The Early Modern Dutch Press in An Age of Religious Persecution The Making of Humanitarianism David de Boer Full Chapter
The Early Modern Dutch Press in An Age of Religious Persecution The Making of Humanitarianism David de Boer Full Chapter
The Early Modern Dutch Press in An Age of Religious Persecution The Making of Humanitarianism David de Boer Full Chapter
DAVID DE BOER
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This publication is part of the project The Invention of the Refugee in Early Modern Europe
(016.Vici.185.020) which is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
To my parents, Marc de Boer and Yvonne Engels
Acknowledgments
This research project began with a move abroad, and was marked by several more
migrations in the years that followed. I feel privileged to have had two mentors,
Malte Griesse and Judith Pollmann, whose guidance made sure that my academic
traveling did not turn into wandering. Malte generously shared with me his
expertise in premodern communication and conflict from the very beginning.
He opened my eyes to what borders meant and did not mean in early modern
Europe. Judith’s intellectual input, precision, and encouragement were indispens-
able. Our conversations about early modern society always reminded me that it
was shaped by flesh and blood people, and never failed to give me the renewed
enthusiasm and focus that I needed for writing this book.
Several academic institutions made the preparation of this book possible. The
Mahindra Center of Humanities at Harvard University, the Institute for European
History in Mainz, and the European University Institute in Florence all offered
stimulating short-term academic homes, from where I developed many of my
ideas. I would like to thank all the staff and fellows there for their support and
company. Many thanks also to the Dutch Research Council (NWO), which
generously funded the final writing stages and allowed me to publish the result
in open access.
At the University of Konstanz, I learned a lot from my colleagues at the Cluster
of Excellence and the members of the Signaturen der frühen Neuzeit working
group. In the meantime, my office mates Agata Nörenberg and Katrin Winkler
guaranteed that writing a dissertation in the faraway Y-building was not a lonely
undertaking. Luckily, Leiden University also gave me great coworkers for mutual
distraction, Erika Kuijpers, at the very beginning, and Leonor Álvarez Francés,
Lauren Lauret, and Thérèse Peeters, the second time around. I also want to thank
my fellow PhD students Carolina Lenarduzzi, Carolien Boender, Cees Reyner, and
Silvia Gaiga for reviewing some of my work with a critical eye. I am especially
grateful to Erica Boersma, for meticulously reading the dissertation on which this
book is based and providing me with many valuable suggestions. Later on, my
manuscript greatly benefited from the probing questions that Mirjam de Baar,
Helmer Helmers, Jeroen Duindam, Sven Trakulhun, and David Onnekink raised
during my doctoral defense.
My thanks also go out to the members of the Early Modern Mobilities working
group and the Invention of the Refugee research project at the University of
Amsterdam. Djoeke van Netten, Maartje van Gelder, Jonas van Tol, Kerrewin
van Blanken, Nina Lamal, Rosanne Baars, Lotte van Hasselt, Hans Wallage, and
viii
Gerdien Evertse were of vital help in turning this dissertation into a book. Special
thanks to Geert Janssen, for his encouragement and advice throughout the
publication process. At OUP, I am immensely thankful to Cathryn Steele, Karen
Raith, Luciana O’Flaherty, Hannah Doyle, Thomas Stottor, and the Delegates of
the Press for their confidence in this project, and to the two anonymous reviewers,
whose generous comments greatly improved my manuscript. My gratitude also
goes out to Bhavani Govindasamy and Dolarine Sonia Fonceca for managing the
production stage and to Elizabeth Stone and Joanna North for correcting my
English.
Moving to pursue a PhD inevitably blurs the line between academic and private
life. I am greatly indebted to my dearest colleague Monika Barget for helping me
find my way in German academia with the patience of a saint. I miss our tireless
discussions about historical evergreens, such as celibacy, theodicy, and the nature
of free will. My first Mitbewohnerin Pascale Siegrist, and not much later, my
flatmates at the Schürmann-Horster-Weg 5 truly made me feel at home in
Konstanz. My wonderful friends in Utrecht, Limburg, and elsewhere ensured
that the Netherlands would also remain home. While I cannot name all of you
here, rest assured that all festival trips, heated Risk-sessions, Mengvoeders United
Bedrijfsuitjes, and long nights in Venray were ultimately vital for this project’s
completion, as was your support during my doctoral defense.
I could not have written this book without the warmth and great fun provided
by my family. I have always felt immense support from my parents, Marc de Boer
and Yvonne Engels. While having a healthy distance from the humanities, their
advice, listening ears, and good humor have gotten me to where I am today. My
siblings, Coen and Maren de Boer, too were also always there for me in the
broadest possible sense, and I am glad that in the years that it took to write this
book, Petra de Rover, Sander van Bruggen, and Midas, Ronja, and Ties joined the
family.
Serendipity is a treasure in academia but even more so in life, and I was
immensely lucky to meet Viola Müller along the way. Viola’s love for research is
a constant source of inspiration, and her keen sense for the bigger picture has
made this a much better book. Finally, I want to thank Sam, for always pulling me
from the past into our wonderful here and now.
Contents
List of Figures xi
Introduction 1
1. The Paradox of Intervention 21
2. A Silent Persecution 54
3. Covering a Refugee Crisis 81
4. Selling the Last War of Religion 111
5. Between Eschatology and Enlightenment 134
Conclusion: Beyond the Confessional Divide 167
Bibliography 173
Index 209
List of Figures
At the turn of the eighteenth century Amsterdam was a gateway to the world in
more than one sense. Not only did the city have one of Europe’s biggest ports from
which ships sailed to all corners of the known world, it was also home to about 150
printers and booksellers, who produced and sold all sorts of literature covering
what was going on beyond the borders of the Dutch Republic.¹ One of these
printers was Johannes Douci, whose shop was well situated on a junction of the
busy Singel, not far from Dam Square, the city’s beating heart. Customers brows-
ing the shop’s stock in 1714 were likely to stumble upon a small book called Story
of the torments inflicted upon the Reformed on the galleys of France, written by the
Frenchman Jean-François Bion. In case the title did not immediately attract
potential readers, the cover further explained why they should buy the work: it
had been translated from French into Dutch for the “common good, but especially
for those who take the oppression of Zion to heart.”²
In Story of the torments, Bion shared with the world his experiences aboard the
royal galley La Superbe, on which he had been chaplain since 1703.³ Remarkably,
most of the forçats, the galley slaves who formed the majority of the ship’s crew,
were not fellow Catholics. Over half of them were Huguenots from the Cévennes,
a mountainous region in south-eastern France that was plagued by a destructive
religious civil war against the Crown.⁴ The other galley slaves included Turks,
deserters, highwaymen, and peasant smugglers. Bion described the horrendous
circumstances on board, where the slaves were reduced to a life of beatings, rotting
food, and physical labor so arduous that it quickly ruined their health. One
Sunday, after the chaplain had sung Mass, the comitre—commander of the slave
crew—ordered that the Huguenots were to receive a foot whipping, as punishment
for refusing to kneel to the Holy Sacrament. Struck by guilt and pity, Bion realized
that the men endured their fate solely for having chosen to obey God rather than
The Early Modern Dutch Press in an Age of Religious Persecution: The Making of Humanitarianism. David de Boer,
Oxford University Press. © David de Boer 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198876809.003.0001
2
men. In a dramatic reversal of roles, the priest converted to the Reformed religion
and fled to Geneva.⁵
The refugee’s account of the enslavement of Huguenot rebels, engulfed in a
religious war against their sovereign Louis XIV, reminds us that sixty years after
the end of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), Europe had not shaken off the
specter of religious violence. The fate of the Cévennes Huguenots exemplifies that
the secularization of politics that many historians and political scientists believe to
have come in the wake of the great wars of religion was a rocky road at best.
Throughout much of the twentieth century, little historiographical attention was
paid to persecutions after 1648. They were treated as historical anomalies, irrele-
vant disturbances within the larger narrative of political modernization. Over the
last few decades, historians have begun to revise this picture, demonstrating that
politics remained rife with confessional antagonism in the century after the Peace
of Westphalia.⁶ Still, how victims and the international community reacted to
instances of religious violence remains largely overlooked.
Bion’s pamphlet also illustrates, however, that in a time when consuming news
became an everyday practice for many Europeans, victims of persecution and their
advocates increasingly managed to raise international attention for religiously
inspired maltreatments, executions, and massacres. Oppressing rulers often
tried to manage or contain information about the religious conflicts within their
realms.⁷ But despite their attempts to monopolize public political communication
through censorship, monarchs had few means to stop foreign publishers from
covering their persecutory measures. For them, the backlash in the international
press against the maltreatment of religious minorities increasingly became a force
to be reckoned with.
This book argues that religious minorities and their advocates, in search of
international support, played a foundational role in the emergence of a humani-
tarian culture in Europe. Especially in the wealthy and urbanized Dutch Republic,
the period’s dominant international news hub and a renowned safe haven for
religious refugees of various stripes, authors found a relatively comfortable climate
to employ print media in their efforts to raise transnational solidarity (Figure 1).
⁵ Conlon, Jean-François Bion, p. 26; the book did not describe Bion’s flight to Geneva.
⁶ B. J. Kaplan, Divided by faith: Religious conflict and the practice of toleration in early modern
Europe (Cambridge, MA and London, 2007); for the role of religious conflict in Dutch foreign policy
see D. Haks, Vaderland en vrede 1672–1713: Publiciteit over de Nederlandse Republiek in oorlog
(Hilversum, 2013), pp. 86–114; D. Onnekink, Reinterpreting the Dutch Forty Years War, 1672–1713
(London, 2016); for Britain see T. Claydon, Europe and the making of England, 1660–1750 (Cambridge,
2007); A. C. Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the Protestant interest, 1688–1756 (Woodbridge, 2006);
A. C. Thompson, “The Protestant interest and the history of humanitarian intervention, c. 1685–c.
1756,” in B. Simms and D. J. B. Trim (eds.), Humanitarian intervention: A history (Cambridge, 2011),
pp. 67–88; for other countries see the contributions in D. Onnekink (ed.), War and religion after
Westphalia, 1648–1713 (Farnham, 2009).
