"
To return to Amsterdam's sights, the church which I remember with most
pleasure is the English Reformed Church, which many visitors never
succeed in finding at all, but to which I was taken by a Dutch lady who
knew my tastes. You seek the Spui, where the electric trams start for
Haarlem, and enter a very small doorway on the north side. It seems
to lead to a private house, but instead you find yourself in a very
beautiful little enclosure of old and quaint buildings, exquisitely
kept, each with a screen of pollarded chestnuts before it; in the midst
of which is a toy white church with a gay little spire that might have
wandered out of a fairy tale. The enclosure is called The Begijnenhof,
or Court of the Begijnen, a little sisterhood named after St. Begga,
daughter of Pipinus, Duke of Brabant,--a saint who lived at the end
of the seventh century and whose day in the Roman Catholic Calendar
is December 17.
The church was originally the church of these nuns, but when the old
religion was overthrown in Amsterdam, in 1578, it was taken from them,
although they were allowed--as happily they still are--to retain
possession of the court around it.
In 1607 the church passed into the possession of a settlement of
Scotch weavers who had been invited to Amsterdam by the merchants,
and who had made it a condition of acceptance that they should have a
conventicle of their own.
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