Chapter 31
Münster
September 1636
It was good to be back. Which was not a sentiment Frederik had ever expected to feel for Münster when he chose it as the capital. He’d taken Hinrich Bothmann with him and installed the boy at Imperial Tech while he was in Magdeburg.
Now he rather regretfully assigned Christian Ulrik to take over as commandant in Osnabrück. He would miss his half-brother, but didn’t have any good options.
“And fifthly,” he said at the end of a rather long discussion, “you’re going to have to put an end to the calendar fight over there for once and for all.”
“Calendar fight?”
“Calendar reform. Twenty years or so, the Catholic bishop introduced the new Gregorian calendar; the Lutherans refused to accept it because it was a pope’s idea. Still won’t use it. Tell them flatly that it’s the up-timer calendar, it’s been adopted by the whole USE, and they can like it or lump it, but even if they lump it, that is the way they will date their official documents from now on.”
Frederik stood up, paced across the room, and looked out at the construction site. The new chancery building involved a great amount of excavation and consequently a great amount of mud.
“And no matter what anyone says, old Mayor Modemann’s even more ancient mother is not a witch. The official position of the government of the United States of Europe is that there are no witches. Whether or not there actually are is beside the point.” He pulled the window casement open. The air outdoors was as muggy as that inside the room. “Bitches maybe, but no witches. Make it stick. Before Lütkemann left, he said something about the Hebrew word mekhasheph in Exodus 22:18 being better translated by another word than ‘witch.’ I’m sure the world will be a lot better off having ‘sorceresses’ running around free.”
He slammed the casement closed. “And, while you’re at it, straighten out the school funding.”
Christian Ulrik grinned, nodded, and bowed his way out of the room.
As Frederik prepared for bed that evening, he reflected that he would miss his half-brother greatly. But, perhaps, it was just as well. The commandant’s position would be a stepping-stone for him, to higher things. And . . . he himself had come to be too much at ease in Christian Ulrik’s company. He should not have spoken so carelessly today, should not have expressed himself so freely. It was more prudent for a man to keep his own counsel.
As to the vote in Magdeburg, though: Bremen aside, if the Lord himself had been content to see Deborah as a judge in Israel, it seemed unlikely that He would be a stickler about male representation for women in legal matters in the USE.
He recited Luther’s evening prayer. Then, in accordance with the great reformer’s recommendation, he settled himself to go to sleep at once and be of good cheer.
* * *
Otherwise in Westphalia, there was a great deal of furor about a provincial governor’s borrowing “foreign troops” to take action against “citizens of the USE.” Of course, the furor was not consistent, ranging from reactionary outrage against using foreign troops against lords who were exercising their legitimate prerogatives to CoC reaction against using foreign troops against reactionary lords instead of utilizing proven CoC cadres of domestic origin against reactionary lords.
Not that the CoC had demonstrated any interest in providing assistance to Frederik the preceding spring, but for writers of propaganda pamphlets, that was more or less beside the point.
“It’s called spin,” Johann Rist said. “The people who produce it are called spin doctors. You need to hire some publicists, My Lord Governor.”
Frederik looked at him. “We have Bucholtz already.”
Rist resigned himself to a dearth of publicists. The governor was not inclined to explain his actions, much less his motivations.
Widespread demands for a “coherent” policy approved by the highest levels of government flew from the newspaper editorial columns.
Concerted spin efforts declared, for various reasons, that the writer was in deep opposition to “ad hoc reactions” by “unelected individuals.”
Frederik promoted Reineke Meyer to colonel and assigned him to design and create a Westphalian National Guard with a minimum of three effective regiments and a significant military police component.
Then he sent a general commendation to the tax collection department over at the chancery, complimenting its members on their zealousness.
“It’s not, of course,” one clerk remarked to another, “as if our own salaries don’t depend on our zealousness. I’d have been happier with a bonus than a certificate.”
“The bonuses will come once he can afford it,” his colleague answered, “so keep on working zealously. The governor’s a fair man.”
* * *
Heinrich Jung arrived, bringing with him a wistful hope for what he might be able to accomplish in his quite unexpected new calling as a private chaplain to the mighty. He meditated on Psalm 72, with high expectations.
Give the king thy judgments, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king’s son.
He shall judge thy people with righteousness, and thy poor with judgment.
The mountains shall bring peace to the people, and the little hills, by righteousness.
He shall judge the poor of the people, he shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor.
They shall fear thee as long as the sun and moon endure, throughout all generations.
He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth.
In his days shall the righteous flourish; and abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth.
