There are two other ways that historians have sometimes identified transnational bonds between Dutch Reformed Protestants across the diaspora: supporting the military and political resistance against Catholic rule—especially in the Dutch Revolt—and publishing proevangelical or anti-Habsburg books to be smuggled into the Netherlands. Both types of transregional activities have been important means by which scholars have measured the strength and impact of “international Calvinism.”
1 Holt, “International Calvinism,” in Holder, John Calvin in Context, 375–82. In both of these arenas, however, we found that the congregations in our study only ever played a minor role.
The Dutch Reformed migrant congregations provided little support for the military campaigns or political stratagems in support of William of Orange, or his allies, against Habsburg rule. This fact disappointed Orange, as he admitted.
2 Roosbroeck, Emigranten, 68; Nijenhuis, Adrianus Saravia, 38, 270; Spicer, French-speaking Reformed Community, 129–31. In England, there seems to have been more support for Orange’s cause among some wealthy English Protestants. David Trim, “Immigrants, the Indigenous Community, and International Calvinism,” in Goose and Luu, Immigrants, 211–22. Orange’s agents, including Diederik Sonoy and Dirck Volckersz Coornhert, did make a collection in Wesel for the prince’s military campaign in the fall of 1568.
3 For Sonoy, see Kipp, Landstädtische Reformation, 412, 415. For Coornhert’s role on Orange’s behalf, see chapter 1. However, we do not know how much they collected. The elder Jan Bayen later explained in a letter to Amsterdam that he had loaned one hundred
dalar to Sonoy in 1568 but that he had intended that “not for the common good [
gemeynen nuts], but for Sonoy’s own personal use.”
4 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 108r. Sonoy had also been expelled from Wesel in May 1568 for helping to organize Orange’s rebellion, and it seems that Orange canceled an intended visit to the city himself.
5 Spohnholz, Convent of Wesel, 39, n. 71. Otherwise, the Dutch Reformed migrants devoted little activity to supporting the revolt. Refugees and other migrants surely watched closely for news of the war, especially when it threatened them directly or affected their business dealings. But we find little evidence of active support for military action against the Habsburg government in Brussels. We have not found even one prayer-and-fast day in support of Orangist armies in any of the surviving records of the congregations in our study.
6 See also Jelsma, “‘Weakness of Conscience’”; Muylaert, Shaping the Stranger Churches. Indeed, when elders at Wesel proposed a fast day in February 1575, it was not to pray for victory for Orange but for a peace treaty between him and the “court of Burgundy.”
7 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 58r. When Orange’s general Philip of Hohenlohe-Neuenstein wrote to Wesel’s Dutch Reformed consistory in November 1579 to collect funds to support “the general fatherland and the building up of the church of God,” elders explained that they could not give because they had too many impoverished refugees coming from Guelders, Jülich, and Limburg. Even if they had the resources to spare, they added, they would not send them to support the Orangist cause because doing so would anger Wesel’s magistrates, risking their welcome there.
8 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 159r. The surviving copy of this letter is incomplete, so it is unclear whether they sent it as written. However, the missive provides an explanation of their attitude. The former pastor in Frankenthal, Petrus Dathenus, even sought to reconcile with King Philip II in 1583 if he could just convince him to grant permission for Reformed Protestants to worship in the Netherlands.
9 Alastair Duke, “Calvinist Loyalism: Jean Haren, Cimay and the Dimise of the Calvinist Republic of Bruges,” in his Dissident Identities, 271.We see a similarly limited role for the Dutch Reformed communities in our study when it comes to printing in support of the evangelical cause in the Low Countries. As Andrew Pettegree has shown, Emden played a major role in printing Reformed literature to be smuggled into the Netherlands.
10 Pettegree, Emden, 87–108; Pettegree, “Emden as a Center.” Geneva played a similar role for France. Gilmont, Le livre réformé. Between 1555 and 1565 several presses operated in Wesel, publishing at least eighty-six books.
11 See the records in the University Short Title Catalogue (www.ustc.ac.uk). Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 57–58, 75–76; Valkema Blouw, “Augustijn van Hasselt”; Rotscheidt, “Eine Weseler Ausgabe.” While this output was substantial, there are a few characteristics that differentiate Wesel as a printing center from Emden. First, over half of the publications were in English, not Dutch, German, or Latin. They were thus printed to serve English Protestant refugees who had fled the Catholic rule of Mary Tudor, or for smuggling back into England. Second, they included far more Lutheran and spiritualist works than Reformed titles. The most books published in Wesel in a single year—eighteen—was in 1567, led by the printing activities of Augustijn van Hasselt (Christoph Plantin’s agent in the city) and Hans de Braeker—both Lutherans.
12 See the essays on printing in Wesel during these years, in Valkema Blouw, Dutch Typography. After that year, though, Wesel’s confessionally charged printing waned. In 1572 and 1573, we find a surge in German-language news publications about recent political events, but these did not focus on theology, liturgy, or confessional polemic, like so much of what was coming out of Emden’s presses.
13 Stempel, “Zeitungen aus Wesel.” Thereafter, Wesel’s presses essentially shut down. Wesel’s printing industry was thus more confessionally diverse and less oriented toward the Dutch market than Emden’s and thus did not play a central role in supporting the Dutch Reformed movement or “international Calvinism.”
There were a few other places with presses that published Reformed literature. In Emmerich there seems to have been a short-lived press run by a Reformed migrant from Ghent, Jan Canin, after he was expelled from Wesel for publishing illegal literature in 1570. Canin soon shifted his operations to Dordrecht.
14 Valkema Blouw, “Jan Canin in Wesel.” In Frankfurt, the Wechel press produced a large number of Reformed books, but those were almost all in Latin, and none in Dutch.
15 Evans, Wechel Presses. Maclean, “André Wechel in Frankfurt,” in his Learning and the Market Place, 163–225. None of the other communities in our study emerged as printing centers for Dutch-language books and pamphlets supporting Reformed Protestantism. That’s not surprising, given the legally precarious situation for Reformed Protestants in most of these communities. Despite its support for the Reformed faith, Frankenthal also never emerged as a printing center in the sixteenth century either. While Jean Barsanges was printing there from 1578, he printed just five books, only one of which was in Dutch. Similarly, in nearby Heidelberg, a leading center of Reformed printing, only two editions of Dathenus’s psalm translations were ever published in Dutch, in 1566 and 1567–68.
16 See records at https://www.ustc.ac.uk/editions/411331 and https://www.ustc.ac.uk/editions/415380.