Batavia's Graveyard (5 page)

It proved to be a fatal error. Within a few weeks of being placed with Heyltgen,
the baby was extremely sick; within a few months he was dead. On 27 February 1628, eight
months before he sailed on the
Batavia,
Jeronimus Cornelisz buried his infant son
in the church of St. Anna, Haarlem.

The apothecary was devastated. The death of small children was a commonplace at a
time when half of all the children born within the Dutch Republic expired before they
reached puberty. Yet there was nothing ordinary about the death of Jeronimus’s child.
The baby had not died of fever or convulsions, or any of the other diseases that usually
accounted for infant mortality. He had died of syphilis.

The final agonies of Cornelisz’s infant son would have been hard enough for
his parents to bear. Babies who contract syphilis die bleeding from the mouth and anus and
also suffer considerably from open sores and rashes, so much so that they are sometimes
described as looking “moth-eaten” at the moment of death. But for Jeronimus and
Belijtgen the prospect of disgrace would have been as difficult to endure. Their families
and neighbors were likely to assume that the boy had contracted the disease from his
mother and that, in turn, implied that one or other of the parents had not been faithful.
For a well-bred couple, living in a respectable part of town, this was a very serious
concern. Their customers, meanwhile, would wonder if they might not catch the pox from
their apothecary. For a fledgling business, this could be catastrophic.

It is very probable that Jeronimus’s pharmacy was in financial difficulty
even before the death of his son. The renewal of the Dutch war against Spain in 1621,
which followed 12 good years of peace, had led to a sudden increase in military
expenditure that put considerable strain on the resources of the Republic. In that year
the Spaniards had added to the pressure by embargoing all trade with the United Provinces,
blockading the coast, and all but ending Dutch trade with Spain, Portugal, and the
Mediterranean. Spanish garrisons along the Rhine, Maas, Waal, and Scheldt halted river
traffic between the Netherlands and Germany. The result was a severe economic depression
in Holland, which lasted for much of the 1620s and proved to be the worst of the entire
seventeenth century. Virtually all Dutch trade was affected by the slump, and even
well-established businesses found it hard to stay afloat.

Cornelisz was far from well established. His pharmacy was still new, and he
himself was young and freshly qualified. Many Haarlemmers must have preferred to do
business with his older rivals even before the scandalous death of his son set tongues
wagging in the Grote Houtstraat. Consequently, by the middle of 1628 Jeronimus was in
serious financial difficulties. He had accumulated debts, which were mounting, and
creditors, who had grown impatient. One man in particular, a merchant named Loth Vogel,
was insisting that Cornelisz repay the money he owed. The apothecary lacked the necessary
funds to do this. He therefore faced the looming prospect of bankruptcy, which—in the
Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century—was a mortal sin.

Throughout the claustrophobic summer of 1628, the merchant Vogel pursued the
apothecary while the apothecary pursued his wet nurse. Jeronimus knew by now that his only
chance of restoring his damaged reputation—and, perhaps, of salvaging his
business—lay in proving that his child had contracted syphilis from Heyltgen Jansdr.
His actions that June, July, and August suggest a man preparing for a court case. Leaving
Belijtgen to mind his failing business in the Grote Houtstraat, Cornelisz vanished into
the maze of narrow alleyways off the St. Jansstraat, searching for those who knew the wet
nurse. He listened to their stories and persuaded them to set down their misgivings about
the woman in sworn statements.

Cornelisz found no fewer than nine of his own acquaintances to testify that
Belijtgen was unmarked by syphilitic sores and ulcers, and six others, from north Haarlem,
who confirmed that the wet nurse had been seriously ill for at least two years. It was
alleged that Heyltgen had left the apothecary’s son wailing and uncared for while she
went out carousing of an evening; several of the nurse’s neighbors remarked on the
extraordinarily foul odor that hung over her bed whenever she fell ill; and one, Elsken
Adamsdr, made a sworn statement in which she described how she had refused to change
Heyltgen’s sheets for fear of catching a disease. A number of the nurse’s
neighbors also testified that she was an unfaithful wife and had slept on several
occasions with a local widower named Aert Dircxsz, whose nickname was “Velvet
Trousers” and who may himself have been syphilitic. Their evidence was hardly
conclusive, but, taken together, the statements that Jeronimus collected were certainly
enough to suggest that the boy’s bereaved parents had right on their side.

