The Expansion of tolerance

The governing body of the WIC, the Heren XIX, in fact drew up an agreed
set of political ordinances for the governance of all its conquests in the New
World, in October 1629, in which it laid down that the Dutch Reformed
Church, organized on the same basis as the Reformed Church in the United
Provinces, would be the sole and exclusive public church in all its territories;
and hence the only ecclesiastical body to be linked with the administration,
army, navy, and judiciary, and the confession to which all its commanders
and higher office-holders were expected to adhere. At the same time, though,
certain specific proposals for religious toleration were instituted. 2 Since in
their strategic deliberations of the 1620s, as recounted among others by
the chronicler De Laet, as also in their published propaganda and publicity
designed to drum up support and investment for the Company, the directors
had always made much of the allegedly cruel exploitation of various
oppressed peoples and groups reportedly suffering under Spanish and
Portuguese colonial rule – especially native peoples and the New Christian
descendants of former forcibly baptized Jews – predicting that these groups
would eagerly and whole-heartedly support the Dutch in any attempts that
they made to wrest Ibero-American territories from Iberian hands, it is not
surprising to find that the directors from the outset intended to make
provision to secure a good understanding, and military alliances, with
native American populations and to attract New Christian and Sephardic
Jewish settlement by according this group freedom to practice their religion
undisturbed in private homes. Whether or not this aspect of their calculations
rested more on fantasy than a realistic appraisal of circumstances, it is
striking that, during the 1620s at least, the Spanish royal Consejo de Estado
(Council of State) in Madrid showed definite signs of alarm at the possibility
that New Christians scattered across many parts of the Spanish and
Portuguese empires might defect both from the Iberian crowns and the
Catholic faith and flock to join the Dutch. 3
17