1
“He was more evil than if he had been changed into a tiger animal.”
FRANCISCO PELSAERT
JERONIMUS HAD NEVER MEANT TO GO TO SEA. He was not a merchant by profession and had no family or interests in the East. He was, in fact, a man of education and refinement, who moved with ease among the upper classes of the United Provinces. At home in the Netherlands, his social standing had been higher than that of any other man or woman on board the Batavia; he had even outranked his superior on the ship, Francisco Pelsaert. Indeed, throughout his life—and he was 30 when he sailed for Java—the under-merchant would have had no reason to associate with what Dutchmen called the grauw, the rabble of criminals and paupers who occupied the lowest strata of society. Now, however, he had at least one thing in common with the thugs and sots who had made themselves at home on the wreck. He was a desperate man.
In the seventeenth century few people sailed to the East by choice. The Spiceries of the Indonesian archipelago were the source of unimaginable wealth, it was true. Yet the men who earned vast fortunes trading with the Indies were the astonishingly wealthy merchants who stayed at home in Amsterdam and Middelburg, Delft and Hoorn and Enkhuizen—not those who actually manned their ships and risked their own lives on the long sea voyage. For the ordinary traders and the sailors of the VOC, service with the Company did offer certain opportunities to profit from the spice trade. But it also exposed them to privation, disease, and early death. The life expectancy of a merchant newly arrived in the Indies was a mere three years, and of the million or so people who sailed with the VOC during the lifetime of the Company, fewer than one in three returned.
A small proportion of the million settled in the Indies and survived, but the climate and conditions accounted for most of the deaths at VOC’s trading bases overseas. Lethal bouts of dysentery—“the bloody flux”—were the principal scourge, but assorted plagues and fevers also took their toll. Some died in accidents at sea or in battle with the local people, and a good number perished at the hands of the Dutch authorities themselves, who ruled with considerable severity. A man in Jeronimus’s position was, in short, much more likely to meet his doom in a place like Java than he was to make his fortune.
It is thus hardly surprising that throughout the history of the VOC the men who sailed aboard the East Indiamen were portrayed as the lowest of the low. In the popular perception, the Company was (in one contemporary’s opinion) “a great refuge for all spoilt brats, bankrupts, cashiers, brokers, tenants, bailiffs, informers and suchlike rakes”; its soldiers and sailors were violent, feckless and otherwise unemployable; and its merchants either disgraced debtors or plucked students who would risk anything for the chance to restore their failing fortunes.
Jeronimus Cornelisz was a merchant of this type: a man who had compelling reasons of his own for gambling his life on the lottery of an Indies voyage. When he left the United Provinces, he was almost bankrupt, a bereaved father—and also a dangerous and possibly wanted heretic. These misfortunes were entirely of his own making.
Cornelisz came originally from Friesland, one of the most isolated and northerly of the United Provinces. It was a place apart, largely rural and with borders so well protected by a dense barrier of peat bogs, lakes, and marshes that only the most persistent travelers ventured in by road. The few who did, and made their way along the almost impassable mud tracks that led into the interior, found themselves passing through a land that was somehow not entirely Dutch.
The Frisian people certainly thought of themselves as different. They traced their ancestry back to Roman times and claimed descent from age-old tribes who had lived along the German border. Their cities were similarly ancient. Many Frisians disliked the Dutch and thought of them as interlopers, whose history hardly began before 1000 and who had usurped lands that had once been part of the semilegendary Dark Age Frisian kingdom. Even in the 1620s, when the rise of Holland had long since reduced the province to a northern backwater and forced the inhabitants of its cities to work and trade with their richer cousins to the south, the majority of the population did not speak Dutch. The language of the countryside was Frisian, a tongue with certain similarities to English. Visitors from the southern provinces struggled to understand it.
Jeronimus Cornelisz was probably born into this environment in the year 1598. His family appears to have come from the area around the provincial capital, Leeuwarden, which was then a city of some 11,000 people; it is possible that their home was the smaller settlement of Bergum, five miles to the east, though the destruction of the relevant records makes it impossible to confirm this town as his birthplace. Cornelisz’s father and mother were almost certainly well-off, and the province’s surviving legal records suggest that they had connections with some significant local property owners. Beyond that, however, almost nothing is known of Jeronimus’s early years. Even the names and occupations of his parents remain a mystery.
One thing is certain: Cornelisz would have attended school from the age of six. In the first years of the seventeenth century, the Dutch education system was by far the most advanced in Europe; all towns and most villages were provided with elementary schools, and the costs of schooling were subsidized by the state. In consequence, even the children of the lower classes received at least a general education, and foreign visitors to the country were frequently astonished to discover Dutch servants who could read.
These schools existed for a reason. The United Provinces had only recently converted to Protestantism, and the old Catholic religion was still practiced by some Dutch families. The main purpose of the state primary schools was to produce new generations of Calvinists; consequently, the basic syllabus was confined to reading and Bible studies. Rival churches maintained establishments of their own, for the same reason. Although they were taught to read Scripture, not all pupils received instruction in writing, and parents who wished their children to learn such skills had to pay extra fees. Arithmetic was considered too advanced to form part of an elementary education.
Many boys and most girls left school at the age of 8 or 10, but as the son of wealthy parents, Jeronimus may have continued his education at one of the famous Latin schools of the United Provinces. These schools, one of which was owned and run by each of the principal towns of the republic, took the male children straight from local schools at the age of 10 and gave them a thorough classical education. They taught Latin and Greek and offered boys a grounding in calligraphy, natural philosophy, and rhetoric as well. They were, however, much more than just places of learning, for the masters of the Latin schools prided themselves in turning out young humanists—men who looked beyond the stifling confines of contemporary religion to embrace the virtues and the values of ancient Rome. Thus, while the Dutch elementary school system existed to instill a rigid Calvinism into its pupils, boys who went on to graduate from the Latin schools were encouraged to abandon fixed patterns of devotion and think for themselves. The schools of Friesland and Groningen were particularly noted for their liberalism in this respect.
As a Frisian and, perhaps, the graduate of a northern Latin school, the young Cornelisz would have experienced an upbringing as far removed from the narrow strictures of orthodox Dutch Calvinism as was possible in the United Provinces. But he would also have been prepared for the highest callings in the Dutch Republic. A good number of the products of the Latin schools went on to become ministers or physicians. Others studied law or were trained as bureaucrats. The rest, who lacked either the scholastic aptitude or the wealth and social standing necessary to command a place at university, were generally apprenticed to one of the more gentlemanly professions.
