1634: The Ram Rebellion: Section Sixteen

Part III: The Trouble in Franconia

December 1632: Grantville, Thuringia

    Arnold Bellamy looked at the assignment that the congress of the New United States had given the Special Commission on the Establishment of Freedom of Religion in the Franconian Prince-Bishoprics and the Prince-Abbey of Fulda. Its members were to go to the area that King Gustavus Adolphus had assigned to be administered by Grantville the previous autumn. They were to establish a headquarters at Wuerzburg. There were to be regional offices in Bamberg and Fulda. They were to hold hearings. In the course of these hearings, they were, basically, to explain a number of things to the civil down-time administrative personnel of these regions. The most important were, reduced to their essence:

    1) Under the Constitution of the New United States, there is Separation of Church and State;

    2) Religious Toleration is a Great Thing;

    3) Burning Witches is a Bad Idea;

    4) We Mean It;

    -and, also, added as a rider during a late afternoon committee meeting;

    5) Voter Registration is Good for You.

    Congress had passed it. Naturally, Congress expected someone else-in this case, as it happened, the Department of International Affairs-to figure out some way of actually doing it. Looking at the three newly appointed commissioners, Ed Piazza grinned. “See if you can instill a proper appreciation of motherhood and apple pie in them, while you’re at it. And good luck. I’m going to be busy with other projects for the next few months, so talk to Arnold Bellamy if you run into any problems. This is his baby, now.”

    Bellamy frowned. He always found the bureaucratic acronym NUS rather unfortunate, since the German word Nuss meant “nut” and could be easily extrapolated to “nuts”. Knowing how humans react to any opportunity to put down the enemy, he could see a "laugh at the interlopers" campaign coming. "They're all nuts."

    The Special Commission, for all practical purposes, could be interpreted to mean the Grantville Commission to Force the Franconians to Accept the NUS’ Laws Establishing Freedom of Religion. It was one of those things Mike Stearns thought needed Ed’s personal attention quite a bit more than the upcoming Rudolstadt Colloquy, if only because the administration already established by the NUS probably wouldn’t appreciate being gifted with a special commission. Its very existence at least implied that they wouldn’t be doing their jobs right. Or that something, somehow, was lacking.

    “I wish you were going to handle this, not Arnold Bellamy. It’s not that he’s hard to work with. He’s just . . .”

    “ . . .reserved,” Ed said. “Reserved and still not entirely comfortable working with you.”

    “Stiff,” Mike said. “Rigor mortis and all that.”

    “It won’t get better unless you work with him. Arnold is perfectly competent. He had a different teaching style than I did, sure, but the students never really griped about it.” Ed thought a minute, “It’s likely, of course, that not even his wife ever calls him by a pet name. But this is no longer a few thousand people with an administration run by an Emergency Committee that you by and large picked because you knew them and – mostly at least, with a few exceptions like Quentin Underwood – liked them. It’s a country of nearly a million people. With an administrative staff comprised mainly of down-timers whom you have never met and may never meet face-to-face. Whom you probably will never meet face-to-face. The commissioners report to Arnold; Arnold reports to you, at least for as long as I’m otherwise occupied. Welcome to the bureaucracy, Mr. President.”

    Arnold Bellamy, looking at the congressional resolution, cleared his throat and commented, “‘Civil?’ Congress does understand that these were ecclesiastical principalities, don’t they? That the rulers of the three biggest ones were two Catholic bishops and a Catholic abbot? That the best one can say about the distinction between ‘civil’ administrations and ‘ecclesiastical’ administration over there is that it’s pretty vague?”

    “Well,” Mike Stearns answered, “the down-timer delegates do, at least. On the other hand . . .”

    “I know. The congress has a couple of Catholics among the down-timers. And for Grantville’s senator we have Becky, who’s Jewish. And if Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel ever showed up to take his seat in the House of Lords, otherwise known as the Senate, we would have a Calvinist. He, however, is chasing around northern Germany in command of an army unit. For all the rest, we’ve got Lutherans in the NUS Congress. For the simple reason that Lutherans are what we landed in the middle of-the state church of almost every place that’s joined the NUS confederation: Badenburg, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Sommersburg, Sondershausen, Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Altenburg, Saxe-Coburg, Saxe-Eisenach, Saxe-Everyplace Else, you name it. Except for the transients, the refugees who’ve come in from outside because of the war, they’ve all been Lutheran for a century, give or take a couple of decades here and there.”

    Mike Stearns sighed. “You know perfectly well what they thought they were voting for. They thought, no matter that it’s officially titled a Commission for the Establishment of Religious Freedom, that it’s really a Commission to Make Catholic Franconia Safe for Lutherans.”