⁷ See M. Griesse, “Frühneuzeitliche Revolten als Kommunikationsereignisse. Die Krise des 17.
Jahrhunderts als Produkt der Medienrevolution” (unpublished Habilitationsschrift, 2015).
3
⁸ For a list of all editions see Conlon, Jean-François Bion, pp. 57–66.
⁹ J.-F. Bion, Verhaal der tormenten die men de gereformeerde, welke op de galeyen van Vrankryk zyn,
heeft doen ondergaan (Amsterdam: Johannes Douci, 1721).
4
Some students of humanitarianism have tried to push back this timeline. They
point out that already in the sixteenth century, Bartolomé de las Casas and some
of his contemporaries lobbied against the cruel subjugation of the native popula-
tion of the Americas, with recourse to the universalizing principle that “all people
in the world are humans.”¹⁹ While de las Casas’ tireless advocacy had some level of
success, it is hard to deny that such efforts were extremely patchy on a wider scale.
It would take two more centuries before the structural violence committed against
subjugated and enslaved people in the Americas became widely contested by those
living in the empires’ metropoles. Most historians therefore stick to the late
eighteenth-century timeframe, identifying the impressive campaigns against the
slave trade as one of the first humanitarian practices.²⁰
The accounts of persecuted minorities that circulated throughout Europe thus
appear to be stuck between two historiographical narratives, respectively concern-
ing a confessional and a more secular age in European history. At the same time,
they suggest that the distinction between these two forms of concern for the
suffering of distant strangers should not be overdrawn. The present study
advances the argument that regardless of their confessional or universal argu-
mentation, opinion makers writing about foreign persecutions shared a similar
conviction that they could make a difference by raising awareness through print
media. An insight into when and why opinion makers appealed to confessionally
bounded or more inclusive solidarity with suffering strangers—before regarding it
as reflective of a certain zeitgeist—may in fact help us to better understand the
extent to which the printing press drove a process of political secularization in the
century that followed the great wars of religion (Figure 2).
The Making of Humanitarianism investigates the seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century press as a crucial site of experiment in which the techniques and languages
of humanitarianism were developed. While the terms human rights and humani-
tarianism are often conflated, scholars have recently made a strong case that the
latter concept is more practice-oriented and restrictive in scope, and therefore has
a deeper history.²¹ Humanitarianism pertains to concerns about foreign atrocities
and the immediate needs of suffering strangers. As such, it does not necessarily
¹⁹ Stamatov, The origins of global humanitarianism; Delgado, “ ‘All people have reason and free
will’ ”; Pagden, The fall of natural man, esp. pp. 119–145. Quotation from Delgado, “ ‘All people have
reason and free will,’ ” p. 93.
²⁰ See for instance S. Moyn, “Human rights and humanitarianization,” in M. Barnett (ed.),
Humanitarianism and human rights: A world of differences? (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 33–48;
T. W. Laqueur, “Mourning, pity, and the work of narrative in the making of ‘humanity,’ ” in
R. A. Wilson and R. D. Brown (eds.), Humanitarianism and suffering: The mobilization of empathy
(Cambridge, 2008), pp. 31–57; A. Moniz, From empire to humanity: The American Revolution and the
origins of humanitarianism (Oxford, 2016). For a good introduction to abolitionist campaigns see
J. R. Oldfield, Popular politics and British anti-slavery: The mobilization of public opinion against the
slave trade, 1787–1807 (London, 1998).
²¹ M. Barnett, “Human rights, humanitarianism, and the practices of humanity,” International
Theory 10.3 (2018), pp. 314–319; M. Geyer, “Humanitarianism and human rights: A troubled
7
Figure 2. Jan Luyken, The book printer, in Jan and Caspar Luyken, Het menselyk
bedryf, 1694, reproduced with permission from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
rapport,” in F. Klose (ed.), The emergence of humanitarian intervention: Ideas and practice from the
nineteenth century to the present (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 31–55; S. Moyn, “Substance, scale, and
salience: The recent historiography of human rights,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 8
(2012), pp. 123–140; A. Heraclides and A. Dialla, Humanitarian intervention in the long nineteenth
century: Setting the precedent (Manchester, 2015); K. Cmiel, “The recent history of human rights,”
American Historical Review 109.1 (2004), pp. 117–135.
²² Barnett, “Human rights”; D. J. B. Trim and B. Simms, “Towards a history of humanitarian
intervention,” in Simms and Trim (eds.), Humanitarian intervention, pp. 1–24.
8
all began to canonize stories about the violent deaths of their respective martyrs,
thus creating a confessional cultural memory which transcended state borders.²³
This transnational sentiment of religious belonging was reinforced by the harsh
realities of forced migration, which religious intolerance continued to bring in its
wake.²⁴ Subsequent generations of exiles cultivated their history of persecution as
a central part of their religious and civic identity.²⁵ The cherished memory of
persecution recurrently inspired people to action. Throughout the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, Protestants, Catholics, Anabaptists, and Jews all tried
to put the fate of oppressed brethren in the faith on political agendas and
raised funds for them, which traveled along confessional trading networks.²⁶
States would sometimes offer military or diplomatic support to persecuted
co-religionists, which some historians have identified as the first humanitarian
interventions.²⁷ People may not have used the term until the nineteenth century,
but the goals and means—averting or stopping atrocity through diplomatic or
military pressure—were very similar.²⁸
This book tells the story of how opinion makers spurred people and their
governments into action and how they created an international stage on which
they put up religious persecutions for public scrutiny. Investigating the rise of
print as a humanitarian tool, it asks first, which political norms were invoked to
communicate religious persecution. This question has not received the attention it
²⁹ H. J. Helmers, “Public diplomacy in early modern Europe,” Media History 22.3–4 (2016),
pp. 402–403; N. Lamal and K. Van Gelder, “Addressing audiences abroad: Cultural and public
diplomacy in seventeenth-century Europe,” The Seventeenth Century 36.3 (2001), pp. 367–387.
³⁰ See Helmers, “Public diplomacy in early modern Europe,” p. 402. For a reflection on non-state
actors and public diplomacy from the perspective of today’s world see also T. La Porte, “The impact of
‘intermestic’ non-state actors on the conceptual framework of public diplomacy,” The Hague Journal of
Diplomacy 7 (2012), pp. 449–450.
³¹ L. Schorn-Schütte, Gottes Wort und Menschenherrschafft. Politisch-Theologische Sprachen im
Europa der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 2015), p. 14.
10
Investigating how opinion makers engaged their audiences with acute political
crises, this study covers a small area in the vast realm of early modern
political communication. Yet it was a particularly versatile area. Decisions to
punish dissenting religious groups were among the most controversial and con-
sequential policies of early modern rulers. They gave rise to a remarkably dynamic
printed debate that invoked many, if not all, of the main norms underlying
Europe’s political order—except, perhaps, the relation between gender and
power. The predicament of religious minorities thus provided unmatched occa-
sions for opinion makers to discuss fundamental questions about humans and
their attitude toward fellow men and women, about princes’ bonds with their
subjects, as well as about the relations between different rulers. In other words,
religious persecutions acutely laid bare questions about how society is best and
most justly ordered and maintained.
Like all evaluations of political decision-making, the public communication of
decisions to penalize a religious minority largely revolved around either justifying
or rejecting it in reference to the common good. In early modern Europe this
usually pertained to communal welfare or the shared benefit of people in a given
society, and increasingly applied to the state.³² Cutting through different political
ideologies, including ruler-centered theories of absolutism, the common good was
regarded as the highest attainable end of a government’s policy by a wide range of
political philosophers, including Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, as well as many
lower profile thinkers.³³ Yet there existed diverging religious and political dis-
courses in early modern Europe on how the common good was best attained in a
religiously divided society. Opinion makers had to navigate these discourses in
their efforts to turn local struggles into matters of transnational concern.
First, and perhaps foremost, was the challenge that transnational support for
persecuted minorities posed to sovereignty. The question to what extent foreign
actors have the right to intervene in domestic conflicts—still a hot topic surround-
ing humanitarianism today—can, in fact, be traced back to the early modern
period. It used to be a common trope among historians, and remains one among
³² See H. Münkler and H. Bluhm, “Einleitung. Gemeinwohl und Gemeinsinn als politisch–soziale
Leitbegriffe,” in H. Münkler and H. Bluhm (eds.), Gemeinwohl und Gemeinsinn. Historische
Semantiken politischer Leitbegriffe (Berlin, 2001), esp. pp. 17–22. For the rudimentary stable definition
of “common good” as shared benefit see G. Burgess and M. Knights, “Commonwealth: The social,
cultural, and conceptual contexts of an early modern keyword,” The Historical Journal 54.3 (2011),
p. 662; alternative terms for the “common good” include “common interest,” “public good,” “public
welfare,” and “public felicity.”
³³ B. J. Diggs, “The common good as a reason for political action,” Ethics 83.4 (1973), p. 283;
P. Wilson, Absolutism in Central Europe (Abingdon, 2000), esp. p. 50. In England, by contrast, the term
“commonwealth” developed into an ideological opposite of absolutism; see C. Cuttica and G. Burgess,
“Introduction: Monarchism and absolutism in early modern Europe,” in C. Cuttica and G. Burgess
(eds.), Monarchism and absolutism in early modern Europe (London and New York, NY, 2012),
pp. 1–18; G. Burgess, “Tyrants, absolutist kings, arbitrary rulers and the commonwealth of England:
Some reflections on seventeenth-century English political vocabulary,” in Cuttica and Burgess (eds.),
Monarchism and absolutism, pp. 147–158.
11
³⁴ H. Steiger, “Konkreter Friede und allgemeine Ordnung. Zur rechtlichen Bedeutung der Verträge
vom 24. Oktober 1648,” in K. Bußmann and H. Schilling (eds.), 1648. Krieg und Frieden in Europa, 2
vols. (Münster, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 437–446; D. Philpott, Revolutions in sovereignty: How ideas shaped
modern international relations (Princeton, NJ, 2001), pp. 437–446; D. Grim, Sovereignty: The origin
and future of a political and legal concept (New York, NY, 2015); D. Philpott, “The religious roots of
modern international relations,” World Politics 52.2 (2000), pp. 206–245; Philpott, Revolutions in
sovereignty; V. Gerhardt, “Zur historischen Bedeutung des Westfälischen Friedens. Zwölf Thesen,” in
Bußmann and Schilling (eds.), 1648, vol 1., pp. 485–489.