He arrived dreaming of Johann Arndt’s conviction that orthodox doctrine was not enough to make a person a true Christian. That, rather, each person needed Christian experience, to feel repentance, to feel the process of sanctification by the Holy Spirit. To have an intimate fellowship, an almost mystical union with God. Admittedly, by the standards of the Flacians, there was a subjective element in this approach, but still, Luther had included sola fide in the three basic principles and faith must work in the heart.
Then he met Frederik of Denmark and remembered that there was more to the psalm.
He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.
They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him; and his enemies shall lick the dust.
The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents: the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts.
Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations shall serve him.
It was probably safer to stick with the purely messianic interpretation of Psalm 72, now that he had given the matter somewhat more thought.
Nor had God ever promised an easy life to His prophets.
In the meantime . . .
He was to organize the Lutherans of Hochstift Münster, beginning with the city, thanks be to God, into superintendencies and consistories on the Ravensberg model, with which he should familiarize himself. He was to investigate the prospects for building a new Lutheran cathedral in the city, see how many parish churches would need to be constructed to meet need, and locate staff for all of those. Compile a list of vendors of church furnishings such as chalices and choir stools. In his spare time, he should check on the status of the Lutherans in Schwerin, which rather concerned the governor.
* * *
The government of the city of Bremen was not happy.
The Fourth of July Party in Bremen was not happy.
The Committees of Correspondence in Bremen were utterly frosted by Frederik’s action at the parliamentary session.
There were debates. Public speeches. Recriminations in taverns. Spiteful comments at ladies’ parties. A few action proposals.
“The question we should be asking ourselves,” Tönnies Breiting said, “is this. Is there anything we can do about it?”
Emil Jauch was tempted to tell them that they could have refrained from inviting Daniel Bartoll as a consultant and adopting his little political gamesmanship as one of their policies quite some time ago. But his assignment was to be diplomatic and soothe ruffled feathers, calm troubled waters. Build bridges between factions, as one of the songs that Knaub’s daughter’s band played went. So he refrained.
* * *
Frederik occasionally stood at the window of his office, looking at the baskets, the iron cages, which were once more hanging from the bell tower of St. Lambert’s church. Then he went back to work on everything else that needed to be done in the province.
He hired a couple of Schepler’s friends who had been in the decoy regiment the summer before and sent them to Grantville to see about acquiring technical personnel. No up-timer evinced the slightest interest in working for the Province of Westphalia, but they came back with a half-dozen recent down-time graduates of the technical college coordinated by a slightly older young man who had been at the University of Jena.
“They’re great guys,” Schepler said enthusiastically. “No matter how hard a job we set them to doing, they say, ‘It’s not a problem; it’s a challenge,’ and plunge right in.”
The governor set them to work planning an alternative radio broadcasting set-up to the one the Jesuits had established right under his nose and had the gall to name Loyola University of the North, which he understood to be some kind of allusion to an up-time institution. Undoubtedly, the Jesuits in Münster conspired with those in Grantville.
His memo was brief. In case his ploy did not succeed in the long run, the one requirement was that the station be located outside of the most extensive possible limits that anyone at all could imagine for an independent imperial city of Bremen but otherwise as close to Bremen as was feasible.
If the parliament should collude with Gustav Adolf and the FoJP and grant the place imperial city status in spite of the best he could do, there was no point in having expended Westphalia’s resources only to have the project given away.
Of course, if the parliament should gerrymander an exclave to include the broadcast facility, no matter where it was located, that would simply be beyond his control.
He wouldn’t put it past them.
Postscript: he had heard about something called “jamming” radio broadcasts. This had been done by two of the sons of John George of Saxony, so it must not require up-time expertise. Have someone investigate jamming.
Next, write to Anton Günther about the general assumption that once Gustav Adolf cleared up the mess in Poland, he would have an army available—and use it to annex Oldenburg and its wonderful deep-water port into the USE willy-nilly. According to Dirk Waßmann, this was “received wisdom” even within the FoJP leadership, which showed no real inclination to object to such a show of force. There were apparently limits to their belief in the right of self-determination (which they defended so stoutly when it came to an individual’s religious affiliation or lack of it). Annexation unquestionably appealed to the emperor, with the prospect that Oldenburg would pass directly into the hands of the Vasa dynasty if the count died without a legitimate heir.
Anton Günther did not care for Christian IV of Denmark, and had his reasons. He might be more willing to enter into cooperative ventures with the governor of Westphalia. With Frederik wearing that hat.
The letter to Oldenburg drafted and in the Out basket for Rist to put into proper form, Frederik picked up a folder containing a sheaf of reports on Lingen. The Congress of Copenhagen had allotted Lingen to Westphalia. In idle moments, he wondered why the Congress of Copenhagen allotted Lingen to the Province of Westphalia.
