Extraterritorial Privacy Zone?

Tom-Eric Krijger

doi:10.52024/tseg.11042

Abstract

The Protestant Reformation led to a radical redrawing of the map of Europe, severely affecting international relations. An important consequence of Protestantism was the emphasis on the private dimension of religious practices, as it did away with clerical intermediaries and instead put the focus on the direct relationship between God and the believer. In this context, to facilitate diplomatic traffic between Catholic and Protestant countries, ambassadors came to enjoy the so-called Right of Chapel, allowing them to create a private place of worship and have a private chaplain at their ambassadorial residences. This right was explicitly included in two treaties that the Kingdom of Portugal and the Dutch Republic concluded with each other in the mid-seventeenth century. However, the two parties to the treaties had starkly different understandings of what was meant by ‘private’. Both of these treaties granted Dutch citizens in Portugal freedom of conscience in their own houses, but the contrasting interpretations of what ‘private’ actually meant for the Dutch and for the Portuguese resulted in serious disagreement about the exact scope of these religious rights.

Highlights

What Central Park is to New York City, the Jardim da Estrela is to Lisbon
Some local ministers in the privileged Dutch Reformed Church had heavily protested at this, the Dutch States-General and the colonial administrators had acted in accordance with reality – Lutherans, many of whom were of German descent, were well-represented among the employees of the Dutch East and West India Companies.[94]
The States-General and Van Kretschmar had merely formalized the existing situation in Lisbon; after all, Lutherans, most of whom were Germans, had been attending the religious services in the Dutch embassy chapel for several decades, but had far outnumbered the Reformed Dutch. This lenient attitude towards Lutherans fits within a larger trend: fuelled by the spirit of the Enlightenment, the urge to counteract economic decline, and the emergence of a sense of Dutch ‘nationhood’ without specific confessional connotations, Dutch political authorities in the course of the eighteenth century began to adhere less strictly to the restrictive mea sures prescribed against non-Reformed religious communities.[95]

Summary

Introduction

What Central Park is to New York City, the Jardim da Estrela is to Lisbon. On the many sunny days with which the Portuguese capital is blessed, locals and tourists alike descend on this municipal park in large numbers to seek out the shade, have a picnic, or catch their breath. As the Latin caption of its mortuary – constructed in 1794 – reveals, it was ‘erected at the expense of the British and the Batavians’, the latter of whom are nowadays better known as the Dutch.[4] second only to that of Henry Fielding, one of the most eye-catching tombs is that of Daniël Gildemeester (1717-1793), the fabulously rich Dutch consul-general in Portugal between 1759 and 1780, and his son Jan (17561778).[5] This Gildemeester family figures prominently in the final stage of the history of a Protestant chapel housed within the Dutch embassy in early modern Lisbon. As I show in my conclusion, because of this discrepancy in the interpretation of what religious privacy entailed, Dutch Protestants’ religious privacy was restricted as much as possible by the Portuguese authorities, a restriction which was challenged, in turn, by the Dutch authorities

Embassy chapels

Protestant foreigners in Portugal and Catholic Portuguese in the Dutch Republic

Conclusion