Designed to Fail, page 34
part #20 of Ring of Fire: 1632 Series
Frederik stumbled again. "My father has, has had for as long as I remember, has had for all of his life as far as I am aware, a deep, deep, fear of Catholic intrusion into Denmark. Of Jesuits recruiting young candidates for the Lutheran clergy and perverting their faith at their schools. Of … " He paused. "He is most sincere in this. Additionally, the bishop of Sjælland, our primate, I suppose you would say, is virulently anti-Catholic. As is his most likely successor, who has written and published a quite vehement defense against Romanism and the papist menace.
"It is … actually … as things stand … illegal for Catholics to inherit property or reside within Denmark and the royal holdings in Schleswig, and Holstein. Not in Holstein anymore, since it is within the USE. Or was, except for Glückstadt. My father granted freedom of religion there, when he founded it. Tax exemption, too. Both were significant considerations because he wanted to make it a major trading center to compete with Hamburg."
"I like almost all the Lutherans I have met, but I am not," Annalise said firmly, "going to convert for their convenience."
Catholic ladies had not been Frederik’s problem. He had maintained that throughout his tenure as governor of the Province of Westphalia. It was now apparent that this one was his problem.
When Frederik of Denmark, duke of Holstein and governor of Westphalia, got in a mood, it turned out, problems toppled like bowling pins.
"We could have told them so," Christian Ulrik said.
Kerstin Brahe and Erik Stenbock nodded.
Bente Luft giggled. “Nobody asked us.”
Joachim Lütkemann, blissfully happy in his significant promotion and recent betrothal, smiled.
Johann Rist ordered another round of beer.
The live band that had come all the way from Bremen played "Another One Bites the Dust." Hans Ulrik stopped by their table during the break but ordered root beer.
The emperor retired to sleep on the problem.
✽ ✽ ✽
"I perceive the solution." Gustav strode around his desk the next day. "The USE has religious freedom, toleration. I can’t say that I’m generally enthusiastic about it. Still, we have it, so the easiest solution would be that you don’t take her into Denmark. Keep doing your job in Westphalia. I’ll give you a raise."
Frederik quirked an eyebrow. "It wouldn’t be hard. So far, you haven’t paid me anything."
"What!"
In private, Gustav howled with glee. Christian IV’s pre-Ring of Fire maneuvers to obtain Bremen and Verden, not to mention Halberstadt, for Frederik had caused his second legitimate son to grow up with an education that was more German than Danish. This marriage would tie him even more closely to the USE; tug him ever more firmly away from his father’s ambitions.
Not that he himself would want to grant Catholics the right to hold property or reside in Sweden, either. Some things were simply unreasonable.
Christian IV declared that if they were to marry at all, they would be married at Roskilde, as Lutherans, and Bishop Resen most certainly would not refuse to perform the ceremony.
Annalise thought a few thoughts about 1 Corinthians 9: Be careful, however, that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to the weak. She could compromise. After all, she had attended chapel at Quedlinburg without complaining about it. She offered that she would be willing to go through a Lutheran ceremony, but not as a Lutheran. If they could have a Catholic ceremony also.
The emperor promptly declared that in that case, they would be married in Magdeburg by Cardinal-Protector Mazzare, who hadn’t been asked, but was unlikely to refuse. Or require a year of pre-Cana counseling in this instance.
Annalise looked at Mary Simpson. "How about Tom?" she asked. "He was Heinrich Schmidt’s friend, back in Grantville, at the beginning of everything. Gretchen is Episcopalian now; maybe that would make her a little happier. Episcopalians are practically Catholic except that they are something called wasps that no one ever exactly explained to me. Almost every up-timer I met in high school who had anything to say about religion said that. Especially the Baptist minister’s son. The clever one. He said it several times."
Mary first gasped with laughter and then looked blank. "Tom has been off on the Eastern Front all this time," she answered. "I’m not even sure that Laud has managed to ordain him yet. They have to go through the laying on of hands. It’s a church that does the apostolic succession thing. I can ask John. But maybe we could get it done in time for the wedding. If someone would lend an airplane."
