She paused for breath.
"I can see," Fred Pence said, "that I'm going to end up with stripes and checks and spots on my orange helmets."
Clara looked at him, then ignored him. "The monks who are in Cologne now mostly belonged to the opposition party. The pope confirmed the changes, but it didn't make much impression on them. The chapter seemed to be absolutely dead set on keeping the privilege of only admitting nobles. I didn't get a very clear view from the abbot as to whether they object to praying in the same room as ordinary people or if they just object to sharing the abbey's income with them. If the latter, the New United States has probably solved one problem for him."
"From what I hear," Orville Beattie said, "the party of his monks that headed off to Cologne probably won't be too enthusiastic about the fact that he's reappeared. The leader of them, a guy named Johann Adolf von Hoheneck, would have been elected as abbot by now if Schweinsberg had gotten himself shot on schedule, so to speak. Hoheneck is feeling a bit deprived, they say. Just gossip, you understand."
Orville had been sent up from Würzburg by Johnnie F.—Johnnie Haun, that was—to run Steve Salatto's brainchild of a "Hearts and Minds" program in Fulda. Up-time, Orville had worked for the state and farmed part time, but he was in the military down-time. "Hearts and Minds" was a military program. Having another up-time military person in Fulda made Derek Utt feel better, even though Orville spent most of his time out of town. Although Orville was Presbyterian, which made the liaison guy from the landgrave of Hesse, Urban von Boyneburg, feel better about things too, he seemed to be finding his feet pretty fast in dealing with Catholics and Lutherans.
"Okay, Hoheneck in Cologne. Probably one of the bad guys." Harlan Stull made a note.
"That's where they took the archives," Andrea said. "Can Schweinsberg get them back?"
"I don't know," Clara answered honestly. "We can ask him to try. But Hoheneck is on very good terms with Ferdinand of Bavaria, who is the archbishop and elector of Cologne. Through him, of course, he can get support from Duke Maximilian of Bavaria and the Leaguists and the Imperials. That probably means that he isn't going to pay much attention to long-distance instructions from Schweinsberg here in Fulda, vow of obedience or no vow of obedience."
"You know," Orville was saying, down at the other end of the room where a different conversation had broken out, "one thing that we really ought to do, when we get a chance, is ask von Boyneburg to come in and give us a briefing about dealing with the imperial knights. Apparently, here in Fulda, they have a legal status that's different from the knights in Hesse. More like the ones in Franconia."
Harlan Stull sighed. "I'll try to fit it into the agenda one of these days."
"Well, if your supporters followed you when you went off with Tilly's army, and Hoheneck's bunch ran off to Cologne with him, carrying the archives, who were the monks we found at Fulda when we got here?" Wes Jenkins thought this was a reasonable question.
"The Saint Gall monks," the abbot answered. "In the abbey. The monks who belong to the conventus of commoners don't reside here permanently. They are parish pastors and only come to the abbey for meetings and special events. And, then, some lay brothers, who do things like caring for the gardens, are still here."
"That means what? Who are these Saint Gall monks?" Wes wondered if Schweinsberg missed having the administration building as a palace. He was living over in the abbey dormitory these days.
"In 1626, I asked the Benedictine Abbey at Saint Gall, that's in Switzerland, to lend us some of their monks to reform us here at Fulda. That is, to show us how to conform more closely to the rule of Saint Benedict. They kindly sent us several, to serve as models for chanting the offices and following the church year, things like that. When the rest of us left for fear of the Swedes and Hessians, they stayed."
"Reform you?"
"Introduce the Tridentine reforms. The prescriptions of the Council of Trent. That was about, oh, seventy years ago. It went on for years. The council, I mean. The abbots have been trying to bring Fulda into conformity ever since, without a lot of luck. The noble families are thoroughly entrenched in the chapter. The younger sons they send us are usually fairly hard-working when it comes to doing things like administering the abbey's estates. That's what nobles do, after all. But they rarely have much enthusiasm about performing specifically monastic duties."
"What's the problem?" Wes was genuinely curious.
"We've tried, goodness knows. The Jesuit school. The seminar for future priests. And we've made some progress. Getting rid of the concubines, for example."