Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

Maurits began by announcing what everyone must have known already: he was preparing
to return home. He thanked the members of the Hoge ende Secrete Raad for their service,
obedience, and trustworthiness and informed them that from henceforth they would assume all
the responsibilities and authority that previously had been invested in him. He addressed each
member individually and administered to each an oath of loyalty to the States General, the Prince
of Orange, and the Heren XIX. 2 Once this had been done, he and the three councilors retreated
into a separate, smaller chamber, where Maurits presented them with a lengthy memorandum he
had composed to advise the council on the best means to govern the colony and to maintain order
amongst its subjects. 3 The counselors thanked Maurits and wished him a swift return journey.
Ten days later he left Recife along roads thronged by supporters and onlookers amidst a carnival
atmosphere famously memorialized by his official chronicler, Casper Barlaeus. 4
It was a ritual display of political power and a reminder—should one be necessary—that
the Dutch commercial world of the mid-seventeenth century was both more colorful and more
complicated than the impression left to us by the rows of portraits of Marcusian one-dimensional
men, clothed in black, counting coins and scribbling notes in their Amsterdam canal houses. 5
Maurits was a nobleman, a decorated military commander, and a patron of the arts and sciences:
a “Humanist Prince” in the New World, as one scholarly collection put it. 6 He has been variously
credited with expanding the territory under Dutch control, promoting religious toleration for
Jews as well as Catholics, and with supporting a coterie of painters, naturalists, astronomers, and
2 The text reads "zijn hoocheyt," which would have referred to Frederik Hendrik, the Prince of Orange.
3 Caspar van Baerle, The History of Brazil under the Governorship of Count Johan Maurits of Nassau, 1636-1644,
trans. Blanche T. Ebeling Koning (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011).
4 Ibid., pp. 395-398.
5 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991).
6 E. van den Boogaart, Hendrik Richard Hoetink, and Peter James Palmer Whitehead, eds., Johan Maurits van
Nassau-Siegen, 1604-1679: a Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil. Essays on the Occasion of the Tercentenary of
His Death (The Hague: Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting, 1979).
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