For whatever reason, Jeronimus Cornelisz followed the latter path and began to train as an apothecary. In the early modern age, the medieval system of craft guilds remained strong throughout the United Provinces. Would-be blacksmiths and grocers, surgeons and tailors—all were required to find themselves a master and bind themselves to him for a period of between three and seven years. The master gave the student board and lodging and revealed to him the mysteries of his trade. In return, the student provided labor for the duration of his apprenticeship.
At the conclusion of the contracted period, the boy—by now a young man—was required to prepare one or more masterpieces, samples of work that, quite literally, demonstrated mastery of his chosen profession. These masterpieces were submitted for examination by officials of the relevant guild, and, if the apprentice was judged to have acquired a thorough knowledge of his trade, he was permitted to join the guild himself. This was a significant commitment. Membership of a guild brought with it certain obligations, and in particular the requirement to contribute regularly and liberally to guild funds. Many men who had successfully completed their apprenticeships never could afford to pay these fees and remained journeymen all their lives.
Jeronimus was probably apprenticed at some time between 1615 and 1620. His was a coveted position. In early modern Europe, qualified apothecaries had a monopoly on the preparation and supply of medicines and were therefore more or less assured a steady stream of customers. Their nostrums were complicated and expensive, and many grew rich supplying them. Gideon DeLaune, a French emigrant who had his dispensary at the English court, died leaving $144,000 and was more wealthy than the majority of the nobles whom he treated. Dutch apothecaries, while not quite so spectacularly rich, were generally well-off.
The number of illnesses requiring their attentions was endless. The major infectious diseases, endemic throughout the century, were plague—which proved fatal in somewhere between 60 percent and 80 percent of cases—leprosy, and typhus. Dysentery (which killed one in four of its victims), syphilis, tuberculosis, and typhoid were also commonplace. Those fortunate enough to escape the attentions of these killers often succumbed to virulent influenza—called “the sweats”—smallpox, or malaria. Cancer was relatively scarce; few people lived long enough to develop it.
It is possible, even now, to determine with some precision just how common and how widespread these complaints were in the disease-ridden seventeenth century. There were, for example, no fewer than 123 saints in the Catholic heaven to whom those struck down by fever could pray for intercession, by far the largest number devoted to any particular affliction. A further 85 saints were kept busy with supplications from parents desperate for help with the wide variety of childhood diseases. Fifty-three more saints covered the panoply of plagues, and there were 23 whose sole concern was gout. Catholics even had a patron saint of hemorrhoids: St. Fiacre, an Irish priest who had lived a life of notorious mortification in the seventh century.
As an apprentice apothecary, the young Cornelisz would have spent at least three years learning to prepare the myriad potions, unguents, poultices, and clysters that were the stock-in-trade of the seventeenth-century pharmacist. The identity of his master is not certain, but there is at least a possibility that he was Gerrit Evertsz, an apothecary and corn-trader who ran a prosperous business in Leeuwarden from the early years of the century until his death some time after 1645. Evertsz was clearly someone with whom Cornelisz had a close relationship, since Jeronimus eventually asked him to take charge of his legal affairs in Friesland. If he was indeed the young man’s master, Cornelisz had found himself an influential patron. Evertsz was one of the most prominent citizens of the Frisian capital, acting, in addition to his career in pharmacy, as curator of the city’s orphans and an official receiver of bankrupts.
Apprentice apothecaries were not generally permitted to become masters before the age of 25, and this suggests that Jeronimus submitted his masterpieces—which would have been treatises on the proper treatment of some illness, or perhaps upon the preparation of a poison—in about 1623. Evidently they were good enough to impress his examiners and, as a newly qualified pharmacist, he now became a member of the trinity of physicians, apothecaries, and surgeons who made up the medical establishment of early modern Europe.
The physicians, who were university graduates, were by far the most haughty and prestigious of these three groups. They had labored for years to master the medical theories of the time and reserved for themselves the sole right to write prescriptions and issue diagnoses. They were enormously grand and distant personalities, who charged huge fees, distinguished themselves from ordinary professionals by donning long gowns and mortarboards, and invariably wore gloves when seeing patients to ensure there could be no actual contact between them. Only the very wealthiest could afford their services; even in the largest cities there were rarely more than a dozen physicians to every 50,000 people.
In the rare cases where some sort of physical intervention became necessary—and, given the contemporary ignorance of anesthesia and antiseptics, this was always a last resort—a surgeon would be called. Surgeons ranked below both the physicians and the apothecaries in the trinity, and it was their duty to set bones, trepan skulls, lance boils, and deal with the more unpleasant and contagious ailments that were rife at the time. The treatment of venereal disease, done with solutions of mercury, was within the province of the surgeons. It also fell to them to treat the plague-stricken, since physicians generally shied away from the most virulent epidemics.
It was, however, far more common for a consultation with a physician to result in a referral to an apothecary. Contemporary medical opinion held that virtually all ailments could be traced to disturbances in the balance of the four humors that were thought to exist within the body, or mismanagement of the six “nonnaturals” that maintained good health or provoked disease. Apothecaries existed to prepare treatments designed to remedy such imbalances and manage the nonnaturals. If they did their job correctly, the full recovery of the patient was—at least in theory—guaranteed.
In the dingy recesses of an apothecary’s shop lurked pots and pillboxes by the hundred—each containing one of the many hundreds of ingredients required to make the incredibly complex preparations of the day. Most drugs were concocted from parts of several different plants, always with an addition of animal products and sometimes with the admixture of metals. Roots and herbs were the principal ingredients, but apothecaries were also required to be familiar with considerably more exotic ingredients. Unicorn horn was greatly sought after. Excrement was widely prescribed—pigeon droppings were a cure for epilepsy, and horse manure was effective against pleurisy—and the sex organs of wild animals were held to be particularly efficacious. Dried wild boar penis, for example, was thought to reduce phlegm.
To modern eyes, at least, the most unusual ingredient in any apothecary’s store was “mummy,” ground human flesh taken (at least in theory) directly from plundered Egyptian tombs. It was a popular cure-all, supposedly effective against almost every ailment from headaches to bubonic plague. The best mummy had a “resinous, harden’d, black shining surface,” an acrid taste, and a fragrant smell. When supplies from Egypt were hard to get, which they usually were, European bodies might be substituted, but it was important that the corpse from which the flesh was taken had not succumbed to disease. Although the very finest mummy was supposed to come from the remains of men suffocated in a Saharan sandstorm, therefore, in practice the principal source was the bodies of executed criminals.
