Designed to Fail, page 21
part #20 of Ring of Fire: 1632 Series
The thought of overmighty subjects was not something that Frederik found appealing. The names "Corfitz Ulfeldt”" and "Hannibal Sehested" passed through his mind. Like everyone else, he had been reading the up-time encyclopedias. The limiting conditions that the Rigsraad, the Danish Council of Nobles, had placed upon him in 1648 before they agreed to elect him as king were undesirable. If he were a man prone to nightmares, he would have them about that haandfæstning.
Fortunately, he wasn’t prone to anything of the sort.
He turned to his secretary. "Rist, check the linguistics of something for me. See if the Danish word haandfæstning is related to the up-timer term handcuffs."
He turned back to the lawyers. "So Buchwald’s party claims that they did have legal right under the 1524 grant by the duke of Holstein, whereas we assert that they did not have legal right under the constitution of the United States of Europe."
Gießenbier looked back over his shoulder at the note-taking law clerk, who nodded.
"That’s basically it," Pestel said, flipping rapidly through the last couple of pages.
Gießenbier employed a lot more vocabulary but reached the same conclusion.
Frederik asked himself, Why me?
✽ ✽ ✽
He had planned to create something in the way of a provincial militia, separate from those of individual towns; had assigned Christian Ulrik to the project, but he had not had time. Other things kept coming up.
He had been thinking about it ever since he was appointed. He had been working on it. Christian Ulrik had been working on it. They hadn’t gotten it done in time.
Frederik requested assistance from the USE army detachment stationed in Hamburg. The major who had been left in charge when the rest of Fey’s regiment was withdrawn rejected the request quite properly, on the constitutional ground that federal forces were constituted to defend the realm against foreign threats rather than to be used to quell domestic disturbances, and he had received no orders from his chain of command to make an exception in this instance.
The Hamburg council, in its role as head of a USE imperial city, also rejected his request to borrow some of their forces. Not only, traditionally, was a militia required to serve only in defense against external attack, which the council’s lawyers cited in extenso in their brief, but there were also practical political grounds. Those, of course, the lawyers did not cite. Frederik knew better than to bother asking anyone in Lübeck for assistance. The USE Navy went its own way and the mayor, Dieterich Matthesen, was even more strongly CoC-supported than Bugenhagen in Hamburg.
The city of Bremen would not cooperate because the city fathers were fairly sure that the USE was going to give them imperial city status and get them out of Westphalia. The public reason that the FoJP was putting forth for this was that it would "strengthen the USE’s naval position." Frederik suspected that it was because it would give the FoJP another vote in the House of Lords, since the city’s political sympathies were strongly in that direction.
He didn’t expect any help from Gottorp. Duke Friedrich logically should provide assistance because, after all, the executed serfs had been retrieved from his lands and they had been working on his canal. However, he was a first cousin of Gustav Adolf on his mother’s side, and generally more inclined to favor his Swedish relatives than his Danish ones. Since he would classify Frederik as Danish in this instance, even though Gustav Adolf had appointed him to his USE position in Westphalia … no. Frederik had not been getting much satisfaction from Duke Friedrich, even from the perspective of information gathering.
If the emperor were willing to provide help, there would already have been some military forces at his disposal as provincial governor. That pretty much closed the circle.
Chapter 25
Rostock
April 1636
Jürg Behr’s wife, née Hedwig von Heimbruch, had taken refuge from Krystalnacht in Rostock. In her rented townhouse, she chatted with various visiting noblewomen from Holstein. She didn’t exactly love her husband, but she knew her duty. If she’d ever heard "Stand By Your Man," she’d have been in the front row, applauding. Nothing she could do for him would make up for her barrenness, her dereliction of that duty which above all else a wife owed to her husband, but she would certainly give everything else a try.