³⁵ A. Osiander, “Sovereignty, international relations, and the Westphalian myth,” International
Organization 55.2 (2001), pp. 251–287; S. D. Krasner, “Rethinking the sovereign state model,”
Review of International Studies 27 (2001), p. 17; S. Beaulac, The power of language in the making of
international law: The word sovereignty in Bodin and Vattel and the myth of Westphalia (Leiden and
Boston, MA, 2004), pp. 127–183; B. Teschke, “Theorizing the Westphalian system of states:
International relations from absolutism to capitalism,” European Journal of International Relations
8.1 (2002), pp. 5–48; H. Duchhardt, “Westfälischer Friede und internationales System im Ancien
Régime,” Historische Zeitschrift 249.3 (1989), pp. 529–543.
³⁶ R. Lesaffer, “Peace treaties and the formation of international law,” in B. Fassbender and A. Peters
(eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of international law (Oxford, 2012), esp. pp. 72–89;
A. Osiander, The states system of Europe, 1640–1990: Peacemaking and the conditions of
international stability (Oxford, 1994); see also B. de Carvalho and A. Paras, “Sovereignty and
solidarity: Moral obligation, confessional England, and the Huguenots,” International History Review
37.1 (2014), pp. 1–21.
³⁷ Krasner, “Rethinking the sovereign state model.”
³⁸ For an elaborate discussion of the right of intervention see Chapter 1; for sovereignty and
interventionism see also de Carvalho and Paras, “Sovereignty and solidarity.”
12
adherence of its people to the true religion, which rulers had the duty to protect
and enforce.³⁹ Of course, most dissidents believed that theirs was the true faith
and that they were therefore ipso facto unjustly persecuted. As most advocates
realized, however, loudly proclaiming one’s religious righteousness and calling for
international confessional solidarity might be a good strategy to move foreign
brethren in the faith, but would do little to convince the persecuting authorities in
question. On the contrary, it could quickly alienate potential allies across the
confessional divide.
To reach a broader audience in a religiously divided Europe, advocates thus
often had to opt for universalizing argumentative strategies. One important
strategy was to appeal to the rule of law. From the sixteenth century, the position
of many religious minorities had been formalized in some kind of religious peace
treaty or edict. These documents were pragmatic compromises granted—often
grudgingly—to religious dissenters until the ideal of religious unity could once
again be achieved.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, religious peace treaties and edicts turned confes-
sional deviants into legal entities.⁴¹ Despite their non-ideological origins, they
imposed and legitimated a “secular ‘rule of law’ in spheres of life previously governed
by religion.”⁴² Opinion makers could thus analyze whether violence committed
against a religious minority had been lawful within the specific legal framework of
the country in question, without lapsing into the stalemate of theological polemic.
Apart from the positive laws of the polity in question, they could also
invoke natural law. In the seventeenth century, political philosophers began to
develop secular concepts of natural law and—its counterpart for the international
stage—the law of nations.⁴³ They built upon the legal settlements that ended the
wars of religion and universalized them, giving the secular state and religious
coexistence theoretical and ideological currency. Becoming increasingly popular
in the 1680s and finding its political zenith in the eighteenth century, natural law
aimed to set the universal boundaries for people to live in society with other
people, without being concerned with their salvation after death.⁴⁴ Most political
philosophers believed that princes too were subjected to natural law, although
they disagreed about the extent to which they could rightfully be resisted if they
did not uphold it.⁴⁵ Being a wide intellectual movement, natural law thinking
defies an easy definition, but as Anthony Pagden succinctly summarizes, it
typically establishes “rationally conceived, and thus universally acceptable, first
principles.”⁴⁶
This brings us to another main argumentative strategy which persecuted
minorities and their advocates could use to find allies across social boundaries,
namely by appealing to the human capacity to reason.⁴⁷ While often associated
with the Enlightenment, Europe had been home to rich vernacular literary
cultures which celebrated natural reason as a moral guide since at least the
sixteenth century.⁴⁸ And whereas the use of reason in politics was initially
associated with moral flexibility or relativism, seventeenth-century philosophers
began to reconcile or even conflate it with justice.⁴⁹ Indeed, in the course of the
early modern period, many European thinkers would come to elevate reason as
the principal tool by which humans could make sense of, order, and restructure the
political world in which they lived, increasingly independent of dogmatic tradition,
superstition, and unquestioned authority. In this light, Jürgen Habermas famously
regarded “rational debate” as the bedrock of the emerging public sphere.⁵⁰
This study argues that appealing to reason was just one argumentative strategy
among others.⁵¹ However, it seeks to demonstrate that evaluating persecution on
the basis of whether the rational mind allowed or dictated it, with a general
audience designated as moral arbiters, was crucial for the rise of a humanitarian
culture.
A final universalizing strategy, as we have briefly discussed above, was to invoke
a sentiment of shared humanity. Relatively few historians have so far looked for
appeals to our fundamental human parity in the premodern world.⁵² After all, life
in early modern Europe was structured around countless forms of inequality and
hierarchy, most of which were justified as divinely ordained.⁵³ Confession was one
of the few markers of division that was recognized as a social group which people
could join or leave—one that had serious consequences in virtually every early
modern society. In short, human distinctions rather than human parity could be
seen as the first foundation of moral order in early modern society. After the
shattering of the Corpus Christianum in the Protestant Reformation and the
destructive religious wars that came in its wake, however, some political
theorists—most notably Hugo Grotius—began to look beyond religion as a basis
of community, and found it in natural human sociability.⁵⁴ As will become clear,
such ideas were hardly restricted to highbrow philosophy. Publishing minorities
and their advocates played a fundamental role in advancing and democratizing
the idea of shared humanity to cut through prevailing social divisions and call
attention to atrocities.⁵⁵
A Center of Appeal
⁵¹ See also G. Hauser, Vernacular voices: The rhetoric of publics and public spheres (Columbia, SC,
1999), pp. 53–55.
⁵² For important exceptions see footnote 18.
⁵³ Most theologians certainly preached some form of egalitarianism in access to the world to come,
but this concerned the dead only. Calvinist theology is illustrative of this complex relationship between
Christian doctrine and shared humanity. On the one hand, double predestination makes a clear-cut
distinction between the elect and the non-elect. On the other hand, the elect group cuts right through
most social inequalities and remains difficult, if not impossible, to identify. For a study of social
stratification and the development of Reformed Protestantism see M. Zafirovski, “Society and ‘heaven
and hell’. The interplay between social structure and theological tradition during early Calvinism,”
Politics, Religion, and Ideology 18.3 (2017), pp. 282–308.
⁵⁴ Headley, Europeanization of the world, pp. 75–79; C. McKeogh, “Grotius and the civilian,” in
E. Charters, E. Rosenhaft, and H. Smith (eds.), Civilians and war in Europe, 1618–1815 (Liverpool,
2012), pp. 37–38.
⁵⁵ See F. Bethencourt, “Humankind: From division to recomposition,” in Klose and Thulin (eds.),
Humanity, pp. 29–50.
15
⁵⁶ C. Zwierlein and B. de Graaf, “Security and conspiracy in modern history,” Historical Social
Research 38.1 (2013), pp. 7–45; B. Dooley, The dissemination of news and the emergence of
contemporaneity in early modern Europe (Farnham, 2010); J. Raymond and N. Moxham (eds.), News
networks in early modern Europe (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2016); A. Pettegree, The invention of news:
How the world came to know about itself (New Haven, CT, 2014); B. Dooley and S. Baron (eds.), The
politics of information in early modern Europe (Abingdon, 2001); R. Harms, R. Raymond, and J. Salman
(eds.), Not dead things: The dissemination of popular print in England, Wales, Italy, and the Low
Counties (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2013); see also N. Fraser, “Transnationalizing the public sphere,” in
M. Pensky (ed.), Globalizing critical theory (Oxford, 2005), pp. 37–47.
⁵⁷ Zwierlein, “Security and conspiracy in modern history.”
⁵⁸ For an overview of Dutch newspapers in the seventeenth century see A. der Weduwen, Dutch and
Flemish newspapers of the seventeenth century, 1618–1700 (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2017).
⁵⁹ For peddlers selling topical literature see J. Salman, Pedlars and the popular press: Itinerant
distribution networks in England and the Netherlands 1600–1850 (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2013).
⁶⁰ See F. Deen, D. Onnekink, and M. Reinders, “Pamphlets and politics: Introduction,” in F. Deen,
D. Onnekink, and M. Reinders (eds.), Pamphlets and politics in the Dutch Republic (Leiden 2012),
pp. 1–30; R. Harms, Pamfletten en publieke opinie. Massamedia in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam,
2011); C. Harline, Pamphlets, printing, and political culture in the early Dutch Republic (Dordrecht,
1987).
16
decades, students of the early modern press have shown that a transnational sense
of contemporaneity played a pivotal role in structuring the political thought and
behavior of both political officeholders and the broader public.⁶¹ By charting the
international production and dissemination of news in early modern Europe, they
have critically evaluated the boundaries of the public sphere. In fact, most students
of print media now identify a multitude of public spheres, which were ordered
around permeable social, discursive, and geographical boundaries, many of which
transcended state borders.
Building on these insights, this book does not aim to find a monolithic
“humanitarian public sphere.” This is not a story about some long-term concerted
campaign to end all forms of religious persecution. Instead, it departs from the
idea that a range of different opinion makers throughout Europe came to believe
that they could use print as a means of observation and a tool to influence specific
policies on an ad hoc basis. Unfortunately, the majority of the authors and printers
discussed in this study followed the common practice to publish their works
anonymously, making it difficult to typify them in terms of their occupational
background. But the authors whose identities can be retrieved indicate that we are
dealing with a remarkably diverse group of people from different parts of Europe,
including ministers, journalists, diplomats, political officeholders, and clergymen
from the Dutch Republic, the Holy Roman Empire, France, Savoy, England, and
other places. By the seventeenth century, this eclectic group of opinion makers
had elevated printed works to be the dominant media of long-distance public
debate about religious persecutions.⁶²
At the same time, opinion makers by no means operated in a public sphere that
was fully separated from the political authorities they discussed. Cross-border
publicity certainly hampered governments’ efforts at monopolizing political com-
munication. But government officials also frequently produced textual interven-
tions into foreign and domestic public discussions, blurring the line between
government publicity and public debate.⁶³
To understand how, when, and why these people turned to the printing press to
inform the world about the fate of persecuted minorities, this study will focus on
works published in the United Provinces. This also inescapably causes a gravita-
tion toward Holland, the most populous and prosperous province with the biggest
printing industry. Fueled by high levels of urbanization, a devolved political
structure, and relatively lax censorship, by the seventeenth century the Republic
⁶¹ Dooley, The dissemination of news; Raymond and Moxham (eds.), News networks; Pettegree, The
invention of news.
