Chapter 5
Verden
September 1634
Frederik’s days were punctuated by the arrival of mail bags from Magdeburg.
He didn’t have a secretary he could rely upon to sort and annotate the contents.
He didn’t even have a secretary he could rely upon to open the letters.
He didn’t have a secretary yet.
The bags contained letters that he generally sorted into three categories.
Things that someone in the USE Department of the Interior wanted him to do before breakfast.
Things that someone in the USE Department of State urged him to accomplish before lunch.
Things that someone in the USE Department of Transportation thought it was urgent for him to accomplish before dinner.
All of which were accompanied by memoranda. Procedural memoranda. Legal memoranda. Memoranda about the proper style in which to write memoranda.
He was, all things considered, glad that no one had yet furnished him with a radio.
Yet.
Things kept coming at him quite fast enough.
The mail bags from Denmark didn’t arrive quite as frequently as the ones from Magdeburg, but they did arrive. This one contained money. Or, to be more accurate, vouchers and letters of credit upon which he could draw funds. Funds that should be ample, if he was careful.
* * *
Verden was a former episcopal principality of which he was still the bishop, if not the prince-bishop. The Catholic Franz Wilhelm of Wartenburg who had been installed in his place by Ferdinand II after the Edict of Restitution had done a lot of damage during his 1630-1631 tenure of the office. The cathedral’s canons were unhappy. No more obstreperous than those of Bremen, but no more cooperative, either.
After all, in the days of the Stift they had been able to elect their bishop and . . . shall we not use the word extort? . . . perhaps not demand? . . . obtain concessions from the successful candidate in return for their vote. Whereas, even if Frederik of Denmark was the same man wearing a different hat, the governor of the Province of Westphalia had been imposed upon them by Gustav Adolf without so much as a “may I” or a “by your leave,” much less a substantial concession.
Within the former principality of Verden lay the city of the same name. Unlike Bremen, Verden had succeeded in obtaining the status of a free imperial city some two hundred years earlier. A status which it now had lost. The city fathers were . . . profoundly dissatisfied . . . that the new governor imposed upon them by the USE, the same USE that had taken away their Reichstag vote, was also, if when wearing a different hat, the successor of the prince-bishops from whose jurisdiction they had managed to free themselves.
The prince-bishops who had continued to hold the cathedral and pertaining premises in town as an immunity district, which had not pleased and still did not please the municipal government.
Frederik’s full lips quirked—a municipal government whose members were at least, for the moment, unlike in Bremen, Lutheran. Having expelled the Catholic members imposed upon them during the Edict of Restitution.
He would have to tell them about the USE policy of religious toleration. Which would be ironic, coming from a Lutheran bishop.
As with Bremen, the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops of Verden covered a larger territory than the secular jurisdiction of the now-extinct Stift had done. Much larger: the Stift lands amounted to only a quarter or so of the diocese. There were places where its jurisdictions overlapped with Bremen. And vice versa.
Frederik thought it was inevitable that a day would come when the archbishop of Bremen and the bishop of Verden were not the same person, with ensuing problems.
He devoted the week to sorting things out. There were some advantages to being both bishop and governor. He abolished the immunity and placed the towering Cathedral of Saints Mary and Cecelia, along with its surrounding precincts in the old town, on the east side of the Aller River, under the normal the city laws. That was not sufficient to appease the hurt feelings of the city fathers, but might be a first step toward achieving their eventual cooperation with measures that he would necessarily, as governor, have to impose.
But he did have to repeat to them several times what the emperor’s new regulations in regard to religious toleration meant, effectively. The message was taking some time to sink in.
If some Catholic former city councillor who had been forced on them by Franz Wilhelm von Wartenburg wanted, for inexplicable reasons, to come back to the city, buy a house, and once more participate in Verden’s municipal politics, they would have to let him.
If some Catholic cleric who had served in the city under Franz Wilhelm von Wartenburg came back to the city and set out to establish a Catholic parish, they would have to let him.
If enough Catholics moved into the city to populate a parish, the city fathers would have to let them be.
“No,” Frederik admitted to the mayor in a moment of unusual openness, “I don’t like the idea, either. I don’t recommend, though, that you risk openly defying the edict. In the city of Bremen, after all, it is working to the advantage of Lutheranism.”
The thought that the Calvinists of Bremen now had to endure the presence of a functioning Lutheran church within their walls did, finally, ameliorate Verden’s grievances in a small way.