Behr was in Holstein, in touch with the unhappiest of the nobles, talking about the need for "restoration" and urging action "before it’s too late and every natural privilege you possess is revoked by the up-timers and the CoCs." With, he added to himself, the support of the now-unfortunately-conscious but obviously-still-out-of-his-fucking-mind Gustav II Adolf. In February of 1631, before the Ring of Fire, the Swedes had landed in Pomerania. The level of forced contributions they extorted had fallen devastatingly on the Behr properties, which had never truly recovered. On a bar chart, the size of his grudge against the emperor would loom considerably taller than those he held against the newcomers and rebels, but the disgruntlement leaked into his opinions on everything else. The same emperor had made no effort to rein in the second wave of destruction during Krystalnacht. Thus, taking a stand against a governor appointed by that same emperor made sense to his way of thinking.
"Justify the stand you are taking," he urged them. "Generate some publicity for your cause. It doesn’t have to be explicitly political. Appeal to every conservative instinct—not just to the most reactionary. Depict your serfs as lazy, ignorant, drunken; in need of a stern but fatherly hand if they are to be constrained to do all things decently and in order. Argue that an established ruling class is necessary if the world is not to degenerate into improvident chaos.
"Use some the arguments that Luther developed about the responsibility of intermediate lords when he defended the resistance of the electors of Saxony and the other Protestant principalities against Charles V. That should appeal to a lot of pastors, who in turn will preach it to their flocks."
Hedwig von Heimbruch found writers willing to write such pamphlets; printers willing to print them; distributors willing to ensure that they could be found in bookstores all over northern Germany. Including in Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen.
In another Rostock townhouse, children in tow, crammed in with one of Gottfried’s cousins and his family, Christine von Holstein-Hagen kept up appearances as best she could. That meant attending ladies’ parties, at which she chatted with various visiting noblewomen from Holstein.
Christine did not care about the plight of serfs in eastern Holstein. Serfdom was what it was; she had never given it a thought. She did not care about the plans that the nobles of eastern Holstein might be making. She did care about all that she had lost.
Which included an estate called Thedinghausen in Stift Verden.
To which Jürg Behr was asserting a claim in the name of his wife.
Because that wife was the sister of her own father’s mistress. Well, one of his mistresses. The most expensive of them. During her own mother’s lifetime! Well, her mother was still alive; she was a tough old bird and might outlast them all. After the Drostin Hermeling died so providentially, though, her father had given Thedinghausen to her brother. Who had, at a time when her finances were better, sold it to her.
If anyone had a claim to Thedinghausen, she did.
She’d lost it to the new prince-bishop. Gottfried was suing him in the Reichskammergericht.
She wasn’t about to lose it to Jürg Behr.
And she was, albeit bastard-born, legitimated and ennobled; a first cousin once removed of the current duke of Holstein-Gottorp, who therefore could not entirely ignore her. She made complaining noises, wrote complaining letters, and distributed copies of those letters widely to anyone who might in her most remote imagination support her (typewriters and carbon paper having made their way from Magdeburg to Rostock and been enthusiastically welcomed by those who churned out the massive correspondence generated by the gentry and bourgeoisie).
Duke Johann of Holstein-Gottorp, still smarting from the loss of his prince-bishopric of Lübeck, for which Gustav Adolf had not given him so much as a provincial governorship as a consolation prize, was rather inclined to lend her a sympathetic ear; his brother Friedrich, the duke-in-office for Gottorp and smarting at being under a Danish governor, not so much so, but he still did not repudiate her requests for money, for compensation, for something, out of hand. So she kept writing.
Then she collected it all together, everything she had heard that even tangentially mentioned Jürg Behr and his wife Hedwig von Heimbruch, because it might pertain to the Thedinghausen lawsuit. She sent the cover letter and attachments to her husband, of course; a copy to her brother, who had gotten pretty deeply invested in the lawsuit along with Gottfried. Because that suit was against Frederik of Denmark as successor of the late prince-bishop of Stift Verden, she directed a carbon copy to him as an interested party, incidentally including all the informative gossip she had collected about what the nobles of eastern Holstein were planning.
