Those who have gravitated towards Josh Nunn – many of whom work in the building trade, stonemasons and so on – he that hath ears to hear, let him hear – have chosen to stay in Leiden. Josh has done well for himself and has his own private loge box at the theatre. The men at the core of his group meet there often and discuss things with each other during the intervals.
Josh has now taken a new boy under his wing. He seems to be starting anew with the same process as before: they withdraw together to speak in private. It is obvious that Josh does most of the talking – I see them sometimes, sitting together in our shared garden – and the boy nods as earnestly as his predecessor did ten years ago.
And here is the most astonishing thing of all: that – former? – apple of Josh’s eye, the young lad who is now a grown man in the prime of his life. The boy who spent the last ten or eleven years as Josh’s inseparable shadow. The boy upon whom Josh looked with fatherly pride, nodding in approval when he spoke in church – to the increasing vexation of the members of the other faction. That boy …
That boy is going to America.
There was likely to be a simple explanation for it all. Josh might have intended for the boy to succeed him, and when that boy decided to go to America, Josh’s eye fell on a new boy. And … Over time, splits often develop in groups – especially in religious groups like the Protestants where the absence of a central, papal authority means that members can interpret the scriptures in any way they wish. There are often people who want to return to the origins of their religion, who believe in strict conformity to the absolute fundamentals of the faith because they think that the divinely inspired texts are being interpreted too liberally. Other people believe that times change, and the way you engage with the ancient texts and their teachings should change too. After all, these days, no one still believes that you should be stoned for gathering wood on the Sabbath, just one of the many sins punishable by death according to the Old Testament.
Then there was the relationship between the Freemasons and the remnant congregation in Leiden. The evidence for it was scant, admittedly, but that ‘he that hath ears to hear, let him hear’ was intriguing.
There was also a logical explanation for the fact that such a large group chose not to go to America. The reasons were explained in the manuscript: the crossing was expensive and dangerous, some of the congregation had become official burghers of Leiden by obtaining poorterschap, which gave them a relatively large degree of liberty.
But for people who risked life and limb by coming to the Netherlands to escape religious persecution, they seem to have abandoned their fervent desire for religious freedom rather easily, Peter thought. Did they choose the easier path instead? Make compromises and accept that this was the best they could do? Were they less devout than the people who went to the New World? And was the group that went to America made up of people who split away from the others? Fundamentalists who stood in opposition to the ‘weak’ ones who were left behind?
Peter circled ‘he that hath ears to hear, let him hear’ in red pen.
He left his office and went to the lecture theatre in the Lipsius Building to give his guest lecture. His colleague, Job, was already waiting for him at the door. Job was a good-looking man in his early forties with a neat ‘designer-stubble’ beard. He was well-liked for his engaging teaching style and genuine interest in his students.
His eyes lit up when he saw Peter coming, as if he had been afraid that he wouldn’t turn up.
‘So glad you’re here,’ Job said, slapping a hand on Peter’s back to steer him inside.
About twenty-five or thirty students sat waiting for the lecture to begin. Peter recognised some of them from his own lectures.
Including Sven and Stefan.
Sven greeted Peter with a nervous smile that almost looked apologetic.
Job briefly introduced him, then Peter forged straight ahead with his lecture on Arminius and Gomarus. He spoke compellingly about the two professors and their heated debate in the early seventeenth century about the doctrine of predestination, man’s free will – a debate that was to have a profound influence on the course of Dutch history.
Now and then, he wrote keywords on the old-fashioned blackboard with a stub of chalk. He wiped his chalky fingers on his trousers occasionally, creating a dusty smudge. It was a habit that Fay had always found quite endearing.
The students seemed to be mesmerised, nodding in agreement at certain moments and frowning in surprise at others.
‘So, guys,’ Peter said, ‘on one side, we have Franciscus Gomarus in Groningen, a professor of theology who said that only God could decide if a person would be saved or not. Essentially, his idea was that everything has already been determined by God, and man can have no influence over His decisions. You can’t achieve salvation by doing good works, by giving food to the hungry and water to the thirsty … I’m sure you’re all familiar with the six acts of mercy?’
He paused for a moment and looked around the hall, where the students’ vacant expressions told him that they were not, in fact, familiar with the six acts at all.
‘You should give food to the hungry, water to the thirsty,’ he answered for them. ‘You should visit prisoners in jail, take care of the sick, welcome strangers, and clothe the naked. The Catholic Church has a bit of an obsession with the number seven, so they added ‘bury the dead’. But Jesus only mentions six good works in Matthew 25. But I digress. What you do here on earth in the approximately twenty-six thousand days that the average person lives – in our time, that is, because people died younger in the seventeenth century – has no influence on God’s decision about whether you’ll be spending eternity in heaven or hell.’
‘But that’s really …’ said one of the students, looking absolutely outraged. ‘That’s really …’
‘Unfair?’ Peter said.
‘Yeah, if it doesn’t matter what you do, then you might as well go wild and do whatever you want. If God’s decision has already been made anyway.’