Bremen
September 1634
The perfume from the swine market in the Neue Neustadt was something that walls and bastions could not keep out. It wafted over them into the streets and taverns of the Alte Neustadt, combining with the indigenous fragrances resulting from bad drainage and crowded living conditions. The area inside the walls was overfilled since the end of the Baltic War, mostly with people who felt grumpily disadvantaged compared to the privileged, if equally overcrowded, residents of Bremen proper on the east bank.
“If we’re going to elect delegates to the USE parliament,” Gerrit Bemmeler said, “I don’t see why we shouldn’t be electing the members of the Rath too.” He glared in the general direction of the market square. “Overturn the patriciate’s grip on the Hochedler Hochweiser Rath and open the Bürgermeister positions to general election by the citizens of the city as a whole.” He had been reading Spartacus.
“Who is this ‘we’ that you speak of? For that idea to do us any good,” his older sister Agnes argued. Cynical and pragmatic, she considered him a dreamer. “First,” she commented, “they’d have to admit us, over on this side, as citizens of the city. Saying ‘elect the councillors instead of letting them basically choose their own successors when one of them retires.’ Or dies, which is the main way the Rath loses its members, sounds good. As propaganda. But the way things are now, electing them would only benefit the people over there.”
Over there, where, in a tavern, “Oh the freedoms of Bremen, the wonderful freedoms of Bremen about which our divinely appointed superiors prate so endlessly,” Peter Schorfmann proclaimed over his beer. “Freedom for whom? For the star-appointed mortal, fortunately descended from a long line of successful ancestors, surrounded by a constellation of successful brothers, uncles, and cousins, plucked from private life to dwell in the hallowed halls of the Rathaus . . . Where all the other councillors, those who bear other family names, are also their cousins, because of the way the patrician families intermarry. The councilmen are not, mind you, elected by the people. Not even by that select group known as adult male citizens, much less by us who are nothing but workers! What are we allowed to do? Permitted to do by their conciliar excellencies? Petition for redress of our grievances. It’s their choice whether or not they bother to read the petitions. As a member of the Committees of Correspondence . . . ”
Schorfmann had been to Hamburg, where he had joined one and promised his recruiter to spread the good word in the other metropolis of the Elbe-Weser triangle.
“Peter,” Bernd Rosenkötter, “you’re drunk. Besoffen. Shut your mouth.”
“I am not,” Schorfmann said with pained dignity, “that drunk. Nicht sturzbesoffen. I could still walk. If I could stand up. Just think. Our esteemed authorities take such pride in arrogating to themselves, as followers of John Calvin, the name of Reformed. If you ask me, what this city needs is another kind of reformation.”
“Nobody asked you. Anyway, it’s no different in any other city.”
“It’s different in Magdeburg.”
“Magdeburg got razed to the ground by Tilly and most of the people killed. Is that what you want for us? They only have different laws now because everything they had before is gone. And, even so, Mayor Guericke there is one of the old patricians, even if he is introducing a lot of the reforms that the up-timers want.”
Out in the street beyond the open tavern door, there was a clatter of dangerously high wooden shoe pattens on the flagstones, then a lantern with two candles, carried by a maid, preceded the passage of several cloaked and bonneted ladies who had, presumably, spent the earlier part of the evening at a party, laughing, gossiping, discussing current events as reported by the newspapers, arguing over the merits of their favorite romance novels, singing, and even dancing with one another until their fathers and brothers came to fetch them home. A party where the current events discussion touched, if briefly and only in passing, on the political structure of the new USE. One of the young men accompanying them turned aside into the tavern, saying, “Ho, Schorfmann, I haven’t seen you for a while. What have you been up to?”
At an otherwise unremarkable evening party the same evening in the Liebfrauen quarter of the Altstadt, hosted by the wife of one of the city council members, her cousin’s gangly son, newly returned from school in Leiden and quite bored, listened to the same complaints that he had heard all his life about Bremen’s never having achieved the status of an imperial city.
It was absurd for the old men and women to keep nattering on about it. Gustav Adolf had abolished the Reichstag, so now it never would.
Except, of course, that the new parliament also had some imperial cities. With the head of the city (one mayor, not four, of course) having a vote in the House of Lords.
Like Hamburg.
