Chapter 7
Münster
January 1635
Rist managed to catch a chaplain. Joachim Lütkemann, in his mid-20s, on his way home from studying at the University of Strassburg.
“Professor Gisenius heard from Professor Dannhauer that he was on his way to Rostock, looking for a position—he’s from Mecklenburg, or maybe Pomerania—and headed him off.”
“If he is the same age as I am,” Frederik asked mildly, “is he likely to be any wiser or more well advised?”
“He’s at least more likely to be able to keep up with you on a horse than someone three times his age.” Rist, only a couple of years older than Frederik but much less athletic, had agonizing memories, more in his buttocks than his brain, of some bruising rides when his employer determined to be in a certain place at a certain time, no matter what. “Also, Dannhauer is noted for his focus on pastoral theology rather than esoteric academic stuff.”
* * *
One obligation could not be ignored. Even without a census, the province would have to conduct an election.
Frederik had thought about it in August. He had started worrying about it in November, but at that point the question of how to do it was still up in the air. Election day was advancing upon him ominously, like an attacking tercio. Slow moving, day by day, but with a ghastly certainty of its arrival.
The various “how to do it” designs on his easel had thus far ruined eight large sheets of expensive paper. On both sides.
“We will have it organized in time for the election,” one of the lawyers he brought from Rinteln assured him. “We’re setting up a network of village notaries. The contracts for ballots have already been let to two printers in each district. Ideally, in each village, the voting would be monitored by both the bailiff and the headman, but in so many places a bailiff has responsibility for five or even ten villages. And the lordship is split in so many others. Nor do we want the lords supervising the way their serfs vote. You will be sending out a mandate authorizing the notaries to deputize official observers.”
Serfs were voting? Frederik shrugged.
“I only wish we had more in the way of a militia to guard the polling places,” he answered. “To assure the voters that they will be safe from reprisals, however they vote . . . reprisals from anyone from feudal lords and reactionaries to CoC fanatics and radicals . . . when they come to exercise their right. That day. And the day, the week, and the month after they drop their ballots in those boxes. I sometimes wonder if the up-timers realize how dangerous this might end up being for an ordinary peasant or a journeyman in a guild. We can’t make the voting districts too large or it would be a heavy burden on people to go to the polls. But when they are small, even with a ‘secret ballot,’ it won’t be that difficult for lords and masters to figure out how any person marked his paper. If there are fifteen voters in a village, the lord told them to vote for Herr X, but the returns show that four voted for Herr Y . . . We’ll be putting out brush fires all over the province next summer.”
Münster
February 1635
Thus far, nobody in Magdeburg had reacted to Christian Ulrik’s proposed marriage one way or the other. Sometimes, Frederik wondered whether anyone even read his regular, conscientious, dispatches.
Still, when it came to maintaining his relationship with the federal government, he would be sure to dot all of his “i”s and cross all of his “t”s, watch every jot and tittle. Be punctilious, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word.
He smiled briefly at his own little joke. He enjoyed word plays.
Osnabrück
February 1635
If anything was likely to attract attention in Magdeburg, it was what came next. Before his own appointment became effective in June 1634, during the chaotic campaigns of 1631 and 1632, the Swedes had managed to install in Osnabrück the emperor’s illegitimate son.
Also Gustav, but not Gustav Adolf. Gustav Gustafsson, born in Stockholm, now turning nineteen years old.
Install as Lutheran prince-bishop of the Hochstift—of which Franz Wilhelm von Wartenburg, the illegitimate son of one of the dukes of Bavaria (not of the currently troublesome Maximilian, but of one of his uncles, Frederik thought), was already the Catholic prince-bishop and had been for several years past. Franz Wilhelm had fled when the Swedes arrived; young Gustav was in possession of the episcopal residence at Schloß Iburg, the episcopal revenues, episcopal hunting lodge, episcopal everything. In theory, the Swedes had furnished him with older and wiser heads to advise him, but complaints were beginning to come in.
Yea, Osnabrück. It must be such a joy for anybody, much less a boy who wanted to get back to his career as a military officer, considering that his appointment had originally been as commandant of what was then a fortress in an active campaign field, to find himself still stuck there two years later, the campaigns having long since moved on. Nineteen years old, with no theological training, supposed to manage a prince-bishopric in which there were twenty-eight parishes staffed by Catholic priests, eighteen staffed by Lutheran pastors, eight dually staffed with the two congregations using the church building at different times of day, and a currently non-functional Jesuit college that had, under Wartenburg, usurped the Gymnasium Carolinum, supposedly founded under Charlemagne and holding the proud distinction of being the oldest continuously functioning school in the Germanies. Until . . .
