Bilderdijks huisbijbel

Bilderdijk was very religious. This is apparent, for example, from the poem ‘Prayer’ (‘Gebed’) that he wrote in 1796, when he was struggling with his ‘forbidden’ love for Katharina Wilhelmina Schweickhardt:

Gracious God, who reads into my bosom! I flee to you, and want, but cannot beg. Behold my distress, my sunken spirit, And behold my eye of silent tears driping [dripping]!

I beg for nothing, how languishing, how sad. You see me a prey of my intoxicated senses: You only know what your child needs, And love it more than it can ever love itself. […]

Gerrit Komrij aptly remarked: ‘During the writing of this poem, Bilderdijk is clearly thinking of something sinful. Of something too sinful. He takes an ultimate bow.’ It is almost inevitable that he begged God for a marriage with Katharina Wilhelmina Schweickhardt.

According to Bilderdijk, love was religious. In a letter to his mistress he wrote during this period: ‘O carissima mia: l'Amore è Religione’ (‘O my love: Love is Religion’). What came out of love could not be sinful. In this way, he tried to justify his actions.

Bilderdijk would divorce his first wife in 1802. This did not mean that he officially remarried after that. It was enough for him that he had already noted in his Bible five years earlier:

Anno 1797 die 18º Maji Londini, uxorem accepi nobilissimam virginem Catharinam Guiljelminam Schweickhardt, quam mihi incolumem napkin Deus Optimus Maximus! (In the year 1797, on the 18th of May, I took as wife in London the most noble virgin Katharina Wilhelmina Schweickhardt, whom the All-Good God may protect and preserve for me.)