With one significant exception, the other ingredients an apothecary required were not so hard to find. Animal products could be had from butchers or specialist traveling salesmen. Pharmacists usually obtained the plants themselves, cultivating physic gardens or wandering the countryside in search of rare roots. The most important thing was that ingredients were fresh; almost every paste and potion had to be specially prepared on the day it was required, and the principal tool of the apothecary’s trade was his mortar and pestle.
The one drug no apothecary prepared on his own behalf was theriac,*5 the main antidote to venoms of all sorts. It was used to treat snakebite and rabies and taken as a cure for poison, though it was most commonly prescribed to strengthen a patient who had been bled, sweated, and purged and whose condition was, nevertheless, deteriorating. Theriacs—there were several of them in existence—were particularly complex and potent medicines, and so difficult to make that only the senior apothecaries of the largest cities were trusted to prepare them. They contained up to 70 different ingredients and were unusual in that their single most important constituent was animal: viper’s flesh. The best theriac came from Venice and was known as “Venice treacle.” Venetian pharmacists bred their own vipers and mixed their theriac in bulk once each year. The concoction was exported by the Italian city-state throughout the rest of Europe, and no apothecary of the time would have been without it.
Nevertheless, medicines were not a Dutch apothecary’s sole source of income. They were members of the St. Nicholas Guild, which included the grocers and spicers, and like them they had the right to sell fruit pies and ginger cakes. Many of the less reputable stocked beer, sometimes dispensing it surreptitiously and free of the heavy state taxes on alcohol. All of them made poisons, based on arsenic, which were used to control the extraordinary quantities of vermin that infested every town. This part of a pharmacist’s work was strictly controlled by the local council, but, even so, it helped to give them a somewhat sinister reputation. When someone in a town died unexpectedly, there were often mutterings of potions brewed in dark back rooms. In their cluttered stores, the black-cloaked apothecaries merely smiled.
Jeronimus Cornelisz set up shop in Haarlem, probably some time between 1624 and 1627. His reasons for settling in the province of Holland, rather than Friesland, remain unknown, but Haarlem was a much bigger and more cosmopolitan place than Bergum or Leeuwarden. It was the second city of the wealthiest and most important of the United Provinces and had a population of 40,000. It must have seemed a propitious place to establish a new business.
Haarlem was a typical Dutch town, raucous and bustling, but neat and tidy to a fault. It had sprung up a few miles inland from the coast, a little to the west of Amsterdam and just north of the dark and storm-swept inland sea known as the Haarlemmermeer. The whole city was girdled by a moat and a defensive wall, and the lazy waters of the River Spaarne, which flowed through Haarlem on its way to the sea, cut it into two unequal halves and brought in the ships that supplied many of its needs. Inside the walls the red-roofed houses were mostly made of brick, and all the major streets had been paved by the first years of the century. They were daily cleaned of rubbish and the ordure that still rained down from upstairs windows—a refinement quite unheard-of outside the Netherlands. All in all, Haarlem was a pleasant, busy place, less haphazard, less chaotic, and less dangerous than the great towns of England, Italy, and France.
The city had been built around eight main streets, all of which emerged into the Great Market that was the focal point of urban life. It was one of the largest marketplaces in the United Provinces and seethed with activity throughout the daylight hours. Its centerpiece was the Grote Kerk of St. Bavo, which was the largest and, some travelers reckoned, the most beautiful church in Holland, though it can hardly have been a peaceful place to worship. A large covered fish market, fully 60 yards long, had been tacked onto the north side of the church, while not 10 yards away, on the west side of the square, stood the substantial bulk of the New Meat-Hall, where during the week the contemplation of the devout would be disturbed by the unholy racket of cattle being slaughtered.
Not all the city was so grand. Away from the main thoroughfares there were warrens of little passageways and alleys where homes were smaller—just a room or two—and the inhabitants much poorer. A whole quarter of Haarlem was given over to cheap housing for the thousands of women who labored in the bleacheries that had made the city famous, dyeing linen white in pits of buttermilk. There were other poorer areas nearby, packed full of Protestant immigrants fleeing the horrors of the Counter-Reformation. But, crowded as it was, Haarlem was a relatively wealthy place, and the people who lived along the streets leading to the Great Market were the wealthiest of all.
Cornelisz rented a house on one of these eight streets—the Grote Houtstraat, or Great Wood Street, which led from the market south through the city, over the moat, and into the wooded park that ran along the edge of the Haarlemmermeer. The young Frisian opened up a pharmacy on the ground floor and lived above the shop. He had a maidservant and a stuffed crocodile—which hung over the counter and was the principal symbol of the apothecary—and he was popular with his neighbors. He was also accepted by the city, becoming a full citizen, or poorter, of Haarlem at a time when such privileges were never granted lightly. This rank brought with it many privileges, including the right to vote.
Newcomer to Holland though he was, Jeronimus now seemed to be on the verge of great success. He had become a master of one of the most prestigious professions in the United Provinces. He was in business for himself, and his shop seemed ideally positioned to attract a clientele from among the citizens of one of the wealthiest towns in the Republic. In normal circumstances he could have looked forward to a life of prosperity, to the deference of his fellow citizens, perhaps even to a civic career and, eventually, a position on the town council. But the circumstances were far from normal. For Jeronimus Cornelisz, the future held nothing but disease, disgrace, and death.
The first blow fell in the winter of 1627. At some point in the middle 1620s, the apothecary had acquired a spouse. We know almost nothing of Belijtgen Jacobsdr, who appears in the town records as the “lawful housewife” of Jeronimus Cornelisz, not even whether she was Frisian or Dutch. She was probably a number of years younger than her husband was and, like him, of a good family that was not quite in the uppermost strata of Netherlands society. It is not unlikely that she was herself an apothecary’s daughter, since pharmacists tended to marry among themselves, and she certainly assisted her husband in his shop. If she was typical of the middle-class Dutch women of the day, Belijtgen would have been clever, somewhat educated, very capable, and not at all dominated by her husband. Foreign visitors generally lauded the women of the United Provinces as extremely pretty, contemporary tastes running to rosy-skinned and plump young wives and one Dutchman writing admiringly of girls who “could fill a barrel with buttocks, and a tub with breasts.” Jeronimus’s wife may have been all these things. But by December 1627 she was also seriously ill.
