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Chapter 23


Münster

February 1636


It was not the most convenient time for the problems associated with Hesse’s continued, illegal, occupation of the town of Dorsten on the Lippe River to surface. But they did, which was the main reason why Chancellor Gießenbier had little time to think about Holstein.

The landgravine had no desire at all to give up what she and her husband had grabbed during their campaign against Essen the previous year. It was a matter of access to riverine transport, which she regarded—rightly regarded—as crucial for the future of Hesse’s economy.

Dorsten proper was incontrovertibly in Essen, since the old town lay on the south side of the river. Westphalia was involved as a secondary party because the old town, like so many, was expanding across the river as its economy grew. The portion across the river was indubitably in Westphalia. The whole thing could get more unpleasant than Bremen Altstadt and Bremen Neustadt, because both sections of Bremen were, at least for the time being, in the same province.

Frederik sent negotiators to Kassel.

Johann Rist had obtained a reprint of the famous up-time history of the Thirty Years War at considerable expense and been bitterly disappointed in how little attention it paid to the Münsterland. After he had hired four experienced researchers in the great Grantville library, who went through the encyclopedias town by town and from one footnote to another, he armed the negotiators with a precis of exactly what Hesse-Kassel would have done to southern and western Westphalia, the Oberstift, from 1633 to 1634, if the Ring of Fire had not intervened, all the way until they reluctantly abandoned the last occupied territory two years after the Peace of Westphalia had been signed, with references to an eighteen-year-long occupation. They were to make it clear—very clear—that the landgravine had neither a moral nor a legal leg to stand on, given what she would have done.

Admittedly, in this world, she hadn’t done it. Still, who was to say that if she was given a chance, she wouldn’t. As an afterthought, he distributed the precis to every town council. They might not like having a Danish Lutheran governor; it might shake them up to realize that a Hessian Calvinist one would have been far worse.

Frederik would have also sent troops to garrison Dorsten Neustadt if he had them available, but he didn’t.


Magdeburg

February 1636


The emperor, accompanied by his cousin Erik Haakansson Hand, arrived in the capital five days after Oxenstierna’s death in a tavern on the outskirts of Berlin.


Münster

March 1636


Frederik picked up the folder from Georg. The duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg-Calenberg was a reasonable man. So was Loring Schultz, the commoner—a trained jurist, but still a commoner—he had appointed to run the Province of Brunswick while the duke himself fought for Gustav Adolf in the east. Of course, Georg’s sons were too young and his brothers were incompetent, which gave Schultz considerable freedom of action in the matter. Georg’s wife was busy and it wasn’t as if he would have appointed a potential rival from one of the other principalities that the Congress of Copenhagen had folded into his bailiwick. The duke of Brunswick was a reasonable man and that would have been well beyond the realm of rational.

They were all in consensus that the Province of Brunswick should continue to manage not only the secular administration but also the needs of the Lutheran churches of the former counties of Hoya and Diepholz. Those properly belonged to Brunswick and had since the line of the counts of Hoya went extinct over a half century earlier. He saw no reason to switch the churches into Westphalia. They saw no reason to switch them out of the Brunswick Superintendency. Done. They were now somebody else’s problem.

He took a piece of note paper, wrote, “Agreed; have Bucholtz add necessary verbiage,” and clipped it to the folder, which he deposited in the “Out” box.

Andreas Heinrich Bucholtz was one of the twin sons of the late Joachim, who had been a Lutheran superintendent in Brandenburg before his untimely death when the boys were in their teens. He’d studied in Magdeburg; had been at the university in Wittenberg, where he obtained his master’s in philosophy in 1630, studying theology, when the Ring of Fire hit. Rather than going back to relatives in Brandenburg and finding a position as a tutor, as he had been vaguely thinking about because his mother was running out of money, Andreas spent the next two years in Grantville, and environs. Towed to the Congress of Copenhagen in the wake of Count Ludwig Günther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, he had made friends with other masters of the art of shorthand who sat around the table behind their employers. Thus his current, rather amorphously described, job in the Westphalian chancery. He was twenty-seven. He was an all-purpose writer. An adder of verbiage.

Next week, the governor would turn twenty-seven years.

That was the difference in your career prospects if you were born the son of a king rather than the son of a Lutheran district superintendent. He didn’t begrudge it. Much. He did occasionally talk to his friends over beer about the Meaning of It All. Pestel pointed out that it made even more difference to your career prospects if you were born the son of a tailor. Or a serf.

Christoph Joachim Bucholtz, Andreas’ brother, had finished up his degree at Wittenberg and come to Herford to clerk in the chancery of the Princess-Abbess Magdalena, born a countess of Lippe. Taken a doctorate in law at Duke Georg of Brunswick’s beloved university in Helmstedt, and headed back to Herford for a better job. Christoph had political ambitions. Once the abbey no longer had a vote in the Reichstag because the Reichstag was no more, he got in touch with the brother who so fortuitously had been hired by the governor of Westphalia. Now he was one of the chancellor’s squad of auxiliary lawyers. The chancellor had dropped the Holstein communications on his desk for review.

“The governor is a duke of Holstein.” That was Christoph Bucholtz’ first line of argument when the three men looked at the folder, over and over and over. “By lineage, he is one hundred percent German. As is his father. As is his brother ‘Prince’ Ulrik, for that matter. You have to go back nearly half a millennium to find actual Danes in the Oldenburg family tree.”

“Not that much, surely!” David Pestel protested.

