by Mike Dash
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 decayi
ng 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 oft
en 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.