II. The Problem of Exile and the Spread of Dutch Calvinism

Scholars have often used the experience of Dutch Protestant exiles in Germany and England to explain how Calvinism emerged as the dominant form of Christianity in the Dutch Republic.Footnote ⁴ Historians have provided a number of reasons that Calvinism was able to survive, and even thrive, under the specter of persecution and forced migration.Footnote ⁵ First, Calvinism's doctrine of providence provided persecuted refugees with the comforting idea of belonging to the elect. The firm belief in God's guidance helped refugees to cope with the experience of persecution and displacement.Footnote ⁶ Second, Calvinism's emphasis on strict ecclesiastical discipline provided a strong organizational structure for underground and displaced dissenters; Calvinists, that is, proved able to develop a well-regulated church independent from state sponsorship.Footnote ⁷ Third, Calvinism's presbyterial-synodal system of church governance created voluntary churches in which the faithful coordinated their efforts in the absence of any governmental coordination and across international boundaries.Footnote ⁸ Historians thus often point to refugee centers as model Calvinist churches, where voluntary communities, emboldened by their shared sacrifice, could define for themselves the doctrinal, liturgical, ecclesiastical, and moral standards of their faith. Forged in the conditions of persecution and forced migration, historians have suggested, Dutch Reformed Protestants supposedly developed a version of volunteeristic and confessionalized Calvinism, independent of governmental oversight.Footnote ⁹

This tradition of seeing Calvinism as a faith forged in exile has been particularly helpful for historians in explaining the dynamics of the early Dutch Republic.Footnote ¹⁰ Former Reformed refugees returned, starting in 1572, as committed, doctrinaire Calvinists who inherited the country's public churches, but remained committed to the doctrinal independence and ecclesiastical autonomy that they had enjoyed in refugee communities. Former refugees established a confessionally Calvinist public church whose members only ever amounted to a small minority of the population. Calvinism, in one prevailing view, was kept in check by an alliance of pragmatic politicians and merchants, alongside spiritualists, humanists, and libertines who promoted more tolerant and inclusive religious views.Footnote ¹¹

There are problems with this explanation, however.Footnote ¹² First, there was simply no coherent exile experience among Reformed Protestants who fled to Germany and England in the mid-sixteenth century. The Reformed movement remained quite diverse on a range of theological, ecclesiological, and liturgical issues before they escaped the Netherlands, during their time abroad, and long after. Historians have tended to select out those refugees who did emerge as advocates of Dutch Calvinism—men like Petrus Datheen and Herman Moded—and then find a causal relationship. In fact, there are plenty of examples of Dutch Reformed refugees whose experiences with persecution and flight encouraged them to adopt moderate, irenical, and even tolerant views.Footnote ¹³ Refugees often compromised, even adopting Lutheran confessional standards if magistrates demanded it. The experiences of displacement in many cases encouraged Reformed to temper, not harden, confessional commitments.Footnote ¹⁴

Second, nearly all the refugee communities operated quite willingly under the supervision of host governments. In many cases, refugees even integrated into local state or civic churches. For example, Dutch Reformed migrants in Emden joined the city church without protest.Footnote ¹⁵ They also joined the civic church at Wesel, where they even attended services alongside Lutherans and Catholics. There were initial protests about this in the early 1550s, but once the loudest complainers left, the system worked for decades. Wesel's Reformed consistory subjected its decisions to the authority of parish ministers and magistrates alike.Footnote ¹⁶ We find the same embrace of governmental oversight over the refugees' religious life in the Duchy of Cleves, Frankfurt, and the Palatinate.Footnote ¹⁷ In England, from 1560 the refugee churches fell under the jurisdiction of the bishop of London or, from 1575, the archbishop of Canterbury. Their English overseers intervened in conflicts within the strangers' churches, and the strangers appealed to English officials for support and to resolve disputes.Footnote ¹⁸ The English crown, city magistrates in Emden, and the Duke of Cleves all forbade the Dutch refugees in their lands from accepting the ecclesiastical authority of any foreign body, which exiles fully respected.Footnote ¹⁹ It was only in the few cases in which Reformed refugees fled to Catholic cities, such as Cologne, that their churches operated as voluntary communities without government oversight—but there they lived in small underground churches just as surely as they had back in the Netherlands.Footnote ²⁰ Simply put, most Dutch refugee churches simply did not, as a whole, operate as voluntary, model churches independent of government oversight.

In addition, while it is true that some Dutch Reformed (including those with a more Calvinist orientation) did adopt an exile mentality after having to flee the hardships of persecution, they had no monopoly on this. Lutherans, spiritualists, libertines, and Mennonites from the Netherlands and across Europe who experienced displacement adopted many of the same views.Footnote ²¹ Further, while the presbyterial-synodal system allowed Reformed Protestants to coordinate efforts across national boundaries, other church structures proved perfectly able to do this as well. For the Netherlands, a good example is the role that the Holland Mission served to support Dutch Catholic refugees from Germany.Footnote ²²

Neither was church discipline a special characteristic of Reformed Protestantism, let alone of refugee communities within that movement. The different confessions competed to appear as the most holy and the most sanctified. While one might debate whether consistorial supervision was more or less successful than other forms of ecclesiastical discipline, religious leaders of all stripes during the confessional era worked to establish more effective means of achieving a well-disciplined church.Footnote ²³ In addition, there are good indications that Reformed refugee communities were not stricter in their discipline than Reformed churches elsewhere, and that they were perhaps even less stringent in patrolling belief and behavior. Ministers and elders often had incentives to lower their standards rather than raising them, since members who were treated harshly might easily step over to a competing confession, including the local church.Footnote ²⁴ In other words, consistories in exile often saw the need to apply discipline moderately.Footnote ²⁵

