success.

  Fresh and attractive, the girl represents the so-called new draperies, light woolen fabrics, easily cut in a variety of designs. Woven in Leiden in rolls, nearly thirty yards long, white in their raw form but dyed with brilliant colors, these fabrics were known as says. They weighed much less than other woolens, and their popularity reached a peak in the early seventeenth century. Middle-class people, enriched by trade or rising rents, began to want new outfits with fashions that changed from year to year. They also began to wear undergarments. Says were ideal for both. Beginning in the late 1570s, the city of Leiden seized control of the trade, making itself the foremost producer in Europe. This happened after the siege, when a free, fortified Leiden opened its gates to refugees, driven there by war and persecution.

  Painted in the 1590s, Van Swanenburg’s depiction of the new draperies arriving in Leiden. Above the old lady’s head we see the Pieterskerk, close to the homes of William Brewster and John Robinson, with the town hall to the right. (S 423, Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden)

  The decisive episode occurred after the sack of the textile town of Hondschoote, near Dunkirk, where more says were made than anywhere else. In the 1560s, the weavers of Hondschoote became ardent Calvinists, pillaging churches and killing priests, and when the time came they joined the revolt against Spain. In support of the rebels a French army arrived in 1582 but the troops soon fell out with the townspeople. They sacked and burned Hondschoote, destroying nine hundred workshops, and the say weavers fled: some to England and to Germany, but most of all to Leiden. The city welcomed them warmly, and it gave them religious freedom: not absolute religious liberty, because that never existed in the Dutch Republic, but at least the right not to join a state church. Holland did not have one. With the weavers from Hondschoote came the fabric symbolized by Van Swanenburg’s maiden.4

  As a result, Leiden grew rich. As the years went by and demand for its cloth continued to grow, the city continued to attract new immigrants. They came not only from Hondschoote but also from Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres, and then from Antwerp after it fell to Parma in 1585. In due course, Leiden readily allowed the Pilgrims to settle in the city.

  Robinson’s group numbered about one hundred, of whom about twenty-five came from the Idle and Trent valleys. They reached Leiden in May 1609, after the city politely ignored a protest from the English ambassador, Sir Ralph Winwood, Carleton’s predecessor. Both men, it should be said in passing, were reluctant oppressors of English religious exiles, interfering with them only when pestered to do so by an outraged king or archbishop. Carleton spoke with respect about the most eminent English Puritan exile, William Ames, whose sermons he attended. Not quite a Separatist, though not far from it, Ames was on friendly terms with Robinson. Despite being a nonconformist, for eight years he acted as chaplain to the commander of the English regiments in the Netherlands.

  For its part, the city of Leiden had an obvious, unsentimental motive for offering asylum to the Pilgrims, because temporarily the city had lost momentum. Between 1602 and 1604 a long epidemic killed five thousand of its inhabitants. The output of says fell sharply, and took several years to recover. Robinson and his colleagues arrived at a time when Leiden was starting to grow again, but remained short of labor. Most of the Pilgrims found work as artisans, and some clearly worked very hard indeed.

  A case in point was William Bradford. He hired himself out to a French silk weaver, until he reached the age of twenty-one. Then he sold his land in England and used the money to start up on his own. His business went badly at first, absorbing all his capital, but by 1612 he could at least afford to buy his own small house. This was success of a kind, since only two-fifths of families in Leiden were homeowners. Bradford wove fustian, a mixture of linen and wool, and he must have done so energetically. When he sold his house in 1619, it fetched 1,250 guilders: not a large sum, but equivalent to four years’ wages for a laborer. In 1623, Leiden levied a property tax on householders, and if he had remained in Holland, William Bradford would have been eligible to pay it. Only a dozen fustian weavers were affluent enough to enjoy this doubtful privilege.

  By settling in Leiden, Bradford and the Pilgrims entered another vortex, driven by international flows of goods and people: a fabric of migration in which religion was the warp, money was the weft, and politics served as the shuttle of the loom. For the majority of emigrants, the textile industry offered by far the most viable avenue of escape from whatever they were fleeing. Weaving was only one facet of an industry built on a multitude of roles, with slots for men, women, and children, whatever their aptitude, dexterity, or physical strength. So we find the English in Leiden working as processors of wool as well as weavers, and there were many other opportunities, in shearing, spinning, dyeing, and “fulling,” or beating and kneading cloth in tubs or pits with fuller’s earth.

  Workers of each kind needed helpers and suppliers, makers of soap or shears or the lads who brought beer to quench the thirst of men combing wool, an exhausting business. Van Swanenburg painted all of this as well: in the Leiden museum, immediately opposite his allegory of the old and the new draperies, visitors will find his crowded cycle of paintings of the many stages of cloth manufacture, from the import of raw wool by sea to the sale of the final product by haggling merchants. He completed the last one in 1607, two years before the Pilgrims arrived.