A copy that landed on the desk of a different Hedwig, electress-dowager of Saxony and the governor of Westphalia’s regent in Stade.
It had slipped Christine’s mind, momentarily, that Frederik of Denmark wore more than one hat. All she had really hoped to get from her paternal cousins was an annuity.
"Christine is still in Rostock," Aunt Hedwig wrote. "She headed there for safety last fall and has told von Hagen that she isn’t leaving. It’s entirely possible that the Gottorps will make mischief in the Erzstift rather than having to provide for her and her family in Holstein."
In his mind, Frederik called a blight and plague down upon the ghost of his late great-uncle.
While he was in Magdeburg for the last session of parliament, he had encountered the fashion fad for zippers. Not succumbed to it, mind you. Observed it.
Along with the accompanying jokes in regard to "keeping it zipped."
Why hadn’t Great-Uncle Johann Friedrich managed to keep it zipped? Why didn’t men in general manage to keep it zipped? Why did they litter the world so improvidently with offspring who did not fit neatly into a well-planned family tree? Or, more immediately, into an orderly and well-designed strategy of wealth management?
"But Christine also sent … " Aunt Hedwig concluded her letter. "That’s what I need to discuss with you so urgently."
Holstein
April 1636
Godske von Ahelefeldt started gathering his forces. Almost by default, by means of no formal choice, he had become the organizer among the resistance. For so they saw themselves: resisting the expanding tyranny of royal government.
Henning Pogwish gave the speeches. Not in crowds. In parlors; in reception rooms; over dinners; during banquets. Mette Reventlow egged him on.
His older brother, Laurids, would have none of it. Neither would Ditlev von Rathlou; he had married late, had a family of small children, and was staying out. They would keep their mouths shut, though.
Poul Rantzau, in Kiel, Beate’s brother, quietly provided links through which they could obtain financing. Nothing came for free.
Quite a few of them, though, saw a dilemma. If they wanted to gather a large number of bodies in case it came to a military clash, they would have to use serfs from their estates. But what rational Gutsherr would arm a serf? Otto von Buchwald was increasingly anxious, increasingly nervous. Bendix worried about money, warning that too many of the estates had gone bankrupt in recent years. But they moved around; found sympathizers. Ditlev Reventlow had been driven out of Mecklenburg by Krystalnacht; he was currently in Kiel, negotiating for a marriage there with a sister of Hans von Rantzau. Both of those were brought in by Poul. Both, Godske realized, were more articulate than either Otto or himself. Hans produced several pamphlets giving a fairly clear expression of their political goals, which were mainly the defense of their economic status, which was based on Gutsherrschaft with its associated Gesindezwang and Anfallzwang, which could not be maintained without their legal privileges vis-à-vis the serfs. Ditlev took those and tied them to the broader need, as he saw it, for the nobility to entrench itself and resist what the emperor was permitting the up-timers and the Committees of Correspondence to do.
Jürg Behr took these and did additional promotion. One could not call it rabble-rousing; the last thing any of them wanted was to rouse the rabble.
But that didn’t create an army. Godske realized that they had to have an army. The Mecklenburg nobility, he thought, had fallen so easily mainly—not entirely, but mainly—because so many individual estates tried to defend themselves. Alone. Oh, there had been the big battles, but most were taken down one by one.
They weren’t going to get much in the way of cavalry, given that they were hemmed in by the USE on the south, Denmark on the north, and the sea on either side. Nor did he expect anyone come to help them from the western side of the duchy, where the system didn’t exist for the most part. So for cavalry, it would be them; the nobles, Gutsherren, younger brothers, younger sons, cousins. Not even all of the members of the thirty-five of so families of equites ordinarii.
There was no option. The infantry would be overwhelmingly Insten and Gesinde who would not be "following" their noble lords. They would be driven by their local lords, forced to take part. Some of them, at least, would have to be armed.
