1634: The Ram Rebellion (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  Which was ridiculous. She managed her home and her children; she had no trouble controlling her classes-discipline had never been a problem for her.

  In spite of that, she was in constant awe of Liz. There was a line, somewhere, between being able to do things and being able to do them superbly. Emma was on one side; Liz on the other.

  Even Liz’s mother was in awe of her. Which said something.

  So here she was. “Not the most important thing for clothes and stuff. That’s all sorted out and packed. Your folks are dealing with renting out the house; they’re using Huddy Colburn. I’ve put our things in storage, except for what Willard asked me to bring. I’ve rented a wagon and hired a driver.

  “But I’ve never done any mission work. This Frau Faerber in Bamberg-we’ll be staying at her house, at least for the rest of the winter-wants me to be talking to other women, mainly. I think. So what should I take?”

  Of all the things that Emma might have predicted an hour before, two hundred copies of an abbreviated German translation of Robert’s Rules of Order would not have been right at the top. But that was what Liz gave her.

  Along with a great big hug.

  Bamberg, mid-January, 1634

  Noelle Murphy pushed through the front door of Kronacher’s print shop. “Hello. I’m back from Grantville. Anybody home?”

  Martha pushed through the curtain and hugged her. “I’m so glad you could spend Christmas with your family. Everyone else is down at the city council meeting, listening to the debate about the missionaries who have come to town. Pastor Meyfarth and the up-timer. Thornton, his name is. After they’re done, Mutti will bring them home for dinner. The two missionaries, I mean. Not the city councillors.”

  Noelle tipped her head to one side. “Is there enough in the pot for a couple more?”

  “You and…”

  “I brought you someone to help keep a lid on Melchior and Otto until I can get some CoC printers for Frau Else. He stopped at a street vendor’s grill to get some breakfast, but he should be here…”

  The door opened again.

  “…right now,” Noelle finished. “Martha, this is my friend Egidius Junker. We call him Eddie. He’s been studying law at the University of Jena. And economics. He’s also spent a lot of time in Grantville, so he can sort of help explain things. Back and forth. Between, oh…” She paused. “Between people for whom explanations would come in handy. So I want him to meet your mom and brothers. He’ll also get started on a couple of projects for me.”

  Martha looked doubtful. This Egidius Junker did not appear to be old enough to control her brothers. Though Noelle could make them pay attention and he was, perhaps, about the same age as Noelle.

  * * *

  “Eddie will work for you as an in-house translator,” Noelle said to Frau Else between bites of sauerkraut.

  “I can’t afford…” Frau Else began.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Noelle’s tone was sharp. “Eddie will work for you as an in-house translator. That’s why he’s in Bamberg. That’s what his letters of introduction say. That’s the way it is.”

  Martha didn’t look up, but glanced around the table while keeping her head down. First at Noelle, whose face was suddenly pinched and older than her years. Then at the up-timer, Thornton, who was talking to Pastor Meyfarth. Then at Pastor Meyfarth. Again at Pastor Meyfarth. She had looked at him before. At a break in the theological discussion, she asked, “Will your families be joining you soon?”

  Willard Thornton smiled. “My wife Emma is already on her way to Bamberg. She should arrive any day, if the group she is traveling with isn’t seriously delayed by this weather.”

  Meyfarth shook his head. “I am a widower. My wife and children died of the plague in Coburg, nearly two years ago.”

  Martha extended her sympathy. Wondering a little why she didn’t feel as sorry as she should and then not wondering. Meyfarth was a very attractive man. Perhaps twenty years older than she was. Mature. She liked that.

  “Have you found a place to stay?”

  Herr Thornton answered first. “We will be with Frau Stadtraetin Faerber until we can find something more permanent.”

  “For the time being, I am at an inn,” Meyfarth added. “I can’t afford to remain, of course. As soon as I have taken a census of those persons who are likely to become my future parishioners, I will see if one of them is in a position to rent me a room.”

  At the head of the table, Frau Else looked up. “I know someone,” she said. “A very respectable widow and her house is conveniently located. I will be happy to introduce you to her.”

