Chapter 1 By God’s Grace, Bernhard, etc.
Besançon, Franche Comté
February 1635
Gary Lambert stood on the citadel hill of the town of Besançon in the Franche Comté. He didn’t wonder what he, a nice Lutheran boy from twentieth-century Indiana, was doing there. He knew. By the grace of God and the Ring of Fire, he had escorted his aging future father-in-law, Friedrich Hortleder, to watch Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar officially become Bernhard, Grand Duke of the County of Burgundy.
Hortleder, now chancellor of Saxe-Weimar County in the State of Thuringia-Franconia in the United States of Europe, still very much in the confidence of Bernhard’s brother Wilhelm Wettin, was one of Bernhard’s former tutors––possibly the only one to whom the independent Bernhard had ever paid much attention––and an honored guest at the ceremony.
Wettin wasn’t here. As head of the Crown Loyalists, the party that had just won the USE election, he was slated to become the next prime minister of the USE and considered it not fitting to attend a ceremony at which his youngest brother, who had quarreled bitterly with Gustavus Adolphus, emperor of the USE, was setting the seal on his betrayal by officially becoming an independent ruler. Duke Ernst had planned to come––Bernhard had invited him––but some last minute emergency in the Upper Palatinate, where he served as the USE regent, had kept him away.
Duke Albrecht was present. Albrecht ran the remaining Saxe-Weimar estates on behalf of his absentee brothers and was, by nature, a peacemaker. Hortleder, Gary, and a half-dozen other people from Weimar and the Eichfeld had traveled with him. Of the eleven sons of Johann of Saxe-Weimar (twelve if you counted Wilhelm’s stillborn twin), only these four were still alive. The others had succumbed to the vagaries of childhood mortality, smallpox while attending the university of Jena, war, and, in the case of the unfortunate Johann Friedrich, death in confinement, where his brothers had placed him on account of his growing insanity.
A brisk but not freezing breeze stirred the air. Even though he was wearing a warm, fur-lined, cape, Gary felt grateful for the bright sunshine. Hortleder said something. Gary turned around, expecting a question, but the older man’s attention was on someone else.
“Nihus? I scarcely expected to see you here, now that you have become such a distinguished scholar that your name is latinized on various title pages. Not to mention for a few other reasons.”
Bartholdus Nihusius smiled. “My theological feud with Georg Calixtus seems to be winding down, though the Helmstedt professors have scarcely forgiven a former tutor of the dukes of Saxe-Weimar for converting to Catholicism. Still, now that Calixtus is making ecumenical overtures, it looks like I’ll be going to Mainz. Part of the policy of Cardinal-Protector Mazzare, you know. I’ve been invited by Wamboldt von Umstadt himself to join the archepiscopal staff.”
“Very distinguished for one of our little band of ‘former tutors of the young dukes of Saxe-Weimar.’” Hortleder looked around. “Wolfgang Radtke is here, too, somewhere in the crowd. I saw him earlier. He came as part of the delegation of the president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia. I don’t see him, right now.”
Nihusius nodded. “Not surprising in this crowd.”
The assembly of people who were crowded onto the citadel hill above Besançon, awaiting the ceremony in which their former pupil would be assuming his grandiose new title, was large, and the numbers kept growing. Anyone who could make the climb from the city below, or if not in sufficiently good physical shape for that, could afford to hire a cart with a donkey and driver, a sedan chair with bearers, or a wheelbarrow with someone to push it, seemed to have come.
Nihusius was looking a little rueful. “So Wolfgang, too, is now a distinguished ‘Ratichius’ and after all his decades of striving in vain to introduce educational reform, has become the ‘Secretary of Education’ of the State of Thuringia-Franconia.”
“Supervisor of numerous up-timers.” Hortleder laughed. “Largely by grace of Count Ludwig Guenther’s widowed sister-in-law Anna Sofie at Kranichfeld. She never lost faith in his ideas. Now, by virtue of Schwartzburg-Rudolstadt’s friendship with the up-timers, she had the influence to persuade Herr Piazza to make the appointment––over the objections of some of the ‘Grantville educational establishment’ who are convinced that only they can bring technological enlightenment to the poor ignorant down-timers, I assure you.”
“That only leaves Thomas Grote? Where is he, these days?”
“I’m afraid we’ve lost touch.”
“Trumpets. Here comes the procession.” Nihusius turned.
“Have you seen Bernhard to talk to?” Hortleder asked.
“At the reception yesterday evening.”
“How did he seem?”
Nihusius rubbed his fingers on his chin. “He’s not the hot-tempered teenager we knew, any more. Not even the hot-tempered young general of Breitenfeld. He looks older. Colder. He has bags under his eyes and not, knowing Bernhard, from dissipation.”
“I saw him last night, too. That was pretty much my impression. Even though there’s not yet any gray in that wavy dark hair––which I’m sure he’s happy to have kept in such abundance, given how many men of thirty are starting to go bald––he’s learned control to go along with his ambition. He’s achieved a position where he can surround himself with men of his own choosing, rather the ‘must-hires’ foisted on him by someone else’s politics. I doubt he’ll ever learn to be patient with incompetence, but he seems to have finally resigned himself to the existence of incompetent people in the world. As long as they aren’t anywhere near him. Whether he will ever be at peace with himself––who can say?”
