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De Zeventiende Eeuw. Jaargang 16 (2000)

De Zeventiende Eeuw. Jaargang 16

(2000)– [tijdschrift] Zeventiende Eeuw, De–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

A clash of values: the survival of Utrecht's confraternities after the Reformation and the debate over their dissolution
Benjamin J. Kaplan

In 1604 the Utrecht painter Paulus Moreelse received an unusual commission. It was to produce a set of five panels portraying the members of a local organization known as the Kleine Kalende (Small Kalends) Confraternity.1 Group portraits of confraternities had been no rarity in the northern Netherlands prior to the Revolt against Spain, especially in Utrecht, where Jan van Scorel had made a speciality of them.2 After the Revolt, other sorts of groups, like militia companies and trustees of charitable institutions, commissioned countless group portraits, iconic assertions of the active and responsible citizenship of their members. Moreelse's, though, was one of only two known confraternity portraits painted in the Dutch Republic, and the reasons for its rarity are not far to seek: the Reformation of the 1570s-1580s had led to the abolition of most Dutch confraternities and left the survivors in an anomalous, illegitimate position. First formed in the twelfth century, confraternities were by origin Catholic religious organizations, vehicles of popular lay piety that by the end of the Middle Ages had gained wild popularity and an importance arguably as great as the parish itself. They existed ostensibly for the performance of rituals that by 1581 had been declared illegal throughout the territories in Revolt against Spain.3 That any confraternities at all survived the outlawing of Catholic worship and adoption of Calvinism as the official religion of the Republic is on the surface a puzzle. Elsewhere only a few are known to have done so: two in Haarlem, one each in Dordrecht, Gorinchem, and Arnhem, scattered singletons in various villages of Utrecht province, and two each in Den Bosch and in Maastricht after these southern cities were taken from the Spanish.4 In Utrecht, by contrast, not

only the Kleine Kalende but dozens of confraternities survived into the seventeenth century, some of them showing a remarkable vitality and self-assurance.

Thus when Utrecht's government moved aggressively in 1615 to abolish all the city's confraternities, a loud public dispute erupted. The dispute took a complex and surprising form, though: contrary to what one might expect, it did not pit Catholic defenders of the confraternities against Calvinist critics. Instead of running neatly along confessional lines, the split cut jaggedly across them, and the loudest voices on both sides of it were members of the same moderate religious party, the Remonstrants. Motives on both sides were mixed. More significant than motives, however, was the language of the dispute. In formulating its position, explicating it, and seeking legitimacy for it in the public sphere, each side appealed to values that enjoyed powerful endorsements and wide approval in Dutch society. On one side of the debate stood proponents, both Catholic and Protestant, of what we might call ‘civic’, ‘traditional’, or most appropriately ‘fraternal’ values; on the other side stood advocates of a new social discipline and puritanical morality. In their clash, defenders of the confraternities and abolitionists enunciated opposing sets of values - both sets familiar to all, both contested more widely in society. Far from being unique to Utrecht or even the Netherlands, this cultural clash was a typical aspect of campaigns for social and religious reform in Europe of the confessional age. It took particularly clear form, though, in this curious episode, when the magistrates of the ‘Domstad’ called for the abolition of the confraternities and the use of their assets to found a new type of institution, a house of correction.

1. Survival of the confraternities

At first glance, it seems that the dispute over Utrecht's confraternities should have pitted Calvinists directly against Catholics. After all, the fundamental purpose of confraternities - their raison d'être - had a distinctly Catholic character: to provide masses for the souls of the deceased.5 Confraternities (geestelijke broederschappen) were voluntary

organizations, each one under the patronage of a particular saint or aspect of the divine, such as the Trinity or Holy Cross. People joined in order to gain the protection of that patron, to assure themselves of a good funeral, and to lessen the time they would have to spend in purgatory. Typically, each confraternity had a grave and a chapel with an altar in one of the local churches. When a member died, he or she would be buried in that common grave and a priest would say masses for his or her soul at the altar. Members of the confraternity were encouraged, sometimes required, to attend these rites and to pray for the deceased. In addition, confraternities sponsored regular masses for all the deceased of the confraternity. Some required of their members an intensive routine of prayer and penance; others engaged the group in acts of charity. Once a year, each confraternity celebrated the day of its patron. On this refectiedag, as it was called (or alternately statiedag), the members of the confraternity would march in solemn procession to their chapel, where a special mass was said for all members, living and deceased; then, retiring to a tavern, the group would hold a general meeting at which financial accounts were presented, officers elected, decisions made, and the confraternal statutes read; finally, its business complete, the group sat down together for a festive meal - the so-called refectie.

