1635-The Tangled Web

by Virginia DeMarce

  Section Three: Choose some wise, understanding and respected men . . .

  Mainz, June 1634

  Nils Brahe rapped his genuine up-time souvenir gavel on the table. Since it was a gift from Thomas Price Riddle of Grantville via his granddaughter Mary Kat and then via Derek Utt, to celebrate the acquisition of the Province of the Upper Rhine by the USE, he followed the rapping with a stern, English "Order in the Court."

  The rest of the council looked at him blankly.

  "The immediate results of the Congress of Copenhagen that concern us today pertain to the Province of the Main and the new Province of the Upper Rhine. Some of the correspondence we've received refers to the latter as the Upper Rhenish Province, but it is the same entity. Basically, for us here in Mainz, there's not much change. The king—the emperor—is keeping the Province of the Main under direct imperial administration, from the Fulda border down to the Rhine. The only real difference is that Frankfurt-am-Main is getting new rights to self-administration. Or, more precisely, Frankfurt is getting back its old privileges as an imperial city and seats in the USE parliament, one each in the House of Lords and House of Commons. We also have some negotiations to complete concerning the status of the former possessions of the archdiocese of Mainz over around Erfurt that now lie in the State of Thuringia-Franconia, and—"

  "We do have to be careful," Botvidsson said.

  "About what?"

  "Do we have any firm direction from Chancellor Oxenstierna about how to handle the traditional rights of the king's Protestant allies whom he has placed, willy-nilly, into the Province of the Main now that it's a new, permanent entity of the USE? It was one thing for him to set up a temporary military administration of occupied territories. It's a problem of a different dimension for it to become a permanent civil government. Especially, I would point out, since you are still an appointed administrator rather than a man selected or elected by the Estates of the new province. Which we still have to set up—the Estates, I mean. I suppose we need to call one of these 'constitutional conventions' and establish a governmental structure. One that doesn't infringe on the traditional rights of . . ."

  Stenbock and Ulfsparre started to chant in unison, imitating Oxenstierna's voice at the Congress of Copenhagen, "Hesse-Darmstadt, Solms, Isenburg, Gelnhausen, Hanau, Usingen, and Rieneck."

  "Not to mention," Ulfsparre continued in his normal voice, "the now ex-rulers of each of the above, who aren't going to be anything more than members of a provincial House of Lords, like the one over in the SoTF, with the former count of Isenburg having to share and share alike with the mayor of Gelnhausen. It won't go over very well, I predict."

  Brahe frowned at him.

  "Five hours," Eberhard said at the Horn of Plenty that evening. "We sat at that table for five whole damn hours."

  Hartmann Simrock raised one eyebrow. "Was it information you need to know?"

  "Eventually. Not necessarily right this minute. None of what Brahe covered today makes much difference to us, personally." He waved generally in the direction of his brother Friedrich, who was at a different table with Margarethe and Theobald.

  "Does that leave some of it or even a little bit of it that makes a difference to you personally?"

  "Coming out of the Congress of Copenhagen? Sure." Eberhard reached back and pulled a newspaper off the bar counter. Simrock grabbed it by one corner and waved it around the tap room in the Horn of Plenty.

  "This issue has a new cartoon about the Congress of Copenhagen. I think it's one of van de Passe's best. You can identify everyone important easily enough."

  Hertling got up and came across the room, leaving Merckel and the others to their dice.

  "It's probably by one of his sons," Theo said. "Simon and the younger Crispijn have both been working in Copenhagen the last few years."

  Margarethe stuck out her tongue. "Don't be pompous."

  "Here's Gustavus with Princess Kristina, here's King Christian with Prince Ulrik, there are Mike Stearns and Rebecca Abrabanel. Oxenstierna's the one with the piles of note cards about to fall over and bury him. Don Fernando in the Netherlands is peeking through one window and the Holy Roman Emperor through the other one. That's the archbishop-elector of Cologne and Duke Maximilian of Bavaria under the table with horns in their ears, eavesdropping." Simrock paused for breath.

  "What are they doing?" Tata asked.