Nihusius rubbed his chin again. “He’s a man with no illusions.”
Gary looked at them. “That’s what happens when you live in a tough neighborhood. Sheila, my wife up-time, used to work pro bono in an inner-city medical clinic. The weak––their eyes just got vacant. The winners, by the time they were thirty, had the same look in their eyes as this guy. If you ask me, fighting this war counts as a tough neighborhood, all by itself.”
✽✽✽
“Von Gottes gnaden, Bernhard, etc.”
By God’s grace, Bernhard, etc. The newly installed grand duke of the County of Burgundy contemplated the start of his letter to the regent of the County of Tyrol. Claudia de’ Medici, widow of an Italian duke, then widow of a Habsburg archduke, and by birth a grand duchess of Tuscany. Claudia de Medici, whom he had met earlier in the month.
At least he wouldn’t have to learn a new opening for his letters as the result of his new status. Except for the most formal legal documents, where all the miscellaneous titles of the Wettins were required, he had for years taken care of them with “etc.” so he could get to the meaningful content without delay.
The recipients of his letters always knew who he was. What was the point in emphasizing it?
The signature, though...
He looked down.
He had always signed Bernhard H.z.S. Bernhard, Herzog zu Sachsen. Duke in Saxony. Saxony, not Saxe-Weimar. They were the Ernestine line. The senior line. By rights, the electoral title belonged to them––not to John George of the Albertine line. So the split went back two-hundred-fifty years? So what? If you have a right to something, you have a right to it.
Now, for the first time, he signed Bernhard G.H.z.B. Bernhard, Gross-Herzog zu Burgund.
Grand Duke in Burgundy. He liked the look of that. No reason to be picky about the French insistence on Grand Duke of the County of Burgundy.
The uptime-encyclopedias told him that in another world, he had gained a duchy in Franconia and then lost it again to the vicissitudes of war. In this world, they had passed the date of the Battle of Nördlingen. He was not desperately trying to reconstitute an army for Axel Oxenstierna in a world in which Gustavus Adolphus had been killed more than two years earlier in yet another battle never fought, at Lützen.
In this world, whatever it took, he would not lose the County of Burgundy he had gained–and significantly expanded with bits of Alsace and Baden that he had managed to nibble off, bit by bit, here and there, in a most satisfying campaign. As campaigns came and went, this one had come cheap. As for the old Habsburg appanage of Burgundy itself, given what getting it had cost him, not to mention having to endure the diplomatic squabbles with the French whose lawyers and bureaucrats nearly had apoplexy at the thought the name might result in a creeping claim to Bourgogne... Given the effort he had expended thus far, and would expend in the future, he had a right to it. He’d earned it.
✽✽✽
“Ah,” Friedrich Ludwig Kanoffski von Langendorff said after banquet, after reception, after, finally, the celebrations of the day had wound to an end and the newly installed grand duke had gone off to bed. “Ah.” He twirled his wine glass.
The others of the inner circle of der Kloster, Bernhard’s closest advisers who had, the year before, adopted their totally inappropriate nickname of ‘the cloister’ from his temporary headquarters at the Benedictine monastery at Schwarzach, looked at him, then at one another.
“You do still have the list, I hope,” Reinhold von Rosen said.
“List?” Kanoffski asked, his face blank.
“The impromptu list of things to be done that our new grand duke issued while we were getting lined up for the procession into the banquet room?”
“Oh, that list. Yes, right here.” He pretended to feel around the inside of his doublet. “Somewhere.”
“Pest, Kanoffski. You are a pest. It’s a good list. I am quite gratified by Bernhard’s willingness to propose a modus vivendi agreement to the USE in addition to his forthcoming marriage. It looks like things may be stabilizing, which can only be beneficial to our long-term prospects.”
“This would have nothing to do with the long-term prospect named Anne Marguerite? The prospect of settling down, long-term, with estates in Alsace, would it?” Kanoffski, as usual for him, punctuated his speech and emphasized his points with a wide array of gestures. He claimed that the technique worked in any language.
“You married, you formerly wild Bohemian. You married almost two years ago. You married a nice, respectable girl from a nice, respectable family in Freiburg. She’s Catholic, but what the hell! We are all sinners in the eyes of God and that must be hers, since otherwise she seems to be ideally virtuous. You are rapidly settling into being nice and respectable yourself.” Rosen spread his hands widely. “When a nice Alsatian girl is so very...there...and willing to risk her life and estates on a wandering soldier of fortune from Latvia... Why not? Why not sons and daughters? Why not hostages to fortune under better circumstances than I could have offered them in the past? Poyntz here is also already married. I am not the last bachelor among us, but almost.”
Sydenham Poyntz nodded. “Under other circumstances, I might have wanted to go home some day, but England has become a disaster. In any case, Anna Eleanora prefers to stay in the Germanies.”