Some time in November, Belijtgen had given birth to a baby boy. The pregnancy had not gone well, and Belijtgen had been unable to leave her bed for several weeks before the birth. In her eighth month she had been so ill she had thought she was going to die and had even summoned a solicitor to her bedside to dictate a will that named Jeronimus as her “universal heir.” But, in the end, she carried her baby for the full term and the boy was delivered safely. Several neighbors testified that he was a lusty child, free from blemishes and illness.
Belijtgen, on the other hand, suffered agonies after the birth. The midwife she had hired, an Amsterdam woman named Cathalijntgen van Wijmen, turned out to be uncouth, deranged, and dangerously incompetent. During her stay in Haarlem, Cathalijntgen danced and sang compulsively, confessed to suffering from “torments inside her head,” and slept with an ax beside her bed. During Belijtgen’s labor, she left part of the placenta in the new mother’s womb. The decaying afterbirth became infected, and Cornelisz’s wife contracted puerperal fever as a result.
This illness was a serious matter. In the seventeenth century, puerperal fever was frequently a lethal condition, and it made it impossible for Belijtgen to care for her son. Dutch infants of all classes were generally breast-fed by their mothers; it was universally agreed to be the best way to safeguard an infant’s health, and wet nurses were seldom employed in the United Provinces unless the mother was physically incapable of producing milk. Belijtgen had no such difficulty; for a month or more before the birth, as was common at the time, her husband had paid an old woman named Maijcke van den Broecke to suckle his wife’s breasts in order to stimulate the flow of milk.*6 But while she lay wracked with fever, Cornelisz’s wife could not feed the child, and Jeronimus was forced to seek a nurse. His choice fell on a woman named Heyltgen Jansdr, who lived in an alleyway off the St. Jansstraat in the north quarter of Haarlem.
Cornelisz and his wife seem to have been notably poor judges of character. Their midwife had already proved to be a madwoman, and in Heyltgen Jansdr they had unearthed a similarly disreputable character. The least inquiry among her neighbors and acquaintances would have revealed her as a woman of hot temper and low morals, who was known to be unfaithful to her husband and who suffered from a mysterious and long-term illness. But, for whatever reason, the apothecary did not trouble to discover this.
It proved to be a fatal error. Within a few weeks of being placed with Heyltgen, the baby was extremely sick; within a few months he was dead. On 27 February 1628, eight months before he sailed on the Batavia, Jeronimus Cornelisz buried his infant son in the church of St. Anna, Haarlem.
The apothecary was devastated. The death of small children was a commonplace at a time when half of all the children born within the Dutch Republic expired before they reached puberty. Yet there was nothing ordinary about the death of Jeronimus’s child. The baby had not died of fever or convulsions, or any of the other diseases that usually accounted for infant mortality. He had died of syphilis.
The final agonies of Cornelisz’s infant son would have been hard enough for his parents to bear. Babies who contract syphilis die bleeding from the mouth and anus and also suffer considerably from open sores and rashes, so much so that they are sometimes described as looking “moth-eaten” at the moment of death. But for Jeronimus and Belijtgen the prospect of disgrace would have been as difficult to endure. Their families and neighbors were likely to assume that the boy had contracted the disease from his mother and that, in turn, implied that one or other of the parents had not been faithful. For a well-bred couple, living in a respectable part of town, this was a very serious concern. Their customers, meanwhile, would wonder if they might not catch the pox from their apothecary. For a fledgling business, this could be catastrophic.
It is very probable that Jeronimus’s pharmacy was in financial difficulty even before the death of his son. The renewal of the Dutch war against Spain in 1621, which followed 12 good years of peace, had led to a sudden increase in military expenditure that put considerable strain on the resources of the Republic. In that year the Spaniards had added to the pressure by embargoing all trade with the United Provinces, blockading the coast, and all but ending Dutch trade with Spain, Portugal, and the Mediterranean. Spanish garrisons along the Rhine, Maas, Waal, and Scheldt halted river traffic between the Netherlands and Germany. The result was a severe economic depression in Holland, which lasted for much of the 1620s and proved to be the worst of the entire seventeenth century. Virtually all Dutch trade was affected by the slump, and even well-established businesses found it hard to stay afloat.
Cornelisz was far from well established. His pharmacy was still new, and he himself was young and freshly qualified. Many Haarlemmers must have preferred to do business with his older rivals even before the scandalous death of his son set tongues wagging in the Grote Houtstraat. Consequently, by the middle of 1628 Jeronimus was in serious financial difficulties. He had accumulated debts, which were mounting, and creditors, who had grown impatient. One man in particular, a merchant named Loth Vogel, was insisting that Cornelisz repay the money he owed. The apothecary lacked the necessary funds to do this. He therefore faced the looming prospect of bankruptcy, which—in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century—was a mortal sin.
Throughout the claustrophobic summer of 1628, the merchant Vogel pursued the apothecary while the apothecary pursued his wet nurse. Jeronimus knew by now that his only chance of restoring his damaged reputation—and, perhaps, of salvaging his business—lay in proving that his child had contracted syphilis from Heyltgen Jansdr. His actions that June, July, and August suggest a man preparing for a court case. Leaving Belijtgen to mind his failing business in the Grote Houtstraat, Cornelisz vanished into the maze of narrow alleyways off the St. Jansstraat, searching for those who knew the wet nurse. He listened to their stories and persuaded them to set down their misgivings about the woman in sworn statements.
Cornelisz found no fewer than nine of his own acquaintances to testify that Belijtgen was unmarked by syphilitic sores and ulcers, and six others, from north Haarlem, who confirmed that the wet nurse had been seriously ill for at least two years. It was alleged that Heyltgen had left the apothecary’s son wailing and uncared for while she went out carousing of an evening; several of the nurse’s neighbors remarked on the extraordinarily foul odor that hung over her bed whenever she fell ill; and one, Elsken Adamsdr, made a sworn statement in which she described how she had refused to change Heyltgen’s sheets for fear of catching a disease. A number of the nurse’s neighbors also testified that she was an unfaithful wife and had slept on several occasions with a local widower named Aert Dircxsz, whose nickname was “Velvet Trousers” and who may himself have been syphilitic. Their evidence was hardly conclusive, but, taken together, the statements that Jeronimus collected were certainly enough to suggest that the boy’s bereaved parents had right on their side.
