ABSTRACT

With the forces of Alexander Farnese recovering the provinces of the southern Low Countries for Philip of Spain during the early 1580s, the so-called Calvinist republics were faced with an increasingly stark choice between loyalty to the Reformed faith or the rebel cause. The demoralised, divided and increasingly desperate Calvinist regimes which negotiated the surrender of their towns to Farnese attempted to secure religious concessions. Their ultimate failure meant that they not only tasted the bitterness of defeat, but they also had to endure accusations of treason from rebel ‘hawks’ who were not in the firing line. Some, like Petrus Dathenus, seem not to have recovered from the psychological traumas. For more than 30 years, Dathenus had been one of the foremost Calvinist preachers in the Low Countries and the Palatinate, yet in 1584 he was detained in Holland, suspected of being an ‘enemy of the fatherland’ because he had been party to the reconciliation of Ghent.1 The experience seems to have left him broken-hearted for he withdrew to North Germany, changed his name, abandoned the ministry and even toyed for a time with Jorist opinions. After negotiating the surrender of Antwerp, Marnix, whose devotion both to the cause of the Revolt and to the Reformed faith was beyond reproach, also found himself the target of recriminations and more or less ostracised after 1585.2 The radical Calvinist Jan van Hembyze fell victim to the vicious anti-Catholic forces he had earlier incited. When in March 1584, his conspiracy to deliver Dendermonde to the Spanish miscarried, he was arrested in Ghent and executed as a traitor barely two months before the city finally surrendered to Farnese. And after the reconciliation of Bruges, Jean Haren, too was the subject of criminal proceedings, and in September 1584 he was formally declared unfit to hold any charge. Shortly afterwards, Haren turned his back on

1 T. Ruys, Petrus Dathenus (Utrecht, 1919), pp. 193-94; Bor, Oorsprongk, II, 518-19. For a transcript of Dathenus’ examination entitled ‘Puncten ende Articulen’ see s.v. Dathenus in J. Kok, Vaderlandsch Woordenboek 2de edn. 35 vol. (Amsterdam, 1785-96), XI, 54-71.