1636： The Saxon Uprising ARC - By Eric Flint Page 0,19
which is up here in Westphalia.” The wand now moved to indicate the USE’s large northwestern province.
“Ah! Of course.” That came from Constantin Ableidinger, who suddenly broke into a grin. “I hadn’t been thinking of that. If Oxenstierna launches a civil war here in the USE, he will be creating a gigantic Danish headache for himself, won’t he?”
“I don’t think there’s much doubt about it,” agreed Ed, nodding. “With Gustav Adolf incapacitated and given the still-fuzzy laws of the Union of Kalmar, you could make a good case that King Christian IV is now Kalmar’s regent.”
Rebecca smiled. “And I will bet that even as we speak the king of Denmark has every lawyer on his payroll assembling that case.”
“Don’t anybody take that bet,” cautioned Piazza. “Yes, I’m sure he is. More directly to the point, the governor of Westphalia is none other than Christian’s son Frederik. Who, I will remind everyone, is still petitioning to have his title changed to ‘Prince of Westphalia.’ So what are the chances he will be paying much attention to Oxenstierna?”
“The CoCs are quite strong in Westphalia,” said Albert Bugenhagen, “especially in the big cities. They’re politically sophisticated, too. If Frederik decides to thwart Oxenstierna, they’ll give him tacit support.”
“That’s what I figure,” said Ed, “and it’s the final reason I think Brahe won’t move far from the Rhineland.”
His expression got a lot more grim as he shifted the wand to the east. “We have quite a different situation with the final Swedish force of any size within the USE, Banér’s army marching to Saxony from the Oberpfalz. Banér’s a brute, pure and simple. A capable one, but still a brute. He doesn’t much like Oxenstierna, but then he doesn’t much like anyone. He’ll still do what Oxenstierna wants him to do, partly because he’ll see that as his best route for advancement but mostly for the good and simple reason that he agrees with Oxenstierna.”
Ed lowered the wand and took a deep breath. “Things are going to heat up in Saxony before much longer. If there is a civil war, that’ll be the cockpit.”
Chapter 6
Dresden, capital of Saxony
Gretchen Richter studied the man sitting behind the desk. He was slight of build, with a large-featured face framed by long, light brown hair and decorated with mustachios and a goatee. Two bright blue eyes peered at her above a bony nose. The gaze was composed of equal parts of apprehension, suspicion and curiosity.
He seemed to be using the desk as a shield to protect himself against her—more like a barricade, perhaps. He held an old-fashioned quill pen as if it might serve him as a pike against charging cavalry.
About what she’d expected. The very fact that Duke Ernst of Saxe-Weimar had chosen to meet her in his office with himself seated at his desk told her a great deal about the way the man approached the world. The leaders of the Spanish forces besieging Amsterdam with whom she’d negotiated had been politicians, first and foremost. Despite the vast formal gulf in rank between themselves and a printer’s daughter like Gretchen, both Don Fernando—then the Cardinal-Infante in command of Spain’s armies in the Low Countries; now the King in the Netherlands—and his great-aunt Isabella, the Austrian archduchess who was the Netherlands’ regent, had always met her sitting down at chairs in an informal setting.
But the duke was not really a politician, no matter that his older brother Wilhelm Wettin was now the prime minister of the USE and his youngest brother Bernhard had carved out an independent principality for himself from the Franche-Comté and parts of Swabia. Instead, Ernst was an administrator—what the Americans called a bureaucrat. His natural and instinctive response when face with a challenge was to withdraw into his redoubt, his desk. There, armed with pen and ink and paper, he was best equipped to deal with whatever might arise.
A very good administrator, by all accounts. Even a fair-minded one, and no more prone to favoring his own class than was more-or-less inevitable given his origins and upbringing.
Gretchen had spent some time discussing Wettin with Dane Kitt, just a few weeks before coming to Dresden. The SoTF soldier had been in Grantville for the birth of his daughter at the same time Gretchen had been there attending to some personal matters for her husband. Kitt had served in the Oberpfalz during the Bavarian crisis and had given her a hilarious depiction of Wettin’s insistence on bombarding the Bavarian defenders of Ingoldtadt with Lutheran religious