Holland's Magistrate Elite as Investors in Renten

One of the striking features of the new provincial debt that was created in Holland after 1542 is that, by and large, the biggest investors were the same men who, as deputies to the States approved creation of the debt and oversaw its management. Before examining renten investments more closely, it will first be helpful to consider who the deputies were.

Between 1542 and 1562 there were 285 dagvaarten or meetings of the States convened by the central government, an average of 13.5 per year. This total does not count the numerous occasions when smaller delegations were sent to Brussels to give the States' response to a bede request or to conduct other business. For most meetings a town sent two or three deputies, but sometimes it was considered sufficient to send the pensionary by himself—for example, to hear a bede "proposition," which did not require an immediate response. The extent to which towns relied on their pensionaries to represent them in these discussions may be seen from the following comparison:

The low figure for Gouda is due to the fact that this town dismissed its pensionary in 1545, apparently as an effort to save money. But all the other cities—even Leiden, which struggled the most with its debts—found it necessary to have two pensionaries on the payroll. The pensionary's growing importance in town life was part of a larger process of bureaucratization of urban institutions, visible somewhat earlier in the southern provinces of the Low Countries. Just as the pensionary's responsibilities expanded, men with the title "Meester," denoting a legal degree, began to appear more frequently on the magistrate rolls.^[30] In the States of Holland, the elder statesmen were pensionaries like Leiden's Meester Jacob de Milde who attended 196 meetings during this period or Haarlem's Meester Lambrecht Jacobszoon who attended 181. These men were still employees of their town governments—only Amsterdam's Meester Adriaan Sandelijn seems to have become a member of the vroedschap, while still serving as pensionary^[31] —but their counsel cannot have been without influence in shaping the instructions on which they acted in the States.

If there were two deputies, one would likely be the pensionary, and the other a member of the college of burgomasters. It often happened that the same burgomaster attended several meetings in a row, and in some cities, like Amsterdam, the college of (four) burgomasters rotated by quarter in attending the dagvaarten .^[32] The burgomaster could be accompanied by one of his colleagues, or by a member of the vroedschap or of the college of schepenen, but the deputation of these lesser officials seems to have become less common over time. As a rule, the magistrates who most often represented their towns were the ones most frequently elected burgomaster. Among the six great cities, there were notable differences in the degree to which the responsibility of serving as deputies was concentrated among a few individuals. It should be reiterated that government in all these towns was oligarchical: membership in the vroedschap was for life, and a man was usually not elected burgomaster unless he was also a member of the vroedschap . Nonetheless, there are various indices of representation at the dagvaarten which suggest that the formation of an oligarchy-within-the-oligarchy was more advanced in some towns than others. The following table

compares the six cities in terms of (a) the total number of trips by magistrates, not counting pensionaries; (b) the number of magistrates who served as deputies; (c) the average number of trips per magistrate deputy; and (d) the trips by the five magistrates most often chosen as deputies, as a percentage of all trips by magistrates. Towns are ranked according to their place in the last column, which is the sum of' each town's ranking in the other four columns.^[33]

Gouda's high ranking in the fourth column is due to nearly constant attendance at the dagvaarten by just a few men. Jan Dirkszoon Hoen, who attended 103 meetings, must have been Holland's most traveled magistrate. In 1546 Hoen was a leading brewer, with a total number of "brews" which ranked second among eighty-three practitioners of the city's most important trade. He began the first of his thirteen terms as burgomaster a few years later (1548–1565), and it was during this period that he also attended the dagvaarten including, at one stretch, twenty-eight consecutive meetings. Hoen seems to have made a career in politics, and the same might be said of Witte Aertszoon van der Hoeve (five times burgomaster, fifty-four dagvaarten ), Jan Gerritszoon Hey Daems (sheriff from 1548 to 1552, forty-one dagvaarten ), and Jan Willemszoon Moel (nine times burgomaster,

thirty-five dagvaarten ). Two of these four magistrates, Hoen and Hey Daems, were apparently the sons of men who had served multiple terms as burgomaster.^[34] At the other end of the attendance scale, Gouda and Haarlem had a large number of men—nineteen—who attended only one meeting of the States; in Gouda, even a "Pieter Gerritszoon the priest" was called into service. One may infer that except for the few who were willing to make of it something like a profession, taking time for the business of the province was an unwelcome duty to be shared among as many men as possible.^[35] But the assiduous attendance of these few men did not necessarily win Gouda an influential voice within the States. Gouda spoke last at the meetings, and the vroedschap resolutions for this period indicate a strategy of returning negative answers to bede requests as long as possible, until the consent of other towns left no choice. Christopher Hibben's fine study, Gouda in Revolt, shows a town which, left to its own devices, avoided innovation of all kinds like the very plague, a practice that seems to have been followed also during the Habsburg period.^[36]

