Chapter 18
Münster
October 1635
One thing could produce more wrangling over details than schools did. Churches.
Frederik was Lutheran. Denmark was Lutheran. That had been a beautifully uncomplicated state of affairs. He had grown up with the situation; absorbed it through his skin, consumed it with his cured ham.
Northern Germany had been somewhat more complex, but still comprehensible. While the principle of cuius regio, eius religio had not worked infallibly (see for reference the messy church history of the Upper Palatinate), nonetheless under the terms of the Peace of Augsburg, if a principality was blessed by God with a sequence of reliably Lutheran rulers, one could anticipate that it would develop a reliably Lutheran population. A state church with the ruler as summus episcopus.
Now correspondence informed him reliably that the Crown Loyalist majority in parliament and the emperor of the USE were expecting each province of the polity to establish a single state church.
After the same emperor—who was now off fighting in the east, his attention focused on other matters, leaving an increasingly impotent Wilhelm Wettin as prime minister to try to ride herd on the bucket of eels that had voted him into office—yes, after that same emperor, little more than a year earlier, had arbitrarily created a province that . . .
Frederik counted on his fingers.
Nearly half Lutheran, but not half Lutheran. Not fifty-one percent, not likely to make up even a simple majority in the new legislature, even if all Lutherans could be expected to agree with one another and vote the same way. Which they could not be expected to do.
Nearly half Catholic. Which, fortunately from his perspective, would never add up to a simple majority either, even if their priests drove them all to vote the same way.
Calvinists were at least Protestant; one could think that it would be reasonable to expect that they would cooperate with Lutherans. But one would be sadly wrong. Consider Bremen. Too pigheaded to make reliable alliances; too few of them to be able to grasp important positions in the new legislature without alliances. But if he could manipulate them to keep a balance, some of them, sometimes, agreeing with the Lutherans on some things, the Landtag might at least get as far as electing a speaker.
And a tiny scattering of other ecclesiastical minorities, of which the Mennonites refused to take an active part in civil government at all and the majority of the Jews were still too cautious to try.
None of whom, thus far, had massacred any significant number of the others on his watch.
Krystalnacht had marked a slight deviation from that state of affairs, but one could make a reasonable argument that the events of June had not been generated by internal controversies but rather imported from outside. Carried out by Westphalians at Loccum and Minden, but after those Westphalians had been exposed to foreign, alien, ideas.
* * *
Rist took time off; went home to get married; stated that the betrothal was of considerable standing and it was time to convert it to a marriage. He would be gone for six weeks, which was annoying.
Rist’s assistant, Gerhard Schepler, came in with another folder.
Orange. Churches again.
Thanks to the power of nepotism, Rist, whose sister was married to Schepler’s cousin, had managed to find a competent assistant. Schepler had turned twenty and ought to still be in law school, but Rist had persuaded the young man from the county of Hoya to take a couple of years off from his academic wanderings. Since he showed every sign of becoming a perpetual student, his father had made no objection to his, praises be!, getting a job.
At heart, Frederik was still dubious about most up-time innovations, but beyond the In Box and Out Box array, he had taken the color-coded expanding pocket folder to his bosom. The shelves of the temporary archives he had established next to his office looked like a rainbow; they brightened even the gloomiest day. Which this day was. If it wasn’t raining in Münster . . . But today, as usual, it was raining.
It was unreasonable that he was inclined to seize upon an initiative of the Fourth of July Party. However. It was insisting that if each of the provinces was allowed to “decide for itself” what the established church should be, then one of the options must be “none of the above.”
They wanted that for the SoTF, of course, and for the Upper Palatinate. Perhaps they would not know how to react when Westphalia petitioned to be included within that option.
“Piggybacking,” Kerstin Brahe said. That was what it was called when you let someone else bear the burden of carrying the water for a policy or other boon that you wanted. If that was not a mixed metaphor. He idly doodled a pig walking on its hind legs with a yoke supporting wooden pails laid across its neck.
