The Supply of Pastors

First, it’s true that some pastors in rebel-held Reformed areas in the Netherlands were recruited from positions in the diasporic congregations in the Empire. The three most influential of these, Petrus Dathenus, Gaspar van der Heyden, and Arent Cornelisz, deserve attention. All three men had served in the Dutch church at Frankenthal, and later became key reformers in Ghent, Antwerp, and Delft, respectively. Dathenus and Van der Heyden had been collaborators well before working together in Frankenthal: they served as pastors of the Dutch congregation in Frankfurt for four years before the closure of the Weißfrauenkirche in 1562 convinced them to move to the Palatinate.2 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 141–43. Van der Heyden’s presence in Frankfurt goes unmentioned in Scholz, Strange Brethren. In 1566–67, both men had actively preached and organized in Flanders and Brabant until the arrival of the duke of Alba forced them to return to Frankenthal. After fleeing the Low Countries, both remained among the most active organizers (along with Philip van Marnix) in promoting coordination among the churches across the diaspora between 1568 and 1571. Van der Heyden (1530–86) ministered in Frankenthal from 1567 to 1574, when he returned to the Low Countries to help organize a synod of congregations in Holland and Zeeland that met in Dordrecht that year. He later became pastor of Middelburg (1574–78) and Antwerp (1578–85) before fleeing the Habsburg reconquest of the southern Netherlands for the Palatine, where Johann Casimir gave him an appointment in 1586 in Bacharach, where he died soon after.3 Cuno, Die pfälzischen reformierten Fremdengemeinden, 16–25; Van Lennep, Gaspar van der Heyden. After organizing in Ghent in 1566/67, Dathenus (c.1531–88) escaped to Frankenthal until 1570, when he became an advisor to the Elector Palatine in Heidelberg. He returned to Ghent in 1578 after the orthodox Reformed took over that city but fled back to Frankenthal the following year after his brand of hardline reform fell out of favor. He returned to Ghent in 1583–84, until again forced to flee following the collapse of Ghent’s Reformed republic.4 Ruys, Petrus Dathenus; Van Schelven, “Petrus Dathenus.” For the tragic end to his life, see Janssen, “Petrus Dathenus.” On Ghent’s Reformed republic, see Decavele, Het Eind van een rebelse droom. For both men, Frankenthal served as a kind of staging ground to build ties between the Dutch Reformed movement and the Palatinate, to find safe harbor in preparation for their next organizing activity, and to provide pastoral care for fellow Dutch refugees.

The profile of Arent Cornelisz (1547–1605) was rather different. Sixteen and seventeen years younger than Van der Heyden and Dathenus, respectively, Cornelisz did not leave for the Holy Roman Empire because of any danger to his life but to pursue an education at the University of Heidelberg in 1565.5 For Cornelisz’s early life and education, see Jaanus, Hervormd Delft, 94–100. When the Reformed demonstrations broke out in summer 1566, rather than returning home to preach and organize, he continued his studies abroad, moving to study at the Genevan Academy from 1568 to 1570. When he took his first pastoral post in Frankenthal in 1570, alongside Van der Heyden (after Dathenus began working for Elector Friedrich in Heidelberg), he was again moving from one safe and supportive environment to another. Two years later, on a trip to his hometown of Delft, soon after Orangist victories there allowed the creation of a Reformed church, he became pastor there and retained that post until his death in 1605. While the older Van der Heyden and Dathenus had been refugees multiple times, forging new lives for themselves over and over again, Cornelisz led a more stationary existence. He lived most of his life in his hometown, except when he was getting a university education (which the two other men lacked). He also played a critical role in the first two “national” synods in the Netherlands, and basically every provincial synod in southern Holland until his death. Dathenus and Van der Heyden represented the fluid, mobile, multilingual, and transnational character of the Netherlandish Reformed movement up until the mid-1570s. Cornelisz, by contrast, was part of a growing trend toward domesticating the Netherlandish Reformed movement as a “Dutch” enterprise centered on the United Provinces of the Netherlands from 1572, even if he still understood himself as a part of the European-wide Reformed movement.6 We will discuss this further in chapter 6.

