Chapter Three — Netherlands

Decades ago, before the Internet, searchable data bases and DNA testing, my father retired from his job and got interested in the genealogy of his paternal ancestors. Back then, in the 1970s, I had little interest in the history of the Lattin family. It was the tail end of that Dionysian era we now call “the Sixties.”  I was into the here and now, not the there and then.

Yes, it’s funny how we turn into our fathers. Here I am typing into my laptop, looking down on the ring finger of my left hand, upon which rests my late father’s golden ring, a hefty chunk of jewelry he had made back in the 1970s. It depicts the medieval Lattin coat of arms. Three tiny diamonds glisten inside stars surrounding as many rising chevrons. 

In the past, I hated how my family’s medieval heraldry resembled the corporate logo of an infamous oil company. Now I see this similarity of symbols as a kind of branding synchronicity, reflective of how my people came from a time and place that gave birth to capitalism and the multinational corporations that now rule the world. The time would be late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The place would be a slice of western Europe then known as the Burgundian Netherlands — seventeen small, free-thinking provinces with a long and uneasy relationship with the Holy Roman Empire. 

Me and dad had a big head start in our efforts to figure out how our clan arose out of those turbulent times and sailed into the modern world, coming to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638.  My great Aunt Jennie, a school teacher and the sort of woman we used to call a “spinster,” was our clan’s genealogical pioneer. She worked the story back when family research was done by writing letters in longhand to long-lost relatives and mailing them with three-cent stamps, traveling by horse and buggy to the county seat to pour over dusty ledgers, and climbing up into grandma’s attic to find handwritten clues in old family Bibles. 

Aunt Jennie helped organize the now-defunct Lattin Family Association, which in the 1920s held a series of family conventions in New York. My father went to one of those reunions with his aunt, which began with an invocation and the singing of “America” and ended with a long series of three-minute talks by various members of the extended family.  At the time, Warren Charles Lattin was a ten-year-old boy going through a growth spurt that would continue until he reached his adult height of six-foot-six.  Hearing the long history of his ancestors made a lasting impression on this only child, inspiring him a few decades later to do everything he could to carry on the patriarchal brand. 

Here’s the opening chapter in the Lattin family history as described in the program for the association’s Fourth Annual National Reunion, held in the New Pavilion at Watkins Glen State Park on Saturday, August 18, 1928:

“In the fifteenth century there lived at Malines, in Flanders, Pierre Lettin, the earliest ancestor to whom the Lattin family can trace their descent. His descendants by the name of Jean for three generations were Secretaries and Registrars for the Supreme Tribunal of Malines, and some of them are buried in the old Cathedral of St. Rumbold…One of these, Jean Lettin III, driven from his native land in 1567 by persecutions under the Duke of Alva, settled in Norwich, England.”

Building on the work of Aunt Jennie, my own research revealed that Jean III, my eleventh great-grandfather, fled in the face of the heresy trials and tortuous executions provoked by the Iconoclastic Fury of 1566. That infamous Reformation revolt occurred when angry bands of Protestant rebels stormed Catholic churches and cathedrals across what is now Belgium and Holland, tearing down the statues of  saints and whitewashing religious art in a campaign to purify these sanctuaries of papist idolatry. To put down this revolt by Calvinist extremists, Philip II, the Hapsburg king sitting on his throne in Madrid, directed an infamous Spanish general, the Duke of Alva, to raise a mercenary army and re-establish his divine right to impose political order and religious belief.  

To this day, the massacres committed by Alva’s forces are remembered with bloody horror in the watery lowlands of western Europe, kept alive by nightmarish cartoons of unimaginably cruelty, of Spanish soldiers impaling babies on their bayonets, then raping and murdering their mothers.  

Seventy years later, in 1638, Richard Lattin, my eighth great-grandfather, sailed to the New World from London. As we saw in chapter one, the colonial Lattins tried to establish themselves in Concord, Massachusetts, then the edge of the western frontier, before settling down in the 1650s on both sides of Long Island Sound in what are now the states of New York and Connecticut.  

Our branch of the Lattin family tree traces back to Richard’s son, Thomas, born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1643. His descendants migrated to western New York state in the early 1800s just as a great religious revival was breaking out in a region that would become known as “the Burned-over District,” named for the fiery power of the Holy Spirit. It is said that flames of spiritual conversion swept across the land, saving souls from eternal damnation in what historians of religion now call the Second Great Awakening, giving rise to various Christian sects, including the Mormon church. But most of these settlers, including my ancestors, did not come in search of divine salvation. They came seeking work on the great Erie Canal project, a massive network of manmade tributaries designed to allow waterborne shipping from Chicago to the Eastern Seaboard. 

