Imagining the Synod of Dordrecht and the Arminian Controversy
Joke Spaans
The Synod of Dordrecht was a memorable event, in all the meanings of the word ‘memorable’. It was an important moment in European history and the history of Reformed Protestantism. It is also memorable in the literal sense of ‘easily remembered’. It is fixed in our memories, not only because we have factual knowledge of the when, where, and why of the proceedings, but also because paintings and prints enable us to actually visualize it. This makes the Synod special. The majority of events that have made the textbooks for church history have not inspired contemporary artwork.
This is annoying for church historians today who want to illustrate their work. It also begs the question what kind of impression the theological and ecclesiastical battles during the Twelve Years’ Truce made on a seventeenth century audience — or rather, how it was presented to this audience. Today an international summit meeting, which the Synod of Dordrecht was for its own time, would certainly make the headlines of the newspapers, and be on the evening news. As newspapers were still in their infancy in the 1610s, information on matters of public interest flowed along different channels: official proclamations, semi-private letters, pamphlets, popular prints, morality plays, protest songs, handwritten pasquils posted in public places.[1]
These various media represented diverging interests, from public authority to disaffected individuals. Their audience, however, cut across distinctions of rank. They were read, viewed and sung by high and low. A professional class of writers, drawers, engravers and printers that catered to official and unofficial and illegal publications indiscriminately, as long as there was a profit to be made, produced this kind of news service. News was distributed in a lively but somewhat segmented market, of interlocking public and covert channels, by booksellers, pedlars, and, in ways hard to reconstruct nowadays, among friends and connoisseurs. Theirs was, however, not an open market. Censorship suppressed opinions that were unwelcome to the authorities or harmful to privileged institutions and ‘persons of quality’.[2]
By and large all these news media shared a common language, that strikes modern readers as preachy and tedious, but may more accurately described as holistic. It presents society as a complex organism that, in order to live and flourish, should be in a state of equilibrium. Early modern news was never impartial. It could speak with the voice of authority which stated that its benign rule was the best way to maintain that desired harmony. It could also represent a particular ‘opinion’ — a concept with strong negative connotations, as harmful to the ideal of equilibrium and harmony. And of course it could be anything in between. The holistic message was most poignantly conveyed through allegory or emblem, a genre that was enormously popular at the time.[3]
To some extent this emblematic language is present in all the prints on the outcome of the Arminian Controversies, and the Synod of Dordrecht in particular. The originals are mostly contained in the collections of ‘historical prints’ of Frederik Muller, Abraham van Stolk and Simon van Gijn, now in the Print Cabinet of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in the Historisch Museum Rotterdam, and Museum Van Gijn in Dordrecht respectively.[4] For the most part these prints are well known. This is due to two books in particular, to which I am much indebted: the volume on the Synod edited by W. van ’t Spijker and others in 1987 and the 1993 companion volume to an exhibition in Museum Catharijneconvent dealing with the Arminian controversy. Both works give attention to the ‘media coverage’ of these events, in articles by H. Florijn and Tanja Kootte respectively.[5]
The treatment of the prints by Florijn and Kootte is mainly descriptive. They do not use these prints as sources for the popular perception and reception of the events surrounding the Arminian Controversy and the Synod. Tanja Kootte, however, in her very thorough article, addresses an interesting point, repeated by Jonathan Israel in his The Dutch Republic. Whereas pamphlets on the disputed matters in church and state were published in great numbers from about 1614, practically all prints were dated 1618 or later. They were not used as propaganda during the years of conflict, but merely commented upon their outcome. Israel ascribes this to censorship. City magistrates and provincial States, irrespective of theological leanings, prevented the lambasting of the bearers of high political office in popular prints.[6]
I would like to expand on Israel’s suggestion, and demonstrate that censorship protected all vested authorities, both political and ecclesiastical. Under the confessional state both were, of course, inseparable — the Arminian controversy and its pacification are just one example of that. I will argue furthermore that religion was considered even more sensitive than politics, as it was supposed to be the bond of society, the very guarantee of the harmony and equilibrium deemed necessary in a well-ordered society. The inviolability of true religion, embodied in the public Church would explain why theological controversy was only selectively addressed in prints, why the publication of prints was limited to the final stages of ecclesiastical conflicts, and why religious caricature is almost absent.
It is, however, also interesting to see what the prints did show, and which audiences printers supposed were interested in their products. The scope of this article does not allow for anything like completeness. I do, however, want to give an impression of the various types of print, distinguishing various genres as well as prints catering to the higher and lower market sector. Especially the latter is less well known. Ironically, the cheap prints that may have had the widest distribution have often been least resistant to the depredations of time.[7] Such an overview of print production may help us put the controversy, and the Synod that resolved it, in its proper historical context.
Newsprint and propaganda
The town hall of Dordrecht boasts a painting that shows the Synod in session. There are dozens of prints on the same subject. They differ slightly. Some depict the earlier sessions, in which the Remonstrant ministers were present. They were seated at a long table at he middle of the conference room. They were the accused, and their judges sat around them in a seating arrangement that reflected the rank and status of each of them. Other versions represent the later sessions and have an empty table in the middle of the room. Most prints have a number of onlookers in the public stand that fills the foreground, some showing a dog among them, others without. Some put a balcony over the seat of the English delegation, others do not. One printer published his version, under the resounding Latin caption Delineatio synodi Dordraceni, with a privilege of the States General as the official, copyright protected, souvenir of the occasion.[8]
This print is best known for the central picture, but its impact must have been determined equally by the accompanying texts. To the left is a poem by Jacob Cats, comparing the Synod with the Convocation of Jerusalem, described in Acts 11, which endorsed the mission to the Gentiles, and the Synod of Nicea in 325 which defined the Full Divinity of Christ — decisions which determined the further course of Christianity. It describes the company here shown in session as ‘the fairest flower of all those countries not subject to popery, those of deepest insight and soundest doctrine, the salt of the earth and the brightest lights of this world’. Their decisions are to define the course of Reformed Protestantism, and to provide the salve that, applied with the help of the worldly magistrate, will heal the wounds struck by controversy.
