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Chapter 28


Bornhöved

May 1636


When the Insten and Gesinde in the front line saw the cattle coming, they ran. Probably more efficiently than if they had been facing a cavalry charge. Most farmers had been chased by an angry cow at some time in their lives.

Lars Larsson, a serf from Bendix von Ahlefeldt’s Haseldorf, just as somebody or the other had told him that he was supposed to do, headed down the banks of the Schwentine. When he saw some cavalry coming toward him, he veered off, opened a gate, and let loose a flock of geese that some resident of Bornhöved, presumably fleeing prudently in the face of an oncoming army, had left behind. Ahlefeldt’s cooks had penned them up and announced plans in connection with feeding the fine gentlemen after the battle.

He didn’t intend to oppose Frederik’s forces who, under Erik Stenbock, were moving in to flank Ahlefeldt’s right wing. He had no idea who they were. He vaguely hoped to slow them down as they moved forward, so those horses, monumentally large by the standards of the field ponies he was used to, wouldn’t run over so many of his friends and neighbors. Which he accomplished.

The geese were unhappy. Unhappy geese are aggressive geese.

These Oldenburgers were not trained war horses. Those were much too valuable for the count to rent to the governor of Westphalia and risk their eventual purchase price. Anton Günther had included in his calculation of the lease cost that not all the horses would make it back. Nor the men riding them, but that was a price of war. Those he sent were good solid riding horses, under skilled men, but enough of them took exception to the attacking geese that their riders needed both hands to bring the panicking mounts back under control. They were in no position to use weapons. Stenbock ordered them to slow down; then to pull up; not ride in among the enemy one by one. Hold together as a unit was his cry.

On the left wing, Frederik’s riders under Christian Ulrik arrived as planned and pushed against the mess that stampeding cattle had made of Ahlefeldt’s mounted formation, which started to give to the left. But there was no pushback; he couldn’t see what was happening on the other side of the field; was afraid that he had a hammer, but no anvil.

But there were geese.

As Christian Ulrik pushed them, Ahlefeldt’s mounted troops started to move right, trying to avoid the angry cattle who had not already passed them, skirting fallen bodies so their horses would not lose their footing. When they got to the geese, they had to slow, milling around. Stenbock’s riders finally managed to advance as a unit, slowly but with swords out, threading among the fowl.

An unidentifiable officer, from the middle of Ahlefeldt’s forces, began yelling orders, a drummer next to him beating them out. The nobles started to reorganize, turn towards the front, where Frederik had—nobody.

Nobody had followed those stampeding cattle.

From the rise, Reineke Meyer spurred his horse, headed down, and ordered the dragoons standing by as a reserve to divide and support the flankers; the game wardens to aim and shoot at any of the enemy horse who managed to make it out of the center and drive toward the rise where the governor was, and the three hundred infantrymen who had marched from the Stifte through Bremen, through Oldenburg, and onto those horrible cattle ferries, to follow him.

Quite a few remembered him. Not for himself, so much, but because he had once been a lieutenant under Claus Christian von Bargen, the hero of Minden. Whatever that might mean. But a man had to assume that Meyer knew what he was doing. They followed him. Foot soldiers with pikes, marching against horses.

Frederik would report to Gustav Adolf that Captain Reineke Meyer had distinguished himself on the field of battle.

The nobles of eastern Holstein were stuck; they couldn’t go anywhere. Ahlefeldt tried to keep some kind of order; Otto von Buchwald moved to one side, taking stock.

Captain Meyer and his infantry, plus a few standing peasants and cattle, were in front of them; mounted cavalry advancing to the left of them; and a mess of geese and riders to their right. Worse, they were now utterly disorganized, even more cattle mixed up with them, quite a few horses and riders down. Nothing was left that even resembled a coherent unit, despite Ahlefeldt’s best efforts. Individually, they turned and ran, now in a disorganized panic, blocked to the east by the swampy turf and wet holes caused by the constant runoff from the mill dam, the only possible way out to the southeast, around Christian Ulrik’s incoming riders.

At which point they met Botterbrodt, Pestel, and the decoy regiment that had come up from the south. Of the same school of thought as Bothmann, Botterbrodt, when he heard the noise ahead that signaled the fight was in progress, hefted his substantial fifty-year-old self up a tree, observed the field, and yelled orders. Which, he hoped, he had pushed this collection of academic pen pushers into being able to recognize during the evening drills he had conducted on the march. Not proper military orders. Words that even a law clerk could understand.

If not, his Minden militiamen would position them where they needed to be.

“You who have guns, get your butts into a single line. Next to each other, not behind each other, you idiots!”

