Grantville Gazette, Volume 66

by Bjorn Hasseler

  "We are plagued with pestilent poperies," Smythe continued, thumping the pulpit in time with his alliteration. "The putrid pus of Parliament's pandering to the monarchy's claim to being the head of the church in England, our own pitiful pope-let, binds the government and the church together in an abomination that is a sharp shadow, the mirror image of Rome. Yes, we decry Rome's sins. Yet we cling to them, heart and soul."

  At this, several families quietly, or not so quietly, got up and left. More importantly, a single man whispered to the companion next to him, "Stay and observe. I will call the guard," before slipping out of the chapel.

  "In Acts 14:22 did Paul not say we must go through much tribulation to enter into the Kingdom of the Lord?

  "And from where has tribulation and persecution arisen?

  "It issues forth, a noxious stream, from the springs called the governments of this world with whom the great whore and her daughters have laid down in debauchery and sin. Idolatry and whoredom, whoredom and idolatry."

  His head shook as almost as a terrier shakes a rat while his voice went from loud and clear to low, soft, and gravelly as he spoke the last half of the paired couplets. It was a voice still clearly audible in the far corners of the vaulted room even in its soft melancholy sadness.

  The quote of Ephesians 6:12 blasted forth from the pulpit like a roar of thunder. "We wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

  The roaring thunder did not abate with the quote. "Yes, we do indeed wrestle against principalities, the king of England, the head of the Church of England, two thoughts with but half a mind, lost in the darkness of this world; half a mind with no room for the truth of the Lord or the good of the nation. What is good for the king is what is good for the nation, in what passes for thought in the mind of our monarch. 'I am the nation,' sayeth the king. And what does he feel is good for the king? Why whatever takes his fancy, whatever the king wants."

  He paused as if to gather a thought, "Why does he dare not call Parliament? Because they will call him to task for what he has done with the taxes he has raised. But will they call him to task over the vile evil of unevenly yoking the church of the Lord and the reign of man?" He pounded the pulpit hard enough to be heard between each of the next four words. "Nay,—they—will—not!" The preacher did not seem to notice how badly his hand was throbbing which it most surely was.

  "The king tells us he does not rule by permission of Parliament. Nay, he rules by divine right. He answers to the Lord and the Lord alone. If we have a good king, it is a gift of the Lord. A poor king is a punishment visited upon us for our wicked ways. And if we have a mindless idiot for a king who was married to a wife who was an even greater mindless idiot, then surely it is because we have been very wicked indeed!" The words very wicked indeed were gargled so far back in the speaker's throat they almost hurt the ears of those who were left.

  "Blessed are the poor in spirit." Smythe roared as the man who had told his companion to wait and observe reentered the church and stood in the back by the doors.

  "Blessed are they who turn first to the Lord because they are poor and have nowhere else to turn. And the King of England is busy seeing to it there will never be a shortage of blessed people in this so sadly afflicted land. As fast as he drives so many into starvation, he sees to it there is a plentitude of people to fill the ranks of the poor. He is indeed a punishment for our wickedness!

  "What wickedness you ask?"

  Again the voice went from a near-roar to a near-growl and still it was somehow clearly understandable in the farthest corner of the great hall.

  "The wickedness of believing in the divine right of Kings! The Magna Carta tells us we as English subjects have rights! If we have rights, then the king has limits. If the barons could force the king's signature on the great charter then did the king not admit his right to govern derived from the consent of the governed?

  "Christ said, 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto the Lord the things that are the Lord's.' But how can we do that? How can we separate the two, when the Lord and Caesar in the person of the king stride hand and hand across the backs and the faces of the good people of this land?

  "The Lord told the priest of Israel to stay out of government and the kings of Israel to stay out of the temple. The daughters of Rome, like their noble mother before them, bind the temple and the throne together in an unlawful incestuous marriage. 'Come ye out from amongst them and be ye separate sayeth the Lord.' How can the church call the government to repentance when the church is the government? When they are one and the same? Did not Henry II cry out, 'Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?' just before Becket was assassinated between the communion rail and the altar? And was Becket not appointed to the job of archbishop by the hand of the very same king who called for his death?"

