historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

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Chapter 3. Biography
possible argument to place Boxhorn in the Counter-Remonstrant camp can
be found in a report of the French doctor Samuel Sorbière (1615-1670) about a
visit he had paid to Boxhorn around 1642/43. 226 Sorbière tells us that
Boxhorn seemed not really well-disposed towards the very wellknown
Grotius. For as the conversation gradually, as is usual,
advanced to the questions which were then discussed amongst the
learned and to the recent writings, he not only admitted that he disagreed
[with Grotius-JN] (what many people do who are sympathetic
and well-disposed towards Grotius) about beginning a sort of union
and attributing too much authority to the Pope, but he also accused
Grotius, together with the other Remonstrants, about political matters
of the fatherland. 227
Sorbière comes up with two arguments ‘with which I could excuse Boxhorn’.
Or because he, when he was younger, had heard what had happened
from other unreliable witnesses. Or because he, holding the office of
professor, believed that he was hired by the Calvinists, whose favour,
because they govern the commonwealth, it not belongs to a man, who
seeks to govern his private assets well, to lose. 228
cism. During the Truce Controversies, Pontanus, a relative of Boxhorn by marriage, had written three
epigrams ‘in which he argues against the Remonstrants on the question of predestination’. Skovgaard-
Petersen, Historiography at the Court of Christian IV (1588-1648), p. 42, there footnote 9. Heinsius, ‘a cultured
and enlightened but consistently orthodox member of the Reformed Church’, was ‘Secretary of
the Lay Commissioners at the Synod of Dort’. Sellin, Daniel Heinsius and Stuart England, pp. 21, 29.
Adriaen Hoffer was send by the ‘ultra-Gomarist inclined churches of Zeeland’ as a deputy to the Synod
of Dort and is called by Meertens ‘an orthodox Calvinist’. Meertens, Letterkundig leven in Zeeland in de
zestiende en eerste helft der zeventiende eeuw, pp. 326, 329. Scriverius, however, belonged to a family which
had a ‘Remonstrant background’. Langereis, Geschiedenis als ambacht, p. 106.
226 According to Sorbière, he had ‘visited Boxhorn, a thirty-year old man …’. Samuel Sorbière, Sorberiana,
ou bons mots, rencontres agreables, pensees judicieuses, et observationes curieuses (Sebastien Mabre-
Cramoisy ; Paris, 1694), p. 44. ‘Invisi Boxhornium juvenem annorum triginta …’ Since Boxhorn was
born on August 28, 1612, this places Sorbière’s meeting with Boxhorn somewhere between the end of
August 1642 and the end of August 1643. Sorbière had moved to Holland in 1642, where he stayed for
a number of years. See the entry “Sorbière, Samuel (1615-70)”, in Luc Foisneau (gen. ed.), The Dictionary
of Seventeenth-Century French Philosophers, Vol. 2 (Thoemmes Continuum; London, 2008), p. 1186.
227 I here follow the version given by the French philosopher Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) in his Dictionnaire
historique et critique. Cinquième édition de 1740. Revue, corrigée et augmentée, Vol. 4 (Slatkine Reprints; Geneva,
1995), p. 562, (N). N). N ‘ Is visus est τώ πάνυ Grotio minus amicus; nam sensim procedente, ut fit, sermone ad quaestiones
tunc temporis volitantes docta per ora virum & nupera scripta, non solùm dissentire (quod faciunt multi boni & amici
Grotio) se fassus est circa initum conciliationis modum & tributam nimiam Rom. Pontifici authoritatem, sed ipsum
insimulatus est circa politica patriae negotia, unà cum caeteris Remonstrantibus.’ Bayle follows here the Sorberiana
printed by George Gallet in Amsterdam in 1694. The 1694 Paris edition reads ‘initium’ instead of ‘initum’
and ‘ipsam’ instead of ‘ipsum’. I would like to thank Henk Nellen for his help with this text.
228 Ibidem. ‘Quaerens apud me rationem qua excusarem Boxhornium; aut quia junior res gestas audierat ab
aliis non probatae fidei testibus: aut quia professorium munus exercens conductum mercede se putabat à Calvini-