by Eric Flint
The subjects of the Freiherr Fuchs von Bimbach had thought of sixty-three points, some of them very specific, involving the allotment of hay mowed in the upper meadows and the annual worth of the acorns consumed in the Freiherr’s forests by his subjects’ hogs. All of which they announced themselves quite willing to take all the way to the imperial supreme court for adjudication.
“Fox from Bimbo?” someone asked.
Everyone else pretended not to have heard. The general impression that they drew from the sixty three points was that the subjects of the Freiherr von Bimbach were not happy campers this Anno Domini 1634. However, he was Protestant, and out of their jurisdiction, having most of his estates as an enclave over to the east of Bamberg, surrounded by those of the margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth.
“The emphasis on education in Latin and access to secondary education. Are those really all that important to the farmers?” Estelle Colburn was frowning at her copy.
“It doesn’t strike me as quite the ringing revolutionary cry of ‘to the barricades’ with which Gretchen Richter has been trying to inspire the Committees of Correspondence,” Anita agreed. “’Admit our sons to the civil service’ doesn’t have quite the same effect in grabbing the reader’s attention as, ‘Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains’.”
“But they do go into the civil service, if they can, Anita,” her husband Steve pointed out. “I talked to Count Ludwig Guenther’s chancellor before we came down here, way back. He’s the son of a farmer from one of the count’s villages. His father sent him to school because the pastor recommended it; he went into the count’s service straight out of the University of Jena and climbed right up the ladder. That’s not so unusual. Along with being a priest, it’s just about the only path to social mobility around, for a farm family, given how the towns and the guild trades freeze them out.”
“Gretchen’s grandma, maybe,” Maydene Utt said.
Everyone else at the table stared at her. This comment seemed to be coming out of left field.
Maydene persisted. “Ronnie Dreeson has students from Jena talking conversational Latin to the toddlers at the St. Veronica’s schools. I think she’s got pretty much the same idea.”
“Thought I heard a few echoes of what you and Willa were doing last fall, in the tax stuff,” David Petrini interjected.
All three of the auditors pointedly ignored him.
“Gretchen Richter isn’t writing this stuff. I don’t think that anyone involved with the Committees is writing this stuff,” Johnnie F. said. “The CoCs really haven’t spread much in Franconia, except in some of the industrial towns. There are Committees in Suhl and Schmalkalden and Schleusingen. The honest truth is, though, that they don’t have much interest in the farmers. They’re focusing on the cities—places where they can get hold of good-sized audiences all at once, not country villages where maybe they get a half-dozen or a dozen.”
“It sure isn’t what Spartacus is writing. It’s not intellectual, analytical stuff. The style is way different, too. They aren’t even plagiarizing him,” Dave Stannard added. “The Twelve Points aren’t like the Brillo Broadsides or the Common Sense pamphlets, either. The author has his own agenda.”
“Where is it coming from, then?” Maydene asked.
“Some of the points, from the farmers themselves,” Johnnie F. said. “Like, ‘don’t try to tell us how to divide our property when we die.’ The rest...”
“There are two kinds of revolutions,” Dave Stannard interrupted. “The ‘down with the system’ revolutions. Those are really hard to handle. Especially when the people in them don’t know for sure what they want to put in place of what they have. Then the ‘let us into the system’ revolutions. Those are a bit more manageable, generally, and that seems to be, mostly, what we’ve got here. A lot of the rest of the points, I think, from talking to the Amtmaenner and people out in the villages who are working on the voter registration lists, are what our old friend Meyfarth thinks would be good for them.”
“Meyfarth!” Scott Blackwell choked on his coffee.
Johnnie F. cleared his throat. “Stew says...”
Steve motioned to Weckherlin again. “Stewart Hawker, Johnnie F.’s counterpart over in Bamberg.”
Weckherlin nodded.
“Stew says that he’s churning out the propaganda pamphlets, apparently spending all night writing with both hands at once, plus songs and poems and talking points and,” he grinned, “getting a lot of help from Emma Thornton. So you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
Steve looked warily at Maydene, Willa, and Estelle. “Don’t tell me,” he said, “that Emma Thornton is a member of...”