‘Very good,’ Peter said appreciatively. ‘And that was also … Well, the idea is more that God is the sovereign Lord of all. He’s so powerful that your insignificant human acts can have no influence on His decisions which, of course, are always wise and just. But Gomarus’s opinion was aligned with that of Calvin. He said that God didn’t completely absolve man of responsibility for his own actions. It’s a thorny issue. Even though your fate is already decided, and you can’t exercise any influence over it, you still have to follow God’s moral laws, the Ten Commandments. Of course, this argument was partly a Protestant response to some of the more corrupt doctrines of the Catholic Church, doctrines that had no basis in scripture. You know about that, right? The Catholic Church taught that you could pay your way to heaven. Or rather, that you could shorten your time in limbo or purgatory – the awful waiting room where you’re tormented before being admitted to heaven – by buying an indulgence. And that you could still earn your place in heaven anyway, like you can all earn your degrees by working hard. That idea, in particular, was seen to diminish the majestic divinity of God. You see, then it’s like God is just an accountant who keeps a record of all your good and bad deeds. He tots it all up, makes the deductions, balances your book and then looks at the bottom line to decide whether you’ll get to stay with Him forever in heaven, or whether you’re going to the terrible place where there’s no God, no love: hell. The Catholic Church had turned salvation into a “horse trade” where poor people would spend their last penny on indulgences, and unscrupulous priests lined their own pockets. According to Luther and others like him, that’s not how God works. That describes a very small, human, all-too-human God. Moreover, there’s nothing in the Bible about indulgences or buying forgiveness for your sins. Only your faith in God and His Son would save you. You could only be redeemed by the grace of God …’
He gave the students a chance to write everything down.
‘And then on the other side of the argument, you
had Arminius,’ Peter went on. ‘He was from Leiden. Actually, he lived quite close to here, opposite the Pieterskerk. He opposed Gomarus’s view. Arminius thought that Gomarus’s ideas about predestination were far too stringent. For example, in his view, man was free to choose whether or not he believed in God in the first place. So, to a large extent, redemption depended on the free will of each individual person. As I said earlier, these are thorny issues, guys. It’s impossible for us to imagine today just how incredibly heated this debate became. But it was the issue of the day everywhere. Everyone had an opinion about it, and everyone was talking about it, not just in the university – on every street. Discussions often got out of hand and friendships were broken. Imagine going for lunch in the cafeteria after this lecture and finding that everyone there is engaged in a heated debate about theology, predestination in this case, and there are even people supporting their arguments by reciting long texts from memory. You’re not likely to see anything like that today. Imagine emotions and tempers running so high that some students have to be restrained because they’re threatening to punch another student who doesn’t share their opinions on man’s foreordained fate.’
The students laughed.
‘Different times, different times … But … anyway …’ Peter felt his phone buzz in his trouser pocket. He was itching to check it, but he didn’t dare. He was known around campus for being unusually intolerant of the use of mobile phones during his lectures. He usually left his own phone in his desk drawer to set a good example to his students and prove to them that life went on even when you were physically separated from your mobile devices. He regularly found himself with an empty battery and no charger, meaning that he would be out of reach for hours – something that this generation would find unthinkable.
He fished the phone out of his trouser pocket as nonchalantly as he could and dropped it into the inside pocket of his jacket that he had hung over the back of a chair. Now he wouldn’t be distracted if the phone rang again.
He went on with the lecture, but the intense focus he’d had earlier in the session was gone. ‘The official church of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands was the Dutch Reformed Church. I think Meneer Westrate already covered this in an earlier lecture?’
The students and his colleague nodded in reply.
‘After his death, Arminius’s supporters tried to have his ideas adopted by the Reformed Church, the state church. They submitted a statement of opposition to the States-General, formulating their points of disagreement with Calvin’s teachings which had been adopted by the church. This sort of statement is called a “remonstrance”, and so they became known as the “Remonstrants”.’
Peter erased the notes he had previously made from the blackboard and then, in large letters, wrote the words REMONSTRANTS – ARMINIUS and CONTRA-REMONSTRANTS – GOMARUS – PRINCE MAURICE.
‘This is the last thing I’d like to talk to you about today,’ he said. ‘And then I’m going to end with a clip from God in de Lage Landen, a rather underappreciated documentary series about the history of Christianity in the Netherlands. So, to continue … In 1619, a great synod, a church council, was convened in Dordrecht. It ultimately decided that Gomarus’s teachings would become part of the official doctrine of the Dutch Reformed Church. Those who favoured Arminius’s teachings, the Arminians or Remonstrants were given a choice between keeping quiet about their views or being persecuted by their opponents, the Contra-Remonstrants. The conflict intensified, and it took on a political dimension when Maurice, Prince of Orange, declared that the young Republic should only have one faith and chose to support the Contra-Remonstrants.’
While the faint rattle of dozens of fingers on the keyboards slowly but surely died away, Peter took a moment to find the section of the video that he wanted to play.
‘Now we’re going to watch a clip from this documentary, which, by the way, I wholeheartedly recommend you watch all the way through if you can. What’s good about this is that the stories are told on location, so you’re going to see a lot of well-known places in Leiden this video.’