What was that rhyme he had seen in the up-time poetry anthology? He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases.
A sneeze causing a temporary mental blackout on Oxenstierna’s part was as charitable an explanation as any, perhaps, for if he had done it deliberately . . . Admittedly, Lingen was on the eastern side of the land bridge connecting the southern Oberstift and northern Niederstift of Münster. A land bridge that was nowhere near as crucial for the Province of Westphalia as it had been for the prince-bishops, since the new geography provide other routes.
But Lingen belonged to the United Provinces, having been conquered by Maurice of Nassau-Orange in 1597, reconquered by the Spanish in 1605, and then taken by Swedish forces when the Spanish pulled out in 1632. Probably “taken by Swedish forces” had something to do with it, but that didn’t change that Lingen belonged to the Low Countries.
Fortunately, the Stadhouder was a practical man. Early on, they had agreed that the Netherlands would re-establish the local administration, Westphalia would not interfere with the local administration, and any questions involving international status would be referred to the USE Department of State.
So far, the USE Department of State had not gotten around to responding, at least according to the most recent information obtainable by the administration of the Province of Westphalia. Frederik sincerely hoped that Gustav Adolf was not intending to provoke a conflict with the Low Countries over it.
That was a longer-range concern. He himself should attempt to put the best construction on everything, as Luther admonished Christians to do in the Shorter Catechism. For immediate purposes, a policy of noninterference did not mean a policy of ignoring what was going on in that county, so he started reading the reports.
David Pestel submitted his resignation to the chancellor. He intended to move back to Minden and prepare to run for parliament when Dirk Waßmann retired. Waßmann had been his teacher once upon a time; he hadn’t been a young man, even then.
* * *
From the original furor about “foreign troops” and “ad hoc responses,” the debate throughout the USE whirled out of the control of anyone’s propagandists and publicists, into increasingly acrimonious arguments over serfdom itself. Arguments over the entire nature of serfdom. Arguments that were caused, to a considerable extent, by the varying historical developments that meant there was no such thing as a unified legal condition that could be labeled “serfdom” within the boundaries of the USE, not only from province to province, but within any given province. This meant, frequently, that remedies proposed by analysts and politicians in one area or region were inapplicable to the situation in another, which resulted in would-be reformers’ attacking one another’s arguments at least as vociferously and extensively, if not quite as fiercely, as they did the positions of the apologists for and proponents of the institution.
For there were apologists and proponents—quite a lot of them, ranging from jurists who were pragmatically appalled by the chaos they saw resulting from a major change in land tenures to Lutheran pastors who saw the governance of a lord over the people on his lands as comparable to the position of authority that a Hausvater occupied in relation to his wife, children and servants.
Almost every paper mill in the land saw a spike in third-quarter profits.
There was a nationwide shortage of copiers; manufacturers found themselves overwhelmed with backorders and retailers could not keep stock on the shelves.
Generally, outside of the SoTF, there were numerous riots and widespread unrest, for which there was no obvious remedy.
Any direct imperial response was constrained by the general prevalence of serfdom in Sweden’s Baltic possessions and Denmark.
* * *
Frederik picked up a folder of reports pertaining to the administration of the Lutheran parishes in the former county of Ravensberg, now incorporated into the county of Westphalia.
Before he could finish reading them, he had to stop for a meeting with delegations from the city of Lemgo and the multiple counts of the various subsections of Lippe. Resolving this was not a problem. The governor looked at the delegations, tight-lipped. When he did open his mouth, it was to say that the Calvinism of the dukes of Lippe was not to interfere with the Lutheranism of the city of Lemgo and vice versa. They were all to stick to the provisions of the Peace of Röhrentrup of 1617, which had granted Lemgo the right to determine its faith independently. He told the delegates that their principals should expect a memo confirming that decision. With an addendum; both parties must practice religious toleration.
He opened the folder of reports on Ravensberg again, but before he could finish even skimming the contents, Gießenbier appeared for a last review of the document by which he would confirm the residential privileges, including synagogue and cemetery, that Count Ernest of Schaumburg and Holstein-Pinneberg had granted to the Ashkenazic Jewish community of Altona in 1611. He approved with the addition of the words “and Sephardic,” to make sure that all contingencies were covered, initialed the insertion, and went back to the problems of ecclesiastical administration in Ravensberg.
Three days later, he dropped a memo into his Out box instructing Rist to send a letter to the mayor of Hamburg indicating that the internal affairs of Altona were none of Hamburg’s business, as Schaumburg had been incorporated into the Province of Westphalia by the Congress of Copenhagen—add appropriate verbiage.