Finally, one might ask whether the Dutch Reformed Church was ever as confessionalized as many historians suggest. There are many reasons to qualify the supposed victory for orthodox Calvinism within the Dutch public church at the National Synod of Dordt in 1618–1619. This synod's decisions did indeed ascribe a major role to the confessions in church life. In daily practice, however, confessional statements did not play the decisive role that attendees of the synod had intended and Reformed theologians often identified their church as a broad and encompassing church.Footnote ²⁶

Where, then, did historians get the idea that exile promoted confessional Calvinism in the Dutch Republic? This essay examines historical writing about the Dutch Reformation, and the exiles' experiences specifically, as a lens through which we can understand identity formation among Dutch Reformed from the late sixteenth century until today. Until the twentieth century, it focuses on historical writing by Reformed authors about the Protestant refugees of the mid-sixteenth century and their impact on the early Republic, because it was within these discussions that the idea first emerged. For each piece of historical writing under investigation, we have examined how the author described the Protestant refugees fleeing the Habsburg Netherlands in the mid-sixteenth century and how that author described the impact of returning exiles on the religious culture of the early Dutch Republic. The answers to these questions turned out to be particularly instructive. They show the importance of late nineteenth-century debates in shaping present-day historical understandings of the origins of Dutch Calvinism and the religious culture in the early Dutch Republic more broadly.

III. The Origins of ‘Dutch’ Toleration

To begin with, it is important to understand the contingent events that led to the creation of the Dutch Reformed Church as the public church in the new republic. In the 1560s, grievances against the Habsburg government in Brussels, which had been working to centralize the administration of the seventeen loosely-affiliated provinces of the Low Countries, coalesced into a rebellion that brought together disaffected nobles, urban magistrates, and religious dissenters with various economic, religious, and political grievances.Footnote ²⁷ The result, the creation of the Dutch Republic, was the outcome of a military struggle between the Habsburg-led state and the rebel coalition that began in 1568. In 1572, rebels had a degree of success—they gained control over territories in the northern provinces of Holland and Zeeland. A long and protracted civil war over control of the Low Countries dragged on for decades. By the 1610s, the boundaries between the northern and southern territories were mostly set.Footnote ²⁸ In the South, the Habsburgs retained control, an absolutist monarchy under the Spanish crown remained, and Tridentine Catholicism became dominant.Footnote ²⁹ In the North, the de facto government became republican in form, in part because it was founded by opponents of princely centralization, but also because its leaders failed to find anyone willing to serve as the new monarch of the war-torn provinces.

If republicanism was contingent on military circumstances, so too was the emergence of the Dutch Reformed Church as the Republic's public church. In the mid-1560s, urban magistrates and nobles who had made up the rebels' political core were largely interested in protecting local and regional autonomy by invoking the language of political liberties and freedom of conscience.Footnote ³⁰ Meanwhile, most Reformed leaders were living in refugee communities in England and the Holy Roman Empire—London, Norwich, Southampton, Emden, Wesel, Cologne, Frankenthal, Heidelberg, and elsewhere. Reformed Protestantism showed itself as the most potent religious alternative to Catholicism during the so-called “Wonderyear” of 1566–1567, when a brief moment of weakness in the Habsburg regime encouraged Reformed activists to return from exile. Massive public protests and outdoor sermons testified to the energy and organization of the movement, as did iconoclastic attacks inspired in part by the messages people were hearing from Reformed preachers about Catholic “idolatry.”Footnote ³¹ The subsequent crackdown forced Reformed leaders back into exile. William of Orange's failed 1568 military campaign against the Brussels government convinced him that he needed to broaden his coalition to include Reformed leaders from whom he had previously distanced himself. Starting in 1570, the rebel prince tapped into their financial, intellectual, and motivational resources, which helped him establish a foothold in Holland and Zeeland (and later elsewhere) starting in 1572.Footnote ³²

This alliance resulted in a rather uncomfortable compromise in the newly-independent territories. Reformed Protestants emerged as inheritors of the formerly Catholic church buildings and gained a privileged position as the only legally-allowed public church in the Republic. At the same time, given the widespread antipathy to coercive practices of the Habsburg government, northern Netherlanders, who were still predominantly Catholic, could not be coerced into joining the new church. Although the Dutch Reformed Church earned considerable state sponsorship, membership in that church never became obligatory. Catholics, Lutherans, and Mennonites worshipped in barely-concealed secret churches.Footnote ³³ Other people (often called liefhebbers) attended services in Reformed churches, but chose to not become full members.Footnote ³⁴ The compromises required by the unintended consequences of the Dutch Revolt thus resulted in a public Reformed Church as well as a remarkable degree of religious pluralism.