After the first evening drill, fortunately unarmed, he had concluded that his first priority was to keep the members of his command from shooting each other by mistake.

“Ammunition line behind them. Sitting down. Keep your stupid heads down, ammunition caddies. Not one inch higher than you have to be to reach the boxes to your partner.”

“Open the ammunition boxes.”

“Load the guns.”

He looked again at the melee ahead of him, hard to make out at this distance.

“Any rider who comes this way, shoot the horse. They make a bigger target than a man and I don’t trust your marksmanship farther than I can spit.” One thing he knew: a downed horse was a big obstacle on a battle field; a bunch of them would slow down a retreat a lot; could make an orderly retreat impossible.

Botterbrodt’s men, lined up a half mile southeast of the main battle, shot at horses.

Their rate of fire was abysmal. But nobody was shooting back at them and the riders came one or two at a time, mostly, so the men from Minden, the clerks, and the students managed to hold an astonishingly steady line for nearly a quarter of an hour before Botterbrodt ordered them to get out of the way and let the rest of the bastards try to run. They wouldn’t be going far.

His three hundred eighty-four men took seventy-three casualties; only eleven of them fatal on the spot and only sixteen more of them dead later of gangrene and other inevitable results of open wounds in the next few days. Not one of them had shot another. He called it good.

No other unit on the field had it that good.

Three-quarters of the Stifte infantry who followed Captain Meyer into that chaos went down, not to rise again until judgment day. The others kept going and had the honor of capturing von Ahlefeldt and von Buchwald, fastening them up with reins cut off dead horses, leading them in fetters—dragging them in fetters, more accurately—in front of the governor.

Frederik considered his next move. “Arrest every adult male of the Holstein Ritterschaft who isn’t already dead or fled out of Westphalia’s jurisdiction” was perhaps an overly comprehensive ruling, but it gave him a place to start.

Stenbock went after Bendix von Ahlefeldt; Christian Ulrik caught up with various Reventlows, Rantzaus, and Pogwisches.

On the main battle field, amid the cowherds trying to round up the surviving cattle and get the drove moving again, within the hour there were local peasants butchering those Vieh that had become casualties. Nobody wasted perfectly good Rindfleisch. And the horses, as well.

Some of them were peasants who had been on the field and ran. Most of those, however, if they came back at all, were identifying corpses. One of them asked Meyer if he knew anyone who could write. There was no way to take all these bodies back to the estates to which they belonged for burial. Someone needed to write down the names of the dead.

“Maybe the chaplain,” Meyer said.

But Lütkemann was already on the field, comforting the injured and dying.

“I can do it,” Hinrich Bothmann said.

Meyer detailed a squad of captured Holstein nobles to dig a mass grave for their serfs.

How many? How big?

Bothmann provided an estimate.

There was no room in the village of Bornhöved’s churchyard for that many bodies. Not even in a mass grave. They weren’t talking about a couple of hundred.

Cornelis Duyts arranged the draining of the big pond, almost a small lake, near the village. Captain Meyer insisted that they needed to get this done before the corpses started to decompose and spread illness.

Frederik ordered that his own fallen were to get individual graves in the churchyard. The captured nobles started digging; at this season, darkness did not come early in the evening nor linger long before dawn arrived. Lütkemann performed the rite of Christian burial over and over and over through the night, carefully recording each in his register.

The next morning, Frederik ordered Lütkemann to give a service of thanksgiving.

Exhausted, all the chaplain could think to say was, “What text? God’s reaching out his hand? Saving Israel from the Egyptians? Exodus 14:30? ‘So the Lord saved Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore.’ It’s frequently used.” And, he thought wearily, so applicable, given what was still under way at the pond. Most of the dead Egyptians had probably also been poor schmucks who had no choice as to whether to chase after the Israelites or not.

“No,” Frederik answered. “Psalm 66. It references that passage in Exodus, but has a broader, more general, application.”

So over the stink of the field, to exhausted men, injured men, prisoners, and those who were still inconspicuously harvesting the bounty of dead animals at dawn, Lütkemann complied, reading aloud the third and fourth verses: “Say unto God, How terrible art thou in thy works! Through the greatness of thy power shall thine enemies submit themselves unto thee. All the earth shall worship thee, and shall sing unto thee; they shall sing to thy name. Selah.” And the seventh: “He ruleth by his power for ever; his eyes behold the nations: let not the rebellious exalt themselves. Selah.”

With, possibly, the least-prepared sermon he had ever delivered.