My father’s efforts to understand our family’s flight from the killing fields of Flanders to the Burned-over District of western New York inspired a trip to Belgium in the 1970s, which coincided with my undergraduate year abroad. I was studying at the University of Birmingham, not far from Norwich, England, the town I would later learn offered refuge to Jean III and his family back in the 1570s. On their way back home from Belgium, Dad and his third wife, Dorothy, stopped by to visit me in my university dorm room. They left me with a story of their visit and a Polaroid snapshot of a tomb. That photo sits on my desk as I bring this tale to you, nearly half a century later.  

They arrived at the cathedral in Mechelen, a.k.a. Malines, twenty miles north of Brussels, in the late afternoon on a crisp autumn day. 

Mechelen has a long history, but one thing has never changed. A river runs through it. As rivers go, the Dyle is extraordinarily ordinary. It’s fifty-three miles long and goes nowhere. Once, hundreds of years ago, back in the Flemish golden age, the Dyle was linked to a series of canals that could transport the waterborne traveler and his cargo — the finest textiles in Europe — out to the Antwerp seaport, to England, and beyond. Long ago, the upper locks were closed to navigation, but the Dyle still flows, slow and without much purpose, through Mechelen/Malines. 

This town, like many places in multi-lingual Belgium, is a place with three names. Some residents use the French word, Malines, to describe where they live. Others, and now most of the world, use the Dutch word and call the city Mechelen. Dutch speakers know the river that runs through their town as the Dijle. What you call the town and the river used to depend on what side of the river you live on. In fact, many locals say neither “Malines” nor “Mechelen,” but call the town Dijlestad, which is Dutch for “city on the river Dijle.” 

“Malines” is what most people called the town back in the days when three generations of men named Jean Lettin roamed its cobblestone streets in the sixteenth century.  

Its recorded history began one millennium earlier, in the sixth century, when a Scottish missionary journeyed to these western European lowlands to convert the Germanic tribes that settled here amid the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Today, the remains of that wandering priest are said to be buried somewhere inside the church that carries his name, St. Rumbold’s Cathedral. According to legend, Rumbold was martyred near Malines by two men the saint had denounced for their evil ways. 

Dad, a lapsed Presbyterian, and Dorothy, a practicing Catholic who spoke French, were looking for other remains, the remains of anyone named “Lettin.” They approached an old priest at the cathedral and asked him in French if he knew if there were any “Lettins” buried in the old cemetery, or if there was some registry they could consult. The priest told Dad and Dorothy that most of the records and many of the gravestones had been lost in bombing raids, some in the First World War and others in the Second.

 “There are nothing but dead people here,” the cleric said, sarcastically, in French. “Feel free to look around.”

Dad and Dorothy did just that. They spent an hour trying to decipher the barely legible names on the remnants of moss-covered stones in the cemetery outside St. Rumbold’s. Decades later, in 2010, more than 4,000 skeletons were removed from the cemetery to make way for a carpark. Back in the 1970s, Dad and Dorothy found no Lettin graves, so they decided to go inside to get a quick look at the cathedral before heading on their way. It was there, on the floor of the great church, that they found the tomb of a woman named Franchoise Lettin. My father had always wondered, as have I, how one of our ancestors  — and a woman ancestor at that — had been important enough to have been buried inside the cathedral back in the most tumultuous years of the sixteenth century.

Here’s the translation of the inscription on the tomb, rendered as literally as possible:

Here lies Mr. JACQUES GODIN, during his
life Lawyer to the Grand Council
of the King our Sire, who passed away on the
22nd of May, 1559
And Lady
FRANCHOISE LETTIN
His companion (wife), who left
from this world the 29th  of the month
of January 1586.
Pray God for their souls.

Solving the mystery of Franchoise Lettin, and how she and her husband found favor under  “the King our Sire,’’ requires a little history lesson about life back in the Burgundian Netherlands and the role on the Grand Council of Mechelen, the same body that Aunt Jennie referred to in the Lattin family history as the “Supreme Tribunal of Malines.”

Before the Protestant Reformation and the Roman Catholic counter-Reformation of the  sixteenth century, Malines and other Flemish towns like Bruges and Lille had enjoyed a couple centuries of relative peace and prosperity. Skilled craftsmen and craftswomen were known across Europe for producing the continent’s finest quality textiles. Raw wool imported from England was spin into yarn, then dyed and woven into cloth to produce luxurious tapestries, draperies, clothing and other fineries that commanded high prices and allowed some merchants to amass small fortunes. Some cloth towns were known for specific items, like bonnets or stockings. Malines was named after a French word denoting a special kind of silk cloth. 

Royal patronage from kings and queens, dukes and duchesses produced a golden age in the Flemish cloth trade in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, most notably through the sponsorship of the Dukes of Burgundy. The conspicuous consumption of the lavish Burgundian courts set aristocratic fashions as to what the finest noblewomen and noblemen should be wearing, along with what sort of sprawling tapestries they should  hang on the inside walls of their medieval castles. 