Confraternities enjoyed extraordinary popularity in medieval Utrecht, which, as seat of a large bishopric, bulged with churches and clerics. Eager to participate in the rich liturgical life surrounding them, its burghers founded at least sixty-three confraternities. A list compiled in 1615 by the city magistrates counted forty-two divided among the four parish churches, thirteen in various monasteries and convents, and three attached to hospitals. Records have survived testifying to the existence of five more.6 With a population of 20,000 or less, pre-Reformation Utrecht thus had more confraternities than giant Antwerp or Ghent; more than Maastricht, another episcopal center, or Den Bosch; and far more than other northern cities: while Deventer had twenty-nine confraternities, Haarlem, more typically, had only five and Rotterdam not many more.7

With the Reformation, though, came a new form of Christianity that repudiated the power of saints, denied the existence of purgatory, and held the mass to be an abomination. Protestantism condemned the rituals of the confraternities as idolatry and the beliefs on which they were based as superstition. In most parts of Europe that went

Protestant, authorities quickly abolished all confraternities. Rotterdam is one Dutch city that conforms to the normal pattern: by 1580, the municipal government had seized all properties belonging to the confraternities there. Donated by wealthy members in years past, these properties had formerly subsidized the groups' activities, including the masses they sponsored. Now the properties went to the wardens of the local parish church, the St. Laurenskerk. Gouda's magistrates worked even more swiftly, seizing all confraternal assets by 1575.8 When Utrecht's magistrates attempted a similar confiscation, however, they ran up against fierce resistance. Efforts by the provincial states in 1580 and in 1586 had equally little effect.9

It must be said that among the various Catholic properties which Utrecht's authorities were trying to seize, those of the confraternities were small potatoes. They were of little value compared even to the benefices of parish priests and vicars, for which the States felt greater concern. The real prize, though, and focus of conflict in Utrecht was the property of the five collegiate churches located in the city: the cathedral, or Dom; St. Jan, St. Marie, St. Pieter, and Oudmunster. Together, these five churches owned about a quarter of all the land in the province, not to mention much of the city's best real estate. Pressures for confiscation, in other words, did not focus on the confraternities. Nevertheless, one can see already in the late 1570s a pattern of resistance that was to continue for decades.

More than greed motivated Dutch city and provincial governments to seize the former wealth of the Catholic Church and its appendages; they had many pressing needs. Of these, the most urgent was to finance the Revolt against Spain, whose costs, direct and indirect, were astronomical. Haarlem's magistrates, confiscating in 1581 the property of all but two local confraternities, used the wealth thus gained to help restore the damage done to the city by its recent siege.10 In 1598, some Utrechters demanded likewise that their provincial States use formerly Catholic ‘religious properties’ (geestelijke goederen) to defray the costs of war. They proposed this course of action as an alternative to the imposition of a new tax on the city, already hard-struck by the bubonic plague and harvest failures.11

Those who demanded most ardently the seizure of Catholic properties, however, did not want them turned to secular ends. They pointed out that the donors who had originally endowed the confraternities and churches had given these properties to be used to pious ends: ‘ad pios usus’. The proper way to honor the intent of these donors, they argued, was to continue to use the income from these properties for pious ends - pious now conceived in Protestant terms. Above all, magistrates and reformers wanted to use these incomes to pay the salaries of the Reformed ministers who had been appointed

to replace the old Catholic pastors. The rubric of ‘pious use’ also included what we would call matters of social welfare: caring for the poor, the aged, the sick, and the orphaned. These matters stood high on the agenda of magistrates and devout Protestants equally.12 Even a former Catholic priest agreed that confraternal funds which once had paid for masses should now pay for other, more acceptable pious works. In 1587 Joost Janssoen van der A asked Utrecht's magistrates to help him extract from several confraternities the money he was formerly paid by them to perform masses. True, since the Reformation he no longer performed the masses, he conceded, but now the confraternities were spending all their money on food and drink for their annual refectiedag meals. These funds ought to be used for ‘better and more devout purposes’, he argued, and they would be if his former salary were restored to him, seeing as he, the petitioner, was very poor, ‘too old...to earn his bread with labor, and ashamed to beg’. Alms to a deserving recipient like himself would fulfil the original purpose of the funds' donors far better than the current annual feasts.13

Utrecht's confraternities did respond to such demands, albeit grudgingly, and by the 1610s fifteen confraternities were making regular charitable distributions to the poor.14 In essence, though, Van der A's assertion was correct: since the Reformation, the confraternities were spending most of their money on their annual meals, many of which had already been quite elaborate before the Reformation. Indeed, many confraternities celebrated their refectiedag, or kermis, as it was also called, with a real blow-out party. The kermis of St. Anthony's Confraternity in the Jacobskerk, for example, lasted for three days in the 1560s and 1570s. Still, the confraternity paid considerable sums for masses, and the procession and solemn mass held on its refectiedag were grand, expensive ceremonies. After the Reformation, though, the only expense the group bore besides those associated with its kermis were the burial fees charged by the Jacobskerk undertakers. Flush, the group extended its annual celebration, beginning in 1580, to five days.15