  Meyfarth thanked her solemnly.

  Most of the conversation was political.

  “Thanks again for the dinner, Frau Else,” Noelle called back as she went out the door.

  Martha followed her. “Umm.”

  Noelle grinned at her. “Everyone in Wuerzburg says that the pastor is a really nice guy. And he’s a poet. Very cultured. Everyone says so.”

  “We, ah, sort of stopped being Lutherans back when I was a teenager. Because of the bishop, you know.”

  Noelle raised her eyebrows. “That’s one of the beauties of freedom of religion, Martha. There’s nothing to say that you can’t start being Lutheran again. If you’re interested in theology, of course.”

  “Oh.” Martha looked back a little nervously at the door where Pastor Meyfarth and Herr Thornton were still standing, talking to Egidius Junker. “Oh, of course. Theology. Err, Noelle.”

  “What?”

  “That ‘respectable widow’ Mutti mentioned to Pastor Meyfarth.” Martha squirmed a little. “She’s the mother of Judith Neideckerin. The woman you asked if I could find some way to put you in touch with. The woman I wrote you about. The one that Helmut mentioned the last time he was here.”

  “Freiherr von Bimbach’s mistress, you mean?”

  “Yes. Her. Mutti has talked to her mother. The one with the room to rent. She can put you in touch with Judith. If you still want to be, that is.”

  Noelle thinned her lips, pulling them in between her teeth. “Oh, yes. I would very much like to be put in touch with Judith Neideckerin, if Helmut is willing. His Bimboship presents problems. Judith Neideckerin may offer opportunities.”

  Wuerzburg, mid-January, 1634

  The rector of the University of Wuerzburg had come to talk about libraries. Specifically, the wonderful library of the late Bishop of Wuerzburg, Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn. Before Gustavus Adolphus had assigned the prince-bishopric to the New United States in the fall of 1632, the king of Sweden’s troops had managed to pack up the library. The rector had last seen it crated up, on wagons, on its way to improve the cultural ambiance of Stockholm.

  The rector’s message, Steve Salatto noted ruefully, was quite clear. He wanted the library back. Or, if the up-timers could not get it back, an equivalent library. Which would cost a lot of money. Which he wanted the administration to provide.

  Steve’s new chief of staff, Georg Rodolf Weckherlin, cleared his throat significantly and started to discuss the removal of the library of the late Elector Palatine from Heidelberg to Rome at an earlier stage of the Thirty Years War. Weckherlin was the son of a Wuerttemberg bureaucrat. Although he had spent time in England even before the marriage of the luckless Bohemian Winter King whose adventurism had been the trigger that started the Thirty Years War, to Elizabeth Stuart, his ties to the country had been strengthened through that marriage and he had worked for the Electress Palatine for a while.

  The rector brought up the Peace of Augsburg and the fact that the Calvinism of the late elector had made him an outlaw within the Holy Roman Empire in any case, whereas this was a clear case of theft of property from an institution which followed a religion that was legal under the constitution of that empire.

  “Recriminations,” Steve said, “will get you nowhere. I can’t guarantee you any money. You know what the budget looks like just about as well as I do. But there is one thing that I can
guarantee, which is that if you keep raking up old grievances, there won’t even be a budget request.”

  He looked at Weckherlin. “That goes for you, too. If you want to keep your job.”

  Weckherlin smiled back quite cheerfully.

  * * *

  Steve thought for a while after Weckherlin left to show the rector out. “Tinker to Evers to Chance.” Oxenstierna to Stearns to Piazza, who had sent Weckherlin to Franconia. Steve had not had anything to say about it. He wouldn’t have any more to say about getting rid of him.