They bought weapons in Kiel. Quietly. Kiel was after all directly subject to the duke of Gottorp, who was more favorably inclined toward the Swedes than to the Danes.
Quite a few of the Kiel merchants hoped to do well financially out of this little dispute.
The Holstein nobles believed that the governor of Westphalia would do something.
The question was what. And would he do it in the name of the USE or of Denmark?
Stade
April 1636
Frederik looked at Christine’s gossip with frustration. "Hartwig von Schack is actively involved." Which one of them? He could think of three adult males bearing that name, right off the top of his head. Which one of the Rumohrs? Not Asmus, surely—he was from Denmark proper, past fifty, and while no mental giant, still had more common sense. Some connection of old Cai’s perhaps? He’d been dead for ten years, but there was a son still alive—and married to a Brockdorff.
Why von der Wisch? Well, Otto’s mother, so maybe some of his cousins on that side of the family.
Wensin? Probably one of Pogwisch’s in-laws. More Ahlefeldts.
He frowned at the next name. The Brüsehaver family was from Schwerin—Stift, he thought. Some of these names must be associates of Behr. There was no reason for them to be involved in this unless someone had a connection by marriage.
Which reminded him. Was his brother Ulrik still bishop of Schwerin? He hadn’t heard. If not, who was responsible for the spiritual welfare of the Lutherans of the diocese. Who was acting as summus episcopus? He scribbled a note to Rist to send an inquiry.
He moved on to the next paragraph. Ditlev Reventlow, driven out of Mecklenburg; possibly. Hans Rantzau from Kiel; also possible. Detloff von Bülow? Probably not. That family spilled over into Pomerania. Young Barthold Hartwig von Bülow was, he thought, off in Burgundy; he had stayed with Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. As had young Josias Rantzau from Kiel. Those two were in the Franche-Comté, not Holstein. Frederik pulled in his lips, biting them. Wilhelm Wettin’s baby brother, now calling himself Grand Duke of the County of Burgundy! How pretentious could the man get?
He focused his mind. Wrote a note to Rist: "For now, find a couple of young clerks or perhaps some students that Schepler knows. Send them up to Altona to hang around in taverns and accidentally drop information that 'it’s said' that I’ll be bringing a detachment into Holstein, coming in east of Hamburg."
He called Christian Ulrik in. "David Pestel is from Minden and his uncle—one of his relatives—may be on the city council now. He has younger relatives who must know half the law students and clerks in the province. Tell him to scrape together from somewhere three hundred or so young men who are willing, at my expense, to hoist themselves on any rag of a horse they can find and ride, slowly and with as much disorganization as possible, up through the land bridge from Munster and Osnabruck toward Hamburg, trying to resemble dragoons. If they can’t ride, tell him to form them into squads of something that might resemble infantry and walk. Tell him to surround them with as many of the Minden city militia as he can roust out so the edge looks vaguely military when observers see them. Militant. I want them to be observably on the move. Go. Use your radio."
Then he returned to the pile on his desk. By the time he sorted through Christine’s letter and attachments, he had a list of possibly fourteen more men now involved; only nine of them likely; only five of them certain. All of those belonging to the equites originarii, the old untitled nobility of Holstein, convinced that they owed nothing to any king or emperor for no king or emperor had created their status.
But not too proud to hold on tenaciously to the privileges and exemptions once granted to them by a Danish king. His letter to his father was as heavily encrypted as he could make it and did not go through either Rist or the chancery.
Job said, "naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." Job 1:21.
What a king once gave, a governor could take away in the name of an emperor.
Chapter 26
Minden
April 1636
It occurred to David Pestel that he would be out of radio communication once he left Minden. The network that Christian Ulrik had set up only went from one territorial seat to the others and to the provincial capitals. They had no portable or personal radio units. He sent the governor an urgent message bringing the presence of the four men in Bremen to his attention. He phrased it as a reminder and urged that it would be a good idea for the governor to take them along as guides, as well as witnesses, since they would be able to identify the main offenders on sight.
