The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (22 page)

Arguments in favour of leniency mostly come down to the time- honoured theory relayed by Belcampius: prostitution is a necessary evil. Both this basic notion and its wording were often drawn directly from medieval statutes: in a city of commerce like Amsterdam one cannot do without ‘public whores’, so the best approach is to allow prostitution on certain conditions, the
1478
statute argues.The
1509
statute claims such an approach will prevent a greater evil, namely ‘the rape of women, vio-

lation of virgins, and other such outrageous offences’.
80
In
1651
the
R
ev- erend Petrus Leupenius speaks scornfully of the ‘toleration of whores, so

that honourable women and girls should remain unharmed’.
81
Another frequently heard argument (see Appendix
1
) was that the Amsterdam authorities regarded prostitution as a necessity because there were so many foreigners, travellers, and sailors in the city.
8
2
‘Well, would it not be better,’ asks the first-person narrator in
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
of his guide, the devil, ‘if the whores and whorehouses were all driven out, as is done in other cities?’ He receives the following answer:

The world cannot be governed with a Bible in the hand; other cities, where people will not tolerate whores, do not have such an influx of foreigners and seafarers as Amsterdam has, and, just as such people are not so very discrimi- nating in their tastes, especially the sailors, who daily, when they are on shore, drink themselves tight and full and are just as rough and intractable as the element they navigate, so it is necessary, in order to avoid a greater evil, to wit, the assaulting and defiling of honourable women, the violation of maids, and other such irregularities, to tolerate public whores.
83

The argument from the presence of sailors is repeated endlessly. Only rarely can a dissenting voice be heard, such as that of the German visi- tor Johann Grimm, who in
1775
calls the seafarer argument a ‘miser- able excuse’. He is convinced that the very existence of music houses invites the frequenting of prostitutes. He has seen for himself how eas- ily lascivious women can tempt men to enter brothels.
84

In his
Fable of the Bees
(
1714
), Bernard Mandeville praises Amster- dam’s policy on the issue, using time-honoured arguments and phrases. Prostitution is a necessity, because of the thousands of VOC sailors in the city who have not seen a woman for so long. He adds:

It is Wisdom in all Governments to bear with lesser Inconveniences to prevent greater. If Courtezans and Strumpets were to be prosecuted with as much
R
igour as some silly People would have it, what Locks or Bars would be suf- ficient to preserve the Honour of our Wives and Daughters? . . . And how is it to be suppos’d that honest Women should walk the Streets unmolested, if there

were no Harlots to be had at reasonable Prices? For which
R
eason the Wise
R
ulers of that well-order’d City always tolerate an uncertain number of Houses, in which Women are hired as publickly as Horses at a Livery-Stable.
85

Bernard Mandeville was born in
R
otterdam in
1670
, studied and gained his doctorate of medicine in Leiden, and settled in England in
1691
, where he died in
1733
. In England he worked as a physician, but it was as a writer of shrewd and provocative social analyses that he

gained his considerable fame—and notoriety. In
The Fable of the Bees
, his best-known work, he devotes several pages to prostitution policy in Amsterdam, writing that the organizers were hounded and fined. Pros- titution could easily be rooted out, he claimed, but the government had no intention of doing so, although it would never admit as much. The policy is aimed at keeping excrescences within bounds and pro- viding the police with an income; as a result the city has a well-drilled and cheap police force. A further aim is to give the outside world the impression that prostitution is in fact being tackled. In reality, the trade is tolerated, which is a sensible and advantageous policy. So runs Man- deville’s interpretation (Appendix
1
).

