#On the Name in the File
"Every conspiracy has someone who keeps the accounts. The Bureau finds him last and ought to look for him first."
Dr. Jan de Waal of Amsterdam is the third name under which the Year of Letters is filed. The other two are Dr. Pieter van Hoorn and Dr. Gerrit Lemstra. The three share a collective dossier, and most clerks are content to leave them bound together. This entry takes out the man who handled the addresses, the money and the copyists. Without those three things the Bone Census would have stayed a private table in a Dutch study, and the Church would have slept through 1678.
The record gives his title, his city, his partners and his work. It does not give a year of birth, a year of death, a face, a household or the faculty that granted his doctorate. The title says doctor and does not say of what. I have no university to give him, no medical practice and no chair, and I will not invent any of them to make the folio look fuller. The Bureau of Records punishes forgery whatever the forger's rank, mine included.
The Ledger indexes this dossier at A.S. 0. That is the floor of the Synod's numbering, and nothing de Waal did happened in it. His work belongs to A.S. −32, which the old calendar calls 1678.
#On the Addresses and Accounts
"Every heresy needs a theologian. The successful ones also need a clerk."
The published account divides the labour three ways, and I keep the division as I received it. Van Hoorn compiled the comparative evidence and wrote the short commentary beneath the table. Lemstra drafted the formal inquiries to the holding clergy. De Waal kept the addresses, held the money and managed the copyists. None of the arithmetic was his, and no record I hold puts a word of the commentary or the inquiries in his hand.
His contacts were booksellers, canal merchants, university secretaries and postal clerks. Each of those trades knows where letters go. A bookseller knows which learned men buy books and where they live. A university secretary keeps the faculty roll. A canal merchant knows which correspondents settle their accounts, and through which houses. A postal clerk knows what a packet costs and how long it takes to arrive. De Waal took the correspondence of commerce and put it to work for scholarship, and then aimed the scholarship at the altar.
I have elsewhere called him a Dutch bookkeeper, in the entry on the Continental Post. I meant it as a sneer and still do. It is also the most accurate thing the Ledger says about him. The phrase tells you nothing about his life, and it tells you exactly how he worked.
My discomfort starts here, and I record it because the Warden owes the Ledger candour at least once per folio. An address book, a cash account and a roster of hired hands are the instruments of my own office. I keep all three, with better seals than any Amsterdam doctor could have had. He used the same tools for the opposite purpose, and in 1678 he got more out of them than any diocese did.
#On Making the Table Travel
"A table in one study is an opinion. Forty cities' worth of copies is a postal event."
What de Waal sent out was one common document, copied by hand. At its centre stood the Bone Census, a comparison of every registered claim to a relic of Saint Aldebrand that could be found in the registries of the German states, the Lowlands, northern France and the Swiss cantons. It came to two hundred and forty-three relics attributed to one saint: forty-one femurs, nineteen skulls, twelve hands and the remainder in lesser bones. Seventeen of the femurs belonged to Cologne, each one certified as the only one. Below the table came Van Hoorn's commentary. Attached to it was Lemstra's courteous request that the relic-holding clergy reconcile their competing certificates.
Nobody in Amsterdam held a bone. Nobody boiled one or weighed one, and no assembly was shown that a particular femur had come from a pig. The Census laid one document beside another and let the documents contradict each other. I may give a public description of it. The full table and the list of cities stay where the Bureau of Records has put them.
Van Hoorn conceived the campaign in the winter of 1677, which the Synod's later numbering calls A.S. −33. That conception was his. The surviving postal records date the start of dispatch to March 1678, and from that point the figures are de Waal's: fourteen copyists, forty cities, three months. The fourteen were hands, and they wrote far more than fourteen letters. The forty were cities, and most received more than one copy. Any clerk who confuses the staff count with the document count, or the cities with the letters, is advised to resign.
Three of the copyists were later identified by a Bureau of Purity investigation as former seminary students. The Church had trained some of the hands that copied out the case against it. The letters went to universities, parishes, town councils, merchant guilds and print-houses, and in each of those places a letter gets read aloud, entered in a register, copied again or set in type. A bishop could forbid a sermon in his own diocese. He had no authority over a guild-hall in another prince's town, a printer in a third, or a faculty secretary in a fourth who had already logged the letter as received.
"…the Concordats of Ulm were still a draft circulating among university common rooms…" — The Year of Letters, "On the Scholars of Amsterdam."
Corrected. The original Concordats of Ulm were sealed in A.S. −55, 1655 CE, twenty-three years before de Waal's copyists picked up their quills. The letters of 1678 went out under a compact that was already a generation old. The parent entry stands as written and is to be read with this correction beside it.
#On the Cost of Arrival
"A bishop can burn a letter. He cannot burn a delivery schedule."
The Church of 1678 had no Synod, no Bureaus and no central office for suppressing awkward paper. It had dioceses, and each one answered its own copy in its own way, on its own timetable and usually badly. A book printed in a single city could have been seized at the press. De Waal's letters arrived at forty different places, sent through correspondents the recipients had dealt with before. By the time a prelate had decided what to say, the table was already in a magistrate's drawer or locked into a printer's forme.
The cost was counted in coin. The parent entry cites records of the Cologne cathedral chapter, later seized and filed with the Bureau of Tithes, which show pilgrimage to Aldebrand's shrines down forty-one percent in the year after the letters. The queues thinned, the offerings fell with them, and the chapels and hostels along the route began to decay. I do not hold de Waal personally answerable for every empty way-station, because the doubt passed through other hands after it left his. The delivery, though, was his arrangement.
Vienna answered by subtraction. The diocesan hierarchy of the old Holy See struck the Reliquary of Saint Aldebrand from its inventories, sealed the provenance ledgers and removed the pilgrimage receipts to a vault. The Bureau later took that act into its own lineage, as it takes most things. An object that does not exist cannot be reconciled with anything, so the erasure disposed of the inquiry by abolishing its subject. In the thirty-nine other cities the letter was already on file, and the erasure did nothing about it.
#On the Later Comparison
"The Synod caught up with him. It took a hundred and forty-two years."
Looking back, the Bureau of Records measured Synodal distribution against the Amsterdam campaign. It recorded that the Synod did not match the campaign's efficiency until A.S. 110, 1820 CE, when the Continental Post reached that pace. The Post is a point of comparison and nothing more. No record carries de Waal's copyists, merchants, routes or ledgers into it. Two networks, built a century and a half apart for opposite masters, reached the same speed. Records filed the finding with distaste and has not reopened it since.
The dates must be kept apart. When the letters went out, the Concordats were twenty-three years old. The Amsterdam Academy did not publish De Vera Luce until 1710, A.S. 0, thirty-two years later. The formal Synod, its Bureaus and the numbering I use to date his work arrived in 1800, A.S. 90, a hundred and twenty-two years after the letters left Amsterdam. De Waal founded no academy, wrote no line of De Vera Luce, and appears on no muster roll of the later wars. His documented career is three months of correspondence.
The Rationalists did not start with him either. Ulm, and the violence before it, came first. What he gave them was proof that a table, properly copied and properly addressed, could travel faster than the authority it accused. Later Rationalist distribution doctrine adopted that proof as method. The Bureau has entered it as evidence.
The Bureau's position is that de Waal performed an unlicensed clerical function in the service of heresy, and the Bureau is correct. I add for the record that he performed it well. That is not a mitigating circumstance, and I never meant it as one.