  At least, being a poet like Meyfarth, Weckherlin was more than willing to write propaganda pieces. And Steve couldn’t complain that they had stuck him with an incompetent. Weckherlin had studied law and been a low-level diplomat as well as writing poetry. He had married an English girl, the daughter of the Dover city clerk, in 1616; she was here in Wuerzburg with him and they had a couple of kids. He got full-time employment in the English government in 1626, became an English citizen in 1630. The entry under his name from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, kindly provided by Ed Piazza, indicated that up-time, he had joined the Parliamentary forces during the English Civil War, becoming John Milton’s predecessor as “Secretary for Foreign Tongues” under the Commonwealth. In this world, he had caught a boat from Dover to the continent in a timely fashion, before the royal troops who had nabbed Oliver Cromwell caught up with him.

  Well, a poet. Not a poet like Meyfarth, though. Replacing one man sitting in your outer office, the poet who had written “Jerusalem, Thou City Fair and High,” with another man sitting in your outer office, the poet who had written “Seduction in the Garden, or Love Among the Cabbages,” took some getting used to; a bit of readjustment, so to speak. Not that Weckherlin had gotten this job because of the cabbages, or the roses, or the girls with too-beautiful eyes who populated most of his verses. He owed this job to his sonnet in praise of Gustavus Adolphus.

  The one that addressed him as a “king whose head and fist were alone adequate to conquer the world, a ruler whose heart and great courage were adorned by fear of God, justice, strength, moderation, and wisdom, whose sword was the terror of persecutors and drove lamentation, fear, and danger away from the persecuted.” And that was just for a start. Somewhere before “Mars, of divine descent and from the blood of the Savior who was worthy to triumph over pride and tyranny.” The more that Steve read, the more he suspected that it would be pretty hard for any propagandist to get to a level at which the USE’s current emperor would consider effusive praise to have reached the point of overkill.

  Weckherlin was a competent chief of staff, but a very different man from Meyfarth. Steve would just have to adapt, he supposed.

  The thing was, for all his tendency to be a poseur, the man did goddamn well believe that there was such a thing as “Germany.” A Germany, moreover, that could and should be a decent place for human beings to live in. One without the “anger, arrogance, treachery, disloyalty, servility, injustice, and superstition” that had destroyed “freedom, laws, and divine worship.” If Weckherlin really did, for some reason, believe that Gustavus Adolphus could reverse all that, teaching “the enemy to turn his madness and splendor into repentance, the ally to turn his suffering into joy,” maybe it was worth putting up with the rest of the poem.

  Not, Steve thought, that he was likely to ask his mother-in-law to cross-stitch a copy of it for him to frame and put up over his desk. His mouth quirked then. He reached across his desk for a pen and clean piece of paper and wrote a note. With a copy of a sonnet. Folded them together, sealed the packet, and addressed it to Grantville. Anita’s mom could cross-stitch it for Mike Stearns and send it to Magdeburg. It would fit right in with the rest of the decor of his office, from what Steve had heard.

  Better that Mike had to put up with all that garbage than himself.

  Wuerzburg, February 1634

  “As far as any leadership that I can see,” Scott Blackwell said, “it’s still fairly inchoate at this point. I mean, insofar as there is any visible leadership, it’s come to be focused on Frankenwinheim. But that’s largely because of the publicity stemming from the attack on Maydene, Estelle, and Willa back in December and our own propaganda. I don’t have the vaguest idea who the real leader of this ram movement is-or who the leaders are, if they are multiple. Or where they are. And that, believe me, bothers me a lot.”

  “At least,” Johnnie F. Haun said, “we do pretty much know what they’re thinking. Or, at least what they’re putting out in pamphlets, what they want their followers to think. They have to have access to some pretty good printing press. Which means they, or some of them, at least, have to be somewhere that they can get paper. Somewhere that they can haul the paper in; haul the pamphlets out. The broadsides and placards are one thing, but not all the pamphlets. They have to be using a press in one of the cities. I just can’t see some little village up in the hills producing those under the noses of the Amtmann and the constable. Not to mention under the nose of the priest. Not, at least, unless some fairly prominent people are in sympathy with the whole thing.”

  “Is that the way it looks to you?” Scott asked.

  “Not here in Wuerzburg, I’m sure of that,” Johnnie F. answered.

  Steve Salatto raised his eyebrows. “Somewhere?”