The creation of a new state necessarily raised questions of identity. What characteristics defined the people of the rebel territories? What did it mean to be Dutch Reformed? Many of the political and religious conflicts of the early Republic centered on these questions. Authors soon began to treat tolerance or a devotion to political and religious freedom as an inherently Dutch trait.Footnote ³⁵ Meanwhile, conflicts arose over the question of the early Republic on the question of who had sovereignty over the public church, including who could appoint pastors and make rules about church membership. Orthodox Reformed worked to protect the principles of their faith for which they believed the revolt had been fought. Their opponents—led by libertines, urban magistrates, and provincial leaders of the dominant province of Holland—promoted instead a broad encompassing church under government oversight. They saw orthodox Reformed's efforts to use the Belgic Confession and Heidelberg Catechism as litmus tests for doctrinal orthodoxy as undermining the principle of freedom for which they thought the revolt had been fought.Footnote ³⁶ Meanwhile, orthodox Reformed started to blame libertines for what they portrayed as a lack of tolerance: the refusal to allow the Dutch Reformed Church to establish its own doctrines and organization put limits on its religious freedom. Those who didn't agree with Reformed principles, they argued, would be better off attending a different church or organizing their own gatherings. In other words, rather quickly, the issue at stake was not whether freedom constituted a chief legacy of the Revolt (libertines and orthodox Reformed agreed that it did), but where to locate that freedom: within or outside of the public church.Footnote ³⁷

Questions about how to define the Dutch Reformed Church were temporarily resolved in 1618, when the orthodox Reformed gained enough political and military support to topple their opponents. They organized the National Synod of Dordt, which, at least at first sight, marked a victory for Calvinists within the church. That meeting made approval of the doctrine of predestination, as well as of the Heidelberg Catechism and Belgic Confession, a precondition for entrance into the clergy. The earlier tensions did not disappear, however, because Dordt's decisions were never systematically put into practice. The state blocked any further national synod from taking place and no national institution emerged to enforce Dordt's proclamations. Instead, churches were overseen at the local and regional level. In some places, Calvinists retained the upper hand, but elsewhere more leniency was allowed. This condition left room for a variety of alternatives to Reformed orthodoxy as defined by Dordt, including libertinism, both inside and outside the public church. At the local, regional, and provincial level, strains of tolerance and libertinism within the Reformed tradition lasted not only for decades, but for centuries.

IV. Historiography of Exile and the Dutch Reformation from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries

From the outset, Dutch historians differed on the reasons and motives behind the Dutch Revolt. In fact, two different stories of the revolt emerged: the Reformed told a religious story while politicians told a political story. According to the champions of Reformed orthodoxy, the revolt aimed at the establishment of the pure faith. They agreed that the rebels fought for freedom, but interpreted this freedom in a religious way. It was, in their view, the freedom to serve and honor God in a Reformed manner.Footnote ³⁸ The more political discourse described the revolt as a fight for freedom in the sense that it aimed to safeguard the old rights and privileges against Habsburg centralization. The fight for religious freedom, in this view, could very well be seen as a part of this larger political struggle.Footnote ³⁹

During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries these two separate narratives were central to Dutch history writing. From the 1590s, this polarized historiography was deeply influenced by the polemic between the orthodox Reformed and the Remonstrants, who would not support the former's doctrine of double predestination. Both sides justified their point of view by invoking the history of the Reformation and the Dutch Revolt. Orthodox Reformed often compared the revolt with the ancient Israelites' exodus from Egypt, or the cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem under the reign of King Joshua.Footnote ⁴⁰ Because the revolt had been about defending the pure Reformed faith, they saw the need to limit the influence of non-Reformed, most especially Catholics, whose continued existence they felt constituted a serious threat to their recently-obtained freedom. They remembered Spanish-Catholic cooperation during the revolt all too well. These memories induced them to mistrust Catholicism in general.Footnote ⁴¹ On the other hand, authors with dissenting religious views, like Joost van den Vondel, Pieter Cornelisz Hooft, Hugo de Groot, and Geeraerdt Brandt, pictured the revolt as a fight to defend Dutch freedom, tracing the freedom-loving character of the Dutch back to their ancient Batavian ancestors. Drawing on Tacitus's myth on the Batavian revolt against Roman imperialism, they pictured freedom as an endemic trait of their nation. The Dutch were simply born as freedom-loving people, who cherished their own freedom, but who also granted this freedom to others.Footnote ⁴²

Religious refugees did not play a major role in any of these early histories of the revolt. The persecution they faced and the need to flee the country merely provide another example of suffering as part of the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty.Footnote ⁴³ The displacement of refugees was just one example among many of the tremendous miseries that Reformed Protestants had endured. Even authors who had lived as refugees themselves did not ascribe a special meaning to the life in foreign lands.Footnote ⁴⁴ Whereas Lutheran authors wrote numerous treatises on the question of what it meant to be an exile,Footnote ⁴⁵ Dutch Reformed writings on the topic are rare. Only two examples are known: Jan Utenhove's Simplex et fidelis narratio (Simple and Faithful Narrative, 1560) and Petrus Datheen's Kurtze und wahrhafte Erzehlung (Brief and True Account, 1563). In the first, Utenhove told how Dutch refugees felt forced to leave London after Queen Mary's ascension to the throne, and how they searched for a new safe haven in Denmark and northern Germany. Lutherans, in this account, were unwilling to grant the Reformed the same privileges they had had in London, so that the Reformed only found their new refuge in Emden and Frankfurt am Main. Utenhove did not in any way describe the Reformed exiles as hardliners. In his portrayal, these refugees were peaceful moderates who were looking for common ground with their Lutheran hosts.Footnote ⁴⁶ Reformed authors never adopted an “Exulantentheologie” in the sense once influentially suggested by Heiko A. Oberman.Footnote ⁴⁷ Even a Calvinist hardliner like Datheen, in his Kurtze und wahrhafte Erzehlung, emphasized the Reformed's willingness to compromise with Lutherans.Footnote ⁴⁸ Libertines and later Remonstrants, too, pictured the Reformed refugees as religious moderates who were ready to accommodate themselves to their environment. Such was the case with Geeraert Brandt's Verhaal van de reformatie (Story of the Reformation, 1663), for instance.Footnote ⁴⁹ Johannes Uytenbogaert, in his Kerckelicke historie (Church History, 1647), also mentioned the willingness of Dutch Reformed refugees in the Palatinate to subscribe to the Augsburg Confession and to conceal their own ideas on predestination and on the Lord's Supper.Footnote ⁵⁰