What Dathenus, Van der Heyden and Cornelisz did have in common, though, was their time in the Palatinate. Indeed, no other home for Dutch Reformed migrants in our study supplied so many influential pastors for the new Reformed churches in the rebel-held Low Countries. In this respect, it was Cornelisz whose experience is the most representative for pastors in the early Dutch Republic, not his elder colleagues, because he had not fled as a refugee but had studied at the University of Heidelberg. It was that university’s training of Reformed pastors, not the refugee churches’ role in staffing Dutch pulpits, that proved most influential for Dutch Reformed church building. From 1550 to 1600, some 529 Netherlanders studied at the University of Heidelberg, many of whom returned to the Low Countries to staff churches.7 De Wal, Nederlanders, studenten te Heidelberg. On this university as an international center of Reformed learning, see Christoph Strohm, “Die Universität Heidelberg.” The majority of those came, like Cornelisz, in the 1560s or the 1580s. They included prominent Dutch reformers, including Mathaeus de Lannoy, Werner Helmichius, Peter van Aelst, Thomas van Thielt, Jacob Barlaeus, Reginaldus Donteclock, Hendrik van den Corput, Hendrik de Smet, Hugo Donellus, Franciscus Gomarus, and many more. Meanwhile, the migrant congregations in our study had a relatively small impact on staffing of the churches in the early Dutch Republic. Wesel’s Reformed community supplied four pastors to churches of the Dutch Republic.8 Martinus Janssen (who became pastor in Delft), Lieven Massis (who later became pastor in Middelburg), Abraham Musenhole (who took a post in Breda), and Pierre Moreau (who served as pastor of the Walloon congregation at Delft). Aachen’s only supplied two. Five former pastors in Cologne later worked in the Netherlands, though three of these also studied at Heidelberg (and one other was soon dismissed for bad behavior). Nine former pastors in Frankfurt later worked in the Republic, but eight of these had also studied at the University of Heidelberg or worked elsewhere in the Palatinate.9 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 187–88, 190–91.

Germans who studied at the University of Heidelberg also later became pastors in the Low Countries, including ten men from the Palatinate identified by Fred van Lieburg, as well as twelve recruited by Johann Casimir to serve in Guelders identified by Christiaan Ravensbergen.10 Van Lieburg, Profeten en hun vaderland, 226; Ravensbergen, “Language Barrers,” in Soen, Soetaert, Verberckmoes, and François, Transregional Reformations, 354–55. Some financial aid to support these pastors came from the Lutheran landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. Ruys, Petrus Dathenus, 123. Van Lieburg does not provide complete numbers for those who studied theology at the University of Heidelberg, but he identifies ninety-one German pastors who served in Dutch Reformed parishes from 1572 to 1599, many of whom surely studied at Heidelberg.11 Van Lieburg, Profeten en hun vaderland, 198. Language barriers sometimes proved a barrier to this transnational supply of pastors. But in many cases the Germans were able to provide much needed spiritual care to vastly understaffed parishes in the Low Countries, especially after the death of Elector Friedrich III; the succession of his Lutheran son Ludwig VI in 1578 meant that the job market collapsed for Reformed pastors in most of the Palatinate.

The Palatinate also provided theological training for pastors in the migrant congregations in our study. More than half of the pastors who served Cologne’s and Frankfurt’s Dutch Reformed congregations had been trained at Heidelberg, or at the Casimirianum, founded in Neustadt in 1578 by Johann Casimir after his Lutheran brother became Elector Palatine.12 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 187–88. Thus, while previous historians have stressed the role of refugee churches in helping to staff the newly opened Reformed congregations in the United Provinces, far more important was the role of the University of Heidelberg. And most of the students at Heidelberg were not refugees but more conventional participants in the peregrinatio academica.13 On this tradition in the German-speaking lands, see Irrgang, Peregrinatio academica. Because there were so few Reformed universities, the peregrinatio academica was particularly common for sixteenth-century Reformed Protestants. Murdock, Beyond Calvin, 41–45.

