Chapter 30
Münster
September 1636
The duke of Bavaria had been exiled to Italy.
The Ottomans had captured Vienna.
Those things happened far away.
The meeting of the USE parliament was here and now. Frederik put Christian Ulrik in charge of Westphalia as his deputy, got on a considerably better horse than he was accustomed to riding, surrounded himself with a larger entourage, both civilian and military, than he was accustomed to having, and reluctantly made his way to the capital of the USE, where it was possible that things could go very, very, wrong.
It was Rist who came up with a replacement chaplain while was out of town. “If you would authorize me to issue an invitation,” he said to Christian Ulrik, “I can get this done without having to bother the governor.”
“Who are you thinking about?”
“Hermann Jung. He’s in Hamburg now, working for Joachim Jungius at the Gymnasium. He was born in Holstein. I know him from Rostock; he’s about the same age that I am. He’s been thinking about going back to Rostock for graduate work, becoming a Hebraist. Nice guy, makes friends easily. Knows Comenius, which can’t hurt when it comes to getting along with the up-timers. Also, Jungius, his mentor, is interested in science and has made connections with the technical schools in Magdeburg and Grantville; we certainly need all the help we can get in those fields.”
Christian Ulrik considered that list of qualifications for a chaplain. “What’s his theological position?”
“Um.” Rist looked doubtful. “Not so sure, but he’s a nice guy. Might tend a bit more toward feeling rather than strict doctrine. ‘Love your neighbor’ and all that. I know he’s read Arndt’s True Christianity several times; he used to carry a copy around with him. He talked about missions—maybe pastoring a Lutheran congregation in the Netherlands and teaching common people, sailors, enough that they could spread the gospel all around the world, everywhere that VOC ships sail, without needing learned theologians.”
He looked at the ceiling. “Um. Err. That sort of thing.”
He wasn’t a man who was normally at a loss for words.
Christian Ulrik opened his mouth, prepared to say, “No.”
Andreas Bucholtz sighed. “His father’s a farmer in Brokreihe; it can’t hurt the governor’s public image to bring in a personal chaplain of peasant origins right now. And it might go a way to soothe ruffled feathers in Holstein to bring in at least one Holsteiner into his personal circle.”
“Western Holstein,” Rist pointed out. “And as peasant farmers go, the family’s prosperous.”
“It’s not as if you’ll find peasant boys who made it to the university from eastern Holstein,” Bucholtz countered. “That’s rather what the battle was about. We can spin it.”
“Very well,” Christian Ulrik said. “Go ahead and invite him. It can’t hurt anything.”
When Andreas told his brother, Christoph made a face. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play.”
Magdeburg
September 1636
“I wish to God that Becky was here too.”
Helene Gundelfinger frowned mildly at Ed Piazza’s oath. “She is where she is, doing what she must do. Be grateful that I was able to catch the train on such short notice.”
“Why in hell are the Crown Loyalists suddenly pushing this so hard right now?”
Helene’s frown morphed into a slow, reproachful, gaze.
“All right, I’m sorry. Soap in my mouth and all that.”
“Everyone’s on edge. How . . . ” He caught himself. “How on earth did the Commons come to pass it?”
“We weren’t paying attention. A little amendment here; a small paragraph there; a sentence altered. It all adds up.”
“The parliamentary system here sucks, in some ways,” commented the prime minister. “Compared to the USA, that is. If it passes Lords, I don’t have a veto the way the American president did. There’s nowhere near enough support for it to override a veto by a two-thirds majority in either house. If I had one.”
“You can try to persuade the emperor to withhold his approval.”
“I can. But I suspect that in his heart, he finds it attractive.”
“You do?”
“Think of the ways in which he is grooming Prince Ulrik to be, in essence, his successor, even though Kristina will rule. The managing partner, so to speak. Rather like William and Mary in England did . . . or will . . . I suppose they’ve been butterflied out of existence.”
Helene reached over to the pot and poured them both more coffee. Annabelle had brewed it fresh, piled a plate high with cookies, and left them to what she called “political stewing.”
This issue made for a thick stew. Inheritance laws always did. Inheritance laws with political implications . . . All in the name of standardization, of course. Uniformity. Simplification. No more massive confusion for courts, judges, and lawyers, with one little region having primogeniture, one ultimogeniture, one partible inheritance, and more variations, often all within the same province, accompanying by centuries of conflicting precedents and applications. Each province must adopt a uniform inheritance law. No matter how it upended individual families and time-honored customs. Omelets and eggs. Back in the USA, Maurice Tito had reminded him, Virginia, the parent of West Virginia, had done in primogeniture and male-only inheritance by statute after the Revolution, which had upset folks at the time.
The idea itself hadn’t been so bad.
Until the damned amendment sneaked in.
Yeah, even for the down-timers, the mantra was “rank trumps gender.” Witness the regents of Hesse and Tyrol. But not always. That awful von Campe woman from Himmelpforten with her eternal this, that, and the other. One of her main complaints was that she had never been able to take her own causes to court, over there in Erzstift Bremen. That her little Stift had to have a male provost as a legal representative. That she couldn’t make him get off his lazy ass and do anything unless he felt so inclined.
He wondered idly if the same was true for someone as exalted as the abbess of Quedlinburg. Had she voted in person in the Reichstag, or had she sat on the sidelines, with a male legal representative casting the vote in her name? He’d never thought to ask. She was highly exalted enough that rank probably trumped gender.
Melissa Mailey was on a tear about this! The USA had gotten rid of it in the middle of the nineteenth century; no way was the world going back to it. She hadn’t appreciated being reminded that the middle of the nineteenth century was more than two hundred years in the future.