  The church was half-empty by now, and people continued to leave.

  "Constantine wanted a unifying agent to rebind the empire into a single whole. He chose Christianity. The bishops and all the popes, yes the popes! The Pope of Antioch, the Pope of Alexandria, the Pope of Constantinople, the Pope of Rome who now claims to be the only one. The popes and the bishops sold themselves to Constantine, choosing to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season rather than suffer the afflictions of the people of the Lord. The bride of Christ knowing her husband still lived and would return did in his absence shamefully take an adulterous lover. She has married the kings of this world."

  Smythe paused and grimaced from an exceptionally sharp pain shooting down his arm. "For many will say to Christ on that day, did we not prophesy in thy name? Did we not cast out demons and do many great works? Did we not burn many vile witches and heretics? Did we not build many great cathedrals? Christ will say unto them, 'Depart from me ye workers of iniquity I never knew you.' On that day, he will ask Rome and her daughter the Church of England, 'Who are you? Go to your lovers the kings of this world and say unto them, save me.' "

  "Constantine compelled all to be baptized under pain of death. It was not the loving call of Christ, 'Come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest,' but the stark choice, convert or die. Constantine decreed all must conform. And today the king of England does likewise command us."

  By this time the church was very thinly populated.

  The doors of the church banged open. The guard marched in two by two and did not stop until they reached the communion rail. It was not the regular city guard, but a unit of the mercenary army bought by the king of England with French money and now used to suppress all dissent.

  "Be seated," Reverend Smythe said. "The Eucharist will follow the homily."

  The head of the guard spoke in a voice trained to carry across a battlefield. "Reverend Smythe, you are under arrest in the name of the king on charges of high treason and heresy."

  Smythe smiled. If he lived long enough, he would be executed, perhaps even burned at the stake. There was a list of notable preachers in the history book who were executed. Perhaps now he would be remembered. Besides, it felt good to speak the truth plainly. His right hand rubbed his left arm from shoulder to elbow to ease the shooting pains. The end, as he well knew, was near.

  "Depart from me ye workers of iniquity. This house is a house of prayer. You have made it a common stew. Return like the mindless curs you are to the corrupt master you have chosen to serve in the place of the Lord your God."

  "Take him," was all the leader said.

  Robert lifted the heavy pulpit Bible over his head in both hands. "Sola Scriptura." The labor of holding it there, on top of the excitement, on top of the exertion of filling the vast hall with his voice, took its toll, and Reverend Robert Smith collapsed under the strain. The Bible fell and tumbled into the feet of one of the guards and he stumbled over it before he helped gather the Reverend up off the floor and carried him out. Smythe would never regain consciousness i
n this life on earth.

  By the week's end, it seemed every shepherd in his isolated croft knew of how the king's men had stormed the church in York. From Land's End to the Isles of Scotland, all knew that the kingsmen had beaten Reverend Smythe to death between the communion rail and the altar. It was told that they trampled the Bible.

  The tale of their leaving a streak of blood as they dragged the body feet first down the aisle and out the door, backside up, with the face bouncing from step to step, was oft-repeated. One version claimed that the blood stains were still there, that they would not wash away. Another version claimed that it was washed clean only for the stain to reappear with the rising sun.

  Yet another version claimed that the reappearing blood was as fresh each morning as it was in the hour it was first laid down, and the groans of the dying clergyman could clearly be heard filling the sanctuary in the dark of night. Every version averred that the stunned men of the packed congregation stood with their wives and children and could do nothing but watch when faced by halberds, swords, and pistols.

  Some people muttered. Some few who knew the future history asked quietly, "Where is Cromwell?" Hotheads met in secret as hotheads are wont to do. There they cursed the king, discussed matters of state, and considered what might be done. It seemed, indeed, that the blood would not dry and the voice crying out in the dark of night in a church in York disturbed the sleep of a nation.