Dordrecht's leading deputies came from families distinguished in the service of the city or the Emperor. Arent Corneliszoon van der Mijle, who served twenty-one times as burgomaster between 1542 and 1572 and attended forty-eight dagvaarten, followed his father and grandfather in the same office. His first cousin once removed, Damas Philipszoon, was town treasurer for fourteen years and a frequent attender of dagvaarten in the previous generation, and this man's nephew, Wouter Barthoutszoon, a participant in twenty-four dagvaarten, was Van der Mijle's contemporary in the magistracy. Pieter Jacobszoon Muys was something of an exception, since after a great flood in 1423 his family had moved to the smaller town of Schiedam where they provided two generations of burgomasters, until Pieter Jacobszoon returned to Dordrecht where he was schepen sixteen times (1539–1568) and attended forty dagvaarten . Jacob Oom came from a family whose members had been magistrates in Dordrecht since the 1380s; he was among the twenty children of a late fifteenth-century burgomaster, served in that capacity himself in 1556 and 1558, and attended thirty-

three dagvaarten . Heyman Adriaanszoon van Blijenburgh served as sheriff and burgomaster, was treasurer for seventeen years and a participant at thirty-one dagvaarten . Descended from the lesser nobility in the thirteenth century, his ancestors included a leading burgomaster and a military commander of the fifteenth century. As a final example, Willem Blasius Bucquet, the son of Charles V's Master of the Mint at Dordrecht, attended thirty dagvaarten .^[37] This sort of linkage between magistrates and comital officials—including the sheriff, who also appeared often at dagvaarten —was noticeable in Dordrecht; one is reminded of the fact that while tenacious in asserting its own privileges, this city was usually more willing than the others to grant what was asked by the prince.^[38]

Among delegations from the six great cities, Dordrecht's deputies were the most tinged with blue blood, Gouda's and Amsterdam's the least.^[39] Delft, along with Haarlem and Leiden, falls somewhere in between. For Delft, a chance survival of lists of potential officeholders in 1553 provides some clues as to the business interests of leading deputies to the States. Jan Sasbout Dirkszoon, a participant at forty-four dagvaarten and a burgomaster twenty-four times between 1532 and 1562, is identified as "rentenier, formerly a brewer." As with the equivalent French term, a rentenier was in the first instance an investor in land.^[40] Jan Dirk Herpertszoon, burgomaster twice in the 1550s who attended twenty-five dagvaarten, was also a rentenzer, but still did "some business as a merchant." A bit farther down the attendance list, the same description was given for Huygh de Groot, a participant at sixteen dagvaarten, who served eight times as burgomaster. De Groot's father had been burgomaster fourteen times, and his grandson was the famous Hugo Grotius. Although not mentioned in the 1553 lists, Cornelis Janszoon Cruyser attended twenty dagvaarten and served as burgomaster four times between 1558 and 1561. Frans Duyst van Voorhout, a member of an important clan that combined city magistrates, farmers of comital domain revenue, and lesser nobles, was four times burgomaster in the 1560s and a deputy at twenty meetings; earlier, he was a rentenzer and served as Bailiff for the rural district of Delfland. Michiel Janszoon Camerling, who was at twenty dagvaaarten, was the only "brewer" among Delft's lead-

ing deputies even though this industry was still of great importance for the city.^[41]

