The Desolate End of Ericus Walten

Although the affair of the pamphlets was over by the end of 1690, the scandalmongering would sour the rest of Romeyn's days. His assiduous helper Ericus Walten was to suffer worse consequences. His part in the pamphleteering attracted the attention of William iii, and William's intercession had serious consequences for Romeyn’s standing and safety. We must therefore turn to the vicissitudes of Walten after Romeyn had betrayed him.

Ditched – but also alerted – by Romeyn, Walten settled in Rotterdam. Here he witnessed the riots that broke out in the early days of October 1690, when a frenzied mob razed the house of the local bailiff. He again put his pen at the disposal of the Orangist cause and wrote two pamphlets in defence of bailiff Jacob van Zuylen van Nijevelt, a notoriously corrupt official, but also William iii's client and strongman in Rotterdam.

His next project was the controversy around Balthasar Bekker, the Reformed minister who in The World Bewitch’d denied the existence of ghosts, spirits, witches, and the devil. His book was an immediate bestseller, with almost 6,000 copies of the two volumes selling out in two months. It sparked a furious debate, conducted in some 200 books and pamphlets. Bekker's orthodox opponents banned him from the Lord's Supper and had him sacked from the pulpit. Walten became the most mordant of Bekker's defenders, labelling his enemies as ‘seditious, Devil-sick usurpers, Satan-worshippers, and disturbers of the common peace’, forever seeking to rob the common man of the right to think for himself. His head-on attack on the clerical establishment was as radical as it was reckless. In November 1693, the Synod of South Holland submitted a petition to the Hof van Holland. Indignant at his ‘filthy mockeries, gruesome slander, and absurd distortions of the Word of God, and charging the orthodox opinion of the Reformed Church with horrible consequences’ they demanded Walten's seizure and the suppression of his writings. On 19 March 1694, he was arrested on a charge of blasphemy and locked up in the Gevangenpoort jail in The Hague.

During the following months, the justices of the Hof interrogated Walten about his theological views.