Today, the place where the Jean Lettin I and II worked is commonly remembered by historians as the Great Council of the Netherlands at Mechelen. Echoes of the council’s  importance in the history of the region can be seen in an expression still commonly used in nearby Luxembourg, which was one of the seventeen provinces of the Hapsburg Netherlands, and remains today as the world’s last remaining grand duchy. The Luxembourgish phrase mir ginn op Mechelen, or  “we’ll go to Mechelen,” is still used there to mean a last-ditch effort, or playing one’s trump card. 

Greffier de le Grand Conseil (it sounds more exotic in French) was a patronage job that could be passed onto one’s sons and other family members, which is what the Lettins did for much of the sixteenth century. But these clerks, if you want to call them that, did not lead boring lives. Eventually, they found themselves in the middle of a dispute that literally tore the Burgundian Netherlands to pieces. It also seems to have torn our family asunder. 

Working with an archivist with the City of Mechelen, I was able to trace the Lattin family back a little further, into the fourteenth century. The clues are contained in a battered, hand-written folio with an indigo-colored cover. The title, in florid French reads, “Genealogies des Familles de Wachtendorch.” Penned in the late eighteenth century, this record chronicles the marital unions and offspring produced by six “noble” families in the Burgundian Netherlands, starting in the year 1380. 

My family crest appears on page thirty-three of the folio —  three green chevrons, pointing skyward, surrounded by as many stars. It was depicted alongside the coat of arms of the Corenhuysen clan, three green clovers against a solid yellow field.

This document offers hints at how the Lettins wound up in Mechelen in the fifteenth century, working for the Grand Council during the sixteenth century reign of Charles V. It turns out that Pierre Lettin and his father, Gehan Lettin, came to Mechelen after serving as the bailiff of Armentiere, a town that’s now on the northern tip of France, right on the Belgian border.

In the late medieval period, in this part of the world, the bailiff was the guy who oversaw the estates of the lords and ladies, collecting rents from tenants, but he would also act as a magistrate, administering justice. So think of him as a kind of cross between a landlord and a judge.

Gehan Lettin’s ticket into the Dutch nobility was through his marriage to Lady Catherine de Corenhuysen, who hailed from  a noble family in one of the northern provinces. Don’t think of this marriage as a great romance. It was probably some kind of strategic alliance allowing both families to hold onto some degree of power, property and prestige in the rapidly changing economic and theological landscape of the Low Countries.

Gehan and his son, Pierre, were the bailiffs of Armentiere for much of the fourteenth century. At some point, Pierre moved to Malines, where his first son, Jean I, got the Grand Council posting that would be passed down to his son, Jean Lettin II.

Other documents in the Mechelen city archives confirm that Jean Lettin I was named greffier of the Grand Conseil  in 1494, just two years after Columbus “sailed the ocean blue.” 

One way to understand the role of the greffier is to think of it as the medieval equivalent to the head clerk for the chief justice of the California Supreme Court.

Another record uncovered in the Belgium archive, handwritten in a tight, cursive style in an antiquated French dialect, records the fact that Jean Lettin held the post of greffier of the Grand Conseil until August 31, 1521, when he was succeeded by his son, Jean Lettin II.  Further research revealed that on July 20, 1564, Jean II passed the job onto his son-in-law rather than his son, Jean III, who would soon flee to England. Also noteworthy is the fact that Jean II was ordained as a Catholic priest after stepping down as greffier. 

Europe in the fifteenth and sixteen centuries was a land of constantly shifting alliances between  royal families, papal forces, and the dukes and duchesses that these monarchs and pontiffs put in charge of  vast inherited land holdings, like the still-existing Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. This was also an era that saw the rise of artisan guilds, a merchant class and various local institutions that helped govern these rapidly-developing societies. 

It was the beginning of capitalism and the modern nation-state, and the beginning of the end of the divine rights of kings.  

These political, social and economic changes transformed medieval Christianity. Nascent states in the form of free cities and autonomous cantons challenged the ruling princes, pontiffs and principalities. This revolution would soon spark a Protestant revolution and counter-Reformation in the Low Countries by the global Spanish Empire, whose taxation of these prosperous city/states and plundering of the New World silver mines fueled economic prosperity and endless wars. 

In Malines, those vested interests between church, the crown and the rising merchant class would soon clash. And as is often the case, religion was the fuse that would ignite this inferno.

The medieval rulers of Europe established councils of state, which were also known as the consilium or curia, a word still used to describe the advisors to the Roman Catholic pontiff. Over time, these councils developed into bureaucracies with special branches appointed to oversee financial, judicial and political matters. In the Burgundian Netherlands these councils were once portable bodies, traveling around with whatever duke or duchess had been put in charge of the territory. 

