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Chapter 18


The biggest news of September, at least for the Upper Palatinate, was that Gustav Adolf transferred Duke Ernst and Johan Banér for the purpose of “stabilizing Saxony.” They left without any particular fanfare.

Most people in Amberg who had anything to say about it were sorry to see the administrator go. Ernst of Saxe-Weimar, Ernst Wettin to the die-hard CoC members, had become a well-respected figure in the province. A person couldn’t really say “popular.” “A fair-minded man,” was a phrase you heard often when people spoke of him. As for General Banér—his departure was nowhere greatly mourned. He did leave some of his mercenaries behind, now incorporated into the USE’s Danube Regiment under Colonel Friedrich Engels, to garrison Ingolstadt.

At the Schloss, somewhat to Johann Heinrich Böcler’s dismay, given that his projected biography of his former mentor was making good progress, Duke Ernst left his private secretary behind. “Christian will need someone who knows where the bodies are buried,” he had explained.

Böcler modified the title page of his manuscript biography of Duke Ernst to include, “Volume I, until his Transfer from the Upper Palatinate to Saxony by Emperor Gustav Adolf in 1635” and buckled down to get the Vita Ernesti Ducis Saxoniae, an offshoot of his project of writing a greater history of the entire war, into sufficiently finished form to send to the printer.

Ernst and Banér had no more than left when the bigger news came in that the emperor had been badly injured in a battle at Lake Bledno on the Polish front and taken to Berlin for convalescence.

It said something about the nature of local journalism that Kellermeister’s headline in the Amberg Global News read:


Appointment of Interim Administrator Finalized before the Emperor’s Injury!


The interim administrator, Count Christian of Pfalz-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler, who had succeeded Count Wilhelm Ludwig of Nassau-Saarbrücken as imperial administrator of the Province of the Upper Rhine, would clearly be temporary. Probably picked by the emperor because of his distant relationship to the former Winter King and current heir-in-polite-custody-in-the-Spanish-Netherlands, Christian left that job in the hands of his competent deputy (who had also been his predecessor’s competent deputy). Given that he also left his wife and children in the provincial capital of Zweibrücken (which also happened to be her home town), it was clear that he expected to be returning to the Rhineland as soon as the emperor and his close advisors finished sifting through the options for a permanent replacement.

“Gustav Adolf really does stick with the old Adel, the old Hochadel really, as much as he can when he comes to making these appointments,” Erdmann Leitsinger griped. The Amberg CoC still met at Rickel’s blacksmith shop. “Aside from the up-timers, who are starting to be treated as some kind of honorary ‘von Up-time’ Adel, has the emperor put any commoner into an important office in his immediate circle?”

“What do you expect?” Achaz Schwandorfer answered. “The man’s a king.”

The CoC members were unfavorably impressed by the new appointee long before he arrived in late October.

There had been few social entertainments during Duke Ernst’s term. He didn’t have a wife yet; only jokes about the duration of his betrothal to his much younger cousin, Elisabeth Sofie of Saxe-Altenberg, which had run about as long as that between Prince Ulrik and Princess Kristina would. With the interim administrator’s wife remaining behind…

The tailors, dressmakers, and seamstresses of Amberg emitted a collective sorrowful sigh.

Amberg’s newspaper reporters were more interested by the arrival of several up-timers in Ingolstadt, particularly that of Michael Stearns’ sister and her husband, Major Simpson, who commanded the flying artillery unit. The occasional appearances of one of the great dirigibles with its pilot were also worth a paragraph. However, the weather was getting thoroughly nasty and it was much too far to go from Amberg to Ingolstadt in the possibly, yea probably, vain hope of being granted an interview. They made do with speculation and reprints from the Ingolstadt papers.

The constitutional crisis precipitated by the Swedish chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, in the name of the comatose emperor gripped every politically interested individual in the USE.