Annalise wrote a letter to Gretchen apologizing for the haste with which everything was being arranged and representing it as a noble self-sacrifice through which she could gently present the ideas of her sister's Good Cause to people who otherwise might not hear them. Or, at least, not hear them in a favorable light.
She referred to how she had the idea of how they could get the abbess back into political life and that Frederik had helped. "Which was nice of him, you must admit."
She hoped that Gretchen would understand.
Annalise was, if nothing else, an incurable optimist.
"What made her think," Gretchen shouted at Jeff, "that I would be delighted to see the abbess of Quedlinburg back in political play? The woman’s a Crown Loyalist to the hilt and probably smarter than any other ten of them put together. Amalie Elizabeth excepted. Thank God she’s not in Magdeburg Province. Or Saxony."
The news went public even before Gretchen got the letter. There was an instant rise in popularity of the old ballad about King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid.
"I don’t mind," Annalise said to Iona. "If you listen to the ballad, the king and the beggar maid lived happily ever after and died in peace at an advanced old age."
Ronnie Dreeson cleared her throat and mentioned David Bartley, stock exchanges, OPM, prudent investments, and Annalise’s current net worth. Her granddaughter would not be entering this marriage as a dowry-less beggar-maid. The abbess of Quedlinburg smirked.
Magdeburg’s CoC members started to get outraged, some of them yelling about class treason, but Gunther Achterhof weighed in with the opinion that Frederik of Denmark was fundamentally a stone-cold, ruthless, ambitious, SoB who in that other world had transformed Denmark into an actual, legally established, by the grant of his idiotic subjects, absolute monarchy, and the Fourth of July Party was gambling an awful lot on the good sense and basic good intentions of his brother Ulrik. The last thing any sane revolutionary would want was for Ulrik to get himself killed while he was running around the Eastern Front gathering his mandatory stupid military experience and have the emperor and the Danish king slot Frederik in as a substitute fiancé for Kristina.
"Wherefore," he exhorted, "having Frederik tied up in a royally approved marriage he will have a hell of a time getting out of has to be considered a Really Good Idea. Yes, Annalise Richter may get caught in the grinder of Danish royal politics and come out as mincemeat, but balance that against getting Frederik out of the Kristina picture and it’s worth it to the movement. Remember the proverb about omelettes and eggs."
One of the women leaning against the wall at the back of the Golden Arches looked at her husband next to her. "The prince is 'stone-cold,' is he? Well, there’s that saying. 'It takes one to know one.' "
Gustav II Adolf was a hard man to refuse. In the end, in Magdeburg, they had Mazzare, Tom Simpson, and the Lutheran superintendent of the Magdeburg church officiating jointly with two quickly imported Danish Lutheran bishops. The bishop of Lund was of no particular significance in this instance except as to the office he held. Nobody present missed the implied statement that Scania was an integral part of the Danish crown rather than future pickings for the Swedish crown. The other, the elderly bishop of Sjælland, ever since his appointment by the king two decades earlier, had led the campaign for strict Lutheran orthodoxy within the Danish church, tirelessly combating not only non-existent Catholics (there weren’t any left in Denmark and Norway for all practical purposes), but also Calvinists as represented by Dutch immigrants and Philippists and crypto-Calvinists within his own fold.
Theologians short on orthodoxy had fallen to his righteous wrath; professors at the University of Copenhagen who showed the slightest taint of liberal opinions had lost their positions. Right now, Christian IV told him firmly, he was going to officiate jointly with the cardinal-protector of the USE if that was what Gustav Adolf demanded. Whatever else, this marriage was going to stick.
"It might not work," the emperor commented privately to his cousin Erik Haakanson Hand after the ceremony, "not as the up-timers think of a marriage as working, but it will stick. They’re as married as they can possibly be here. Once they have the Danish ceremony, they’ll be even more married."
"How is Christian handling the no-Catholics-in-Denmark issue?"
"I ordered the Department of State to issue her a diplomatic passport."
"That should do it." Hand stood up and stretched his aching arm. "Neither of them is an up-timer, after all. I rather hope," he added, "that they like one another, once Frederik gets all the first flurry of desperately desired sex over with." He considered the issue briefly. "It’s not something I would have expected of the man. Perhaps he’s more his father’s son than anyone ever thought."