Heyltgen Jansdr responded violently to Cornelisz’s campaign. She publicly alleged that Belijtgen was so riddled with venereal disease that all her hair had fallen out and her scalp was festooned with ulcers. She twisted the scanty evidence she had collected in her own defense to make it appear stronger than it was. She even appeared again in the Grote Houtstraat, where she gathered a crowd outside Jeronimus’s shop by cursing, beating her fists together, and screaming that Belijtgen was a whore, whose eyeballs she would rip out if she could.
Despite this ongoing personal horror, in the end it was not Heyltgen’s lies but Loth Vogel and his demands for reparation that sealed Cornelisz’s fate. Trade had continued to decline and the apothecary’s financial situation had deteriorated further. On 25 September, Jeronimus appeared before his solicitor to transfer to Vogel the sum total of his worldly goods. It was not bankruptcy, but it might as well have been. Tables and chairs, sheets and blankets—even the pharmacist’s marriage bed—were handed over in settlement of debts. With them went Cornelisz’s pestle and mortar, his drugs and potions, and his stuffed crocodile.
The pharmacy on the Grote Houtstraat was closed; Jeronimus the apothecary was dead. But, no doubt quite unknown to Vogel, that was far from the end of the matter. Cornelisz the heretic was still very much alive.
Jeronimus seems to have been brought up as an Anabaptist—a member of one of the smaller Protestant churches then established in the Netherlands. His home province, Friesland, had long been the religion’s main stronghold in the Dutch Republic, and in 1600, when Cornelisz was still a child, as many as one in five of the population of Leeuwarden professed the faith.
The members of the Anabaptist church could easily be spotted on the streets of the Frisian capital, for even by the standards of the day they insisted upon sober dress, clothing themselves in black from head to foot and favoring baggy breeches and long jackets that had fallen out of fashion years before. Most Anabaptists were quiet, thrifty, conscientious, and hardworking, yet even in Leeuwarden their neighbors often viewed them with distaste and barely tolerated their religious views. Elsewhere in the republic they were sometimes actually persecuted.
Cornelisz’s early faith thus assumes a certain significance, for the distrust that other Dutchmen felt when confronted by Anabaptism had strong roots in the history of the preceding century. The Anabaptists had not, in fact, always been model citizens. When Jeronimus’s grandparents were young, their religion had been the scourge of northern Europe; militant members of the church had formed armies, captured cities, and been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. This movement had eventually been crushed, but memories of its excesses persisted. In its pure form, Anabaptism was a fanatic’s creed, and even in the last days of the century it still attracted agitators and iconoclasts.
The faith had first emerged during the 1520s, a period of unparalleled religious ferment that also saw the rise of the new Protestant religions of Martin Luther and John Calvin. Unlike Calvin—whose views came to dominate in Holland and who believed in predestination, the notion that the fate of every soul is fixed before birth—Anabaptists acknowledged the existence of free will and held that infant baptism was a worthless sham, for only a mature adult, they believed, could accept entry into the church of Christ. This doctrine was heresy to Catholics and Calvinists alike, but the early Anabaptists were dangerous for another reason. They were, without exception, fervent millenarians—convinced that the Second Coming would occur within a few months or years and determined to assist a vengeful Christ to reclaim his earthly kingdom, thus triggering the bloody occurrences prophesied in the Book of Revelation. To Anabaptists, those verses were no allegory. They were sure that Revelation described a literal series of events, which would begin with the construction of a new Jerusalem on earth, and end in an apocalypse that would consume all those who had not accepted the new faith.
The first Anabaptists firmly believed it fell to them to build this new Jerusalem, and their faith thus led them inexorably into conflict with the civil authorities of western Europe. Several bloody attempts were made to seize control of this city or that, and in 1534 thousands of members of the church streamed into the Westphalian town of Münster, expelled all nonbelievers, and held the place for 16 months. The reprisals were appalling; when the Anabaptist “kingdom” eventually fell, every defender capable of bearing arms was slaughtered, together with hundreds of women and children. A similar fate befell the members of another party, 40 strong, who stormed the town hall in Amsterdam in the hope of sparking a revolution there, while in Friesland—already a great stronghold of the faith—another group of 300 radicals was besieged within an old Cistercian abbey that its members had fortified and proclaimed their own Jerusalem. After the walls had been systematically leveled by artillery fire, the male survivors were hung or beheaded on the spot, and their women taken to the nearest river to be drowned.
Before the siege of Münster and the attempted seizure of Amsterdam, most Dutch cities had tolerated the presence of Anabaptist sects within their walls. Afterward, the new faith was fiercely persecuted everywhere. The Anabaptists had revealed themselves as dangerous revolutionaries who actively opposed the lay authorities wherever they encountered them and insisted that they owed no allegiance to any earthly lord. In Münster, they had gone so far as to overthrow the natural order, holding all property in common and dispersing food and possessions to each according to his need. Toward the end of the siege, indeed—when the men of the town were greatly outnumbered by the women—their leaders had even introduced a system of polygamy. The Anabaptists thus naturally attracted the radical, the violent, and the dispossessed, men who were fully prepared to achieve their aims by force. They were a genuine danger to the state.
Radical Anabaptism never recovered from the fall of Münster. Many of its leaders were killed or driven into exile, and their place was taken by men who were prepared to coexist with other Protestants and even Catholics. These pacifist Anabaptists could trace their roots back to the earliest days of the movement, and they had always existed side by side with the revolutionaries. Now, led by a Frisian preacher by the name of Menno Simmons, they came to predominate. The Mennonites opposed the use of force to achieve their aims and did not seek to overthrow the state. By the middle of the sixteenth century they had become so successful that Mennonism and Anabaptism had become synonymous, and persecution of the sect became gradually less severe. True, even in Leeuwarden the Mennonites were never granted real freedom of worship, and they were not allowed to proselytise or hold civic office. But by the time Jeronimus was born, the faith was no longer a barrier to success in most professions.
Nevertheless, revolutionary Anabaptism had not been altogether extinguished by the fall of Münster. A large group of surviving radicals flocked to the banner of a man named Jan van Batenburg, who saw nothing wrong in robbing and killing those who were not members of his sect. When Van Batenburg was captured and executed in 1538, the surviving Batenburgers turned themselves into a band of robbers and infested the Dutch border with the Holy Roman Empire for another dozen years. After that, the sect fragmented into several increasingly extreme and violent groups, the last of which persisted until 1580. In that year, the surviving radicals fled east and found their way to Friesland, where they concealed themselves among the local Mennonites and disappeared from view some 15 years before Jeronimus was born.