 By 1473, the councils had grown into such bureaucracies that one of the French Dukes of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, established the council in a set locale, in prosperous Malines. For a time, this body was called the Parliament of Malines. Just a few years later, Charles’ daughter, Mary of Burgundy, severely limited its powers  —  part of the long struggle in this part of Europe between centralized royal power and the rising bourgeoisie.

Mary’s son re-established the local governing body in Malines, not using the term “parliament” but christening it the Grand Council. This body developed into a kind of supreme court for Flanders and its surrounding cantons, although its authority, powers and reach shifted throughout the sixteenth century.

Serving as the greffier would  have put the Lettin family in intimate contact with the rulers of the Burgundian Netherlands, or at least with their representatives. In this century of religious revolutions, tortuous interrogations, heresy trials and capricious executions, it was an appointment that seems to have placed the Lettins right in the center of the cyclone. 

That, in a nutshell, is the Grand Council of Mechelen. But what was everyday life like for people living in Mechelen in the middle decades of the sixteenth century?

We get a pretty good idea thanks to the work from the famous Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who lived for a time in Mechelen and whose work celebrated lively and often comic scenes of ordinary peasant life. 

Bruegel signed and dated one of his masterpieces, Netherlandish Proverbs, in 1559, the same year that the husband of Franchoise Lettin died and was entombed in St. Rumbold’s Cathedral. 

 Snatches of detail from Bruegel’s massive painting catch a man and a woman kissing in the highest attic window of a country home as a broom incongruously flies from the window. An armored man leans against a brick wall, dozing off while petting a gray cat. Another soldier dressed in white and wielded a large knife beats his head against that same wall. A man in a gold coat carries what appears to be a large basket of sunshine. A woman hugs a broken pillar, biting into it. At the center of the painting a young large-breasted woman in a bright red dress drapes a blue cloak over the head and shoulders of an old man. 

These are both scenes of ordinary life and illustrations of the proverbs collected and published in Bruegel’s time by the great Christian humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam. Proverbs collected in Erasmus’ Adagia include such favorites as “the blind leading the blind” and “a rolling stone gathers no moss.” Lesser known sayings help the viewer understand what’s happening in Bruegel’s famous painting. A “pillar biter” is a hypocrite, while placing a blue cloak over one’s husband marks him as a cuckold. 

Netherlandish Proverbs and other Bruegel paintings hint at some fundamental truth about the Flemish soul. The intriguing characters who populate these paintings are often engaged in frenzied, nonsensical activity. One can see in these peasants and burghers an automaton-like forlornness, a pathetic futility that touches on some unforgettable tragedy. 

Perhaps Bruegel sensed the horrific trauma that would rip the seventeen provinces apart in the 1560s. There is a foreboding sense in his 1566 painting, The Sermon of Saint John the Baptist, which purports to depict the prophet who foretold the coming of Christ. But the scene is, in fact, an obvious illustration of the Reformist “hedgerow” preachers of Bruegel’s time. It depicts a new type of minister who challenged the sacramental monopoly of the Roman Catholic priesthood. 

These Reformist clergyman included both Calvinist agitators from France and Switzerland and homegrown prophets from all classes of Flemish society. In the very year Bruegel painted this scene — a crowded, clandestine gathering in a dark wood across the river from a walled Flemish town — a Reformist sect that had been quieting growing here for several decades mushroomed into a mass movement. Hedgerow preachers attracted larger and larger audiences in the countryside outside the walled cities of Flanders, Brabant and other provinces. Sermons delivered at these open-air meetings took on increasing anti-Catholic tone. 

To the elite, the Iconoclastic Fury seemed to come out of nowhere. But it had been building for decades. 

Those psalm-singing revolutionaries were inspired by John Calvin, a French lawyer and theologian who rose to fame in the sixteenth century by questioning some of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.  Calvin was eight years old in 1517, when his fellow church reformer Martin Luther  posted his infamous ninety-five theses on the door of Wittenberg Castle. 

Fifteen years later, Calvin’s own theological musings prompted an outcry at the University of Paris, forcing John to flee France to avoid religious persecution. He would later recall that his ideas about reforming the church began with the dreadful realization of his own inherently sinful and profoundly depraved nature. That led him to such inner turmoil that Calvin became “exceedingly alarmed at the misery into which I had fallen.” His doorway out of this spiritual and psychological anguish was “a sudden conversion that subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame.”  

In 1536, Calvin sought refuge in the free city of Geneva, a place where he would eventually find enough intellectual liberty to reframe his ideas about the mechanics of divine salvation. His teachings about predestination — that God has already decided who will and will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven — along with his views on how the church should be organized and governed — would within his lifetime inspire the beginnings of the religious revolt that chased Jean Lettin III out of Flanders. 