  Les Futuriens, Parts III and IV by Virginia DeMarce

  Part III

  December 1636-January 1637

  "Thank you, Bernhard." Rohan watched the grand duke pace around the room, his hands clasped behind his back. "I know that it wasn't convenient for you to send replacements to Lorraine or for these two to travel back here in this weather, for that matter."

  "It's not as if we'll be sending troops into the field for the next couple of months, so don't bother to thank me. I think your concerns about Ducos' people are perfectly justified. He seems to have an astonishing number of followers."

  "There are a lot of Huguenots in France." Rohan pursed his lips. "Several million of them." He twisted his mouth wryly. "We can't expect them all to be rational men, particularly since many have lost family members, homes, employment, property, and the occasional body part to the policies of the crown since the death of Henri IV. If I had to guess, Ducos is drawing his few hundred from a possible pool of a quarter of a million."

  "So if they see a chance for what appears to be retaliation, they will take it."

  "That's pretty much the case. Especially when they have found a leader who, no matter how undesirable we find his tactics to be, appears to have a great ability to attract and influence others. Charisma, Madame Calagna calls it."

  "She knows Greek?" Bernhard turned around. "Nobody told me that."

  "No, she just knows the word. Up-time English apparently had an approach to vocabulary that was very eclectic."

  Bernhard's secretary stuck his head through the door.

  Rohan picked up his stack of red-tape-tied bundles for another day of paper-pushing.

  ****

  At the Hôtel de Buyer, Marguerite dashed down the staircase into the hallway screaming, "Henri, nobody told me you were coming," and threw herself into Ruvigny's arms.

  "You will note," August von Bismarck said to the astonished footman, "that he braced himself firmly in anticipation of this event, one leg extended and slightly bent and the other held to the rear to provide support and balance. A perfect fencing stance. Experience has demonstrated that since the young duchess reached her full growth, although she is still quite small, she has enough weight to overbalance a man standing with his feet together, especially when she moves rapidly and then leaps."

  The footman was far from sure what to make of this.

  Hamilton, following Marguerite down the stairs, was quite sure that he didn't like it.

  Shae spotted the pout on his face and gave Dominique a perfectly demonic grin. This could be fun.

  ****

  "You young people entertain yourselves in the dining room, since it has a fire going," Rohan said that evening. "Play cards or something. Don't destroy the furniture. I have reached a stage in my study of Les Futuriens that requires more consultation with Madame Calagna. Traill, stay and observe, but do not interfere unless there is danger to the furniture."

  Traill sputtered at being treated as an upper servant, but there wasn't anything he could do about it. He might now be an ordained Presbyterian minister, but in reality, as a tutor, he was an upper servant. His obligation was just to Lord Clanboye rather than to Rohan.

  "I am surprised," Rohan said when they reached his study, that in I Am NOT Going to Get Up Today, even though the efforts to get the boy out of bed indicate familiarity with the concepts of duty and diligence and condemnation of laziness, the lazy boy is not duly punished for his defiance of authority."

  "Yeah," Carey said. "There was a lot of that reaction going around up-time, too. I've heard fussing from more than one frazzled mom who thought the kid shouldn't have been allowed to get away with it. When you come right down to it, there's a great big anti-authoritarian component in some of Seuss' books. A kind of sneaky sympathy for anarchy, maybe. But if you compare this one to The Cat in the Hat, the idea that Seuss was against discipline just doesn't fly."

  "Fly?"

  They drifted off into a discussion of idiomatic English, but Rohan, who was not easily gotten off track, was back on Seuss within fifteen minutes.

  "Is this Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now? really part of the juvenalia? The language is very simple. The boy doesn't want to go wherever he's being sent by the adult figure represented by the hand."

  "It's his father," Carey interrupted.

  "Why do you say that?"

