The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (24 page)

All these women were tried and convicted, which does not neces- sarily mean their stories were simply made up. A woman who claimed in court in
1676
that she had bought off her banishment said she had personally paid the bailiff
300
guilders for the purpose.The aldermen took this very seriously and questioned the bailiff, who protested in vain that the reprieve had been in return for ‘services to the law’. One interesting detail mentioned in passing is that the deal was negotiated not by the bailiff but by his wife.
33

Brothel-keepers were in an excellent position to act as informers. They received many visitors of all kinds.Their trade was illegal but not consistently proceeded against, so the police could deploy threats and rewards at will. Bawds were especially useful in tracing girls who had disappeared into the world of prostitution. In
1712
a mother approached procuress Lijs Koetsier ‘to beg her to help find out where her daughter might be’.Together they went to nine or ten addresses, in vain.Then the police decided to put Lijs under pressure; she was arrested, but told her banishment would be annulled if she found the girl within three days. She failed to do so and was expelled from the city.
34

The police faced a dilemma, since it was the most notorious of broth- el-keepers who were of greatest use to them, one example being the infamous bawd
R
ijkje Jans, alias
R
ijk Banket, who had been convicted at the age of
20
for selling her
14
-year-old sister’s virginity. For more than a decade each further arrest and trial ended in her release, presumably in exchange for services to the police. In
1691
, at the request of the bailiff,

she traced
16
-year-old Mary van de Put, a girl from Delft who had fallen into prostitution in Amsterdam. The bailiff asked her to keep the girl with her until Mary’s family came to fetch her, but
R
ijkje had the audac- ity to employ the girl as a prostitute in the meantime.This meant she had overstepped the mark: her prostitution business was wound up and she was banished from the city for two years.
35

‘Correspondents’ were hated in their own milieu and risked falling victim to acts of revenge. Brothel-keeper Clara Walraven flew at a man and hit and scratched him in the face, then smashed the windows of his house,‘because his wife has been of service to the law’.
36
In
1733

Jacob Bicker
R
aye noted in his diary that a woman had been stabbed to death in the street and there was talk that ‘she was a whore and an

informer, who has been of much service to the law, which people believe to have been the reason for it [the stabbing]’.
37
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Informers and witnesses in cases that carried the death penalty were the focus of particular animosity. Hilletje Joosten, a silk-winder with connections in criminal circles, called out loudly to two women in the
R
eguliersbreestraat in
1699
: ‘Traitors, are you here? You’ve helped an- other twenty to the gallows.’ This caused a large crowd to gather, shouting ‘Strangle the whore now with a rope around her throat and hang her from a tree.’ At this ‘a large bunch of riff-raff . . . dashed up to

the women, and kicked and hit one of them so dangerously that she would have been at risk of her life had she not been grabbed by a constable’.
38
No wonder some of those who were freed on condition they found ways to betray their comrades failed to come forward with information. Streetwalker Marretje Jans, released in
1723
on condition she provide incriminating evidence, did nothing, but boasted openly to her friends:‘The bailiff has promised me
330
guilders if I can inform against Toon Parlepoe and Jan Weva.’ The next time she was arrested she was shown no mercy and harshly punished.
39

Their willingness to enter into deals with such characters did the reputation of the bailiff and his officers no good. Given the sums of money and the types of people involved, malpractice lurked on all sides.
40
The custom of compounding in particular could easily lead to abuse and even extortion.

Buying off charges of
adultery
41

Adultery was deemed far worse than mere fornication. Forbidden by the Ten Commandments, it was one of those scandalous sins which, in the words of the Political Ordinance of
1580
, ‘ignite God’s wrath and bring it down upon lands and peoples’, and which ought really, it was felt, to carry the death penalty. It did not, but punishments were very harsh. A man could be sentenced to fifty years’ banishment from the

Province of Holland and West Frisia, plus a large fine and an official declaration that he could no longer be considered an honourable man, such that ‘the same man, as being perjurious and without honour, shall de facto forfeit his office’.
42
By contrast, an unmarried woman who had been to bed with a married man was sentenced merely to four- teen days on bread and water: she was guilty of fornication, but not of adultery.
43

These laws, which treated men in established positions particularly harshly, might seem to have given the wives of respectable burghers a powerful weapon against unfaithful husbands, including those in the habit of visiting prostitutes, but in fact it was too powerful a weapon, since the whole family would suffer as a result of the punishment meted out to the man. Wives therefore hesitated to report such of- fences, indeed it was sometimes they who went to the authorities to plead for their husbands to be allowed to buy off the charges.

The wives of whore-walkers usually preferred to take things into their own hands.A well-documented
1724
case from The Hague con- cerns Josias Marda, who frequented a brothel on the Binnenhof. His wife repeatedly followed him and eventually took the children with her, standing at the door shouting loudly at the prostitute whose regu- lar client he was:‘My husband is here again, you hold him here, I and my children have nothing left to eat or drink, he spends all he earns here in your house and leaves me and the children to go hungry.’ A constable who asked why she did not lodge a complaint with the authorities was told:‘I’d have done so a long time ago, except that my neighbours advised me against it, for fear that my husband would be made to suffer hardship for it.’
44

This was a common public ritual, and often the wife would be ac- companied and supported by women from her neighbourhood. Such a scene would soon cause a crowd to gather in front of the whore- house and might end with the smashing of the windows. The wife targeted all her aggression and curses at the prostitute, not at her hus- band, giving him a chance to come home without too much loss of face.This was also a signal that he was still welcome at home.