A young man who could map out a new route to imperial city status in the new polity for his Heimatstadt—might well expect to be appropriately rewarded in the way of municipal status and honors.
Gustav Adolf, it was widely known, had no particular fondness for Calvinists.
The new people, though . . . the up-timers and the Fourth of July Party . . . they proclaimed their belief in religious tolerance loud and long. Tönnies Breiting kept his face blank and examined his fingernails.
In the disorganized mess that was the Neue Neustadt . . . they kept slaughtering pigs.
* * *
Frederik opened a letter from Alverich Knaub, one of the household stewards who had accompanied him during his years of study in France and the Netherlands. Knaub was pompous; Knaub was bombastic; Knaub was in many ways self-righteous and usually overly pleased with himself. He was, however, also efficient—not once had Frederik ever run into budgetary difficulties—and available. Frederik was in direly short supply of available resources, so he had persuaded him to “retire” and take his wife and children to settle down in the city of Bremen, where he had been born and was some sort of cousin to a family of shipping magnates who had fallen on hard times, in order to provide him with a pair of ears inside the city.
Knaub reported, complained about, the ubiquitous presence of rebels and revolting revolutionaries, up-time propaganda and growing membership in the Committees of Correspondence, all over Bremen. He called upon the governor to intervene and squash it.
Squashing it was also Frederik’s first impulse. But with what? He didn’t have the resources to squash it, either in the way of political support in the new province as a whole or in the way of force majeur.
His second impulse was to let them fight it out, on the “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” principle, because at least while the Bremer were brangling with one another, they wouldn’t have the time or energy to focus on actively opposing his efforts to organize the province as a whole.
Plus, from what he knew of the up-timers, they probably wouldn’t have much interest in Bremen. Not that he knew much about them. When the early hires passed through his father’s court, in 1632 and 1633, he had still been away at the university. Then he was with the Danish army during the League of Ostend episode. From October 1633 up to Anne Cathrine’s marriage in June 1634, his assignments from his father kept him away from the court, so didn’t get to know Eddie Cantrell; his meetings with up-timers at his sister’s wedding were brief and superficial. His only real experience was observing at the Congress of Copenhagen.
Plus, he had to spend this winter doing something about the situation in Münster and Osnabrück.
He had people in and around Bremen now. A couple of the canons had turned out to be reasonably useful. Captain von Bargen could keep an eye on things from Bremervörde. There was even, heaven help him, Knaub. They would keep him apprised. For the time being, Bremen could wait.
Magdeburg
September 1634
Ben Leek shook his head. “Westphalia? It’s going to be ‘West-failure’ if you ask me, and a big one. No real industry. The rivers aren’t going to do that Danish kid much good. The best one is the Elbe and Hamburg’s sitting right squat on it. That’s right. The independent, and mostly hostile, imperial city of Hamburg is sitting on the Elbe. The strongly-wishing-it-were-independent, and mostly hostile, city of Bremen is sitting on the Weser. The Ems, whatever could be made of it in the way of navigability, goes through Ostfriesland before it reaches the sea at Leer. Ostfriesland has joined the United Netherlands, so nothing is going to go out or come in without the permission of Fernando and Fredrik Hendrik. A lot of it, especially in the north, is going to be a bitch for building railroads: peat, swamp, and a high water table. Let me tell you: as a prudent investor, I wouldn’t sink a wooden nickel into that province.”
Pete Rush shook his head.
Ben scowled. His son Tom tended to share almost every opinion that his old man expressed, which he found to be a highly satisfactory state of affairs; his son-in-law was more inclined to be argumentative. Ben attributed it to an insufficient sense of practical business and an overabundant amount of time in R&D for Greg Ferrara.
Before he could rouse himself to trample on whatever idea that Pete might have this evening, though, Phil Hart, who was serving as special liaison from USE Treasury Department to the Federal Reserve Bank of Grantville, interrupted. Or tried to. Saying something about heavy levels of existing indebtedness.
“From everything I’ve heard at Transportation,” Edgar Frost said, “Ben’s entirely right about the railroad problem.”
Jere Haygood, whose B.S. in Civil Engineering carried some weight in these matters, said that he had to agree with Edgar, adding that the only decent potential deep-water harbor up in that direction was in Oldenburg, which wasn’t even part of the USE.