Cornelisz, we know, once claimed that he had never been baptized. The archives of Haarlem show that his wife, Belijtgen, was a Mennonite. Taken together, these two facts suggest that he was born to Anabaptist parents and remained a member of that church into early adulthood. But it is much less likely that he himself had faith in Menno Simmons’s teachings. He married a Mennonite girl, and so he—and therefore his parents—probably did profess to be Mennonites themselves. But most Mennonites were baptized between the ages of 18 and 23, whereas Cornelisz reached the age of 30 without undergoing the ritual. This may indicate that he had become disillusioned with the church and left it altogether, but it could also be interpreted as a sign that he and his parents had picked up elements of the Batenburger’s teachings. It is just possible that the apothecary’s family may have been one of those that made its way to Friesland after the collapse of the last Anabaptist robber-bands, and quite likely that Cornelisz heard the radicals’ beliefs discussed during his youth in the province. In time, he would demonstrate an apparent familiarity with their ideas concerning righteous killing and the communality of property and women. But this religious influence, which surely helped to shape his childhood, seems to have been tempered in adulthood. The reason for this is unclear, but if Jeronimus did attend a Latin school, he would have been exposed to humanism and the works of ancient philosophers and encouraged to think for himself.
By the time Cornelisz set off for Haarlem, then, other voices and other thoughts had probably begun to make their mark on him. And when he got there, he soon discovered that his new home was far removed from the provincial narrowness of Bergum and Leeuwarden. Haarlem was a place where wealthy men pursued religious and philosophical inquiries largely free from the attentions of the Dutch Reformed Church. If one knew the right people, introductions could be arranged to certain circles where radical and even openly heretical ideas were freely discussed. Working on the Grote Houtstraat and dealing with some of the most influential people in the city, Jeronimus was in an excellent position to make such acquaintances. And it seems this is precisely what he did.
The fencing club run by a certain Giraldo Thibault in Amsterdam was typical of the philosophical talking-shops that would have attracted Cornelisz. The club was located in a fashionable area of the town, and its habitués were mostly young, unmarried, very wealthy members of the city’s ruling class. They generally came to Thibault daily, ostensibly in the hope of mastering his fashionable technique. But for many of the members the club’s real attraction was that they could relax and mix informally with their peers, far from the ears of parents, wives, or ministers of the church. The salon was a fine place to meet interesting new friends. Thibault knew everyone worth knowing in the city, and his club was popular with artists, doctors, and professors as well as with the sons of wealthy burghers. One member of the fencing master’s circle was Cornelis van Hogelande, who was professor of philosophy at the University of Leyden and also a leading alchemist. Thibault’s brother-in-law Guillermo Bartolotti was the second-richest man in the Republic and had long been a major investor in the VOC. Another frequent visitor to the club was Johannes van der Beeck, one of the finest of Dutch painters; a sometime resident of Haarlem, he was better known by the Latin version of his name, “Torrentius.”
Thibault himself was a good deal more than a mere swordsman. Many of his pupils revered him as a philosopher as well, and he and his friends are known to have discussed many of the topics that fascinated the humanists of the day. Talk in the salon ranged from alchemy and Greek philosophy to magic and mythology. The apparently unremarkable fencing club thus served as a conduit through which many new and revolutionary ideas found their way into the very heart of the Dutch Republic.
It is unlikely that Jeronimus himself was a pupil of Thibault’s. He probably lacked the social standing required to gain entry to such an exclusive group. But he certainly had connections with some of the master swordsman’s acquaintances, and, through them, he became familiar with some dangerous philosophies. These he seems to have absorbed and combined with the radical Anabaptist precepts he had picked up in his youth to create a strange, intensely personal creed—one that was not only explicitly heretical, but potentially murderous as well.
The man who linked Cornelisz to Giraldo Thibault’s circle was Torrentius the painter. Jeronimus knew him in Haarlem, and though it is impossible to say with any certainty where or when they met, they did live in close proximity to each other, the apothecary in the Grote Houtstraat and the painter only 200 yards away in a house on the Zijlstraat. Cornelisz and Torrentius also had several acquaintances in common—Jacob Schoudt, whom Jeronimus used as his solicitor in his pursuit of Heyltgen Jansdr, had known the painter well for years, and Lenaert Lenaertsz, a well-respected local merchant, was very close to both of them. Apothecaries also sold many of the materials that artists needed for their work—white lead, gold leaf, turpentine—so it is possible that Torrentius acquired his supplies from Cornelisz. By the late 1620s the two men knew each other well enough for Jeronimus to be described as a disciple of the painter.
It was, without question, a potentially dangerous relationship for a newcomer to Haarlem to engage in, for Torrentius was a controversial figure throughout the Dutch Republic. He had been raised as a Catholic, even working for a while in Spain; and by 1615, back home in the United Provinces, he had acquired a reputation as a lively but dissolute companion who spent freely on fine clothing and roistering in the many taverns of the Dutch Republic. A bill that he and a group of friends ran up at the inn The Double-Crowned Rainbow, in Leyden, came to the staggering total of 485 guilders—more than 18 months’ wages for a reasonably well-to-do artisan at that time. Part of this sum, at least, must have been incurred in paying for the services of women; the painter often claimed that adultery was not a sin and bragged that he had half the whores of Holland at his personal disposal.
In truth, many of the province’s rich young men behaved in much this sort of way. But Torrentius was notoriously indiscreet, which made his activities unusually risky. Riotous living and consorting with prostitutes were severely frowned on by the church authorities and could easily attract the censure of otherwise well-disposed acquaintances. In Torrentius’s case, plenty of shocked witnesses could testify to the artist’s loose morals. His marriage, to a well-brought-up young girl named Cornelia van Camp, had been a disgrace; the couple quarreled violently and when the union finally collapsed, Torrentius had gone to prison rather than pay for his wife’s upkeep. The nudes and mythological scenes he painted also made him suspect, but it was the drunken conversations he indulged in, in the back rooms of taverns up and down the province, that particularly concerned his family and friends. On one occasion Torrentius and his company were heard to drink a toast to the devil. On another, in a Haarlem hostelry, they drank first to the Prince of Orange, next to Christ, and finally to the prince of darkness. A Leyden man named Hendrick van Swieten, who had been lodging in the same tavern, was reportedly so shocked he feared such blasphemy might cause the building to sink into the ground.
