The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (26 page)

Hendrik Timmerman was so upset that he felt in no fit state to go to see the bailiff the next morning. Abraham de Haan visited Sper- mondt on Timmerman’s behalf and took the opportunity to challenge the deputy, saying such fines surely applied only to married men. Sper- mondt answered that ‘according to the law of the land no one was exempted from punishment for lechery’, which was of course true. De Haan also asked why the woman had been released,‘for the one does not sin here more than the other’. She made her living at a ‘lamentable and lewd trade’, he pointed out, and therefore deserved to be sent to the house of correction, whereupon the deputy responded ‘that then we might as well turn the whole city into a Spin House’.

In Timmerman’s deposition we read about the events that had pre- ceded all this. He had been approached in the street by a young woman, ‘Chrissie the seamstress’, who claimed she was not a public whore but still lived with her parents.They agreed to meet in a private house, but after they got into bed a man emerged from a corner of the room and went to fetch Deputy Spermondt.Timmerman’s protests—that he was not married, that he wanted to speak to the bailiff himself, and that he needed a lawyer—were to no avail. He was ordered to pay
200
guilders and told he should count himself lucky he did not hold public office, since then it would cost him double, and indeed that he was not mar- ried, since if he were it would set him back
6
,
000
guilders. If he refused to hand over the money, Spermondt was certain to receive orders the next day to take him to the holding cells, which meant Timmerman would be declared dishonourable and find himself banished from the province.

Timmerman caved in at that point, but when Spermondt demanded that he write a personal letter to the bailiff he at first refused to set down what had happened in black and white, since his honour would then be tainted in perpetuity.The deputy swore that the letter would be

returned to him. Two days later Timmerman asked for it back, but Spermondt said he had already burned it.That was a lie, since, as Tim- merman feared it would, the letter ended up in the dossier:

To the Chief Officer Esq.,

I have, to my misfortune, fallen into the hands of Mr François Spermondt, deputy bailiff, who has found me in bed with a wench. I pray very humbly and submissively that Your Honour will forgive me this weakness on this occasion, it being the first time that I have come into Your hands in this fash- ion. I offerYour Honour a sum of
200
guilders.With the request that with this I may be instantly discharged.

Your very humble and dejected servant,

Hendrik Timmerman

According to his version of events, Deputy Spermondt took the letter to the bailiff, who was magnanimous enough to leave it to the deputy to settle the case. As soon as the money was paid, the offender would be free to go. As we have seen, the matter was settled that same night with the help of Timmerman’s friend Abraham de Haan.

Timmerman had promised to thank the bailiff personally, and on
13
February at eight in the morning he stood on the Herengracht outside Bailiff Ferdinand van Collen’s door along with Spermondt, who had given him detailed instructions on the way.Timmerman must merely thank the bailiff, saying nothing about the fact that the woman had approached him in the first place or that he was unmarried. Such excuses would only provoke van Collen to issue a ‘sharp reprimand’. So Timmerman held his tongue, even when the bailiff, admonishing him for his deed, said that he had not wanted to take money for it and had therefore forbidden his deputy to do so. This makes clear why Spermondt had pressed Timmerman to go to the bailiff personally to thank him: the bailiff had in fact ordered his immediate and uncondi- tional release. Confused and upset, standing face to face with a high- ranking gentleman,Timmerman got no further than to stammer that with God’s help he hoped he would never commit such an indiscre- tion again. Only afterwards did he realize the extent to which Sper- mondt had deceived him.With the help of his faithful friend Abraham de Haan he lodged an official complaint against the deputy bailiff.

The affair cost Spermondt his job, although he was not so severely punished as Schravenwaard. His case was dealt with in a civil proce- dure that took place behind closed doors, so he was not publicly

dishonoured. The story does not end there, however. His colleague, Deputy Bailiff Abraham van den Bogaard, died suddenly on
11
May.
58
‘They say from shock,’ Bicker
R
aye writes in his diary. He had played no part in the misdeeds of his colleagues, but the scandal did reflect on him since he was closely involved in the whole affair. It was he who had been sent to arrest his colleague in Utrecht. Moreover he had personal connections with the Schravenwaard family: he was their
‌
‌

landlord.
59
By 20 May Schravenwaard too was dead; there is every sug- gestion that he had left the city and committed suicide.
60
Two dead and two sacked: only Deputy Bailiff Jan Geurssen and the water bailiff (the deputy responsible for shipping) emerged unscathed.

Was the Amsterdam police force corrupt?

The ‘roguish tricks’ of Schravenwaard and Spermondt are on a par with those of the corrupt bailiffs and sheriffs of contemporary fiction. The question is, however, whether these were exceptional cases that occurred in a specific period, or whether they serve to bring to light the usual course of events.There is much to be said in support of the former theory. The evidence of extortion is concentrated in a few

years, roughly
1734
–
9
. Jacob Bicker
R
aye, a keen observer of the judi- ciary, noted rumours of enormous sums paid by married men caught

with whores in diary entries for
1735
(
3
,
600
guilders),
1737
(
20
,
000
guilders), and
1738
(
3
,
500
guilders).
61
The bailiffs’ accounts do not give these exact sums, but they make clear that a great deal of money was earned from compounding with adulterers in these specific years.

