The Tangled Web(29)

The man raising all the objections was named Hans von Hutten.

He was, he said, an imperial knight.

He was, he said, a Franconian imperial knight proper and was not and had never been a member of the Buchen Quarter, so owed no obligation to any decisions that it might have taken.

"If you aren't," Joel asked, "then why are you here today?"

The answer, delivered by a lawyer carrying several boxes full of paper, involved a series of transactions by which the abbey of Fulda had pawned its outlying possessions in the Kinzig river valley to the von Hutten family, redeemed them, pawned them again, split them, redeemed them, and the like, for the past two and a half centuries.

Von Hutten's position was that he held a currently valid Pfandschaft arrangement with the Abbey of Fulda. If the New United States, and then the State of Thuringia-Franconia, had possession of the abbey's former estates, then by extension he held a currently valid Pfandschaft arrangement with it. The terms were that until such time as the governing entity, whoever it might be, paid him back the capital sum that his great-grandfather had advanced to the abbot and chapter of Fulda, these lands were damned well his and these people were damned well his and the administration in Fulda had no authority to have conducted an election here by which they illegally voted themselves into Buchenland.

Von Hutten added that he, personally, as a resident of the former prince-diocese of Würzburg, had voted against incorporation, and that even though the majority of the people in Würzburg voted in favor of it, he did not accept that a majority vote was binding upon him. In his view, nothing to which he personally did not agree was binding upon him, because if he accepted the decisions of others it would restrict his liberty.

"Look, man," Joel protested, as he experienced a political epiphany vaguely related to his half-forgotten memories of Ms. Mailey's explanation of how representative government worked, "that's no way to run a railroad."

Von Hutten announced that he was appealing the election results to the emperor, to the imperial cameral court, to the other emperor, to the imperial supreme court, and to anyone else he could think of. He proposed to demand an imperial commission to investigate.

When Joel got back to Fulda, he reported that just because the election went well, this whole thing was not yet a done deal, by any means.

Andrea's lawyer pointed out that all those appeals would be very expensive, so that unless von Hutten had more money than he appeared to, or was calling on outside resources, his complaints would make haste very slowly.

The rest of the meeting was devoted to speculation on possible sources of outside funding.

Wes told Joel to write up a report. They would send it down to Steve Salatto. First to let Steve know that von Hutten was making a nuisance of himself, since he properly belonged to Würzburg. Second to ask for money to buy the pawned districts back from von Hutten, so they could go ahead and incorporate them into the administrative system they were setting up for Buchenland.

Not that Steve would be able to come up with that much money before the next fiscal year, at the earliest.

Who Will Rid Me?

Bonn, Archdiocese of Cologne, March 1634

Walter Butler was leaving it to his associates to work out the details. Overall, he thought, he was in a pretty good position for a Catholic Irishman and professional military enterpriser. Or, if one wished to be crude, a colonel of a mercenary regiment. At least, compared to the position he would have been in if Wallenstein had caught him, once the bastard found out that Butler had been one of the point men for Ferdinand II's generals in organizing his assassination in that other world.

Butler had left Bohemia a year before, hightailing it through Tyrol and the Habsburg lands in Swabia, bringing Dennis MacDonald, Robert Geraldin, and Walter Deveroux with him. While passing through that heavily Leaguist territory, with a decent subsidy that Maximilian of Bavaria had arranged, they had recruited. With four regiments of dragoons, staffed almost to paper strength and well equipped, they had managed to negotiate an advantageous arrangement with the archbishop of Cologne.

Whose confessor was now sitting in the room with them. Along with Franz von Hatzfeldt, the bishop of Würzburg who had been driven from his lands by the Swedes. And von Hoheneck, one of the provosts of the abbey of Fulda. Both Würzburg and Fulda were now run by the "up-timers." That was, Butler presumed, why the others wanted to talk to them.

Since the others had initiated the contact, that meant that Butler and his colleagues had something they needed. Or, at least, that they wanted. Which meant that his negotiating position was good.

At the moment, Deveroux was telling the archbishop's confessor that he was out of his mind. Not a prudent thing to say, but true. Given the layout of the military map right now, there was no way they could take troops into Fulda. Not through Hesse. Not through Mainz and Frankfurt. Not through Württemberg and Franconia. Not. It was too far inside the borders of the USE. Unless the coming summer's campaign changed the way that the Swede's troops were deployed, a raiding party could only figure on being chewed up. No profit. No plunder. Where was the gain in that?