Odd, that Besançon had become home, she thought.
Bismarck leaped up and headed down the hallway, walking rapidly.
Nicholas-François’ first worry was, “Are your children ill?”
“No, no,” Claudia said impatiently. “I have an urgent message from Henri de Rohan. It’s Jean Mairet. He’s a native of the town, He went to Paris to study, oh, at least ten years ago, and has had several plays performed. One, Sophonisbe, from three or four years ago has been very well recognized. The local people are quite proud of him. This year was not a good time for him to pick up the theme of Marc Anthony, though, so he had excellent reasons to leave Paris rapidly. He has relatives in Besançon and keeps up ties with his old friends. Both genuine friends and political friends.”
She turned around. “Oh, why am I chattering? Mairet ‘has come to visit his family’ and in fact came to Rohan with information about the situation in France, sent by Isaac de Benserade, one of Rohan’s informants, who has managed to continue on as an event planner for Anne de Rohan as she spins her intrigues around Soubise. We have to get back.”
That broke up the conference, which was still going around in circles, just as Duchess Nicole had predicted the first time she saw the agenda. There was nothing more that anyone could say that hadn’t already been said several times.
✽ ✽ ✽
Before everyone left, Nicole announced that happy news that there was a impending heir for Lorraine. Boy or girl, it did not matter. The duchess herself was living proof that Lorraine could be inherited by a female child. The waiting would come to an end in November. She implored the prayers of all of them for this greatly-desired infant.
This rather frustrated Henriette, because it meant that her constant teasing would not have bothered Nicole at all because she really was pregnant. How exasperating. How frustrating. How maddening. How exasperatingly, frustratingly, maddening.
Nicholas François announced that Claude was also pregnant again – she must have conceived just before they left Savoy the previous spring. She would stay in Tuscany with Vittoria through the winter, taking advantage of the milder climate and not risking the child to the hazards of travel.
Nicole was well and truly delighted for her sister.
If only Bernhard would let Claude come home.
✽ ✽ ✽
Ableidinger had everything packed up by dawn the next morning, the first of them actually ready to head out.
“I haven’t seen Bernhard much, as it happened,” he said to Bismarck and Ruvigny, “and he’s not back yet, Aldringen says. But you also know him, so I’ll ask you to give my respects to Josef please. And assure him that I haven’t forgotten Anna Dorothea, either.”
“I’m sorry,” Ruvigny said, “But who is Josef? Who are we talking about?”
“Josef Kempinger. Raudegen, he calls himself, now; he took a military name. At that dinner the night after I arrived, Bernhard said he’s working with, or for, Rohan this summer. My brother-in-law? Hasn’t he ever mentioned me?”
Bismark almost jumped. “No. Last summer, once, he mentioned that he had been married when he was young; that his wife and baby died. That was the only personal reference he’s ever made as long as I’ve worked with him, and he only made that because we asked. Because we were talking about who we might like to marry some day. He headed up to his room and made it pretty clear that it shouldn’t come up in the conversation again.”
“Josef was like that. Turned in on himself. Not a man to let grief come to the top and get over it. Anna Dorothea has been dead for more than a decade now.”
Ableidinger sighed. “Well, let him know what I said. We should get together again, one of these days, if our paths cross. Tell him to look me up if he ever gets to Magdeburg.”
✽ ✽ ✽
Huygens thumbed through Ruvigny’s pamphlet of quotations from Otto von Bismarck.
Wer den Daumen auf dem Beutel hat, der hat die Macht.
Whoever has his thumb on the purse has the power.
True enough, if scarcely an innovative idea. Now, how did he break that news to the grand duke of the County of Burgundy? Preferably in such a manner that it did not cause a rift between anyone and anyone else.
Constantijn Huygens was an excellent diplomat.
Frederik Hendrik would not have sent him to the Nancy conference if he were not.
He managed to duck Scaglia, who was not in the ‘need to know’ category for this conversation.
The rest of the Burgundy delegation had been gone for three days by the time Bernhard got back to Nancy. Huygens found him exercising his warhorse.
He considered this fortuitous and initiated the conversation with reference to reins; how they differed from leashes or the leading of a simple pack horse on a line, but were necessary components in the successful partnership that led to victory rather than defeat on a battlefield.
The mutual cooperation between them rather than conflict.
How magnificent such a partnership was when it functioned as it should.
Bernhard was not known to love many things in life, but it was generally known that he loved the huge black beast he had named Raven with passion.
It took a while.
Bernhard did not receive the news of the limitations being imposed by his paymasters gracefully or gladly, but he did accept it with some modicum of self-control. “I may have learned something from Rohan,” he said finally. “...from the way he accepted the news that I did not wish to marry his little Marguerite. And how thankful I was, at that moment, for his courtesy.”
The Hague
July 1637
Frederik Hendrik, when he received Huygens’ verbal report, was profoundly glad that Christian had not inserted himself into the negotiations.
Besançon
July 1637
“And for this, no more results than this,” Bernhard yelled. “Talk, talk, talk, talk, for days on end, with nothing accomplished. For nothing more than useless talk, I missed my favorite brother’s wedding! We should have gone to Altenburg instead.”
Claudia sat quietly, listening to him fume.
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 a lot of documentation available for Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. Most quotations in the section headers for An Uneasy Kind of Peace are taken, out of context of course, from letters of Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar as published in:
Per Sonden, ed. Rikskansleren Axel Oxenstiernas Skrifter och Brefvexling. Utgifna af Kongl. Vitterhets- Historie- och antiqvitets-Akademien. Sanare Afdelning en Sjunde Bandet.
1. Hertig Bernhards af Sachsen-Weimar Bref 1632-1639.
2. Landgrefve Wilhelms af Hessen-Kassel Bref 1632-1637.
Med Tillågg af Brefven från der Sistnåmdes Gemål., Landgrefvinnan Amalia Elisabeth 1634-1650.