⁶² R. Schlögl, “Politik beobachten. Öffentlichkeit und Medien in der Frühen Neuzeit,” Zeitschrift für
historische Forschung 35.4 (2008), pp. 581–616.
⁶³ See J. Peacey, Politicians and pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil War and the
Interregnum (Farnham, 2004); Helmers, “Public diplomacy in early modern Europe,” pp. 402–403.
17
had become Europe’s most versatile and prolific hub of the printed word.⁶⁴ If an
early modern opinion maker wanted to advocate his or her cause in front of a large
European audience, the Dutch press was often the preferred choice. After having
been published in The Hague, Utrecht, or Amsterdam, printed news media often
traveled abroad again.⁶⁵ Even if the opinion maker in question first turned
elsewhere, there was still a good chance that, before long, Dutch or French editions
would be produced in the United Provinces.⁶⁶
This was all the more the case because the Republic did not only have an
impressive market share in the international production of printed opinion, it
was also a main center of appeal (Figure 3). Dutch society was characterized by a
pronounced discussion culture and a widely shared sense of political involvement.⁶⁷
While not officially part of the political process, petitioning and lobbying
different levels of government was a common practice.⁶⁸ As Andrew Pettegree
and Arthur der Weduwen recently put it, “to Dutch statesmen, ministers and
writers, pamphlets were persuasive tools, allowing for the continuation of politics
by other means.”⁶⁹ It comes as no surprise then that the Dutch were also used to
⁶⁴ A. Pettegree and A. der Weduwen, The bookshop of the world: Making and trading books in the
Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT and London, 2019); J. W. Koopmans, Early modern media and the
news in Europe: Perspectives from the Dutch angle (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2018); Deen et al. (eds.),
Pamphlets and politics; Harline, Pamphlets, printing, and political culture. For an insightful historio-
graphical discussion of the Dutch public sphere see van Netten, “Propaganda, publics, and pamphlets.”
For newspapers in the Dutch Republic see E. J. Baakman and M. van Groesen, “Kranten in de Gouden
Eeuw,” in H. Wijfjes and F. Harbers (eds.), De krant. Een cultuurgeschiedenis (Amsterdam, 2019),
pp. 21–46; M. van Groesen, “(No) news from the western front: The weekly press of the Low Countries
and the making of Atlantic news,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 44.3 (2013), pp. 739–760. Good
overviews of censorship in the Dutch Republic are: I. Weekhout, Boekencensuur in de noordelijke
Nederlanden. De vrijheid van de drukpers in de zeventiende eeuw (The Hague, 1998); H. E. van Gelder,
Getemperde vrijheid. Een verhandeling over de verhouding van kerk en staat in de Republiek der
Verenigde Nederlanden en de vrijheid van meningsuiting in zake godsdienst, dukpers en onderwijs,
gedurende de 17e eeuw (Groningen, 1972); J. W. Koopmans, “Bloei en beteugeling van kranten,
1700–1813,” in Wijfjes and Harbers (eds.), De krant. Een cultuurgeschiedenis, pp. 47–86; S. Groenveld,
“The Mecca of authors? States assemblies and censorship in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic,” in
A. Duke and C. Tamse (eds.), Too mighty to be free: Censorship and the press in Britain and the Netherlands
(Zutphen, 1987), pp. 63–81.
⁶⁵ M. van Groesen, Amsterdam’s Atlantic: Print culture and the making of Dutch Brazil
(Philadelphia, PA, 2017).
⁶⁶ Pettegree and der Weduwen, Bookshop of the world.
⁶⁷ H. J. Helmers, “Popular participation and public debate,” in H. J. Helmers and G. H. Janssen
(eds.), The Cambridge companion to the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 124–146; van
Groesen, Amsterdam’s Atlantic; W. Frijhoff, “Calvinism, literacy, and reading culture in the early
modern Northern Netherlands: Towards a reassessment,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 95 (2004),
pp. 252–265.
⁶⁸ For a short introduction to Dutch civic culture and political involvement see M. Prak,
“Urbanization,” in Helmers and Janssen (eds.), Cambridge companion, pp. 15–31; J. van den Tol,
Lobbying in company: Economic interests and political decision making in the history of Dutch Brazil,
1621–1656 (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2021); M. Reinders, “ ‘The citizens come from all cities with
petitions’: Printed petitions and civic propaganda in the seventeenth century,” in Deen et al. (eds.),
Pamphlets and politics, pp. 97–118.
⁶⁹ Pettegree and der Weduwen, Bookshop of the world, p. 67.
18
Figure 3. Jan Miense Molenaer, Folk singers selling their songs, 1630–1635, reproduced
with permission from the RKD—Netherlands Institute for Art History.
operating the presses to raise charity after the floods and fires that periodically
ravaged local communities.⁷⁰
⁷⁰ See Boersma, “Noodhulp zonder natiestaat”; L. Jensen, “ ‘Disaster upon disaster inflicted on the
Dutch’: Singing about disasters in the Netherlands, 1600–1900,” BMGN—Low Countries Historical
Review 134.2 (2019), pp. 45–70; L. Jensen (ed.), Crisis en catastrofe. De Nederlandse omgang met
19
rampen in de lange negentiende eeuw (Amsterdam, 2021); A. Duiveman, “Praying for (the) community:
Disasters, ritual, and solidarity in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic,” Cultural and Social History
16.5 (2019), pp. 543–560.
⁷¹ E. Kuijpers, J. Pollmann, J. Müller, and J. van der Steen (eds.), Memory before modernity: Practices
of memory in early modern Europe (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2013); J. Pollmann, Memory in early
modern Europe, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 2017); J. van der Steen, Memory wars in the Low Countries,
1566–1700 (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2015).
⁷² J. Pollmann, “Met grootvaders bloed bezegeld. Over religie en herinneringscultuur in de
zeventiende-eeuwse Nederlanden,” De Zeventiende Eeuw 29.2 (2013), pp. 154–175; S. Schama, The
embarrassment of riches: An interpretation of Dutch culture in the Golden Age (London, 1987),
pp. 51–125.
⁷³ Van der Steen, Memory wars in the Low Countries; Haks, Vaderland en vrede.
⁷⁴ G. Janssen, “The Republic of the refugees: Early modern migrations and the Dutch experience,”
The Historical Journal 60.1 (2017), pp. 233–252; B. J. Kaplan, “ ‘Dutch’ religious tolerance: Celebration
and revision,” in R. Po-Chia Hsia and H. van Nierop (eds.), Calvinism and religious toleration in the
Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 8–26.
20
decades after the prohibition of the Reformed religion, civil war broke out in the
mountainous Cévennes between remaining Huguenots and the French Crown.
Chapter 4 explores how opinion makers operated the presses in an effort to steer
the course of this religious conflict. Chapter 5, finally, compares the news coverage
of two instances of religious persecution in Central Europe, the so-called
“Bloodbath of Toruń” in 1724 and the expulsion of the Jews from Prague in 1745.
The cases under analysis were not the only instances of religious persecution
that were publicized in Protestant Europe. The Waldensians, for instance, were
not only persecuted in 1655, but also in the 1680s and the 1730s. In 1731, the
expulsion of 20,000 Protestants from Salzburg led to an impressive outpouring of
pamphlets, most of which originated in Prussia—whereas there were surprisingly
few Dutch news media commenting on the matter.⁷⁵ Many more persecutions of
varying degrees and scope could be named, the printed echoes of which all merit
investigation. After all, this study will show that the complex interplay between the
agency of the persecuted, the appropriation of the news by foreign publicists, and
specific international (religio)political circumstances guaranteed that different
persecutions were always discussed through very different patterns of argumen-
tation. However, I have prioritized the thorough investigation of a limited number
of cases, spread out over a relatively long timeframe, over an exhaustive account of
all instances of persecution and their printed echo in the merchant cities of the
Rhine Delta. The snapshots 1655–1656 (Chapter 1), 1679–1685 (Chapter 2),
1685–1689 (Chapter 3), 1702–1705 (Chapter 4), and 1724–1747 (Chapter 5)
largely cover the persecutions with which the Dutch were most concerned and
have good intervals to track potential changes in political argumentation.
⁷⁵ See G. Turner, Die Heimat nehmen wir mit. Ein Beitrag zur Auswanderung Salzburger
Protestanten im Jahr 1732, ihrer Ansiedlung in Ostpreußen und der Vertreibung 1944/45 (Berlin,
2008); M. Walker, The Salzburg transaction: Expulsion and redemption in early modern Germany
(Ithaca, NY and London, 1992); G. Florey, Geschichte der Salzburger Protestanten und ihrer Emigration
1731/32 (Graz, 1977).
1
The Paradox of Intervention
In the spring of 1655 Protestant Europe was shocked by the news of a massacre
that had occurred amongst the Reformed Waldensians in the Alpine valleys of
Piedmont. Around Easter, an army under Savoyard command had entered the
Pellice Valley, some 60 kilometers south-west of Turin, where they wreaked
carnage among the local men, women, and children. According to modern
estimates, about two thousand people were killed while entire villages were
razed to the ground during what came to be known as the Piedmont Easter.
The survivors fled across the border into the French Dauphiné, where their leaders
developed a plan to draw international attention to their predicament.¹
Much to the chagrin of Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy, this plan was
successful. News of the macabre fate of the Waldensians quickly crossed the Alps,
traveling north to Geneva, Paris, Amsterdam, and London, where it was widely
discussed and decried in print media. Attention was soon followed by action. The
Dutch States General and the Commonwealth of England declared national days
of prayer for the persecuted and organized charity campaigns to aid the survivors.²
Contemporary observers were struck by the intensity of the transnational solidarity.