Not because he believed in religious tolerance. He didn’t. He would far rather be a Lutheran ruler of Lutheran people. As things stood in Westphalia, however, out of sheer pragmatism, if he did not want a return to the chaos of the years following the Edict of Restitution in reverse . . .
He had consulted with his father. In fact, he had written in “just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you” mode, heavily encrypted, along the lines of, “This would ruin everything I’ve managed to hold together so far; Oxenstierna is out to cause Westphalia to fail and then will claim that it was my fault, which means that it was your fault, and under his leadership, Sweden will annex Scania now and all of Denmark eventually. Remember what the encyclopedias say they tried in 1658!”
To his father who, if he had religious preferences unconstrained by political realities, would probably have converted to Calvinism.
He was factoring in the strength of the CoCs in Westphalia, particularly in the larger cities. CoCs that had remained thankfully quiescent since Krystalnacht. Probably because they were consolidating their position and recruiting new members, to emerge even stronger at the next crisis.
Nonetheless.
At the moment.
They would support his position that Westphalia should opt out of having an established church. However much it might pain them to do so.
The CoC leaders in Bremen were mostly Calvinist: a majority in the city, but a minority in the province.
Frederik pulled in his lips, chewing on them.
The CoCs had no serious option.
Kerstin Brahe talked a lot, which was annoying. Not as annoying as the prospect of the arrival of another Lutheran lady within Frederik’s inner circle, however, once Rist returned from his honeymoon. Not an unmarried one, though. Unmarried Lutheran ladies were the truly perilous ones. Particularly those of the Hochadel who had been Aunt Hedwig’s protegees. So he should count his blessings. One of which was that Rist would move into his own house, freeing a room for baby Ulrikke and her wet nurse, who up until now had been in a screened-off corner of the guest room where Christian Ulrik and Bente lived.
From the up-time hymnal, a not-quite-down-time hymn verse flitted across his mind. Thomas Ken had not written the words yet, but would, within this century. Or would have, within this century. If it was the same century, even, in this altered world.
All praise to thee, my God this night,
For all the blessings of the light.
Keep me, o keep me, King of Kings,
Beneath Thine own almighty wings.
Preserve me from unmarried Lutheran ladies, O Lord. You have provided me with enough problems. He recited Luther’s evening prayer and went to sleep.
Magdeburg
October 1635
The news of the emperor’s injury at Lake Bledno, with his following illness and disability, reached the USE capital almost as soon as it happened. Thanks to radios.
It not only reached political movers and shakers; it reached the newspapers.
From the capital, it reached Münster almost as quickly. Münster and every other place on the Province of Westphalia administration’s radio relay.
Berlin
November 1635
Dr. James Nichols was unable to determine when Gustav Adolf might recover from the not-exactly-a-coma state, he told Mike Stearns. The emperor was awake, but with serious difficulty in expressing himself. Even if he did recover to some extent, there would probably be brain damage. Oxenstierna ordered Princess Kristina to join her father.
Bremen
November 1635
There might be a national crisis in progress, but that didn’t prevent local outbreaks of ordinary life. In Bremen, there were spats between Calvinist women and Lutheran women over allotment of stall locations in the weekly market; then additional spats when both parties found themselves dealing with Catholics who wanted to sell their goods—not a lot of Catholics but a steady trickle—moving in from the Niederstift, Cloppenburg mostly, but also Vechta.
It was unfortunate that Jutta had found herself in the path of a flying rotten cabbage.
It was even more unfortunate that Trinke had retaliated by grabbing several nice, firm, beets from the nearest stand and launching them in the general direction from which the cabbage had come with a powerful overhand throw.
Trinke had five brothers, two of whom had become fans of the new game called baseball.
It would have remained a normal spat among women if Trinke had not been a maid in the household of the mother of one of Bremen’s most important CoC spokesmen.
