This chapter examines the most important religious consequence of the Revolt of the Netherlands, the splitting of the Low Countries into two confessional states: the Catholic Southern Netherlands and the Protestant Dutch Republic. In the Southern Netherlands Catholic reformation would pick up speed, as church, state and laity worked together to re-catholicize the region and marginalize its small Protestant minority. This would prove in the long term to be a successful effort, and the Southern Netherlands became a bulwark of Baroque Catholicism. The Dutch Republic would be an officially Protestant state with one public church, the Dutch Reformed, but its population was multiconfessional. A regime of toleration was put in place that managed both the privileged church and the private confessions. Thus the legacy of reformation continued in both states, but under very different guises.

Writing on the religious culture of the early modern Dutch Republic, the eminent historian Johan Huizinga once observed, “The foreigner who wishes to understand our history begins with the assumption that the Republic was indisputably a Calvinist state and a Calvinist land.” To this Huizinga, a Groninger with Mennonite antecedents, wryly rejoined, “We Dutch know better.”1 Indeed, although in the popular imagination Calvinism and the Netherlands are virtually synonymous, the actual history of this relationship is, of course, far more complicated. In the Netherlandish context John Calvin, or rather the religious movement his ideas helped to inspire, had to compete with a wide variety of other equally zealous and committed groups intent on religious reform. Although Calvinism would “win” the Reformation in the Netherlands by becoming the only publicly sanctioned religion of the independent Dutch state, it would also have to coexist with a wide variety of religious movements and sects throughout its history. The Dutch Republic was not Calvinist, but Calvinist and pluralist.