Besides which, there were two other competing Latin Schools, the Domschule, under cathedral sponsorship, and the Ratsschule, sponsored by the city council. There had been a tendency for centuries for bishops to try to close the municipal school and the council to try to close the cathedral school. Not that there was a clear confessional distinction. At one point in the previous century, not only had Lutheran students been admitted to the cathedral school, but its rector had been Lutheran as well. Damenstifte that were maybe Catholic again. This indolent biconfessionalism had functioned reasonably well until a dozen years earlier, when the new suffragan bishop had started to get energetic about Tridentine reforms.
Frederik shook his head. He wasn’t supposed to be considering schools right now. He was supposed to be considering complaints about Gustafsson.
Gustafsson was supposed to be considering the logistics of it all. Not pestering the daughter of an important supporter of one of the rival mayors. Rival mayors being a separate issue: one had in a staunchly Lutheran way gone into exile rather than submit to the demands of Wartenburg; the second had in a staunchly Lutheran way stayed in the city to resist the demands of Wartenburg; the third had in a staunchly Catholic way stayed in the city and enthusiastically supported Wartenburg. Each, along with his partisans, considered that his way had been the only proper way to handle the situation during the era of the Edict of Restitution.
He’d have to do something. He’d . . . send Christian Ulrik to deal with it.
“Say something like, ‘my mother was the daughter of the mayor of Copenhagen. Let me tell you something, buddy. It’s not a good idea for a nobleman to mess with a girl of good bourgeois family unless she and her family are willing for her to be messed with.’”
* * *
Gustafsson was dazzlingly good-looking.
Of course, Christian Ulrik thought, all the gossip maintained that his mother, a woman of Dutch merchant extraction named Margriet Slöts or Cabiljau, had been extraordinarily beautiful.
Then again, powerful men did tend to choose mistresses who were extraordinarily beautiful. Wives, not so much, with the result that Princess Kristina looked like she did. Or, for that matter, in his own family, there was no doubt that his father’s gaggle of children by Kirsten Munk were far better looking than the three legitimate royal spawn.
He himself, bastard again, had some margin over those three in the looks department, by any impartial judgment rendered.
He looked at the boy again. Handsome is as handsome does.
Young Gustav had been fostered by Karl Karlsson Gyllenhielm, baron of Bergkvara, high admiral of Sweden, his equally bastard paternal half-uncle. Off to the University of Wittenberg at age fourteen for an almost purely ceremonial tour, during which he had been tutored privately and served a term as honorary rector. Then into the army, commissioned as colonel of a Livonian cavalry regiment, and then dropped into this spot as commandant of Osnabrück.
The boy was lively; according to those who knew him, honest and fearless; also mouthy and fearfully short-tempered.
And conceited. Which brought an observer back to dazzlingly good-looking.
Tell papa all about it.
The girl was named Margaretha. Seventeen to the boy’s nineteen.
Indignant denial that he was pressuring her. “She likes me.”
Well, yes, he had sneaked into her bedroom at night.
All right, yeah, he’d had sex with her.
And then he’d brought her out to Iburg, where she had stayed for a week.
“Iburg’s pretty nice,” he remarked inconsequentially, “now that I’ve gotten the damage from the last time someone occupied and plundered it fixed up. The rooms in a couple of the newer wings are nice. I don’t see why she wouldn’t want to live here. It’s way too comfortable for some Catholic bishop like Wartenburg. I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to wear sandals in the snow and flog themselves, aren’t they?”
Christian Ulrik answered that those were hermits or ascetics or something, not bishops; then he managed to get Gustafsson back on track.
No, he had not “dishonored her and sent her home in shame.” If it was up to him, she would still be at Iburg. Her father had insisted that he send her back home, threatening legal action if he didn’t comply. Had actually served him with a warrant.
The week that Christian Ulrik had planned to stay in Osnabrück dragged out into two.
* * *
Bente was afflicted by the temperamental miasma that often came upon expectant mothers. An up-timer would have said pregnancy hormones. Her future brother-in-law, who had never heard of hormones, resorted to the theory of the four humors.
As the time dragged, she concluded that Frederik had sent her beloved away on a pretext in order to separate the two of them. Just as his father had wanted to have her exiled to Norway. This was accompanied by floods of hysterical tears that could not be stemmed by the ministrations of either Vendt’s wife or mother.
Thinking, that can’t be good for the baby, Frederik retreated to his office. Where he remained, dreading any more hassles that might result from having to deal with Lutheran ladies of various types.