Mandeville adapts his description to his line of reasoning, to serve as an example of rational governmental policy. In his
Modest Defense of Publick Stews
(
1724
) his message is: if you cannot abolish it, regulate it. Even so, his observations are extremely interesting. Mandeville was one of the most astute observers and commentators of his time. His style and his thinking owed much to his Dutch background, and he continued to write in Dutch to his many Dutch friends in London. In
1700
he spent several months in Amsterdam and his conclusions may therefore be based to some degree on what he saw with his own eyes.
86
He is the only Dutchman to contribute—admittedly in England and in Eng- lish—to an open debate about prostitution, and what he wrote was in- fluential. His
Fable of the Bees
was sharply criticized but also much read and translated, although not into Dutch. Many foreigners, especially the English, observed Amsterdam prostitution with the words of Mandeville in mind, or took a stance based on opposition to what he had written.
87

In England and France, from the late seventeenth century onwards, a public debate took place about the role of governments in combating prostitution. There is no sign of such a discussion among the Dutch until much later. Amsterdam lawyer Henricus Calkoen was the first to write openly about the problem of prostitution policy, and in his
Ver-

handeling over het voorkomen en straffen der misdaaden
he offers a defence of the policy pursued in Amsterdam, which in his day was one of regu- lated tolerance. Prostitution, says Calkoen, cannot be prevented but at best curbed; anyone who looks at the matter with ‘a political eye’ and ‘is not so foolish as to demand the impossible’ will have to admit that there is a great deal to be said for the way it is dealt with in Amsterdam:

For to tackle this evil vigorously, by tolerating absolutely no brothels, nor any other places of iniquity, however they may be named, would prove dan- gerous, indeed entirely impossible, especially in large cities, where luxury and excess predominate.This evil, then, like cancer, incurable, and not being vanquishable either by the force of law or by authority, policy, or admoni- tion, must rather be restrained than strictly proceeded against. A sensible connivance and state supervision, coupled with sufficient harshness to pre- vent or impede the growth of this evil, is all that must be done against it by the legislature.
88

This seems to have become the prevailing opinion. In his
Vrolyke reis van een Engelschman door Holland
(
1796
) Gerrit Paape articulated it as follows:

Amsterdam has the healthy statecraft to tolerate music houses, alias public whorehouses. I say healthy statecraft, for where the temptation is irresistible, the government will do best whenever it takes the reins into its own hands in this matter and makes it as little damaging to society as possible; just as, when the people have wise leaders, one makes use of lightning conductors, in order to give the lightning a course to follow, such that great damage to the same can be prevented.
89

Both Calkoen and Paape employ the typical late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment imagery of sickness and lightning conductors, but the argument that prostitution is a necessary evil is many centuries old.

‘The devil! I must have money for this’:The Dark Side of Prosecution Policy

P

rostitution was vigorously denounced, it was forbidden by law, the police were under strict orders to eradicate it and arrested thou- sands of whores and bawds, yet in Amsterdam the trade was rife and highly visible. Contemporaries blamed the authorities.The municipal government was said secretly to regard prostitution as a necessary evil, impossible to eliminate from a port city that could not function without it. Dutch writers claimed the bailiff and his men earned money from prostitution, not only through fines and out-of-court set- tlements but by corruption and extortion. Some foreigners wrote that in Amsterdam prostitution was regulated through taxation and the sale of licences.The prevailing image, broadly accepted by historians, is of a hypocritical government, a corrupt police force, and a blind eye

turned to brothels and music houses.
1
How much of this is true?

The police were far from popular. Constables were publicly reviled and even pelted with dirt or stones, and the bailiff himself was some- times treated with open hostility, even though such audacity would be severely punished.
2
Corrupt bailiffs, deputies, constables, and night- watchmen abound in farces, popular prose works, pamphlets, and satires.
3
Their poor reputation was closely connected with the prosti- tution trade. Prostitutes and bailiffs are mentioned in the same breath in Dutch sayings of the time such as ‘Let none be tempted from his path | By whores who weep and bailiffs who laugh’ and‘As the whores weep, so laugh the bailiffs’.
4
In the popular farce
De gehoornde schout
(
1712
) (The Horned Bailiff ) a bailiff proposes to a bawd named Griet

that they lure a married person into a trap and then make him pay dearly to have his adultery settled out of court. He tells her: ‘if you know of a fat married plum |You’ll get your share of the overall sum’. Griet then arranges things in such a way that he catches his own wife, who has arranged to meet her lover in the very same whorehouse.
5