For the next fifteen minutes, they watched as the presenter, Ernst Daniël Smid, told viewers about the Synod of Dort with all the eloquence and dramatic delivery of an actor, bringing history to life as he stood outside the house where Arminius had lived and walked past the stately townhouses on the Rapenburg canal.
Peter looked at the clock and saw that his time was almost up.
‘I’ll wrap this up now, guys,’ he said and paused the video. ‘As Meneer Smid explained, this led to an extreme intolerance towards other faiths in the Republic. Church services were only allowed to be conducted – in public at least – by the Reformed Church. If you wanted to hold public office, you had to conform to the Reformed Church, and swear an oath to that effect too. In reality, the hunger for prosecuting dissenting churches for holding religious services varied over time and depended on each city or region’s governors. In the early days of the Republic, the main target was Roman Catholicism, the religion of the Spaniards who were the ‘enemy’. In seventeenth-century Leiden, you could be fined two hundred guilders – an astronomical amount of money in those days – for allowing your house to be used for non-Reformed church services. You could even be banished from the city!’
There was a growing buzz of restlessness in the room, not so much because of this last eye-opening fact, but more because everyone was clearly ready for a coffee break.
‘This was the time when schuilkerken were set up, clandestine churches where services were held in secret. There are a couple in Leiden,’ Peter said, winding up the lecture. ‘There’s the Remonstrant church on the Hooglandse Kerkgracht and the Sint Lodewijkskerk on the Steenschuur. Well worth popping in, on Heritage Open Days for example. They were tolerated but not allowed to have a visible church façade on public streets, so they were often hidden inside houses.’
Job Westrate held up a hand to indicate that it was time for a break.
‘Thank you very much, Professor De Haan,’ he said sincerely. ‘Let’s stop there, and after a short break, I’ll pick up exactly where you’ve left off, in 1620. We’ll be looking at the radical Amsterdam Burgomaster Frederick de Vrij who demolished the stalls at a Sinterklaas market on Dam Square in an attempt to end the “popish” celebration of the Feast of Saint Nicholas, like a modern Christ in the Temple.’
Peter turned down Job’s invitation to go for coffee with the excuse that he had another appointment.
As he walked back to his office, he took out his mobile phone
There was a text from Fay.
It was short and simple.
Peter, we need to talk.
Chapter 22
A post-mortem conducted on the body in the Galgewater immediately after it was found had shown that the victim had been dead for somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours, just as Dalhuizen had suspected.
That meant that Yona Falaina had been killed after Coen Zoutman.
Rather than having drowned, he had died before entering the water.
Everything pointed to death by suffocation. His neck showed no signs of strangulation. The absence of anyone else’s DNA under his fingernails suggested that his hands had been tied together before he was killed.
Another twenty-four hours had passed since his body had been found, but the police were still essentially coming up empty-handed.
A check of the Interpol databases had turned up nothing useful in Greece. The man was registered nowhere, had broken no laws, had no debts, no irregularities in his documentation and didn’t even have so much as a parking ticket in his name … he was a model citizen of the European Union. All that was left to do now was wait for a response from the Greek embassy who were looking into whether Yona Falaina had family who should be informed about his death.
Rijsbergen sat next to Van de Kooij in the car. A file on his lap contained a photograph of Yona Falaina taken from municipal records and the drawing of Coen Zoutman’s tattoo. T
hey would be showing both to key figures within the Freemasonry community.
The first name on their list was Jenny van der Lede, one of the two candidates who had stood against Coen Zoutman in the chairmanship election.
She lived in the Burgemeesterswijk, an expensive and popular 1930s neighbourhood in Leiden, just beyond the Zoeterwoudse Singel, part of the seventeenth-century ring canal that enclosed the centre of the city.
As they drove to her house, Van de Kooij excitedly told Rijsbergen about one of the true crime programmes he and his partner Sharon enjoyed watching on his favourite TV station, the Discovery Channel. You could easily fill an entire evening with Homicide Hunter, or Deadly Women, or American Monsters, or whatever they were called.
Van de Kooij had a boundless admiration for the tenacious American sleuths who always seemed to be haunted by that one, unsolved murder, even after years of retirement. What he liked most was that they used old-fashioned detective work. They were always thinking about possible motives or mulling over the inconsistencies in the testimonies of both suspects and witnesses, many of whom also took part in the show. He loved how they would comb through box after box of the dusty files that had been stored in warehouses for years, and how, eventually, they would join all of this evidence up in a logical way.
How disappointing it must be for him then, Rijsbergen thought, that you get to do so little of that here in Leiden. And then when those sorts of cases do come your way, they’re never as simple as they are on television.
Because so far, every trail they had tried to follow had been a dead end.
The Dutch police successfully solved eighty per cent of murder cases. However, that figure included cases where there was no real case to solve because the murderer was apprehended at the crime scene or handed themselves in to the police. And, in eighty per cent of those cases, the killer was someone the victim knew – after all, you need a reason to kill someone – and sooner or later, detective work would lead to their door.
The Pilgrim Conspiracy Page 22