The Life of Elector Friedrich IV, Holy Roman Empire, 1547
Portrait of a Man with an Embroidered Cap, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, as the Duke Johann the Younger of Saxony
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Now, let’s get to it. I'm Duncan Duncan, and this, is...Resignations, our continuing privatcast look at all the great quitters of history, and the story of how they all came to make the decision to walk away from it all. This week we reach part 83 in the ongoing struggle of the Emperor Charles V and the Elector Friedrich of Saxony, over the Holy Roman Empire too small to hold them both.
Now you will recall last week Charles finally captured Friedrich, his conniving antagonist who has shown himself thus far to have a love of the suckerpunch and a talent for taking artillery that is most definitely not his. Friedrich, having been conveyed all the way to Charles’s court at Aachen in a circuitous route through northern Germany in the wintertime, tied up and bleeding in the back of a covered wagon, was received as kindly as could be expected in his secure new lodgings.
Now, let’s be clear. Just like Francis I of France, Friedrich’s confinement would be honorable. There would be no rack, no torture, no question about him getting regular meals. But all the same, when Francis was held by the Emperor Charles V he was an anointed king and a fellow Catholic monarch. Whatever else he was, Friedrich was by contrast a rebel and a heretic, and had made off over the years with a fair amount of Charles’s stuff, including, like we said, artillery, a niece, and, oh yes, Magdeburg, not to mention the other half of Saxony that was not a family heirloom. And while Charles was glad to think of himself as a nice guy, he was determined not to be so nice he didn’t turn out Friedrich’s pockets getting everything back.
And so we get the very much capitalized Ultimatum of Aachen. Charles told Friedrich, who was maybe brought before him in chains, maybe not, it depends on the source—you are going to convert, you are going to give back every territory you’ve annexed on this little frolic of yours the past year, and you are going to abdicate. Or you can just die. Now, Friedrich was allowed some choice in the matter. His family, the Ernestine House of Wettin, could keep their original lands and the Electoral dignity following Friedrich’s abdication, but only if Friedrich’s infant son Alexander was given into Habsburg care to be brought up a good Catholic. Plainly, this was a sop to Charles’s niece, Dorothea, who was now Friedrich’s wife and mother to the little baby Duke Alexander. If little Alexander was not surrendered, everything the Ernestine Wettins had would go to the head of the Albertine house, Charles’s loyal lieutenant Duke Moritz.
And of course, because he was just so thoughtful, Charles had already prepared the documents whereby Friedrich could do just this thing. Declare himself a Catholic, renounce his claims to the new lands, abdicate, and give his son to the Habsburgs. Of course, as Charles V explained, none of this meant Friedrich could, even if he did everything as requested, actually go home. Nope, the plan was for Friedrich to spend the rest of his life in Spain, once again, honorable confinement, though not so honorable as a king of France.
As with so much else about these two, what happens next depends on what national creation myth you happen to be reading. Sources in Charles’ camp report a fair bit of groveling and crying from the victor of Kreuzberg. And not a Lutheran historian of the past five centuries has failed to report the Elector’s bluff answer, referring to the Lutheran practice of the congregation partaking of both parts of the communion, “Why sir, I am well used to taking a bit of drink with it, else a man might choke.”
In short, Friedrich’s answer was no. No to the conversion, no to the surrender, no to the abdication, and no to little Alexander becoming a proper Habsburg prince educated by Spaniards. Following the example of his mother in a similar argument with his father but with the doctrinal roles reversed, Friedrich informed Charles he’d just have to kill him. Charles, though not especially the vicious sort, was by now well past the point of frustration with Friedrich, by about I would say a decade, was hardly unenthusiastic about that prospect. Moreover, all his advisors were urging him to do just as Friedrich requested and be done with it.
Friedrich was, they declared a rebel. If Charles wanted to forge Germany into a proper country, he would have to treat a rebel like a rebel. And if he wanted to restore Germany to the proper religion, he had to treat a heretic as a heretic. There were no two ways about it. But as ever, the Germans thought differently. For their part, the representatives of the German princes traveling alongside Charles were shocked at the notion, most particularly the inclusion of the heresy charge.
Princes like the Elector of Brandenburg or the Duke of Mecklenburg may not have rebelled against the emperor’s lawful authority in their view, but they had certainly committed heresy as the emperor would understand it. Even the agents of Charles’s brother Ferdinand, King of the Romans, King of Bohemia, King of Hungary, objected on the grounds that an execution on the heresy charge would provoke an immediate uprising among the Protestants that might sweep away Habsburg rule in the elective monarchies of the East.
So then Charles inquired about a compromise: “What if I just kill him on the grounds of rebellion?” Plenty enough of the princes including ones just lately pardoned for their part in the war thus far, like the Elector Palatine and the Duke of Cleves, were guilty of that too, so it was not met with the unabashed enthusiasm Charles wanted. Moreover, by then Friedrich was beginning to give ground on the religion question.
From the dungeons came a counter-offer: “what if I become a Catholic, and my son becomes a Catholic, and I abdicate in his favor, and even spend the rest of my life in a traveling road show promoting Catholicism, but in addition to the electoral dignity, we keep the lands of the Albertines?” Charles ultimately turned down his prisoner, but not before an enraged Duke Moritz, who had, let us remember, in fighting for Charles lost all his lands, become a de facto exile, suffered some pretty vicious slanders, and been made to swim a literal river of blood at Kreuzberg, left Aachen in outrage. This was the first real sign Friedrich still thought in earnest he had a role to play, and that role was nothing short of taking a flensing knife to the alliance against him.