Men caught in the act of adultery were usually eager to buy off the charge there and then. Some might be willing to pay even if the ac- cusations were false. The whole point of the procedure was that it should be carried out with absolute discretion, but tongues would wag, especially if members of the elite were involved, as the diaries of

Constantijn Huygens Jr and Jacob Bicker
R
aye demonstrate.The com- bination of sexual misconduct, money, links with prostitution, and the spectacle of people from the elite brought low will always arouse con- siderable public intrigue. It was not the lower orders for once but the

higher who were at risk, not outsiders but the established. The au- thorities were uneasy about such cases.After the notorious affair of the sheriff of The Hague, Johan van Banchem, brought to trial in
1676
for the gross abuse of compounding for adultery, the States of Holland issued a ban on buying off such charges.Within two years, however, it was permitted once more.
45

As the bailiffs’ accounts show, the vast majority of men arrested for adultery, Jews accused of sleeping with Christian women, and ‘perpe- trators of obscenity’ had been caught in the company of prostitutes, whether in brothels or in the street. Sometimes they had been found by chance during raids on music houses, or caught by nightwatchmen doing their rounds, but many had been informed against by prostitutes or brothel-keepers. There was a rule in such cases that the illicit or perverted sex must not have been stage-managed or incited. Informers could expect rewards, but entrapment was punished. Then there was the complicating factor that anyone who had complied with the wishes of such a client had herself committed a punishable offence.

Streetwalkers Lijsbeth Janssen and Susanna Thomasse, for example, found out how thin the dividing line was between informing on someone and entrapment. OlphertWijnands, himself a police informer, had contacted them and told them to alert him if they came upon a possible ‘exploit’, in other words a case that could earn them all some money. One evening in September
1704
they picked up a man and took him to the Leidsekerkhof, a graveyard in the city centre. He gave them money to buy a rod, which Lijsbeth did, but she then went straight to Olphert to tell him they had a ‘flagellant’, a man demanding to be flogged.When Olphert arrived a little later with a deputy bailiff and several officers, the women were just starting to lash the man. In- stead of being rewarded they were arrested and punished.
46

Another woman who came off badly as an informer was Margriet van den Hillebrants, in
1723
. She had spoken to two deputies and of- fered ‘to do them considerable services . . . and to render into their hands Jews and Christians who were married and had fornicated with other wenches and also among others a gentleman who committed foul acts or sodomy with his valet’. She received some twenty guilders

in total, but never actually informed on anyone. She was arrested as a prostitute and given an exceptionally severe sentence: public whip- ping, exposure on the scaffold, and six years in the Spin House to be followed by ten years’ banishment from the province.
47

When supping with the police, it seemed, you did well to use a long spoon. No wonder, then, that there were brothel-keepers who had no intention of turning their customers in, especially if they paid well. Such was the case with Susanna Jans, whose whorehouse was visited once a week by a Jew who paid to have himself flagellated. Sadomasochism was one of the ‘foul acts’ that rated as punishable offences and could be com- pounded.When Maria Wessels, the prostitute to whom Susanna gave the task of flogging the man, refused, saying ‘that it was an executioner’s task and that such knaves should be dealt with by the bailiff ’, Susanna com- mented ‘that it was better that she should get money from the Jew every week than that the bailiff should do so only once’.
48
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These stories reveal a twilight zone where the boundary between use and abuse of the law was all too easy to cross, but there is no evi- dence that the Amsterdam bailiff was personally involved in such abuses, and only a few isolated cases have been found of imputations levelled against his deputy bailiffs and their men. Even the sensational- ist
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
contains no suggestion they were cor- rupt. True, dozens of nightwatchmen were tried for drinking in whorehouses or for blackmailing streetwalkers, but they were not pro- fessional policemen and the mere fact that their cases came to trial suggests such practices were not tolerated. In the spring of
1739
, how- ever, a scandal broke that would cast the integrity of the Amsterdam police into considerable doubt.

The extortion case of
1739
49

In March
1739
, in the strictest secrecy, Deputy Bailiff Jan Schraven- waard was arrested.The accusation, in the words of diarist Jacob Bicker
R
aye, was ‘that he had kept several whores and rented houses and rooms for them so they would entice this or that married person and then send for him, and so in this underhand manner he had entrapped various people, and committed further acts of knavery’.

Beginning on
27
March, in proceedings that lasted for two months, the deputy was interrogated and repeatedly confronted with accomplices

and witnesses. At first he was held and questioned in his own house, guarded by two of the bailiff ’s men.The proceedings were recorded in a separate file that was only later bound into the appropriate Confes- sion Book; the authorities apparently wanted to avoid the disgrace of a public trial of a high-ranking law-enforcement official.They managed

to hush up the case for several weeks. Bicker
R
aye, who always had an eager ear for gossip about the judiciary, makes no mention of it until

16
April. By then all of Amsterdam was talking about the arrest, and the news became a true sensation that night, when Schravenwaard climbed out of the window of his house and fled the city.

The bailiff, Ferdinand van Collen, immediately sent two men after him and on
20
April they arrested the fugitive playing cards at a Utrecht inn.
50
Deputy Abraham van de Bogaard and his officers came to fetch him the next day, and it was after nightfall when the group arrived back in Amsterdam. The barriers (the wooden gates that blocked ac- cess to the city from the water at night) were not lowered and despite the lateness of the hour there were many people around.‘Beat him to death, beat the dog to death,’ hostile bystanders shouted. Schraven- waard was led away to the holding cells in the town hall like a com- mon criminal.

Two of his most important accomplices had already been taken into custody: the bawds Johanna den Hartog (also known as Poxy Anna or Yids’Anna) and Seija Hendrina de Koning, alias Hendreyne the Mus- sel. Poxy Anna ran a bawdy-house on the
R
eguliersbreestraat, close to an inn the deputies used as a police station, while Hendreyne was in charge of a music house in a slum neighbourhood commonly referred