Calvinists in the city had good reason to worry. For all the prestige that they enjoyed as members of the Dutch Republic’s established church, Leiden was no Geneva. Its consistory exercised discipline only over those who willingly submitted to it. This was, perhaps, no more than 10 per cent of the population. The consequences, it appeared to the godly, were as malign as they were self-evident. Attempts had been made by professors in the university to soften the impact of Calvin’s teachings on predestination. Rival factions had clashed in the streets. So violently had tempers flared that in 1617 barricades had gone up around the city hall. Not even a purge of dissident preachers in 1619 had entirely calmed the controversy. Meanwhile, others in Leiden devoted themselves to dancing, or going to plays, or gorging themselves on enormous cheeses. Parents cuddled their children in public. Lutherans, and Anabaptists, and Jews all worshipped much as they pleased. The reluctance of magistrates to regulate these excesses had become, by 1620, a matter of voluble protest from members of the Reformed Church. The identification of the Dutch with the children of Israel was, in pulpits across Leiden, less a reassurance than a warning.
Yet even in the ambition to separate themselves from idolatry, and to create a land that might be pleasing to the Almighty, at once godly and abundant, there lurked just the hint of a reproach. ‘O Lord when all was ill with us You brought us up into a land wherein we were enriched through trade and commerce, and have dealt kindly with us.’3 What, though, of those who had not been brought dry-footed through the floodwaters, but still, beyond the limits of the republic that the Dutch had established for themselves with such effort and fortitude, suffered oppression at the hands of Pharaoh? That September, as the people of Leiden celebrated their liberation from the Spanish, and Reformed preachers pushed with ever more determination for their country to serve worthily as a new Israel, war was threatening the Protestants of the Rhineland and Bohemia. As in the days of Žižka, a Catholic emperor had mustered armies to march on Prague. His ambition: to extirpate Protestantism. The Dutch, true to their conviction that the promises made by God were promises made to the entire world, and that nothing in the whole of human existence possessed so much as a shred of authority that did not derive from his will, steeled themselves for the fight. Troops were sent across the border to buttress Protestant princes. A column of cavalry advanced up the Rhine. Outside Prague, on a mountainous ridge pockmarked by chalk pits, the army that had taken position there to defend the city from the onslaught of Antichrist included some five thousand men either funded or provided by the Dutch.
The centre did not hold. On 8 November, the Protestant forces on White Mountain were broken. Prague fell the same day. The war, though, was far from over. Quite the opposite. It was only just beginning. Like the blades of a terrible and revolving machine, the rivalries of Catholic and Protestant princes continued to scythe, mangling ever more reaches of the empire, sucking into the mulch of corpses ever more foreign armies, turning and ever turning, and only stopping at last after thirty years. Christian teachings, far from blunting hatreds, seemed a whetstone. Millions perished. Wolves prowled through the ruins of burnt towns. Atrocities of an order so terrible that, as one pastor put it, ‘those who come after us will never believe what miseries we have suffered’,4 were committed on a numbing scale: men castrated; women roasted in ovens; little children led around on ropes like dogs. The Dutch, increasingly imperilled in their own fastnesses, abandoned any thought of sending armies into the slaughterhouse that lay beyond their borders. Not merely a sensible strategy, it was the godly thing to do. The prime duty of the Republic was to maintain its independence, and thereby sustain its Church, for the good of all Christendom. In Leiden, where the needs of the defence budget saw extortionate taxes levied on bread and beer, even the poorest citizens could feel that they were doing their bit. Calvinists who held firm to the fundamentals of their faith, and had the wealth to back it up, made sure to provide charity to refugees. Here, then, amid the spreading darkness of the age, was a model of Christian behaviour that might serve as an inspiration to the whole world.
This was not a perspective shared by everyone. To many in the killing fields of Germany and central Europe, it seemed that the roots of the Republic’s greatness were being fed by blood. Munitions, and iron, and the bills of exchange that funded the rival armies: all were monopolised by Dutch entrepreneurs. The great dream of the godly – that by their example they might inspire anguish-torn humanity to reach out to the joy and the regeneration that only divine grace could ever provide – was shadowed by the nightmare of a Christendom being torn to pieces. How, amid the throes of such a calamity, were the elect ever to avoid the taint of compromise and hypocrisy? How were they to shutter themselves away from the evils of the age, and yet at the same time serve as the light of the world – as a city upon a hill?
Raising taxes on beer was not the only attempt to answer these questions that Leiden had fostered. On 9 November 1620, one day after the battle of the White Mountain, a ship named the Mayflower arrived off a thin spit of land in the northern reaches of the New World. Crammed into its holds were a hundred passengers who, in the words of one of them, had made the gruelling two-month voyage across the Atlantic because ‘they knew they were pilgrims’5 – and of these ‘pilgrims’, half had set out from Leiden. These voyagers, though, were not Dutch, but English. Leiden had been only a way-point on a longer journey: one that had begun in an England that had come to seem to the pilgrims pestiferous with sin. First, in 1607, they had left their native land; then, sailing for the New World thirteen years later, they had turned their backs on Leiden as well. Not even the godly republic of the Dutch had been able to satisfy their yearning for purity, for a sense of harmony with the divine. The Pilgrims did not doubt the scale of the challenge they faced. They perfectly appreciated that the new England which it was their ambition to found would, if they were not on their mettle, succumb no less readily to sin than the old. Yet it offered them a breathing space: a chance to consecrate themselves as a new Israel on virgin soil. Just as an individual sinner, reaching out to God, might be blessed by the gift of his grace, so might an entire people. It was in this conviction that the Pilgrims, making landfall in America, founded a settlement which they named Plymouth, to serve the whole world as a model. When, a decade later, a second settlement was established just up the coast, on Massachusetts Bay, its leaders were equally determined to demonstrate that the dream of a godly community might be more than a dream. ‘Thus stands the cause between God and us,’ declared one of them, a lawyer and preacher named John Winthrop, on the voyage out to the New World. ‘We are entered into Covenant with him for this work.’6 Liberty was the freedom to submit to this covenant: to be joined in a society of the godly that was hedged about by grace.
From the beginning, however, the leaders of New England found themselves negotiating a paradox. Their gaze, for all that they had settled on the margins of what seemed to them an immense and unexplored wilderness, was fixed on the entire expanse of the globe. Were they to fail in keeping their covenant, so Winthrop warned his fellow settlers, then the scandal of it would make them a story and a byword through the world. The fate of fallen humanity rested on their shoulders. They were its last, best hope. Yet for that very reason they had to be exclusive. No one could be permitted to join their community who might threaten its status as an assembly of the elect. Too much was at stake. It being the responsibility of elected magistrates to guide a colony along its path to godliness, only those who were visibly sanctified could possibly be allowed a vote. ‘The covenant between you and us,’ Winthrop told his electorate, ‘is the oath you have taken of us, which is to this purpose, that we shall govern you and judge your causes by the rules of God’s laws and our own, according to our best skill.’7 The charge was a formidable one: to chastise and encourage God’s people much as the prophets of ancient Israel had done, in the absolute assurance that their understanding of scripture was correct. No effort was spared in staying true to this mission. Sometimes it might be expressed in the most literal manner possible. In 1638, when settlers founded a colony at New Haven, they modelled it directly on the plan of an encampment that God had provided to Moses. This it was to be a chosen people.