R
eal-life bailiffs and their deputies were accused of making precisely such deals with whores and bawds, through what was in fact an abuse

of a legitimate arrangement known as ‘compounding’ (
compositie
), a remnant of an ancient legal practice by which certain crimes and mis- demeanours could be settled out of court for a negotiable fee. The bailiff ’s men were also said to accept payment in return for leaving whorehouses and music houses in peace, or for warning brothel-keep- ers of upcoming raids. The reputation of nightwatchmen was little better. They allegedly refused to protect brothels against acts of vio- lence unless paid to do so; once paid, they simply sided with brothel- keepers against the citizenry. Both constables and watchmen were said to be in the habit of walking into whorehouses and music houses and accepting free drinks.

The Amsterdam bailiff does not feature anywhere as a fictional character, but we do come upon a deputy bailiff in
D’Openhertige Juf- frouw
, where the heroine, prostitute Cornelia, sets a trap and delivers up an adulterous ex-lover to him as an act of revenge.The deputy catches the man in the act of adultery and ‘compounds’ with him, making him sign a bond promising to pay
800
ducatoons (
2
,
520
guilders). Cornelia gets her share, but the deputy bailiff goes on to make her life a misery, pressuring her to bring him more such customers and threatening that otherwise she will face prosecution herself. She eventually moves out of Amsterdam, since there is no way she can get the better of the bailiffs, who ‘resemble Horse-Leeches, and never leave sucking their Prey, as long as they find the least Humidity’.
6

In this period, little distinction was made between personal and political virtue, and to a great degree personal virtue was conceived in sexual terms. It is therefore not surprising that politically motivated hos- tility towards a person who held public office might find expression in accusations of sexual impropriety or of having links with prostitution. In

1690
the corrupt and much-hated
R
otterdam sheriff Jacob van Zuylen van Nievelt was accused in satires penned by his opponents (among

them the young Bernard Mandeville) of being a ‘whore-walker’, of sex- ually abusing maidservants and female prisoners, of suffering from the

pox, and even of being a sodomite: a sizeable inventory of sexual sins. True or not, this was ammunition commonly used in polemic.
7
‌
‌

Pecuniary interest

The police, at all ranks, had a financial interest in acting against prostitu- tion. Many offences and misdemeanours carried fines and in other cases the charges could be bought off. The bailiff and his deputies were entitled to a third of all such payments, another third went to the person who had reported the offence, while the remaining third was for the city. This system of rewards, such that a public servant earned part of his pay in the course of his duties, goes back to the Middle Ages. It was one of the usual means by which public employment was financed and there was nothing illegal about it.Wages and salaries were adjusted accordingly.The Amster- dam bailiff received a fixed salary of
1
,
550
guilders a year, including ex- penses, yet his total annual income came to between
5
,
000
and
6
,
000
guilders. His deputies were paid
800
guilders and received a cut of all fines of up to six guilders.The fixed income of a constable, at
260
guilders a year, was below the subsistence level. It was supplemented by small bo- nuses and tips. Both deputies and constables profited most of all from the one-third share of the proceeds allocated to those who reported and brought in a criminal, since it was often they who did so.

Cases involving prostitution contributed significantly to police in- comes.There were fines for brothel-keeping, for instance, although the sources suggest such penalties became substantial only well into the eighteenth century. Mandeville claims that the police vexed and fined brothel-keepers as much as possible ‘to squeeze a Living out of the immoderate Gains accruing from the worst of Employments’.
8
Fines, however, were far less lucrative than ‘compounding’, which often came into play in cases of adultery; many married men caught in brothels paid there and then to have the charges dropped. The same went for Jews, since sex between Jewish men and Christian women was pros- ecuted as adultery.
9
Arrests for sex in the street and for ‘extreme ob- scenities’, such as flagellation, could also be settled in this way. Naturally none of these outcomes are mentioned in the Confession Books, but they do appear in the bailiffs’ accounts (
schoutsrekeningen
), which were submitted annually. Unfortunately the only accounts to have survived are for
1723
and for
1732
–
95
, and the data is abbreviated, with no