Chapter 29
Westphalia
June 1636
All of which, of course, had been happening in the middle of another national election, for which there had to be determinations of voter eligibility, determinations of candidate eligibility, polling places, poll workers. All amid the vigilant oversight of the CoCs, whose adherents were not to be budged from their conviction that the governor would finagle it to the advantage of the Crown Loyalists if he could.
Westphalia sent a Crown Loyalist majority to the USE House of Commons again.
But not by much.
Münster
July 1636
The continuing controversy over status of the city of Bremen . . . continued, of course. It was bound to become more prominent now that the election was over and the up-timer Piazza would become Gustav Adolf’s prime minister.
Losing the economic resources of Bremen would not be good for the people of the Province of Westphalia. Depending on how generous the emperor and parliament might be in granting Bremen a hinterland, it could be economically catastrophic for the people of Westphalia. In reply to Chancellor Gießenbier’s most earnest representations, with strong endorsements from the provincial treasurer’s office, he authorized Rist and Schepler to write a pamphlet on the topic of gerrymandering.
In their spare time.
They turned the task over to David Pestel, who outlined the legal arguments and passed it on to Andreas Bucholtz.
Not that Frederik thought that it would do any good. He didn’t actually hold any grudge against the FoJP for wanting to gerrymander an additional vote for themselves in the House of Lords. As a political maneuver, it made perfect sense. If the FoJP could persuade Gustav Adolf to give it imperial city status, they would have one more guaranteed—if, for the time being, Calvinist—vote in the House of Lords (or the Chamber of Princes, left over from the CPE as it had been before a short time 1633; or the Senate, as borrowed from the up-timers). The term people applied to the jury-rigged entity that bore no resemblance to either the old Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire or the House of Lords in the existing English parliament in casual conversation tended to depend entirely on the individual political stance of the observer. Or sheer mental laziness.
That the vote would be Calvinist might be the only thing that would slow down the emperor’s inclination to approve their initiative. Frederik scribbled a note directing Rist to see to it that every bureaucrat in the Province of Westphalia paired the words “Bremen” and “Calvinist” at the slightest excuse in any document sent to Magdeburg.
If he were in a position to gerrymander some advantage to himself, he would not hesitate to do so. Manifestly, however, he was not, so there was no point in losing sleep over the matter.
He had nothing against some of the things that the up-timers had brought with them.
One of them was the poetry. There were few benefits to being dragged to Magdeburg every now and then, but the bookstores were surely among them. Some of the poetry was dreary, but some managed to be simultaneously entertaining and clever, perhaps even wise. As in the surprisingly apropos meditations by a poet named Edwin Arlington Robinson upon one Miniver Cheevy, a man born out of his proper era who spent far too much time thinking about his dilemma.
Bremen was a dilemma.
Westphalia could not afford to lose Bremen. Its economy would not survive being squeezed out of access to another major port. Nor was the national FoJP in any mood, apparently, to force Hamburg to listen to reason, for all of its idealistic rhetoric.
Why was the FoJP supporting Bremen’s independence?
The vote in the House of Lords.
Frederik kept thinking about it.
Was there anything that would force the FoJP to back off from support for Bremen’s independence?
Westphalia had voted close to 45% FoJP.
He was himself an appointed governor, not elected and therefore not bound to vote with the province’s overall majority. Appointed, not hereditary, no matter what the FoJP, even so clever a woman as Rebecca Abrabanel, might believe his ambitions to be.
He’d heard the gossip. Not gossip. Dirk Waßmann sat right there in the room. He was, after all, a FoJP delegate to parliament. But also a Westphalian. And friends with a man who had been a schoolmate of Claus Christian von Bargen, who had been Captain Meyer’s commanding officer.
According to Waßmann, this was what the leadership in Magdeburg thought: that the emperor would favor their position that Bremen should be added as an imperial city because it would strengthen the USE’s naval position. And they wanted Bremen added as an imperial city to ensure an additional FoJP vote in the House of Lords.
Emil Jauch had proven to be a wonderfully competent emissary plenipotentiary in Bremen. When it came to his attention that the young radicals were reading a certain up-time textbook on business management, he had ordered three copies, kept one for himself, sent one to his father, and the third to Frederik.
“Keep your goals firmly in view, but be flexible as to your methods.”
Westphalia could not afford to lose Bremen. Nearly a million of the emperor’s subjects—for whom the emperor had given him the responsibility under God—could not afford to lose Bremen.
The end did justify the means, especially when the end was of critical importance.
Within Frederik’s mind, the seed of a wonderful, awful, idea began to sprout.
The next time that parliament met . . . which would be in the next few weeks . . . well, he would have to see.
* * *
Surely, though, nothing else would happen this day.
