halt to all conflict
the emperor offers a truce to king wladyslaw
the emperor to return to magdeburg
The festivities and the parades died down, although they didn’t die out entirely. People of whatever political persuasion understood that the coming days were going to be a time of hard bargaining. Most of them figured they’d wait until they saw the end result before they started celebrating again.
Or started crying in their beer.
PART V
March 1636
The thunder and the sunshine
Chapter 54
Magdeburg, capital of the United States of Europe
Gustav Adolf arrived in Magdeburg five days after Oxenstierna’s killing. His advisers—that mostly meant his cousin Erik, right now—had had to talk him out of flying to the capital. Why take the (admittedly not great) risk, when there was no point to it? There would be no way to start any serious negotiations until Mike Stearns arrived in the capital, after all. Given the situation in Dresden and his responsibilities there, it would take him most of a week before he could leave for Magdeburg.
Besides, Gustav II Adolf—the full and formal name was needed here—could spend a useful two days or so dealing with the men who’d been arrested in the palace. Oxenstierna’s minions, as Colonel Hand was wont to call them.
Deal with them he did. The emperor was sorely tempted to have the ringleaders summarily executed. But Wilhelm Wettin talked him out of that. The prime minister pointed out that given the chancellor’s freewheeling abuse of power, it would probably make a nice counter-example if the emperor displayed a great deal of restraint at the moment.
Gustav Adolf was a bit dubious of the logic, but since Erik weighed in on Wilhelm’s side, he decided to accept their advice. He was still shaken by the results of his temper tantrum and not as inclined as he normally would be to trust his own instincts.
Having ruled out summary executions, however, he drew the line at summary punishments short of removing heads. No way would he accept timid restrictions!
He started by stripping von Ramsla and anyone else whom Oxenstierna had given any sort of official position of all of his noble titles. Then, of all his lands, if he possessed any.
As a strictly legal proposition, his right to do any such thing was eminently disputable—and there was no shortage of lawyers in the USE ready and willing to argue the case. The problem was that Gustav Adolf did not extend the punishment to the heirs of the punishee—but made it very clear that he would do so the moment any of them tried to challenge him.
That made the whole thing a very risky proposition. A man could bow his head, accept the penalties, and slink back home—where, at least for most of them, their families would maintain them in more-or-less the same comfort they’d been accustomed to. Or, he could challenge the emperor in court. If he lost, though, he risked being out in the cold with his entire family.
Most of them accepted the punishments. Only three indicated an intention to file a legal challenge. In all three cases, because their families detested them and would be pitching them into the cold anyway.
That done, the emperor ordered any of Oxenstierna’s minions who might conceivably—remotely, at the far edges, barely, tangentially, it didn’t matter—have been involved in the plot with the Bavarians to be kept under arrest until such time as Erik Haakansson Hand got around to interrogating them and deciding they were innocent.
At which point, of course, any other penalties would kick in.
That done, the emperor levied heavy fines on anyone who had participated in what he chose to call the “outlaw convention.” If the person in question had been a member of Parliament, the fine was doubled and the emperor unilaterally decreed that their election was null and void because they had violated their oath of office by participating in said outlaw convention.
This ruling was very questionable, there being no provision in the constitution that gave the emperor any such power. And, in the end, Gustav Adolf would rescind it two weeks later. The electoral disqualification, that is, not the fines. He did so not because he feared the courts but because Mike Stearns insisted on it and the emperor decided it was not an issue he was prepared to fight over tooth and nail.
That done…
He decided to rest from his labors. He’d already stripped large pieces of hide from just about everyone who’d been arrested, after all. In fact, the only exceptions were two servants who’d been rounded