Second, some of the pastors who moved from Dutch migrant centers to take pastoral positions in the newly independent United Provinces emerged as central critics and thorns in the side of orthodox reformers. We have previously noted that this was the case for Hubert Duifhuis, who had fled to Cologne; Herman Herberts, who worked as a pastor in a civic parish in Wesel from 1571 to 1577; and Caspar Coolhaes, who fled Deventer for the Empire in 1567, serving as pastor in Essen and Mönsheim. All three men became prominent “libertines” in the early Dutch Republic and had public conflicts with leading Reformed pastors.14 Van Veen and Spohnholz, “Calvinists vs. Libertines.” For Duifhuis, see Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines. For Herberts, see Van den Berg, “Herman Herberts”; Plaizier, Herman Herbers; Hibben, Gouda in Revolt. For Coolhaes, Kooi, Liberty and Religion. It was also true for Petrus Bloccius, who had served as a pastor in Niedermörmter (a noble enclave within the duchy of Cleves), had lived in Wesel and Rees, and later became pastor in Lier, Brabant. Like Duifhuis and Herberts, Bloccius was a spiritualist who rejected requiring the signing of confessional statements, which he saw as a hindrance to true faith, not a path toward it.15 In the nineteenth century, Bloccius was romanticized as representing the tolerant “Dutch” spirit. Kist, “Petrus Bloccius.” Others in these migrant communities who spread spiritualist views included the minister of Goch, Godfried Loeffs, and the elder in Wesel, Pieter de Zuttere, both of whom promoted the ideas of Sebastian Franck and other radical authors.16 Van Booma, Communio clandestina, 1:231; Sepp, Drie evangeliedienaren, 81–122. In 1574, De Zuttere moved to Rotterdam to take a pastoral position, but he was soon run out of town by orthodox reformers.17 Rogghé, “Pieter Anastasius de Zuttere”; Ten Boom, De reformatie in Rotterdam, 162–63. In some cases, migrant centers were not seedbeds for orthodoxy, but petri dishes of religious heterodoxy, as Nicole Grochowina has argued was the case for Emden.18 Grochowina, Indifferenz und Dissens. To be clear, most Reformed pastors and elders in these migrant communities strove to eliminate Anabaptist, spiritualist, and anti-Trinitarian ideas from within their ranks. But it would be wrong to conclude that preachers coming from these Dutch migrant communities always promoted the spread of Reformed orthodoxy. In some cases, they did the opposite.

Third, at times migrant churches even opposed efforts to recruit pastors for the United Provinces from their ranks (a point we will return to in chapter 6). In 1574, when Dordrecht’s consistory proposed hiring the Dutch schoolmaster in Wesel, Gerardus Larenius, Wesel’s elders refused, explaining that their need for Larenius’s work was greater than the need in Holland.19 EKAW Gefach 72,1 fol. 55r–v. Soon after, Wesel’s elders helped Larenius take a pastoral position in a newly formed congregation in Emmerich.20 Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 129, 155. In October 1576, the Reformed congregation in Gorkum, in southern Holland, asked that Maastricht’s exiled church in Aachen send their pastor, Johannes Huckelum, to help them build their congregation in the “fatherland.”21 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 174–75. Members of the church at Gorkum appealed to article thirty-five of the synod at Emden (actually they appealed to article thirty-four, but they got their numbering off), which suggests that “pastors who originate from the Netherlands” (Ministri Belgio oriundi) who have taken positions abroad (exteris) should heed calls to serve the churches in the Netherlands.22 Rutgers, Acta, 74. But the Reformed Protestants in Aachen declined. In his letter refusing this request on behalf of his classis, Johannes Christianus argued that Aachen’s Reformed community was larger and growing and needed to maintain pastoral care for its members. He also argued that it was inaccurate to describe Huckelum as originating from the Netherlands, since he was born in the duchy of Guelders before it became part of the Habsburg Netherlands under the Treaty of Venlo in 1543.23 Simons, “Ein rheinisches Synodalschreiben.” Aachen’s Reformed Protestants had supported needy coreligionists as needed, Christianus argued. But this request simply went too far. The Palatinate was sending pastors to help staff Dutch churches, but even the pious Elector Friedrich III would not abandon his own congregations to do so!24 Christianus had no way of knowing that Friedrich III had died two days earlier.

The next year, we find two more cases. In the first, the church at Dordrecht hired Servatius Wijnants from under the nose of the five small congregations he was serving in Cleves.25 Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 110, 111, 129. Originally, in October 1577 the classis of Cleves had just loaned Wijnants to the Reformed congregation in Eindhoven.26 EKAW Gefach 72,2 48r. Simons, Synodalbuch, 533. Since he was already in the Netherlands, the classis also encouraged him to attend the synod held in Dordrecht in July 1578.27 Rutgers, Acta, 308–9. Wijnants never returned to Cleves. Instead, immediately following the closure of that assembly, he took a permanent position in Dordrecht.28 Jensma, Uw Rijk kome, 114, 116. Wesel’s elders grew angry. Not only had Dordrecht hired Wijnants without consulting the classis of Cleves—as Wesel’s elders put it, “not without great scandal and shame”—the congregation at Emmerich had funded his journey to Brabant and Holland in the first place. They called for the return of Wijnants, or at the very least repayment of his travel costs.29 EWKA Gefach 72,2 fols. 155v–156v. That same year, the Reformed congregation at Brussels asked the Dutch-speaking congregation at Frankfurt to send Werner Helmichius “to strengthen those brothers” and to “help plant the Word of God among them.” But Reformed elders in Frankfurt said they would refuse the request unless their coreligionists found a replacement and a means to pay the substitute’s salary. After all, they argued, they could not reasonably sacrifice the spiritual care of their own congregation.30 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 173–74. The following year, Dathenus found a replacement, Martinus Lydius, and the elders in Frankfurt agreed to loan Helmichius out. This may not have been the best deal for them, however, because Helmichius never returned. And as, within a year, Lydius had moved to Amsterdam, Frankfurt’s Dutch Reformed congregation was again in search of a new pastor.

