1634: The Ram Rebellion

by Eric Flint

  Paul took up the narrative. “I don’t know if we’ve persuaded them that voter registration is good for them, or if the existing elites will want to let all the people vote, when push finally comes to shove, but they’ve thrown themselves into getting it done. If you let them loose with personal computers, they’d put every single egg that a village chicken lays into a cross-indexed data base that assigned it a unique identification number. With provision for transferring the number to the proper chicken, if the egg hatched somewhere along the line.”

  “Tell me about it,” Arnold answered. He had been subjected to the Joy of Statistics as represented by an Abrabanel with a laptop, more than once. “Thanks, Dave.” He looked at their faces. “The other horses aren’t doing so well, I take it.”

  “Forget about the Witches is hanging in there, thanks to Matz.” Paul nodded toward Meyfarth, who was sitting on the other side of the table. “The people aren’t really going to forget about them, of course. But we have managed to make the point to just about every town council and to the judicial officers of all three of the big jurisdictions, here in Würzburg, over in Fulda, and in Bamberg, that is, that we are not going to cough up government funding. So they are, for the time being, just stashing their grievances and biding their time, hoping that the fortunes of war will remove us and they can go back to pursuing their delightful hobby of witch-burning. Of course, we can’t do anything about the parts of Franconia that aren’t Catholic, and therefore aren’t ours to administer. But most of them are Lutheran and Matz’s boss is putting on the pressure there. We ought to send him a letter of appreciation.”

  Bellamy duly made a note about an appropriately flowery commendation to be sent to Duke Johann Casimir. Better, two: one from Gustavus Adolphus and one from Mike Stearns.

  “Then we get to Separation of Church and State and the other horse in that team, Religious Toleration.”

  “Not so good?”

  “Religious Toleration is pretty much running neck-to-neck with Forget about the Witches. Considering that we’ve managed to hitch them both to We Mean It, who has been lumbering along steadily, like a big old Clydesdale. We’ve been able to make the point that they have to do it—yeah, we’ve done that. Protestants can settle in Catholic Franconia. We’ve imposed that law as part of the occupation rules. The towns can’t exclude Jews from trading privileges on the grounds of religion. We’ve imposed that law as part of the occupation rules. That won’t stop them from trying to find sixteen other grounds for exclusion that accomplish the same purpose. We’ll have to watch every town council very closely. What we haven’t managed is to persuade them that it’s a great thing, which is sort of what Congress assigned us to do. If enforcing it was our whole job, Toleration would be running pretty well. But the real kicker is that Congress told us to make them like it. Fat chance. On that, we’re in possession of a thoroughly deceased equine.”

  Reece Ellis cleared his throat; Paul continued.

  “Separation of Church and State is running okay, I guess. At least, as a matter of principle. And it is also hitched up with We Mean It. We’ve told them that that’s the way it is. We’ve told them that we’re going to make them do it. The NUS has just imposed separation of church and state. That’s what Congress ordered. Beyond principle, when we get into practice, things get more complicated. Let me turn this over to Steve Salatto. That part of it is his game.”

  Steve had a whole report, with appendices for Bamberg and Fulda. “It’s harder to manage in practice, when so much of what we think of as civil government was run by the church here, because the ruler was a bishop. Plus, we’ve been ordered only to confiscate the property that actually belonged to the bishops and abbot as rulers. Not to take the church stuff that was in their names—the buildings where they have the altars and crosses, the stained glass and candles. We’ve got the bishop’s palace, the one he lived in, and are using it for office space. But not the convents and the monasteries and the hospitals and the old folks’ homes and the schools and the orphanages . . . We’ve got taxes coming in from a whole batch of rural real estate, and beyond taxes, the NUS is now the direct holder of a lot of agricultural and residential leases on which it collects the rent, which means that we can pay the Amtmaenner and their staffs. That’s a good thing. Paying your employees on time is a thoroughly sound idea, from a public administration perspective. It really cuts down on the temptation to graft.”

  He paused. “That reminds me. We could use a couple of auditors down this way, when you have them available.”

  Arnold Bellamy duly made a note.

  “Back to what we’ve been doing. I’m just sitting in the place of the bishop, so to speak, for that kind of thing. I’m the State, and I’m trying to figure out what’s properly Church and hand it off officially to this guy called the suffragan. Who’s the equivalent of a deputy sheriff for a bishop, the bishop himself having run off to the Habsburgs rather than staying here to do his duty.”