His move had demonstrated for the assembled German princes and their representatives just how large the restoration of Catholicism loomed in the thought of Charles, enough so that the Emperor was willing to consider slighting one of his most loyal and effective lieutenants to strengthen the hand of the Church. This left Charles’ Lutheran adherents and the neutral princes wondering just how secure they would be if the only party that had emerged to effectively oppose Charles’s designs on the country was eliminated outright. At Aachen in spring 1547 the reality of what Habsburg domination meant was beginning to dawn on some of the gray heads of the empire, and they were not pleased.
Moreover, murmurings in the halls and at the tables began to take an even darker turn. Friedrich’s insistence, Juelich aside, on not breaching the peace when faced with provocations in the Wurzener lands, in Naumburg, in Goslar, now gave him a saintly glow. It was Charles who now seemed the aggressor against a poor, peace-loving electorate where they just wanted to to drink some blood alongside the body of Christ. Even Saxony’s annexations in 1546 seemed far from unreasonable: Friedrich had moved against the lands of the princes who had moved against him, which seemed to originate more in prudence than a burning lust for conquest. Even now, Brandenburg, Bohemia, and even tiny little Anhalt, which would have been little more than a snack for the Saxon army, lay intact on the borders of Saxony.
So as the truce of the previous year near its end, and the time approached for the Imperial Army to retake the field, Charles V could not help but notice the dirty looks he was getting from the same princes who the previous year were rushing to reassure him of their undying loyalty.
But now let’s cut to Saxony, which since the capture of the Elector was verified sometime in early February had been under the regency of Friedrich’s brother Johann.
Johann had taken the situation as only a man could, when he was asked to begin a regency for his somewhat indisposed elder brother and that brother's sickly two year-old, whose only advocates in the court was one woman, who half-delusionally demanded she be called the Queen of Denmark, and another who was basically thought of as running the local branch office for the Anti-Christ himself. In short, Johann was warm, and snug, and happy, in his new position. And when the plainly distraught Elizabeth of England began making inquiries about raising a cash ransom to help grease the wheels for getting her first-born back, the response had been noncommittal, somewhere between a “hey, let’s see how this all plays out” and “that’s a lot of silver you’re talking about for the one who made me eat sand when we were kids.”
Now, this is as good a time as any for us to chat a bit about the personality of Mr. Johann the Younger, who is going to play a big part of our story for the next bit. He was born in 1515, late enough that while he was raised up on all the same bedtime stories about the fun times of the Houses of Lancaster and York that Friedrich was, and bore some of those same influences on his character, he did not have the same traumatic response to his mother’s exile in 1520 Friedrich did. Instead, Johann the Younger was much more his Daddy’s boy, growing up with a fervent love of the hunt and the tiltyard and the six-hour ordeal the Germans called supper.
And so, whereas Friedrich was weird, willful, unpredictable and dishonest, Johann was affable, plainspoken, and utterly, boringly conventional. Whereas Friedrich had weighed the various theological arguments of the era with a jeweler’s eye, Johann had the attitude that if Martin Luther said it, that was enough for him, and if it wasn’t enough for you, the problem is with you. You will recall how, back in episode 59 when Friedrich went to England to meet his beloved Onkel Henry, part of the arrangements was that Johann’s first-born would reside with Philip of Hesse while they were gone. This is the firmest early evidence we have that the trust and affection between the two brothers had its limits.
Of course, Friedrich had never shied away from laying significant responsibilities on Johann, as well as even more significant gifts. Word is, for instance, he wanted to turn Magdeburg and Braunschweig-Wolfenbuettel into a hereditary duchy for him. At any point, if Johann had wanted to betray Friedrich to the emperor, Friedrich would have been well and truly screwed. But Friedrich knew his brother, and understood well beyond even questions of personal honor the fact that Johann was, for all the obvious reasons, more fiercely opposed to the rule of Charles V, and more ready to throw off the Habsburg yoke, than he would ever be.
Thus what quickly became apparent in early 1547 was that, the good badge being taken off the board, the bad badge was free to do as he wilt. You will recall the arrangement, dating all the way back to 1534, by which Friedrich had granted tolerance to his Catholic subjects in exchange for Ferdinand’s agreement to do the same with the Lutherans of Bohemia. Well, Johann had little patience for that nonsense in the first place, and even less so with the Habsburgs sending armies after him and kidnapping his brother. So the word went out: everyone still loyal to the pope and the emperor had until Michaelmas to convert or leave, and literally they could only take the clothes on their backs with them as they left. They could not even pile their belongings on a horse or mule.
When, finally, the embassy of Charles V arrived under flag of truce, announced officially the capture of the outlaw Friedrich, and explained the terms by which the Ernestines could continue as princes of a much-reduced dominion, Johann laughed it all off. Whether Johann was indeed certain his brother would rather die than him surrender to the emperor, he certainly had no less reluctance than big brother when it came to calling the Emperor’s bluff. He even went further, and declared any documents the Habsburgs might produce with Friedrich’s name attesting to any peace terms would be the result of forgery, torture, or abominable duress, and that “he would know no such devilish instruments.”
So, as the delegation returned to Charles’ traveling court, the message was loud and clear: nothing was resolved, nothing was over, and whether Saxony would fight to the last man, it would certainly fight past the end of the one sitting in stir at Aachen.
Next on Resignations Privatcast, more war. Lots more.
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