Christian Ulrik stuck his head through the door. “According to the village council at Ahlen, their sheep are being tormented by werewolves; bitten to death in the night.”
Frederik sighed. He didn’t have any men to spare. “Talk to the Schützenbruderschaft and see if they’d like to go on a hunting trip instead of pointing their guns at targets this year. If the wolves turn into men after they’ve been shot, I’ll deal with it then.”
He considered the possibilities. “And if the marauders are men rather than wolves, I’ll deal with that, too.”
* * *
After considerable meditation, introspection, and searching of his conscience, Joachim Lütkemann submitted his resignation. He felt, he said in his letter, that he needed to return to his original plan of finding a parish to serve in the vicinity of Rostock, where he would be more available to assist his aging parents than would be the case if he remained in Westphalia.
Frederik was mildly annoyed, since it meant that someone—probably Rist, again; make a note to have him consult Gisenius—would have to locate a replacement. Still, unless one made oneself a lord over serfs, a master over slaves, it was always better not to come to rely on other people. In the natural course of events, they came and went.
“Since you’re going,” Frederik said, “be so kind as to take a letter from me with you and make a personal call on Frau Christine von Holstein. I still need a reliable residential caretaker for the Schloß at Thedinghausen and she can’t stay crowded in with friends in Rostock indefinitely. She might as well come and live there, if she’s so fond of the place. That should take some of the wind out of the sails for her brother and husband with their pesky lawsuit.”
After the past months, Lütkemann had been reflecting on the costs of serving a prince, recalling a prior conversation in which Frederik had commented, “And in the same passage He asked, ‘what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’ I doubt that any man knows until he has made the exchange.” He had been asking himself how much he would be willing to give if he continued as chaplain in this court. Deciding that he didn’t want to learn the answer. “Get thee behind me, Satan!”
Which did not keep him from mapping out a route to Rostock that managed to go by way of Itzehoe.
Osnabrück
August 1636
Osnabrück’s situation in a valley penned between the Wiehen Hills and the northern tip of the Teutoburg Forest occasionally had some interesting consequences. A young, perhaps two-year-old, brown bear wandered into the suburbs from the Teutoburger Wald and took up residence near a kitchen garbage pit belonging to Schloß Iburg. A sheltered territory with ample food was nice work for a bear, if he could get it, much easier than foraging for roots in the ground and insects hiding themselves under tree bark.
Two mornings after the bear moved in, the commandant of Osnabrück, in person, came riding pell-mell through the streets of the capital and drew himself up in front of the city hall. In front of the offices where the governor’s staff worked—there being no room for anyone except Rist over at the small office in Frederik’s residence. He jumped off with the careless competence of a natural athlete and dashed up the steps, banging open the front door before either of the guards could step in front of it, yelling. Down in the market square, two equerries dismounted more sedately, climbed the steps, and followed him.
“If it was a matter of shooting a bear,” Gustav Gustafsson communicated with some excitement, “I wouldn’t be inviting you. But . . . ”
Christian Ulrik and Erik Stenbock looked at one another with some resignation. If the kid was excited . . .
“ . . . it’s a fine, upstanding young bear, and looks healthy. Do you remember that in Saxony, at Torgau, Elector John George kept a menagerie of bears in the moat?”
“Surely,” Kerstin Brahe moaned, “you don’t want to add a moat with bears to Iburg.”
Gustafsson was still rattling on. “Oh. What, Kerstin? Not that. It was a dry moat, of course . . . and when the Swedish army came through, our soldiers ate them.”
“What?” Christian Ulrik was not sure what he was hearing.
“Swedish soldiers ate the elector’s bears. The ones in the moat at Schloß Hartenfels in Torgau. So I was thinking . . . ”
Erik winced. They had learned through painful experience that when Gustafsson had an idea, the ramifications were frequently . . . complex.
“So instead of shooting the bear, I think we should capture it and I can take it over to Torgau and give it to die Richterin, since she’s in charge of Saxony now, as a kind of apology because the army ate the others.
“He won’t be a descendant of the original bears, of course,” Gustafsson said. “Perhaps, though, he could be brought to symbolize a new beginning. Over there in Saxony, I mean. And the defeat of everything that went on in Berlin last year; the town uses a bear as a kind of symbol or mascot, you know. Publicity and all that.” He beamed.
So they went bear-hunting.
Bente insisted on going along for the ride; she was expecting again and wanted to take advantage of having one infant weaned and in the hands of a reliable nanny while not yet being heavily pregnant with the next.
The easiest way to catch a bear was to bait the bear. Coax it where you wanted it with food, which worked well for hungry bears in the wild. Not so much for a bear who had found a garbage dump of his own.
The kitchen staff had named him Brutus. He didn’t have a picky appetite, though he had a clear affection for sweets.