Calvin had fled Paris to escape the French version of the Inquisition. Switzerland was already becoming the birthplace of the Reformed Protestant tradition, thanks to the teachings of  Huldreich Zwingli, a Swiss priest who established himself in Zurich and in 1519 began questioning Roman Catholic teachings on monasticism, purgatory, the invocation of saints and the nature of the Mass, which Zwingli saw as a purely symbolic ritual. 

In Geneva, Calvin eventually set up his own Protestant theological regime, which found its own heretics to condemn and burn at the stake. Calvin and some of his followers were as sure as Philip and the Duke of Alva that God was on their side. 

These clashing certainties would be disastrous for the townspeople of Malines and hundreds of thousands of other inhabitants in the watery low-lying  region of western Europe. 

Heresy trials and executions in the Low Countries began in the summer of 1523, when Augustinian monks at a monastery in Antwerp embraced Martin Luther’s Reformist ideas. Two who refused to recant were burnt at the stake in the Brussels marketplace. Between then and the outbreak of the Calvinist insurrection in the summer of 1566, scholars estimate that at least 1,300 Protestants were sentenced to death in the Low Countries for violating anti-heresy edicts. Among them were more than two hundred Anabaptists who were hunted down and hung in Holland after members of that sect attempted to seize control of Amsterdam in 1535.

“Charles V and his son Philip II were two of the most zealous persecutors in Christian history,” notes Oxford church historian Cecil John Cadoux. “How many persons were roasted or burnt, beheaded, hung, buried alive, drowned, branded, scourged, mutilated, exiled and imprisoned…is impossible to say.”

William of Orange estimated at the time that 50,000 persons had been either put to death or driven into exile under the government’s orders by 1566, which was when things really got bad.

 The first Calvinist pastor from Geneva had arrived in Flanders in 1544. Reformist preachers got their first hearing not in the countryside, but in the industrial districts of Flanders, including among foreign workers and those employed at the port of Antwerp, the busiest in Europe. At one early gathering in Ghent, a preacher used the ladder from a mill as his pulpit, inviting passersby to simply come and hear the “Word of God.” This self-appointed minister spoke with the dialect of a town in Flanders, indicating he was homegrown. Bareheaded and dressed in grey, he delivered a sermon in which he admonished sinners and prayed for the enlightenment of the king and the pope. He attracted a congregation of nearly a hundred worshippers, who sang from a book of psalms, which he sold for a denier, a coin worth about a penny.

At a monastery in Malines, Calvinists who had stormed the sanctuary faced off with armed magistrates assigned to protect it. Did Jean Lettin II and his son, Jean III, wind up on opposite sides of that face-off? It’s likely that Mechelen bourgeoise were divided between those supporting the Calvinists and others staying loyal to the Catholic cause, and it looks like the Lettins wound up on both sides of that divide.  

For the most part, the early iconoclasts in Flanders murdered neither priests nor their wealthy overlords. That was more commonly the case with the Huguenots, the French Reformed Church activists. In Flanders, the revolt — at least in its early years — had an admirable respect for human life, something the Duke of Alva and his mercenary soldiers most certainly did not exhibit when they swept into the lowlands in the summer of 1567.   

The previous summer, for example, at one church in Malines, a band of image-breakers approached the man in charge of a Catholic sanctuary, demanding the keys. The guardian of this church called on the local magistrate, who warned the mob that he had the power to call out a squad of  a hundred gendarmes. That was enough to convince these iconoclasts to find another church to purify, one they could sack without spilling any human blood.

This band of idol smashers may have been inspired by Gasper van der Heyden, a member of a respected burgher family in Malines who ran off at the age of sixteen to join the Calvinists in Antwerp. Gasper, the son of a wealthy goldsmith, took a job as a lowly shoemaker in that port city before being forced to flee to Germany, where he served as the pastor of a refugee church there.

As the Protestant revolt spread in the summer of 1566, there were efforts to negotiate a peace through a Netherlandish noblemen associated with the Order of the Golden Fleece, a powerful chivalric network established by the Hapsburg monarchy in 1429. William, the Prince the Orange, and the Counts Egmont and de Horne — along with the insurgent Protestants —  were led to believe that Philip had suspended the inquisition and the heresy charges, thus “allowing that in all places where the reformed religion had been preached it should be permitted.” 

Attacks on Catholic churches subsided. The Count of Egmont, who was the governor of Flanders and Artois, convinced those who had been quietly practicing “the new religion” that they should sign an agreement with their local magistrates. This turned out to be a ruse, a means to merely identify the leaders of the revolt. “The accord had only been made to be broken, so, as soon as the government was strong enough, the reformed religion was suppressed,” wrote historian William Moens. “The result for those who had signed the accord before the magistrates was disastrous; nearly all with their families had to leave their homes and goods, which were confiscated, the majority finding their way to England.”

Included among these, I suspect, was the lawyer Jean Lettin III. 