  "Putting together the pieces of one of the up-timer 'jigsaw puzzles.' It's van de Passe's commentary on the way the emperor and Stearns threw together the new USE provinces. The crowned heads of Europe are playing with the local jurisdictions. But if you look closely, they're forcing the pieces into place, even if they don't fit quite right."

  Eberhard nodded. "Like their maybe-it'll-happen-someday Province of Swabia. The pieces that the Swedes and up-timers want to cram in don't really fit at all. Did any of the rest of you read what Oxenstierna said about their 'future Province of Swabia, once it is pacified'?"

  Simrock nodded. "A big chunk of the map. All of southwest Germany on the right bank of the Rhine, really, except for whatever Duke Bernhard may manage to slice off in the Breisgau and Baden."

  Eberhard raised an eyebrow. "Did you notice the new imperial administrator for Swabia?"

  Reichard Donner snorted. "Georg Friedrich—the margrave of Baden-Durlach. He's an old man—past sixty. It's no wonder that van de Passe drew him with white hair and a beard that makes him look like the up-time Santa Claus. He's not exactly an honorary appointment. He'll show up in Augsburg and go through the motions, but everybody expects that for all practical purposes, he'll delegate most of the work. He'll have to."

  Friedrich stuck out his mug for another beer. "His heir's busy running their government-in-exile in Basel. And Christoph, his second son, is one hundred percent a soldier who doesn't have the patience to do it—administration and diplomacy and stuff like that."

  "Georg Friedrich has a competent son-in-law," Simrock protested. "Count Wilhelm Ludwig of Nassau-Saarbrücken. Picking him as backup would build another bridge over to Frederik Hendrick in the Netherlands, too, since the Dutch stadholders are from the Nassau family."

  "I know. But damn. The single biggest chunk of land in the new proposed 'Province of Swabia' is Württemberg. We . . ." Eberhard waved at Friedrich again. "Not only weren't we there—it would have been hard for us to travel, that's true—we were not even invited. The Congress of Copenhagen didn't even acknowledge that we exist. They didn't even hold any kind of a memorial for Ulrich's death. Not so much as an eulogy. Sometimes I think that Gustavus Adolphus just stuck us down here in Mainz, forgot about us, and doesn't want to be reminded."

  "There's not much you can do about it."

  "But there is something else I can do." Eberhard stood up on the bench and waved his good arm for attention. The various conversations dwindled down.

  "My friends and colleagues. I have an announcement to make."

  Kunigunde Treidelin and Philipp Schaumann kept arguing over their card game.

  Reichard Donner rapped on the table. "Attention."

  "As you may have noticed, my brother Friedrich is in love with Margarethe Pistora."

  There were various shouts, hoots, and squalls of, "We've noticed."

  "The rest of you, except Theobald, of course, probably don't know that he's actually offered to marry Margarethe—spoken to her father and all that. Papa Pistor is not impressed—as far as he is concerned, being Lutheran is a negative that far outbalances being a duke."

  Friedrich snorted. "Especially a duke with a squashed foot and no lands or income left."

  Eberhard ignored him. "That's 'hardly any lands and not much income.' We're still getting some money from the bits and pieces of estates our ancestors picked up in Alsace, or we couldn't pay for our beer, much less the rent for our sisters' townhouse in Strassburg."

  "Anyhow!" Friedrich had picked that up from Jeffie Garand and used it whenever he could. It was such a useful word for a teenager. Depending on the t
one of voice, it was appropriate for any of a dozen different situations.

  "What's left of what used to be the bureaucrats of the duchy of Württemberg are against it, of course. The prospect wasn't so much of a strain for them to swallow before Ulrich was killed, but now there's just one spare, aside from the uncles and cousins. Except . . ."

  He paused for dramatic effect.

  "There isn't any spare at all any more. I'm the head of the family. I have given Friedrich permission to renounce his title—that's done, by the way, with all the legal paperwork signed, sealed, and filed—and I say that Friedrich and Margarethe can go ahead and get married."

  The Mainz Committee of Correspondence, what there was of it, since Ursula Widder had gone back to the kitchen to bank the fires for the night, mostly applauded. Reichard Donner muttered, "Then why don't you go ahead and give yourself permission to marry Tata, you randy little twerp," using a different descriptive adjective, but not loudly enough for anyone but Justina to hear.