The three of them chanted together, “the Grantville League of Women Voters.”
Willa added, “So’s Liz.”
“Liz who?” Weckherlin asked.
“Liz Carstairs. Her sister-in-law. Was Mike Stearns’s chief of staff; now Ed Piazza’s. You must know her.”
* * *
Georg Rodolf Weckherlin looked down at his notes to disguise a wince. Were all these up-timers related to one another? How could a person possibly keep track of it? He doubted that he would ever forget his first encounter with that, that... creature who sat in the anteroom of the SoT’s president. She was not an Araminta. Nor an Ariadne. Nor any of the other nymphs who populated love poems. His job require him to exchange correspondence with her regularly. It was not his favorite activity. No one short of a dowager empress should be so self-confident. Certainly not that woman. She was, really, only the wife of a small town guildsman who belonged to a heterodox religious sect.
At least, he had known enough to treat her with outward respect. He had been warned about her already in Magdeburg, before he took the letter of recommendation to Grantville. Which meant that he owed a big favor to Graf August von Sommersburg. A very big one which, undoubtedly, the count realized. And would, someday, call in. Dealing with these up-timers could be a touchy business.
Chapter 9:
“Unless It Should Happen That I Am Unlucky”
Franconia, February 22, 1634
David Stannard had been quite right the previous fall when he said that down-time Amtmaenner really had lists down pat. They had the electoral lists in shape. Every Amt had just as many pre-printed paper ballots as it had potential voters, with a dozen or so to spare in case someone made a mistake. The spares were sealed. If one was used, two different election officials had to sign an explanation of the circumstances why it was needed, written on the envelope next to the opened seal. With the spoiled ballot, crossed out, put into the envelope.
In a few places, such as the town of Gerolzhofen, the election had to be conducted under military supervision. Not many, though.
The administration had given the ram its point three. Every adult in Franconia got to vote, even the people living in the little independent enclaves, just as long as they were within the general boundaries of Wuerzburg, Bamberg, and Fulda.
So in quite a few more places, the electors had to be conducted under military supervision, so to speak. Conducted from their village of residence, where some sputtering local lord was trying to prohibit voting, to the nearest functioning polling place.
Followed by a visit from the military police to the lord or Reichsritter to explain what they planned to do if they received any information in regard to attempted retaliation against legal voters.
“We mean it” did very well in the Franconian election of 1634. “Motherhood” and “Apple Pie” were not on the ballot.
The Amtmaenner had counting the votes down pat, too. The results were tallied, certified, and delivered to Wuerzburg within a week.
With a few exceptions like Bamberg and some of the industrial towns nestled against the Thueringerwald, the towns and cities had not been enthusiastic. The guilds had led a bitter opposition, largely based on the argument that if incorporation passed, the “foreigners” would impose points six, seven, and eight of the �
�Twelve Points.” In most of the towns, incorporation either failed or barely squeaked by.
However, eighty percent or more of Franconia’s population did not live in chartered towns.
Some villages were solidly opposed; some few were a hundred percent opposed. Dave Stannard proposed to take a look at possible undue pressure from landlords, here and there, in spite of all the precautions that he and Scott Blackwell had taken in regard to secret ballots. The simple truth was that if a precinct only had a dozen voters, if one of them disagreed with the local boss, the boss could probably find out who it was. Even with a ballot held secret, there were a very limited number of choices about who it might have been.
Overall, however, sixty-three percent of the registered voters cast ballots in favor of the incorporation of Franconia into the State of Thuringia and citizenship for its inhabitants.
Grantville, State of Thuringia
On March 5, 1634, the Congress of the State of Thuringia adopted a formal name change, subject to a future referendum, from the State of Thuringia to the State of Thuringia-Franconia. There had originally been some discussion to the effect that as a courtesy and in the name of welcome, the name of the new region should be placed first. Arnold Bellamy pointed out that this would result in the acronym SoFT, not an image which the USE or its component states wished to present to the League of Ostend just now.