Every confraternity experienced the same change, and with money to spare, many extended their kermissen, which grew more extravagant than ever before. The Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament in the Buurkerk resolved to hold every other year a separate, second feast, on St. Martin's day.16 Our Lady's Confraternity in the Geertekerk threw each year one rowdy, three-day bash that often left the group with a big bill for broken glasses.17 In 1586, the shopping list for this event included 119 pounds of meat - just to feed the ten members plus their wives. The St. Jacobsgilde in Haarlem manifests the same pattern: the cost of its annual meals rose from only f 7½ in 1588 to f 99 by 1610; such delicacies as turkey, salmon, lobster, and pastries joined the once sober menu; the

group purchased its own wine cellar; and by 1682 it was spending no less than f995 for its meals - a sum that exceeded the salary of most Calvinist ministers.18

2. ‘Friendship between christians’

Not all confraternities had abandoned their Catholic devotional practices. Our Lady's in the Geertekerk, for example, sought to follow ‘good old tradition’ as far as possible. At their annual meeting, its members recited Ave Marias and prayers for the dead, and had a priest say a collect. The new statutes issued by this confraternity in 1596 expressed sorrow at the outlawing of Catholicism and hope for its restoration.19 Of the five confraternities, however, which issued new statutes in the post-Reformation era, Our Lady's was alone in reaffirming its commitment to the old faith. Another, the Confraternity of St.Adriaen in the Buurkerk, embraced the new Protestant forms of piety. Following the new rules it adopted in 1593, members concluded their refectiedag with a prayer, asking God to grant them ‘through Christ out of grace thy Kingdom in eternal life’.20 Among the members of this confraternity was a tailor named Adriaen van Renen, one of the first people to join Utrecht's Calvinist Church after it was founded in 1578.21 The other three confraternities made no references at all of a confessionally-specific nature, and would have been equally hospitable to Catholic or Protestant members.22

In fact, as Utrecht's magistrates noted in 1615, some confraternities did accept members of both faiths. This was true of the Kleine Kalende, always the most exclusive of Utrecht's confraternities, recruiting from the leading families of the provincial gentry and urban patriciate.23 The Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament in the Buurkerk and numerous others also included Protestants.24 In many cases it seems that memberships were passed down within families and that this practice simply continued. At any rate,

what is certain is that, after the Reformation, at least some of Utrecht's confraternities recruited their members from across the religious spectrum. They became multi-confessional societies.

That does not mean, though, that they had become mere banqueting clubs. One confraternity from outside Utrecht offers a revealing example: Our Lady's in Den Bosch. After Prince Maurits conquered Den Bosch in 1629, Our Lady's began to spend all its money just as Utrecht's confraternities had done since 1578: to throw parties and to bury its dead. At first, all its members were Catholic, but after vehement debate the confraternity decided in 1642 to open itself to Protestant members. In a new constitution it declared that its object would henceforth be to prevent religious differences within the ruling elite from developing into political factions. The organization was to serve

for the removal of all mistrust that is coming to grow more and more as a result of the separation and distancing of [Reformed Protestants and Roman Catholics] from one another; and in order henceforth to live with one another with greater trust, correspondence, and unity, as inhabitants of one state, brothers of one brotherhood ought to do.

One member added a marginal note saying ‘unity and friendship between Christians stands at the centre. The most important task for the brothers is to see that the enmity between Roman Catholics and Protestants disappears’. Along with this change of constitution the confraternity offered membership to a contingent of highly-placed Protestants: Johan Wolfert, Count of Brederode, governor of the city; thirteen members of the city government; and five elders of the Reformed Church there.25

The decision of these men to accept the offer was highly controversial, splitting the Dutch Reformed Church. Opposing the decision were Den Bosch's minister Lemannus and Utrecht's renowned theologian Gisbertus Voetius, who wrote a scathing condemnation, accusing the Protestants of ‘indirect’ idolatry and ‘idolatry-by-participation’. Samuel Maresius, on the other hand, the town's Walloon minister, professor at its Illustere School, and soon-to-be professor of theology at Groningen, defended the men. A pamphlet war raged for four years. Even the provincial synods split: North Holland's ruled against those who had joined the confraternity, but Gelderland's said that only a national synod could decide the matter and that in the meantime it was all right for them to remain in the confraternity.26 In the event, no national synod did convene and the members remained. Indeed, in the following years a system of numerical parity emerged: memberships and offices were split evenly between Catholics and Protestants. In this form the confraternity has survived to the present day, as has Haarlem's St. Jacobsgilde, which had adopted the same system of numerical parity as early as the 1580s.27

None of Utrecht's confraternities give any indication that they adopted the system too. Like their counterparts in Den Bosch and Haarlem, though, some brought Protes-

tants and Catholics together, fostering a sense of community and even ‘brotherhood’ among people of different faiths. This brotherhood took varied forms. Protestant and Catholic confraternity members marched together in one another's funerals, from which ‘difference of religious conviction holds no one back and makes no one unwilling’, according to a contemporary observer.28 They lay deceased members of both faiths together in common graves and erected common memorials to them. They commissioned artworks representing all the members of the confraternity, Protestant and Catholic, together, and distributed charity to the poor irrespective of their church affiliation.29 The Kleine Kalende, like Our Lady's in the Dominican monastery, also continued some version of the traditional Maundy Thursday ceremony. A commemoration of the Last Supper, the latter involved the brothers' washing each others' feet and sharing a simple meal of wine and a special bread called mandaatbrood. Viewed from this perspective, even the raucous merrymaking of the kermis takes on a different appearance. For Catholics and Protestants to break bread and to drink together was a way as ancient as civilization itself for them to make peace and forge a united community.