He stretched the arm again, smiling. "I suppose that, upon this auspicious occasion, you will name him 'Prince of Westphalia,' too.’
Gustav Adolf smiled back. "Ah, I think not." His smile faltered a little. "When that time comes that must inevitably come to us all," he looked at his body, "that time of which I am myself now frequently reminded, it would introduce awkwardness." He pushed himself up from the chair. "But neither shall I publicly rule out the possibility. I have no idea where that belief came from. However, while the up-timers and die Richterin may be able to push me in many directions where I would not, on my own, be impelled to go. I will not deprive myself of the satisfaction of tweaking their tails, occasionally, in the process."
The Lutheran clergy of Roskilde discovered that once the ceremonies in Magdeburg were over and done and the Danish court had a chance to organize suitable festivities, they were going to host a Catholic choir from St. Mary’s in Grantville at the Lutheran wedding ceremony in Denmark. Singing something called On Eagles’ Wings7[7] written by some twentieth-century up-time Catholic somebody. Annalise insisted on the choir. In this, she was an immovable object.
"No priests," her future father-in-law insisted.
Annalise didn’t have any objection to that. There weren’t any priests in the choir.
"My organist!"
She agreed to that, too.
Denmark had a Lutheran state church—that meant something—and the king was its secular head, which meant even more. Christian had no desire to see a Catholic choir in his favorite cathedral, the burial place of Danish monarchs, but he did want this marriage to stick. So he didn’t give the bishop a choice, but then, after the Magdeburg ceremony, the bishop had not expected to have one.
Rehearsing in Grantville, one of the choir members whispered to the alto next to her, "Don’t we usually do this one at funerals?"
"Sssshhh."
Epilogue
August 1637
"I
confess that I am distressed by the sequence of events in Magdeburg," Hedwig said to her brother after the Danish wedding. "In truth, though, less so than I would have been if there were even one young woman in the entire Hochadel who would be an ideal match for him right now. Keeping the issue of the Ansbach Hohenzollerns to one side, as things stand, any marriage I would have wished to arrange would have had to wait almost as long for its consummation as the match between Ulrik and Kristina."
✽ ✽ ✽
"Hah!" Duke Georg of Brunswick exclaimed, looking at Lennart Torstensson.
Torstensson looked back. Both of them were still mired in the apparently unending struggle on the Polish front. Sometimes, it seemed to him as if an eternity had passed since the "glorious victory", as the newspapers still referred to Ahrensbök.
The duke waved one of those offensive newspapers at him.
"Die Richterin’s sister made off with my future son-in-law, did she? In addition to Gretchen’s making off with Saxony and Silesia. With Gustav’s connivance, of course." He paused. "Well, no matter, I suppose. Things have changed so much that it’s unlikely he’ll be as favorable a match here as he would have been there. My little Sophie’s only nine, and by the time I married her off to Frederik in that up-time world, it was clear that his older brother would not have children and he was likely to succeed Christian as king of Denmark.
"Here and now, who knows?"
AFTERWORD
The fictionalization of historical characters is always a challenge. The basis available for a depiction may vary widely, even for the same time period, which is the case here.
There is no comprehensive biography of Frederik, duke of Holstein, who in our timeline became king of Denmark as Frederik III in 1648—not even in Danish. He was a man who spoke little, wrote little, and was not given to explaining himself. As a basis for his writing style in regard to his notes to his private secretary and correspondence with his father as they appear in this book, since he was close to his father, King Christian IV, I have used Carl Frederik Bricka and Julius Albert Fridericia, eds., Kong Christian den Fjerdes Egenhaendige Breve 1632-1635 (Copenhagen: Rudolph Klein, 1878-1880) and 1636-1640 (Copenhagen: Rudolph Klein, 1882).
For his situation in Denmark, the best introduction in English is Paul Douglas Lockhart, Denmark 1513-1660: The Rise and Decline of a Renaissance Monarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For more detail to the immediate period, by the same author, Paul Douglas Lockhart, Denmark in the Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648: King Christian and the Decline of the Oldenburg State (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 1996).