Matters escalated all the way up to the city council. The beet vendor, who was of the Lutheran party, was demanding restitution. From someone. Whether it be the Calvinist beet thief or the Catholic who instigated the fray with the cabbage.
Tönnies Breiting felt obliged to speak out.
Knaub, in his report to the governor, viewed the situation with the utmost alarm.
Jauch insisted that everything had been blown out of proportion.
Frederik expected to hear from Aunt Hedwig, at length, any minute now, demanding justice for Lutheran beet vendors. Female ones.
None of which could be allowed to overwhelm the information that the city council of Bremen was using one Daniel Bartoll of Hamburg as a consultant in economic matters.
Osnabrück
November 1635
In the matter of whether, when it came to wrangling, schools or churches took the prize, there was naturally a third option. Sometimes one found the two combined, with results that were not merely arithmetic, but exponential.
In Osnabrück, there was an ongoing squabble between the ancient Gymnasium Carolinum and the Jesuits. That was a touchy one. The Gymnasium Carolinum, supposedly founded during the reign of Charlemagne, claimed to be the oldest continuously existing school in Germany. It had been “upgraded” by the archbishop of Cologne to a Jesuit university in 1632, but the city was taken by Swedish troops almost at once and restored it to Protestant control. The charter had never gone into effect. Now the Jesuits were suing for possession.
They had brought suit in the Reichskammergericht, which Gustav Adolf had taken over, pretty much in its entirety, from the Holy Roman Empire and installed at Wetzlar.
That would have been straightforward, if a knotty problem for the lawyers, if it had remained a lawsuit. But the bad feeling aroused by the suit split the Lutheran and Catholic canons into bitterly contending groups. Then the two Lutheran factions supporting the two rival mayors, Modemann and Pelzer, took sides. The boards governing the Domschule and the Ratsschule got involved.
And Margaretha Timmerscheidt said to her boyfriend, “Why don’t you issue an order saying that if they can’t settle it peacefully, you’ll turn the Carolinum into one of these new colleges for women?”
Her boyfriend who was both the illegitimate son of the comatose emperor of the USE and the commandant of Osnabrück. His authority as commandant, which predated the appointment of the imperial governor of the Province of Westphalia, had . . . murky limits, undefined boundaries, and imprecise parameters.
Frederik sent Christian Ulrik, Erik, and Kerstin to Osnabrück to deal with it. If they couldn’t squelch it there, they’d be off to Wetzlar.
Magdeburg
November 1635
In a meeting of the Fourth of July Party, Rebecca Abrabanel confirmed that Oxenstierna had ordered Princess Kristina to join her father in Berlin. That would give him control over both the disabled emperor and the heiress while he dismantled the constitution of the USE.
When one of the FoJP backbenchers from Westphalia rather timidly pointed out that Oxenstierna, as chancellor of Sweden, had no proper authority in the USE, all he got was a snort from Constantin Ableidinger in return.
At that meeting.
Münster
November 1635
But Dirk Waßmann from Minden was not alone in his opinion. As it happened, the governor of Westphalia, if sharing not one other political opinion with “those radicals,” fully subscribed to the view that Oxenstierna had no legitimate independent political authority within the USE. He was merely one of Gustav Adolf’s Swedish employees. Essentially, Oxenstierna’s status was no different from his own; less, if anything, for Oxenstierna had no vote in the House of Lords.
If anyone should be taking charge in the USE during the imperial incompetency, Frederik thought, it should be . . . his brother Ulrik as Statthalter for Princess Kristina.
Leaving their father’s status in the Union of Kalmar out of it for the time being. Their father, whose concerns about the structure of the reinstituted Union of Kalmar would make him inclined to exercise restraint vis-a-vis the USE’s Crown Loyalists.
