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Chapter 6


Carlo drank from his mug, realized that Frau Mechthilde was watching him, and didn’t make a face. Broth was unpredictable at the best of times; he had been out for lunch yesterday, but today’s broth had clearly been preceded by a main dish that contained a lot of cabbage.

On the basis of the major government order, he suggested in a low voice, “We don’t have to stay at this inn and eat the food that our landlady over there cooks. We have enough money now that we could rent a house. Hire a cook and tell her what we want to eat.”

Paolo tried the broth. Nevertheless, he shook his head. “Maintenance, my friend. Maintenance. No sooner do you sign a lease for a house than the roof leaks, the windows sprout drafts, and the bitch next door thinks you should install window boxes and cultivate flowers to improve the tone of the neighborhood. Then you re-read the lease, only to discover that the owner’s sneaky lawyer included clauses that put the cost of all such problems on you. There would go our retirement fund—down the drain, sucked away by someone else’s property. We can drink a lot of cabbage broth to keep our savings safe.”

Carlo tried the broth again and scratched his beard thoughtfully. The German enthusiasm for cabbage was inexplicable. Maybe they could buy a house. A duplex townhouse. Lease the other half to someone else to cover part of the expenses. Get von Dalberg, that sneaky lawyer, to draft a contract whose clauses would make that someone else responsible for the maintenance.

***

Immediately prior to the beginning of Advent, Caspar Hell, S.J., rector of the Jesuit Collegium in Amberg, requested an appointment with Duke Ernst to discuss the province’s “no established church” procedures and the USE’s expanded principle of religious toleration in light of the series of guest sermons currently being delivered in Amberg by one Pastor Georg Eckenberger, a resident of Regensburg.

The series, given on Thursday evenings at Our Lady’s (the pastor at St. Martin’s wouldn’t give Eckenberger time or space) featured, with numerous contemporary applications, Judges 2:1-5, in which THE ANGEL (Eckenberger managed to capitalize the words with his voice when he preached and actually capitalized them when he produced copies of his sermons for distribution by using his wondrous duplicating machine) delivered a message:


THE ANGEL of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bochim and said, “I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land which I have sworn to your fathers; and I said, ‘I will never break My covenant with you, and you shall not make a covenant with the people of this land; but you shall break down their altars.’ Yet you have disobeyed me. Why have you done this? Now therefore I tell you that I will not drive them out before you; they will be thorns in your sides and their gods will be a snare to you.”


“Why?” Eckenberger demanded of his congregation. “Why has Gustav Adolf’s administrator not broken down their altars? Why are the Jesuits still here, tolerated when the Lion of the North entered the war as the champion of the Protestant faith?”

So why were the Jesuits still there? Duke Ernst also sometimes asked himself that question. Until Gustav Adolf made up his mind whether or not he was going to experiment more broadly with a “religious toleration” that might or might not come at the more or less permanent expense of the interests of young Karl Ludwig, the late Winter King’s oldest son, who had converted to Catholicism during his polite custody in the hands of the former cardinal infante—now self-promoted to the rank of king in the Low Countries—in Brussels, he was keeping his options open. That involved letting the Jesuits stay until such time as they might realize that their cause was hopeless, pack their bags, and go.

He was not aware that the Jesuits sometimes asked one another the same question.

***

In the current conversation, Father Hell appeared to be diplomatic, but not hopeless, and showed no immediate intention of departing hence into another place. He was…concerned…about some…incidents…that had arisen.

He slapped a couple of broadsides on the table that separated them. Duke Ernst glanced down; then handed them over his shoulder to Böcler.

Hell finished his presentation.

“I could sincerely wish,” Duke Ernst responded, referencing the first broadside, “that the only song being sung by my fellow Lutherans was Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort, Und steur des Papsts und Türken Mord. Dr. Luther wrote it himself, and a desire not to be murdered by either the pope or the Turks is a worthy enough sentiment.”

“Although its traditional classification as a children’s song may be a bit…”

“Not a ‘children’s song,’ precisely; rather, it was recommended for boys’ choirs. It’s not all that bloodthirsty. What’s wrong with, ‘avert our murder by the pope and Turks’ as a prayer?”

Father Hell brandished a reprint of the 1941 Lutheran Hymnal. “I note that the up-timers, even the most doctrinally conservative Lutherans among the up-timers as I understand it, had modified the lines to be somewhat more…neutral, shall we say? ‘Lord, keep us steadfast in Thy word, curb those who by deceit or sword…’ No pope; no Turks.”

“Point granted,” Duke Ernst admitted.

Hell persisted. “Beyond that, leaving Erhalt uns, Herr to the side, shall we consider:


Auß tieffer Not,

Schlag Pfaffen zu Todt,

Und laß khein Munch leben!”


The Lutheran administrator of the Upper Palatinate, duly installed by the Lutheran Emperor Gustav Adolf, winced. “I believe that is more of a…folk song? Popular ditty?”

“It is a satirical travesty of the De Profundis. ‘Out of deep necessity, beat priests to death, and don’t let a single monk live!’”

“There are…quite a few challenges in navigating this new universe that has been brought into existence by the Ring of Fire. The up-timers are strong proponents of religious toleration. Simultaneously, they are strongly opposed to government censorship of free speech.”

Hell raised his eyebrows. “You’re the governor; not me.”

