Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [178]
After the Judge’s death, the Batenburger sect fragmented into several tiny groups, one of which, the Children of Emlichheim, was active in the middle 1550s. Its sole creed appears to have been revenge against the infidel; on one notorious occasion its members stabbed to death 125 cows that belonged to a local monastery. The last of the Batenburger splinter groups, and also the largest, was the “Folk of Johan Willemsz.” This sect persisted until about 1580, living by robbery and murder in the countryside around Wesel, on the Dutch-German border. It was when Willemsz himself was burned at the stake that the remnants of the group found their way to Friesland. L. G. Jansma, Melchiorieten, Münstersen en Batenburgers: een Sociologische Analyse van een Millenistische Beweging uit de 16e Eeuw (Buitenpost: np, 1977), pp. 217–35, 237, 244–75; Jansma, “Revolutionairee Wederdopers na 1535” in MG Buist et al. (eds.), Historisch Bewogen. Opstellen over de radicale reformatie in de 16e en 17e eeuw (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1984), pp. 51–3; S. Zijlstra, “David Joris en de Doperse Stromingen (1536–1539), in ibid., pp. 130–1, 138; M. E. H. N. Mout, “Spiritualisten in de Nederlandse reformatie van de Zestiende Eeuw,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 111 (1996): 297–313.
Giraldo Thibault’s fencing club Govert Snoek, De Rosenkruizers in Nederland: Voornamelijk in de Eerste Helft van de 17de Eeuw. Een Inventarisatie (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Utrecht, 1997), pp. 164–73. The Amsterdam club shut down in 1615, when Thibault moved temporarily to Cleves, so Cornelisz could not have attended it himself. However, Thibault returned to the Dutch Republic in 1617 and apparently settled in Leyden, where he died in 1626. It is possible, though there is certainly no proof, that Jeronimus could have met the fencing master there; in any case, the point is that he may well have attended some intellectual salon run along similar lines.
Guillelmo Bartolotti Israel, op. cit., pp. 345, 347–8.
Cornelisz and Torrentius Cornelisz’s association with Torrentius was taken for granted in the Batavia journals, which occasionally refer to him as a “Torrentian.” For a discussion of this point, see epilogue.
The extent of the Torrentian circle Snoek, op. cit., pp. 78–9.
Schoudt and Lenaertsz Ibid., pp. 89–90, 91, 94; ONAH 99, fol. 159; Bredius, Torrentius, p. 42. Lenaertsz witnessed the legal document that Cornelisz. had drawn up to transfer all his worldly goods to Loth Vogel, a matter so humiliating that he would surely have called on only a close friend to countersign it.
“. . . apothecaries sold the paints . . .” Roeper, op. cit. p. 14.
“Disciple” Antonio van Diemen to Pieter de Carpentier, 30 November–10 December 1629, ARA VOC 1009, cited in Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Voyage to Disaster (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1995), p. 50. It should be admitted here that there remains no direct evidence that the two men were acquainted, and Jeronimus’s name does not appear in the process file concerning Torrentius’s eventual arrest and trial. Nevertheless, in a town with an elite the size of Haarlem’s—perhaps 1,000 men—it would actually be remarkable if two men of such distinct views were not known to one another.
Torrentius Bredius, Johannes Torrentius, pp. 1–3, 12, 22–6, 29–31, 34–5, 45–6, 49, 58; Rehorst, Torrentius, pp. 11–4, 15–6, 78–80; Zbigniew Herbert, Still Life with a Bridle (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), pp. 82–100; Snoek, pp. 60, 67–8, 71, 80–3, 87, 90, 101, 171. He was born in Amsterdam in 1589. Torrentius’s father is famous for having been the first inmate of Amsterdam’s new prison; his mother, Symontgen Lucasdr, remained loyal to him throughout his imprisonment and exile and survived him.
According to testimony collected by the painter’s irate father-in-law, Torrentius was well able to pay for his wife’s upkeep but chose not to. He always dressed