Malines was not known as one of the hotbeds of Calvinist insurrection. Rather, it is remembered as one of the strongholds of the Catholic faith. Its secular status had risen in the first half of the sixteenth century, but its political importance declined when many government institutions moved to Brussels. The town compensated for this by rising in religious prominence when the Roman Catholic Church reorganized its Flemish hierarchy and proclaimed Malines as the new seat of an archdiocese that would oversee the entire region, including Brussels. 

Early maps of the Seventeen Provinces of the Burgundian Netherlands show Malines/Mechelen encircled by its own border, making it a kind of separate city-state, a bit like the Vatican in modern maps of Rome.  This reflects its pre-existing organization as an independent lordship that was considered to be both part of the County of Flanders and the Duchy of Brabant. This special status as the spiritual center of the region is still reflected today in the fact that the Roman Catholic jurisdiction that administers Belgium is known as the Archdiocese of Mechelen-Brussels. The archdiocese was established in 1559. That’s the same year that Margaret of Parma, the daughter of King Charles V, was installed as the secular governor overseeing the seventeen provinces.  It’s also the same year the Franchoise Lettin became a widow. 

Within a year, an infamous Catholic priest and monarchist would be brought in to advise — some would say to subvert — Margaret of Parma, the governor of the Burgundian Netherlands. That would be the Rev. Antonio Perrenot de Granvelle, an advisor and papal emissary for both Charles V and Phillip II. 

In 1560,  Granvelle would be named by the pope as the first Archbishop of Malines. One year later, he would be elevated to cardinal. It is not hard to imagine that Granvelle would have crossed paths with Jean Lettin II — given that my semi-illustrious ancestor was both the gatekeeper at the Grand Council, whose duties included enforcing anti-heresy edicts, and was ordained as a Catholic priest during the first few years of Granvelle’s tenure.

It is not much of a speculative  leap to see the hand of Cardinal Granvelle in the events leading up to the flight of Jean Lettin III. 

Those of us more familiar with the geo-politics of the 1960s and 1970s than the machinations of the 1560s and 1570s might use the career of Henry Kissinger as the model to understand the role that Cardinal Granvelle played European politics in the sixteenth century. Kissinger was to Richard Nixon what Granville was to the Holy Roman Emperor. 

Born in 1517 in the Free Imperial City of Ornans, now in France, Cardinal Granvelle followed in his father’s footsteps to become a leading advisor to the Habsburg kings and papal diplomat just as the Protestant movement was challenging the European church and state. Among his duties were negotiating the marriages — a.k.a. strategic alliances — that Charles V sought for both Philip II and Margaret of Parma. Granvelle was also a key player in the Council of Trent, the historical gathering of Catholic bishops and cardinals held in northern Italy between 1545 and 1563 — a series of meetings called to respond to the rising Protestant threat. So it’s not surprising that Philip, one of the more religiously devout members of the Hapsburg lineage, would send Granvelle to Malines in his crusade to eradicate the rising Calvinist insurrection in the Burgundian Netherlands. “A true servant of Spanish absolutism, he clashed repeatedly with local estates and law courts in matters of religion, justice, and finance,” writes Charlie Steen, Margaret of Parma’s biographer. “Clearly hostile toward the cumbersome procedures of the Netherlands, he resolutely circumvented them at every opportunity, offending all who had vested interests and privileges.”

Looking back, it seems like the cardinal was not quite diplomatic enough in his Malines assignment. He overplayed his hand. He became so unpopular that King Philip was forced to recall him. Granvelle left the Netherlands in 1564, just as Jean Lettin II was stepping down as greffier of the Grand Council and being ordained as a Catholic priest. 

If this book were a novel, we would have Cardinal Granvelle leaving the Rev. Jean Lettin behind as his ecclesiastical spy. This could have divided the Lettin family, with the humanistic lawyer Jean III showing sympathy to the Calvinist cause. As one historian of the events in the Low Countries put it, the uprising of the 1560s pitted “neighbor against neighbor and even fathers against children.” 

Philip’s response to the Iconoclastic Fury in the summer of 1566 was the reign of terror unleashed the following year by the Duke of Alva, his inquisitors and his troops. Since the Netherlandish courts, including the Grand Council of Malines, were not seen as rigorous enough in their enforcement of anti-heresy edicts coming out of the Vatican and Madrid, the Spanish Duke set up his own panel of inquisitors. It condemned thousands of people to death or imprisonment, often without trial, including noblemen who had been negotiating a compromise with Margaret of Parma. Alva’s Council of Troubles, also known as the Council of Blood, was not just about theology. It was about political control. Alva and Philip used the Protestant uprising as an pretext for casting aside the provinces’ long tradition of legal protections and civil rights, the so-called “particularism of the Low Counties.” 