Deeply incriminating though it was, such evidence actually paled beside the tales that were told in Haarlem concerning Torrentius’s apparently preternatural skill as an artist. The painter, it was popularly supposed, was actually a black magician who freely admitted that his masterpieces were not produced by human hands. Rather, it was claimed, he simply placed his paints on the floor next to a blank canvas and watched while supernatural music played and his paintings magically created themselves. Others whispered that Torrentius often went for walks alone in the woods south of Haarlem, where he was understood to converse with the devil. When he was seen purchasing black hens and roosters in the market, it was said he needed them as sacrifices to Beelzebub. Ghostly voices had been heard coming from his studio.
These accounts, and others, may well have been greatly exaggerated; Torrentius himself always claimed that many of his controversial comments had been meant as jokes. But, even so, there is little doubt that by the standards of the day, he was a heretic. Torrentius insisted, for example, that there was no such place as hell, arguing that it was ridiculous to suppose there was, since it was well known there was nothing beneath the ground but earth. He told friends the scriptures were nothing but a collection of fables—a useful tool for keeping the population in check. He was overheard describing the Bible as “the Book of Fools and Jesters.” He even mocked the suffering of Christ.
So far as Torrentius’s critics were concerned, these views proved the painter was no Christian. Many believed he lived his life according to the precepts of Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher who wrote that true happiness is to be found in the pursuit of pleasure, and certainly his activities in Holland’s taverns suggest an acquaintance with the Epicurean worldview. But for all this, Torrentius was not an atheist. He was, if anything, a Gnostic—a believer in the ancient heresy that God and Satan are equal in strength, and that the world is the creation of the devil. Like all Gnostics, the painter held that each man had a divine spark within him, which was suppressed by sin but could nevertheless be reanimated while he was still on Earth; indeed, he hinted to one correspondent that he himself had successfully completed this quasi-alchemical operation.
This was without question an intensely heretical philosophy. During the Middle Ages, thousands of people had gone to the stake for such beliefs, and even in the Dutch Republic of the 1620s, such views could be enough to earn a man a death sentence. Yet Torrentius apparently believed himself to be too well connected to run afoul of the church or the civic authorities. He openly discussed Gnostic philosophy with his friends.
Jeronimus Cornelisz came to share several of Torrentius’s thoughts and may well have picked up a number of his views in discussion with the freethinking painter. Like Torrentius, the apothecary did not believe in the existence of hell. Like him, he saw merit in the Epicurean way of life. But Jeronimus went further than his friend in some respects, holding to philosophies that even Torrentius could not agree with. Where he came across such ideas remains a mystery; it may be that they, too, had been discussed at philosophical salons such as Thibault’s fencing club, though the apothecary could also have heard them in his youth in Friesland. All that is certain is that they made even the Gnostic heresy seem harmless in comparison.
Cornelisz’s central belief, it seems, was that his every action was directly inspired by God. “All I do,” he explained to a handful of trusted acquaintances, “God gave the same into my heart.” It followed that he himself lived his life in what amounted to a state of grace. This was an intensely liberating philosophy, and one that would have shocked any God-fearing Calvinist to the core. Taken literally, it implied that the apothecary was incapable of sin. If each idea, each action, was directly inspired by God, then no thought, no deed—not even murder—could truly be described as evil.
Twisted and simplistic though it might have seemed to any orthodox Christian, Jeronimus’s strange philosophy had a long tradition. Its proper name is anti-nomianism, the idea that moral law is not binding on an individual who exists in a state of perfection. No other creed—not the Jewish faith, nor even the Muslim—held quite so much terror for the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Church, for no other philosophy was quite so dangerous to the established order.
The antinomian philosophy had existed in Europe since at least the early thirteenth century, when a group called the Amaurians began preaching it in Paris, mixed with the teachings of Epicurus. Similar beliefs cropped up again in Germany a century later, where a sect known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit emerged, eventually spreading throughout central Europe. On this occasion they persisted well into the sixteenth century.*7
The Brethren divided humanity into two groups—the “crude in spirit” and the “subtle.” Those who failed to cultivate and ultimately release the divine potential that lay within them would always remain crude, but those who absorbed themselves in it could become living gods. As one historian of the movement explains:
“Every impulse was experienced as a divine command; now they could surround themselves with worldly possessions, now they could live in luxury—and now too they could lie and steal and fornicate without qualms of conscience, for since inwardly the soul was wholly absorbed into God, external acts were of no account . . . . The Free Spirit movement was, therefore, an affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it amounted to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation.”
Not every member of the sect exercised his license to cheat and steal. The founders of the movement taught that perfect happiness was most likely to be found in quiet contemplation. But in truth the Free Spirit was generally perceived, even among its adepts, as a movement of anarchy and self-exaltation. As such it was vigorously persecuted and never had a large number of adherents, even in its German heartland. From time to time the Catholic Church seems to have hoped that the sect had been stamped out altogether. But antinomianism was too potent a philosophy to be repressed for long. Although the Brethren of the Free Spirit vanished around 1400, their ideas found their way into the Low Countries under the guise of “Spiritual Liberty.” A sect of this name was crushed in Antwerp around 1544, and the surviving Libertines fled from Flanders. Some of them turned up in Tournai and Strasbourg. Others vanished altogether. It seems at least possible that a few went north into what became the Dutch Republic.
Cornelisz, then, was apparently a Libertine—though not a very good one, for he ignored the more spiritual aspects of the faith in favor of the promise of complete freedom of action. In this he resembled Torrentius, his friend and teacher, and the two men might well have gone on enjoying their philosophical debates indefinitely had the painter not at last attracted the attention of the Dutch authorities around 1625. From then on, however, Torrentius found himself fighting for his freedom and his life. Labeled a heretic, hounded by both church and state, he became the first of Giraldo Thibault’s circle to be persecuted for his beliefs. The thoughts and views of his acquaintances became of increasing interest to the authorities as well.
The seeds that led eventually to Torrentius’s downfall were sown in the little German town of Kassel in the year 1614. It was there that a small group of German adepts produced an esoteric pamphlet that was not only to inspire generations of mystics but also to lead, at least indirectly, to Jeronimus’s departure from Haarlem.
The pamphlet was an anonymous work of indeterminate origin purporting to be nothing less than the manifesto of a powerful secret society called the Order of the Rosy Cross. It was a potent call for a second reformation—a reformation, this time, of the sciences—which promised, in return, the dawning of a golden age. But what really excited those who read the work was its subtext—scraps of information about the mysterious Brethren of the Rosy Cross themselves.