Three years after the massacre, Samuel Morland, one of the extraordinary ambas-
sadors sent to Turin to mediate for the Waldensians, recalled that since the
beginning of the Reformation, there had never been “such a marvelous unity in
the cause of Religion.”³
By summer, the massacre appeared to be escalating into an international
political crisis, as Protestant governments started negotiations to jointly confront
the attack on their confession, under the leadership of the Lord Protector.⁴
¹ M. Laurenti, I confini della comunità. Conflitto europeo e guerra religiosa nelle comunità valdesi del
Seicento (Turin, 2015), pp. 175–176; D. J. B. Trim, “Intervention in European history, c. 1520–1850,” in
S. Recchia and J. Welsh (eds.), Just and unjust military intervention: European thinkers from Vitoria to
Mill (Cambridge, 2013), p. 36.
² N. C. Kist, Neêrlands bededagen en biddagsbrieven. Een bijdrage ter opbouwing der geschiedenis van
staat en kerk in Nederland, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1849), vol. 2, p. 334; charity campaigns were also organized
in France and Switzerland; N. Greenspan, Selling Cromwell’s wars: Media, empire and godly warfare,
1650–1658 (London, 2012), p. 137; for Dutch charity initiatives see Boersma, “Noodhulp zonder
natiestaat”; E. Boersma, “Yrelandtsche traenen gedroogd. Transnationale solidariteit en lokale
politiek in Zeeland, 1641–1644,” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 2 (2015), pp. 201–222.
³ S. Morland, The history of the Evangelical churches in the valleys of Piemont (London: Henry Hills,
1658), p. 540.
⁴ H. C. Rogge, “De Waldenzen-moord van 1655 en de zending van Rudolf van Ommeren naar
Zwitserland en Savoye,” Verslagen en mededeelingen der koninklijke akademie van wetenschappen 4.5
(1903), pp. 303–312.
The Early Modern Dutch Press in an Age of Religious Persecution: The Making of Humanitarianism. David de Boer,
Oxford University Press. © David de Boer 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198876809.003.0002
22
Tensions rose so high that notable observers began to worry that Europe was again
standing on the brink of religious war. Ministers at the court of the young Louis
XIV feared that England would incite a Huguenot rebellion in France and send
Swiss mercenaries to Savoy.⁵ Upon hearing that the Protectorate considered
sending the fleet to Nice, Willem Boreel, the Dutch ambassador at the court of
Paris, also sounded the alarm. He urged Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, the
Republic’s de facto head of government, not to undertake a military intervention,
lest the conflict escalate and lead to a new age of confessional warfare in Europe:
It was about one hundred years ago, namely in 1561 and 1562, that they started
to massacre the believers in [France]. God wants to save us from a similar
century, which could also begin with an event like that, and this nation, which
is bigoted and impetuous, should not be roused to such barbarian cruelties,
which we have already seen way too much of here.⁶
We should begin by taking a step back to briefly consider the tensions that led up
to the tragedy of 1655. The Waldensians located their origins in the twelfth
century as a religious community that preached the merits of poverty and basing
one’s faith on Scripture alone. Despite centuries of persecution, remnants of the
movement managed to persist, mainly in the Cottian Alps, where its adherents
lived secluded lives as shepherds and farmers.¹² In 1530 they declared themselves
Reformed and rethought their creed and church order in a Calvinist fashion.¹³
¹⁴ See C. Zwierlein, “The Peace of Cavour in the European context,” in S. Stacey (ed.), Political,
religious and social conflict in the states of Savoy, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 2014), pp. 125–168.
¹⁵ Ibid.
¹⁶ For a translation of Gastaldo’s ordinance into English see J. Stoppa, A collection, or narative, sent
to His Highness, the Lord Protector of the Common-Wealth of England, Scotland, & Ireland, &c
(London: H. Robinson, 1655), pp. 7–8.
¹⁷ The following summary of events is based on E. Balmas and G. Zardini Lana, La vera relazione di
quanto è accaduto nelle persecuzioni e i massacri dell’anno 1655. Le “Pasque Piemontesi” del 1655 nelle
testimonianze dei protagonisti (Turin, 1987), pp. 15–35.
¹⁸ Laurenti, Confini della comunità, p. 180.
¹⁹ B. Peyrot, “Giosuè Gianavello, ovverò il Leone di Rorà,” in C. Mornese and G. Buratti (eds.),
Banditi e ribelli dimenticati. Storie di irrudicibili al future che viene (Milan, 2006), p. 209.
25
What do you do when you have fallen from your sovereign’s favor? Since the right
of resistance was among the trickiest questions occupying political theorists in the
early modern period, persecuted minorities could rely on a rich tradition in
answering this question. Spurred by persecution and war, Reformed thinkers
had developed an impressive number of resistance theories. These included
theological arguments, aimed against rulers who disobeyed the laws of God, and
more secular approaches, directed against tyrants who oppressed their people.²³
Recent history provided ample examples of how such theories had been put into
practice. The Dutch had built a republic upon the precepts of resistance theory—a
state that had at last become universally recognized in 1648—and the Huguenots
had successfully fought for extensive rights as a religious minority in France. More
recently, Calvinist Parliamentarians—themselves inspired by the Dutch Revolt—
had ended the English Civil War by executing King Charles I.²⁴
From the late sixteenth century onwards, however, political theorists increas-
ingly came to reflect on Europe’s era of revolt and confessional warfare as proof
that the rights of subjects to resist their rulers should be drastically limited. Few
went as far as to deny them fully, but influential philosophers such as Jean Bodin
and Hugo Grotius strongly preferred that when subjects were in extreme and
imminent danger, foreign sovereigns would intervene on their behalf.²⁵ To be
sure, this right to intervention was not universally recognized. Thomas Hobbes,
for one, while granting a very limited right of resistance, opposed foreign inter-
ventions.²⁶ But most political thinkers in the seventeenth century agreed that the
compromising of external sovereignty was less problematic than the fracturing of
domestic sovereignty.²⁷
As is so often the case, the facts on the ground in Piedmont quickly blurred
the apparent clarity and consistency of political theory. It was not easy to
translate pervasive political norms of resistance and intervention into practice.
As mentioned, the Waldensian refugees reorganized in the Dauphiné and took
up arms. Yet they refrained from publishing a manifesto justifying their resist-
ance. Nor did they initially send out requests for aid to foreign governments.
Instead, they sent several messages to Savoyard officials pleading for the hostil-
ities to cease.²⁸
The reason for this was that the Waldensians were stuck in what we can call the
paradox of intervention. Since foreign intervention was preferable to domestic
revolt, it made sense for subjects to stress that they were passive victims. Such
passivity not only implied that they were defenseless in a military sense, but also
that they had not taken any diplomatic initiative. In the course of the seventeenth
century, non-state actors slowly began to lose formal access to Europe’s increas-
ingly differentiated spaces of diplomatic communication.²⁹ If the subjects of a state
sought the help of any foreign power against their own sovereign they ipso facto
subverted the latter’s authority.
The Waldensians had already broken this taboo by seeking foreign aid before
the massacre had taken place. Upon hearing the news of Gastaldo’s order from
January the Swiss evangelical cantons had jointly written a letter to the Duke of
Savoy, requesting him “to look upon his pitifully afflicted subjects with an eye of
commiseration” and let them live within their old habitations.³⁰ The duke replied
that “the boldness that [the Waldensians] take to make their addresses to forraign
was in fact inspired by Bodin. See P. Piirimäe, “The Westphalian myth and the idea of external
sovereignty,” in H. Kalmo and Q. Skinner (eds.), Sovereignty in fragments: The past, present and
future of a contested concept (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 68–70.
²⁶ See P. J. Steinberger, “Hobbesian resistance,” American Journal of Political Science 46.4 (2002),
pp. 856–865; S. Sreedhar, Hobbes on resistance: Defying the Leviathan (Cambridge, 2010); R. Tuck,
“Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf on humanitarian intervention,” in Recchia and Welsh (eds.), Just and
unjust military intervention, pp. 96–112.
²⁷ C. Kampmann, “Kein Schutz fremder Untertanen nach 1648? Zur Akzeptanz einer responsibility
to protect in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in T. Haug, N. Weber, and C. Windler (eds.), Protegierte und
Protektoren. Asymmetrische politische Beziehungen zwischen Partnerschaft und Dominanz (16. Bis
frühes 20. Jahrhundert) (Cologne, 2016), pp. 201–216.
²⁸ Balmas and Zardini Lana, Vera relazione, p. 49.
²⁹ M. S. Anderson, The rise of modern diplomacy, 1450–1919 (London and New York, NY, 1993),
p. 42.
³⁰ J. Léger, Histoire générale des églises evangeliques des vallées de Piemont, ou Vaudoises, 2 vols.
(Leiden: Jacques le Carpentier, 1669), vol. 2, p. 203.
