Chapter 3
Bremervörde
July 1634
Before he did anything else, Frederik had a funeral to attend. His predecessor as prince-archbishop of Bremen, Johann Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp, had died in April. What with the war and all, his body had been embalmed and put in storage rather than interred with appropriate pomp and ceremony.
Before he could attend the funeral, he would have to organize it. Have it organized; the administrative staff of the Erzstift would do the detailed work, of course, but he had to decide how he wanted them to handle it. While he might not yet have acquired a staff when he was wearing his hat as governor of Westphalia, he did at least have one to administer the secular jurisdiction of the Erzstift.
In theory. If he could take control of it. The canons of the Bremen cathedral had been, at best, apathetic in regard to the innovations in the city; most of the administrative staff reported to them individually. The middle managers were displaying minimal enthusiasm for episcopal initiatives that might require them to give up their comfortable lives as country gentlemen and actually exert themselves.
As the duly elected coadjutor, Frederik had succeeded his great-uncle in Bremen quite independently of having been appointed governor of the Province of Westphalia by Gustav Adolf two months later. The prince-archbishopric’s lands, those under its civil administration, consisted of only about a third of the ecclesiastical archdiocesan territory. Most of them lay in the area to the north of the city, between the Weser and Elbe rivers.
He was, he presumed, still responsible for the spiritual welfare of all Lutherans within the larger limits. Nobody had told him anything to the contrary. That had little in common with running the Erzstift. He would have district superintendents and consistories to deal with, pastoral appointments to approve, trial sermons delivered by candidates for those parish appointments to listen to—all the familiar routines of a bishop for which he had been educated.
In addition to his new political duties as governor of Westphalia, which were almost overwhelmingly more extensive than those of a prince-archbishop of Bremen and prince-bishop of Verden would have been.
He had a funeral to attend and some Augean Stables to sluice out. He would combine the funeral for his predecessor with the matter of dealing with “his own” cathedral canons in Erzstift Bremen. Who most certainly needed to be dealt with. First things first. I think that I’d better clean my own house before I start trying to sluice out everyone else’s, no matter how extensive the problems of the rest of Gustav Adolf’s new province are.
* * *
This time, he was setting up his easel in Schloß Bremervörde. Also called Vörde Castle, in the town of Bremervörde, about forty miles northeast of Bremen in the direction of Stade, it was the largest fortification in the region as well as having been the effective capital city of the Erzstift since the thirteenth century.
It would be a nice place to live, if all he needed was a nice place to live. Damp, of course, but no more so than anywhere else in northern Germany or Denmark. The castle was located on a fortified island in the Oste River. Those fortifications protected the residence itself, a house with several wings, designed to impress, built in the modern Renaissance style, with both formal gardens and more practical vegetable gardens
It would not do for his permanent residence as governor of Westphalia, being too far north. He would need to choose a place where neither Bremen nor Hamburg could so easily isolate him from the remainder of the province if for some reason they decided it was expedient to cut him off. Which meant that he was going to have to appoint an administrator for Bremen. It might no longer have a vote in the Imperial Diet, but somebody had to run the local government. It wouldn’t run itself.
He made a note to leave Captain von Bargen here when he went south, along with half of the company that he had brought from Copenhagen. Appoint him Statthalter. Charge him with responsibility to poke and prod the canons to keep things moving. Promote Lieutenant Meyer.
But that was tangential to the moment.
It was going to be more than a trifle touchy to put together a satisfactory guest list for the funeral. The mothers of both Gustav Adolf, now emperor of the USE and his own superior when he was being the governor of Westphalia, and Count Ulrich II of Ostfriesland had been duchesses of Holstein-Gottorp, sisters of old Johann Friedrich. By virtue of that, both men, the deceased’s nephews and one another’s first cousins, certainly should be invited.
Ideally, neither of them would come.
Frederik pulled his lips inward, chewing on them. He could not brush over the numerous implications of the successful petition of Ulrich II of Ostfriesland to join the United Provinces—he’d done that already before the Congress of Copenhagen. Gustav Adolf certainly would not be inclined to overlook it. By adding Ostfriesland—and Bentheim, but that was smaller and not of significance for this particular funeral—the United Provinces had become larger. The two counts had set an effective limit on imperial Swedish ambitions in that particular direction unless Gustav was willing to spend more on the conquest than would be practical.
Because the United Provinces were part of Don Fernando’s “Low Countries.” There were times when Frederik hoped that it bothered Oxenstierna, when he was trying to go to sleep at night, that the new Province of Westphalia that he had constituted also had a low-lying coast. Nobody yet had a reliable gauge of how ambitious the former cardinal-infante of Spain might be.
And there was still Oldenburg to consider. He would have to invite Count Anton Günther, who was his own cousin. Not to mention a cousin of Emelie, who was now married to Count Ludwig Günther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, who was prominently associated with the up-timers. The count and Emelie had both been at the Congress of Copenhagen; ideally, it was to be hoped, they would deem it too far to return north so soon for a funeral.
He turned his attention back to the prospective guest list.
