Chapter 2: Rensselaerswyck

II

Rensselaerswyck

            In the days when the Dutch still held government in the New Netherlands, before the Duke of York could claim name to the province, a ship given charter by the West India Company sailed from Amsterdam and among its cargo were two lowly pilgrims with the surname Van Den Bos. In Old Dutch, it meant 'From the Woods', and they speculated that their medieval ancestors were indeed woodland folk, never coming from out the trees besides on market days to sell and barter. Such was common in those days, when oddments daily grew in the old-growth forest, fragmented cults and shrines to queer occurrences, such as old Saint Guinefort. Men were lulled into the balmy recesses, free from tax and king. Yet then, the Van Den Bos family left the Netherlands for fairer strands, and smoother commerce, leaving the shadows of the wood behind forever. After a long and arduous voyage aboard the frigate Valckenier during the winter, for the seas are never kind during December, the family arrived in the bustling port of New Amsterdam on a snowy Christmas Eve, 1650. As they were indebted in their crossing to the Rensselaer family, who had paid their fare, they took their meagre possessions aboard a small brig up the Hudson to settle their roots in the provincial soil. 

            In the middle of the province of New York, 150 miles north up the Hudson River sat the rustic Manor of Rensselaerswyck, quietly nestled in gorgeous and lush fields between the numerous nourishing tributaries which flee the great river into the countryside. Upon arriving at the Manor, as was custom, they were given leave to build, and build they did, a small humble cottage of wattle adjacent to which they planted their first crop of an unfamiliar sort, the North American winter-pumpkin. The spring and autumn harvest came and went, and the Van Den Bos family grew comfortable in their new home in the wild reaches of the Dutch colony. Ten suns had past, with many a summer and winter spent in mirth, when the Rensselaer family gave lease to the plot, which the Van Den Bos family had cultivated. In Old Dutch ran the contract, not a deed in fee simple, but a lease of years to be paid to the manorial lord, and at the bottom lay the signature, Barendt Van Den Bos, in the sprawling orthography of his low style, followed by a seal in red wax of the Manorial family.

The years then passed without any spot of difficulty, for though news of trouble with the English spread far within the colony, the Manor was well insulated from all sorts of disquietude, fairly secluded in the quiet of North America. Indeed, the Van Den Bos family grew both in number and in happiness, tending to the land as simple farmer folk, and were quite loyal to the Dutch government and to Lord Rensselaer himself. In 1674, at the end of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, the Van Den Bos family rejoiced at news of the return of the Dutch commandant in the City of New Amsterdam, yet, paradoxically, they were tacit upon learning of the concession of the Colony to the Crown of England. Thus, in that year, the Colony of New Netherland became the Colony of New York, and the Van Den Bos family became English subjects.

            While many among the Manor grew restless and uneasy at the change of government, and resisted the Anglican English, reverting to a form of Dutch conservatism in name, language, and all but law, the Van Den Bos family happily learned the English tongue, and became in name and affect Englishmen. It is no surprise then, that from the year 1700, the family conveyed names of English descent upon all children henceforth, utterly abandoning any semblance of Dutch ancestry beyond their idiosyncratic surname. From then on, time passed quietly and the original two who had braved that winter Atlantic became but tokens upon stone in the family graveyard.

            These are the accounts of the family Van Den Bos from whose sinews our George was born in the year 1748, in the reign of King George the Second. He enjoyed an easy childhood, being youngest among three boys and eldest amongst two girls, who loved exploring the hilly woodland surrounding the village, for the small farm Barendt had cultivated in solitude now stood one among many in a small hamlet (itself one of many in the sprawling Manor). The very trees seemed alive to George, and in their leafy boughs, he imagined all assortments of fairy creatures and spooky beings, his impressionable mind filled with twilight superstition. He would oft sit on the bank of a bubbling brook, his back resting on an ancient oak, reading the poetry of Edmund Spenser or John Milton and savoring every syllable.  

            Born by this youthful activity was an admiration of the lore of England as provided in books obtained by his father. Amidst the silence of that sleepy village, his mind would wander far to England’s urban shores, rehearsing ever and anon the grand epics of history: the debates of Parliament with their soaring rhetoric, the War of the Roses, the signing of Magna Charta at Runnymede, and even the sad flight of James the Second, throwing the great Seal of the Realm into the Thames, with the triumph of the Whigs. He felt fervently English, and his desire to join the civic society of the British Empire only grew when his father enrolled him into the nearby Latin school at Albany. “I'm but a farmer, George,” his father would tell him, “But this life is not meant for you.” “But I love the farm, papa,” George would say, and his father would smile, saying firmly “No, boy. You are my dearest son, and to you I give everything.” By this, he meant the blessings of education, for at the age of sixteen, having been heavily taught in the rhetoric of Quintilian and Cicero, George left for New York City to study for the bar, the first of his family to escape the grasp of Rensselaerswyck. His father sold a few acres for tuition and his Latin school tutor helped galvanize enough patronage to send him thither.

            Therefore, the progeny of tenant farmers, with no claim to a grand name or fortune, began his studies at the greatest college in the Colony of New York.