27
And as in the last revolt of your own subjects, the horror that we had of their
rebellious attempt, moved us not to afford them any help or favour, either
directly or indirectly; so likewise We hope, that your prudence will move you
to testifie the same affection and deportment towards us, in abstaining from
giving any foundation or appearance of reason, to uphold their vain and insolent
temerity.³³
Some weeks after the massacre, a similar letter was sent to the cantons after a
Waldensian minister had been caught in the Susa Valley during his return from a
mission to Lausanne. He had carried various drafts for treatises against the
court.³⁴ In a magnanimous gesture Susa’s governor set the minister free. The
intercepted documents were sent back to Bern with an accompanying letter
expressing the hope that the authorities had not been involved in anything that
could endanger the harmony that existed between allied states.³⁵ The fact that
writing to foreign governments with pleas for help was understood as a form of
lèse-majesté explains why the Waldensians long refrained from doing so. In one of
their first pamphlets, the True account of what happened during the persecutions
and massacres carried out this year—which will be investigated in further detail
below—they actually used this as proof of their unconditional loyalty to the Duke
of Savoy:
They have accused the said Reformed Churches of having sought the protection
of foreign princes or states, but they are no less wrong than in the preceding
impositions: Because it is true, as the said princes and states are willing to testify,
that they have never received a letter or even the smallest note from these
churches. If they [the foreign princes and states] have written letters in their
[the Waldensians] favor to His Most Serene Highness, then this has only sprung
from their holy zeal and ardent charity.³⁶
authentic and very true account of what happened during the persecutions and
massacre. This pamphlet stated that foreign princes and states had interceded on
their own initiative “out of pity with their poor brothers.”³⁷ As their military
situation worsened, the Waldensian committee did finally send a letter to the
States General in July. In it, they apologetically explained once again why they had
not sought the Dutch Republic’s help before:
This has not happened because shortly after the start of our miseries, the enemies
of the true religion have accused us of having sought help from foreign powers, in
order to better charge us as malefactors against the state. Because we were
staggered by this, we have resolved to endure their rage (to give less credence
to this calumny) rather than give them the opportunity to make us look bad and
to brand us with a crime of which we are completely innocent.³⁸
Ironically, despite the letter’s explicit warning of the dangers pleas for help might
entail, the States General decided to publish the letter both in the French original
and in Dutch, to stir people for the upcoming prayer days and collections.³⁹ The
Waldensians’ decision to directly address the States General, despite this poten-
tially serving as evidence of subversion, gives us a sense of the value that they put
on receiving support from as many powers as possible. With the publishing of the
letter, the names of the leaders of the Waldensian resistance were now for the first
time publicly circulating throughout Europe—albeit without evidence that they
actually fought in the mountains. The States General must have believed that
publicity outweighed the dangers of evidence of lèse-majesté.
This does not mean that the Dutch Republic had been idle before. The States
General had already sent a letter to Charles Emmanuel II via Willem Boreel on
May 27, nine days after they had first discussed the rumors of the massacre in
Piedmont.⁴⁰ They requested an immediate cessation of the violence committed
against the Waldensians and the restitution of their goods and territories.⁴¹
However, the letter had been judged inadmissible by the Savoyard court, because
it had made the insulting mistake of not addressing the duke as King of Cyprus, a
title he claimed.⁴² On July 13, the States General also decided to send a special
envoy to Turin to advocate the Waldensian cause and provide them with reliable
information from a court in which they had no resident ambassador.⁴³
³⁷ Anonymous, Relation dernier authentique & tresveritable de ce qui s’est passe dans les persecutions
et massacres, faicts ceste année (s.l.: s.n., 1655), pflt 7633.
³⁸ Anonymous, Translaet uyt den Françoysche, vande missive, geschreven aen de Hooge en Mogende
Heeren Staten Generael der Vereenighde Nederlanden (The Hague: s.n., 1655), pflt 7626.
³⁹ Rogge, “Waldenzen-moord van 1655,” p. 315.
⁴⁰ Ibid., pp. 307–308; for a transcription of this letter see Léger, Histoire générale, vol. 2, p. 231.
⁴¹ Rogge, “Waldenzen-moord van 1655,” p. 308. ⁴² Claretta, Storia del regno, vol. 1, p. 140.
⁴³ Individual provinces’ squabbles over finances and the death of van Ommeren’s father delayed the
envoy’s departure until August 21; Rogge, “Waldenzen-moord van 1655,” pp. 313–314.
29
Despite all the diplomatic and financial support Dutch regents gave, they were
far from insensitive to the possibility that they might be supporting a revolt. This
became painfully pressing when news reached the Republic that on August 18,
1655 the Waldensians had signed a “Patent of grace and pardon,” after two weeks
of peace negotiations between a Savoyard, Waldensian, and a Reformed Swiss
delegation with French ambassador Abel Servien serving as mediator.⁴⁴ The
document, signed by all parties, officially stated that the Waldensians had indeed
rebelled. The city council of Amsterdam thereupon initially decided to freeze the
money raised for charity, to make sure that they were not supporting rebels.⁴⁵
Early modern observers were aware of the disruptive potential of religious intoler-
ance, but they were equally wary of the revolts that had recently plagued France,
England, and Italy.⁴⁶
Two months after the signing of the peace, Willem Boreel forwarded a letter
written by Waldensian representatives to the States General. The ambassador
included a personal note in which he stressed that the document had been
handed to him “under the particular recommendation that both the letter and
the sender . . . will be kept strictly secret, because—[as] your High Mightinesses
will sufficiently notice from the content—[it] would suffice to bring the poor
people to utter ruin and misery.”⁴⁷ The letter was another request for help and
argued that the peace had been signed under severe pressure. Clearly hoping to
still receive the raised money, the Waldensians implored the States General “not to
diminish their compassion shown to [them].”⁴⁸ This time, as requested, the States
General refrained from publication. Finally, in early 1656, almost a year after the
massacre, the Waldensians received their money, which was transferred via the
consistory of Geneva.⁴⁹
Public Diplomacy
Clearly, keeping up the appearance of passive obedience while at the same time
asking foreign governments for aid is a tricky thing to do, especially if the
governments in question rashly publish your pleas. There were no laws in early
modern Europe, however, that forbade subjects from communicating with
⁴⁴ For a transcription of the Italian original see Morland, History of the Evangelical churches,
pp. 652–663.
⁴⁵ Resoluties met munimenten of bijlagen, 1 and 4 oktober 1655, Archief van de vroedschap 5025,
inv. nr. 21, Stadsarchief Amsterdam; the vroedschap ultimately followed the States of Holland, who
decided that the money would be sent to Piedmont; I thank Erica Boersma for providing me with this
source.
⁴⁶ See G. Parker, “Crisis and catastrophe: The global crisis of the seventeenth century reconsidered,”
American Historical Review 113.4 (2008), pp. 1055, 1060–1064.
⁴⁷ Transcription in Rogge, “Waldenzen-moord van 1655,” p. 341. ⁴⁸ Ibid., pp. 342–343.
⁴⁹ H. C. Rogge, “Vervolging der Waldenzen in 1655 en 1656,” Nederlandsch archief voor
kerkgeschiedenis 2 (1903), pp. 152–155.
30
⁵⁰ A. Pagden, “Human rights, natural rights, and Europe’s imperial legacy,” Political Theory 31.2
(2003), pp. 184–188.
⁵¹ P. Piirimäe, “Just war in theory and practice: The legitimation of Swedish intervention in the
Thirty Years War,” The Historical Journal 45.3 (2002), pp. 515–516.
⁵² K. Härter, “Political crime in early modern Europe: Assassination, legal responses, and popular
print media,” European Journal of Criminology 11.2 (2014), p. 149.
⁵³ M. North, “Anonymity in early modern manuscript culture: Finding a purposeful convention in a
ubiquitous condition,” in J. W. Starner and B. H. Tralster (eds.), Anonymity in early modern England:
“What’s in a name?” (Abingdon, 2011), pp. 25–28.
31
these accounts, Léger traveled north to advocate the Waldensian cause across
Europe.
The minister initially hoped to have the manuscript published in Geneva, but
the canton’s authorities forbade it.⁵⁴ Probably they did not want to worsen the
political situation in the Swiss Confederacy, where religious tension was mounting
between the Protestant and Catholic cantons—who, in fact, suspected each other
of fomenting the crisis in Piedmont.⁵⁵ Léger therefore set course to Paris, where he
met Boreel. The latter advised the pastor to abbreviate his account of the perse-
cutions, probably to make it a more inviting read as a pamphlet. With Boreel’s
help, the manuscript was translated into several languages and sent to publishers
across Europe’s main Protestant states.⁵⁶
Léger’s first account, the True story of what has recently befallen the valleys of
Piedmont, was first published anonymously in French at an unknown location.⁵⁷
The True story was soon followed by the aforementioned True account, a similar
but more extensive narration of the events (Figure 4).⁵⁸ Together, the True story
and the True account provided the basic narrative of the persecution, from which
subsequent pamphlets drew.⁵⁹
The arguments raised in the pamphlets will be extensively discussed below. For
now, it is important to remember that the Waldensian leadership had made
explicit in their letter to the States General in late July that they had chosen a
policy of defending their innocence and passive obedience. Accordingly, the two
pamphlets made no mention of any (military) leadership, resistance, or skir-
mishes. As such, the rhetoric of these works starkly differed from manifestos,
through the publication of which non-state actors clearly postulated themselves as
political actors.⁶⁰ In fact, although Léger was in all likelihood the author of the
True story and the True account, he did not portray himself as one of the
Waldensian victims. Instead, he emphasized that he recounted what he had
heard about the massacre “from those who experienced this disastrous desola-
tion.”⁶¹ The works did make a direct appeal to their readership, albeit of a rather
Figure 4. First page of True account of what happened during the persecutions and
massacres carried out this year against the Reformed churches of Piedmont, 1655,
reproduced with permission from Ghent University Library.
innocent sort; they asked all believers to support the victims through prayer and
charity. They were, however, not presented mainly as pleas, but as truthful
accounts of what had happened in Piedmont. Coupling this too closely to requests
for international aid and intervention would only harm the image of passive
obedience.
Another random document with
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the individual who is translated and handed over to their care.
Nevertheless, the raw material counts for a good deal—as you
express it in one of your homely English proverbs: 'One cannot make
a silk purse out of a sow's ear'; and on the same analogy even our
skilful ministers of state would be unable to construct the true
substance of a Child of the Sun-god out of an inferior Herthian
mortal. The nicest caution has therefore to be observed in the work
of selection. For nearly three years now I have been busily seeking,
and can at last congratulate myself on having obtained the requisite
material, the potential dross that will later be converted into pure
gold. For some time past I have been on your track without arousing
the smallest suspicion in your mind, and now at length I have
grasped the favourable, the critical, the final moment in which I claim
you for this most exalted, and indeed most sacred office....
"You are thoroughly out of touch with your own age and with your
own country in a special degree, and for my purpose your deep-
rooted dissatisfaction causes in me on the contrary the most intense
satisfaction. You have grown disgusted with the decadence of your
Royal House; you are sick of the greed and frivolity of your
aristocracy; you abhor the mischievous methods and aims of your
unscrupulous demagogues in power; you shrink from the violence
and brutishness of your all-powerful mob; you lament the utter
incapacity of the few serious and honest politicians who yet survive.