Therefore, it was SoTF. Unpronounceable, of course, but also not evocative of any undesirable associations whatsoever.
Until the next crisis, which occurred very shortly thereafter, Bellamy was in an unusually good mood.
Franconia, mid-March, 1634
Several minor lords, mostly Protestant, whose lands were enclaves within Wuerzburg and Bamberg, objected vociferously to the incorporation vote. Especially the Fuchs von Bimbach family, which turned out to have not only a Protestant branch centered in Bayreuth but also a Catholic branch with estates intermingled among those formerly belonging to the prince-bishop of Bamberg.
This, Johnnie F. found out from Meyfarth on one of his jaunts up to Bamberg, was not at all unusual in Franconia. A lot of the Reichsritter, Freiherren, and lesser local nobility had split into Catholic and Protestant branches, in order to have a foot in each camp and someone among the relatives with an arguable and viable claim to the family’s lands whenever the politico-religious situation underwent a minor shift or major earthquake.
Bamberg, mid-March, 1634
“So how are the CoC English lessons going?” Janie Kacere asked.
Eddie Junker sighed. “Apprentices. Unruly apprentices.”
“’Amid gloom and doom’ is the normal situation for first-time teachers,” she consoled him.
“Most of them are just antsy and energetic. If I tell them to write a sentence using the words pink, green, and yellow, they’ll toss paper airplanes at one another – those are quite a fad, these days – but they’ll write something like, “I got out of bed, put on my pink shirt, harnessed up my green wagon, and looked at the yellow sun.’”
“That’s not bad,” Stew Hawker said.
“Yeah.” Eddie sighed deeply. “Then there’s Otto. Frau Else’s younger son.”
“He wrote?”
“The telephone greened. Green, green. I pinked it up and said, ‘yellow!’”
“I take it,” Janie said, “that he knows better.”
“Oh, sure. He’s the best student I’ve got. He’s just ... Well, he knows he’s the best student I’ve got and he takes advantage of it. None of the rest of them are anywhere near to the point of making puns in English.”
* * *
Noelle shuffled through the mail that had arrived at the Bamberg Schloss in the diplomatic pouch and picked out the letter from Ed Piazza to be read first. The one from the administrators in Suhl, second. Arnold Bellamy’s went to the bottom of the pile.
Fuchs von Bimbach is going to be the key. That was the gist of Piazza’s letter.
Well, she didn’t disagree. Here on the ground in Franconia, His Bimboship maybe looked even more key than he did from Grantville. Or from Magdeburg. There was a letter from Don Francisco Nasi’s office, too.
* * *
“I have to get inside,” Noelle said that evening. She rapped her knuckles on the table in front of her.
“I don’t like the idea.” Eddie Junker was chewing on his lower lip. “Ja, Helmut has supporters among the servants there. Bimbach’s subjects don’t have any love for their lord and master. Frau Else can put you in touch. But if the bosses catch on that you’re not just one of the Ram’s people but also that you’re an up-timer, there would be hell to pay.”
“It’s not that dangerous. After three years talking mainly to Germans, my German is pretty good. Plus, with all the different dialects, accent isn’t that much of a problem. I can avoid the castle authorities. I’ll be Downstairs, not Upstairs. Even if His Bimboship’s personal staff hear me say something, it won’t be fatal. They’ll know that I’m not from right around here, but with all the population displacement that the war has caused, they’ll just think that I’m from somewhere else.”
“Do you actually trust the old Neidecker woman?”
“Not as long as her daughter is in that castle. She lived through the witch trials. It’s not like the nun who’s helping us.”
Eddie nodded. Anna Maria Junius at the Dominican convent in Bamberg was so grateful to Grantville for saving her sister Veronica when those fanatics hauled her into Suhl a couple of years ago that she had really gone out of her way to help the NUS administration.