The forging of peace and unity, in fact, had always played a prominent role in confraternal life. Since their first formation, confraternities had viewed it as one of their chief missions to foster Christian love among their members. Studying medieval Florence, Ronald Weissman has shown that the medieval confraternities there brought together ‘members of divergent factions, lineages, occupations, patronage chains, and neighborhoods’. Through a ritual life that stressed the unity of the group, they forged links of ‘ritual brotherhood’ between potential enemies. They were ‘symbols of and vehicles for promoting civic peace’.30 Since Weissman's work was published, historians have found confraternities in other medieval cities performing a similar function.31

Utrecht's confraternities sought likewise to forge a sacral unity among their members. Since their founding, all of them had placed great emphasis on this quality in their statutes, which laid out rules to avoid and to resolve conflicts among members. Our Lady in the Geertekerk, for example, required its members to speak respectfully towards one another: ‘whoever speaks dishonorable, offensive, or scandalous words, be it man or woman, or speaks mockingly, out of rancor, to any of the brothers or sisters shall...be fined, notwithstanding any apology or agreement’.32 If a conflict arose, the procurators and other members could constitute an ad hoc court whose judgements

were binding. Every confraternity in Utrecht reserved the right to expel any member who did not accept its judgement in such a case. In this way the statutes sought to ensure that members would ‘live in perpetual peace, as befits sisters and brothers in God’.33

The rules laid down by Utrecht's confraternities for their gatherings did more than mechanically keep the peace: they testify to a shared set of values, among which social harmony, as the supreme expression of Christian love, took first place. Second came ‘honor’, a word that, with its variants, recurs frequently in the statutes. As Our Lady's in the Dominican Monastery put it, confraternity members were required to be ‘honorable persons of good repute and name’.34 The Confraternity of Our Lady of Sorrow in the Jacobskerk threatened with expulsion any member, ‘be he young or old, who is immoral [onzedelic] in word or deed’ and fails to heed the admonition of his brothers.35 Even as they held their extravagant annual celebrations the confraternities evinced a sense of propriety: most of them limited, one way or another, how drunk their members could get. St. Adriaen's in the Buurkerk prohibited any drinking in the morning or by candlelight; St. Ewout's in the Niclaaskerk imposed a fine of six stuivers on anyone who drank so much ‘that he - written in reverence - vomits in company’. St. Ewout's also threatened any member whose word as a businessman proved false: expulsion was the penalty for agreeing to a business transaction with another member and then refusing to complete it.36

Even after the Reformation, then, shorn of their Catholic ritual, Utrecht's confraternities continued to unite their members through the bonds of charity, mourning, festivity, and shared rules of behavior. As clubs promoting the traditional values of harmony and honor, they lived on even after the Reformation had seemingly rendered them obsolete. Those whose members included Protestants as well as Catholics even extended their social mission to promote peace among the confessions. Thus, as of 1615, at least forty-four confraternities remained active.37

3. The debate over dissolution

In that year, though, the proponents of abolition launched a new offensive that, unlike its predecessors, ended in victory. Armed with a new and more powerful rationale, they claimed the city needed the assets of the confraternities to finance an expensive new social project: a house of correction. Known in Dutch as a tuchthuis (‘tucht’ meaning discipline), the latter was in one sense an extension of the welfare and charitable reforms pioneered in the early sixteenth century by civic humanists, who created a moral distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor; in another sense, the tuchthuis embodied a radically new approach to poverty. ‘Vagabonds’ and ‘sturdy beg-

gars’ - poor people who in theory could earn their own living but did not - were to be its chief inmates. Such people, complained Utrecht's magistrates, were as good as stealing the city's precious charitable funds; in their idleness, which they passed down like a disease to their children, they shirked their familial responsibilities, flouted society's rules of behavior, and sought personal gain in the downfall of others rather than in self-improvement.38 The innovation of the tuchthuis, as first conceived by Dirck Coornhert and described in his Boeventucht (1587), was to add rehabilitation to deterrence: instead of whipping or maiming such people, one would reeducate them to become productive, responsible members of society. To do that, though, one had to incarcerate them. By forcing them to perform grueling labor - the men ground Brazilwood to dust in order to produce a dye, the women spun yarn - the tuchthuis sought to instill a work ethic. At the same time, it placed the inmates under the strict moral supervision of a surrogate family, the ‘binnen-vader’ and ‘binnen-moeder’, and forced them to receive religious instruction. Children of the poor could also enter the tuchthuis voluntarily to imbibe the same virtues of hard work, clean living, and fear of God as the inmates proper, and to learn a skill, such as weaving, with which they could later earn their keep. Amsterdam's, built in the 1590s, was the first of about twenty-seven houses of correction erected in the Dutch Republic, serving as a model for these and others abroad. Treating unemployment as a form of social deviance, these institutions subjected the poor to what was truly a ‘Great Confinement’ and belong to a larger category of new institutions in seventeenth-century Europe promoting social discipline.39