You mourn over the industrial devastation and the uglifying of your
once-beautiful world; you turn with horror from the blatant arrogance
of the ruling gang of financiers, who with the besotted populace
mean to involve the whole world in a final sordid struggle for
mastery. On all sides you see nothing but rapid change upon
change, all for the worse; the rooting-out of all that is good, artistic
and ennobling, and the substitution of all that is vile and
mercenary....
"You are obsessed with the same hatred of this evil transformation
as are we ourselves, the ruling body in Meleager, who utilise your
planet now, not as in the past for purposes of imitation and guidance,
but for serious warnings as to what to avoid in our own future course
of polity. For in Meleager we still set before us as our main striving-
point Universal Content, not so-called industrial and educational
Progress and the mere amassing of wealth. The happiness of all is,
and always has been, the sole aim of our statesmen, and we firmly
hold that the various theories of equality that are so advertised and
belauded on your Earth are in reality most deadly poisons that are
being injected into the corporate mass of humanity. One of the
leading saints of your Christian Church has wisely said that in every
house are to be found vessels alike formed to honour and to
dishonour, yet that, as they are all equally necessary, so viewed in
that reasonable light are they all equally honourable. Thus in our
government of Meleager do we recognise the clear necessity of the
various grades of society which form the total fabric of every healthy
and happy state; whilst we reject with scorn and loathing the
specious notions that, under the guise of an equality that has no real
existence, endeavour to weld all society into one drab dismal
detestable whole....
"Nowadays everything that is ordered or orderly you worldlings have
set out to destroy. Your barbarian hordes broke up the stable Roman
Empire; your fanatical reformers and greedy monarchs destroyed the
consolidating features of the Middle Ages, which though very far
from being perfect yet presented many illuminating features which
we deemed expedient to copy in Meleager. In recent years your
death-dealing guns and your proselytising emissaries have
destroyed wantonly the vast matured civilisations of China and
Japan and Burmah, which are now rapidly casting out all their
antique virtues and are fast absorbing all the vice and vulgarity of the
West. Every community, howsoever poor or insignificant, yet content
to work out its own salvation and be governed by its own ancient
laws and customs, and consequently happy and healthy according to
its own lights, you have disturbed and dismembered....
"Everywhere and every day the beautiful is retreating before the
utilitarian; smoke and noise pollute the greenest and loveliest valleys
of Europe and America; dirt and disease increase in spite of your
undoubted advances in medical science, whose services are given
over to the individual who will pay for them rather than to the
community at large. One sees the feeble and the cretinous of your
world breeding like flies, whilst those of a better condition and in
sound health are found too selfish and too tenacious of their ease to
undertake the trouble or expense connected with the rearing of a
family. Epidemics continue, and in the form of a gift of Western
civilisation are allowed to sweep away whole tribes and nations of
wholesome primitive peoples; your most loathsome and yet
preventable diseases of contagion still hold sway, either by reason of
your own indifference or from false ideals of a prudery that, I
confess, wholly passes my own comprehension. Over all your Earth
the universal craving for wealth at any cost of morals or self-respect
has settled like a blight. All pleasures of the intellect are rapidly
ceasing to attract, and the extravagance and debauchery of the
ostentatious rich are announced by your odious vassal Press as the
sole objects worthy of attainment or imitation to-day....
"You slaughter and exterminate your rare animals and your beautiful
birds in order that your women may adorn themselves with their pelts
and plumage, and even now in this cold weather I have watched
your fine ladies daily walking in your noisy, crowded streets of
London, half-naked yet wholly unashamed, with their limbs and
bosoms exposed equally to the bitter wind and the lascivious eye of
the stranger, whilst masses of costly furs, the spoils of innocent and
peaceful animals, are heaped upon their pampered bodies....
"Whither are you being driven in this mad stampede after so-called
progress and knowledge? In what morass will this mocking will-o'-
the-wisp ultimately entice and overwhelm you?... I see chicanery and
disbelief possess your churches and their priests; a clinging to
stipends and a craving for personal leadership seem to me to have
become the sole guides of such as are themselves supposed to
guide their flocks. Everywhere change, restlessness, cynicism,
vulgarity, extravagance, crime, hypocrisy, covetousness, greed,
cringing, selfishness in every form are rampant; what sensitive mind
would not instinctively recoil from contact with such a changing
world? Can a nature such as your own endure to be associated with
such a mass of passive squalor and of active evil? Are you not more
than ready to welcome some chance of escape from such an
uncongenial environment?...
"As you confess in your heart the utter collapse of your early aims
here on Earth—so must you recognise your unique chance to attain
to something higher than even you dreamed of in your youthful
moods of hope and ambition. You will be reincarnated as the Child of
the Sun, after you are once translated to Meleager. That is a part,
but a part only, of The Secret, which perhaps already you are
inclined to regard as The Fraud. And yet, if fraud it be, its ultimate
aim is a beneficent and unselfish one, for it has been practised in
order to keep a whole population happy and content...."
"And herewith I think I had now better give you some instructions, or
rather hints, as to your new position and as to your proper attitude
towards the governing caste of Meleager on your arrival there. As
King, the Child of the Sun is invested with a species of sovereignty
that has no exact counter-part on your Earth. Your high office in
Meleager partakes in some respects of the nature of a King of
England, of a Pope of Rome, of an old-time Sultan of Baghdad, of a
modern colonial governor; yet it is itself no one of these things. To
sustain your part you will be reincarnated after your long sleep, and
you will awake to find yourself endued with a fresh supply of youth
and energy, whilst all your acquired learning and ripe experience of a
lifetime already more than half consumed will abide in your brain.
There now remains for you the final stage of all on Earth, that of
putting yourself and your future unreservedly and confidently in my
hands...."
There followed an abrupt spell of silence in which d'Aragno
scrutinised me closely. I knew not why, but I had begun to
experience a sort of repulsion against his arrogance in thus
presuming obedience on my part before ever I had signified my
assent. I felt in some wise bound to protest against this assumption
of my readiness to obey, and accordingly I made a protest rather out
of personal vanity than from any depth of rebellious feeling.
"And suppose, sir, I decide not to accept your proposal? Suppose I
refuse absolutely and doggedly to accede to your demand, whatever
the consequence to myself? What then?"
D'Aragno rose from his chair, thrust both hands into the pockets of
his dress jacket, and took up a position on the hearth-rug before the
dying embers of the fire. A curious expression, which I quite failed to
analyse, spread over his features, as he regarded me sternly for
some moments in silence. At length he spoke:
"Your objection I do not regard as sincere. It is idle, and has been
prompted, I am convinced, by a vague sense of wounded dignity on
your part. Perhaps I have been not sufficiently considerate to your
proper pride. You are anxious to 'save your face,' as you express it in
your English idiom. I therefore refuse to take your question seriously.
You have, I know, in your heart the fullest intention of complying with
my arrangements." A pause ensued, and he added with indifference:
"In any case, do you suppose for an instant that I have thus spoken
to you openly of The Secret with the smallest possibility of my
sharing it with any living mortal on your Earth? In reality you have no
choice left you. Whether you follow or refuse to follow my lead, your
connection with your own world is already severed. Need I make the
case any clearer to an intelligence such as yours?"
Again a spell of silence, which was ended by the harsh five strokes
of the Westminster clock resounding through the heavy air. With the
final reverberation I bowed my head, and simply said: "I am ready."
It may have been only my fancy, but I thought I detected a shade of
relief pass over that now sinister face; at any rate, the pleasant
earnest look had returned when d'Aragno muttered quietly as though
to himself: "I never felt a moment's doubt!"
Again I essayed a question, this time, one that was really agitating
my mind: "As I am unalterably and inevitably destined to fill the
throne of your kingdom in Meleager, surely I may be permitted to ask
you for how long a period I am to enjoy the position that has been
thus allotted to me? How many years can I expect to rule in this
realm whence there is obviously no return? Is my reign to continue
till the end of my natural mortal life, or is it to be prolonged
indefinitely by mysterious measures, such as you have already
hinted at?"
D'Aragno stroked his chin meditatively for some minutes and then
replied in a placid voice: "That at least is a reasonable and proper
question, though I have not the knowledge to answer it as you could
wish or might reasonably expect. I was an infant when our late king
came to be crowned, and he has ceased to rule since my sojourn on
the Earth—that is to say, his tenure of office must have lasted some
forty years. Thus for three years or more our realm has been without
a monarch, so that the whole community in all its classes has begun
to clamour vigorously for a successor, and hence the task of
selection wherewith I have been entrusted, and which I am now
bringing to a close. Our late king was, I fear, unfortunate in his
relations with our priestly or governing class, and by his own folly
rendered his office a source of real danger to our whole system of
administration. I have every reason to believe no such catastrophe is
likely to occur in your case. Your native endowments of head and
heart, combined with the additional advantages of youth and wisdom
that you will obtain on your arrival in Meleager, will protect you
sufficiently from such an untimely ending. Yet I warn you, you will
require all your faculties, especially those of self-restraint and
discretion, if you are to win and retain the good will and co-operation
of that all-powerful hierarchy which is actually not only your master
but in a certain sense also your creator. It used to be said in ancient
Rome that two augurs could never pass in the public streets without
smiling—well, you must first of all learn to repress that classical
grimace, and be content to abide ever with a solemn countenance in
an atmosphere of make-believe. Moreover, the desirability of such
an attitude ought not to irritate a person who like yourself is filled with
a divine discontent. You will be the glorious and adored figure-head
of a community wherein the maximum of human happiness and
content has been already attained. But I shall not pursue this
dissertation further. With my warning voice ever whispering in your
ears, and with your natural tact and intelligence to guide you, I am
sure you will not fail. As to the length of your reign, I cannot tell you
what I myself do not know. But this much I can honestly say, and that
is, its duration will wholly depend on your own action, and on your
relations with the senators, who alone possess the sources of power
that are essential to your continued maintenance in office. For aught
I know to the contrary, our priests, by means of their marvellous
recipes and contrivances, may be able to prolong your life, and even
your youth, indefinitely for centuries. But I do not speak with
authority; I can only repeat that the extent of your reign depends very
largely on your own behaviour."
