Well, a poet. Not a poet like Meyfarth, though. Replacing one man sitting in your outer office, the poet who had written "Jerusalem, Thou City Fair and High," with another man sitting in your outer office, the poet who had written "Seduction in the Garden, or Love Among the Cabbages," took some getting used to; a bit of readjustment, so to speak. Not that Weckherlin had gotten this job because of the cabbages, or the roses, or the girls with too-beautiful eyes who populated most of his verses. He owed this job to his sonnet in praise of Gustavus Adolphus.
The one that addressed him as a "king whose head and fist were alone adequate to conquer the world, a ruler whose heart and great courage were adorned by fear of God, justice, strength, moderation, and wisdom, whose sword was the terror of persecutors and drove lamentation, fear, and danger away from the persecuted." And that was just for a start. Somewhere before "Mars, of divine descent and from the blood of the Savior who was worthy to triumph over pride and tyranny." The more that Steve read, the more he suspected that it would be pretty hard for any propagandist to get to a level at which the USE's current emperor would consider effusive praise to have reached the point of overkill.
Weckherlin was a competent chief of staff, but a very different man from Meyfarth. Steve would just have to adapt, he supposed.
The thing was, for all his tendency to be a poseur, the man did goddamn well believe that there was such a thing as "Germany." A Germany, moreover, that could and should be a decent place for human beings to live in. One without the "anger, arrogance, treachery, disloyalty, servility, injustice, and superstition" that had destroyed "freedom, laws, and divine worship." If Weckherlin really did, for some reason, believe that Gustavus Adolphus could reverse all that, teaching "the enemy to turn his madness and splendor into repentance, the ally to turn his suffering into joy," maybe it was worth putting up with the rest of the poem.
Not, Steve thought, that he was likely to ask his mother-in-law to cross-stitch a copy of it for him to frame and put up over his desk. His mouth quirked then. He reached across his desk for a pen and clean piece of paper and wrote a note. With a copy of a sonnet. Folded them together, sealed the packet, and addressed it to Grantville. Anita's mom could cross-stitch it for Mike Stearns and send it to Magdeburg. It would fit right in with the rest of the decor of his office, from what Steve had heard.
Better that Mike had to put up with all that garbage than himself.
Würzburg, February, 1634
"As far as any leadership that I can see," Scott Blackwell said, "it's still fairly inchoate at this point. I mean, insofar as there is any visible leadership, it's come to be focused on Frankenwinheim. But that's largely because of the publicity stemming from the attack on Maydene, Estelle, and Willa back in December and our own propaganda. I don't have the vaguest idea who the real leader of this ram movement is—or who the leaders are, if they are multiple. Or where they are. And that, believe me, bothers me a lot."
"At least," Johnnie F. Haun said, "we do pretty much know what they're thinking. Or, at least what they're putting out in pamphlets, what they want their followers to think. They have to have access to some pretty good printing press. Which means they, or some of them, at least, have to be somewhere that they can get paper. Somewhere that they can haul the paper in; haul the pamphlets out. The broadsides and placards are one thing, but not all the pamphlets. They have to be using a press in one of the cities. I just can't see some little village up in the hills producing those under the noses of the Amtmann and the constable. Not to mention under the nose of the priest. Not, at least, unless some fairly prominent people are in sympathy with the whole thing."
"Is that the way it looks to you?" Scott asked.
"Not here in Würzburg, I'm sure of that," Johnnie F. answered.
Steve Salatto raised his eyebrows. "Somewhere?"
"Over at Fulda, maybe. Orville thinks . . ."
Steve motioned to Weckherlin. "That's Orville Beattie, the Fulda organizer for Johnnie F.'s `Hearts and Minds' team."
"Thank you." Weckherlin nodded as he took notes.
"Orville thinks, but he can't prove it, that some of the monks from the abbey are backing the farmers. Not the important ones, so much—the nobles who are there because their families put them there. But the guys out in the rural regions, the provosts as they're called, who manage the farms and the estates, and see more of what the people have been put through these last couple of years. The invasion by the Hessians and all. Yeah, I know that the landgrave of Hesse is one of Gustavus Adolphus' allies, but his soldiers aren't any different from all the rest. Some of the provosts, at least, are sort of sympathetic to the desire of the people in the ram organization. To fight back, I mean. Against—well, against anyone who comes along to hassle them again."