  Van Swanenburg portrayed a thriving, confident city, but it had a dark side that he did not expose. The vortex might all too easily become a whirlpool where the migrants were the most at risk of drowning. In a trade depression, or during a war, demand would wilt, slashing the income of textile workers, who were paid by the piece. This happened during the European slump in the 1620s. The output of says in Leiden reached a new peak in 1617, bobbed up and down for six years, and then collapsed. Never again did it equal the heights attained in the year of the whale. The fustian trade did better, taking up some of the slack, but only after its own troubles between 1620 and 1622. Meanwhile, the price of bread in Leiden soared, more than doubling in the next decade, thanks to the resumption of war with Spain.

  Furthermore, by coming to Leiden, a refugee found himself at the bottom of the social hierarchy. In Leiden wealth and influence belonged to very few. More than half the city’s property was owned by a narrow class of no more than 250 people, led by the brewers and overseas merchants. Among them were a tiny group of the super-rich, fourteen magnates who each possessed, on average, assets worth 160 times the value of Bradford’s house. In England, the typical Separatist was somebody rising like the Drews of Everton, but in Holland the ladder was blocked from above.5 No Englishman could penetrate the clique of oligarchs who ran the towns, and neither could most of the Dutch.

  Inequality led to bitter antagonism. This began to take a violent shape as economic conditions worsened. After the Dutch signed their truce with Spain in 1609, weavers and brewers in Spanish-held Flanders and Brabant were suddenly free to begin to fight for market share against the Dutch towns of the north. Competition forced weavers to make cheaper cloth, so
that even during the boom years profits may have fallen despite rising sales. As wages dropped, unrest grew among the workers at their looms and in the breweries. It led to a first explosion twenty miles from Leiden at Delft.

  To pay for repairs of their harbor, the port from which the Pilgrims later sailed, the authorities at Delft imposed a tax on flour in 1616. At the same time they refused to place a duty on imported wine, drunk by the rich. Workingwomen marched on the tax collector’s office, with their children at their side, beneath a flag made from a long blue skirt. They attacked the town hall, ripping up records and smashing windows, while the burgomaster hid in a back room. Order was only restored when troops arrived from The Hague, and even then the ringleaders escaped over the walls of Delft by night.6

  William Bradford lived in Holland during a period that saw an angry deepening of social division. As for the beauties of Leiden, they could certainly be found, but nearby lay insanitary squalor. Disease was yet another peril facing exiles who worked in the textile trade. People died far more often in the towns than in the country, and so a path of emigration to urban Europe might well be a road to nowhere. If the Pilgrims were to survive, they needed to break away from the sixteenth-century pattern of escape undertaken by way of industrial toil in a back street. The risks they faced if they did not were all too obvious in the stinking suburb where William Bradford and John Carver made their homes.

  LIFE BY THE BACK CANAL

  Modern Leiden has a long, wide, and crowded thoroughfare called the Haarlemmerstraat. A few minutes by bicycle north from the town hall, on the way to the railway station, the street curves from west to east through the heart of a low-lying area once known as Marendorp. Long before the Pilgrims arrived, Marendorp had ceased to be a village. By 1609, it was an industrial neighborhood, identified by the city fathers as a place to put the smelliest textile trades, those that turned canals into sewers of effluent. Fulling was one of the most horrid, and today in Marendorp you will still find a street called Vollersgracht: in English, the Fullers’ Canal.

  Narrow little lanes lead northward out of Haarlemmerstraat, and among them is Paradise Alley. Walk up it, and after forty paces you come to another long street, running parallel with the Haarlemmerstraat, but much quieter. It used to be called Achtergracht, or Back Canal. Even now it is obvious, from the curved surface of the pavement, that a watercourse runs beneath it, about six paces wide. This was where William Bradford lived.

  The Achtergracht was what the Dutch called a stincknest. Even in the seventeenth century, the authorities wanted to brick it over because it was so noxious, thanks to human sewage as well as waste from industry: William Bradford’s privy emptied by way of a pipe leading down into the canal. Pollution was worst by far in hollows such as Marendorp, where the canals could not drain freely. The same was true near the home of William Brewster, in an alley known as Stincksteeg, much closer to the center of Leiden, where most of the Pilgrims lived. Only sixty paces from Brewster’s doorstep was a stagnant canal, another Vollersgracht, which had to be covered over in stages after 1595, because it smelled so dreadfully.7

  Of course there was more to Marendorp than open sewers. It made sense for Bradford to move to the district, along with seven other Pilgrim families, because on the Haarlemmerstraat was the hall where finished fustians were inspected and displayed for sale. And close by, the city authorities had built something else that was very new, and very Dutch: purpose-made dwellings for the working class, two minutes from Bradford’s house. They occupied a site where, in the Catholic Middle Ages, monks and nuns had lived in three cloisters in Marendorp. After the Reformation, the city confiscated their property and turned the space over to become a cattle market, a leper hospital, and then a housing project.

  Between 1581 and 1606 nearly six hundred new homes for weavers appeared in Marendorp. Mostly they were very small indeed. Closest to Bradford was a complex called the Mierennest, or the Anthill, where a convent had once stood. In 1596, the authorities jammed more than sixty new dwellings into the plot that the monks and the lepers had occupied. Built of brick, with a steep roof, the weavers’ cottages measured twenty-two feet by eleven, with two rooms at street level, with space for a weaving loom in the front, and a bedstead and fireplace for cooking at the rear. A ladder led up to an attic bedroom. They were cheap, letting each week for the same as it cost to feed one person with the staple diet of rye bread for seven days.

