Reformed Netherlanders also fled to small hometowns of one or two thousand people just across the border of the Habsburg Netherlands, mostly in the duchy of Cleves.
1 Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief.” In using the term “hometowns,” we are drawing on David Luebke’s adaption of a concept introduced by Mack Walker. While Luebke includes Wesel under this umbrella, we leave it out here because its role in Cleves politics was distinct from the duchy’s smaller towns. Luebke, Hometown Religion; Luebke, “Ritual, Religion, and German Home Towns”; Walker, German Home Towns. The hometowns focused on here include Goch, Gennep, Kalkar, Xanten, Emmerich, and Rees, though the uneven survival of evidence means that it is impossible to examine them in systematic parallel. In each, Catholics remained the majority. In these smaller and less strategically important towns, the arrival of Reformed Protestants from the Netherlands did not pose the same constitutional questions about how to implement the Peace of Augsburg that we find elsewhere. There are two main reasons for this. The first relates to the porousness of social, cultural, and linguistic borders on the frontier. The second emerges out of the unstable and fluid ecclesiastical organizations in these small towns. The result was a flexible attitude in these communities toward confessional differences.
In general, one of two ecclesiastical models prevailed in these towns. In Emmerich, Kalkar, Rees, and Xanten, Catholics maintained a monopoly over public worship. In these places, the Reformed congregation was the only Protestant community—there was no competing group claiming to adhere to the Augsburg Confession. Thus, claims to
Augsburger Konfessionsverwandtschaft allowed Reformed Protestants in these towns to piggyback onto the informal toleration permitted to Reformed Protestants in Wesel. Meanwhile, parish churches in Goch, Gennep and a few other towns in the region adopted accommodationist liturgies that included both Catholic and evangelical elements. Catholics and local
Augsburger Konfessionsverwandt-Protestants worshipped together using a liturgy that included separate Catholic and Protestant moments. As described by a visitor to Goch and Gennep in 1562, after the bread and wine were placed on the altar, the evangelical minister led his part of the congregation out of the church while the Catholic Mass continued.
2 Van Booma, Communio clandestina, 1:58–60. For similar situations in neighboring Münsterland, Luebke, Hometown Religion. Afterward, the Protestants returned, and their pastor led his part of the congregation in psalm singing, and then offered an evangelical sermon, from which some Catholics excused themselves. Subsequently, the priest took over the service again (and Protestants who objected again exited). This distinction between two ecclesiastical models hardly does justice to the dynamic situations in these border towns, but it does provide a sense of the structural situations facing Netherlandish migrants when they arrived.
In both ecclesiastical models, most Reformed in Cleves’ small towns worshipped in private houses.
3 Van Booma, Communio clandestina, 1:20, 22. Goch’s congregation kept a list of twenty-five houses that were approved for such uses.
4 Van Booma, Communio clandestina, 1:127–28. However in practice the lines between the supposedly underground Reformed congregations and the public parish churches remained fluid. For instance, Reformed congregations distinguished between full members and those who attended sermons regularly but did not submit to consistorial discipline and who celebrated sacraments in the parish churches.
5 For a similar distinction in the early Dutch Republic, see Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, 33–34, 68–70. Reformed Protestants even sometimes attended Catholic services when no Protestant pastors were available. Reformed elders and ministers were uncertain about how to handle this matter. In October 1581 attendees of the regional classis meeting debated whether to admit to the Lord’s Supper those had who worshipped in Catholic churches because their community had no pastors.
6 Simons, Synodalbuch, 560; Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 92–93. In Kalkar as many as forty-five Netherlandish migrants submitted a statement professing their Catholicism in 1569 but were later found to have been Reformed all along.
7 Dünnwald, Konfessionsstreit und Verfassungskonflikt, 137. There were also examples of Reformed Protestants who attended Anabaptist services.
8 Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 93. In some cases, confessional fluidity resulted from the prerogative of individuals, but in others it was enforced from above. In Goch, the town council required that members of the Reformed congregation periodically attend sermons in the city’s churches if they were to stay.
9 As noted by elders on October 4, 1570. Van Booma, Communio clandestina, 1:176.Even when they had local elites as members, these congregations remained unstable and vulnerable. They faced pressure when local priests or Catholic officials pursued anti-Protestant policies.
10 Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 88–89, 115. Pastors in these towns were particularly at risk when they traveled outside the town, finding themselves vulnerable to discovery by ducal authorities. This proved particularly challenging because of the congregations’ meager resources. When communities of believers lacked the funds to pay for a full-time minster, they shared one with other congregations. The enclave of Hörstgen, where a nobleman sponsored a small Reformed church of mostly Netherlanders, sent a pastor to the cathedral city of Xanten for secret underground services.