Stade
November 1635
When Aunt Hedwig did write, she mentioned beet vendors only in passing. Rather, after having been in residence for a while, she said, she had concluded that Bremervörde was the wrong place for what had become effectively the Province of Westphalia’s northern capital: it was inextricably tied to the Erzstift and its ecclesiastical concerns. Frederik should leave it as a regional administrative center.
As for the second capital, which he certainly would need, given the extent of the province, nearly 270 miles from far southeast to far northwest, he should rather put it in Stade. As a former Hanseatic city, Stade had sufficient prestige. As a location on the Elbe rather than the Weser . . . it had significant potential.
Additionally, she had a proposal. While dealing with Himmelpforte (which had quite a lot of local support amidst all its tribulations; she thoroughly endorsed what Gerdruth von Campe was planning), she had made it a personal project to adopt the rather orphaned Stift Neuenwalde and had called in the abbess of Quedlinburg as a consultant in the matter of reviving and rehabilitating it. See the attached memorandum.
Frederik winced.
Damenstift Neuenwalde, a local foundation, poorly supported by its founders as far as finances went, accepted as canonesses not only girls from the local nobility, the Ritterschaft, of Erzstift Bremen, but also from the patriciates of Hamburg and Bremen and even daughters of well-to-do peasants if they could come up with a sufficient contribution to the endowment. It was in parlous condition. The buildings had burned in 1629, it was down to six canonesses, and hadn’t had a prioress in place for a generation.
Aunt Hedwig proposed . . . At length.
Frederik put a note on the memo for Rist to take a look at it and went back to her letter.
Moreover, she said, Friedrich von Holstein, who had gotten a law degree from the University of Tübingen and been respectably employed in the bureaucracy of the Duchy of Württemberg until the recent unrest caused by Duke Eberhard’s will, had lost his job. Consequently, he was back in the Erzstift and conspiring with his brother-in-law Gottlieb von Hagen, to institute a lawsuit in the Reichskammergericht for possession of Thedinghausen. The Mecklenburger to whom Johann Friedrich had married off Christine had sense enough to flee with his immediate household before Krystalnacht came down on him, but of course he’d effectively lost everything, so was nosing around for money. Since their other source of money might well be their father’s family, it was possible that the Gottorps might make mischief in the Erzstift rather than having to provide for them in Holstein. Moreover, Gertrud von Heimbruch’s sister, married to a Pomeranian, was thinking of getting involved, and her brother was a not unimportant official for Duke Georg of Brunswick, which could introduce complications all around.
She urged him to come north before winter set in heavily to inspect and put his stamp of approval on her initiatives. She wrote reproachfully that he had been neglecting the northern portions of the new province.
He looked at that suggestion with suspicion and wondered which prospective bride she wanted to suggest to him this time. She must be down to the girls who were cousins in Ansbach and Bayreuth; they must be the last eligible Lutheran Hochadel females of marriageable age in the USE. Given her views on the Hohenzollerns, any daughter of one the margraves would count as scraping the bottom of the barrel. And why were there so many Lutheran ladies?
Although, in the nature of things, ever since Adam and Eve, the human race had been more or less equally divided between male and female.
Magdeburg
November 1635
“Nils is going to hold the Province of the Main out of it,” Kerstin reported. “If any of the nobility go to Berlin to back Oxenstierna, it will be without his blessing; in fact, with his full disapprobation. He does not want to see the Union of Kalmar disrupted, and . . . ”
She looked at Frederik.
“ . . . if Oxenstierna launches an all-out civil war here in the USE between the reactionaries and the SoTF and its supporters in the other provinces, he’ll create . . . ”
He looked back.
She continued.
“ . . . an unhappy king of Denmark. Who might possibly argue that as second in the Union of Kalmar, with the emperor incapable, he is the rightful regent for Princess Kristina. Not just in the USE. In Sweden. With lawyers.”
“More probably,” Frederik said rather mildly, “for Ulrik as regent in the USE and himself in Sweden. It would be an easier legal argument.”
Chancellor Gießenbier nodded in agreement.