Some authors did discuss the refugees who fled the Spanish military offensive in the southern provinces of the 1580s as religious hardliners. According to Caspar Coolhaes and Hugo de Groot, for instance, foreigners from the southern provinces threatened to undermine the moderate religious culture of the North. But the experience of displacement did not play a role in encouraging these people to adopt Calvinism; it merely explained how hardline Calvinists had moved from the South to the North. Further, their characterization of these refugees from the South as particularly zealous was as much rhetorical as real; these authors presented themselves as the defenders of “Dutch” freedom, while presenting their opponents as foreigners who threatened that tradition. The accusation that southerners were fanatics, however, may well have been a stereotype rather than a historical reality. Johannes Müller has recently pointed out how Nicolaas van der Laan, one of the leading politicians in Haarlem, used the characterization of the zealous southerner as a rhetorical tool. After all, Van der Laan himself had studied in southern Leuven and had a southern son-in-law, even as he described his political opponents as immigrants from the South.Footnote ⁵¹ Whether southern refugees more often belonged to the more radical wing of the public church or not, the idea promoted by Coolhaes and De Groot, that refugees fostered specific ideas, was probably exceptional. In early seventeenth-century historiography, refugees were only rarely treated as a group apart.

Within a short time, the two stories of the revolt as a struggle for freedom or one for the true religion merged. In histories written in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Reformation and the Dutch Revolt, religion and freedom, became closely intertwined: most Dutch authors treated them as two sides of the same coin. The military sieges of William of Orange and the blessings of the Reformation could be understood as part of the same story of freedom. That is, eighteenth-century history writers quite easily used both the more Remonstrant-oriented narrative of the revolt as a struggle in defense of political freedoms and the orthodox Reformed narrative of the wars as a battle for religious freedom simultaneously.Footnote ⁵² The role that the Dutch Revolt and Reformation played in the development of a Dutch identity explains authors' focus on the sixteenth century. Reformed authors considered the Middle Ages as little more than a prelude to the glorious times to come: the birth of a freedom-loving, Reformed nation.Footnote ⁵³

In commemorative sermons, ministers too told the history of the revolt and the Reformation by referring to both the Old Testament stories of the Israelites and to Tacitus's Batavian myth. In this narrative, the Dutch had embraced the Reformation because of their freedom-loving character. According to eighteenth-century ministers, the Catholic Church had lost the support of the Dutch during the Middle Ages, when it had started to restrict the freedom of believers by introducing a strict hierarchy and by imposing human ceremonies. Many believers, however, remained true to their Batavian freedom-loving ancestors and sought to withstand Catholic oppression. In this sense, the Reformation did not emerge in the sixteenth century: men like Tanchelm of Antwerp and Geert Grootte had already been instilled with the same spirit during the Middle Ages. In fact, the Batavians had been prototypes of Reformed believers. They may have been unaware of any specific Reformed confession, but their behavior had been Reformed in character. An important aim of these narratives was to defend the Dutch Reformed Church against Catholics' accusation that it was a new institution. Reformed authors thus argued that the Dutch Republic and its public church were inseparable: they belonged together because, in this view, Dutch identity had always been Reformed.Footnote ⁵⁴

It is not entirely clear how these eighteenth-century ministers defined freedom; they merely seem to refer to independence. This independence had been acquired by the Batavians and had been threatened by people who had been far too eager to submit themselves to foreigners. According to some, Willibrord and Boniface had already been examples of people who had threatened this independence by allying themselves with Rome. In the mid-sixteenth century, though, Philip II posed the most serious threat to the Batavian inheritance. His unhappy role in Dutch history was very well explicable: he was a foreigner. Hence he was simply unable to understand the Dutch language or Dutch freedom.Footnote ⁵⁵

In this eighteenth-century narrative, the Reformation became a sort of a liberation movement: it was an integral part of an attempt to defend the endemic Dutch freedom. In these stories, Reformed Protestantism was hardly treated as a narrow-minded, confessionalized movement: the Waldensians, the Hussites, Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, Philip Melanchthon, John Calvin, Heinrich Bullinger, and Menno Simons were all part of this broad reformation movement. Lutheran, Anabaptist, and Reformed martyrs had died for the same cause. In 1738, Eduard Meiners simply denied the doctrinal differences between Luther and Zwingli: they were now sitting in heaven, next to each other.Footnote ⁵⁶ Generally speaking, Catholics were excluded from this eighteenth-century narrative, not because of their doctrine per se, but because, in the minds of these Reformed authors, Catholics could not appreciate Dutch freedom. Reading the eighteenth-century historiography gives the impression that sixteenth-century libertines, with their ardent plea for a broad encompassing church, had finally won the battle. Eighteenth-century Reformed ministers distanced themselves from the iconoclasm and praised the moderate religion of irenicists like George Cassander and Franciscus Balduinus. The very fact that these Reformed authors included some Catholic peacemakers as members of their movement illustrates how broad their understanding of the Reformation could be.Footnote ⁵⁷ These authors identified their Reformation and their public church largely with the church that William of Orange had envisioned. Once again, refugees did not play a specific role in these narratives. Just like the Dutch who had stayed at home, refugees had fought to defend Dutch freedom. Only now and again did authors dedicate a specific paragraph to the hardships of displacement. So far, however, we have not found a single eighteenth-century author who ascribed any distinct thought, behavior, or influence to refugees.Footnote ⁵⁸