The Order, said the pamphlet, had been established in the fifteenth century by a man named Christian Rosenkreuz, who had spent many years traveling in the Middle East, collecting ancient wisdom and occult knowledge. The pamphlet stated that upon his return to Germany, Rosenkreuz created a brotherhood to ensure that his discoveries were put to use. There were eight Brethren of the Rosy Cross, and they moved from place to place, spreading secret knowledge, adopting the customs and the dress of the countries where they lived, and living incognito. Each brother was a potent mystic in his own right, and each was tasked with recruiting a worthy replacement for himself as he grew old. Christian Rosenkreuz himself, the pamphlet continued, had lived to be 106. When he died, in 1484, the members of his order laid him to rest in an underground vault hidden somewhere within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire. The vault was then sealed for a period of 120 years, and its rediscovery by a member of the Order, in the first years of the seventeenth century, had heralded the dawning of a new age. The opening of the tomb was a signal for the Brothers of the Rosy Cross to step out of the shadows and make themselves at last generally known.
Two further Rosicrucian pamphlets appeared over the next two years, both of them anonymous and each making further revelations. It is not difficult to understand why they inspired the tremendous interest that they did. As well as promising the advent of a golden age, the manifestos hinted at the existence of a secret brotherhood that recruited most selectively and invited only the best and wisest to join its ranks. An invitation to join the Rosicrucians would thus be a supreme honor, and one that vainer readers dared hope might be extended to themselves. The fact that the Brethren of the Order appeared to travel incognito merely added to their dangerous allure. If no one knew just who they were or where they lived, it was at least possible that one or several dwelled nearby, and that they might be searching for converts.
Few people seem to have doubted that the pamphlets were the work of a genuine group of adepts; a number of prominent thinkers, including the French philosopher Descartes, devoted considerable efforts to searching for the Order. Several northern European states—among them the United Provinces—thus began to fear that they were faced with a genuine and dangerous new threat. Rumors that Rosicrucians had crossed the borders of the Dutch Republic reached several Calvinist ministers in 1624. In the following year, a secret agreement between French and Dutch Rosicrucians was purportedly discovered in a house in Haarlem. This threat—real or not—could not be tolerated, and in January 1624, the Court of Holland, which was the senior judicial body in the province, was ordered to investigate the Rosicrucian movement.
The task seemed impossible but, nevertheless, the Court did have some leads. Rumor and tittle-tattle suggested that the Rosicrucians of the Dutch Republic had their headquarters in Haarlem, where they assembled by night at a house in the prosperous Zijlstraat. Furthermore, the judges were informed, “one Thorentius should be considered one of the most important members of the sect.” Armed with this name, the Court of Holland commenced an investigation that was to occupy it for the next four years.
“Thorentius” was not a hard man to identify, and the controversial painter was eventually seized in Haarlem in the summer of 1627, three years after the first testimonies against him had been recorded. In the interim, the civic authorities had discovered a good deal about Torrentius, his circle, and his penchant for drunken theological discussions in the taverns of the province. The artist was charged with heresy and with membership of the Rosicrucian order and interrogated on no fewer than five occasions. Torrentius freely admitted that he had jokingly claimed to possess magical powers, but he denied every serious charge that was laid against him. His interrogation continued from August to December without producing anything that would justify a trial.
By late autumn, the magistrates of Haarlem had grown weary of Torrentius’s obduracy, and they applied to the Court of Holland for permission to resort to more violent methods. This was readily granted, and on Christmas Eve 1627 Torrentius was interrogated by a certain Master Gerrit, who was Haarlem’s executioner and also its chief torturer. Heavy weights were tied to the painter’s legs while four men hauled him into the air by ropes that had been attached to his wrists; he was left hanging in this way while more questions were put to him. Afterward he was stretched on the rack until his limbs were pulled from their sockets. A third torture damaged his jaw and left him temporarily unable to eat, and at one point, it appears, some effort was actually made to shoot him. But the efforts of the torturers were to no avail. Through all this agony, Torrentius continued to deny he was a Rosicrucian. Supporters of the painter, who spoke to Master Gerrit in the tavern of the Gilded Half-Moon after the prisoner had been returned to his cell, were told he had impressed the executioner as an honest man. The only words Torrentius had spoken, Gerrit said, were, “Oh my Lord, my God!”
In the absence of a confession, the burgomasters of Holland were forced to go to extraordinary lengths to obtain the verdict that they wanted. In January 1628, Torrentius was brought to court still crippled from his torture and tried on 31 charges “extra-ordinaris,” a rare procedure that meant he was not allowed to mount a defense and could not appeal the verdict of the court. Instead, the judges heard a long parade of witnesses and statements damning him as an immoral heretic. In such circumstances, it was inevitable he would be found guilty, which he was after a truncated hearing. The prosecutor demanded that he be burned at the stake for his sins, but the aldermen of Haarlem balked at this request. Instead, Torrentius was sentenced to 20 years in prison. This punishment began at once.
Undoubtedly the painter’s silence, even under torture, saved him from a far worse fate and made it impossible for the magistrates to convict him of membership of the Rosicrucian order. The charge that he was a brother of the Rosy Cross, which had been the principal reason for his arrest, remained unproven. But Torrentius’s resistance to the attentions of Master Gerrit had a further consequence. The authorities in Haarlem could not be certain how widely he had spread his heresies within the city, and though the evidence that they collected was sufficient for them to identify several dozen prominent members of his circle, they continued to suspect that others had escaped their grasp.
In his empty and abandoned store on the Grote Houtstraat, Jeronimus Cornelisz had reason to be thankful that his name had not cropped up during Torrentius’s trial. But he knew there was no guarantee that some further investigation of the case would not occur and that any such action might easily compromise him. This fear, it seems, together with his bankruptcy, persuaded him that it might be best to leave the city.
The timing of Jeronimus’s departure from his home certainly suggests that this was so. In the aftermath of Torrentius’s trial, the burgomasters of Haarlem banished all the members of the painter’s circle from the city. These suspected heretics were ordered out of the city on 5 September 1628 and given a matter of weeks to settle their affairs. This period of grace coincides more or less exactly with the period that Cornelisz spent winding up his affairs and transferring what remained of his possessions to his creditor, Loth Vogel. At the end of the first week of October 1628 he appears to have fled from Haarlem. He went leaving his wife and his past life behind and took the road to Amsterdam, where the wharves and flophouses seethed with human flotsam just like him, all rootless and all headed for the East.