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Chapter 21


For those in charge of finding synonyms, it was something of a relief to be handed, with all its implications,


Wilhelm Wettin Calls for July Elections!


Von Dalberg fretted a bit that the proclamation only called for a time frame of ten days, rather than the constitutionally mandated two weeks. Everyone else in the Fourth of July Party basically told him to stop being such a lawyer.

O! What grist for a political columnist’s mill! Or pen, Sebastian Kellermeister thought, since he didn’t really utilize mills often. Nor did he want grist in his expensive new fountain pen. Perhaps some other analogy…

In Saxony, Duke Ernst, for the Crown Loyalists, would be opposing—Gretchen Richter! Ah, what rejoicing filled a reporter’s heart.

In the Oberpfalz, to no one’s surprise at all, the candidates for governor would be Hans Friedrich Fuchs and Werner von Dalberg.

Because…

Emperor Gustav Adolf, after the Dresden Crisis, or the Berlin Conspiracy, otherwise known, particularly to the Committees of Correspondence, as the Filthy Reactionary Oxenstierna Plot, agreed that the Province of the Upper Palatinate would be released from direct imperial administration and permitted to establish a republican constitution with an elected governor and no established church.

In most towns and districts, the and caused much more excitement than the governor’s race.

On the model of the State of Thuringia-Franconia, the Upper Palatinate would choose a directly elected legislature, replacing the traditional Estates made up ex-officio of the large landowners (be they actually noble, imperially ennobled, or commoners with enough money to buy rural estates and live like country gentlemen), urban patricians (be they merchants, industrialists, or large landowners who collected enough rents to afford to live in a city), and…well, once upon a time, back before the Reformation, there had been clergy in the Estates, the abbots of the big quasi-independent monasteries, but after secularization, those had dropped out of the picture and the monastic incomes had dropped into the provincial treasury.

In some places, there was quite a scramble to find enough candidates who could or would run. In others, it was hard to keep the number of potential candidates manageable. All politics was local.

***

“It’s funny,” Paolo said. His feet were up, the various out-of-town papers to which they subscribed in a pile next to him, a fountain pen in his hand and a clipboard on his lap for convenient note-taking. Sometimes, reports on the same events from four or five different papers—say one in Bremen, one in Wismar, one in Brunswick, one in Stuttgart, one in Dresden—provided bits and pieces that separately seemed to be of no particular importance, but when juxtaposed to one another, produced an interesting pattern.

The post office clerk always kept an eye out on Carlo’s behalf and handed over their bundle of papers as soon as it came in.

“Funny? How?”

“In Magdeburg, the editorials are saying things like, ‘The emperor’s decision to give the Upper Palatinate a republican structure will probably cause trouble for him in the future with sections of the nobility, who are not pleased by this modification in the USE’s existing, and to them perfectly satisfactory, arrangements.’”

“So? It probably will. Cause trouble, that is.”

“But what nobility are they talking about? In other provinces of the USE? Hochadel? Niederadel? Uradel? Reichsadel who were given some title by the Holy Roman Emperor for the sake of precedence and protocol? The known reactionaries? All those who are Crown Loyalists? And why only ‘nobility’ rather than including the urban patricians and other guys who hold significant power now? Many of the iron merchants who have bought country estates and become Landsassen have a lot more influence than some of the old Landadel families who have fallen on hard times. Think a bit. Right here in Amberg…”

Right there in Amberg, the city council elections were being fought like packs of hungry wolves over a fallen deer. For centuries, discontented and dissident citizens of the town had been kept off the council, and thus effectively prevented from obtaining their preferences and desires, by the simple mechanism of having new members of the large council brought in by the small council and the members of the small council chosen by and from the large council. Now, since both councils were to be directly elected by the general body of citizens—even if qualification as a citizen of the town was much harder than the new standards established (in accordance with the demands of the FoJP as represented by Michael Stearns) for the USE as a whole—a sizable number of the current council members were facing the prospect of defeat.

So, yes, the members of the urban patrician families were not pleased. The local election wasn’t being fought by hungry wolves, exactly. More like by starving bears just emerged from hibernation.

“If you ask me, they’d be better off if they reorganized their thinking a bit,” Carlo said. “They ought to stop fretting over nobility unless it’s an issue like taxation where, sometimes, in some places, being noble, or at least holding a grant of ‘noble land,’ has an actual legal impact. It would make more sense for them to say ‘upper class,’ the way some of the pamphlets in Grantville did.”

“Hilpoltstein’s certainly Adel. Hochadel, even, by birth. He’s certainly made it plenty clear that he is not pleased.”

“Kellermeister’s latest column says that he’s off to Magdeburg. He thinks that he can present his objections to the emperor in person.”

“He probably can. Aside from his sister-in-law, he’s the highest-ranking Lutheran in the Oberpfalz, so he can probably get at least a polite personal audience. More, he’s married to a sister of Landgrave Georg of Hesse-Darmstadt, who waves Lutheranism like a flag in his disputes with Amalie Elisabeth of Hesse-Kassel. His wife gave birth to another baby a couple of months ago, which will change the whole balance of power in regard to the Junge-Pfalz inheritance prospects if the boy lives. That family, collectively, still holds a lot of real estate in the province. Landgräfin Sophie Agnes is how old?”

“Thirty-two, I think.”