He also, the Jäger who were keeping an eye on him said, seemed to be rather clever as bears went. For example, in less than a week, he had noticed that the benevolent bringers of divine bounty, also known as the pot boys from the kitchen, were reluctant to bring that bounty when he was standing right on top of the pit, so now, when he saw the scullery door open and the children come out with baskets of peelings and pits, stems and cores, he would back away some distance until they dumped them out and left again.
The head Jäger suggested that they try a large, comfortable cage with big sliding door, a thick layer of straw bedding, and a basket filled with the bearish gentleman’s favorite foods in it. Not, he added, that he was willing to forego having several of his sturdy companions armed with equally sturdy bear spears in the vicinity, just in case. The fellow hadn’t been aggressive so far, but with a bear, one never knew. They’d turn on a man in a flash. Though, of course, this chummy boy hadn’t been made nervous by the packs of yapping dogs with which men usually hunted a bear. They’d been keeping the castle’s hounds kenneled, not wanting to provoke him, what with people around all the time. A hunter only needed dogs if the intent was to kill the bear. Which he understood that it was not.
On the first day, Brutus watched the preparations with considerable interest.
The second day, he paid no attention to the cage and its charms.
“Maybe,” Kerstin suggested, “if you stop dumping food into the pit every day, he’ll get a little hungry and go see what’s in the food basket in the cage.”
“And what,” the head cook asked, “does the young lady think we’ll be doing with the waste if there’s no pit for dumping it? It would get pretty ripe in here in no time. It gets pretty ripe out there, but at least it’s out there.”
This was followed by philosophical meditation on the meaning of life as exemplified by the practice of garbage disposal.
“Couldn’t you put something on top of the pit?” Bente asked.
“He’ll pull it off, ma’am,” the Jäger answered.
“Something big. Heavy. Too much even for a bear.” Bente looked speculatively at one of the massive ornamental wrought-iron gates through which people entered the inner courtyard at Iburg.
There were no serious injuries resulting from taking down the gate. The stable boy’s broken arm was straightforward and should heal without problems.
As a result of putting it back up, of course . . .
“I’m pretty sure,” the head cook said, “that when they put that thing in place the first time, back when I was a lad, there was a pulley and rope to hold it upright ’til they got the hinge pins in place. Not a bunch of fools trying to push it up when it’s twice as tall as any of them.”
“And I was thinking, too,” Gustafsson rattled on the next morning, “that now that we have the boy . . . ” He patted the wooden bars of the substantial cage with its straw bedding fondly, “now that we have Brutus, I’ll take him over to Torgau myself.”
Christian Ulrik looked at him warily.
“Why not? I think that Oxenstierna stabled me. He can’t have believed that I in particular as Gustav Gustafsson would be needed as a commandant here. He didn’t like anyone who might be competition to his influence and wanted to get me out from the under the king’s eye; put me where I’d be invisible. And while the money’s good, it’s not great.
“The governor can appoint someone to command the Iburg itself in my place, take over the civil administration stuff, and I can get back to the army. I’m so bored here. I’ll stop to see the king, well he’s the emperor now, get my colonel’s commission reactivated, get a regiment, get back into the thick of things. There’s plenty action now in the east; they can find a use for me.”
“I think,” Kerstin Brahe said, “I think that’s a great idea.”
“Actually,” she said to Erik in bed that night, “I think it’s a marvelous idea. Wonderful. Superb.”
Christian Ulrik lay in his bed alone, contemplating what the response of his half-brother Ulrik and Princess Kristina might be if Gustafsson resurfaced in the imperial orbit.
Estonia, he suspected. Latvia, Finland. Someplace far, far, away.
If ever a nice, actually fairly smart, if somewhat superficial and silly, boy had been born as “surplus to need,” it was Gustafsson. Even more than himself.
He was in bed alone because Bente was having dinner with Margaretha Timmerscheidt.
“You have to make up your own mind. Christian Ulrik did marry me,” Bente said, “but that’s not why I eloped with him. I’d have gone with him, and stayed with him as long as he wanted me, even if no one ever mentioned the word ‘marriage.’ Are you willing to go trekking with Gustafsson wherever he goes and in the end maybe find yourself abandoned hundreds of miles from home, in a town that you’ve never seen before? Not see your father again? Not see the rest of your family again? That’s what you’ll be risking.”
In the end, it was Ernst Wettin, once Duke Ernst of Saxe-Weimar, who got the duty of ceremonially receiving the bear upon its arrival in Saxony.
Quedlinburg
October 1636
Iona Nelson went skipping through the halls singing “Gretchen Richter got a bear, e, i, e, i, o.”
“I’m glad I wasn’t there when she heard about it,” Annalise said to Osanna Merkur.