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Chapter 19


Magdeburg

December 1635


While ordinary people in most of the country read about the national crisis in the newspapers and otherwise got on with their own lives, the politicians in Magdeburg were preoccupied with it. Sometimes with more assumptions than facts. At one FoJP meeting, Albert Bugenhagen, the mayor of Hamburg, proclaimed, “At least half the stinking noblemen—

and just about all the Hochadel—from Brunswick and Westphalia are in Berlin right now, plotting with Oxenstierna.” Anselm Keller, from the Province of the Main, chimed in that this was also true as one looked out from Mainz on his region.

Dirk Waßmann, the wimpy little backbencher from Westphalia, stuck up his hand and pointed out that, technically speaking, there weren’t any Hochadel in either Brunswick or Westphalia. There were some former, now mediatized, high nobility who formerly ruled the various principalities that were thrown into Westphalia, but Brunswick didn’t even have that. Except for the abbess of Quedlinburg, of course, who most certainly was not in Berlin plotting with Oxenstierna. As for a fair number of Westphalian and Brunswick Niederadel, he was willing to grant that they were in Berlin—but not with the approval of the governors of their respective provinces.

And not, he was willing to bet, any of them from Erzstift Bremen or Hochstift Verden. Not if they knew what was good for them. The dowager-electress took the position . . . 

He was firmly told not to raise minor technicalities; subsided with a mutter about people not being free to create their own facts just because they liked them.

He’d been elected on a platform of shutting down the witchcraft persecutions that had plagued the city of Minden during the previous thirty years, which had appealed to the CoC. His main platform plank, “you never can tell when someone with a grudge will accuse your own mother or sister,” might not have been strict party line, but had proven effective. His major qualification in the eyes of the rest of his constituents was that he had been thrown into prison for several months by the Catholic imperial forces during the years they occupied the town before the Ring of Fire and subsequent events.

He had no claim to fame other than having been present during the skirmish at Minden that led to the death of von Bargen. Which counted for nothing in this room, von Bargen having been representing the province’s legitimately appointed governor rather than some heroic dissenter.

The count of Lippe-Brake is a manuscript collector, he thought rebelliously, unlikely to conspire with anyone; the count of Lippe-Schaumburg is young and inexperienced, old Count Hermann of Schaumburg having died only this year without heirs, and has ambitions to marry into the Hesse-Kassel family to shore up his position, so he won’t do anything contrary to the wishes of the landgravine. The count of Lippe-Detmold might be in Berlin, but if so, I haven’t heard about it. His Aunt Magdalena is certainly home in Herford doing her job as abbess, as ordinaria loci or, in the minds of those who object to women in positions of ecclesiastical power, monstrum Westphaliae.

Perhaps one of Lippe-Detmold’s younger brothers? There are three of them, all dissatisfied with a younger son’s share.

There’s definitely no Hochadel there from Diepholz, because the comital line is extinct and it’s been mostly incorporated into Brunswick since 1585, which only goes to show that the emperor should have assigned it to Brunswick rather than Westphalia in the first place. And the same is true of Hoya, except that part of it went to Hesse-Kassel when the comital line died out in 1582 instead of all to Brunswick.

Aloud, once he managed to get a word in, he only said, “The least you people could do is familiarize yourselves with local history, since it’s perfectly clear that Chancellor Oxenstierna didn’t bother when he cobbled the Province of Westphalia together. We—not ‘we the FoJP supporters’ but ‘we the people who have to live there’—are only lucky that both Frederik of Denmark and Duke Georg have been reasonable about it.”

“Waßmann,” Anselm Keller shouted, “stop being such a prig of a schoolteacher.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a schoolteacher,” came Constantine Ableidinger’s counter-shout. “In any event, we shouldn’t be worrying about petty noblemen. We’d better be asking ourselves what Gustav’s Crown Loyalist provincial governors are going to do. Brunswick. Hesse. The so-called ‘Prince of Westphalia’ and his ilk.”

Even Ableidinger had no idea where the story that circulated so widely had originated. By this time, it just was. So when Anselm Keller sullenly said, “They never made that Danish bastard a prince,” Ableidinger retorted, “Who didn’t? They didn’t make him a prince because Gustav Adolf put his foot down. But what do you think are the odds that Oxenstierna won’t hand him the title, if Frederik gets pissed at us and makes friendly noises toward Berlin?”

Dirk Waßmann thought about pointing out that Frederik was not actually one of the Danish bastards but rather a legitimate son of the king, but decided it was fruitless. Moreover, he currently held an imperial appointment from the USE that entitled him to a vote in the House of Lords under the new constitution, and that was that. If Frederik lost his job, he lost his vote. No different from the way that he himself, or Thomas Krage one district over, would lose the right to vote in the House of Commons if he lost the next election.

The title of Fürst, sovereign prince, that had once been held by the prince-archbishops of Bremen and prince-bishops of Verden had been . . . He glanced around at his fellow party members. It had been extinguished by them, right along with the old Reichstag. And they didn’t even seem to realize what they had done.