“Christian IV is king of Denmark, but he’s German. The governor’s mother was from Brandenburg. His grandparents, with the same ‘king of Denmark’ exception; seven of the governor’s eight great-grandparents bore German Hochadel titles and the eighth, the ‘princess of Denmark’ in that line, was a woman whose German Oldenburg grandfather grasped the throne of Denmark a century and a half ago.”

All three of them agreed. This thing in Holstein couldn’t get lost, buried in the piles of paper on the chancellor’s desk. They needed to tug it out; get it in front of the governor’s eyes now that he was back in the capital. Pestel became rather insistent that the governor pay attention to a folder concerning actions by the nobility of Holstein. He nagged Chancellor Gießenbier. He haunted Rist’s outer office.

* * *

Frederik tugged a memo pad from the shelf under the surface of his desk and penned a memo. “To Andreas Bucholtz—find Eichrodt and get him to prepare a Gutachten on the legal status of former ecclesiastical princes and abbots within the USE in general. When he’s done, turn into pamphlet for publication.” He put it into the Out box.

Rist stuck his head through the door. “Pestel is here. Again. You gave him an appointment.”

Frederik nodded. “Send him in.” And listened.

Now he stood at a desk in Münster, where in another world, in another dozen years, part of the signing of the peace that ended that war had occurred, would occur. Not only that war, but also the Eighty Years War in the Netherlands. The Dutch War of Independence, now so oddly resolved by an understanding between Fernando and Frederik Hendrik.

Osnabrück, the other location where that treaty was signed, also lay within his area of administration.

He had gone to the trouble of standing in the rooms where both signings took place. Or would take place. Or would have taken place.

He turned back to the window.

St. Lambert’s church. He had ordered the three iron baskets in which the bodies of the leaders of the Anabaptist rebellion of a century ago had been displayed removed from the bell tower. Stored. Filed without a response, if anyone should ask.

He once again picked up the original radioed report from Lübeck that Christoph Bucholtz had flagged for his special attention.

He was a son of the king of Denmark, who held extensive properties in Holstein even if he was no longer the sovereign. The king of Denmark, who was still sovereign in Schleswig and therefore must be notified because of the events at Eckernförde.

He was a duke of Holstein.

He was Gustav Adolf’s administrator, governor if one would, of the Province of Westphalia, which included Holstein.

Any way a person considered it, Holstein was his problem.

As of this morning, a large and looming problem.

But not the only problem.

It would be so convenient if problems came one at a time.


Dorsten

March 1636


Frederik ended up having to go to Dorsten himself. The landgravine’s agents there, his negotiators reported, had unearthed incontrovertible evidence that several of the important noble families in the region of the town had been involved with Oxenstierna’s coup; that the family heads, while themselves remaining conspicuously visible on their Westphalian properties, or even, a few of them, deciding that it was a great time to make a visit to the Low Countries and departing for Deventer, had in no way interfered when younger brothers, nephews, cousins, even an occasional younger son, had gone to Berlin.

Von Twickelo. Von der Recke. The Hackfurt line of the Westerholdts. The Merveldts at Westerwinkel. Even some distant connections of the von Galen and von Velen. Not just minor, local, Niederadel. Not imperial Freiherren, owing allegiance only to the emperor, either; they had been mediatized to the prince-bishop of Münster; they were now subjects of the Province of Westphalia. But they called themselves freie Herren. Not quite the same thing, but he had no doubt that each one of them harbored the ambition to become free and independent of any overlord, of any governmental authority. Catholics, many of them; Calvinists, some of them.

He wondered briefly if Claessens, the suffragan bishop of the still vacant archdiocese, had spurred them on. Unfortunately, the prospect that a fanatical Catholic might have been in collusion with Oxenstierna went beyond any realistic scenario he could envision. Reluctantly, he dropped the idea. There were conspiracy theories, but then there were also sheer conspiracy delusions. This was normal power-grabbing.

He might not have troops, but he had lawyers and notaries who delighted in following paper trails.

By the time Frederik was finished with the traitors (banished, most of them; permanently exiled on threat of execution), he had property. True, the lawyers had confiscated most of it for the benefit of the province and henceforth the dedicated revenues from those would go to cover certain specific administrative expenses. Such as the construction and maintenance of a suitable official residence for the province’s governor (whoever he might be or become). Such as a decently sized chancery building. For the first time in his life, though, he had three comfortable, extensive, manor properties of his own, one with a nice little Schloß.

The landgravine not only wasn’t surprised; she didn’t disapprove. One of the strengths of the landgraves of Hesse-Kassel, before the enlargement to provincial status, was that about 60% of Kassel was direct domanial land, from which they collected not only the taxes, but also the rents and dues, to the immense benefit of the ruling family when it came to dealing with the noble estates. Acquisition of property was how things were done. If anything, she was a bit surprised at how modestly Frederik enriched himself. Under the circumstances.


Quedlinburg

March 1636


“The old ladies say,” Bethany Leek wrote to her mother, “that the governor in Westphalia came down pretty hard on the conspirators, but left the branches of the families that he couldn’t prove sent anyone to Berlin alone. Sort of the same pattern that the emperor followed with the ones who actually were in Berlin. Most of the ladies don’t have a lot of sympathy for the reactionaries in the Münsterland. They’re of the opinion that they’re an uppity bunch. Not to mention Catholic or Calvinist, most of them. But, anyway, they figure that either the rest of the Westphalian nobility, no matter what church they belong to, has either gotten the message by now or the governor will stomp on them later.

“Of course, the ladies are Lutheran and he’s Lutheran, so that may tint their perspective. Or tilt it. Something like that.”


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