The Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648

Section III. —Reaction against Protestantism

§ 1. Theological disputes among Protestants.

In course of time Protestantism, in its turn, exposed itself to attack. Each petty court soon had its own school of theologians, whose minds were dwarfed to the limits of the circle which they influenced with their logic and their eloquence. The healthful feeling which springs from action on a large stage was wanting to them. Bitterly wrangling with one another, they were eager to call in the secular arm against their opponents. Seizing the opportunity, the newly-constituted order of Jesuits stepped forward to bid silence in the name of the renovated Papal Church, alone, as they urged, able to give peace instead of strife, certainty instead of disputation. The Protestants were taken at a disadvantage. The enthusiasm of a national life, which repelled the Jesuits in the England of the sixteenth century, and the enthusiasm of scientific knowledge which repels them in the Germany of the nineteenth century, were alike wanting to a Germany in which national life was a dream of the past, and science a dream of the future. Luther had long ago passed away from the world. Melanchthon's last days were spent in hopeless protest against the evil around him. 'For two reasons,' he said, as he lay upon his death-bed, 'I desire to leave this life: First, that I may enjoy the sight, which I long for, of the Son of God and of the Church in Heaven. Next, that I may be set free from the monstrous and implacable hatreds of the theologians.'

§ 2. The Catholics make progress.

In the face of a divided people, or self-seeking princes, and of conflicting theories, the Jesuits made their way. Step by step the Catholic reaction gained ground, not without compulsion, but also not without that moral force which makes compulsion possible. The bishops and abbots gave their subjects the choice between conversion and exile. An attempt made by the Archbishop of Cologne to marry and turn Protestant was too plainly in contradiction to the Ecclesiastical Reservation to prosper, and when the Protestant majority of the Chapter of Strasburg elected a Protestant bishop they were soon overpowered. A Protestant Archbishop of Magdeburg offering to take his place amongst the princes of the Empire at the Diet was refused admission, and though nothing was done to dispossess him and the other northern administrators of their sees, yet a slur had been cast upon their title which they were anxious to efface. A few years later a legal decision was obtained in the cases of four monasteries secularized after the Convention of Passau, and that decision was adverse to the claim of the Protestants.

§ 3. The disputes which led finally to war.

Out of these two disputes – the dispute about the Protestant administrators and the dispute about the secularized lands – the Thirty Years' War arose. The Catholic party stood upon the strict letter of the law, according, at least, to their own interpretation, and asked that everything might be replaced in the condition in which it was in 1552, the date of the Convention of Passau. The Protestant view, that consideration should be taken for changes, many of which at the end of the sixteenth century were at least a generation old, may or may not have been in accordance with the law, but it was certainly in accordance with the desires of the greater part of the population affected by them.

§ 4. No popular representation.

There is every reason to believe that if Germany had possessed anything like a popular representation its voice would have spoken in favour of some kind of compromise. There is no trace of any mutual hostility between the populations of the Catholic and Protestant districts apart from their rulers.

Section IV. —Three Parties and Three Leaders

§ 1. The leaders of parties.

Two men stood forward to personify the elements of strife – Maximilian, the Catholic Duke of Bavaria, and the Calvinist Prince Christian of Anhalt, whilst the warmest advocate of peace was John George, the Lutheran Elector of Saxony.

§ 2. Maximilian of Bavaria.

Maximilian of Bavaria was the only lay prince of any importance on the side of the Catholics. He had long been known as a wise administrator of his own dominions. No other ruler was provided with so well-filled a treasury, or so disciplined an army. No other ruler was so capable of forming designs which were likely to win the approbation of others, or so patient in waiting till the proper time arrived for their execution. 'What the Duke of Bavaria does,' said one of his most discerning opponents, 'has hands and feet.' His plans, when once they were launched into the world, seemed to march forwards of themselves to success.

§ 3. His love of legality.

Such a man was not likely to take up the wild theories which were here and there springing up, of the duty of uprooting Protestantism at all times and all places, or to declare, as some were declaring, that the Peace of Augsburg was invalid because it had never been confirmed by the Pope. To him the Peace of Augsburg was the legal settlement by which all questions were to be tried. What he read there was hostile to the Protestant administrators and the secularizing princes. Yet he did not propose to carry his views into instant action. He would await his opportunity. But he would do his best to be strong, in order that he might not be found wanting when the opportunity arrived, and, in spite of his enthusiasm for legal rights, it was by no means unlikely that, if a difficult point arose, he might be inclined to strain the law in his own favour.

