While finishing this book, I was struck by the desire to return to Heidelberg. Since I first visited with my eldest brother, I had never been back. Once I was there, I realized that it had been nearly 30 years since I had seen the university's Studentenkarzer (student prisons) for the first time. Standing there, admiring the walls with their early modern graffiti, I also realized that my fascination with the history of education and adolescence had been sparked by those walls. In a flood of memories, I reflected on everything that had happened in my own life in the last three decades, and had an overwhelming sense that things had come full circle. I also wondered whether those long-haired, guncarrying, binge-drinking young men of the Dutch Golden Age had also reflected on their own youth, once they became older?

Otto Copes, 1650

Let us return to Otto Copes, and fast-forward his life 21 years to the year 1650. By that time, the world had changed dramatically and the Dutch Republic was a different country. In 1648, the Dutch Republic had negotiated peace with Spain, the first period of peace for 80 years. But the following decades did not bring the same level of economic prosperity that the country had experienced in the early seventeenth century. Peace in Europe brought hard times for the Republic, which had profited from the lucrative arms trade. The economy went into decline, growth stagnated, and upward social mobility stalled. The Dutch Reformed Church realized that it would never become a state church, like the Roman Catholic Church had been before the Revolt. Population growth slowed down and fewer foreigners came to the Republic. And the young men who had caused so much trouble in the early seventeenth century by breaking windows, fighting, dueling, and drinking excessively, had become adults.

By 1650, they had become fathers and middle-aged men. Moreover, this generation had now become the Dutch establishment, and the non-natives had integrated and were longer foreigners. This was a new generation, which helped to shape a new identity for the country.