V. Historiography of Exile and the Dutch Reformation in the Nineteenth Century

In the nineteenth century, major changes in the writing of the Dutch Reformation took place.Footnote ⁵⁹ It became a matter of debate whether the Dutch Reformation had ever been a broad encompassing movement and authors started to dedicate chapters to Calvinism and its radicalism, or—depending on their point of view—its commitment. Most nineteenth-century writers maintained the older equation of Dutch freedom and Reformed Protestantism, but now many began to question the place of Calvinism in the story. Authors started to differentiate between a Dutch Reformation, freedom loving as it had ever been, and a ‘foreign’ Calvinist Reformation. Whereas seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestant historians had, for the most part, told a single story of the Dutch Reformation, in the nineteenth century, two separate stories began to emerge: one orthodox and one shaped by the spread of liberalism. It was in this context that historians first started to ascribe a special role to refugees.

The key issue in these competing narratives of the Reformation was national identity. As elsewhere in Europe, Dutch historians tried to establish a solid historical foundation for such a national identity. But whereas other Europeans generally traced their identity back to the Middle Ages, the Revolt against Spain became the moment of the birth of Dutch identity.Footnote ⁶⁰ The question of national identity had become a pressing issue after the Napoleonic wars. During the Batavian Republic (1795–1806), attempts had been made to reorganize ecclesiastical life. In this situation, secular authorities, who made a plea for a separation between church and state, ironically, took an active role in overseeing churches as a way of checking what they viewed as religious extremism. Only during the short-lived reunion with the mostly-Catholic South (1815–1830) did a group of leading intellectuals question the Reformed character of the Dutch nation.Footnote ⁶¹ After centuries of vagueness about the relationship between the Dutch state and its public church, the 1816 Algemeen Reglement (General Regulation) for the Dutch Reformed Church seemed to offer clarity. As we have seen, the decisions of the Synod of Dordt had never been implemented on a national scale, which had allowed for considerable freedom and flexibility. In theory, the public church had ascribed a crucial role to the confessions; in daily practice, the binding to the confession was rather loose. The Algemeen Reglement, however, envisaged and organized a top-down church with a specific binding to the confessions: ministers, elders, and deacons were obliged to sign to confessions insofar as these confessions conformed to the Bible.

In the context of the reunification with the Catholic South and the implementation of the Algemeen Reglement, there were major changes in how writers perceived and used history. The critical questions at stake were how the newly re-named Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk should be organized, to what extent it should be a confessional church, and to what extent it should be linked to national identity.Footnote ⁶² Some early nineteenth-century historians argued that Calvinism did not belong to the Dutch character, but had been imported from foreign countries. We can see this, for instance, in volume one of Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Hervormde Kerk (History of the Netherlands Reformed Church), written by Annaeus Ypeij, theology professor at Groningen, and Johannes Dermout, court minister at The Hague, in 1819.Footnote ⁶³ This work aimed to isolate a distinctly Dutch national identity in a shared religious culture. The authors deemed Calvinism as a foreign intrusion to a fundamentally undogmatic nation whose spirit lay in moral reform, not confessionalism. In the context of reunification with the southern provinces, the authors even hoped that a return to the simple morality endemic to Dutch culture might allow the reunification of all Dutch Christians into a single national church. Ypeij and Dermout did not ignore the Reformed refugees, but acknowledged that their experiences and impacts were diverse. Calvinism only emerged as a kind of deus ex machina. Like the Spanish Inquisition, Calvinism was a foreign introduction from Geneva on an undogmatic, pious people that included Reformed, Mennonites, Remonstrants, and Catholics.

We see an approach more explicitly influenced by the growth of nineteenth-century liberalism in a historical reflection written by Ewaldus Kist, D. H. Wildschut, and J. G. Veltman, Twee leerredenen op het Hervormingsfeest (Two Sermons on the Reformation Festival, 1817). The authors' approach was not nationalist, but instead found the essence of the Reformation in universal “liberal thought and tolerant principles.” All Dutch people, be they Protestant or Catholic, had gained from the Reformation and from the freedom, citizenship, enlightenment, and scholarship it had brought. Thanks to the Reformation, the Catholic Church had changed as well, so that Protestant and Catholic might be able to reunite in the near future.Footnote ⁶⁴ Both of these early nineteenth-century perspectives—the liberal and the nationalist—promoted the union of all Dutch Christians, which seemed particularly attractive to many, including King Willem I, who wanted to encourage national unity in the newly-merged kingdom.Footnote ⁶⁵

By the mid-nineteenth century, the combination of the re-separation of the northern and southern provinces and the expanded ecclesiastical rights for Catholics in the northern Kingdom of the Netherlands shifted the meaning of the Dutch Reformation yet again. The Belgian Revolution of 1830 meant that Reformed were once again free to imagine their country as fundamentally Reformed, even as secular authorities continued to be involved in reorganizing their Reformed Church. At the same time, liberalism increasingly shaped Dutch political culture. A series of new constitutions from 1798 to 1848 demonstrated a trend toward the separation of church and state, which allowed Catholics to return to the public life of the Netherlands, after being forced largely underground since the founding of the Republic. In 1853, the Catholic hierarchy was reinstalled, much to the disdain of many Reformed.Footnote ⁶⁶ Meanwhile, many within the Dutch Reformed Church became influenced by new German trends toward theological “modernism” and historical criticism, which encouraged many to rethink their own church's tradition, and correspondingly, its history.