“So even if their first five children did die before they were three, the girl she birthed last year has survived this long, and now there is a boy… There’s no reason that she can’t produce several more. Hilpoltstein is not out of play.”

“I doubt the heirs to Leuchtenberg are pleased.”

“The heirs to Leuchtenberg are Duke Albrecht of Bavaria’s sons. Duke Albrecht of Bavaria is still huddling in Bohemia with Wallenstein. Young Maximilian and Sigmund, whom Piazza in the SoTF last year, rather spectacularly, arranged to have put in an up-time airplane and flown off to Bamberg to keep them well away from Duke Maximilian’s greedy hands. They’re not in any position to complain to the administrator about popular elections. Or anything else. Neither is their father, for that matter.”

All of which went into the letter that Carlo mailed to Salzburg the next day, amid a lot of business correspondence. Demand for their services was picking up again.

***

There might be armies charging all over Bavaria, but Thurn and Taxis managed to get a crate delivered from Bolzano to Amberg.

Paolo arranged for a viewing of the new device. This time it was a prototype typewriter. The interest was so great that he sold admission tickets for two-hour visitation intervals on the opening day.

“In this decade, there is no such thing as an inexpensive typewriter,” Carlo was saying. “Anyone who can afford to buy a typewriter at all can afford to have it personalized. In the instance of Vignelli typewriters, that is limited by the fully standardized casing and the resulting maximum number of keys. Beyond that, however—a merchant or banker may request more numbers for his office that maintains accounts, but more letters that appear in foreign languages for his office that corresponds with other nations. This is only sensible. Perhaps later there will be standardized keyboards and typewriters that students can afford. Perhaps in twenty years. Perhaps in fifty. But not now.”

Paolo shook his head at the questioner’s naïveté. A word which, in itself, only demonstrated the importance of personalized keyboards with specialized diacritical marks rather than standardized ones.

Carlo kept talking. “The mechanism of the keys is fully interchangeable; only the ‘caps’ with the letters and numbers are distinct. Additionally, one of the great advantages of the typewriter is that almost anyone, apparently, can learn to operate one of them, unlike the aqualators. Those are so high tech as it is called that they require an entire support crew of specially trained personnel. It’s a whole different order of expense, more on the order of…” He paused a minute. What comparison would be apt. “…supporting a stable that breeds war horses or, perhaps, the kind of hydraulic crane that loads grain on ships at Danzig for export. For the foreseeable future, only government agencies or large merchant or banking consortiums are likely to make an investment that extensive. A typewriter, however…”

There had been some large, clunky, down-time typewriters on the market for a while. Vignelli had held off while his engineers tinkered. His were workable. Functional. Like the trademark duplicators that had begun the rise of his firm, not prone to breaking down at the most inconvenient time possible.

Vignelli Business Machines was accepting pre-orders.

***

In some ways, Jacob Ranke at the Loyalty looked at the campaign more dispassionately than any of the other columnists.


Whichever gubernatorial candidate prevails in the Upper Palatinate, it will be difficult for even the most fundamentalist CoC member to interpret it as an example of the lower classes seizing political power for themselves. Basically, Fuchs and von Dalberg come from the same level of society—the same “class” if one wishes to call it that.


The main difference, aside from their political philosophies, is that Fuchs is a native citizen, from a family that has resided in the Oberpfalz for generations, and held a province-wide office under Winter King; he was Landmarschall of the Estates then, and has served once more as Landmarschall since the Estates were reestablished by the former imperial administrator, Duke Ernst of Saxe-Weimar.


Werner von Dalberg is an outsider, a private lawyer who has never held any governmental position at all—not only in this province but in any jurisdiction of the United States of Europe. He is affiliated with the Fourth of July Party and is known to have functioned as an organizer of the Committees of Correspondence in the province. He is an effective public speaker. No impartial observer will deny that he is a competent lawyer. Still, one can only recommend to his supporters in the FoJP and CoCs that they consider if he is even the figure they desire to have as the symbol of their movement, much less its acknowledged leader. He may present himself as a modern reformer, but he is, nonetheless, a Reichsritter. He may now aspire to become a provincial governor, but he is, nonetheless, an outsider who may have a natural inclination to subordinate the best interests of the Province of the Upper Palatinate to the preferences of his fellow party members in Magdeburg in pursuit of eventual national ambitions.


One might differ with Ranke’s editorial position. Kellermeister and Grube most certainly did, vociferously and at length, in the columns that responded to the Loyalty.

Ranke’s arguments, nevertheless, had a broader resonance than the Fourth of July Party had expected. His opinion columns began to be broadly distributed, well outside Amberg. Well outside the Upper Palatinate, for that matter.

“Outsider!” Grube banged his beer stein on the table. “Jacob, you grew up in Saxony yourself. You’re as much an ‘outsider’ here in the Oberpfalz as von Dalberg is. Or me. Or…” He gestured at the other people sitting around the table. “Or Paolo and Carlo.” He waved at the offending column. “Or the up-timers. Or the imperial administrator. The only person at this table who is not an ‘outsider’ is Sebastian and even he had all his schooling in Bayreuth.”

“I’m not an outsider,” Lambert Prohorsky said when he refilled Grube’s stein.

“Your father’s from Bohemia.”

Ja. But my mother’s family has been here a very long time. Before she died, my grandmother used to joke that they built the first city walls of Amberg around the Golden Lion.”



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Framed