The Bavarian ambassador did not reply at first. Then, slowly, he said, "Your Majesty, I am not sure that you can count on the duke's directing her. Or, from what I have gathered that you hope for, from my earlier conversations with your confessor, controlling her intellectual development."
Lamormaini breathed in sharply. "Can't he?"
The envoy looked out the window. "Say, rather, will he? The death of Duchess Elisabeth Renata has affected him deeply. You already know that the duke was… reluctant… to remarry. I am not betraying any diplomatic confidences by telling you that. He may not take the trouble to provide her with the loving guidance that a wife has a reasonable right to expect from her husband."
Ferdinand II stood up, choleric as usual at being forced to listen to anything he didn't want to hear. "Then an immediate marriage will benefit the duke, as well, in more ways than providing him with sons. Take his mind off his troubles, and all that. I have no patience with melancholia." He leaned over, rubbed his right calf, and limped out of the room, followed by the chancellor.
Lamormaini frowned after him, worried. The emperor's legs had been bothering him for months, aching whenever he sat for too long or tried to move quickly. He turned back to the ambassador. "Were you implying that Maria Anna might come to dominate the duke?"
The Bavarian shook his head slowly. "No. Not precisely."
"What, then? Can't he direct her? Control her?"
The ambassador shrugged. "He could have. If he were still the man he was ten years ago. If he were even still the man he was a year ago. As I said to the emperor, 'Will he?'"
Lamormaini rubbed his temples. He was starting to feel a headache coming on.
"It's all right, Dona Mencia. At least, you will be coming with me. And staying in Munich. Papa insisted on that, so I won't be surrounded by strangers right away. I'm counting that as another blessing." Maria Anna waved her rosary.
"Do you have a full decade of blessings, yet?"
"Almost. Nearly." Maria Anna jiggled her rosary, pulled her skirts up, and sat down on a hassock, dropping them behind her. Frau Stecher had been harping again on the amount of work that was involved in pressing her everyday clothing while the dressers and seamstresses were so busy putting together a new trousseau, so she had been avoiding chairs the last few days. There just wasn't any way to keep from wrinkling fabric if a person sat down in a chair. "I've also added that at least Uncle Max won't ever take a mistress-well, the odds are really against it, since he was faithful to Tante Elisabeth Renata for all their lives. So I won't have that problem to contend with, the way most of the French queens have done."
Dona Mencia de Mendoza nodded.
"Nor mignons, the way Anne of Austria has had to do in France. And the English king's Danish mother did."
Dona Mencia winked. "Is that one blessing or two?"
Maria Anna put on a serious face. "One, I think. At least, I don't know of any kings who have had both mistresses and mignons. That's not the same thing as a king just having a favorite. Nobody has ever accused the Count-Duke of Olivares of being a mignon. Just a really close adviser. I think." She looked across the room. "You know more about the Spanish court than I do. Mariana wouldn't ever say, of course, even if she did. She's very loyal to her brother."
"The count-duke is King Philip's close adviser and favorite. Only." Dona Mencia's tone of voice was firm.
"That's… reassuring."
Dona Mencia decided not to mention Philip of Spain's various mistresses. None of them were quasi-official court figures the way French royal mistresses tended to be.
Maria Anna stretched her arms. "It will be easier in Bavaria, then, from all that I've heard, than it is for some new wives. Strict and formal, of course. Uncle Max has political and military advisers and he's very close to Uncle Albrecht, too, but… not anything else."
"Nothing else. Not even a rumor of anything else."
"And Uncle Max has an excellent library."
"True."
"And a wonderful art collection."
"Yes."
"There are beautiful churches in Munich."
Another nod.
"Excellent preachers, too. And I'll have my own confessor. How many is that?"
"How many what?"
"Blessings. 'No mistresses or mignons ' is the fifth. Library is the sixth. Art is the seventh. If I can count churches, preachers, and my own confessor separately, that would make the decade. Is that quite fair? Aren't they really just one, altogether? And don't they really all belong under my first blessing, that Bavaria is Catholic? That at least I am going to a Catholic principality? Maybe these are just… subheadings."
"Don't create unnecessary scruples," Dona Mencia warned.
"I won't." Maria Anna nodded. "I'll try to think of more, different, blessings, though. For instance, since Leopold Wilhelm is bishop of Passau, I will see one of my brothers after my marriage. At least occasionally. That makes an eighth separate blessing. I only need two more."
Chapter 7
Miles Bellicosus
Amberg, Upper Palatinate
Gustav Adolf's regent in the Upper Palatinate and his general assigned to the same principality were having a private discussion.
Duke Ernst's private secretary, Johann Heinrich Bocler, was seated behind his employer and taking meticulous notes. He sat in on all of his employer's meetings, at least those that he knew about, and always took careful notes-perhaps even unnecessarily extensive, given that they included marginal comments. But Bocler had been born in the utterly insignificant little town of Cornheim in Franconia, son of a Lutheran pastor and grandson of a high school principal. Today, in March of 1634, he found himself in a plum post that most twenty-three-year-olds could only dream of obtaining. So, better to err on the side of caution.
Thank you, Professor Bernegger; thank you, historical faculty of the University of Strassburg; I pledge upon my honor to be worthy of your trust. He intended these notes not only for the duke's current use, but also as the basis for a history of the exciting events of this great war which he hoped would, some day, make him as immortally famous as Caesar or Livy, Suetonius or Tacitus.
Bocler pursed his lips primly and invented yet one more shorthand substitute for the… colorful -not to say blasphemous and scatological-terms that peppered General Johan Baner's vocabulary. Bocler was a bit of a prig. His father and grandfather would have been proud of him.
"If I don't get out of this godforsaken Upper Palatinate, my troops will mutiny. They are fighters. I have no talent for keeping the men happy when they are in quarters doing goddamned near nothing. Or, at least, not much." Baner slammed his tankard of beer down on the dual-purpose breakfast and card table in the conference room in Amberg castle, which was serving the regency of the Upper Palatinate as a capitol building.
Duke Ernst of Saxe-Weimar had been serving as Gustav Adolf's regent in the province-the Oberpfalz or Upper Palatinate, as contrasted with the Rhine or Electoral Palatinate-since late the previous summer. Technically, he was governing in the name of young Karl Ludwig, the rightful ruler, who was in polite and comfortable imprisonment in the Spanish Netherlands at the moment. He had been appointed by Gustav Adolf and was, as everyone knew perfectly well, managing the region on behalf of the USE. That he was acting for Karl Ludwig had been retained as a polite fiction, however. It was also a useful one, particularly since the USE did not choose to recognize Ferdinand II's 1628 transfer of the Palatinate's electoral vote to the other branch of the House of Wittelsbach in the person of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. In a pinch, if Ferdinand II summoned a diet for the purpose of getting his son elected as King of the Romans, Duke Ernst could challenge, on behalf of Karl Ludwig, Duke Maximilian's right to vote, which could tie it up in procedural wrangling for a long time. Long enough, perhaps that Ferdinand might die before the electors designated his son as his successor.