Lodowick op den Dyck

Son of Gysbert op den Dyck, page 30; son of Lodowick op den Dyck, page 26; son of Gysbert op den Dyck, page 21; son of Johan op den Dyck, page 15; son of Johan op den Dyck, page 11; son of Deric op den Dyck, page 8; son of Henric op den Dyck, page 3.

Born about 1565; alive in 1615; married Gertrude van Wesek before 1597.

His wife may have been a sister of Nicholas and Deric van Wesek, who were elected Schepens of Wesel in 1603, and who are believed by Dr. Harless to have been descended from a knightly family of the name van Woesik, found in Gelderland as early as the fourteenth century.

There is no record of Lodowick having held any of the offices so often occupied by his ancestors. He appears for the first time, as admitted to citizenship in 1586, upon a page of the Wesel Town Book, of a part of which we give a photographic reproduction opposite. In former times this privilege of burghership was regularly transmitted from father to son, but in the sixteenth century it seems to have become personal to the individual, and a deceased burgher's son wishing to receive it had to be accepted by the Council, and to pay a fee.

For at least a part of the thirty years during which he appears on the Wesel records, Lodowick was engaged in brewing, and was also host of the "Dragon" Inn. An explanation of his undertaking these somewhat humble occupations is to be found in the great decadence suffered by Wesel in his life-time. The prosperity of the city depended on its commerce. In the latter part of this century the long and unsuccessful efforts of Spain to conquer Holland, and political dissensions in other countries, involved

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8TH GENERATION; LODOWICK OP DEN DYCK. - 35

Wesel in dangers and difficulties. These were increased, as we shall see, by the confusion arising from the death of the Duke of Cleves without male issue, and finally resulted in the siege, capture, and long occupation of the town by a Spanish force. Some account of these war troubles will be found at the end of this sketch. The burghers saw their substance consumed and their commerce stifled. At such a time it would be natural for a man of active mind to profit by the crowds of strangers that overran the city, and to try, by selling them the necessaries of life, to repair some of the losses occasioned by their hostile presence. We may infer that Lodowick did not lose caste by so doing from the fact that his marriage to a member of the Altbuerger class seems to have occurred after he became a brewer.

The records printed below show Lodowick to have been concerned in several suits before the Council. The incompleteness of the court minutes, and the haste with which they were written, bear testimony to the confusion of the times. The details given are very meager, but we know that one of the suits was brought by Lodowick to recover access to his garden, from which the defendant had sought to exclude him by closing a road-way; Lodowick was denied possession of this road, but was awarded the right of way to his garden. In another case he was granted judgment for nine thalers as the price of three kegs of beer sold to the defendant. Later he brought an action of slander for having been falsely accused of selling short measure. On another occasion he was charged before the Council with the utterance of blasphemy against the Virgin Mary. Although cleared through the testimony of friends, he may have been too outspoken in his zeal against Catholicism. He was also defendant in suits for the violation of city ordinances, relating in one case to the quantity of beer that he had a right to brew and sell, and in another to an obstruction of the street by windows and hooks projecting from his house. There is mention of two other suits in whick he was defendant and plaintiff respectively, but their nature and rsult are unknown.

In 1599 the estates of Lodowick's grandfather Lodowick <6> and great-uncle Johan <6> appear to have been settled. He then began to make the payment on the Mathena house previously made by them and their heirs, and by their father and his heirs. In the same year four annuities, previously paid by the city to a stranger, began to be paid to Aletta, the aged widow of Lodowick <6>, mother of Gysbert <7>, and grand-mother of Lodowick <8>. They were probably bought for her on the settlement of her husband's estate, with the proceeds of a part of his property. She must have been not far from one hundred years old at this time, and the cessation of her annuities after 1607 and her disappearance from the records make it altogether likely that she died in that year. The payment in her life-time of some of these annuities for five years to her son's widow, was doubtless made by her direction, and suggests the existence of pleasant relations between the old

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36 - WESEL OP DEN DYCKS.

lady and her daughter-in-law. In 1608 all of these annuities were entered in the name of the heir of Lodowick's father, and thereafter until 1615 in the name of Lodowick as heir. In 1614 Lodowick surrendered the a annuities to the New School recently established in the city, in return for the release of two yearly payments secured by rent-charges upon his house in favor of two certain charities controlled by the city. The next year he made payment for the last time on the Mathena house, and the subsequent payments on it are made in the name of a stranger. His termination of these payments, his surrender of the annuities, and the absence of all subsequent mention of him as living in Wesel, coincide perfectly in time, and support the theory that he left his native town about 1615. That he did not die at this time appears clear from the fact that the records, in continuing to mention him as the predecessor of the New School in the receipt of the annuities, do not contain the customary expression " the late."

Only the year before Lodowick disappearance, Wesel had been captured by the Spaniards, and the emigration arising from their occupation of the town is known to have been so great that the population was reduced to a small fraction of its former size. The larger number of the refugees sought an asylum in Holland, the sturdy inhabitants of which country, after years of heroic struggle, had thrown off the Spanish yoke and firmly established their political independence and religious freedom. Intimate relations had long existed between the Protestants of Holland and Wesel, and in the preceding century the town had generously received the crowds of Dutch that were driven out of their native land by the Spanish-Catholic oppressions Holland now returned that hospitality. Most of his fellow emigrants going to the Netherlands, and his son appearing as an officer in the West India Company of that country, it seems more than likely that Lodowick established his new home in Holland, but we are reluctantly compelled to leave to future research both his subsequent life there and the circumstances of his son's emigration to America.