"On one other matter I should also like to be informed," interposed I,
"and I trust you will not condemn this question as superfluous. Tell
me, why out of all the inhabitants of the Earth have I, a bankrupt in
worldly glory and success, a person of mediocre attainments and the
owner of no special gifts of beauty or rank, thus been chosen to fill
so exalted a position? I ask from sheer curiosity, and from no subtle
desire to plead my unfitness as an excuse to decline your proffered,
and indeed accepted, honour."
My companion seemed to approve my question. A humorous look
flitted over his features as he dryly answered: "You are fully justified
in your inquiry; but you must recall that I have already mentioned
that, though your world is large, my own field of choice is very
limited. Our King, as I have already said, must be naturally a true
Child of the Sun; in other words, he must be tall, fair, blue-eyed. This
is essential, and such restrictions practically limit my search to your
northern races, and mainly to such as are of Teutonic stock.
Secondly, our King elect must be of middle age, for past experience
and a ripe intelligence are also necessary to our plans. Thirdly, he
must be either a bachelor or a widower, and preferably a misogynist
at heart. He must not quit the Earth homesick; he must not be a
natural prey to the influence of women, so far as it is possible to
guard against this danger, the mainspring of all our fears in
Meleager. For the sheer possibility of the founding of a royal race
springing from the union of the Child of the Sun with a maiden of
Meleager is a constant cause of alarm and watchfulness on the part
of our hierarchy. Not to mention the mischief resulting from any such
intrigue to our body politic, the possible birth of a Prince, a
connecting link between the Divine and the Human, might in a few
days, nay, in a few hours, shatter in pieces the whole edifice of the
present system of government that it has taken so many centuries of
unremitting wisdom and state craft to erect. Surely I need not dwell
on this all-important phase? Last of all, we must have a comely
personality and gentle birth combined with high intellectual gifts and
training. This combination of qualities is not so easy to discover as it
ought to be on your Earth. Your handsome nobles are either illiterate
or debauched, and are often both simultaneously; or else they are
slaves to family ties or to female influence in some form; whilst those
who are both noble by birth and breeding and also highly cultivated
are usually undesirable for our high purpose owing to their physical
defects. In spite of all this, there are doubtless many hundreds of
persons living who would be eligible and would answer to all our
requirements as well as or even better than yourself; nevertheless,
after much reflection I have good reason to suppose that the
hierarchy of Meleager, whose envoy and servant I am, will find no
cause of quarrel with my choice."
Six o'clock struck out on the foggy morning air, as d'Aragno finished
speaking thus, and I grew aware of the renewed vitality pulsing once
more in the surrounding London streets. "One more matter, however,
I must speak of," suddenly ejaculated my host, "before we can freely
discuss the final arrangements. I do not aspire to know what
difference, if any, your impending transit to another planet will entail
in regard to your chances of existence in the Hereafter. On your
Earth, I understand, men hold the most varied and contradictory
opinions and theories on this subject; and even in your Christian
section of humanity I gather there is no real unanimity on this point.
We in Meleager have our own ideals and beliefs in the Hereafter, but
these are purely speculative, for none has ever returned to us from
the domain beyond the grave to tell us the true details, and none
other can supply them; we accordingly let the great question rest
without laying down dogmas of necessary belief. But whether in the
Other Life you will be judged or treated as a denizen of the Earth or
of Meleager, I cannot imagine. I think it my duty however to remind
you of this anomaly in case it may have escaped your notice, for I
am well aware what strong hopes of endless happiness many
members of your Christian churches build on the shadowy world
yonder. From my own observations I know you yourself are fairly
punctual in your religious prayers and duties, and I have always
welcomed such an attitude as edifying on your part; but as to what
are your real views and beliefs on the question of the Other Life I
have naturally no clue. On this one matter therefore I admit you run a
certain problematical risk in your translation to our star; but at the
same time I cannot conceive that your future interest in an unseen,
unknown, undescribed and unsubstantial world could be of sufficient
import or strength to compel you to struggle against your natural
desire to rule as a king in another sphere, perhaps for a stretch of
time that would be out of all proportion to your earthly span of life."
He ceased suddenly, and kneeling at my feet said slowly in a suave
voice that was not wholly free from irony: "And now let me tender my
most respectful homage to the King elect of the planet of Meleager!"
D'Aragno then rose, and for the next hour discussed with me the
necessary steps to be taken before the consummation of his mission
on our Earth.
III
It was long after seven o'clock when I found myself walking home in
the grey drizzle of the early morning. As was my custom when in
town during the last few years I rented a bedroom at my club in St
James's, and the apparition of myself in evening dress at the club
doorway at that unusual hour of return evoked a momentary look of
surprise on the face of the well-trained porter who was then
sweeping the hall in his shirt-sleeves. Making my way up to my bed-
chamber, I proceeded to carry out the first portion of my late
instructions from d'Aragno. This consisted in swallowing a tumblerful
of cold water in which I had previously dissolved the contents of a
small packet he had given me before leaving the hotel. After that I
undressed and crept into bed. On arising again I felt light as air, with
the additional sensation of being several inches taller than my actual
stature. My mind too had become singularly clear and active, so that
I was enabled to carry out all my intended preparations with ease.
First of all I placed my valuables in my trunk, which I locked; then I
dressed myself in a tweed suit, and made my way downstairs to the
club smoking-room, where I quietly undertook the final details I
considered necessary before my departure from this world. I had no
parents living; my brothers and sisters were all married and had their
own homes; I had no debts, and my few outstanding bills could be
easily settled by my executors, for some few years before I had
signed a will that I deemed fair and adequate. There was nobody to
lose in any material sense by my sudden demise; on the contrary,
my brothers would obtain possession of my property, for I was the
owner of a small landed estate and of a meagre income that was the
source of secret but intense bitterness to me under this present
oppression of plutocracy. I had therefore no more arduous task
before me than to compose a letter to my favourite brother, so that
he could easily infer from its contents that I had decided to make
away with my life. This might have proved an unpleasant theme for
composition under different circumstances, but on this occasion I
experienced no difficulty in expressing myself to my own satisfaction.
This last matter accomplished, and one or two cheques to
tradesmen signed and posted, I put on my overcoat and hat, and
sallied out of the club towards noon. A feeling of lightness of body
combined with a sense of calm exaltation of mind assisted me, as I
walked slowly through the muddy streets towards the National
Gallery, one of my most frequent haunts in London. Here I spent
about an hour in sauntering through the huge rooms hung with the
glowing works of the Old Masters, stopping occasionally to admire
some special favourite, and even studying with interest a recent
addition to the collection that hung on a solitary screen. Quitting the
gallery, I crossed Trafalgar Square, the while sensing the gush of its
fountains and gazing at Landseer's stolid lions; thence I strolled
down the length of Whitehall as far as Westminster with its majestic
group of Gothic towers, and after filling my eyes with its bristling
outlines against the murky winter's sky, I entered the north portal of
the Abbey. Here again I wandered in an erratic but pleasurable
frame of mind that I vainly tried to analyse to myself, and after many
pacings to and fro in the ancient cloisters, that held so many
memories for me, I left the Abbey to proceed very slowly towards
Charing Cross by way of the Embankment. According to our
prearranged plan, I boarded a certain train that same afternoon for
Dover. The journey seemed to me interminable, and as I lay back on
the cushions at times I fitfully hoped for some collision that might
prove fatal to me; whilst at other moments I grew morbidly nervous
lest by some unforeseen accident I might be prevented from
reaching my destination in good time.
I alighted at Dover about five o'clock on a raw, cold, windy, showery
evening. From the station I passed into the street, and thence, in
pursuance of my instructions, I followed a road leading westward.
Ere long I had left behind me the suburbs of the town and was now
tramping a dreary exposed thoroughfare that ran between market
gardens. As I walked ahead slowly and deliberately, I suddenly saw
emerge from a mean inn beside the road a short, thick-set man in
seafaring dress and bearing a bundle on his shoulder. I knew him to
be d'Aragno, and I continued to follow in his track. He proceeded for
some distance along the high road, and then striking abruptly into a
by-path amongst the dismal vegetable plots led towards the sea. The
lights of Dover were now far behind me, and I realised sharply the
fact that I was saying farewell to the kindly and accustomed world of
men for ever and aye, and was advancing towards a doom whose
nature I only dimly understood. Like Rabelais, I was stepping into the
Great Perhaps; I was about to take a plunge into the ocean of the
Vast Unknown.
There was no human being in sight save the mariner, and he took no
notice of my presence. We began to descend the steep and slippery
path towards the beach in the teeth of a tearing gale from the west.
The rain was drenching me to the skin; the darkness had increased;
once or twice I stumbled heavily. Suddenly my guide turned round
and, noting my difficulties, halted to assist me but never spoke a
word. With a firm hand he led me down the slope, and shortly we
were walking on level ground beside the sea, whose angry waves I
could hear close at hand, and could even distinguish the white foam
on their crests as they broke on the shingle. After some minutes of
skirting the fore-shore my companion stopped, and, waiting for me to
approach, for a second time he seized my hand and thus helped me
to climb a small crag that jutted out into the raging surf. Together we
reached its summit, where we rested for a moment. Then d'Aragno
in a sonorous whisper bade me remove my clothes, and one by one
I stripped myself of every sodden garment in the midst of the pitiless
gale laden with rain and spray. When I was naked as ever I was
born, my companion signed to me to lie down on the flat surface of
the rock. I obeyed, and he next produced a small phial which he
gave me to drink. Strangely enough in this brief space as I lay
numbed and bruised on the sharp clammy bed, buffeted by the wind
and stung by the lashing of the rain-drops, two lines from an old
Moravian hymn kept buzzing in my brain;
"Oh, what is Death?—'Tis Life's last shore
Where vanities are vain no more."
But it could have been only for a minute or so, for d'Aragno was
already forcing the phial to my lips, and at the same time helping me
to raise my aching head, the better to obey his command. A burning-
hot sweetish liquid now raced down my throat; an indescribable
sense of warmth and repose began to trickle through every portion of
my body; wondrous waves of violet and vermilion were floating
before my eyes or in my brain; in a shorter space than it takes me to
write this single sentence I became insensible.