  “Over at Fulda, maybe. Orville thinks…”

  Steve motioned to Weckherlin. “That’s Orville Beattie, the Fulda organizer for Johnnie F.’s ‘Hearts and Minds’ team.”

  “Thank you.” Weckherlin nodded as he took notes.

  “Orville thinks, but he can’t prove it, that some of the monks from the abbey are backing the farmers. Not the important ones, so much-the nobles who are there because their families put them there. But the guys out in the rural regions, the provosts as they’re called, who manage the farms and the estates, and see more of what the people have been put through these last couple of years. The invasion by the Hessians and all. Yeah, I know that the landgrave of Hesse is one of Gustavus Adolphus’ allies, but his soldiers aren’t any different from all the rest. Some of the provosts, at least, are sort of sympathetic to the desire of the people in the ram organization. To fight back, I mean. Against-well, against anyone who comes along to hassle them again.”

  Weckherlin was frowning. But still taking notes.

  Johnnie F. felt a little guilty for not mentioning Frau Else Kronacher in Bamberg, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was her press being used by the ram. Just ninety-nine percent sure. If Scott and Vince had Stew looked into it, that would cause trouble for her, and she had problems enough with those two boys. Not to mention that she did a lot of work for Stew and the rest of the Hearts and Minds team in Bamberg and it would be a nuisance for Stew to have to find another printer. And…

  He suspected he was just rationalizing his decision to keep quiet. But he figured if there did turn out to be a problem, he’d take care of it himself without bothering Steve and Scott.

  Chapter 8:

  “But You Think That We Are Going To Hell”

  Bamberg, February 1634

  It was a very small flock. Johann Matthaeus Meyfarth looked out at the fruits of his efforts to organize a Lutheran congregation. He proceeded through the liturgy. General prayer for the church. Collect for peace. Prayer for those whom God had placed in authority over his flock. Sacrament of the altar.

  In the afternoon, he wrote. Accompanied by more prayers. Propaganda pieces-many organizational in nature, but well salted with the theme of, “This isn’t the time to settle your personal scores; hold that until after we have won. Then we can take our complaints through a fair judicial system in which we have a say.”

  Propaganda for people who were preparing to revolt against those whom God had placed in positions of authority. Propaganda that might, if they heard it, hold the flock back from worse sins than simply demanding justice.

  Twelve Points. Twelve because of the echo of the Bundschuh that it raised. Shorter, much shorter, than the Twelve Articl
es of 1524. Some the same. Some different. Printed, circulated.

  The ram had asked him to do this. The ram, he had found, was guarding his flock. And himself.

  1. There shall be complete separation of church and state, with no imperial knight, free lord, or other ruler, be he count or duke or king or emperor, having the right to dictate the conscience of his subjects;

  2. Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist parishes request the right to choose their ministers from a list of qualified men provided by the ecclesiastical authorities, which we know that the administration, because of the separation of church and state, cannot make the churches do, yet we ask it; we say that other religious groups tolerated by the civil governments may pick their own leaders by their own rules, however they set up their organization;

  3. All lords and imperial knights whose lands are enclaves within Franconia must permit their subjects to vote in the upcoming elections, saying that they themselves should have such a right to vote also;

  4. We demand the end of all vestiges of serfdom on private estates of imperial knights and lords as well as on those which escheated from the bishops and abbot to the administration of the New United States; specifically the ending of restrictions on movement, restrictions on the right to marry, death duties of the best beast and best garment, and compulsory labor services on the lord’s own land, though we state that we are nonetheless willing to work the corvees when they are needed for the common good, as on the roads, fords and bridges, as is customary;

  5. We demand that local custom be respected in regard to inheritance rights of leases on farms and other rural property, with no requirement for partible or impartible inheritance, etc. being imposed from above;

  6. All towns in Franconia must open their citizenship to villagers, as long as they are of good repute and not criminals; citizens of Franconia and their families are to have freedom of movement and settlement anywhere within the territory administered by the State of Thuringia, whether city, market town, or village;