For present purposes, the "sum of Rankings" (table 5) among urban delegations to the States suggests a particularly interesting contrast between the neighboring cities of Amsterdam and Haarlem. To begin with, Amsterdam's college of four burgomasters was somewhat more independent of other magistracies than were their counterparts in other cities. In Amsterdam, three new burgomasters were chosen each year by the "old council," which consisted of all former burgomasters and schepenen, and which had no other function besides this election. The three new burgomasters then chose an "old burgomaster" from among their retiring colleagues. By contrast, in Haarlem and in Leiden, burgomasters were elected by the vroedschap, in conjunction with the outgoing gerecht (burgomasters and schepenen ).^[42] Accordingly, Amsterdam's executive college had less need to report to the larger vroedschap . Thus Haarlem's vroedschap received detailed reports on what was discussed at each dagvaart, and it was the vroedschap that decided how to proceed. In Amsterdam, the vroedschap assumed this role only in time of crisis, as in 1542, when the city was being forced to surrender its practice of selling "apart" when renten were issued by the States.^[43]

As one might expect in these circumstances, Haarlem's magistrates made fewer trips to the dagvaarten then their colleagues in other cities, and the few who went frequently still travelled less often than leading magistrates elsewhere. Burgomaster Joost van Hillegom was the leader with twenty-eight trips, and Meester Gerrit Hendrikszoon van Ravensberg, a frequent burgomaster after 1557, had twenty-three. In Amsterdam, however, the strong college of burgomasters became the focal point for a series of ruling factions. S.A.C. Dudok van Heel has shown that for periods of roughly forty years, the college of burgomasters was effectively controlled by successive groups, each consisting of a small number of interrelated families.^[44] Between 1535 and 1538, in the wake of an armed uprising by revolutionary Anabaptists, the ruling faction that included Ruysch Janszoon and Cornelis Bennink was replaced by another led by Meester Hendrik Dirkszoon, which came to be

known as the "Dirkisten." The Dirkisten then remained in power until 1578, though not without provoking serious internal opposition, resulting in the Doleantie which seventy burghers submitted to the central government in 1564, and which will be discussed in Chapter 7. What is of interest here is that the five men whom the Doleantie accused of concentrating power in their hands were with one exception the same men who represented Amsterdam most often at the dagvaarten, as the following table shows:^[45]

During the twenty-one-year period in question, these seven men filled sixty-three percent of the possible slots as burgomaster and made sixty-six percent of the trips to dagvaarten by all Amsterdam magistrates. Certainly in this case, frequency of attendance at the meetings of the States reflected a comparable measure of influence in the councils of government at home.

Among buyers of Holland renten after 1542, men invested more than women did; and town magistrates, together with Habsburg officials in The Hague, invested significantly more than did other men.^[46] If one makes a further distinction between magistrates in general and those who were prominent as

magistrate-deputies to the States, it is clear that the latter were especially noteworthy as buyers of Holland renten . As a rule, the magistrates who attended dagvaarten were more likely to purchase renten than their stay-at-home colleagues. In the following table, magistrate-deputies are first treated as part of the general class of magistrates, then for the two cities where the largest purchases were made, they are separated from their colleagues who were magistrates but not deputies. For this purpose, calculations are limited to the period 1553–1562, since magistrates were sometimes forced to buy renten before 1553.^[47]

Moreover, those magistrates who attended the dagvaarten most frequently were likely to be the largest investors. During the period in question, twenty-eight men appeared twenty times or more as deputies; of this number, sixteen bought renten, for a total of 54,408, or an average of about 3,400. By far the largest buyer of Holland renten was Gerrit Hendrikszoon van Ravensberg (22,568), who appeared twenty-three times as a deputy for

Haarlem. His purchases are excluded from the following table, so as not to skew the results:

The cities that stand out in this summary are Amsterdam and especially the smaller and less wealthy Delft, where magistrates as well as deputies had a quite unusual appetite for renten .^[48]