When in doubt, toss the ball at the other party and see what they’ll do with it. “Do you have any recommendations?” Duke Ernst asked. “Somehow, I doubt that you are as enamored of the doctrine of ‘complete separation of church and state’ as our new friends the up-timers are. Or these Committee of Correspondence radicals who are sprouting up here and there well outside the limits of the State of Thuringia-Franconia, not only in Magdeburg, but right here.”

Hell steepled his fingers. “Their apparent leader came to Amberg from the SoTF and is, at least technically, a parishioner at St. Georg’s.”

Duke Ernst hesitated briefly, pursed his lips, and asked, “What do you think about Werner von Dalberg? I have really had no contact with the man other than in regard to reparations claims. I do know that he specializes in real estate titles and their incredible tangles.”

“He’s been around for a while—since before the Congress of Copenhagen, definitely.” Hell started to calculate out loud. “That was when? June, 1634, of course. No, he was here well before that—before the Ram Rebellion broke out in Franconia, so…early summer of 1633, probably. No, let me think a minute. He probably came right after the Swedes retook the Oberpfalz from Bavaria. That would be…”

He looked at up at the carved wooden ceiling tiles, their floral designs picked out in red and blue paint long before anyone had heard of the Ring of Fire, counting on his fingers. “Well, the Special Commission on the Establishment of Freedom of Religion in the Franconian Prince-Bishoprics and the Prince Abbey of Fulda—lovely title, don’t you think?—almost down-time in its charming verbosity—started work in Franconia in December 1632. Von Dalberg was here before that. The first time I became aware of his presence, he was speaking at a public meeting, giving an explanation of what the NUS commission would be doing in Franconia and what it might possibly imply for future developments in the Upper Palatinate.”

“Where did he come from?”

“He’s from somewhere in the Rhineland, originally, one of the old electoral prince-archbishoprics. Immediately, from the episcopal chancery in Würzburg.”

Entwurzelt, then.” Duke Ernst permitted himself a small smile at his own cleverness and tugged at his blond goatee.

Uprooted in more than one way, I would think. In social status, he’s from one of those families of imperial knights that made a successful transition from perching on hilltops in a ramshackle castle and raiding merchant caravans that passed by to perching in the chanceries of various ruling Hochadel and raiding the taxpayers. Like the von Hatzfeld family, but on a lesser scale. He’s younger than he looks, closer to mid-twenties rather than mid-thirties, even now. B.A. from Trier; law degree from Mainz. Würzburg was his first position, fresh out of law school. His family most likely expected him to make a career as a canon lawyer for one of the prince-bishops, if he didn’t get a spot in a cathedral chapter himself, which they’d have regarded as ideal. Now he’s deep into the Fourth of July Party—one of its main organizers.”

“How did he end up in Amberg?”

“Someone among the city officials who had been appointed by Maximilian of Bavaria hired him almost as soon as the Swedes retook the Upper Palatinate. He was supposed to produce well-footnoted counter-arguments that they could use against the Lutherans in regard to property titles. Given that when the emperor assigned Franconia to the New United States, as it was called then, the Lutherans were pretty much under the impression that the long and impressive name I gave you above really meant Special Commission to Make Catholic Franconia Safe for Lutherans. The exiles, the Exulanten who left rather than convert under Maximilian’s administration, were coming back in hopes that Gustav Adolf would send in appointees that would function as a Special Commission to give the Upper Palatinate Back to Us. Both secular and church property.”

Hell smiled briefly. “They got you.”

“Did the city official have any idea what kind of a man he was hiring? It’s a big, long, leap from parsing clauses in deeds to organizing a revolution, which is what the Fourth of July Party is doing. Not as obviously here as they did in Franconia, but there are a lot fewer of the up-timers in the mix and it’s a whole different situation. How did he connect up with it?”

“With the Fourth of July Party? During the Ram Rebellion, probably, but I can’t envision him as an associate of Ableidinger. As far as I know, he has never been to Grantville, either. Basically, he reads a lot. He’s created from scratch, organized, what exists in the way of the FoJP and the Committees of Correspondence in the Oberpfalz.”

“It seems odd to me,” Duke Ernst said, “extraordinarily odd, to think of an aristocrat as leading a revolutionary movement.”

“There’s Spartacus, of course. He’s from a noble family.”

Duke Ernst nodded. He had read several of the Spartacus tracts. Given what the changes had already done to Saxe-Weimar, it was well to keep abreast of what might happen next.

“I have a sense that something happened during von Dalberg’s time in Würzburg that made him unhappy. He may be willing enough to talk to you about political theory and revolutionary principles, if you want to arrange an interview, but he’s not the kind of person who will tell you anything about his personal life. I certainly can’t tell you anything.”

A Calvinist might have sneered something along the lines of, “Oh, of course, the seal of the confessional.”

Duke Ernst, as a pious seventeenth-century Lutheran, went to private confession himself. Luther had redefined the practice as not one of the sacraments, but he hadn’t abolished it, any more than he had abolished marriage or ordination when he denied their sacramental status. Ernst thought, basically, that the seal of the confessional was a fine thing. He certainly wouldn’t want his own confessor to go around gossiping about the state of his soul and conscience. What he said was, “He’s obviously not working for a Catholic ex-city-councillor any more. Who’s paying him?”

“That’s an excellent question.” Hell proceeded with the conversation while thinking to himself that the confessional seal was scarcely relevant. To the best of his knowledge, although von Dalberg identified himself as Catholic, the man had neither been to confession nor taken communion since his arrival in the city.



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Framed