  Then he sighed. The new universe created by the Ring of Fire was not a world of dreams. What had the up-time book said? Some animals are more equal than others—that was it. Even in this new universe, the daughter of a university-educated clergyman was considerably more equal to a former duke than the daughter of a man who was not the world's most efficient innkeeper was to a still-a-duke. He looked back up. Eberhard was, with some difficulty and a hand from Tata, climbing down off the table.

  "So now," Theobald was saying to Simrock, "it's just a matter of sorting out the Lutheran versus Calvinist thing, which is likely to take a while, given the honorable chaplain our father's prejudices."

  Simrock was talking to Eberhard. "Very charitable of you. I don't suppose all this has anything to do with your conclusion that you're not very likely to ever get Württemberg back, so why not?"

  Hartmann Simrock was even more of a cynic than Donner. A young cynic, but a cynic.

  "Umm," Tata snuggled against Eberhard under the duvet in her bed on the third floor of the Horn of Plenty. "You're so nice and warm." It was June, true. This particular June night, though, was not rare, as the English playwright had described a warm, sunny, June day. It was just like most of the rest of them had been—chilly, with drizzle, and penetrating damp rising up off the river. "I like their Major Utt."

  "Why?"

  "Have you seen his hair?"

  "What there is of it," Eberhard admitted. "He's going bald."

  "But what there is of it is red. Red red. Really red. If I could go stand next to him, I would look blonde in comparison."

  "I like your hair the way it is."

  "It's not funny. All the way through school, the other children called me Füchsin."

  "Foxy is good. I think you're really foxy."

  Eberhard liked Agathe Donner because she told him the truth. She never swore that she adored him passionately. She never declared that he was a great lover, which he was fairly sure that he was not. She never claimed that he was handsome. If she had, he would have doubted her. Among other things, he had been standing near to Major Utt for a good part of the day. What standing next to the up-timer made him feel was "short and dumpy."

  He'd spent quite a bit of his life listening to girls, high-born or low-born, say flattering things to him just because he had been born the oldest son of the duke of Württemberg. They lied. He knew he wasn't tall, dark, handsome, or romantic.

  Warm, though? He was willing to accept as strictly factual that he was nice and warm. He snuggled against Tata in return.

  Mainz, July 1634

  "For another thing, although not directly as a consequence of the actions taken by the archbishop of Cologne in regard to Essen . . ." Brahe paused and took a deep breath before he continued. The various members of his inner council looked at one another. "I have received a formal request from the archbishop of Mainz that he be allowed to return from exile in Bonn to his see here in Mainz."

  "He has persuaded the up-timer who is, since last month, the 'cardinal-protector of the United States of Europe,' to get the emperor to give him a salva guardia." Botvidsson's mouth pursed with distaste at the thought of a "cardinal protector" in any political entity of which the king of Sweden was emperor.

  Brahe, suppressing his developing personal opinion that any Vasa with a practical interest in some day maybe ruling Poland had better, as Derek Utt would say, "get over it" as far as Catholics, Calvinists, and miscellaneous sectarians were concerned, continued serenely. "Wamboldt von Umstadt expresses that he is willing to reach an accommodation with the Province of the Main similar to that which the authorities of the State of Thuringia-Franconia have reached with Abbot Johann Bernhard Schenk von Schweinsberg in Fulda. This will involve our sending a delegation to Fulda to gather more detailed information in regard to precisely what that accommodation involves before we commit ourselves to an agreement."

  He turned a page over and handed his notes to Botvidsson. "Cover the rest of this, will you, Johan. I have another meeting scheduled."

  "The archbishop also indicates that Franz von Hatzfeldt is, or will be, or may be—his phrasing is a bit vague, here—proffering a similar offer to the SoTF authorities in regard to the Diocese of Würzburg."

  Botvidsson stuck up one finger. "The emperor has also requested that his administrators in Mainz take a particular interest in the status of the city of Wetzlar, since the Imperial Supreme Court has settled there rather than in Magdeburg."

