Plan of the Konigstein Fortress, 1690, as
Plan of the Konigstein Fortress before its transformation by the construction of the Schottisches Schloss, the Belvedere, and the Residenz der Kaiserin.
Sigismunda Killinger, Lecture Record, November 16, 1998 Charpentier-Synthtranslate Edition.
Today is going to be a somewhat awkward class, given that we must begin from events outside our subject matter. This is not a class on English history, for which I am thankful, given that the obscure dynastic accidents of that country's depressingly centralized political life offer little pleasure. But today we must do English history to know the German. I promise as short a digression as possible into the matters of Henry VIII's codpiece.
So on July 7 King Edward VI dies at Greenwich. Immediately there springs into action a plan long-developed, by which Henry Brandon, Second Duke of Suffolk, is acclaimed king. With hindsight, we today tend to think of this as some madcap plan born of desperation to avert the rise of Bloody Mary. In truth, a Brandon succession in 1553 had the support of Henry VIII's will, and of Edward VI's own Devise for the Succession.
And simply put, for our purposes, even their sex aside, both Edward's sisters presented enormous problems as heirs. The elder, Mary, daughter of Katherine of Aragon, had essentially been declared a bastard as the daughter of a null marriage. The younger, Elizabeth, was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, a woman convicted of treason by way of adultery against the king. And if one took the position that the marriage of the king to Katherine of Aragon was legally effective and legitimate, then it was Elizabeth who was the daughter of the null marriage.
So questions hung over both princesses. Though each could argue she was the daughter of a king, never mind that a few courtiers in the case of Elizabeth might cough behind their hand the names of Thomas Wyatt or George Boleyn, what neither could promise was that she would be legitimate to all fractions of what was in 1553 a divided kingdom.
And all this is besides the fact that the last time England had a woman ruling it was way back in the time which had inauspiciously come to be called The Anarchy.
Now, Henry VIII's will also emphatically disinherited the line of his elder sister Margaret, both her children by the Stuart kings of Scotland and her subsequent issue by Archibald Douglas. And as we discussed all the way back in September, Friedrich disclaimed the English succession in return for his uncle's assistance against the Habsburgs. This left the surviving son of Henry VIII's youngest, and favorite, sister, Mary, and his best friend, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk.
Brandon had come to Saxony in 1534 with the Elector Friedrich on his return from his visit in England, ostensibly to learn all about war-making. What he quickly learned of war was that whatever skills his father had possessed had not transferred to him. And so he settled into a dilettante's life of hunting and whoring at court. He married Friedrich's sister Katarina, the two of them offering the land of Saxony in its years of deep crisis little more than a steady stream of conspiracies until the Electress Elizabeth sent them packing back to England in 1542.
Henry Brandon, who before his father's death used the courtesy title Earl of Lincoln, but from 1545 was Duke of Suffolk in his own right, had little more to recommend him for the throne than the fact that he was the first adult man in line once the two king's two problematic daughters, the Scots, and the Saxons, were all excluded. But he was of course also a reliable, if not the most pious or theologically keen, Protestant.
And the fact that he was married and had produced his own heir already of course helped. If all went according to plan, England might even go more than one generation without a succession crisis under the Brandons. Whatever the case, the council governing for Edward VI could look on Brandon as a solid option to succeed, should Edward not make heirs of his own.
Brandon was so favored that English court ceremonial during the late reign of Edward VI rarely missed the opportunity to put him in armor and on horseback. That he was hopeless on the tiltyard in a manner that had shamed his father, and lacked the minimum skills and preparation to partake in anything like actual battle, was openly known. Nonetheless, he aptly played the part of the warrior for the teeming masses, cutting a majestic figure in the saddle.
So when Edward died, cousin Suffolk was more than ready to step in. Henry and Katarina had been astute enough following an early period of rivalry to cultivate the Duke of Northumberland and secure his assistance in the matter. They were somewhat helped in this by Brandon's own reputation by this point as a bit of an imbecile: those who had profited under the kingship of a young boy looked forward to not that much sterner of a taskmaster in Henry IX.
Nonetheless, Brandon at the beginning of the enterprise was remarkably sure-footed. He quickly secured the allegiance of Edward VI's council, Parliament and critical officers and courtiers controlling the treasury, the ports and Calais, which had a standing armed force that had proven crucial in previous struggles over the throne.