Heyltgen Jansdr responded violently to Cornelisz’s campaign. She publicly
alleged that Belijtgen was so riddled with venereal disease that all her hair had fallen
out and her scalp was festooned with ulcers. She twisted the scanty evidence she had
collected in her own defense to make it appear stronger than it was. She even appeared
again in the Grote Houtstraat, where she gathered a crowd outside Jeronimus’s shop by
cursing, beating her fists together, and screaming that Belijtgen was a whore, whose
eyeballs she would rip out if she could.

Despite this ongoing personal horror, in the end it was not Heyltgen’s lies
but Loth Vogel and his demands for reparation that sealed Cornelisz’s fate. Trade had
continued to decline and the apothecary’s financial situation had deteriorated
further. On 25 September, Jeronimus appeared before his solicitor to transfer to Vogel the
sum total of his worldly goods. It was not bankruptcy, but it might as well have been.
Tables and chairs, sheets and blankets—even the pharmacist’s marriage
bed—were handed over in settlement of debts. With them went Cornelisz’s pestle
and mortar, his drugs and potions, and his stuffed crocodile.

The pharmacy on the Grote Houtstraat was closed; Jeronimus the apothecary was
dead. But, no doubt quite unknown to Vogel, that was far from the end of the matter.
Cornelisz the heretic was still very much alive.

Jeronimus seems to have been brought up as an Anabaptist—a member of one of
the smaller Protestant churches then established in the Netherlands. His home province,
Friesland, had long been the religion’s main stronghold in the Dutch Republic, and in
1600, when Cornelisz was still a child, as many as one in five of the population of
Leeuwarden professed the faith.

The members of the Anabaptist church could easily be spotted on the streets of
the Frisian capital, for even by the standards of the day they insisted upon sober dress,
clothing themselves in black from head to foot and favoring baggy breeches and long
jackets that had fallen out of fashion years before. Most Anabaptists were quiet, thrifty,
conscientious, and hardworking, yet even in Leeuwarden their neighbors often viewed them
with distaste and barely tolerated their religious views. Elsewhere in the republic they
were sometimes actually persecuted.

Cornelisz’s early faith thus assumes a certain significance, for the
distrust that other Dutchmen felt when confronted by Anabaptism had strong roots in the
history of the preceding century. The Anabaptists had not, in fact, always been model
citizens. When Jeronimus’s grandparents were young, their religion had been the
scourge of northern Europe; militant members of the church had formed armies, captured
cities, and been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. This movement had eventually
been crushed, but memories of its excesses persisted. In its pure form, Anabaptism was a
fanatic’s creed, and even in the last days of the century it still attracted
agitators and iconoclasts.

The faith had first emerged during the 1520s, a period of unparalleled religious
ferment that also saw the rise of the new Protestant religions of Martin Luther and John
Calvin. Unlike Calvin—whose views came to dominate in Holland and who believed in
predestination, the notion that the fate of every soul is fixed before
birth—Anabaptists acknowledged the existence of free will and held that infant
baptism was a worthless sham, for only a mature adult, they believed, could accept entry
into the church of Christ. This doctrine was heresy to Catholics and Calvinists alike, but
the early Anabaptists were dangerous for another reason. They were, without exception,
fervent millenarians—convinced that the Second Coming would occur within a few months
or years and determined to assist a vengeful Christ to reclaim his earthly kingdom, thus
triggering the bloody occurrences prophesied in the Book of Revelation. To Anabaptists,
those verses were no allegory. They were sure that Revelation described a literal series
of events, which would begin with the construction of a new Jerusalem on earth, and end in
an apocalypse that would consume all those who had not accepted the new faith.

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.