He tried to calm himself with paperwork. He wasn’t sure about much of what had come to the Germanies from up-time, but these boxes with their neat In, Respond Now, Respond Later, File with No Response, Trash, and Out labels were of considerable utility. Of course, the ones he had seen in Magdeburg had only been labeled In and Out, which was quite inadequate, but adding other categories had not been a challenge.
Lutheran ladies. Including the inevitable, eventual, wife he would someday take to his bosom. Would she be inclined to weep? His mother had died when he was four; he had largely grown up under the supervision of male tutors, attended all-male schools, had little to do with his flock of younger half-sisters, and generally found himself at a loss when confronted with the female of the species. Which was, his father had trained him to think, generally predatory and out to sink claws into a promising young royal scion if he was not careful.
* * *
Meanwhile, in Osnabrück, Christian Ulrik was counseling that putting pressure on Margaretha’s father would lead to lasting hostility and a lot of bad feeling. “Why don’t you find a girl whose father is more agreeable? They’re out there by the bushel, I guarantee you. Men who realize that a youthful affair with a man of high rank is a stroke of good luck for a girl, usually leading to a generous financial settlement, and concentrate on making sure that the contracts are as foolproof as possible. That’s sure how my grandfather saw it; it was a stroke of bad luck for him that my mother died so young and the trust funds settled on me came along with a set of conscientious trustees who wouldn’t let him waste my money.”
Gustafsson protested that not only did he like Margaretha; she also liked him.
That was not unlikely. She was seventeen and he was dazzlingly good-looking.
Christian Ulrik handed over a letter from the governor that could be summarized as, “Thou shalt not seduce the daughter of a wealthy supporter of one of the mayors unless both the father and the daughter are willing and see advantages to it.”
Gustafson kicked a hassock, impatiently. “I’ve already seduced her. It’s not the kind of thing that you can take back.”
“Do you have a chaplain?”
“Dreary old stick!
* * *
Frederik’s promised chaplain was, presumably, still on his way from Strassburg. At least, he had not yet shown up in Münster, which was no surprise considering the weather. He drafted a Lutheran pastor who had come into the city a couple of weeks earlier, traveling with a party of merchants which was, in turn, still stuck at the inn because of the weather.
That, of course, caused a variety of jurisdictional questions to arise, all of which the lawyers from Rinteln pounced upon with glee. The ordination of the traveling cleric was not in question, as he was well known to his companions, but he had no call to a parish in the city. Nor was Lutheranism yet so well organized in the Oberstift that there was any Lutheran superintendent or consistory. It had been less than a year since Archbishop Ferdinand of Bavaria’s vicar general had been energetically prohibiting Lutherans from living in the town at all.
Frederik swiped his hand through his unruly hair. Lutheranism wasn’t organized at all, yet, anywhere in the Oberstift. Or Niederstift. Could he as governor appoint himself as summus episcopus, recruit a cadre of duly ordained clergymen, and set it on its way, more or less as he was managing his spiritual obligations in Bremen and Verden?
He made a note to ask the lawyers.
For the time being, the traveling pastor could make the entry in the church register of his own parish when he got back home.
The German pastor, who spoke no Danish, raised an eyebrow. “Bente?” he asked. “Is that a name?”
“It would be ‘Benedicta’ if the register were written in Latin,” the bridegroom said.
The pastor recorded it as Benedicta. The groom’s surname as Guldenlöwe. The permanent residence of both as the imperial city of Hamburg, since that was where they told him that Bente’s father was currently residing. Christian Ulrik said that his mother was deceased, so his father went into the register as Wittwer—a widower. A father named Christian Guldenlöwe, residence Glückstadt.
When the weather broke, he returned to a small town near Freiburg im Breisgau, where, since the couple were not his parishioners, he copied the information into the few pages at the back of the parish ledger that he reserved for the baptisms, marriages, and funerals of “vagabonds.” Nobody was ever able to locate a copy of the official marriage record on the various occasions that it was called for during the ensuing half-century.
Christian Guldenlöwe of Glückstadt, otherwise known as Christian IV, king of Denmark, was not pleased by the marriage and expressed that to Frederik in forceful terms. However, he was less displeased than he would have been if Christian Ulrik had carried out his threat to become an officer for the Spaniard in the Low Countries.
On balance, Frederik thought, it was not a bad outcome.
Christian Ulrik took stock of the “couldn’t locate any other pastor” situation and promptly arranged the installation of a primitive but usable radio connection for Frederik with the other major locations within the province, all the time thinking rather ruefully that when it came to technology, someone was going to have to haul his otherwise fairly admirable older half-brother, kicking, screaming, and dragging his heels, into the modern world.