Custom, tradition, long-standing precedent. The idea of male legal representatives for women who owned property outright (nobody wanted to abolish that, even for married women, which was, as Melissa said, at least one way in which the Germans were miles ahead of the contemporary English and their femme covert nonsense) was something that—well, the Committees of Correspondence were against it, loudly, but even for a lot of your average FoJP backbenchers, it didn’t sound so bad. And the amended bill had passed the Commons. With a squeak, but it had passed.
The FoJP could lobby, but when it came to the Lords, in the final analysis, all Ed could do was watch the likely debacle.
The roll call dropped, one by one.
Frederik sat and waited. If nothing else, one of the charms of being governor of Westphalia was that the roll was called alphabetically by province.
Keep a firm grasp on your goals but be flexible in your methods. Equating that advice to the tried and true “the end justifies the means,” he had considered at length what would throw the greatest spoke in the FoJP agitation for Bremen’s independence.
The city government of Bremen had its own reasons, but the party at the Magdeburg level wanted another reliable vote.
The vote tied.
Ed waited for the inevitable.
Westphalia voted “nay.”
The governor of Westphalia pulled in his thick lips, pinched them between his teeth, and hoped that his gambit might succeed. Even if it does not, he thought wryly, at least Aunt Hedwig and Gerdruth von Campe will love me.
It would have been counter-productive for him to try to bargain with the FoJP before he had actually cast the vote. He had decided that much even before coming to Magdeburg for this session. For one thing, they wouldn’t have believed him.
Once it was done, the bargaining started. If the Fourth of July Party wanted reasonably consistent support of their measures from Westphalia, then their support of Bremen’s becoming an independent imperial city had to die.
“Why?” Ed Piazza asked.
Frederik stood up, motioning. Johann Rist, leaning against the wall, stepped forward and set up an easel.
The governor of Westphalia started to draw with a thick, black, charcoal stick that ensured everyone in the room could see the diagrams.
“Holstein has access to Hamburg. And other ports, such as Kiel, if Hamburg sets out to strangle the province’s exports with exorbitant usage fees and burdensome warehousing requirements. Which, I must mention, it is doing. Holstein will have another, once the Eider Canal is functioning. Eventually, if I have to, I can set up export facilities downriver from Hamburg and if you—the federal government, that is—do not blast them out of existence with your ironclads for the pleasure of Bugenhagen and your other members in Hamburg, Holstein’s farmers will survive.”
He looked pointedly at Albert Bugenhagen; then turned back to the easel, flipping a page over.
“For the purpose of the USE navy, it logically makes no difference as far as naval power is concerned whether the port is in Westphalia or an imperial city. It remains the same port on the same river.
“My former Stifte, Bremen and Verden, can access the Elbe to the northwest if Bremen tries to strangle exports on the Weser. Their farmers will survive.”
He flipped another page. “That isn’t the case for most of the Niederstift. If the Low Countries, now that they have Ostfriesland, close off access to Leer and Emden, the only practical outlet is by way of Bremen.
“For that matter, if Essen and the Low Countries ever close off access to the Rhine, the farmers in the Oberstift will be facing the same problem. An Oberstift where almost every surviving town is heavily burdened by debt from borrowing to pay off the Brandschatzungen levied by passing armies, not just since 1618, but long before that, throughout the Dutch wars. Or, if they could not borrow, are piles of soot and ashes, to which the former residents are only trickling back, needing to rebuild quite literally from the ground up. Where the people cannot afford the wonders of the better looms, the sewing machines, the other possibilities that the new industries offer.
“For that vote by Bremen in the Lords, you would be happy to allow fifty thousand people, not heavily indebted because during the war they were able to shelter behind strong walls, to impose misery on five times that number. Or ten times that many, if ever enough insanity prevails that the USE goes to war with the Low Countries. Or even feuds with Fernando to the point that he closes off access.
“So I gave your FoJP my vote on this. You wanted to remove Bremen from the province to obtain the vote; you got the desired vote from the province itself. You got a better deal, because at the same time, the Crown Loyalists lost a vote—which, I would point out, would not be the case if you merely added Bremen as an imperial city juxtaposed against Westphalia.”
Everyone expected more, but Frederik simply sat down. After a few minutes of silence, he said, “I will leave you to your deliberations,” arose, and left, followed by Rist with the easel.
There was no immediate decision, of course. The FoJP would not move on this without talking to a lot of other people. Supporters in the states and provinces; from the other imperial cities. Not to mention Becky. And Mike.
“Why is the man so universally loathed?” Ed asked Helene Gundelfinger.
“I’m not sure that he is,” she answered. “Loathed, that is. Except by people who only know him by way of their assumptions. And people who get contrariwise to something he’s determined to do. As a person, he’s more on the order of . . . ” She paused, “universally not particularly well liked. He does not share his father’s charm. Also . . . ” She hesitated again.
“Also what?”
“He seems to have put together a pretty good working staff. Not full of saints, but lacking in obvious sinners.”
Ed requested a private meeting.
Frederik obliged.
“If your party persists in supporting imperial city status for Bremen, you can forget entirely about obtaining my support for any measure that arises.”
By the end, Ed had a clearer understanding than ever before of why Martin Luther’s “Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders” had created a revolution in half of Europe a century earlier. He vaguely recalled the kerfuffle over “we shall not be moved” a couple of years earlier and thought that compromise had a lot to be said in its favor.
“And if you wonder why I have done this,” Frederik said, “it is much as Anton Günther is determined to protect Oldenburg. A message which the emperor has already received. Understand this, Herr Piazza. To keep Bremen and its port available to the people of the province whose welfare the emperor has entrusted to me under God, I would vote with the party of the devil himself.”