  "The hand has a father-type wristwatch. Up-time, men and women wore different styles in wristwatches. If you ever get to Grantville, I can show you the display that is up in Roth's original little jewelry store, before he became a great grand pooh-bah in Prague."

  "What is a pooh-bah."

  "I'm not sure. We just say it to describe someone important. That makes one more item to put in my next letter to the researcher at the State Library."

  "Back to the boy Marvin. Within the limits of the rhyming and the small vocabulary, much of this is really ingenious. It never says where he is being sent, so each child can use his imagination, inserting the place where he would least like to be."

  "Probably bed," Carey said. "Kids never want to go to bed, which is why it's so hard to get them up in the morning. See the previous chapter."

  "But, whether mailing himself or shooting himself with a cannon; in this book, the boy does eventually obey."

  Carey frowned. "There was something else about this book. I honestly can't remember. Maybe you had better ask one of the librarians in Grantville. It was something political, though." She made a another note on her list for the Grantville researcher.

  "Now we reach The Cat in the Hat. I will analyse it together with the sequel, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. Obviously, there is far more substance here."

  "Well, it was aimed at young readers who were a few years older."

  "The fish obviously objectifies the power of conscience: natural conscience as instilled into mankind at the creation, corrupted by the fall and original sin as part of our fallen nature: divine law in its three functions of mirror, curb, and guide."

  "Oh," Carey said. "Really?"

  "Obviously," Rohan answered. "Thing One and Thing Two represent the corrupted nature of the two children, Sally and her unnamed brother, after the fall of Adam and Eve. The children's disobedience to their mother's authority, parental authority, with the girl as the lead actor, parallels Adam and Eve's defiance of God's command to avoid the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with Eve being the one who first plucked the forbidden fruit. The role of the anthropomorphized cat is ambivalent, to say the least, playing both the tempter and the one who calls to r
epentance. It will take extensive discussion to make this clear to my readers."

  "Sure, Your Grace," Carey said. "If you say so."

  ****

  Christmas had come to Besançon. Or, more precisely, as far as the great majority of the people who were Catholic and the modest minority of the population who were Lutheran were concerned, Advent had come. Aside from the ever-mounding piles of baked goods in the marketplace, they wouldn't get around to Christmas until late on December 24.

  From the perspective of Traill and Hamilton, it might as well have been Armageddon. Traill would probably have preferred Armageddon.

  Both men objected to the keeping of Christmas altogether, partly on the grounds that it was a pagan holiday adopted by the Catholic church and partly, in Traill's case, because he interpreted the second commandment to forbid all religious festivals other than the Lord's Day. Not to mention the connected train of argumentation which held that "every day is the Lord's," which he took to prohibit singling out any day in particular other than the Sabbath as commanded in Scripture.

  "Your Grace," he admonished Rohan. "In this city, which for all intents and purposes is so full of Catholics that it might as well be pagan, you, as the leading Huguenot, must be particularly strict. Because the grand duke is Lutheran and his spouse Catholic, the city, during the coming season, will be subjected to many non-scriptural celebrations. Incense. Pageants. Moreover…"

  "Hah!" Shae whispered to Dominique. "He missed candles."

  "That's because everybody uses candles all the year around, down-time. They're not Christmas-y," Dominique whispered back.

  "Moreover" covered quite a bit of territory. Traill objected to the traditional church calendar observed by Catholics, Lutherans, and the Church of England. He objected to liturgies. He objected to "man-made hymns" rather than psalms, and he was being assaulted by them every time he stepped outside of Rohan's door. He objected, in fact, to all worship practices not specifically commanded by Scripture, "man-made hymns" being only one of them. He digressed into the Scots' quarrel with English episcopacy (and, for that matter, in the few moments when he had leisure to think about it, with Swedish episcopacy, Danish episcopacy, and the occasional German Lutheran episcopacy), not to mention Lutheran Damenstifte, which he described as barely disguised nunneries, and abbeys that had not been destroyed but turned into schools whose students were daily subject to the idolatrous stone carvings on their walls.