A Brill Calendar: August 13

Few consequences of the rebellion against Habsburg Spain have been more far-reaching than that it caused a vindication of the Protestant stance in religious matters.

The freedom of personal conscience, advocated by individual idealists and visionaries like Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert (1522 – 1590), the humanist and champion of tolerance, quickly gave way to a socio-cultural dominance of a mighty minority: members of the Dutch Reformed Church. Although ruthless, government-endorsed persecution of convictions dissenting from the religious views of the State Church of the Republic didn’t become a fact of public life, keeping any kind of office excluded to all practical purposes membership of the Roman-Catholic Church; its traditional Episcopal structure had also ceased to exist. It was unthinkable, for instance, that in the ‘Bulwark of Freedom’, Leyden University, Roman-Catholics carried office or took Chairs.

The deferment and submission may be said to last at least until 1853, when the Papal flock was welcomed back in the wealth of religious organizations officially accredited by the Kingdom of The Netherlands. It would take another century or so, say until the end of the Second World War, that the Roman Catholic part of the Nation to emancipate itself from this legacy in cultural terms. Its main proponent became Josephus Albertus Alberdingk Thijm (August 13 1820 – March 17 1889; both at Amsterdam). It is seldom, that an eclipse of a legitimate component of the national heritage lasted as long: a slow, often secretive up-hill cultural battle. The strangest thing about it may be, that the country’s largest minority by far acquiesced so long in the situation; in a sense, Amsterdam never ceased to be a Roman-Catholic city.