In this the print is highly propagandistic, endorsing the measures taken by the authorities in Church and State to restore unity, and stating plainly that the Synod of Dordrecht was meant, not only to solve a Dutch domestic problem, but also to reach an authoritative definition of a contested dogmatic point which was relevant for the entire Reformed Protestant world. All this is underlined by the enumeration by country of the names of all the delegates, on the right hand side of the print. But the simpler, cheaper newsprints, that had to make do without this elaborate textual commentary, were as authoritative, in showing the Synod as a court convened to judge the Remonstrants.
This ‘official’ print of the Synod in full session has its counterpart in the, equally official and authoritative, print Iustitie aen Jan van Oldenbarnevelt geschiet [Justice done to John of Oldenbarnevelt].[9] Here again a central panel, in which we see the scaffold on which the landsadvocaat was beheaded on May 13, 1619, exactly a week after the Canons of Dordrecht were solemnly read out to a large multitude in the Grote Kerk in Dordrecht. The event is carefully framed. The execution itself is only a very small part of the picture. Its protagonist is actually hard to find, half hidden behind the executioner and the wooden railings and practically drowning in the sea of tiny figures on and around the scaffold. We see his backside, his bowed head invisible — a generic convict, lacking all the gravitas suggested by Vondel’s poem Het stockske van Joan van Oldenbarnevelt, Vader des Vaderlants [On the walking stick of John of Oldenbarnevelt, Father of the Fatherland]. Only in the hand-coloured version he stands out by his white shirt.
The buildings surrounding the scaffold take up most of the space in this panel. The scenery of The Hague, the official seat of the States General, draws the eye, rather than the execution itself. From left to right the print prominently shows, and identifies by printed captions, the palace of His Excellency Prince Maurice of Orange, the building that housed the Provincial Court of Holland, which had sentenced Oldenbarnevelt to death, and the ‘Groote Saalle’, the hall where the States General held their meetings. People are shown watching the execution from the open windows of and temporary balconies connected to these buildings, and even from the roof of the Provincial Court. No doubt these spaces were reserved for VIPs who could see the execution while being seen themselves. All this pictorially proclaims that the combined political elite of Holland and the Seven United Provinces sanctioned the event. The common people throng around, craning their necks around the tall hats of the men. Several companies of uniformed guards, armed with pikes and arquebuses, are standing by, but there is no rioting for them to quell: even the populace seems to approve.
For good measure, the print shows not only the execution of Oldenbarnevelt, the political leader of the Arminian faction, but also the somewhat gruesome hanging of the lead coffin with the already decomposing corpse of Egidius Ledenberg, who had committed suicide in prison, and, in the little panel at the bottom of the print, the exterior of the fortress Loevesteyn. Here Hugo Grotius, pensionary of Rotterdam, Romualdus Hogerbeets, his colleague in Leiden, and Adolf de Wael, lord of Moersbergen, all three, like Ledenberg, close associates of Oldenbarnevelt, were incarcerated. Arranged around these depictions of the typical early modern pageant of public justice[10] we see the portraits of all these men. Facing the effigy of Oldenbarnevelt, in the upper left hand corner, is the portrait of Johannes Wtenbogaert, court preacher to the stadholder and minister of the Walloon Church in The Hague, the principal theologian of the Arminians. He had evaded arrest by flight, and lived in exile in the Southern Netherlands. Their names, noble titles and the high offices they held — a reminder that they were condemned for treason against the state they had been beholden to serve, identify all of them.
These prints undoubtedly sold as newsprints and souvenirs, informing and reminding the public of notable events. There was a market for such pictures, as is evident from the number of editions, in a variety of price-categories. The large, official representations of the Synod and the execution of the Arminian leaders, often printed on deluxe paper, handcoloured or even printed on silk, must have been above all government propaganda, showpieces for display in official buildings, endorsing the new theologico-political regime. These prints express with a massive show of authority that justice had been done, exemplary punishments had been meted out and proper order had been restored. Even so, in 1619 the sale of prints of the execution of Oldenbarnevelt and of portraits of the other prominent members of his faction was forbidden — presumably because they were also popular among those who mourned their fate and revered them as martyrs for the cause of state and religion.[11]
Allegories
The message of these newsprints was reinforced by allegorical representations of Prince Maurice as the protector of Dutch and even European Protestantism. The beautiful engraving Idea Belgicarum Provinciarum Confaederatarum[12] shows the Stadholder at the helm of the ship of State, depicted as a man-of-war, its cannons ready for action, and running under a minimum of sail before a favourable wind. The States General surround him. Amidships seven seated ladies represent the Dutch seaports. It is crowned with flags showing the heraldic shields of the Seven Provinces, the stadholder, and the tricolore, the flag at the rear spells Argo Concordiae, and smaller pennants flying from the mastheads are inscribed with the well-known mottos Tandem fit surculus arbor and Concordiae res parvae crescunt. The bow shows a lion holding the seven arrows and a lance with the liberty hat, the bowsprit holds an astrolabe. The Dutch Republic is thus represented as a united country and a naval and mercantile power to be reckoned with in the international arena, confidently steered ahead by the Stadholder. Among a host of personified virtues the ship also carries Religion, shown with a cross and bridle, and accompanied by her defenders. The bearded gentleman at her right hand strongly resembles Johannes Bogerman, the president of the Synod.