Construction of Utrecht's tuchthuis cost an exorbitant sum, almost f.60,000.40 To help pay for the project, the city government once again proposed seizing the assets of the confraternities. This would be to convert money currently being ‘uselessly...consumed and squandered’, said the government,

to a more honorable, laudable, and godly work...so as to keep many poor folks' children from the beggar's sack and vagrancy, to bring them up in honest crafts, and in discipline [tucht] and fear of God, and by means of the latter to draw them away from all disorder, evil, and scandalous living; and furthermore, to chastise [tuchtigen] all other evildoers for their evil and ungodly life [and] by good instruction to bring them to knowledge of and repentance for their evil deeds, improvement of their lives, and advancement in the fear of the Lord, [and] also consequently to release them, by God's mercy, from eternal death into life, etc.

This, said the government, was ‘truly a cause [held] by all the world, or at least by honorable and conscientious people, [to be] more than praiseworthy and godly’, infinitely

preferable to the confraternities' promotion of ‘gluttony’ and ‘disorder’.41 With this expostulation the magistrates undertook a deft rhetorical manoeuvre, contesting the notion of honor maintained by the confraternities, redefining that civic virtue, and enlisting it on their own side. For the most part, though, the magistrates couched their proposal in the idiom of Dutch Calvinism. Equating moral reform with religious repentance and discipline with ‘fear of the Lord’, the magistrates' language echoed that preached in the Dutch Reformed Church, lending a degree of religious sanction to their proposal.

Utrecht's rulers were scarcely, however, the consistent champions of ‘godly discipline’ they represented themselves to be, and to many Calvinists their words must have sounded hypocritical. Until 1605 they had blocked every effort by Calvinist reformers to establish an effective system of ecclesiastic discipline for Utrecht's Reformed Church, with synods, classes, and consistories able to censure and excommunicate the immoral and unorthodox. Condemned for this reason as ‘Libertines’ by the Calvinist establishment of the Netherlands, the magistrates had moved only tardily to embrace a moderate Calvinism. Even then, they had set strict limits to the application of ecclesiastic discipline, and when the Remonstrant controversy had burst onto the public stage in 1610, they had sided nearly to a man with the followers of Jacob Arminius against the more precisian Contra-Remonstrants. They had been equally reluctant to extend Calvinist influence beyond the ecclesiastic sphere to the social and cultural. Popular pre-Reformation festivities like Three Kings' and St. John's eve were still celebrated with abandon; Catholics, who outnumbered Calvinists, attended mass with impunity.42 If Utrecht's magistrates endorsed tuchthuis discipline in 1615, they did so for two reasons. First, while it was Calvinists first and foremost who championed the values of ‘discipline and order’ in the Netherlands, those values had a wider, non-denominational appeal. In the confessional age that stretched from roughly the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, they had the endorsement of reformers of all ecclesiastic stripes, who went as far as to equate them with piety and morality themselves. Nor were they purely religious values; rather, they marked a point where the perspectives of pious reformers and practical rulers often converged.43 Second, Utrecht's magistrates recognized in the call for discipline the most effective way to legitimize and rally support for abolishing the confraternities, and that - tuchthuis aside - they were determined to do, for they had grown convinced that the confraternities were a threat to their rule.

The origins of that conviction went back five years to a popular uprising that shook the foundations of Utrecht's political system. On January 21st 1610, Utrecht's civic militia - over 4000 armed men, most of them guild craftsmen - mustered on the square in

front of city hall and forced the entire magistracy to step down. Their complaints had mostly to do with the domination of Utrecht's government, both city and provincial, by members of the gentry. Turning the government to their own financial interest, the gentry had allowed brewing and other industries to develop in the countryside, undercutting the urban economy; they had granted themselves lucrative tax farms, prebends, and offices; and they had turned a blind eye to peculation of public funds. Holding impromptu elections, the militia chose a new magistracy which it hoped would better represent the interests of ordinary burghers, and went on in the following weeks to formulate a series of proposals for larger, structural reforms of government. Far from unprecedented, the episode was one in a series of clashes going back to the Middle Ages that pitted craftsmen against patriciate and gentry in Utrecht. Religious divisions, however, added a new element in 1610. Since the signing of the Twelve Years' Truce the previous year, hopes had risen among Utrecht's Catholics for an improvement in their position, and many of them took part in the uprising, seeing it as an opportunity to press their demands. During the shouting and turmoil of January 21st they called for use of a church; a month later they instigated another demonstration, while behind the scenes they saw to it that the reform proposals of the citizenry omitted the requirement, standard since the 1580s, that magistrates be supporters of the Reformed religion.44