Alva, born in Spain in 1507 as Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, become synonymous with political cruelty and religious intolerance. His network of informers in heresy trials divided communities and families, perhaps the Lettins. “Eager for money or revenge, people hastened to give information against aristocrats, magistrates, and their neighbors, thus helping Alva at every step,” Steen observes. “An infinite number of previously errant people became automatically guilty of heresy according to narrow interpretation allowed by Alva. His determination to punish everyone only forced the good into despair and the bad into fury or flight.”

His terror, along with new taxes he levied during his reign, made him so unpopular that Philip was forced to call him back to Spain. He had to destroy the southern provinces of the Burgundian Netherlands in order to save them — to keep them until the control of the Hapsburg kings. 

Five years after Jean Lettin III escaped to England, in the summer of 1572, Malines fell into the hands of rebel troops under William of Orange, who soldiers committed their own acts of violence upon the lives and properties of loyal Catholics in Malines. Control of city shifted several times over the next decade — its misery aggravated by the outbreak of epidemic disease in 1573. 

William is also remembered as “William the Silent” or “William the Taciturn,” titles to differentiate him from his grandson, another William of Orange, who would later reign as the King of England. A nobleman and leader of the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece, William I turned on his one-time Hapsburg allies, a crime that resulted in his assassination in 1584 by a Burgundian Catholic and supporter of Philip II. 

That was more than a decade after Philip ordered the unpopular Duke of Alva to withdraw from the Netherlands, just like he had to do with the unpopular Cardinal Granvelle. 

It wasn’t until 1585 that the ruined city of Malines was brought back under the control of the Spanish kings. This successful military campaign was led by Alexander Farnese, the sole surviving son of Margaret of Parma, who had long since been sent back to Italy. 

In my research into the horrors that traumatized my paternal ancestors, I stumbled across a nineteenth century account written by William Moens, the vice-president of the Huguenot Society of London. He was among the descendants of French Huguenots, Flemish refugees and others who found a safe haven from the Inquisition in sixteenth century England. 

“The people in all parts of the Netherlands were fairly driven mad by the vengeance dealt out to them,” he writes, “nothing being left to them but torture and execution or self-expatriation, with the confiscation of all property and goods.”

Moens cites this first-hand account written in 1579 of the treatment of accused heretics swept up by the Duke of Alva and his Council of Troubles, complete with the Old English spellings:

Nowe  the ordinary torment of the prysoner is this: first, his handes are bounde together behinde his backe, and his body being trysed up into the ayre with a tormentrous engine, they bind to his feete instruments of yron of twentie-five pounds weight; then the Inquisitors say unto him: ‘Understand thou fellow, that if thou wilt not confess the troth, assure thy selfe we will leave thee heere to die in these torments.” In this paine hangeth this wretched and miserable patient, all his weeping and teares helping him nothing at all. 

Then the hangman letteth him slip at one choppe almost to the ground, by means whereof one joynt falleth from another. When this is done the hangman giveth him the second and third charge, and then getteth hym up; and thus this unnaturall torture and horrible torment lasteth from niene of the clock untill it bee eleven or twelve. 

When the prysoner continueth constant and will confesse nothyng hee is carried to the Church, where the Barbour Surgeons put him to three times somuch paine. The patient being in this miserable estate, they will him to be confessed or shriven, whereupon they finde of what religion hee is, and if so bee that he will confesse himselfe to the Priest, they have a notarie hid behind some clothes to write and note all the prysoner’s confession, because hee maketh him to speake distinctly and a loude.

Then the Priest telleth him: That hee hath power and aucthoritie to deliver him out of the handes of the father Inquisitors.

By these and such like words they sometimes deceive and beguile the poore prysoners, for if they confesse any thing, they bring their owne testimonie against them, to render them punishable. 

Alva’s army did not even bother to interrogate most of its victims. In one town, Moens writes, “Every house was plundered of everything valuable, and even the children were robbed of their shoes and clothing; unutterable outrages were committed on the married women and girls, who were afterwards sold by auction to the highest bidders. Men and women were murdered in cold blood by hundreds.”

Some of  the lucky ones, including the lawyer Jean Lettin III and his family, escaped across the North Sea and found sanctuary, for a time, on the British Isles. 

Mechelen was sacked by Alva’s mercenary army on October 2, 1572, just a few years after the Lettin family fled. Several hundred townspeople were killed during three days of looting, rape and rampage.  The Spanish general reported to Madrid that “no nail was left in the wall” in Mechelen. Alva’s troops then headed north to Naarden, where only sixty of the town’s 3,000 inhabitants survived that massacre. Alva boosted to King Phillip that “not a man borne escaped.”

Memories of the historic horror in the Low Lands are still very much alive today, nearly five centuries after the campaign of theological cleansing began in 1523, when two early Protestant reformers were burnt at the stake in Brussels. The Iconoclastic Fury of 1566 and the invasion by Alva’s mercenary army kicked off a war in the Low Lands that would drag on for eight decades and alter the map of Europe in ways that survive to this day. 

