The Zuiderkerk

The church in Amsterdam known as the Zuiderkerk (‘South Church’) loomed large in the youth of Romeyn de Hooghe. Finished in 1611, it was the city's first church to be specially constructed for the Reformed Protestant community. The building served the Lastage district, a neighbourhood recently transformed from dockyards into a residential zone to accommodate Amsterdam's rapidly growing population. The occasion for its construction, prosaic rather than pious, had been the urgent need for burial space for the victims of a plague epidemic (fig. 1.1).

The Zuiderkerk was the de Hooghe family's habitual place of worship. Here they would gather to attend Sunday service and had most of their children baptized – and eventually buried. It was where father and mother de Hooghe, on Sunday, 10 September 1645, presented their third child Romeyn at the font. The Zuiderkerk's baptismal register records the father's name as another Romeyn, and the mother's as Susanna Gerrits. The infant's godmother was Marietje Gerrits, surely Susanna's sister.

Four years earlier almost to the day, the young Romeyn's parents had had their banns of marriage announced (see Genealogical Table 1 on p. 20, and the Appendix on p. 417). The groom, Romeyn de Hooghe Senior, stated that he was born in Amsterdam, was 22 years old and a button-maker by profession. Both his parents were dead, and he was living on Engelspadt (‘English Path’); his brother Jan de Hooghe was acting as his witness. His fiancée Susanna Gerrits also hailed from Amsterdam, reported the same age as well as the same address as her future husband, and had brought her mother, Annetje Andries, as her witness. The register yields another nugget of information: signing his banns with a shakily scribbled single letter r, the elder Romeyn de Hooghe was clearly illiterate, whereas his bride signed with a meticulously penned Susanna Gerris [sic]. Three weeks later, the couple had their wedding solemnized in Diemen, a small village near Amsterdam.

Romeyn Sr had been baptized at Amsterdam's Nieuwe Kerk on 25 February 1620 as the son of Jan de Hooghe and Sara Stevens. At the time of his wedding, this would have made him one year younger than the age he reported.