In the end, it didn’t suit anybody, but almost everybody, both those who attended in person and those who did not, was about equally dissatisfied. That was probably the best he could have hoped for.
* * *
He convened the meeting of the canons in the chancery building. Like most of the construction in the region, the amply large L-shaped structure was brick. It had been damaged in the siege, back in 1627, but since repaired and refitted. Each of the canons had an elaborate, comfortable, chair. The support staff, a goodly number of permanent bureaucrats, stood or leaned against the walls.
Frederik cleared his throat.
“It has been brought to my attention that the ex-mistress of my predecessor, a woman named Anna Dobbel, is living on a diocesan-supplied retirement estate at Beverstedtermühlen.”
It was possible, even, that his predecessor had entered into a morganatic marriage with the woman, but that was a topic better avoided. If it had occurred, then his predecessor had violated the oath he had taken at the time of his election, to the effect that he would remain unmarried. In any case, he had managed to get the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, to legitimate and ennoble their two children in 1621.
Since everyone in the room already knew about Anna Dobbel, none of them responded.
“We need to have a serious discussion about the requirement you have established that the prince-bishop may not marry and its results. It is inconsistent with the Lutheran view of marriage and Luther’s repudiation of the Catholic doctrine of clerical celibacy. In what way is your requirement different from what Luther complained about among the noble high-clergy of the Catholic church in his day, such as the notorious archbishop of Mainz, who treated their positions as sinecures and kept mistresses?”
Since it wasn’t any different, and had been introduced for essentially the same practical reason, namely a concern on the part of the canons that married bishops with legitimate children might convert elective ecclesiastical territories into hereditary secular ones, such as had happened in Prussia the century before, none of them had an immediate answer.
“It has also led to significant legal expenses.”
Frederik referenced the complex lawsuit in the Reichskammergericht involving the late Johann Friedrich’s unsuccessful attempted betrothal in 1600 to a sister of Count Anton Günther of Oldenburg. The canons had sued to prevent it; after several years, Johann Friedrich had sued to break it off unilaterally; and Count Anton Günther had sued to enforce it.
This, too, was quite true. Lawyers cost money and those suits had dragged on for a dozen years.
The canons appeared to be, on the whole, remarkably unstirred by his exhortations. When it came to sowing seed, his admonitions appeared to be falling on extraordinarily stony ground, well-supplied with thorns and nettles.
He turned around and motioned to the guard standing at the door, who left.
A few moments of silence ensued.
The guard returned, accompanied by a slightly scruffy middle-aged man wearing a well-worn Geneva gown with a clerical collar.
Frederik smiled at the gathered canons. “May I introduce you to your new chaplain.”
Hermann Hütter, the pastor of the parish of Lunsen, who had had the guts to publicly call out Frederik’s great-uncle and predecessor for fornication and adultery, stepped up on the podium, approached the lectern, and delivered a few trenchant words based on a reading of Jeremiah 26:8-15, with special focus on verse 13: Now reform your ways and your actions and obey the Lord your God. Then the Lord will relent and not bring the disaster he has pronounced against you.
Frederik let Hütter’s proclamation echo around the room for a while.
“Since the Erzstift is no longer an independent secular principality, but only a subordinate administrative unit of the Province of Westphalia, you, if you wish to retain your status as canons of St. Peter, will henceforth serve the spiritual needs of its Lutheran residents. Alternatively, each of you may choose to become simply an administrator for one or another business matter of the territory for the length of your own life, after which your canonry will no longer offer a sinecure for the local nobility. Instead, the stipend will rather go to an ordained pastor with theological training who is willing to assume the spiritual responsibilities that the members of this chapter, you who are canons of the cathedral, have so blithely neglected up to this day.
The canons might have minimal interest in religion, but few of them were stupid. Focusing on the aspect of this speech that conceded that each of them now in place could, in fact, keep his income for the remainder of his own natural life, they adapted. After all, who was to say that Gustav Adolf’s new regime would last and that all of this would not be revoked in due time.
* * *
Frederik was conferring with von Bargen and Meyer about last minute details when one of the bureaucrats who had been standing at the back of the room during his confrontation with the canons—the confrontation that Meyer, who had associated with Eddie Cantrell and several other up-timers rather familiarly during the months that Cantrell was in Copenhagen, persisted in flippantly describing as a “come-to-Jesus meeting”—knocked rather timidly at the door.
“Your Grace?”
“Yes?”
“I do have one more slight complication that I would like to bring to your attention. How will the new USE policies on religious toleration affect the way we as the administrative staff of the Erzstift handle the two functioning Catholic convents that have survived the Reformation?” When he received no immediate reply, he added helpfully, “Buxtehude Altkloster and Buxtehude Neukloster, over near Hamburg.”
Frederik stood a minute, pulling his lips inward and chewing on them. Then he pushed them out. “I, ah, interpret the new policies to mean that we do not have to handle them at all any more. Or, at least, no more than we will handle a guild or a municipal hospital by ensuring that they obey the laws of the land. Draft a letter advising the Catholic ladies that they are now the pope’s problem.” He paused. “Not mine.”