In sum, the closer one gets to what may be described as an elite among the deputies, the more one finds men who invest impressive amounts of their own money in the new debt that they themselves managed as deputies to the States. The fact that these men were withdrawing funds from other unspecified uses and putting them into renten has both an economic and a social meaning. There was surely some disinvestment from productive activities, though not so much as one might think, because many investors bought renten as a means of providing security to their children; for this purpose the most obvious alternatives were other kinds of renten, like those which town governments issued for their own purposes.^[49] Where there was disinvestment, it seems more likely to have occurred in declining industries, less so in the vigorous commercial sector or among men active in land reclamation projects. One must also take seriously the possibility that men who devoted as much time as many deputies did to affairs of state were choosing a manner of life rather than a form of investment. One could become a politician in the same sense that one might become,

for instance, a farmer of government revenues. In either case, money invested in Holland renten was safe and probably of some political benefit. In his study of Florentine patricians of the early fifteenth century, Gene Brucker finds that leading magistrates were set apart from other Florentines not by their wealth or their business interests, but by a conscious choice to devote themselves to the affairs of the city, a choice reflected also in exhortations to invest in the public debt.^[50] Holland's patricians have not left for posterity a record of their thoughts that might compare with the pratiche of Renaissance Florence. Nonetheless, one may reasonably credit them with the same variable combination of amour propre and civic-mindedness that always has drawn men to politics.

The social importance of renten -buying by the deputies is that this form of investment was part of a larger process by which leading patrician families became assimilated to the lower ranks of Habsburg officialdom. If one defines the boundaries of social groups by a combination of intermarriage, shared occupational interests, and shared investment habits, it seems that government officials and town magistrates were in the process of fusing together as an office-holding elite, whereas Holland's traditional noble families remained sharply distinct from both. The men who served the Emperor at the Hof van Holland in The Hague (and their womenfolk) were the largest per-capita purchasers of Holland renten all through the reign of Charles V. By contrast, nobles were prominent among buyers for the first series of Holland renten between 1515 and 1533, but not for the second series, especially after the practice of constraining wealthy Hollanders to buy was dropped in 1553.^[51] Henk van Nierop shows that, after about 1550, nobles were also withdrawing from their traditional share of comital offices in The Hague. (The fact that nobles were often leading investors in the reclamation projects that gained momentum about this time could help to account for both tendencies.)^[52]

Much of the prosopographical work for Holland's official families remains to be done, but it will likely be found that vacancies left by the nobles were filled from patrician families like the Sasbouts of Delft and the De Jonges of Dordrecht,

many of whom continued to be represented at city hall as well as at the Hof van Holland. Delft's leading deputy to the States during the period discussed above was the prominent burgomaster, Jan Sasbout; his brother Joost Sasbout had been Councillor Ordinary in the Council of Holland until 1543, and his son Jan Janszoon Sasbout, also a magistrate, was Delft's second-leading buyer of Holland renten .^[53] One son of Dordrecht's Arent Corneliszoon van der Mijle became Castellan of Gouda, and another became President of the Council of Holland.^[54] As for intermarriage, Holland's nobles maintained their distance from commoners, as Van Nierop's discussion of endogamy shows, but official and magistrate families regularly contracted marriage connections, as if among social equals. In Haarlem, Meester Gerrit Hendrikszoon van Ravensberg, the leading investor in Holland renten, was married to a daughter of Meester Vincent Corneliszoon van Mierop of the Council of Finance.^[55] In Dordrecht, the second wife of Heyman Adriaanszoon van Blijenburgh was a daughter of Meester Vincent van Droogendijk, Auditor in the Chamber of Accounts; Blijenburgh's second cousin, the prominent city treasurer, Damas Philipszoon, was married to a daughter of a Councillor of Friesland.^[56] In Amsterdam, two of Meester Hendrik Dirkszoon's sons married daughters of Meester Reynier Brunt, the Procurator-General (chief prosecutor) at the Court of Holland.^[57]

The men who represented their cities most often at the dagvaarten, and the men who represented the sovereign in Holland, were thus drawing closer together. Those trained in the law—like most officials and an increasing number of magistrates—were used to representing conflicting interests in a way that need not entail personal animosity. Furthermore, officials based in Holland were usually natives of the province and habitually remonstrated with their superiors in Brussels over instructions they deemed contrary to Holland's interests. Hence deputies could be at ease with the "lords" who spoke for the prince, because both parties shared important common goals, such as the protection of Holland's grain trade.^[58] Finally, the deputies were by way of becoming lords themselves; they contracted for a vast new debt; they funded it by levying taxes as they saw fit; and for enforcing collection of these taxes, they

had at their disposal the full judicial apparatus of the Hof van Holland.^[59] Appropriately enough, it was near the end of Charles V's reign that the deputies began to style themselves mogende heren, or "mighty lords."