  Everyone realized that this was polite phrasing for, "make sure that the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, however valuable an ally he may be, doesn't get his claws into it."

  Botvidsson stuck up a second finger. "And since the deaths of counts Wolfgang Wilhelm and Philipp Wilhelm of Pfalz-Neuburg in the Essen war, with regard to their status as dukes of Jülich-Berg-Cleves-Mark, the ongoing inheritance controversies with Brandenburg, and the new developments in regard to the Republic of Essen . . ."

  Duke Eberhard of Württemberg, now seated at the council table in deference to both his own services in the Upper Rhine campaign and his youngest brother's death, asked, "That doesn't have anything directly to do with us here, does it?"

  "Not directly. But . . . derivatively. The heir to Jülich and Berg is now an infant, whose mother, Katharina Charlotte of Zweibrücken . . ."

  "That's part of the Palatinate family," Eberhard whispered to Ulfsparre. "The French call it Deux Ponts, like that one Württemberg exclave can be either Mömpelgard or Montebéliard, depending on who's talking."

  "Damn," Ulfsparre whispered back. "I hate the Rhineland."

  "If you hate the upper Rhine, just wait until you get transferred someplace that you have to learn about the lower Rhine."

  Ulfsparre frowned. "I already hate Elsass. Alsace, the French call it. It's annoying of them, like calling Lüttich by Liège. The Frenchies even call this city Mayence. They call Aachen Aix-la-Chapelle. They call Köln Cologne."

  "The Dutch call it Keulen," Eberhard interrupted. "I saw that in a letter."

  "Damn. A man no sooner finishes learning one language than he has to pick up another."

  Botvidsson ignored the whispers. ". . . is the half-sister of the wife of Count Palatine Christian of Birkenfeld-Bischweiler, who has just been appointed by the emperor as his administrator of the new Province of the Upper Rhine."

  "Different mothers," Duke Eberhard whispered. "Christian's wife's mother was a sister of Duke Henri de Rohan, the French Huguenot leader. He's in exile. He was in Venice, but I think he's in Lausanne now—Rohan, I mean, not Count Christian."

  "This half-French, half-German stuff drives me nuts," Ulfsparre whispered back. "You were still sedated when they brought you out, but Sergeant Beyshlag told me that the owner of that farmhouse where the men took your brother Ulrich after he was injured had a French baptismal name and a German family name. His brother-in-law had a German baptismal name and a French family name. I tell you, it's crazy."

  Ulfsparre couldn't seem to let it go. "Crazy," he repeated to
Erik Stenbock over their beer after the meeting. "The whole Rhineland. With all due respect to Gustavus, why does he even want to include these stupid little patchwork territories down here in the southwest in the USE?"

  "Merckweiler-Pechelbronn," Stenbock suggested mildly. "Jeffie Garand taught me a song from a 'musical play' performed once in their high school. The diva sings, "Oil. Oil! OIL!" getting louder and louder and louder. Most of the play makes bad jokes about small European countries, though. His best guess was that 'Lichtenberg' was supposed to be a combination of a couple of real small duchies. He didn't know which ones."

  Ulfsparre was not to be diverted from his main complaint. "Look at Duke Eberhard's little CoC whore. The Donners came to Mainz from somewhere in the Pfalz."

  "That's 'Palatinate' to the up-timers, my friend."

  "They spell her name 'Agathe' like the French, but they pronounce it 'Agata' as if it was German. She is German." He winked. "Oooh, what a build."

  "I wouldn't let Eberhard hear you call her a whore," Stenbock warned. "Her father's a halfway respectable innkeeper. She's not just an 'available' and the duke is fond of her, I think."

  "Not saying it in his hearing doesn't keep me from thinking it." Ulfsparre shook his head. "He could do a lot better. It's not as if he'll be able to escort her to any of the social events that General Brahe will host once his wife and sister join him. Almost any family of the Mainz patriciate would be happy and honored for one of their daughters to serve as the duke of Württemberg's favored companion for as long as he is stationed in the city."

  Nils Brahe's other meeting featured wine rather than beer, and a sumptuous lunch that had stretched well into the afternoon.