This environment spurred on yet another brand of church history, spearheaded by Reformed theologians in the so-called Groninger richting. This movement was made up of theologians centered at the University of Groningen who defined true Christianity as embodied in the essence of the Gospels, rather than confessional statements or external institutions. The Groningers, led by Petrus Hofstede de Groot, described themselves as “evangelical” in the sense that Christian unity could be found in the piety of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, rather than in specific doctrines.Footnote ⁶⁷ Like the nationalist church historians before them, the Groningers emphasized both the importance of non-Reformed Dutch reformers and the domestic origins of the Dutch Reformation. For Hofstede de Groot, this endemic evangelical spirit could be found in the writings of Netherlanders such as Wessel Gansfort, Thomas à Kempis, Desiderius Erasmus, and Menno Simons, rather than the “foreign” influences coming from Geneva. The key statements of Calvinist orthodoxy that emerged as compulsory were imports that threatened, rather than expressed, true piety. As Hofstede de Groot wrote in an influential 1842 essay, “during the Reformation in the Netherlands, and especially at the Synod of Dordt, foreign foundations displaced the domestic, national character arising out of the people.”Footnote ⁶⁸ As he wrote in a later work, that foreign Calvinism repressed the true Dutch religious spirit from 1619 until 1795.Footnote ⁶⁹ While some of Hofdstede de Groot's contemporaries accused him of overstating the case,Footnote ⁷⁰ the key point here is that church historians in the Groninger tradition, like other nineteenth-century authors, did not see exile as contributing anything specific to the Dutch Reformation.

Indeed, when most early and mid-nineteenth-century church historians discussed the Reformed refugees, they pointed out their obedience to political authority, and the diversity of confessional standards that they used.Footnote ⁷¹ They also recognized that libertines had lived as refugees as well, but assigned no special meaning to those experiences.Footnote ⁷² Practitioners of the new historicist, modernist, ethical, liberal, and/or nationalist strands of church history were not all the same, to be sure.Footnote ⁷³ But none of these authors were suggesting that exile fostered Calvinism or that the Dutch Reformed Church had ever been exclusively a confessionally Calvinist church. For the most part, these authors did not offer any explanation for the spread of Calvinism in the Low Countries; they simply described foreign ideas seeping in from France or Geneva.Footnote ⁷⁴

The embrace among many nineteenth-century theologians and church historians of a less-dogmatically defined Reformation, however, encouraged some Reformed to move in exactly the opposite direction—toward a deeper commitment to Reformed orthodoxy, which they felt was under siege. The orthodox Reformed framed their position in terms of a defense of the Synod of Dordt, the Belgic Confession, and the Heidelberg Catechism.Footnote ⁷⁵ Some with these views began constructing historical narratives that emphasized that the Dutch Reformed Church had been founded in exile in order to emphasize its independence from state oversight—that is, to provide a historical basis for their opposition to the Algemeen Reglement. Such was the case with Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer in the first volume of his Handboek der geschiedenis van het vaderland (Handbook of the History of the Fatherland, 1841). While secular government had a duty to support the Dutch Reformed Church, Groen explained, the church itself constituted a self-governing entity answerable only to God. This was enshrined from the moment of its founding, at an event that Groen called the “National Synod of Wesel” in 1568.Footnote ⁷⁶

A more influential and expansive expression of orthodox discontent came under the leadership of Abraham Kuyper, a Reformed minister in Utrecht and later Amsterdam in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. While Kuyper had been academically trained in the more modern Reformed tradition, by 1867, he began shifting his orientation. In the face of what he described (often exaggerating) as the abandonment of true Reformed belief, Kuyper called for what he described as a return to Reformed orthodoxy. By the 1870s, Kuyper was the first major Reformed leader in the Netherlands to embrace the moniker “Calvinism,” which had been a derogatory term used since the sixteenth century by opponents of Reformed orthodoxy.Footnote ⁷⁷ In contrast, Kuyper argued that Calvinism played a critical role in promoting liberty and freedom, not just in the Netherlands, but in the world more generally.Footnote ⁷⁸ Calvinism, as Kuyper described it, demanded recognizing God's sovereignty in daily life. His view of divine supremacy implied strict limits to the state's power. In contrast to sixteenth-century Reformed Protestants, the modern separation of church and state was fundamental to Kuyper's understanding of what was needed to preserve the true faith. Kuyper, after all, insisted that the state should be barred from interfering in internal church matters. A key target of Kuyper's critique was the Algemeen Reglement of 1816 and what he portrayed as the top-down, bureaucratic supervision of the public church that followed from it.

Even before he had systematically developed his Neo-Calvinist political theory, Kuyper was developing an interpretation of the Dutch Reformation and Revolt that would serve as a critical foundation for his worldview. He offered his historical argument in a series of books and articles written between 1869 and 1874, including his De Hollandsche gemeente te Londen in 1570/1 (The Dutch Church at London in 1570/1, 1870).Footnote ⁷⁹ In that work, Kuyper described the “courageous and unwavering” exiles who defended truth in the face of perilous danger, and who should serve as models in the battle against of the religious tepidity of his own day.Footnote ⁸⁰ Reformed exiles constituted the intellectual and moral heart of the Dutch Revolt. They founded their churches as voluntary communities of the faithful who were free to establish the doctrines, structures, and rituals for their faith. Kuyper pictured these refugee communities as the forerunners of free and independent churches. Reformed principles, which he felt were under threat by the late nineteenth century, were best suited to lay the foundations of freedom. Thus, like others before him, he found in the history of the Dutch Reformation and Revolt his vision for what the present and the future ought to look like.