“Don’t look at me,” Johann Ludwig von Erlach refilled his glass. “Being from Bern, I’m not so far from home. I’m ten years older than the rest of you except for Kanoffski here––he has a couple of years on me––and married to a cousin since before the Ring of Fire. I have spent my adult life as a soldier and done well from it. But, yes, if Bernhard’s overture to Gustavus succeeds, if there can be, may be, will be, even an uneasy kind of peace, I will be entirely content to wait at home until the war comes to find me again. ‘There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.’ I am not so much a warrior that I would go in search of a different Kriegsherr who is recruiting.”
Bolzen, Tyrol
Dr. Wilhelm Bienner, chancellor of Tyrol, bowed to the regent. “You should be flattered, Your Grace. The grand duke wrote to you personally, in his own hand, rather than dictating the message to a secretary.”
Claudia de Medici glanced once more at the letter she held, rose from the table, and walked to the window, in hopes of getting better light than the flickering candles were giving late in the afternoon on this gray day in late winter. “In the matter of correspondence from Grand Duke Bernhard...” She paused. “We conclude that ‘written in person’ can only be counted as a mixed blessing. We must say that he has one of the most difficult and illegible scripts it has ever been Our misfortune to attempt to read.” She laughed. “Still, We shall overcome these obstacles––by this time tomorrow, perhaps. But it appears that de Melon’s work with his agents in developing the details of Our very sketchy pre-nuptial agreement is proceeding smoothly. Now, if only word doesn’t leak out prematurely...”
She gave the chancellor a firm look. “If it does...”
“Everyone understands, Your Grace. This is in the same category as the proposed voluntary entry of Tyrol into the USE. Heads will roll.”
“Make sure that Dr. Volmar is aware that his head is included in the possible count.”
The lawyer who had headed Tyrol’s chancery in Alsace, now alas absorbed into the County of Burgundy, was not one of the regent’s favorite people. Vain, ambitious, and stubborn were not the most desirable characteristics in a bureaucrat, particularly when they were combined with a willingness to take bribes.”
One of the main reasons that she was still paying out his salary in distant Ensisheim, even though there was no longer any work for him to do there, was that she didn’t want him in Innsbruck.
Besançon
“Your Grace.” Henri de Rohan bowed to a suitable depth.
“Your Grace.” Bernhard bowed back.
Both of them smiled.
“You requested to visit me? Rather than requesting that I visit you? There must be a matter of some import at hand.”
Bernhard cleared his throat. “At Schwarzach...” he began. “During the meeting that recently took place at Schwarzach with the regent of Tyrol...”
This was awkward.
Still, he had chosen to deliver the news in person.
Rohan, twenty-five years the older and inured to intrigue not only through his status as a French nobleman but by his years of service to the Serenissima of Venice, waited.
“The regent of Tyrol is...” Bernhard stopped and made another short bow.
“Yes?”
“I wished to do you the courtesy of providing this information in person, rather than by letter or through an intermediary. Claudia de Medici has done me the honor of agreeing to become my wife.”
Rohan was not certain precisely what he had expected from this meeting. He was certain that he had not expected this. He turned away, stiffly. “In the face of the honor that I had already done you, by suggesting my daughter as your wife?”
“Marguerite is, without doubt, eminently eligible.”
“Not to mention, suitably Protestant.”
“That, too.”
“Of an ideal age.”
Bernhard thought a moment. Rohan, in his own day, had been saddled by King Henri IV of France with a bride who was barely ten years old. The Huguenot duke, currently his guest and ally, almost surely did consider that delaying negotiations for his daughter’s marriage until the girl was seventeen––nearly eighteen––was the height of political liberality and paternal indulgence.
He did not want Rohan to take his forthcoming marriage to Claudia de Medici as an offense to his honor.
Leopold Cavriani was in town––had been for some time, for that matter, going back and forth, planning, undoubtedly, obscure Calvinist things. In a pinch, maybe Cavriani could help.
He couldn’t afford for Rohan to break off the working alliance they had forged.
Did he need to apologize? It was not as if he were breaking off a betrothal. Their discussions had been tentative.
Could he afford to apologize? If the alternative were a break with Rohan, yes.
Could he get through this without apologizing? He certainly hoped so.
A politically necessary decision could look quite different when you were the maker of it and not the recipient of its impact.
A sneaking understanding of some of Gustavus Adolphus’ possible motives in allying with the up-timers at considerable cost to the dukes of Saxe-Weimar came creeping into his mind.
“Upon consideration,” Bernhard said. “Upon consideration, with all due respect, I am not the man you need as Marguerite’s husband. She is your only heir. She needs a husband who can become Rohan for her, and for you––a husband who can accept the Huguenot cause and its needs as his primary obligation.”
Who will fight your battles, he thought, the battles you choose. And possibly even let you lead him around by the nose, though a man who would accept that will be of little use to her.
“In my case, not only am I Lutheran rather than Calvinist, which would make me less than acceptable to many of the Huguenot theologians, but also the needs of the County of Burgundy would provide a constant distraction...”
Rohan did not stalk out.
It had been a near thing.