The bailiff at the time was Jan Backer, who took office in
1726
. There are no surviving bailiffs’ accounts for the years before
1732
, and in
1732
and
1733
they feature only a few ‘married men found with whores’.The numbers then increase. In
1734
there are eight such cases, in
1735
sixteen, and in
1736
around thirty. In
1736
roughly
16
,
000
guilders was collected for adultery committed by Christians and another
1
,
425
from three Jews who had visited Christian prostitutes. In addition, a great deal of money was paid to correspondents in these years; at the same time, the number of arrests for prostitution declined. Then, on
2
February
1737
, Ferdinand van Collen was appointed bailiff and the practice of compounding immediately stopped. He wasted no

time in ordering strict measures to combat prostitution and that same year there were ninety-seven arrests, the highest annual total in the whole of the eighteenth century. But things quickly slipped back into the old pattern. More and more cases of adultery were bought off for higher and higher sums, paid informers were always involved, and it was usually Deputy Schravenwaard who turned the men in. On
1
February
1739
Schravenwaard settled accounts with the bailiff in no fewer than five cases of compounding. For that month alone the total collected was
12
,
000
guilders, but after
1739
the bailiffs’ accounts men- tion only a few cases of this kind per year, and they no longer involve payments to correspondents.
62

On
3
March
1739
Schravenwaard carried out his last recorded com- pounding. By then the police were rounding up Poxy Anna, Hen- dreyne the Mussel, and various others for involvement in extortion. Soon the deputy bailiff was under arrest and his first interrogation took place on
27
March.Van Collen may well have had his suspicions before this, but he needed to wait for concrete complaints and for people prepared to testify. The first of these was the prostitute Wille- mijn Biesheuvel, who presumably declared herself willing to give evi- dence against the deputy, no doubt in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Her evidence was important enough for Schravenwaard to threaten her:‘I hear you have made a deposition,’ he said, and ‘I shall put you in the Spin House if you make such a declaration under oath.’ It was only when Schravenwaard was under lock and key that others came forward with incriminating statements. Finally Schravenwaard’s victims themselves found the courage to tell their stories, followed by the victims of his colleague Spermondt; the depositions by Hendrik Timmerman and Abraham de Haan date from mid-April.

One question remains. How could things have been allowed to come to such a pass, especially since the deputies had to consult their chief officer at every stage, tell him all they knew, and ask his permis- sion before arresting anyone or allowing charges to be bought off? Part of the answer lies in the fact that it was up to the bailiff to seek verifi- cation of what his deputies told him. There was a considerable social divide between them, which grew even wider in the eighteenth cen- tury as Amsterdam’s ruling elite steadily distanced itself from the com- mon people.
63
In the seventeenth century compounding had been carried out by the bailiff in person. Even in those days ‘exploits’ may not always have been ‘pure’, but the Amsterdam bailiff could hardly

stoop to personal dealings with brothel-keepers or to nocturnal ap- pearances at the beds of adulterers.

By withdrawing from day-to-day affairs the bailiff lost contact with ordinary people. There is a world of difference between the familiar relations between burgher and bailiff suggested by the joke about the man who came to report his own offence and Hendrik Timmerman’s subservient and fearful attitude towards the chief of- ficer. In the eighteenth century the bailiff depended on the deputies for his information, which made the supervision of compounding more difficult but profiting from it easier. The largest share of the profits, after all, was for the bailiff himself while other people did the dirty work, so there was a great temptation not to ask too many questions.Van Collen personally profited to the tune of
9
,
532
guil- ders in
1738
alone from married men and Jews found with prosti- tutes, while the accounts record that Schravenwaard and Spermondt took home
1
,
830
and
1
,
300
guilders, and their officers shared a total of
2
,
317
guilders.

As the involvement of the deputies in everyday policing increased, the potential for abuse grew. Things got out of hand in the
1730
s when the wrong people were appointed, in the persons of Spermondt and Schravenwaard. They did not belong to those families that had pro- duced deputies for generations, nor were they from the ranks of estab- lished Amsterdam citizens. Spermondt, a former wine merchant, became a deputy in
1734
; Schravenwaard, not a native of Amsterdam, in
1736
. These newcomers stepped a long way over the ill-defined boundary between use and abuse of the law.

There is a further aspect that helps to explain the increase in abuses of compounding in these years. A few years earlier, in
1730
, the
R
e- public had been startled by revelations about the existence of a net- work of ‘sodomites’, involving people in the highest social circles. It led to a veritable witch-hunt, with dozens of executions for sodomy and hundreds of men fleeing the country and being convicted
in ab- sentia
. Opinions are divided as to the causes of this unprecedented pursuit of sodomites, which engendered panic and violence.There was

a temporary tightening of moral norms—the old fear of God’s punish- ing hand was felt strongly once again—and sodomy was no longer seen as a separate category of sinfulness that was incompatible with less serious acts such as illicit heterosexual sex and adultery, but rather as the ultimate consequence of moral and sexual depravity. People came

to believe that prostitution could lead to sodomy and therefore needed to be dealt with firmly.
64

The discovery that many of the accused were not outsiders but from the very heart of urban society came as a shock. None other than the brother of Bailiff Jan Backer, for instance, turned out to be a sodomite. Amsterdammers now became especially keen to avoid any stain on their sexual reputations, which made them particularly susceptible to blackmail. It was in this atmosphere that an unmarried burgher like Timmerman, who was not a prominent figure and did not hold public office, could allow himself to be so successfully entrapped.

In the end it was Ferdinand van Collen who stepped in. He was a suitable candidate for the post of bailiff, in that he was extremely rich and therefore not in need of money, unlike his predecessor. He had a good reputation, in fact he may even have been appointed specifically to put a stop to the abuses, which were much talked about.When he be- came burgomaster a few years later the common people were delighted, ‘because he is a very good man, who is loved by all the world’.
65

The practices brought to light by the Schravenwaard and Sper- mondt affairs show that complaints about the police were by no means always unfounded.The system as such was far from sound and clearly prosecutions were partly motivated by avarice. Still, I can only con- clude that the Amsterdam police constituted a reasonably professional force, abuses were regularly punished, and trials were generally fair. Amsterdam did not compare badly with other European cities.