  New as they were, these weavers’ houses captured the ambiguities of Leiden. In a sense they were the product of enlightenment, planned and built to last. At the same time, they embodied division, holding the artisans at a distance, segregated from the wealthy, who lived on the higher and healthier ground around the Breestraat, beside a free-flowing river. Worst of all, the Back Canal harbored infection.8 Centuries later, in 1832, the city suffered an outbreak of cholera, spread by bacteria in water contaminated with feces. A map of the incidence of death shows that the overcrowded weavers’ lanes in Marendorp were among the worst affected. Paradise Alley and the streets around it became in time the city’s most infamous slums, to be shamed as such by Dutch journalists in the 1930s. Nobody would have called them that in 1617, but even so Leiden had the makings of a death trap.

  Understandably, historians have always lingered over the deaths at New Plymouth in the winter after the Mayflower reached America. But most of the English Pilgrims at Leiden stayed put and never crossed the Atlantic. They numbered about three hundred. In 1624, they faced a catastrophe of their own, the worst epidemic since the siege by the Spanish. In the space of two years, the plague killed eight thousand people, nearly one in five of the inhabitants. Among those who died was John Robinson, in the late winter of 1625: he was in his early fifties. A decade later, it happened all over again, when fourteen thousand people died in the Leiden epidemic of 1635.

  William Bradford gave four reasons to explain why he and his comrades left the city. At the top of his list was what he called “the hardnes of ye place”: poor conditions, endless work, and a harsh diet. Rye bread was eaten at Austerfield too, but there at least they could cook their own bacon, and their cows gave them milk and cheese. He also mentions a gradual weakening of morale, as in Leiden the Pilgrims aged prematurely, because of the hardships of manual labor. He lived before the language of industrial disease, but this may have played its part. Exposed to flax dust, workers with linen suffer from byssinosis, a lung disorder that causes a chronic cough.

  Third among Bradford’s grounds for departure came the burdens inflicted on children. In Leiden, they had to work from an early age. In Nottinghamshire, even the smallest boys and girls hand knitted woolen stockings, but there was a world of difference between cottage life among the open fields and the toil of fetching and carrying in cramped Leiden. Worst of all, Bradford mentions the fact that the young might take to crime, or choose to ship out on Dutch vessels bound for the East Indies. In the seventeenth century, half of those who did so never returned.

  Finally, William Bradford speaks about the hopes the Pilgrims had of conveying the Gospel to the New World. We will return to this in due course, when we explore the motivation of the investors in London who financed the voyage of the Mayflower. Edward Winslow, meanwhile, added a list of arguments of his own for quitting Leiden: the fear of losing an English identity, the lack of education for the young—Leiden did not have an English grammar school, like the one Winslow attended—and lastly the irreligion of the place. As he and Sir Dudley both pointed out, in Holland greed and competition transformed the Sabbath into a working day.

  By the year of the whale, the Dutch Republic had ceased to offer a safe haven. The riot at Delft was merely a mild forerunner of what lay in wait. Less than eighteen months later, the city of Leiden became a battlefield. Years of rising tension, social and religious, led to a bloody crisis that added a last incentive for removal to America. Ironically enough, in Leiden the violence began on the city’s annual day of thanksgiving. Within a few weeks, the Pilgrims were
deep in their talks with the Virginia Company in London as they sought permission to settle across the Atlantic.

  THE ARMINIAN BARRICADE

  In Leiden, October 3 marks the anniversary of the lifting of the siege in 1574. It remains a public holiday, celebrated with herring and vegetable stew, the first meal the survivors ate after the Spanish retreated. Public holidays had a way of turning sour. So, expecting trouble, on the day in question in 1617 the burgomasters of Leiden installed squads of armed guards in the Breestraat, at either end of the town hall.

  Kitted out in the city livery of red and white, these guards were known as waardgelders. They were a new force, about three hundred strong, raised by the authorities only four weeks earlier, because the burgomasters did not trust the city’s militia. On the afternoon of the holiday, a crowd gathered to jeer at the waardgelders. They mocked them for failing to wear the orange sash, the great symbol of Dutch patriotism in the revolt against Spain, led as it was by William the Silent, Prince of Orange.

  When one of the waardgelders yawned in the face of an aggravating boy, the crowd took offense. Shouting “Long live Orange,” they pelted the guards with stones, and so the waardgelders began to fire shots over their heads. They struck and killed somebody watching from an upper story. Soon a riot was under way, causing two more fatalities that night. Seeing that they had lost control, the burgomasters called in the old militia to quell the disorders, only to find that after doing so, the militia refused to stand down. Two days later, the burgomasters began to build a redoubt in the Breestraat. Occupying the town hall, they sealed off the space outside with barricades, manned by the hated waardgelders and protected by two cannon pointing down the street.9