Let’s end this chapter with a promise to keep an eye on the myths we create about both ourselves and the larger world. Perhaps my soundbite explanation that my father’s people were persecuted Protestants “fleeing the northern arm of the Spanish Inquisition” is a latter-day incarnation of  another myth — the centuries-old “atrocity narrative” of Spanish cruelty. 

There’s much truth to those stories, but blaming the Spanish or the Papists for our suffering is an easy way to avoid the fact that the “devil is in the details.” It’s clear to me now that members of the Lattin family were fighting and surviving on both sides of the Wars of Religion. And as we’ve already seen in the first three chapters of this story, Protestant sects were at least as capable of cruelty and intolerance as the agents of the Roman Catholic Church, in both the Low Countries and New England.  

Our histories, both personal and global, are based on what we choose to remember. This story you’re reading is merely the latest example. It says as much about me as it does about what may have really happened to my ancestors and the worlds they inhabited. Were my iconoclastic tendencies set in motion by Jean Lettin III’s reaction to the Beeldenstorm? Was this the “faith” my tenth great-grandfather passed down to me? Is my obsession with this history fueled by my self-proclaimed belief in Skeptical Universalism? Or is this all just a misguided effort to understand myself? 

My examination of these questions is informed by a book I stumbled across in my research for this chapter.  Memory in Early Modern Europe — 1500 to 1800 was written by Judith Pollmann, a professor of Dutch history at Leiden University in the Netherlands and published in 2017 by Oxford University Press. I had scheduled an in-person interview with Professor Pullman during a planned trip back to the land of my forefathers, a journey that was postponed twice, most recently by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Pollmann’s view,  the changes brought about by the Reformations of the sixteenth century were momentous, but not only because they inspired political shifts, fueled religious wars and  divided families. They also “called into question fundamental relationships between the living and the dead, the sacred and the profane, the material and the spiritual, the past and present.”

In a chapter entitled “Scripting the Self,” Pollmann digs deep into letters, memoirs, public commemorations and various peace treaties that both describe and seek to move beyond the Wars of Religion that ravaged Europe over these centuries. Among these documents were various “Acts of Oblivion,” collective efforts to officially attempt to forget or downplay the role that religion played in this era of horror. Her analysis is based on a fascinating mix of public and private efforts to both remember and forget. 

For example, Pollmann tells the story of an eleven-year-old Dutch boy, Frederik Jacobs van de Moelen,  who was sent away from the war zone and went to live with relatives in Venice. He returns to his homeland twenty years later, in 1507, only to find that his entire extended family has died in the conflict. He remembers that his father once showed him dilapidated shields upon which were emblazoned his family’s coat-of-arms. Returning to his native Haarlen, Holland, he can’t even find one of those war remnants, which he has sought out to support his claims to nobility. 

“Most of us do not have claims to nobility to pursue, but, like Frederik, we need memories to know who we are,” Pollmann writes. “Cognitive psychology teaches us that humans are wired to forget most things they experience within a very short space of time…Yet people need to retain memories of some of their experiences…to know who we are, where we belong, and what our position is in relation to others.”

Frederik’s story brings to mind the memory I shared in the beginning of this chapter —  of my ten-year-old father attending the Lattin Family Association meeting with his Aunt Jennie, then passing on the story and our family crest down to me. It wasn’t until much later in my life, when retirement inspired me to take another look at my “self,”  that I began to question, and perhaps move beyond, the identity I have created to find my place in our world. 

These words are being written in early 2021, when another sort of iconoclastic fury is sweeping through our world  — another burst of insanity and violence fueled by religion and other fantastic ideologies. On Wednesday, January 6, a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in a deadly act of insurrection. They were inspired by bizarre conspiracy theories, racism, nationalism,  a power hungry narcissist and deluded evangelicals who convinced themselves that the rise of Donald J. Trump was somehow linked to the Second Coming of Christ. That attack followed months of another iconoclastic campaign to tear down or deface statutes of Confederate heroes and other historic figures. Among them were George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who failed to live up to a test of political correctness divorced from any real sense of history. One week after the mob stormed the Capitol, the San Francisco school board voted to rename forty-four of the city’s schools, deciding that such icons as Lincoln and Washington must to be taken down.

And, just like in the sixteenth century, these bursts of collective insanity on the right and the left unfold amidst a pandemic that is sending millions of people around the world to early graves. 

As someone once said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it somehow seems to rhyme. There are lessons from all of this, but I chose to end with a reminder from another scholar who had once shown a bright light on the dark side our mythologies.  

“To be hopeful in bad times is based on the fact that human history is not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness,” wrote Howard Zinn. “If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand Utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”