⁂

[PRETENDED?] GENEOLOGY OF GEORGE VAN DEN BOS

Abstracted from his commonplace, dated from 1763:

My lineage includes the royal line of France and those of the Northmen, and from the ranks of scholars of the truth and of antiquarian lore, yet as far back as I can tell, the line begins somewhere in antiquity in the city of Rome, though may be influenced in some ways from Judea, Cappadocia, Illyricum, Gallia, though in the Pax Romana, all roads led to Rome, even those which led to Byzantium. The following is as rough a sketch as I can provide (tho’ who can credit it?), given what my family has said and what my name implies. It is little more than conjecture and contains many holes, and it must be acknowledged that all low men seek in their nebulous past ancestors of renown.

I hail in some way from VETTIUS AGORIUS PRAETEXTATUS (anno 384 mortuus est) and from CASSIODORUS SENATOR (585 mort.), from these two eminent trees many hundreds of thousands of shoots likely run, including mine. There are lacunae after, and one wonders if my entire ancestry comes from two sole luminaries, surely not. From what hidden strands do I come? From Judea, from Gaul, wither is my origin? Surely, one of these many shoots from Rome was a couple, FELICTAS and HIERONYMOUS AURELIUS SENATOR, who begot EURYDICE, of whom all we know is that she married a Thessalonian. After this was clearly an exilic period when, after the crossing of the Rhine by hordes of barbarians, the descendants of the aforesaid found their way somehow mixed in with the Northmen in Scandinavia, wherein are two lines, which themselves eventually merge: viz. HROLFR OF NORMANDY and ERIC BLOODAXE.

1. The son of the latter was HAROLD GREYCLOAK, who begot TRYGGVE, who with EIVOR HROTHGARSDOTTIR begot RALPH, who with HILDA begot WILLIAM THE SMITH who with ERMENTRUDE begot JONATHEN THE ELDER who died in the 1099^th year.

2. From the former was begot GERLOC who with WILLIAM III OF AQUITAINE begot ADELAIDE who with HUGH CAPET (anno 996 mort. rex Francorum primus, among whose illustrious fruit included St. Louis and fierce Charles of Anjou, who broke the terror of Hohenstaufen) begot HEDWIG OF FRANCE (1013 d.) who begot ERMENTRUDE who with the aforementioned WILLIAM THE SMITH begot the elder JONATHEN. The elder begot a younger, who died in 1156 from whom came HEINRICH, after which is a long lacuna, not very much worth filling, and not at all surprising considering the deadly and virulent plagues, war, and famine dotting the following centuries. HEINRICH is remembered as he is the last ancestor my family felt worth remembering from this mediaeval era, for the lineage was nobly mix’d and exalted until the lowly blacksmith William tore Ermentrude from her nobility in the blindness of love’s passion, hence came two lowly Johns and a Heinrich, of whom nothing really is known, save that he is the incipit of a long line of lowborn people of little consequence (of which I am the latest, but shall I yet gain a reputation?). Shortly after this point, my ancestors likely inhabited the ancient city of Tournai, and shortly thereafter began that hermitic lifestyle of which our surname is a talisman. There is one ancestor, however, who is responsible for our abandonment of France, and that is Martinus, a lowly Martin in truth, who had read some Albertus Magnus and Aquinas with the Black Friars at their school, and knew a bit of Latin enough to alter his name with Roman endings; this Martin, I say, took upon himself the harsh dogma of Calvin after reading his Institutes and in the year 1554, left France for Rotterdam as a religious exile, hoping perhaps to become a second Erasmus. Hence begins our Dutch lineage, the line of which will be given at a later date, for my hand is tired.

⁂

In the year 1560, MARTINUS begot THOMAS (who was much less lettered than the Latin scholar his father, certainly to his great disappointment) who with FRANCESCA ISAASCS a common wench of Jewish ancestry, begot LARS, their youngest, who begot BARENT VAN DEN BOS the Elder, who in the year 1617 signed his name on a freemen’s association as a silk-dyer, using our current surname, for surely then it was a moniker rather than a name, but it stuck, for whatever reason. This man is my great-great-great grandfather and was a very successful tradesman and was very devout. From him a small book of poems exists, written in Dutch, speaking of the virtues of the mind and soul of a member of the elect. BARENT with ALETA SCHUYLER begot a daughter ANNA [she had retained her maiden name] who by all accounts was also a strict Calvinist, who begot a second BARENT, the Younger, on January 5^th 1650 according to a parish baptism record in this province, for she had escaped the Low Countries aboard an Indiaman, seeking better pastures, and this man grew hemp, and some crops in the very town where I live now. A writ granting a lease of years dated the 4^th of February, 1660, a deed still in our possession, witnesses the spidery signature of BARENT the Elder, then certainly very old and with a palsy of some sort, proving they endured the arduous voyage with ANNA to this new world. BARENT the younger in 1675 begot my grandfather ROSAMUND who begot CHARLES, my father in 1704, who begot myself in the 1748^th year of our LORD JESUS CHRIST, the last and least among this genealogy’s sons and daughters.

Chapter 1

Chapter 3

Warning: The Yellow Cardinal contains adult themes that may not be suitable for all audiences under the age of 18. Some chapters may contain descriptions of graphic scenarios including but not limited to: suggestive materials, violence, 18th century racism and slavery, sexism, etc.  Read with caution and/or parental permission.

An 17th century map of Rensselaerswyck, New York.