If the administration of the Province of Westphalia should refrain from cooperating with Oxenstierna, what would be the position of the CoCs?
“They won’t give you any open support,” Erik Stenbock said frankly. “After all, you’re the many-headed demon who is trying to get himself appointed as a hereditary ‘Prince of Westphalia’ as they see it. I expect that most of them would rather die than say a good word about anything you do as governor. They’ve become fairly sophisticated in political matters, though, especially the cohort in the city of Bremen. I don’t think they’ll sabotage you, either.”
“As for Hamburg . . . ” Gießenbier started to say. Then he thought better of it. “Albert Bugenhagen . . . ” then thought better of that, too.
His law clerk, a young man from Minden, listened to all these discussions with fascination. David Pestel never said so, though. He simply sat behind his mentor and took notes for him, using the “shorthand” he had learned from a manual brought by the up-timers and reprinted in Erfurt.
After Frederik received a letter from his loving Papa, expressing certain considerations in regard to the northern region of Westphalia, and another from Aunt Hedwig, he concluded that it was time for him to make another processional through the diverse bits and pieces that comprised the province, seeing and letting himself be seen, ending up by evaluating what might be achieved at Stade.
Christoffel Gabel protested that winter was not the season to make an extended processional; Frederik retorted that it was if he said it was.
He had more in common with his Aunt Hedwig than he was ready to admit. When he said jump . . .
* * *
Kerstin Brahe and Erik Stenbock sent a letter to Nils Brahe in Mainz summarizing their critical evaluation of the status quo. “This may be the last time you hear from us for a while,” she concluded. “We have to go to Wetzlar. With lawyers. Lots of lawyers. One set for the problems in Osnabrück. Another set for a lawsuit that’s being brought simultaneously against Frederik as the governor, Frederik as the erstwhile prince-bishop, and Frederik as a person, all to do with property rights in the Hochstift. Should be fun!”
* * *
“Why,” Johann Rist moaned to Joachim Lütkemann, “is this province still relying on horses and rivers for its transportation needs? Why aren’t we at least looking into railroads? Making inquiries? Even Don Fernando over in the Low Countries is getting a start on railroads and the difficulties with water tables and such that his engineers are having to deal with must be at least as bad as they’d face here in Westphalia. Maybe worse.”
“Get someone to look into it. Schepler, maybe.”
Magdeburg
November 1635
As president of IBM, Ben Leek had a tendency to look at Gustav Adolf’s coma and Oxenstierna’s assumption of power in his name from the perspective of their impact on the stock market. That would be, their unfavorable impact on the stock market. “ . . . stupid of the Crown Loyalists to expel Phil Hart from the Treasury Department. They’re not going to find anyone preferable and it’s not as if he’s a political type!”
Pete Rush shook his head. “Being an up-timer makes you a ‘political type’ all by itself these days.”
Tom Leek had a headache. The conversation around the table pounded on his temples.
“The Federal Reserve Bank in the SoTF . . . ”
“David Bartley, they say, will . . . ”
“Impact on construction . . . ” That was probably Bill Roberts.
“Now that Edgar Frost has left the Department of Transportation for Imperial Tech . . . ”
“How long will it be before the Crown Loyalists start cleaning house there, too? The impact on R&D . . . ”
“Is Jere Haywood going to stay here at Imperial Tech or head back to Granville?”
“I heard rumors that the landgravine of Hesse is trying to hire him. But . . . ”
“I’m with Ben.” That was Bill Roberts again. Bill was married to Ben’s cousin Debbie.
Tom Leek stood up. “I’m heading home. This is affecting fund-raising for Magdeburg Memorial Hospital, too; Amanda’s all tensed up. David’s getting repercussions from the down-timers at the Latin School, too. He says the political tensions among the parents of girls at the DESSSFG are even worse, given its close connection to the Wettins. I’m glad that Bethany is well out of it and tucked away safely at Quedlinburg.”