© DVN, een project van Huygens ING en OGC (UU). Bronvermelding: Jur van Goor, en, in: Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland. URL: https://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/vrouwenlexicon/lemmata/en [13/01/2014]
MENT, Eva (baptised Amsterdam, 1 January 1606 – buried Amsterdam?, 11 May 1652?), wife of Governor-General Coen. Daughter of Claes Cornelisz Ment (c. 1551-before 1627), beer brewer, and Sophia Benningh (1561-c. 1628). Eva Ment married (1) Jan Pietersz Coen (1587-1629), governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, on 8 April 1625 in Amsterdam; (2) Marinus Louwissen van Bergen (1598-before or in 1646), senior merchant for the Dutch East India Company (VOC), later merchant in Amsterdam and director of the Dutch West India Company (WIC), on 16 March 1632 in Amsterdam; (3) Isaac Buys (1617-?), lawyer, on 22 August 1646 in Graft (Noord-Holland). With her first husband Eva Ment had 2 daughters, both of whom died young; with her second husband she had 4 sons and 1 daughter, of whom at least 1 son lived to adulthood.
Eva Ment was baptised on 1 January 1606 in Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk (Old Church). She grew up as the youngest daughter in a family with at least seven children. Her father, the son of a furrier, was a beer brewer; when he married he was living in Nieuwezijds Houttuinen in the brewery called De Witten Arend, which was owned by Pieter Dircksz Hasselaer, co-founder and director of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and a brother-in-law of his wife. Presumably it was this connection that led to Eva’s meeting Jan Pietersz Coen, who was looking for a wife in the Netherlands after his first term as governor-general (1619-1623) of the VOC. Eva was nineteen when she married this influential man twice her age. The groom was determined to marry at home (‘because he was so weak that he could not stand the outdoor air’), but the church council objected to this plan, so the couple married in a civil ceremony at the town hall (Evenhuis). Eva Ment then moved to Warmoesstraat, where her husband was living at the time. In March 1627 the couple and their new-born daughter, Geertruit, set sail for Batavia – taking with them Eva’s mother, her sister Lysbeth and her brother Gerrit – where Coen was to embark on his second term of office. Coen hoped that by taking to Batavia Dutch women and even whole families he would succeed in establishing a respectable, bourgeois society in the city he had founded. Eva’s sister Lysbeth thus married Pieter Vlack, a member of the Council of the Indies, in May 1629. As the wife of the Dutch viceroy in Asia, Eva Ment held a high position in society, but this did not prevent her two-year stay in Batavia from taking a dramatic turn. Within a very short time she lost her brother Gerrit (who died in 1627), her mother and her daughter, and in September 1629, Coen died of dysentery. Even though Eva, like other women, had been given the opportunity to leave the city on a ship, owing to the hostilities of war, she had deliberately chosen to remain at her husband’s side. Five days before he died, she gave birth in Batavia (then under siege) to their second daughter.
One of the duties Coen had thought up for his wife was educating the (half-) European girls who remained in the Indies after the departure or death of their parents. Eva’s household took them in as ‘daughters of the state’, but this was not always an easy undertaking, as evidenced by the scandal caused by twelve-year-old Sara Specx. Even so, the controversial handling of this affair seems not to have damaged Eva’s reputation. In the short time she spent in Batavia, Eva made a name for herself as ‘a lady, loved and respected by one and all, both before and after her husband’s death, owing to her discreet, honest ways and impeccable manners’. Eva did not comply, however, with the request of Coen’s successor Specx and the Council of the Indies to stay on for another year. At the first available opportunity – the fleet returning to Holland under Admiral Pieter van den Broecke – she decided to go home, leaving only a few months after Coen’s death. Before Eva’s departure in December 1629, Specx offered her a farewell dinner, and the next day he accompanied her to the Hollandia, the ship on which she set sail. During her homeward voyage, her infant daughter died.
Returning home on the same ship was Marinus Louwissen (also referred to as Louisz van Bergen), a Middelburg merchant whom Eva Ment married two years later. She subsequently gave birth to five more children: Sophia, Michiel Louis, two sons named Joannes and finally Nicolaas. Of these children, only Michiel Louis is known to have lived to adulthood. On 29 September 1632, Marinus appeared at the meeting of the Heren XVII (the Lords Seventeen, who comprised the VOC’s board of directors) to demand, among other things, Coen’s salary in arrears – but to no avail. Eva Ment was also forced to wage a protracted legal battle against Coen’s sister over his estate. She spent the rest of her life in Amsterdam, where, after the death of her second husband, she married Isaac Buys of Arnemuiden, whose law offices were on the Singel.
The date of Eva Ment’s death is not known, but it is possible she died in early May 1652, since an Eva Ment recorded as living on the Singel was buried on 11 May in Amsterdam’s Westerkerk. In the scant literature on her life, 1658 is usually mentioned as the year of her death, presumably because on 27 November of that year Isaac Buys conducted a case before the Court of Holland, contesting the division of Jan Pietersz Coen’s estate. At this time, one of Eva Ment’s children was still alive: Michiel Louis, who went by the name of Van der Grijp.
Author: Jur van Goor
last updated: 13/01/2014