Together, Kuyper's histories offered the first coherent and complete narrative of a specific role of refugees in the Dutch Reformation. This narrative had three central pillars. First, their experiences of persecution and exile explain how it was that the Dutch Reformed Church emerged as wholly voluntary and independent of state authority. Secondly, this independence allowed the exiles to articulate confessional principles that defined their movement free of any compromise. Thus, the Belgic Confession and Heidelberg Catechism, as well as the decentralized system of church governance, had been established at two foundational meetings held by exiles living in Germany, the Synods of Wesel (1568) and Emden (1571). Third, the strong systems of communication and coordination among exiled Reformed leaders allowed them to survive the fractures of persecution and exile particularly well. After 1572, then, they established “complete autonomy relative to civil government and strong internal unity in confession, practice, and worship or, if you will, the free church in the [new] free state.”Footnote ⁸¹

Kuyper's exile narrative influenced later interpretations of the Dutch Reformation as well. His students at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam continued to tell his story of brave refugees who founded independent voluntary churches. A series of works produced by scholars employed or trained at the Vrije Universiteit in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century examined various components of the exile narrative.Footnote ⁸² We see this view, for instance, in the writings of Kuyper's friend and colleague, Frederik L. Rutgers, who became a professor of church history at the Vrije Universiteit from 1880 until 1910.Footnote ⁸³ The first comprehensive history of the role of Reformed refugee churches in the Dutch Reformation was written in 1909 by A. A. van Schelven as his dissertation at the Vrije Universiteit under the direction of Abraham Kuyper's son, Herman Huber Kuyper. This impressive work emphasized that the experience of displacement pushed Dutch Protestants in a Calvinist direction.Footnote ⁸⁴

Kuyper's historical vision had another less direct impact on historiography of the Dutch Reformation. In 1868, while still actively engaged as a historian, he founded the Marnix Vereeniging (Marnix Society), whose goal was to publish archival sources relating to the history of the Reformation-era refugees.Footnote ⁸⁵ Between 1870 and 1889, the Marnix Vereeniging published eleven massive collections of primary sources. Kuyper only took the lead on the first edition. Almost all the rest of the work was orchestrated by J. J. van Toorenenbergen and H. Q. Janssen, Reformed pastors who ran the society as Kuyper turned his attention to national politics. The works of the Marnix Vereeniging included collections of refugees' correspondence and poor relief records, a contemporary history of the Dutch church at London, and the records of refugees' consistories, classes, colloquies, and synods. They offered thousands of pages of sources that might otherwise have been unavailable to historians. In the 1880s and 1890s, this work was augmented by the work of a Dutch Reformed scholar at Cambridge University, Jan Hendrik Hessels, who published sources from the Dutch refugees in London.Footnote ⁸⁶ As a result of these efforts, the refugees' experiences took on greater centrality to the historical understandings of the Reformation than ever before.

As academic scholarship expanded and ideological differences deepened in late nineteenth-century Dutch society, historians began to tell two quite distinct stories about the Reformation and the Dutch Revolt. Orthodox Reformed authors by and large accepted Abraham Kuyper's exile narrative and stressed the centrality of Calvin and Calvinism to the Dutch Reformation and Revolt.Footnote ⁸⁷ The other group of historians emphasized Dutch religious moderation and diversity, and thus reflected the (often competing) trends toward political liberalism, ethical theology, and theological modernism. These authors, like Reformed historians had for centuries, acknowledged a variety of leaders of this movement in the Reformation Era. They also continued to celebrate medieval predecessors of the Reformation, accepted a degree of theological and liturgical diversity within the early Reformed movement, and showed sympathy for Lutherans, Catholics, and Mennonites of the Reformation Era. Their historical arguments explained that Dutch religious culture had always been stamped by moderation, thus legitimizing their own de-emphasis on dogma and confessional standards. We see this, for instance, in Johannes Reitsma's Geschiedenis van de Hervorming en de Hervormde Kerk der Nederlanden (History of the Reformation and the Reformed Church of the Netherlands, 1893).Footnote ⁸⁸ By the early twentieth century, essentially the same picture got picked up by secular liberal historians like Robert Fruin in his history of the Dutch Revolt, as well as in his specialized study of Dutch Reformed exiles.Footnote ⁸⁹ These works distinguished between Calvinist precisionists, who represented radicalism, intolerance, and political disorder, and moderates, who believed that they represented a Dutch tradition of religious vrijzinnigheid (free thinking or non-dogmatism),Footnote ⁹⁰ tolerance, and political stability. Both Reitsma and Fruin saw themselves as inheritors of this moderate tradition, while they saw supporters of Kuyper as inheritors of precisionist radicalism.