  Steve frowned. Misbehaving bishops offended his up-time sensibilities. “In some ways, that’s lucky. The bishop was a Habsburg crony named Hatzfeld from up around Cologne rather than a local, and hadn’t been on the job for long. He was only elected in August 1631 and the pope didn’t confirm him until January of 1632. After Alte Veste, he scrammed. People weren’t attached to him personally, so to speak. The Bishop of Bamberg just died last March and they haven’t replaced him yet. He was off in exile with the Habsburgs, too, living in Carinthia. Back in our world, the crony also grabbed that diocese. These guys don’t seem to pay a lot of attention to the rules about not holding multiple benefices.”

  “I hear a ‘but’ in your voice.”

  “But a lot of them, Amtmaenner whom we’re paying and all, don’t like the idea of separation of church and state, any more than they like our laws on witches or toleration. And, I think, a fair number of them are just doing a ‘wait and see’ for the time being. They’re just biding their time on this too, hoping that old Ferdinand of Austria will work some kind of a military miracle, restore the bishops, and they can go back to the way things used to be.”

  Arnold pushed his hair back nervously. “That’s the thing. That’s why I really came down from Grantville. I haven’t been able to get any kind of real handle, from anybody’s reports, from anywhere in Franconia, on how many people have that attitude and how many think that we’re doing at least sort of okay. Not just from you, Steve. I’m not pointing a finger. What I mean is, not from anybody. I’m really surprised that we aren’t seeing more popular response. Not just official comments from the city councils and such, but from the ordinary people. It’s not that you haven’t tried, I know. Press releases. Pamphlets. Broadsides. Handouts in the marketplaces. It’s like it’s all falling into a pit.”

  “It’s the wrong season,” Meyfarth commented cautiously. “You started this commission in the spring. That is planting time; then haying; then harvest. Farmers are starting at dawn and working until it is too dark to see; carters are hauling; farriers are shoeing; harness makers are repairing. By evening, they are too tired to think about all the propaganda that the commission is putting out or to express their opinions about the measures it is taking. Just about the only up-timers they see are your ‘hearts and minds’ men.”

  “When can we reasonably expect to hear from them, then?” Arnold Bellamy interrupted.

  “It has been too many years since they could work without interruptions and raids, confiscations from friend and enemy. Under the NUS, the taxes are still high, but at least they are clear about what they will owe and how it is apportioned. The armies, friend and foe alike, are not just ‘taking’ or extorting ransoms on pain of burning the village down. There hasn’t been a Brandschatzung anywhere in Franconia since last fall. It may be a good year. In spite of the problems with the weather.”

  It sounded to Bellamy as if Meyfarth were doing his analysis as he was speaking. “So what do we expect?” he repeated.

  “About October, everything ought
to be inside from this year’s harvest, and the fall plowing and sowing done. Threshing they can do gradually, indoors. From November through February, farmers gather wood and do chores, but the work is not so heavy. They can go to the village tavern. They will start reading all those newspapers and pamphlets, broadsides and handouts, that have been piling up all summer in a stack on the corner bench. Then they will start asking themselves the real question: ‘What does this mean for Unteroberbach? What does this mean for Obermittelfeld? What does this mean for Mittelunterberg?’ That’s when you will start to hear from them. Or, more likely, to see evidence of what they have decided among themselves, in each individual village. The majority will try to exclude those members of the Gemeinde or citizens of the town who disagree with them. You will see people, whole families perhaps, on the move.”

  Meyfarth smiled calmly at the commissioners. “After all, you up-timers have a saying that describes it perfectly.”

  “And what,” Reece Ellis grumped, “is that?’

  “’All politics is local.’ And that, Mr. Bellamy, is why I have advised you not to set your elections on whether the Franconian territories will join the NUS until next spring. Late spring, or early summer; between planting and haying. This is my advice. Do not hold them until each village has had time to think about all of this and about what it might mean for them. They can’t know what it will mean. No man can predict the future with such certainty. But to think about what it might mean—that is possible. On this, the commissioners agree with me.” Reece, Paul, and Phil nodded.

  “The longer we wait to hold elections,” Saunders Wendell complained, “the longer the pro-bishop and pro-Habsburg and anti-us, or anti-NUS, people have to get themselves organized.”

  “And the more they will pick, pick, pick. File a complaint here; submit a petition there; write a letter to the king of Sweden; yada, yada, yada.” Scott Blackwell had minimal patience with the multiple avenues of political process.

  Arnold had an eerie sense that this was just about the point, back when he had been reading the diplomatic correspondence, that he had decided to come down to Würzburg. “Look guys,” he said, drawing a deep breath. This was going to be a long, long, meeting.

  A Nightmare Upon The Present

  Virginia DeMarce

  July 1633: Near the Coburg border, Franconia

  Constantin Ableidinger looked up from the table at which he was working. The breeze was welcome, but strong enough to disturb the various piles of paper on which he was working. He had pressed almost every heavy item in the room into service as a paperweight. A small pewter plate, a candlestick, a small telescope.

