Tolerant Holland? Catholics in the Dutch Golden Age

This paper will examine religious coexistence in the ostensibly Calvinist Dutch Republic during the “Golden Age” of the seventeenth century.  Specifically it looks at the circumstances of Holland’s Catholic minority and its relationships to both political authority and the privileged Reformed church.  Those relationships were complicated by two factors: 1) political power in the Dutch Republic was extremely localized, and 2) the privileged church itself comprised a minority of the population.  Catholics, whose church had been disestablished by the new regime and who were by law not allowed to worship openly, found themselves forced to coexist with Protestants who could be alternately hostile or indifferent to them.  Consequently a spectrum of relationships, from antagonistic to latitudinarian, evolved among the confessions.  This paper will examine how the dynamics of toleration played themselves out between Catholics and Calvinists in the towns of Holland; this toleration was not so much a static set of “either/or” dichotomies as an ongoing, malleable and fluid process of continually negotiated coexistence.  Religious toleration, much like the relatively new Dutch state itself, was a continuous work in progress.