father but simply because of his existence. His nature, as it were. A drunk he might be, and given to grandiosity, but Christian IV was also exceedingly intelligent. On some level he must have realized that any actions he took against the Union of Kalmar would only damage his son’s prospects—which were far greater than his own.
Even royal fathers are sometimes capable of putting their children’s welfare first.
As Gustav Adolf would now have to do himself. He’d had another seizure on the barge, halfway through his voyage here—and this one had not been triggered off by any rage. It had come completely as a surprise to everyone, even Dr. Nichols. The lesson from the experience, which the American medician had drummed home at tedious length, was that the emperor had to accept the fact that he was now forced to operate within certain understood constraints. For how long? Quite possibly the rest of his life.
That meant he needed to develop surrogates. Men he trusted—but they also had to be men with enormous talents.
A rare combination, that. He’d thought he’d found it once before with Axel Oxenstierna. Being fair—to himself as well as his former chancellor—that productive relationship has lasted for a quarter of a century and might well have lasted for another, had Gustav Adolf not been struck down at Lake Bledno. Oxenstierna was hardly the first man to succumb to great temptation. Had the temptation never arisen, he probably would have remained faithful to his dying day.
Now, the emperor needed to find a replacement for Oxenstierna. And by great good fortune, he thought he’d found three: a son, a cousin and a brother of sorts. Perhaps the Lutheran pastors were correct and God did favor Sweden. It was tempting to think so, certainly. But temptation was ever Satan’s favored tool.
Gustav Adolf had already had one long private talk with Ulrik since his arrival in Magdeburg. Two things had come out of it; one specific, one general.
The specific result had been that he’d decided to accept Ulrik’s judgment that there had been something hidden in the murder of his wife. Some dark scheme that lay behind it, quite different from the conclusions one might draw from the superficial evidence. So, he’d put Ulrik in charge of ferreting out the truth.
Or rather, overseeing the ferret—that Norwegian of his, whose mechanical talents were but a veneer over more ancient and grimmer skills.
The general result had been the first step in a long journey they would take together. A king needed an heir, and an emperor needed one even more. A male heir, if at all possible. Women could rule, and sometimes even effectively—witness the great English queen of the past century. But in the nature of things their position was always a bit tenuous. Far better if their reign could be buttressed by a consort who could double as a king-in-all-but-name.
So, as time passed, a son-in-law would eventually become a son. As close to it as possible, at any rate.
As for the cousin, Gustav Adolf’s trust and confidence in Erik Haakanson Hand had proven to be fully justified.
That left the brother of sorts. In the long and often bloody history of monarchy, nothing posed so great a threat to a king as his brothers—yet, at times, could be his greatest strength.
The first outcome was by far the most likely, of course. The Ottomans had made a veritable heathen cult of imperial fratricide. But you didn’t need to venture into exotic lands to find the same phenomenon. Next door in France, Monsieur Gaston had been plotting ceaselessly for years against his brother Louis XIII, the rightful king. And while the plots of the newly crowned Fernando I in the Netherlands against his brother Philip III of Spain were not—yet, at least—of such deadly intent, they had still ripped Philip’s realm in half.
Still, it wasn’t always so. In his long struggle to retain his throne during the English civil wars of the fifteenth century, Edward IV’s staunchest supporter had been his brother Richard, the duke of Gloucester. (His other brother George, however, betrayed him as royal brothers more commonly did.) It was true that after Edward’s death his brother Richard was accused of having murdered the two legitimate heirs in order to take the throne himself. But Gustav Adolf was skeptical of that claim, given that it was advanced by the man who had overthrown Richard himself.
Even if the tale were true, however, it simply reinforced the lesson. More than anything, a crippled king