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Chapter 21


Berlin, Province of Brandenburg

January 1636


Oxenstierna ordered the arrest and imprisonment of Wilhelm Wettin, Crown Loyalist prime minister of the USE, formerly one of the dukes of Saxe-Weimar and consequently a citizen of the State of Thuringia-Franconia.

That last bit had sort of slipped the mind of Oxenstierna and his more fanatical supporters.

Jürg Behr agreed heartily with the action and took the opportunity of dropping a few chosen words about Thedinghausen and the less than energetic, enthusiastic, support that the governor of Westphalia was bringing to the cause of Restoring Things to the Way They Should Be.

He had concluded that “restoration” was a lovely word. He liked “restitution,” too, for that matter, given its financial implications, but it had been unfortunately rather polluted for use in northern Germany by Ferdinand II’s unfortunate edict of 1629.


Magdeburg

January 1636


Mathias Strigel, governor of Magdeburg Province and one of the prominent leaders of the Fourth of July Party, agreed with Rebecca Abrabanel that by arresting Wettin, Oxenstierna had lost the principle of being the legally legitimate government—handed the FoJP a belated Christmas present, a propaganda banquet on a porcelain plate. “He’ll lose the support of most of the provincial governors. Hesse, for sure; Brunswick, too.”

“Westphalia?”

Helene Gundelfinger from the SoTF was counting on her fingers. “Yes, Westphalia.”

“But . . . ”

“Westphalia has a Danish prince as its administrator, governor, official head of state, even if he’s not yet ‘Prince of Westphalia.’ His brother is betrothed to Princess Kristina, in line to succeed Gustav Adolf, as things stand. Even if Frederik doesn’t like Ulrik much—and we don’t know that he doesn’t like Ulrik, though he’s pretty much bound to resent him a bit—it is not probable that he would do something as much to the disadvantage of his own family as support this coup.”

Rebecca nodded. “It’s a bad mistake, a major blunder. Oxenstierna has given up the main thing that historically, counterrevolutions had working for them. He’s given up the principle of legitimacy.”

“Back home,” Helene was counting backwards on her fingers, “there are a lot of people, up-timers and down-timers both, who are spitting mad about the way he’s treating Wilhelm Wettin. Who’s a hometown boy, in a way. It’s not going to make him popular with the rest of the high nobility anywhere else in Germany, either.”

“Why the hell not?”

“If he can do it to a duke of Saxe-Weimar and get away with it, and they do still see Wilhelm as a duke of Saxe-Weimar even if he renounced his title—his wife didn’t renounce hers, remember—then he can do it to them.”

Hesse came out neutral, as predicted. Amalie Elisabeth influenced Brunswick in the same direction, which was not a surprise.

The administration of the Province of Westphalia maintained a stony silence. Frederik fully agreed with the landgravine as to the lack of legitimacy of Oxenstierna’s actions. Not that it took much to get him to view Oxenstierna from the angle described as schief.

Frederik did not interfere in any way when the province’s city officials, newspaper editorials, or private individuals expressed their opinions out loud.

Lütkemann, the chaplain, found the admiration for Matthew 10:16 that Frederik expressed in the course of deciding upon his course of action mildly perturbing. The governor’s personal exegesis and application of it was . . . not the orthodox theological interpretation. As phrased by the compilers of the recent translation into English, the verse read, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” Generally speaking, commentators did not see this as divine approbation for going forth as a wolf disguised in sheep’s clothing. Luther’s usage of ohne Falsch, “without deception,” was in his opinion unquestionably preferable to “harmless.” A wolf in sheep’s clothing was engaging in deception. Not to mention that the biblical imagery pertaining to serpents had been more than a little problematical since the third chapter of Genesis.

The CoC-supported, FoJP-majority, government of Bremen found itself in the distasteful position of having to back Frederik’s lack of action. This did not prevent them from ongoing consideration of the plans presented by Daniel Bartoll.


Quedlinburg

January 1636


“Grandpa,” Bethany Leek wrote from Quedlinburg, “you may think that the Danish Prince Frederik in Westphalia will come in to support Oxenstierna, but that’s not what the Stiftdamen here are saying. They gossip while they’re supervising our afternoon tea . . . well, not tea, but you know what I mean . . . refreshments . . . and watch us embroider and do other down-time, lady-like, things, accomplishments that we’re still supposed to master in addition to the more modern classes that the abbess has introduced for the junior college.

“We’re all really excited about the cranked ice cream freezer that you sent, the old fashioned one made of wood staves, like a barrel. They’re calculating when the abbey’s year will reach a point when there will still be plenty of ice in the ice house for freezing and the dairy cows will start to calve so there will be fresh milk to get the cream from. The cooks are already saving sugar. Most of the food here is pretty soft, boiled to death, because so many of the older ladies don’t have teeth. They’re excited about a dessert that will literally melt in their mouths. So if it’s a big hit, you can pass on to Chad Jenkins that he can expect a lot of orders for these freezers he’s developed as a sideline, because the old ladies here are related to everybody.”

She underlined “everybody” three times.

“Everybody who is anybody. And they say . . . ”

Basically, they said . . . if you boiled down what Bethany required four pages to cover . . . that the governor of Westphalia had undoubtedly read about himself in the Encyclopedia Britannica and found out about all the stuff that happened in the up-time world when he had to negotiate with the Danish Estates to be confirmed as Christian IV’s successor after his older brother died without kids. That he was smart enough to learn something from what he read.

“That, most likely, the way he’d look at it, the moral of the story would be noble reactionaries are not your friends. Not if what you want in life is to be an absolute monarch. Most of the ladies, their fathers and brothers being nobles and pretty much reactionaries, I suspect, don’t like the idea of absolute monarchs at all. No more than they like republics or democracies. Which seems a bit weird, but that’s the way the ball bounces, Grandpa.”

Ben snorted that the girl was nuts.

Ben’s son Tom, Bethany’s father, got a nervous feeling that Bethany was not tucked as safely away from all the political tension by being at Quedlinburg as he had hoped. He took the letter to Pete Rush, who showed it to his wife (who was also Tom Leek’s sister, so that was no breach of confidentiality), who casually mentioned some of the ideas in it to Livvie Davidson, who worked with Mary Simpson—for Mary, really—on school reform.

Mary made a few comments about it in her next letter to her own son Tom.


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Framed