Backed by forty companies of soldiers under the command of Frederick Henry, the States General restored the city's original government at the end of March. Those who returned to office showed a hyper-sensitivity to the threat of rebellion. One of their first acts was to reorganize completely the civic militia, purging it of rebels and placing it under direct magisterial command.45 In the following years, they and their successors persecuted local Contra-Remonstrants (some of whom were implicated in the events of 1610) with a special ferocity born of fear. More generally, they held in suspicion any movement or organization that might serve as a vehicle for political opposition - including the confraternities, who according to rumor had held special meetings in 1610 and provided the uprising with some of its leadership.46

Those rumors did not go uncontested. The man chosen in October 1610 to lead the restored regime, for one, did not believe them - and as a member of the Kleine Kalende he thought he should know. Adolph de Waell, Lord of Moersbergen, was one of Utrecht's most powerful men in the 1610s. From a distinguished local family, he sat in the Provincial States as member of the nobility, on the provincial court (Hof) as extraordinary councillor, and represented the Sticht often in the States General. Religiously, Moersbergen was a Remonstrant, like most of Utrecht's governing elite. Politically he was a close ally of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, and was to pay a high price for the association in 1618. In October 1610, however, in the wake of the uprising, Moersbergen was the man of the hour: anxious to regain their hold over the city government, the

States chose him to serve as first burgomaster, a post he occupied for three years.47 During his tenure, no actions were taken against the confraternities. Proposals for their abolition were revived under his successor, but Moersbergen convinced him not to proceed. He was thus shocked to return to Utrecht in December 1615, after a lengthy trip away, to discover that in his absence the magistracy had taken decisive action, seizing all the confraternities' properties. He quickly assumed the role of their defender, taking his case before the Provincial States and seeking to have the action reversed. Himself no Catholic, Moersbergen did not rest his defence on the confraternities' ties to Catholicism, nor could such a defence have garnered support or legitimacy in the officially Calvinist Republic. Rather, against the ‘godly discipline’ championed by the magistrates, he portrayed the confraternities as bearers of an equally hallowed set of values rooted in fraternal love and civic tradition.

In a speech of 1615 before the States of Utrecht, Moersbergen made two chief arguments.48 The first was that the confraternities were beneficial to the Republic, promoting peace and social harmony. Addressing the rumors, Moersbergen acknowledged that some people believed the confraternities ‘served to nourish mutiny, giving [people] an excuse to gather together and form factions.’ Citing official documents, however, including confessions extracted from its ringleaders, he asserted that the confraternities had played no role whatsoever in the 1610 uprising. Indeed, he declared that the confraternities did not generally talk politics at all at their gatherings. Furthermore, he knew of no ‘disorders’ caused by them,

unless one wished to call it gluttony or disorder that honorable [eerlijck] noblemen, burghers, and other qualified persons gather together once a year and sometimes [once every] two or three years, have a merry meal with one another, [and] sort out and resolve in a friendly spirit all questions and differences that have arisen or might arise among them.

That the confraternities served as a forum for the resolution of disputes, Moersbergen argued, was of great political value. He noted that the confraternities had always included among their members many members of government as well as other notable citizens. ‘Now, what can be more useful for our state’, he asked, ‘than that the most qualified people [die gequalificeerste] live with one another in peace and unity?’ By preventing disunity and resolving differences among people ‘of quality’, he suggested, the confraternities helped to discourage factions.

Moersbergen went on to cite a row of classical precedents for the civic value of confraternities. Good King Numa, he claimed, was the first to establish confraternities in Rome, which the tyrant Tarquinius eventually abolished. Lycurgus in Sparta and Solon in Athens both viewed confraternities as beneficial. Citing the precedent of a modern Republic, Moersbergen claimed that the Swiss had always encouraged such confrater-

nities. Rhetorically he asked, ‘what joins, softens, and civilizes men's hearts like a friendly and amiable collation or gathering?’ Praise for such gatherings, he concluded, can also be found in the Bible, citing as examples the festivals and feast days of the Israelites.

The argument was not original. In fact, Moersbergen seems to have cribbed it straight from Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576), by the French political theorist Jean Bodin. Often caricatured as a blueprint for absolutism, Bodin's treatise makes a case for the utility not just of confraternities but of all sorts of corporate associations - guilds, communes, ‘colleges’, estates, parlements. Such associations are ‘indispensible to the commonwealth’, argues Bodin, because ‘friendship and goodwill among men...cannot endure unless fostered’ by them. Wise princes and lawgivers, he says, have always appreciated how they bring ‘into agreement among themselves’ the ‘parts and members of the body politic’ and thus make it ‘easier to regulate the commonwealth as a whole’. Only tyrants find them a threat. Moersbergen pulled every one of his examples, from Numa to the Swiss to the Israelites, from Bodin's treatise.49

Moersbergen's second argument was that the government had no right to confiscate the confraternal endowments. In the first place, private property had to be respected. It was the duty of the government ‘to maintain everyone in his property and rights’. If need be, let the government regulate the activity of the groups, but it lacked the authority to impound private property. In the second place, confraternities enjoyed protection under the Union of Utrecht itself, the founding document of the Republic. Moersbergen cited article 25 of the Union, which obliged the subscribing authorities to ‘maintain all militia companies, broederschappen and colleges that are in any cities or towns of this union’.50 By seizing their properties, Utrecht's magistrates would be violating privileges which they had sworn to uphold - the very ones in whose defence the Revolt against Spain had been fought - and in the process undermining the very ‘fundament of our state’.