A final case emerged in 1578, after the newly appointed stadholder of Guelders, Count Johann of Nassau-Dillenburg requested that Johannes Badius—then pastor of Cologne’s German-language Reformed congregation and like his predecessor Christianus, a native of Jülich—become his court preacher.31 Nauta, “De Nationale Synode van Dordrecht,” 47. For Count Johann, Badius was a sensible option. The deeply Reformed prince needed a Reformed pastor who spoke High German, since Johann spoke no Dutch. Badius was one of several German pastors trained at Heidelberg whom Johann had recruited to serve in Guelders. However, Cologne’s congregation declined to give up their pastor to the Nassau prince.32 Rutgers, Acta, 332–33; Ravensbergen, “Language Barrers,” in Soen et al., Transregional Reformations, 341 n.32. Clearly, when it came to pastoral staffing the Dutch Reformed congregations in the Empire did not primarily envision themselves as refugee congregations seeking to build up Christ’s true church in the “fatherland.”

The Dutch Reformed congregations and classes in the Empire spent more of their attention trying to staff their own congregations and those in their region. Wesel’s elders, for instance, devoted considerable attention to helping nearby congregations secure pastoral care. After the small congregations who shared the pastor Nicolaus Pancratius fired him in 1579 because his travel was gaining too much attention, elders in Wesel tried to hire a German minister trained at the University of Heidelberg, Erasmus Lauterbach, to replace him.33 EKAW Gefach 72, 2 fols. 222r–223v. Instead, Lauterbach took a post in Werth, in the prince-bishopric of Münster. Luebke, Hometown Religion, 125. The following year, they found a pastor to serve congregations at Büderich, Orsoy, and Xanten, though congregants at Xanten did not approve of the candidate, and the other towns could not afford his salary on their own.34 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 180v. In 1581, Wesel’s elders successfully arranged for a new minister, Paschasius Aquiensis to come from Aachen to serve congregations in Goch, Gennep, Emmerich, Rees, Kalkar, and Zevenaer.35 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fols. 235r–v. More than once Wesel’s elders urged smaller congregations in Cleves to put up with a pastor they did not approve of, in part because finding a replacement proved so challenging.36 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 217r, fol. 254r–v. Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 131–32. When Pieter Hazaert complained in May 1588 at the classis of Cleves about the lack of pastoral care in his community, the elder in Wesel, Gillis van Musenhole, promised to send his son Abraham to serve that role.37 His son never arrived in Emmerich, though he later served as a pastor in Frankenthal. Cuno, Geschichte der wallonisch- und französisch-reformirten Gemeinde zu Wesel, 24. On the theological career of Gillis’s son, see chapter 6. Similarly the Dutch-speaking congregation in Cologne was often on the hunt for a new pastor, given the risks inherent to that job.38 WMV 1/3, 13, 19, 25, 40. Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 80. The German- and Dutch-speaking Reformed congregations at Cologne often had to share pastors, which could lead to disagreements about finances.39 WMV 2/2, 30. Simons, Niederrheinisches Synodal- und Gemeideleben, 56; Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 165–66. The same was true between the French- and Dutch-speaking congregations at Frankfurt.40 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 167–68. Aachen’s Reformed congregation also loaned a pastor to serve fellow believers in Cologne in 1572.41 WMV 2/2, 14. Congregations tried to spread the Gospel in other communities, but their priority was not necessarily the Low Countries. At the meeting of the Cologne classis at Birkersdorf (in the duchy of Jülich) in 1573, delegates sent the pastor Cornelis Walraven to help set up congregations in Düsseldorf and Essen “where many good people are who do not want to find themselves in superstition.”42 WMV 3/5, 79; WMV 2/2, 30; Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 169–70. In all, these congregations did not play major roles in supporting or building up the Reformed churches in the Netherlands. Instead, they spent more time protecting their congregations in unstable and uncertain conditions and supporting coreligionists in their regions.