Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [25]
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.
2
Gentlemen XVII
“If this frothy nation have the trade of the Indies to themselves, their pride and insolencie will be intollerable.”
HENRY MIDDLETON
BY RIGHTS, THE TOWN OF AMSTERDAM SHOULD NEVER HAVE EXISTED. Four hundred years before Jeronimus Cornelisz first passed through its gates, it had been little more than an obscure fishing village festering in the marshes at the southern limits of the Zuyder Zee. Its situation was undoubtedly unfavorable; the climate was appalling—cold and chill in winter, clammy, damp, and foggy for the remainder of the year—and access to the open sea was only possible via a maze of narrow channels, masked by sandbanks and so shallow that ships could not approach the harbor fully laden. There was, in short, little to suggest that Amsterdam would ever be a place of much significance. Yet by the beginning of the seventeenth century the village had overcome these natural disadvantages and become the richest city in the world.
This remarkable success was based on trade. As early as the fifteenth century, the Dutch had built one of the largest shipping industries in Europe, carrying bulk goods such as timber, tar, and salt from the Baltic to the North Sea and the Atlantic coast. The Hollanders