The magistrates' response was sharp. In a rebuttal delivered to the provincial States, they disputed Moersbergen's first point on historical as well as contemporary grounds. The confraternities had not been founded to promote peace and unity among burghers but ‘to celebrate the blind papal religion and to establish a semi-monastic order’. None of them, said the magistrates, had shaken entirely free of Catholic ‘idolatry and superstition’; they represented still a ‘gross remnant of papistry and a great feeding ground for the same’. Moersbergen's classical examples the magistrates dismissed as ungodly. Like Catholicism in general, they said, the confraternities had their origins in heathendom mixed with Judaism. ‘We ought not...to learn from the heathens how to maintain friendships with eating, drinking, and carousing. Rather, following the precepts of our common teacher [Christ], we ought each to lead the other in sobriety and moderation’. The festive meals of the confraternities amounted to ‘great...disorders’, encour-

aging ‘drunkenness’, ‘debauchery’, and ‘unchristian excess’. For a Protestant like Moersbergen to partake of them was like ‘joining the papists in celebrating Bacchus and Carnival but rejecting Lent’ (as in fact many Utrechters did). The waste of so much money on them was a scandal ‘crying to heaven’ and a ‘disgrace to the Christian reformed religion’.

In practice, said the magistrates, the confraternities did not succeed in resolving disputes anyway; on the contrary they were seedbeds of faction, conflict, murder, and mutiny. It was no coincidence, suggested the magistrates, that Utrecht had so many confraternities and that it had experienced so much unrest in the period they were founded. The magistrates may have been referring to the vicious factionalism that divided Utrecht's patriciate in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries into groups known as Fresingen and Lichtenbergers; alternatively they may have had in mind the struggles of that period between patricians and craftsmen.51 As for 1610, the magistrates doubted highly that the confraternities had played no role in the uprising, and even if it were true, they said, just as the militia companies had done in the past, so the confraternities provided a natural forum for political discussion and organizing and thus were a dangerous source of ‘disorder’. Social discipline, in other words, required the suppression of autonomous burgher associations.

As for property rights, the magistrates emphasized that the endowments in question had been established ad pios usus. The city government, they claimed, had always functioned as ‘superintendent’ over pious institutions like the confraternities, and as such had ‘direct authority and power’ over them. Moersbergen himself admitted that the government had the authority to impose order on the confraternities. In fact, reasoned the magistrates, if they wanted to do the job properly, they should reform the confraternities in a manner consistent with their original purpose. That would mean requiring their members to attend Reformed sermons instead of mass and to sing psalms instead of Ave Marias. Moersbergen hardly wanted them to do that, nor was it practical. The important thing was to use these endowments to pious ends, and assigning them to the house of correction fulfilled that mandate.

Finally, the magistrates denied any attempt to curtail Utrechters' ‘privileges, freedoms, old usages, and long-standing customs’. Article 25 of the Union, they argued, does not refer to broederschappen of the religious sort, nor does it deny governments the power to divert their wealth to more godly purposes. Many Dutch cities, they noted, had already abolished the confraternities along with other Catholic institutions.

4. Language and conflicting values

In the event, Moersbergen argued in vain. Utrecht's city government did seize the confraternal endowments and, jointly with the provincial States, built its house of correc-

tion.52 Some confraternities survived this blow, but for most it meant the end.53 The debate between Moersbergen and the magistrates thus formed the climax of a conflict dating back to the beginning of Utrecht's Reformation. In one sense, the government's action represented a long-delayed victory for that religious revolution. Yet from beginning to end, the conflict did not pit religious confessions directly against one another. In the end, the most powerful supporter of the confraternities was a Protestant. For him, the conflict was one primarily of values and sensibilities.