Then he set out for Hunsdon, where Mary was in residence. The Tudor princess had been summoned to the deathbed of her brother, had not come, and was deemed now to be fleeing into the arms of her Habsburg relations. Henry intended to overwhelm whatever guards or loyalists Mary surrounded herself with, return her to London, and secure her in the Tower. What would follow that, we can readily guess.
What the putative Henry IX did not count on was first, that word escaped London of his own preparations, and second, that the character of the princess in question would not permit her to be passively captured. Instead, no sooner had Mary declined the summons to London to appear at the bedside of her brother, than she had left for Norfolk, there to gather an army in the affinities of the Howards and the supporters of prior uprisings against the Protestant regimes of Henry VIII and Edward VI.
From the beginning, the conflict between the two claimants to the throne was enveloped in religious significance. The insignia of Henry Brandon was a lamb bleeding into a chalice, inspired by Luther's favored symbolism. Before Henry Brandon was even Duke of Suffolk, he had subscribed to the notion that Lutheranism could mediate between the religious conservatism of Mary and the radicalism of Edward. Once again, Henry Brandon had no head for theology: in his mind this was little more complicated a matter than that halfway between the Seven Sacraments of the Old Church and the one sacrament of the Geneva radicals, there were Luther's three.
So long as Edward had ruled though, and Suffolk's power was dependent on figures closer to the young king like Seymour and Northumberland, Brandon's agenda was submerged beneath all the pieties expected of a member of good standing of the regime. But with Edward gone, and Brandon no longer the Earl of Lincoln or Duke of Suffolk but in his own eyes, at least, Henry IX, he felt he had no reason to hide his preferences any more.
Mary, meanwhile, gathered men under the old Tudor banners: the dragon of Cadwallader, the portcullis of Beaufort, the red rose of Lancaster. It came as a surprise perhaps only to Henry Brandon that these symbols exerted more power than his, that her networks in the old quasi-feudal affinities were more vital than his; that her force accumulated strength, while his atrophied.
Henry pursued her towards Norfolk, and got as far as Braintree before his scouts reported that her army dwarfed his own. Daring not to engage her directly, he decided to return to London, there to make use of the city walls, the Tower, and most importantly the treasuries and other monetary resources the city offered.
On August 10 Mary sent a herald, offering him a final opportunity to renounce his claim and accept her as queen. The terms of her offer were direct. If he bowed, he would live. Refusing meant the fate of a traitor. He refused, and contemptuously offering her the same bargain.
Then at Romford, on August 12, the two armies faced each other, Mary's force catching Henry's before it could reach the walls of London. The result was a foregone conclusion, with most of Henry's army melting away before a pitched battle could be fought. The putative Henry IX was caught attempting to flee in the borrowed garb of a common soldier, and was even identified for Mary by his own men.
Mary felt all the mercy required in the circumstances she had already offered. The next day he was found guilty, stripped of all lands and titles, and executed in the manner prescribed for a traitor. Henry Brandon did not distinguish himself at the end, and for all the sensitivities of English historians about this progenitor of their royal family, no one has abstained from reporting that Henry Brandon groveled at the end of his life, asking for the same bargain he had previously rejected out of hand.
For her part, the Duchess Katherine had retired to the Tower of London to plan the festivities of an untroubled coronation while her husband went to fetch their intransigent cousin. Though historians have ever chosen to cite her overbearing pride in these matters, Katarina was quick to react when things went awry.
When word reached her that Mary had gathered an army too formidable for her husband to engage, Katherine did not tarry. To flee too quickly might mean embarrassment, but to flee too slowly might lose her everything. So Katarina, not unlike some latter day Margaret of Anjou, gathered her son Henry, who had been demanding his chance to enter the field with his father, crossed the Thames, and began making plans to flee for the Continent.
Two days later she and her "Prince of Wales" were on a fishing boat bound for France, most of their wealth left behind them due to the haste with which they were forced to move. The Protestant nobility that had governed England under Edward and supported the Brandon succession was no less caught by surprise. Some stayed in the hopes of ameliorating the wrath, and eventually winning the trust of, the new queen. This number included Henry Brandon's sister Frances, now Frances Grey, Marquess of Dorset. But Grey's eldest daughter Jane, now married to Lord Guildford Dudley, a younger son of Northumberland, chose to flee. In the disorder of fast departures to uncertain destinations, the great and good of Protestant England were scattered, so that for a long while outside the core members of the Brandon family, no one knew who had made it out of England, who were being held by the new queen in some manner of honorable confinement, and who had fallen already to the executioner's ax.