11 Dünnwald, Konfessionsstreit und Verfassungskonflikt, 170. From 1574 to 1578 Reformed congregations in Goch, Gennep, Emmerich, and Rees all shared a pastor.
12 Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 128–36. From 1581, the pastor Paschasius Aquensis served the same four towns, as well as small congregations in Kalkar and Zevenaer. The travel that such a post required made the pastors much more vulnerable to capture by Catholic officials. In 1580, Goch’s Reformed congregation fired its pastor, Nicholas Pancratius, because the elders deemed it too dangerous for him to be making such trips, following a ducal order that all Reformed pastors should be taken prisoner. Sometimes entire congregations traveled to their pastor rather than him coming to them because that was the safer option.
13 Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 139–40. In August 1576, Emmerich’s elders invited Reformed Christians from Zevenaer to celebrate the Lord’s Supper with them because it was too dangerous for pastor Servatius Wijnants to travel safely to them. The consistory at Goch welcomed Reformed Protestants from the nearby village of Uedem into their eucharistic community because they did not have access to a pastor themselves.
14 Van Booma, Communio clandestina, 1:25, 355, 357; Simons, Synodalbuch, 606–8; Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 140.While initially Goch maintained two separate Reformed congregations, they were divided not by geography, language, or culture (as had happened among Reformed congregations in Aachen, Frankfurt, and Cologne), but by ecclesiastical structure. One maintained a consistory and participated in the ecclesiastical structures of the Dutch Reformed Church. The other, supported by the Flemish noblewoman Clara van der Dilft (known as the Lady of Arnhem) did not.
15 Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 95–108. The two congregations merged in 1577, but only after considerable debate and with many hard feelings.
16 See chapter 4. For a parallel situation in the city of Utrecht that began shortly after this one ended, see Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines.When congregations were without a pastor—or when people wanted the social recognition that a public ceremony could confer (for a marriage, for instance)—they traveled to nearby Protestant towns to worship. We find Reformed Protestants from Xanten and Rees, for instance, showing up in Wesel to celebrate baptisms and marriages.
17 See Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 142–43; Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 204–5. Wesel’s pastors complained about the practice since it did not offer them the opportunity to monitor the visitors’ moral or doctrinal orthodoxy and did not want Wesel to gain a reputation for supporting illegal congregations.
From the perspective of these unstable congregations, debates about whether Reformed congregations were or were not protected by imperial law may have seemed like a luxury. But the Peace of Augsburg was not wholly irrelevant in these borderland regions. Its interpretation became important in negotiations with the duke’s officials, particularly since the duke had informally granted freedom of conscience to
Augsburger Konfessionsverwandten. In May 1562, Goch’s magistrates asked the duke for permission to appoint a pastor who endorsed the Augsburg Confession.
18 Dünnwald, Konfessionsstreit und Verfassungskonflikt, 70. In January 1567, the Reformed pastor in Xanten, Bruno Bitter, petitioned the city council for free worship according to the Augsburg Confession. When asked if he knew what was contained in the Augsburg Confession, he admitted his ignorance, but claimed that his congregation had heard that it was good and grounded in God’s Word.
19 Coenen, Die katholische Kirche am Niederrhein, 60; Kessel, “Reformation und Gegenreformation,” 17. Bitter, that is, seems to have been informed about the document’s strategic value but not its content.
At official functions, some Reformed Protestants defended their rights to worship based on their adherence to the Augsburg Confession. This happened at a meeting of representatives of cities with ducal officers in October 1566. A number of Protestant cities of Cleves refused to pay ducal taxes unless the duke permitted worship according to the Augsburg Confession.
20 Dünnwald, Konfessionsstreit und Verfassungskonflikt, 44. Protestant delegates to meetings of the duchy’s territorial estates (
Landtage) attempted to persuade ducal officials to recognize worship that conformed to the Augsburg Confession in 1572, 1577, 1580, 1583, and 1592.
21 Dünnwald, Konfessionsstreit und Verfassungskonflikt, 251–57. Stefan Ehrenpreis, “Die Vereinigten Herzogtümer Jülich-Kleve-Berg und der Augsburger Religionsfrieden,” in Schilling and Smolinsky, Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden, 262. The duke never granted public worship but instead decided—as he explained in 1580—he would “follow the religious peace to the letter … and not allow each estate, city, commune or subject freedom, and if the subjects are not happy with the religion of their government [
Overicheit], that they can leave their government’s lands to other places with their wives and children.”
22 Keller, Die Gegenreformation, 1:257. And yet in practice, managing the arrival of Reformed migrants from the Habsburg Netherlands into the small hometowns of Cleves did not require careful consideration of what was meant by the diplomats who wrote the Peace of Augsburg. Locals in these small towns—so long as they stayed local—maintained considerable freedom to solve problems created by confessional divisions on their own.