(Stockholm: P.a. Norstedt & Söners Förlag, 1895).
Some additional summarized and/or translated quotations in the text are taken from the documentary supplements to:
Bernhard Röse, Herzog Bernhard der Große von Sachsen-Weimar. Biographisch dargestellt. Erster Theil. Mit dem Bildnisse des Fürsten und einer Münztafel (Weimar: im Verlage des Großh. Sächs. Priv. Landes-Industrie-Comptoirs, 1828).
Much of the detail on what was possible for early modern armies campaigning in Lorraine is based upon:
Ferdinand des Robert, Campagnes de Charles IV Duc de Lorraine et de Bar en Allemagne, en Lorraine et en Franche-Comté 1634-1638. D’après des documents inédits tirés des Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères (Paris: H. Champion; Nancy, Sidot Frères, 1883).
For those without experience in dealing with historical flakes, it should perhaps be mentioned that most of the dumber things that this story depicts Monsieur Gaston and Charles IV of Lorraine doing in their military campaigns are minor variants of things that they actually did.
<
br /> By contrast, very little documentation is available to provide an author of fiction with a basis for valid characterization of Sophia Elisabeth, the second-oldest daughter of Christian IV of Denmark by his morganatic wife Kirsten Munk. She died April 29, 1657, at the estate of Boller, Odense, Denmark, where her mother lived in exile from the Danish court. In actual history, she was married in 1634, a month after her 15th birthday, during the celebrations of the wedding of her legitimate half-brother the Prince-Elect Christian to Magdalene Sybille of Saxony, to a Holstein diplomat and administrator in her father’s service.
Most references to her depend upon Memoirs of Leonora Christina, Daughter of Christian IV. Of Denmark: Written during her Imprisonment in the Blue Tower at Copenhagen 1663-1685 Translated by F. E. Bunnett (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1872). This edition included Leonora Christina’s Autobiography (p. 31) in addition to the Memoirs (p. 87). Leonora Christina disliked her sister and portrayed her in a highly unfavorable light as unintelligent, untalented, and ill-tempered.
Not a great deal is added by the recent biography of her husband: Ruth Möller, Christian von Pentz: Das Ratselvolle Leben des Glückstädter Gubernators Christian Reichsgraf von Pentz (1610-1651) (Borsfleth: Christian Boldt, Im Auftrag der Detlefsen-Gesellschaft, 2017). It does contain (p. 58) a portrait of Sophia Elisabeth as an adult (the most common one seen is when she was a child perhaps five years of age with her mother, her sisters Anne Cathrine and Leonora Christina, and her brother Waldemar, p. 12).
According to Möller, many of the more scurrilous allegations in regard to her conduct during her married life as driving her husband to alcoholism and insanity are traceable to the memoirs of a Danish diplomat from the duchy of Holstein, Detlev von Ahlefeldt. These have been published (Ditlev von Ahlefeldt, Erinnerungen 1617–60, ed. Louis Bobé, [also appeared under the title Memoiren aus den Jahren 1617-1659, Copenhagen: 1896]; 1922), but I have not had access to them.
There is no evidence that Sophia Elisabeth ever had children, in spite of the attribution of three to her by some genealogical sites on the internet. The supposed daughter “Armgard Agnes” is unquestionably the child of Markward Ernst von Pentz and his wife Abel von Bülow. The others may have been illegitimate children of Christian von Pentz.
The portrayal given here of her having had learning disabilities is therefore an extrapolation for which there are no distinct and specific historical sources. The reference to her grandfather, King Frederik II of Denmark, as having had difficulty with reading the Psalms even as an adult is in the historical record.
By contrast, since the opening of the Medici Archives (http://www.medici.org/), the situation in regard to Vittoria della Rovere, born as duchess of Urbino and by marriage grand duchess of Tuscany, is quite different. Researchers are no longer dependent upon G. F. Young, The Medici, vol. 2 (John Murray: 1920) and Harold Acton, The Last Medici (London: Macmillan, 1980), both of which depended heavily on the narrative of a late 18th century historian (Galluzzi 1781).
For a general introduction to current research available in English, see Giovanna Benadusi and Judith C. Brown, eds., Monica Cojnacka, tr., Medici Women: The Making of a Dynasty in Grand Ducal Tuscany (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2015), with particular attention to Giovanna Benadusi’s essay, “The Gender Politics of Vittoria della Rovere,” pp. 264-301 See also the essay by Adelina Modesti, “‘Nelle mode le piu’ novelle’. The latest fashion tends (textiles, clothing and luxury fabrics) at the court of Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere de’ Medici of Tuscany,” in: Jill Bepler and Svante Nordheim, eds., Telling Objects: Contextualizing the role of the consort in early modern Europe (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018) (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen Bd. 153). From Adelina Modesti, see also a recent essay in regard to Vittoria’s activities as a patron of art and culture at the court of Tuscany: (http://www.academia.edu/10473583/The_self-fashioning_of_a_female_Prince_the_cultural_matronage_of_Vittoria_della_Rovere).
For her appearance, I recommend the individual portraits by Justus Sustermans from her adolescence through the 1640s in addition to the well-known dual portrait with her husband, rather depending entirely on Carlo Dolci’s version of her in widow’s weeds, by which time she was in her 60s.
* * *
[1]Henry John Temple Palmerston, Lord Palmerston, allegedly said in regard to the 19th century conflict some variant of the following: “The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was the prince consort, who is dead. The second was a German professor who has gone mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.”
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FItRwasTHVM
[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0asli9YuEVk
[4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voqL5ksOuoo
[5]John Dod, A Plaine and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandements, 1603.
Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence Page 44