Not that we should take Moersbergen's arguments at face value. Moersbergen glossed over the cost and minimized the raucousness of the confraternities' parties, casting what was sometimes a veritable debauch as an exercise in civility. He also deemphasized the Catholic heritage of the confraternities and the continued devotion of some to the old faith. While many had adjusted to the Reformation, finding a continuity of social purpose, they were all, in the final analysis, ‘remnants of papistry’; that in itself made them repugnant to some of Utrecht's hard-line Calvinists. Himself a Remonstrant, Moersbergen did not belong to the latter group, though, as we have seen, some orthodox Calvinists - even elders and ministers, in the Den Bosch case - did not view membership in a confraternity as incompatible with their beliefs.54

As for the magistrates, their very selective support for ‘godly discipline’ was notorious. By 1615 most had declared their allegiance to the same Remonstrant party to which Moersbergen belonged. The two sides in the dispute over Utrecht's confraternities thus did not correspond to the opposing parties in the Remonstrant Controversy then raging. Over time, the confraternities - or at least their great number - may have come to seem increasingly anomalous in a Protestant republic, but religious motives for abolition seem to have been no stronger per se in 1615 than decades earlier. Of course the building of the tuchthuis gave the magistrates a strong financial motive for seizing the wealth of the confraternities. Yet the city government never gave that wealth to the tuchthuis, either as outright gift or by assigning its annual yield to it. Instead it melded the confraternal endowments together into a single, legally distinct fund from which it drew the revenue itself; moneys from it went to the tuchthuis at best indirectly. Financial need may have added impetus, then, but the strongest, most decisive motive for seizing the endowments was political. Utrecht's magistrates were haunted by the popular uprising of 1610 and wished to eradicate what they viewed as potential cells of resistance to their authority. ‘It is essential’, they wrote, ‘that all avenues of insurrection be blocked’.

Ultimately, though, the motives of the two contending sides matter less than the language in which they couched their debate. In a silent assessment of their audience, each

side put forward those arguments it deemed most likely to persuade, or at least to gain acceptance as legitimate. Each side, that is, appealed to values that enjoyed broad sanction in Dutch society. Thus the debate opens a window onto the wider expanses of Dutch culture, where the same two sets of values coexisted in uneasy tension.

On one side, the supporters of Utrecht's confraternities articulated a world-view rooted in custom and protected (or so they hoped) by privilege. It was a view that attached supreme value to brotherly love - to social harmony among honorable burghers. According to this side, confraternities served a high purpose in fostering such unity. Even after the Reformation, their religious rituals curtailed, the confraternities united their members through the bonds of mourning, morality, charity, and conviviality. These bonds had always cut across factions and rivalries; now, in some cases, they extended also across confessional lines, uniting people of different faiths. They could only strengthen a pluralistic, republican regime such as Utrecht's, Moersbergen argued.

The abolitionists, by contrast, posed as champions of a new set of values. They condemned the confraternities as remnants of Catholicism but equally as sources of ‘disorder’. No schools of civic life, they claimed, the confraternities taught vice and rebellion as well as idolatry; their festive meals violated standards of moderation and sobriety embraced by all good Christians. As a counterpoint to their unruly dissipation Utrecht's magistrates held up as exemplary that new institution, the tuchthuis. What it taught its inmates, they said, all Utrechters should learn: the virtues of hard work, piety, obedience, and discipline.

Looking back on the Dutch Golden Age, we tend today to associate these virtues primarily with Calvinism, and certainly Utrecht's magistrates adopted the language of the dominees in blasting the confraternities. Yet reformers of all denominations promoted the same virtues. As modern historians have copiously documented, a call for ‘discipline and order’ swept much of Europe in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. Church leaders and devout lay people took it up, equating these qualities with true piety; rulers took it up, seeking to control their subjects more effectively. To the extent their reforms succeeded, the result was what historians call the ‘confessionalization’ of European society, affecting Calvinist, Catholic, and Lutheran lands equally. Even in Catholic lands, the process brought great change to the old confraternities. Catholic reformers did not abolish the latter, but they did restrict their festivities, subject them to clerical control, and use them to promote a new, more rigorous brand of Catholic piety. The raucous merrymaking of the confraternities had Catholic critics, just as it had Protestant partakers.

In every Christian denomination, however, confessionalization also had its opponents who, like Moersbergen and his confrères, valued civic harmony over godly discipline and found a bona fide morality already embedded in the customs of their forebears. Such opponents were nowhere more numerous or powerful than in the Netherlands, where in the sixteenth century they had rebelled against their sovereign rather than submit to the ‘Spanish Inquisition’ and where, in the Golden Age, they stymied every effort of Calvinist reformers to found a theocratic ‘New Israel’. In the dispute of 1615, Utrecht's magistrates threw their weight behind the call for discipline, but only, one may surmise,

due to the unusual political circumstances. In the broader life of Utrecht and the Dutch Republic such calls fared less well. Confraternities disappeared, by and large, but kermissen did not; ministers preached moderation, but the banquet, as Frans Hals' exuberant militia portraits witness, remained a centerpiece of civic culture. It was a tension the Dutch never fully resolved.55

Abstract - Confraternities (Catholic lay religious brotherhoods) survived the Reformation in large number in Utrecht. Accepting Protestant as well as Catholic members, many of them expanded one of their original missions, the promotion of social harmony, to include fostering amity between different religious groups. In 1615, Utrecht's government finally seized the confraternities' endowments, ostensibly to pay for the building of a house of correction. The debate over this action reveals a cultural divide that cut across confessional lines. On one side stood the defenders of ‘civic’, ‘fraternal’ values; on the other stood the proponents of ‘godly discipline’ and a new puritanical morality.

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