As when a sack of newly minted gold coins is shaken, fifteen or twenty years before the name of the firm of Norris and Van Bergen reverberated in the ears of everyone, for the firm represented one of the richest merchant banking houses in the whole of affluent Antwerp. Its ships sailed on every ocean, its warehouses were full of the most precious treasures from the Indies and America, its underwriting rooms were full of diligent underwriters. Twenty years before you could have asked at the Stock Exchange or at the Oosterling Bank, the great repository of the Hanseatic League, about the firm of Norris and Van Bergen and you would have heard good reports of them.
Now it was a different story. Johann Geerdes Norris had died long ago in Amsterdam and a fortnight since his former business partner had followed him to the grave in Antwerp as an undischarged bankrupt.
If you had asked now on the Stock Exchange or at the offices of the Hanseatic League about the firm of Norris and Van Bergen, you would probably have been asked to repeat your question more than once and received for your answer a shake of the head. Who could still remember now the firm of Norris and Van Bergen? Only the oldest merchants and brokers would still know of it.
But how had such a thing come about?
The answer to that question is easy to give. When the firm of Norris and Van Bergen was in its heyday, two hundred thousand inhabitants were gainfully employed in Antwerp. Now they had dwindled to eighty thousand. is that explanation enough for you?
Let us cast a glance back at days gone by to the twentieth day of August in that annus horribilis of 1585. On this day those of the reformed faith held their last service in the cathedral. After the surrender, which the town had arranged with its mighty conqueror, Prince Alexander of Parma, the Catholics were to have restored to them the following day the sacred property of the Blessed Virgin Mary that they had had to leave so long in the hands of heretics.
It was a solemn and extraordinary moment when, on 20 August, after the last Protestant sermon, the rolling chords of the cathedral organ were heard. A deep silence ensued, people sat with heads bowed praying softly and fervently. Then there was an unexpected commotion—a noise, half a sigh, half a repressed cry of anger rang out in a painful sort of way. A murmuring arose, the congregation got up from their seats and ran in an undisciplined confusion towards the church doors, towards those great portals, to which the Catholic portion of the population were already laying siege.
Triumph and defeat!
Monks of every conceivable order pushed contemptuously or threateningly past the humiliated, still crying or complaining heretics, lifting their wreathes of roses gaily.
How long ago it now was since they had had to succumb to these very same heretics who had then cried out to them: "Papen uyt! Papen uyt!" ("Away with the priests! Away with the priests!").