  He had a housekeeper, too. She was glaring at him from behind his back. He could see her wavering reflection in the glass goblet of cold coffee that stood by his right hand. Undoubtedly, he had committed yet another infraction against her rigid housekeeping standards and she was planning to bring it to his attention. Respectfully, but without yielding.

  If he had been paying her wages, she would not be here any more. However, the ram was paying her wages. The ram had determined, some months ago, that his time was too valuable for him to spend it pulling up the featherbed.

  Or drinking in the Frankenwinheim tavern with Rudolph Vulpius.

  Or planting cabbages in his garden.

  His wife Sara had never complained that he was a slob. She had been agreeable and compliant, even when he walked in from the garden with his boots covered thickly in mud. Even on days when she had just swept the floor boards down with sand.

  Of course, his late wife’s pliancy had also led her to agree that he could bed her right there in the alley behind her father’s bakery in Jena. Which had led to his expulsion from the Faculty of Theology.

  And to his son, who was standing at the door in front of him. Who had, in this year and a half since the up-timers came to Franconia, stopped being a child. How had Matthias gotten to be fourteen? When would he have time to finish tutoring him so he could enter the university? Was that something else for which his own time was now “too valuable?”

  What university should he attend?

  “What is it, Matthias?” he asked aloud.

  “It’s Herr Schulte, again.”

  Ableidinger thought for the hundredth time that he had never properly appreciated Rudolph Vulpius. Heading a village council took a lot of work. That was obvious to anyone who had ever sat on a village council. But a teacher did not sit on the village council. He worked for it and for the consistory. For years, when he was teaching in Frankenwinheim, he had kept the council’s records, so he knew as an observer how much business the council did. Still, he had never understood how much maneuvering it took, before each meeting, to bring the contentious parties in a controversy to the point that when they came before the council, they were either willing to reach a solution between themselves or accept whatever solution the council proposed with reasonably good grace. He had never realized how hard it was to recruit “volunteers” for each of the necessary offices, from fire bucket patrol to bridge and ford inspector to vermin warden.

  He wished he had a suitable “volunteer” to listen to Schulte right now.

  Herr Schulte was in a feud. Not a formally declared feud, as had existed among the imperial knights long ago in the past, but a normal one, stemming from a brawl over property rights. The recently deceased duke of Saxe-Coburg had, some twenty years before, leased property that crossed the boundary line between Coburg and Franconia to a family of Protestant exiles who came from Austria by way of Bayreuth. The duke had done this because the son of the prior leaseholder, Schulte’s father, had abandoned the property, having found a more advantageous situation further south, in the Steigerwald part of Franconia.

  So it had remained. But in the awful winter of 1631-1632, Schulte and his family had been pushed out of the Steigerwald when the army of Gustavus Adolphus passed through. Like so many other farmers, he had been dislocated by the Thirty Years War. He was a refugee. So he had returned to his grandfather’s old village and was now suing the current leaseholder for return of his family’s “traditional” holding.

  Of course, one way to explain his actions would be to attribute them to avarice. The Bible itself said that the love of money was the root of all evil.

  But at least he had learned to distinguish between avarice and political power. Thomas Paine pointed out that,

  MANKIND being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance: the distinctions of rich and poor may in a great measure be accounted for, and that without having recourse to the harsh ill-sounding names of oppression and avarice. Oppression is often the CONSEQUENCE, but seldom or never the MEANS of riches; and tho’ avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy.

  Constantin Ableidinger now knew more about lease grants than anyone except a territorial ruler or a lawyer ought to know. It was certainly more than he had ever wanted to know about them.

  Traditional.

  Schulte was, of course, appealing to the Franconian administration run by the up-timers from Grantville—or, more accurately, managed as far as principle went by the up-timers from Grantville and run on their behalf by a gaggle of German bureaucrats—for redress of his wrongs. Ultimately, if they did not settle it to his satisfaction, he would undoubtedly be appealing to the supreme court of the CPE, the Swede having occupied the city where the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire held its sessions and annexed its personnel. If that court did not satisfy him, he would, if he survived so long, appeal ultimately to Gustavus Adolphus in person as the symbolic “good ruler.”

  What was the Swede likely to know about it?

  Nothing, of course. Der gesunde Menschenverstand. Schlichte Vernunft. Common sense. Thomas Paine, in the first American pamphlet Ableidinger had read, a year and a half ago now, had written:

  There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of M
onarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the World, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless.

  Paine was as refreshing as cold spring water on a hot summer day.

  As Schulte talked, Ableidinger wondered idly if anyone in this famous Grantville had introduced the king of Sweden to Thomas Paine’s views on hereditary succession.

  To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and imposition on posterity. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and tho’ himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.