Except, perhaps, in the Upper Palatinate. Aside from Werner von Dalberg’s trips to Magdeburg to strategize with the Fourth of July Party, most people this far south waited to see what would happen next, in a fatalistic acceptance that there was not much, if anything, they could do about it, and whichever side triumphed in Magdeburg and Berlin some of them, inevitably, would suffer as a result of the outcome. There was a general feeling, not only on the part of the Crown Loyalists but also including a majority of the FoJP supporters, that it was too bad, those reports about how Oxenstierna and his supporters were treating Duke Ernst’s brother. Wilhelm Wettin had, after all, fairly won the election last July and therefore had a right to be the prime minister, but what could a person expect of politicians?

Their more immediate concern was Bavaria.

They all remembered Duke Maximilian’s tenure quite clearly.

They pretty much knew who, right around here, was hoping for him to do it again. If they didn’t know, they suspected.

The dowager countess of Pfalz-Sulzbach left her children in Nürnberg, but herself came back to the Upper Palatinate, where she could be sure of having the ear of the interim administrator. Her brother-in-law, the hornet, moved to Amberg with his family.

In Magdeburg, Werner von Dalberg was smiling at the other members of the inner cadre of the Fourth of July Party. “On the positive side, the Oberpfalz is already leaning toward us. Rest assured that if the Bavarians attack because the Swedes pulled out their troops and Herr Piazza comes to the rescue, the prospects for our party thereafter will be splendid. Assuming we’ve survived the civil war, of course.”

At the end of November, Sebastian Kellermeister asked Dee Hardy out. It would be most respectable, he assured Frau Ebeling. They would attend an evening Advent service at St. Martin’s.

“What’s Advent?” Dee asked her friends. First Baptist in Grantville did not follow the traditional liturgical calendar. It was safe to say that most of the members of First Baptist had never heard of a liturgical calendar. A few of them might have encountered Advent calendars—the kind that had chocolate candy behind little cardboard doors with pictures of glittery reindeer and such—but Dee’s mother considered the kind of woman who bought them in Fairmont, such as Hope Underwood, to be somewhat too much influenced by the decorating ideas found in women’s magazines.

“Wow, that’s impressive!” was her first reaction to the building. “Those pointed arches look like something that ought to be in a photo in an art history book. First Baptist in Grantville is a pretty church, not some hillbilly holy roller thing, but it’s nothing on this.” Her second was, “It looks sort of…Catholic…too. All those statues and stained glass.”

Sebastian laughed. St. Martin’s had been Catholic for a long time before the first occasion it became Lutheran about a century ago. Its stones had history.

Jacob Ranke gave Sebastian a solemn private warning as to the inadvisability of even thinking about marriage to someone who must be an Anabaptist. Kellermeister said that he’d cross that bridge when he came to it, considering that it would be at least three years before he could afford to marry anyone at all.

It occurred to the interim administrator that it would be a good idea to inventory which of the peculiar Grantville sects were followed by the increasing number of up-timers residing in the Upper Palatinate. “Only the civilians,” he ordered. “Soldiers come and go; I’ve never heard of an army that didn’t contain men of multiple faiths. Their chaplains can worry about them. Include the students, though.”

Böcler’s assistant (Böcler himself being out of town) could make sense of some of them. Catholic; Presbyterian (Scottish?); even one Lutheran. Methodist seemed to be an offshoot of the Church of England, with Calvinist tinges—and Frau Ebeling at the normal school was the daughter of their clergyman! Of their—clergypersons? Her mother also claimed to be a pastor? How extraordinarily distressing. Were Baptists the same thing as Anabaptists? What was “Disciples of Christ?” Weren’t all Christians disciples of Christ? How did one distinguish “Disciples of Christ” from “Church of Christ?”

Perhaps he should write a book on all these—a brief, informative, introduction for the benefit of those who needed to deal with such issues. Not a polemic. He cast this mind around for a suitably innocuous title and settled on Separated Brethren.

It was a rare and unusual private secretary who did not harbor aspirations to write and publish something. As an occupation, it tended to attract bookish types who felt no divine call.



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Framed