Three days after that, he met with Gießenbier again, after which he instructed Rist to draft a memo to the current administration of the Province of Brandenburg indicating that, although the county of Ravensberg had fallen to Brandenburg in 1614 by the Treaty of Xanten, the Congress of Copenhagen had placed it in the Province of Westphalia in 1634, which superseded the earlier arrangement. Consequently, Calvinists in Brandenburg had no business mucking about in the affairs of Lutherans in Ravensberg—use appropriate verbiage.
He drafted a memo to the Lutheran pastors of Grafschaft Ravensberg indicating that as they had managed their own affairs since the Calvinist elector of Brandenburg became their Landesherr in 1614, they didn’t need a Lutheran governor to take the job over now. They should consider that there was no guarantee that the next governor of Westphalia would be a quasi-bishop or even Lutheran. Or even, his mind informed him sarcastically, given the peculiar views of the up-timers in these matters and their growing influence over the emperor, male. The pastors should keep on doing their jobs and not bother the governor of Westphalia with their internal troubles. Specifically, they should reorganize their own superintendency and elect a new superintendent. Sincerely.
He scratched a little itch behind his ear, thinking. Very sincerely. There was possibly no one alive who dreamed how sincerely he hoped never to hear about the ecclesiastical politics of Ravensberg again.
He reviewed a complaint from the Jesuits that the radio technicians he had employed were converts to an up-time sect called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and had come to the Province of Westphalia with the intent of serving as missionaries for that heretical movement while they were being paid to design a radio broadcast system for the governor. The Jesuits in Grantville had confirmed that this heresy was expanding with dangerous rapidity. Moreover, the governor had employed them to design a broadcast system that would compete with the perfectly functional one that the Jesuit Order already had in place. The Jesuits objected on both counts.
He laid down his fountain pen, an up-time innovation that he did appreciate, capped it, turned away from the desk, and paced around the room for a few minutes.
Unexpectedly, the next item was a response to the inquiry he had sent out the previous summer on the problem of who was ultimately responsible for the administration of Lutheranism in Schwerin now. The answer was “not your brother Ulrik, or at least he’s done nothing for a couple of years” and “honestly, no one has the vaguest idea.”
He prepared a letter to Ulrik, cc: to the emperor and bcc: to the king of Denmark, recommending strongly that for the spiritual good of the Lutherans of Schwerin, someone should appoint a full-time ordained clergyman to a new position of General Superintendent in Schwerin under the umbrella of whatever authority that his brother might still possess in regard to the Stift and the diocese, no one ever having been elected in his place. As it happened, one Joachim Lütkemann, his own former chaplain, was a man he could recommend strongly as having all the necessary qualifications for the position except a wife. Which Lütkemann was anxious to acquire, having formed, with the approval of her parents, an attachment to one Margaretha Pape of Itzehoe in Holstein which he would be delighted to transform into a betrothal and then a marriage once he had sufficient income.
With an attached memo to Rist: “If this doesn’t work, see that Jung follows up.”
He drafted a memorandum to Gustav Adolf as duke of Mecklenburg pointing out that something needed to be done about it. Attached a note for Rist advising him to enclose an explanation about the way in which Ravensberg was currently managing the matter.
He drafted another memo, for Gustav Adolf as emperor of the USE, saying, for the sixth time in two years, that the emperor could not reasonably expect him to establish a Lutheran state church in a province that was approximately forty percent Lutheran, forty percent Catholic, fifteen percent Calvinist, and five percent Mennonites, Jews, and other ecclesiastical minorities (more precise statistics to follow once the census now in progress was completed). Not to mention how many of them, regardless of their official church membership, were in reality either adherents of the FoJP or supporters of the CoCs, and thus probably Socinians. Possibly Arminians, Remonstrants, Anti-Remonstrants, or Hussites; with semi-Pelagians not beyond the realm of possibility.
And noted that Rist should attach a copy of the memo from the Jesuits.
He then scratched out the final two sentences of the draft memo, adding one more note for Rist: “See if you can find some different verbiage to explain the problem this time. Maybe we should refer to the entire religious situation in Westphalia as a challenge.”
* * *
Frederik glanced at the seventh letter of complaint he had received about Margaretha Timmerscheidt’s non-marital elopement with Gustafsson. This one sent jointly by both of the would-be Lutheran mayors of Osnabrück. The two of them had finally found a common cause beyond loathing the Catholic former mayor of the city.
A letter from Christian Ulrik said that, at the advice of Aunt Hedwig (she was, after all, his aunt, too), he was calling in a consultant.
Frederik looked at Rist as he meticulously placed the letter in the appropriate box on his desk. “Even her father admits that the girl left voluntarily. Tell them to complain to the pope. Catholic ladies are not my problem.”
Rist sighed. “The girl is Lutheran. Alas.”