Even a focused study on sixteenth-century Reformed exiles, in the hands of a moderate church historian, could demonstrate the diversity within the Reformed movement and the historical origins of a moderate, politically obedient, even tolerant Reformed tradition. Such was the case with Marten Woudstra's De Hollandsche vreemdelingen-gemeente te London, gedurende de eerste jaren van haar bestaan (The Dutch Stranger Church at London during the First Years of its Existence, 1908).Footnote ⁹¹ Woudstra's book reads like an implicit response to Abraham Kuyper's 1870 book on the same subject, and uses many of the same sources. The Dutch refugee church in London was not a voluntary church, free to establish its own standards and unimpeded by political authorities, Woudstra argued, but one quite content to accept the supervision of the bishop of London and the English monarch.Footnote ⁹² In describing the central influence of the London refugees on the Dutch Reformed Church, he summarized that the Reformed strangers strove for unity in spirit, not in what he called the “slavish” obedience to rigidly defined confessionalism.Footnote ⁹³

VI. Historiography of Exile and the Dutch Reformation in the Twentieth Century

While there are stark differences in the histories of the Reformation during the century after Kuyper's most influential historical writings, when placed against the histories of the previous three hundred years, a remarkable similarity emerges: elements of Kuyper's exile narrative emerged in almost every one (Woudstra is the only exception we have found). This continued well into the twentieth century among sympathizers of Reformed orthodoxy like Harm Bouwman and vrijzinnige (free thinking or undogmatic) church historians like Johannes Lindeboom.Footnote ⁹⁴ For orthodox Reformed, the exile narrative continued to offer a story of suffering, reorganization, and liberation of the Reformed faith that characterized the best part of the Dutch inheritance. For liberal, vrijzinnige, and other less dogmatically strident historians, in contrast, the exile narrative helped distinguish between an endemic Dutch spirit of religious moderation and the foreign dogmatism of Calvinism. As the liberal historian Pieter Geyl put it in 1932, Calvinists “possessed a peerless band of picked shock troops” who stood in contrast to the “spirit of tolerance and anti-confession which was a heritage of the Netherlands people.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Similarly, for Hendrik Enno van Gelder in 1943, the harshness of Habsburg policies toward religious dissenters only made Reformed Protestants more militant and more confessional. In the freedom allowed by displacement, militant Calvinists designed their organizational structures and adopted clear doctrinal standards—the Belgic Confession and Heidelberg Catechism—that defined orthodoxy within their church. Ultimately, he argued, they failed: the tolerant Dutch character (de Nederlandse volksaard), protected by local magistrates, served as a bulwark against radical Calvinism.Footnote ⁹⁶ Most historians, that is, came to share the idea that a staunch and uncompromising Calvinism had been bolstered by the experiences of exile.

Dutch historical writing changed again in the 1960s, a decade that saw the decline of confessional histories. Social histories of the Reformation emerged as alternatives to institutional political and church histories that had long dominated academic writing on the topic. Most influential in rethinking the Dutch Reformation was perhaps J. J. Woltjer, who wrote a 1962 dissertation emphasizing the importance of a broad middle group of moderates sympathetic to Protestant critiques but unwilling to align with radical Calvinists. “Not Lutheran and not Calvinist,” Woltjer wrote, “but vagueness . . . is the most prominent characteristic of the ecclesiastical situation until well after the middle of the [sixteenth] century.”Footnote ⁹⁷ A new brand of non-confessional social and cultural history of religion emerged in the 1970s and 1980s that challenged many earlier arguments about the Dutch Reformation.Footnote ⁹⁸

In the face of this shift, however, the exile narrative remained remarkably resilient, and has been picked up by historians in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It features, for instance, in the works of influential and innovating historians like Heinz Schilling, Heiko Oberman, and Andrew Pettegree.Footnote ⁹⁹ That is not to say that any of these scholars ignored contrary evidence. They explicitly recognized diversity among the Dutch refugees. Yet the idea that exile served as a catalyst in the development of confessional Calvinism—an idea that had its origins in nineteenth-century Neo-Calvinist histories—can still be found in their works, and in literally hundreds of books and articles written on the Dutch Reformation and the Dutch Republic.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

This picture of Calvinism and exile, however, cannot account for variations within those communities or the diverse ways that refugees would later influence the early Dutch Republic. During the sixteenth century, leaders of the Netherlandish Reformed movement differed on all kinds of questions, including the best form of ecclesiastical organization, the proper function of church discipline, church-state relations, and the doctrine of election.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Kuyper's description of the Reformation, with its focus on Calvin, effaced these nuances and differences. The same goes for his descriptions of refugee communities, which have been adopted even by historians who otherwise critiqued Kuyper's conclusions. Indeed, the idea of a staunch, uncompromising Calvinism even misrepresents John Calvin's own approach to the Reformation-era refugees. In fact, Calvin often urged sixteenth-century Reformed refugees to be moderate and to accommodate themselves to their environment.Footnote ¹⁰²

An important reason for the popularity and durability of this exile narrative among academic historians of the twentieth century seems to be that it offered a powerful secular argument for change. The exile narrative offers scholars a useful answer to a question that has long demanded an explanation: how did confessionalized Calvinism emerge out of the diversity of the early Dutch Reformation? Finding the explanation in exile was further bolstered by the easy availability of sources from Dutch refugee communities, as a result of the efforts of the Marnix Vereeniging. In addition, historians have continued to use A. A. van Schelven's 1909 survey of refugee communities as an important secondary source, often in the process adopting its historical narrative. A similar phenomenon happened with Heiko Oberman's much more recent argument about Calvinism's status as a particular phase of the Reformation, “the reformation of the refugees.” Scholars often treat Oberman's conclusion about the role of exile in the history of Protestantism as authoritative, despite the fact that his research remained incomplete with regards to the actual state of affairs in refugee communities.Footnote ¹⁰³