§ 4. Danger of the Protestants.

Such an opponent, so moderate and yet so resolute, was a far more dangerous enemy to the Protestants than the most blatant declaimer against their doctrines. Naturally, the Protestants regarded his views as entirely inadmissible. They implied nothing less than the forcible conversion of the thousands of Protestants who were inhabitants of the administrators' dominions, and the occupation by the Catholic clergy of points of vantage which would serve them in their operations upon the surrounding districts. It is true that the change, if effected would simply replace matters in the position which had been found endurable in 1552. But that which could be borne when the Catholics were weak and despondent might be an intolerable menace when they were confident and aggressive.

§ 5. Danger of the Protestants.

Resistance, therefore, became a duty, a duty to which the princes were all the more likely to pay attention because it coincided with their private interest. In the bishoprics and chapters they found provision for their younger sons, from which they would be cut off if Protestants were hereafter to be excluded.

§ 6. Protestants of the north and south.

The only question was in what spirit the resistance should be offered. The tie which bound the Empire together was so loose, and resistance to law, or what was thought to be law, was so likely to lead to resistance to law in general, that it was the more incumbent on the Protestants to choose their ground well. And in Germany, at least, there was not likely to be any hasty provocation to give Maximilian an excuse for reclaiming the bishoprics. Far removed from the danger, these northern Lutherans found it difficult to conceive that there was any real danger at all. The states of the south, lying like a wedge driven into the heart of European Catholicism, were forced by their geographical position to be ever on the alert. They knew that they were the advanced guard of Protestantism. On the one flank was the Catholic duchy of Bavaria, and the bishoprics of Würzburg and Bamberg. On the other flank were the ecclesiastical electorates on the Rhine and the Moselle, the bishoprics of Worms, Spires, and Strasburg, the Austrian lands in Swabia and Alsace, and the long line of the Spanish frontier in Franche Comté and the Netherlands garrisoned by the troops of the first military monarchy in Europe. What wonder if men so endangered were in haste to cut the knot which threatened to strangle them, and to meet the enemy by flying in his face rather than by awaiting the onslaught which they believed to be inevitable.

§ 7. Spread of Calvinism.

Under the influence of this feeling the princes of these southern regions for the most part adopted a religion very different from the courtly Lutheranism of the north. If Würtemberg continued Lutheran under the influence of the University of Tübingen, the rulers of the Palatinate, of Hesse Cassel, of Baden-Durlach, of Zwei-Brücken, sought for strength in the iron discipline of Calvinism, a form of religion which always came into favour when there was an immediate prospect of a death-struggle with Rome.

§ 8. Courtly character of Calvinism in Germany.

Unhappily, German Calvinism differed from that of Scotland and the Netherlands. Owing to its adoption by the princes rather than by the people, it failed in gaining that hardy growth which made it invincible on its native soil. It had less of the discipline of an army about it, less resolute defiance, less strength altogether. And whilst it was weaker it was more provocative. Excluded from the benefits of the Peace of Augsburg, which knew of no Protestant body except the Lutheran, the Calvinists were apt to talk about the institutions of the Empire in a manner so disparaging as to give offence to Lutherans and Catholics alike.

§ 9. Frederick IV., Elector Palatine.

Of this Calvinist feeling Christian of Anhalt became the impersonation. The leadership of the Calvinist states in the beginning of the seventeenth century would naturally have devolved on Frederick IV., Elector Palatine. But Frederick was an incapable drunkard, and his councillors, with Christian at their head, were left to act in his name.

§ 10. Christian of Anhalt.