Berlin

December 1635


Jürg Behr, more formally known, if he was speaking High German, as Georg Behr, had been a military officer for the Holy Roman Empire; then, after a rapid and prudent change of heart, a military officer for Gustav Adolf as king of Sweden after he intervened in the German wars and appeared to be on the winning side; then a military officer for Gustav Adolf as emperor of the United States of Europe. After all, a man had to earn a living somehow. His father, unfortunately, had lived far beyond his means trying to keep up with the lifestyle at the court of the dukes of Mecklenburg, and left his children burdened with debts.

But he remained a proud nobleman: not “von Behr,” but Behr, with multiple branches of his lineage annexing the names of their various possessions to the family name. Born in Mecklenburg, fostered in Pomerania, with hereditary, fairly extensive, and, by the standards of the region, reasonably profitable, estates. Newenhofe, Düwelsdorff (known to the rude as Teufelsdorf; spelled by the careless as Deifelstorff), Nustrow in Mecklenburg. But by changing sides, he still had not avoided some of the worst results of the coming of the Swedes. The forced contributions in 1630 and subsequent years had been punitive, ruinous.


Der Schwed’ ist gekommen,

Hat alles genommen

Hat die Fenster eingeschlagen,

Das Blei fortgetragen,

Hat Kugel draus gegossen,

Und alle Todt geschossen.


The Swede had indeed come and taken everything. Currently, almost no Mecklenburg and few Pomeranian nobles had remunerative estates left. He wasn’t one of the lucky few. Nustrow, where he himself had been born, unless things could be changed back, was probably gone for good: divided up among the serfs who had worked the land by the thrice-cursed Committees of Correspondence after Krystalnacht. There had been a nice little Schloß, decent moat, only about a century old—they had burned it to the ground. So much for the effectiveness of switching sides in a timely manner!

Which meant that Axel Oxenstierna, Swede or not, was currently his best hope, which was why he was in Berlin this winter.

If that didn’t work . . . he had been married since 1621 to Hedwig von Heimbruch, from Brunswick. Who, as heiress of her sister Gertrud, had a possibly viable claim to the nice little estate called Thedinghausen in Erzstift Verden where they had celebrated their marriage. Not very viable, given that the previous prince-bishop’s legitimated children had also filed a suit. But potentially, particularly if he could get Oxenstierna to see that a legitimate noble married to a legitimate noblewoman had a legitimate hereditary claim that should clearly take precedence over that of a couple of bastards and most certainly over that of the successor who currently held the see. Whose father, the king of Denmark, was bound to be a thorn in Oxenstierna’s flesh.


Stade

December 1635


“There’s another CoC pamphlet,” Rist said, throwing it on the table. “Alleging that your father and you are agitating to have the emperor name you as ‘Prince of Westphalia.’ Are you going to respond? This time? Finally?”

Frederik, son of King Christian IV of Denmark, turned from the window through which he had been observing the ancient Hanseatic city he had now officially designated as the northern capital of the region he administered, his hands clasped behind his back, and looked down his prominent nose. “No.”

Johann Rist waited, eventually resigning himself to the obvious fact that the governor of the USE’s Province of Westphalia had no intention of elaborating on that statement. The man was not in the least given to sharing the “why”s and “wherefore”s of the decisions that he made.

“Do we have a response from Duke Georg yet?”

“Yes.” Rist placed a folder of correspondence on the table considerably more sedately than he had thrown the pamphlet.

“Thank you. I’ll call when I’ve decided on a reply.”

Rist bowed himself out.

* * *

Frederik picked up the CoC pamphlet and placed it neatly in his “File with No Response” box.

“Prince of Westphalia.” How convenient of the radicals to spend their time worrying about wild improbabilities when they could be creating real difficulties.

What had ever given Stearns’ people the idea that he was petitioning to have his title changed to “Prince of Westphalia”? Why would he agitate for any such thing? He was neither a Printz in Denmark, where there was only one and that was his older brother Christian, the Chosen Prince, the elected heir to the throne, nor a Fürst in any German principality, which the English language oddly translated with the word prince. Nor had any member of the House of Oldenburg ever been a Fürst by birth or inheritance.

In an odd way, he was still the episcopal administrator, if no longer a ruling bishop, in Bremen and Verden, but an elective office as Fürstbischoff did not make one personally a prince. It was a status. It had signified that one headed an ecclesiastical institution that had a seat in the Reichstag. As his current status as governor gave him a seat in the House of Lords of Gustav’s new parliament.

Certainly a prince-abbot such as the late Schweinsberg at Fulda had not been a prince. He had been a member of the lower nobility, a Fürstabt by virtue of the office he held. Frederik’s mind twisted a little. If, by some freakish combination of ability and cunning, a commoner had ever managed to be elected as abbot of Fulda—or archbishop of Bremen—that man would have held such a title and have sat in the Reichstag by virtue of the office he held.

It might even have been possible—remotely possible—even without the Ring of Fire. More and more cathedral chapters over the past century had gone to accepting canons who held university doctoral degrees in law or theology as equivalent in rank to those born to the nobility.

Governor of the Province of Westphalia—that title was, by its very nature, coming from Gustav Adolf, a temporary thing. To quote Job, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

But, so be it. Stearns and his Fourth of July Party had gotten the Prince idea from somewhere—probably from some unfounded speculation published in a newspaper—and the CoC radicals, including those in the city of Bremen, had run with it for the past year. Bless their black little hearts. It was a useful distraction.


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