The lurid details of the Brandons' arrival in Wittenberg is of course the stuff of imagebox historical melodrama, and we need not recite it here. In my view the far more important scene occurred in the far west. When the herald arrived from Wittenberg bearing Julius of Braunschweig's account of all this, he found the Elector Friedrich IV of Saxony already knew everything. For Friedrich had been traveling with his new ally, the Emperor Charles V. And Charles had received updates on all these events as they had transpired, with information flowing much more freely across the North Sea to the Burgundian court than to the distant forests of Saxony.
Each new turn of events had been received in the Habsburg camp with cheers and toasts for the conquering princess, many of them for Friedrich's benefit. These were not the idle displays of dynastic pride. Since 1534 England had in some years done more to fund the Saxon army than the actual tax moneys of Saxony. Never had that flow ebbed to less than a third of Saxony's total military expenses. In addition there had been the incalculable benefit of England's diplomatic support, and help in practical matters like procuring mercenaries in the Swiss Cantons. That assistance had never been in the cause of family solidarity. Henry VIII had understood his commitment to religious reform had made it entirely possible he might face an alliance of Catholic powers, and so he had strengthened the evangelical princes of the Empire to provide Charles a foe in his backyard stubborn enough that he could never truly contemplate the invasion so ardently wished for by his English co-religionists in support of the restoration of the old faith.
Friedrich had, of course, given Henry everything he wanted, and the councilors of Edward VI had gleefully continued the arrangement. Now that era had drawn to a sharp conclusion. Saxony could no longer rely on England to pay the bills for its exercise of military power in a way it could never have afforded on its own. Even if Mary I were to involve herself in the drama of imperial politics, Friedrich could not expect her to be in any way on his side. Thus his only statement to the new queen regnant, so fresh from slaughtering his brother-in-law, and sending his own sister and nephew running for their lives, was a short letter of polite congratulation, with a postscript inquiry on the continued terms of Saxony's pepper trade concession in London, which had been originally established in the terms of his mother's 1509 marriage contract.
Of course, Friedrich's game efforts to play off the import of these transformative events did not change the underlying truth. Even now, his participation in a campaign with the imperial army, alongside soldiers and generals who a few years before had ardently sought his death and who even now viewed it their Christian duty to return his land to the Catholic Church by any means possible, were held off not even by Habsburg military discipline, but by the certain knowledge that a betrayal and assassination of the Elector would be avenged by the still-more-ardently-Protestant, still-more-aggressive, Duke Johann. But now, if Friedrich were to fall, if Charles were to take him prisoner, if any of the long history of slights and abuses passing from Elector to Emperor were cited as reason to deprive Friedrich of his liberty, what now could Johann look to, to fund that war to vindicate Saxony?
Each day now Friedrich stayed in the field with Charles, he spent down the vital reserve that he might need to use against Charles, if the Emperor's intransigence on the matters of a permanent religious settlement for the empire, or even the fraught matter of the Hessian succession, led to war.
Saxony had gone for several years walking between the raindrops, betraying the terms of the agreements with the Emperor by which Friedrich had been set free to little cost, avoiding the disastrous French alliance and its military consequences, then reaping the benefits of its alliance with the Habsburgs, while doing little of the work required of that alliance. But those days were now over. A Saxony without the resources to field its army was also a Saxony without leverage.
So Friedrich began work on manufacturing a story about an illness of the young Duke Alexander that would allow him to discreetly withdraw from the Emperor's presence and return to Saxony with his army, like a performer who realized he had overstayed his time on the stage, and now found his audience fidgeting and impatient.
Never again in Friedrich's lifetime would Saxony be able to act on the same stage as the great military powers, parrying great Spanish generals like the Duke of Alba. What the nightmare of the loss of England's support revealed was that Saxony could not exert itself externally against the Habsburgs unless it was politically and economically self-sufficient. But the Saxony that could do this did not exist yet, and creating it would be out of Friedrich's reach. Instead that work would fall to someone else.
Dusk was falling on the Holy Prince.
