1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [48]
"Where's Helene?" asked Charlotte Kienitz, one of the leaders of the Fourth of July Party from the province of Mecklenburg. She was referring to Helene Gundelfinger, the vice-president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia.
"She should be here by mid-afternoon. She had to sort something out with the abbess of Quedlinburg." Ed got a wry smile on his face. "Who's here visiting Mary Simpson and Veronica Richter, so Helene has to deal with them too."
Melissa, seated at the far end of the tables, barked a little laugh. "I swear, I've never seen anything that generates more wrangling over details than schools do. That's one thing the two worlds on either side of the Ring of Fire have in common."
There was an empty seat next to the mayor of Luebeck, Dieterich Matthesen. After removing a notepad and placing it on the desk, Ed set his briefcase on the floor, leaning it against one of the table legs. Then he pulled out the chair and sat down.
By the time he did so, Rebecca had resumed her own seat. "To bring Ed up to date on what everyone was discussing when he came in, we have received word from reliable sources that Wilhelm Wettin and his Crown Loyalists plan to impose the most sweeping possible variation of their citizenship program. What is sometimes colloquially referred to as Plan B."
James Nichols, sitting next to Melissa, grunted sourly. "Otherwise known as The Bürgermeister's Wet Dream."
"Or the Hochadel Folly," added Anselm Keller. He was an MP from the Province of the Main, and was sitting next to Albert Bugenhagen, the young newly elected mayor of Hamburg. To their right, on the table that form the left end of the U, sat the two remaining attendees at the meeting: Matthias Strigel, the governor of Magdeburg province, and Werner von Dalberg.
Von Dalberg, like Melissa Mailey and James Nichols and Charlotte Kienitz, held no governmental position. His prominence in the Fourth of July Party stemmed from the fact that he was universally acknowledged as the central figure for the party in the Upper Palatinate. Given that he'd had to maneuver with the provincial administrator, Ernst Wettin, and—much worse—the Swedish general Johan Banér, he'd had to be a skilled politician as well as organizer. The political situation for the Fourth of July Party—every political party in the USE, actually—was always tricky in those areas that were still under direct imperial administration.
As of July 1635, there were eleven established provinces in the United States of Europe. The heads of state of each of those provinces, whether elected or appointed by the emperor or established by traditional custom, sat in the USE's upper house, the House of Lords. ("The Senate," in the stubborn parlance of the CoCs.) As such, all eleven of them added the official rank of senator to whatever other posts and positions and titles they held.
Those eleven provinces were:
Magdeburg, which was the name of the province as well as the capital city. The province's head of state was an elected governor.
The State of Thuringia-Franconia, whose capital had formerly been Grantville and was now Bamberg. Like Magdeburg, this state elected its own governor, although the title of the post—president—remained that of its predecessor, the New United States.
Those were the only two provinces that had a fully republican structure and elected their own heads of state. Not coincidentally, they were the strongholds of the Fourth of July Party and the Committees of Correspondence.
There were three provinces whose heads of state, while not elected, were established by the provinces themselves. Like Magdeburg and the SoTF, these provinces were entirely self-governing within the overall federal structure and laws of the USE. They were no longer, or had never been, under direct imperial administration.
They were:
Hesse-Kassel, still governed by its traditional ruler, Landgrave Wilhelm V. The Landgrave, along with his wife Amalie Elizabeth, were prominent leaders of the moderate wing of the Crown Loyalist Party that now controlled the USE Parliament and whose