After which he climbed the little hill to the St. Jacobi church to pray. The interior was a mess: Ahlefeldt and his staff had been living in it for several days. Coming out, he stood quietly, looking out over in the direction where the Baltic Sea lay, in the direction of Rostock and home. He had been born in Demmin in Pomerania; he hadn’t been back since he left for school in 1624 and there was nothing there for him any more. Poor, afflicted, Pomerania. Rostock, where his parents were living now; the city fathers there had nothing against welcoming comparatively prosperous refugees and his father had been an apothecary and mayor, before the war. He was homesick, missing his family, missing his books. He was so much closer to them this minute than he had been since he left to study abroad—and he would have to go back to Münster in Westphalia, which was far away indeed.

There was more to Psalm 66 than the lines the governor had wanted him to use as the sermon text: “For thou, O God, hast proved us: thou hast tried us, as silver is tried. Thou broughtest us into the net; thou laidst affliction upon our loins. Thou hast caused men to ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water . . . I will pay thee my vows, Which my lips have uttered, and my mouth hath spoken, when I was in trouble.”

Erik Stenbock and Christian Ulrik, realizing that it was only a few miles away, took off a few hours and went sightseeing at the Ahrensbök battlefield. Which, by this time, was just another pasture in Holstein. The peasants had stripped it of anything useful and put it back under grass. A few placid cows, with their calves, were grazing over it. A half-grown shepherd boy was keeping a lazy eye on his flock. Lambs still young enough to play raced until they were worn out and then flopped down next to their dams. Somewhat disappointed, they got back to work the next day.

Frederik told the Oldenburg contingent to refill their saddle bags with provisions. “Take some of what’s being illegally butchered on the field; it’s as much ours as it belongs to the peasants I carefully do not see out there with their skinning knives.” And sent them back to Brunsbüttel to catch the cattle ships, safely within the two week deadline that Claus Harmens had set.

Then he prepared another heavily encrypted letter to Christian IV. Fortunately, there had been no need to summon in the troop transports that the king had placed in reserve off the island of Fehmarn; for purposes of tranquility within the Union of Kalmar, and maintaining Ulrik’s amicable relationship with Gustav Adolf, this was probably as well. “I remain, your affectionate and profoundly grateful son, always appreciative of your fatherly love.”


Holstein

June 1636


Christian Ulrik located the wives of the noble leaders in their townhouses in Kiel, where they were preparing to celebrate the triumphant return of their menfolk. He intercepted Henning von Pogwisch en route to Schleswig.

Christian IV would take care of Godske von Ahlefeldt’s associates around Eckernförde who had supported the others, but not been present in Holstein. They were a Danish problem, out of the jurisdiction of Westphalia, or even the USE.

“There is such a thing as an investigative hearing,” Frederik said. “I have become familiar with the term reading some of the up-time literature. I am about to hold one.”

He set up shop in Segeberg, where he had the bureaucrats who managed the royal domain to assist.

After he had heard all the testimony, he made a distinction among:



and



At the hearings, Frederik ascertained who the wives of the men in the first category were. Through them, he concluded, the Rantzau and Reventlow lineages clearly had been involved in the original decision to pursue and retrieve, as it was unlikely that such drastic action would have been taken without a consensus among the extended families and lineages. Undoubtedly, that was why so many others had joined in the armed uprising so quickly.

He confiscated not only the estates of Danish-born Bendix von Ahlefeldt, but also that of his wife Beate. Kohøved. Kuhkopf; Cow-Head. The irony of the name appealed to him; he directed the building of a memorial to the battle there. “Being related to someone who has seriously offended the ruler” was not, to the best of his knowledge, a crime enshrined in any law code. At least, not precisely in those words. Over the centuries of European history, however, many an overmighty subject had experienced its impact.

He was unable to prove anything against Poul Rantzau, the financier in Kiel.

He fully understood the concept of “a speedy trial.” That was precisely what every noble in the fourth category who had appeared on the field in opposition to the governor’s forces, whether in person or by sending another family member or by sending household personnel or by aiding and abetting, got. A very speedy trial. He imposed economic penalties and revoked economic privileges. Exemptions and monopolies that the nobility had accreted fell rapidly by the wayside.

He would rather have liked to behead them all. Traitors deserved the proper penalty for treason. Gustav Adolf’s grandfather, in his day, had found beheading to be effective in subduing the unruly nobility of Sweden, but in modern times, what with newspapers, up-timers, and other obstacles cluttering a man’s path . . . and so many of them . . . He checked with his father, who saw no problem. Those who held their fiefs from the king of Denmark would have to make the best of Norway for the rest of their natural lives.

Those in the first three categories, he would take to Münster.

He would have much preferred not to have peasants out demolishing toll booths, because they would have to be rebuilt. Any son of Christian IV of Denmark had a visceral understanding of the importance of tolls to the government revenue stream. He could deal with the cattle smugglers at his leisure. After all, the nobility had always insisted on receiving precedence as one of their privileges.