“I’m with Ben.” That was Bill Roberts from Magdeburg Concrete. “If the Province of Westphalia wants anything from us, they’re going to have to put cash on the barrelhead in advance. If you ask me, it would be too dicey a prospect to carry them on credit, the way things are set up over there.”
Bill was married to Ben’s cousin Debbie.
Phil opened his mouth again. As a bureaucrat, though, he didn’t have much hope of making headway against a table full of businessmen in full spate. Fortunately, he thought, they weren’t the only people in the USE who had money to invest.
Not that, as far as he knew, anyone from the administration of the Province of Westphalia had even approached them. Or anyone else. Yet.
Rinteln
September 1634
Frederik was pleased that he had been able to keep on Lieutenant Meyer’s schedule when it came to his formal process toward the southwest of the new province. Hoya and Diepholz had each required only a polite meeting with the existing Brunswick-appointed administrative staffs to assure them that if everything proceeded as normal, he had no intention to interfere, followed by a banquet.
Everything one did in life was followed by a banquet. He ate as little as possible, since indigestion was unpleasant. He drank a little as possible because . . . inebriation could lead to disastrous results. Think of Noah. Think of Lot. Think of Ephesians 5:18. Galatians 5:21. Think of Saint Paul’s admonition to Timothy concerning candidates for the office of deacon, which should, logically, apply all the more to bishops, even secular ones.
He admonished himself not to avoid the issue. Think of his own father.
His generous and beloved father, who drank far more than was good for him.
He shook his head and set up his easel.
Minden was likely to cause trouble, even though it presented itself as docile for the moment. He should give both the municipal officials in the town and episcopal administrators in the former principality the news that the up-timers had extraordinarily strong opinions regarding some down-time customs, so they would do well to follow the course of prudence and mend their ways.
Lippe, with three branches of the family of counts.
Schaumburg.
Several days later, he left Schaumburg feeling rather pleased with his idea of hiring the unemployed faculty of the currently non-functional university at Rinteln to staff the chancery of which he was in desperate need. Founded the year after hostilities broke out in 1618, with classes not starting until 1621, it had never attracted much over a hundred students and had not survived the 1629 Edict of Restitution’s confiscation of the building in which it was housed. He had put the medical school professors to dealing with the plague issue on the border with the Low Countries and sent Gisenius with most of the theologians north to assist Pastor Hütter’s efforts to knock some more sense into the recalcitrant cathedral chapters in Bremen and Verden.
He sent a couple of the theologians to Minden with copies of a book that Rinteln’s university press had published anonymously in 1631, the Cautio Criminalis. He pinched his lips in with distaste. The author was now known to be the Paderborn theologian Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, who was not only Catholic but also a Jesuit. The up-timers seemed quite impressed with his argumentation, though. At least, they caused a great many memoranda on the undesirability of prosecuting witchcraft to arrive by way of the mail sacks from Magdeburg.
Logic would have told Frederik to pick his staff from Bremen and Verden. Logic didn’t work—not in this instance. He didn’t trust a one of them. Well, maybe one or two from the Erzstift, but he needed them to stay where they were. As for the city, all the aspiring bureaucrats and attorneys who sprang from the loins of the entrenched generation of Bremen’s patricians were Calvinists. Calvinists might well be tempted to look with undue favor on the grasping Rhenish ambitions of the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel.
Or logic might have told him to recruit his staff from Holstein. But that presented difficulties, owing to his father’s also being duke of Holstein as well as king of Denmark. Diplomatic niceties, in and out of the Union of Kalmar. His father’s German chancery was mostly staffed by nobility from Holstein. Consequently, he had some prudent concerns that anyone he chose from Holstein would intrigue with cousins in Copenhagen, Glückstadt, and points in between.
As a provincial organization, Swabia was no better off than Westphalia; possibly worse, but Georg Friedrich had his own personal income from Baden and sons to stay there and administer his own lands for him—much as Albrecht was doing for the rest of the Ernestine Wettins. And Georg Friedrich was one of GIIA’s officers; he had additional income from that. And a regiment.
One of the realities was the local Estates were stingy when it came to granting tax revenues for maintaining armies. Archbishop Ferdinand, at a maximum, had never had more than two or three thousand men authorized and funded. Those were long gone, and probably good riddance.
Frederik would make do with what he could find.
He kept Rinteln’s lawyers and liberal arts professors for his own use. Once he got the university running again, he supposed he would have to give them back, but in the interval, they were happy enough to be receiving salaries.