“Taking Johnnie F. and Willard in and patching them up last fall. Everything. I’d trust Sister Anna Maria with my life.” Noelle grinned. “I do trust her with my political maneuvers. That history of Bamberg during the war that she’s writing has been a lifesaver when it comes to figuring out the various factions and such. Die alte Neideckerin, though. In her heart, I think, she’s afraid that we’ll be putting Judith in a lot more danger if she helps us deal with von Bimbach. After all, they sent her away in the first place in order to keep her safe.”
“If you go,” Eddie said, “I’m going too.”
Noelle shook her head.
“Yes,” Eddie persisted. “I am.” He pulled out his own stack of mail. “I bet you put your letter from Arnold Bellamy on the bottom of your stack, didn’t you?”
“Umm. Yes.”
“Well, I opened mine. He’s written to Steve Salatto and Vince Marcantonio. He can’t rescind your ‘special envoy’ status when it comes from Prime Minister Stearns, but he’s made it clear to them. If you go in there, I go with you. Down-time muscle. Thick of skull and strong of arm, that’s me.”
Noelle leaned back, looking at him. Eddie was better known for brains than brawn, even though he was quite big.
“You think they’d let in someone who looks like a huge hulking bodyguard coming with the new maid that Judith Neidecker’s mother sent her from Bamberg? Me, they won’t even notice.”
Noelle pulled out her letter from Arnold Bellamy and read through it before she answered.
“Okay. It looks like you’re coming. But I don’t like it. You’re just a kid.”
“I’m as old as you are,” Eddie said. “And just as stubborn. I may not be as wrong-headed and snobbish as my father, but I’m just as stubborn as he is. Plus ...” He flashed her an impudent grin, “I got my mother’s smarts, too. The combination is unbeatable.”
“Except, maybe, by Otto Kronacher.”
“Well, yeah. There’s always Otto.”
Wuerzburg, mid-March 1634
“The person with whom you are meeting this morning,” Weckherlin said, “is an agent of the Fuchs von Bimbach family. A lawyer and administrator. His name is Dr. Polycarp Lenz. Nicknamed by almost all who know him, I hear, ‘Pestilenz.’ Signifying...”
“Plague,” Steve Salatto interrupted. “Why?”
“Irascible. Irritable. Obnoxious. Obstructionist. Uncooperative. Unreasonable.”
“Got
it. Enshrines all the worst qualities presupposed in a Libertarian’s view of the typical bureaucrat.”
“What is a Libertarian?” Weckherlin asked.
“A person who thinks that sort of thing about us—the noble civil servants who give of themselves unstintingly that the citizens of their country may receive their driver’s license renewals in a timely fashion.”
“What is a driver’s license?” Weckherlin had, after all, spent only a week in Grantville and that had mostly been devoted to acquiring a passport from the consular service, a health certificate from the Leahy Medical Center, and other mandatory activities that interfered seriously with getting to know more about life in the twentieth century.
“A permit to drive a motorized vehicle. Did Lenz tell us what he wants?”
“No.”
* * *
Dr. Lenz delivered a petition, signed by over two hundred of the Protestant imperial knights and petty lords of Franconia. All of Franconia, not just the parts included in the SoTF, but also Bayreuth, Ansbach, and the Nuernberg hinterland. In fact, mainly Bayreuth, Ansbach, and the Nuernberg hinterland, since the majority of those inside Wuerzburg, Bamberg, and Fulda were Catholic.
The petition was addressed to Gustavus Adolphus. It requested that he annul the election that took place on February 22, revoke its effects, and remove Franconia from the unnatural administration imposed by the foreign up-timers. That he restore it to its rightful lords, the native-born Protestant nobility. Offering, in a spirit of noble self sacrifice, that they, should the emperor see fit to burden them with the onerous task, would be willing to assume the duty of governing the heretical, rebellious, Catholic principalities.
Dr. Lenz announced that this was the third copy of the signed and sealed petition. The first had been sent to the emperor directly; the second, through one of the administration’s auditors, Herr Johann Friedrich Krausold, to Duke Wilhelm of Saxe-Weimar, who was now using the name Wilhelm Wettin. Lenz’s distaste for the latter version of the name was clear in his voice.