For some background in regard to his position as a Lutheran prince-bishop and prince-archbishop in Bremen and Verden, the following books are of some use: Robert Robert, ed., Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture 1550-1675. Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition, Volume II. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008) and Arnd Reitemeier, Reformation in Norddeutschland: Gottvertrauen zwischen Fürstenherrschaft und Teufelsfurcht (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2017).
For the challenges likely to confront the fictional USE’s new policy of religious toleration, there is background in Thomas Max Safley, ed., A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World. Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition Volume 28 (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
There is some background on Lutheran Damenstifte (canoness foundations), a concept which most American Lutherans of the twenty-first century find utterly alien, in Hans Otte, ed., Evangelisches Klosterleben: Studien zur Geschichte der evangelischen Kloster und Stifte in Niedersachsen. Studien zur Kirchengeschichte Niedersachsens Band 46 (V&R Unipress, 2013).
For the activities of the Jesuits in Niedersachsen under the Edict of Restitution, there is unfortunately almost no information in Robert Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War: Kings, Courts, and Confessors (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003), for it focuses on the highest levels of government rather than the application on policy in practice.
In regard to the underlying circumstances of Frederik’s alternate history military campaign in Holstein, see Georg Hanssen, Die Aufhebung der Leibeigenschaft und die Umgestaltung der gutsherrlichen-bäuerlichen Verhältnisse überhaupt in den Herzogthümern Schleswig und Holstein (St. Petersburg: Commissionäre der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1861). There is also Otto Ulbricht, " 'Angemaßte Leibeigenschaft.' Supplikationen von schleswigschen Untertanen gegen ihre Gutsherren zu Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts" (Demokratische Geschichte: Jahrbuch fur Schleswig-Holstein 6: 1991, pp. 11ff., online at www.beirat-fuer-geschichte.de › pdf). Additionally, see "Leibeigenschaft in Schleswig-Holstein am Beispiel des Gutes Depenau/Kirchspiel Bornhöved" (online at www.riecken-online.de; also at http://genwiki.genealogy.net/Benutzer:Riecken/Gut_Depenau).
Hedwig, Frederik’s aunt, has an extensive section in Ute Essegern, Fürstinnen am kursächischen Hof: Lebenskonzepte und Lebensläufe zwischen Familie, Hof und Politik in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts: Hedwig von Dänemark, Sibylla Elisabeth von Wurttemberg und Magdalena Sibylla von Preußen. Schriften zur sächsischen Geschichte und Volkskunde Band 19 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag GMBH, 2007). In English, but far briefer, there is Mara R. Wade, "Widowhood as a Space for Patronage: Hedevig, Princess of Denmark and Electress of Saxony (1581-1641)," in Renaissance Women as Patrons of Art and Culture (Renaessanceforum 4, 2008).
For far northwestern Germany generally, see Hans-Eckhard Dannenberg and Heinz-Joachim Schulze, eds., assisted by Michael Ehrhardt and Norbert Fischer, Geschichte des Landes zwischen Elbe und Weser. Band III: Neuzeit (Stade: Landschaftsverband der ehemaligen Herzogtumer Bremen und Verden, e. V., 2008). In the general category of "probably more than you ever wanted to know" there are the 642 pages of a superb foray into local history, Armin Schöne, Die Erzbischöfe von Bremen und ihr Haus und Amt Langwedel: Geistliche und weltliche Herrschaft im Alten Reich, Band 1 (Bremen: Edition Falkenberg, 2016).
For the Calvinism of the city of Bremen, the best currently available is Leo van Santen, Bremen als Brennpunkt reformierte Irenik: Eine sozialgeschichtliche Darstellung anhand der Biografie des Theologen Ludwig Crocius (1586-1655). Brill’s Series in Church History, Volume 69 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016). It was a pity that I could not make any significant room for Crocius in this book without skewing the plot in a theological rather than political direction.
For readers who would like additional bibliography on any topic in this novel, please go to 1632 Tech on Baen’s Bar (https://bar.baen.com/index.php?t=thread&frm_id=15&) and request it. I will be delighted to provide.
* * *
[1]https://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=39