    “So does Gustavus Adolphus, for that matter, according to the letter he sent down. Our Captain-General thinks that it’s a grand idea. So does his chancellor, Oxenstierna.”

    “What other frame of reference do they have?” Mike was directing the question more to the air than to Bellamy, but Arnold answered.

    “At least, since they think they know what we’re doing, Duke Johann Casimir of Saxe-Coburg has loaned us this Meyfarth guy to help. He wrote the original set of German words to that awful tune that won the NUS national anthem contest. And we’re going to need all the help we can get. Trust me on that. Here’s a summary of the reports I wrote last fall when I went down to scope out the situation.”

    “Give me a rundown on Meyfarth.”

    “Johann Matthaeus Meyfarth. Matz to his friends. Middle aged, more or less; in his early forties. He’s a Lutheran pastor. That’s a priest, if you’re Catholic; a minister, if you’re a run-of-the-mill American Protestant. And he’s a musician, as if seventeenth-century Germany isn’t overrun with them. I expect any day now to find out that the garbage collector on our route plays the flute between pickups.”

    Bellamy shook his head. He didn’t like thinking about witchcraft persecutions, and found that his mind would take any side direction to avoid focusing on them. Pushing himself back to the topic, he continued. “But Meyfarth also, for years, has been Duke Johann Casimir’s point man for squelching witchcraft persecutions. As you’ve probably noticed, you pretty much have to get south of the ridge of the Thuringian Forest, down toward Suhl and beyond, to find a lot of witchcraft hysteria. Or more precisely, before you find anybody taking a lot of action about witchcraft hysteria. Around here there’s been some, sure. People believe that witchcraft exists. Villagers accuse old ladies of souring the milk of nursing mothers; or the herdsman’s assistant of maliciously drying up someone’s cow. But it hasn’t escalated into major investigations, examinations under torture, court cases by the dozen, and smoke going up from the stakes. On the map of Dead German Witches, this area right around Grantville is a fairly nice, white, hole among the black dots. Barely speckled, so to speak.”

    “So Meyfarth is off to Franconia with the commission to work his magic on the second point.” Mike raised his eyebrows. “Do I even dare to ask how they managed this?”

    “I believe that they bribed him with the offer of a tenured professorship at the University of Erfurt. If he survives the experience.”

    “What I meant was how they managed to create a ‘barely speckled’ spot on the map amid the polka dots and the black splotches.”

    “Oh,” Bellamy answered, “it’s simple enough. Johann Casimir is an old man, close to seventy, and not at all well. He’s been childless in two marriages, so he has focused on projects rather than accumulating bits and pieces of the Wettin family’s properties for his heirs. He has been at this for decades. A long time ago, it occurred to him that these organized anti-witch campaigns don’t happen without money: money to pay the investigators, money to hold the hearings, money to pay the torturers, money to pay the executioner. They are not lynchings, by and large. They are perfectly legal judicial proceedings. Exercising their right to administer high justice, to have jurisdiction in capital cases, is one of those perks that the various rulers protect very zealously. That means that persecutions will not happen if there’s no money forthcoming to pay all that staff. Therefore, if the ruler refuses to allocate money to pay for witchcraft persecutions . . .”

    “ . . .he won’t have witchcraft persecutions,” Mike finished for him. “Or, at least, no more than an occasional random case. Not these systematic witch hunts that lead to chains of accusations and hundreds of burnings. Charming. Beautiful. Elegant, even. I think that I have to admire this technique.”

    “Just keep in mind,” Bellamy warned, “that we have a democracy now. One duke can take a notion that he doesn’t want to spend money on this, lobby his fellow-rulers, who are also his cousins, and make some progress toward stamping it out, at least in his own region. But if we end up with a majority in congress who believe that witches should be burned, they may well vote to throw money at the problem. We’ve been moving awfully fast. If we ever forget that not all our citizens share up-time values, it could turn into something like letting the inmates run the asylum to suit themselves.”

    Mike grunted. “That’s always the problem with top-down solutions to social and political problems. The ideal way to handle a problem like this is for some mass movement to do it. From the bottom up. That’s why I usually try to have the Committees of Correspondence tackle something like this, whenever it’s possible.”

    Bellamy didn’t entirely share Mike Stearns’ enthusiasm for the revolutionary Committees of Correspondence which had, by now, sprouted up like mushrooms all over Thuringia and were beginning to do the same in and around Magdeburg. But it was all a moot point here, anyway.

    “The CoCs don’t amount to much, in Franconia,” he pointed out.

    “I know,” Mike sighed. “So we’ll have to try a top-down approach. Dammit.”