ABSTRACT
During this period, two major political forces competed to rule Holland. William II’s House of Orange and the official Calvinist Protestant Church advocated a quasi-monarchy with a strong central government. The other group, composed of a union of provinces each of which sought to guarantee their sovereignty, sought a republic. The republicans objected to concentrating governmental power in a quasi-monarchical figure, and advocated instead for a regime that diffused power across the various provinces in the society.4 In addition to the struggle over the form of government, there was strife over religious toleration and the lines of difference on this issue ran parallel with the schism between monarchy and republicanism. Those who supported the monarchist position-the Orthodox Calvinists-were not sympathetic to instituting the doctrine of religious toleration throughout society and instead preferred, as Steven Nadler says, a “theologically regimented state.”5 On the other hand, the “Collegiants,” who consisted of various groups of Christian believers disaffected from the orthodox Protestant Church, were a major proponent of the republic, and they opposed the imposition of a religious doctrine onto citizens by a state-supported, clerical class.6 For the religiously tolerant Collegiants, people did not need the official Protestant Church of Holland to tell them the meaning of Scripture, but people, from their own reflection and discussion with others in settings where each was an equal to the other, could determine that meaning for themselves. In support of this view, they believed that true Christianity rested on the idea as Nadler says of “love for one’s fellow human beings. . . . and obedience to the original words of Jesus Christ, unmediated by any theological commentary [and thus not interpreted through the eyes of an official state clergy].”7