Finding people whom he could appoint to the legal and administrative offices of the revised and modified regime of Holstein was not easy. Although it was not a wholly satisfactory solution, Frederik ended up drawing many of them from the ranks of the younger members of the Hamburg patriciate, men in their twenties and early thirties who had studied law for years to prepare themselves to assume increasingly responsible positions in the city and on its council, but whose families had been dispossessed by the events of 1634. Hamburg now had a popularly elected council with a popularly elected, FoJP, mayor. Young men named Moller, Rentzel, Jarre; Lütkens, Schlebusch, and Spreckelsen were unemployed or had not found positions commensurate with the effort they had put into their education. Effectively, he ordered that if a Hamburger applied for a job in Holstein and displayed a law degree, hire him now and sort them out by competence later.

The FoJP by and large regarded the Hamburg patrician class as retrograde. When compared to the Holstein nobility, its members looked like wild-eyed rebels.

Hard-working wild-eyed rebels, by and large. Lutheran ones, too.

Avoid Calvinists from Bremen, even unemployed patricians with law degrees.

Don’t hire Catholics at all. It would be too iffy if they had to deal with Denmark.

Throughout the entire episode, workers had kept right on digging the Eider Canal, which was making surprisingly rapid progress. If nothing else, Frederik’s brutal ending of private jurisdiction had largely solved Duke Friedrich’s manpower shortage. Landholding peasants, no matter how onerous they found the conditions of their tenures, were largely taking a wait-and-see stance, but Insten and Gesinde, whose lives held no hope at all for improvement if they stayed where they were, were flocking away, looking for other work.

Jochen Giese and Marcus Langemach, the Kiel financiers who were funding the Eider Canal, over their evening Dunkles, jocularly considered having a medal cast for Hero of Industry and awarding it to the governor, but decided that it would be in poor taste.

Frederik requisitioned sufficient supplies from Segeberg that his now six hundred or so strong party would not have to forage and headed home by way of the land route, through Altona to Buxtehude, the important prisoners conspicuously in tow. He released the men from the Erzstifte with official thanks and bonuses; pensions for the families of those who fell. He stopped in Minden to make a big fuss over Botterbrodt; released the militia with thanks and more bonuses. Looked at the three hundred, more or less, law students and clerks that Pestel had gathered, wondered what to do with them, and took them along to Münster. Chancellor Gießenbier could figure it out.

In the publicity, Andreas Bucholtz presented it as a great victory.

Admiral Simpson, once he collected copies of the reports and finally had time to look at them, summed up the engagement as a “multilateral clusterfuck.”

Which Mary reported to Tom when she next wrote. “I said that Frederik of Denmark had at least improvised effectively. Your father said that the governor sat there on a stolid bay gelding named Little Bean, watching the whole time, while Meyer and Botterbrodt improvised.”

Hinrich Bothmann hadn’t even made it into the reports, much less the peasant who let the geese out.

“It may not have been a thing of beauty from a professional perspective,” Tom replied in his next letter, “but Frederik of Denmark did, undoubtedly, manage to win. Meyer and Botterbrodt wouldn’t have been on the field and in a position to distinguish themselves without his determination to see the thing through. It makes you wonder how many other men are out there who could have been great, or come close to it, had the potential for it, but didn’t happen to be in the right place at the right time to get noticed and promoted.”


Münster

July 1636


Trials.

He brought the worst offenders to Münster because it was the provincial capital. This was not a local issue. A local outbreak, yes. Not a local issue. The entire province should take notice.

Münster had a plenitude of lawyers and, by now, a reasonable number of journalists.

The testimony, finding of guilt, conviction, and sentencing did not take long.

“I would bring to your attention that the governor of the Province of Westphalia has the right of high justice,” Frederik said. He hoped that the nobility of the Hochstift around him were paying attention.

He supervised the executions. Hanging like common criminals; no privilege of nobility as to the form of execution. As the bodies of Buchwald, Pogwisch, and the two Ahlefeldt men were removed from the gibbets, he glanced behind him on the platform. “Schepler, where did you store those iron baskets?”

* * *

“I feel considerable dissatisfaction at the outcome,” Frederik wrote in an encrypted letter to his father, “in that the wives, whom I believe, on the basis of information I gathered during the investigative hearings largely prodded their husbands into the actions they took, were not also on the platforms.” They were, however, in Norway.

To Duke Friedrich, in Gottorp, he wrote, “I understand your dismay at the death of Buchwald, who was your steward at Itzehoe and one of your close associates. However, I consider him to have been the most culpable, since it became clear from the testimony that he knew better from the beginning.”


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