Christian of Anhalt possessed a brain of inexhaustible fertility. As soon as one plan which he had framed appeared impracticable, he was ready with another. He was a born diplomatist, and all the chief politicians of Europe were intimately known to him by report, whilst with many of them he carried on a close personal intercourse. His leading idea was that the maintenance of peace was hopeless, and that either Protestantism must get rid of the House of Austria, or the House of Austria would get rid of Protestantism. Whether this were true or false, it is certain that he committed the terrible fault of underestimating his enemy. Whilst Maximilian was drilling soldiers and saving money, Christian was trusting to mere diplomatic finesse. He had no idea of the tenacity with which men will cling to institutions, however rotten, till they feel sure that some other institutions will be substituted for them, or of the strength which Maximilian derived from the appearance of conservatism in which his revolutionary designs were shrouded even from his own observation. In order to give to Protestantism that development which in Christian's eyes was necessary to its safety, it would be needful to overthrow the authority of the Emperor and of the Diet. And if the Emperor and the Diet were overthrown, what had Christian to offer to save Germany from anarchy? If his plan included, as there is little doubt that it did, the seizure of the lands of the neighbouring bishops, and a fresh secularization of ecclesiastical property, even Protestant towns might begin to ask whether their turn would not come next. A return to the old days of private war and the law of the strongest would be welcome to very few.

1607

§ 11. The occupation of Donauwörth.

In 1607 an event occurred which raised the alarm of the southern Protestants to fever heat. In the free city of Donauwörth the abbot of a monastery saw fit to send out a procession to flaunt its banners in the face of an almost entirely Protestant population. Before the starting-point was regained mud and stones were thrown, and some of those who had taken part in the proceedings were roughly handled. The Imperial Court (Reichskammergericht), whose duty it was to settle such quarrels, was out of working order in consequence of the religious disputes; but there was an Imperial Council (Reichshofrath), consisting of nominees of the Emperor, and professing to act out of the plenitude of imperial authority. By this council Donauwörth was put to the ban of the Empire without due form of trial, and Maximilian was appointed to execute the decree. He at once marched a small army into the place, and, taking possession of the town, declared his intention of retaining his hold till his expenses had been paid, handing over the parish church in the meanwhile to the Catholic clergy. It had only been given over to Protestant worship after the date of the Convention of Passau, and Maximilian could persuade himself that he was only carrying out the law.

1608

§ 12. The Diet of 1608.

It was a flagrant case of religious aggression under the name of the law. The knowledge that a partial tribunal was ready to give effect to the complaints of Catholics at once threw the great Protestant cities of the South – Nüremberg, Ulm, and Strasburg into the arms of the neighbouring princes of whom they had hitherto been jealous. Yet there was much in the policy of those princes which would hardly have reassured them. At the Diet of 1608 the representatives of the Elector Palatine were foremost in demanding that the minority should not be bound by the majority in questions of taxation or religion; that is to say, that they should not contribute to the common defence unless they pleased, and that they should not be subject to any regulation about ecclesiastical property unless they pleased. Did this mean only that they were to keep what they had got, or that they might take more as soon as it was convenient? The one was the Protestant, the other the Catholic interpretation of their theory.

§ 13. Formation of the Union.

On May 14, 1608, the Protestant Union, to which Lutherans and Calvinists were alike admitted, came into existence under the guidance of Christian of Anhalt. It was mainly composed of the princes and towns of the south. Its ostensible purpose was for self-defence, and in this sense it was accepted by most of those who took part in it. Its leaders had very different views.

§ 14. Formation of the League.

A Catholic League was at once formed under Maximilian. It was composed of a large number of bishops and abbots, who believed that the princes of the Union wished to annex their territories. Maximilian's ability gave it a unity of action which the Union never possessed. It, too, was constituted for self-defence, but whether that word was to include the resumption of the lands lost since the Convention of Passau was a question probably left for circumstances to decide.

§ 15. Revolutionary tendencies of the Union.

Whatever the majority of the princes of the Union may have meant, there can be no doubt that Christian of Anhalt meant aggression. He believed that the safety of Protestantism could not be secured without the overthrow of the German branch of the House of Austria, and he was sanguine enough to fancy that an act which would call up all Catholic Europe in arms against him was a very easy undertaking.

1609

§ 16. The succession of Cleves.

Scarcely had the Union been formed when events occurred which almost dragged Germany into war. In the spring of 1609 the Duke of Cleves died. The Elector of Brandenburg and the son of the Duke of Neuburg laid claim to the succession. On the plea that the Emperor had the right to settle the point, a Catholic army advanced to take possession of the country. The two pretenders, both of them Lutherans, made common cause against the invaders. 1610.Henry IV. of France found in the dispute a pretext for commencing his long-meditated attack upon Spain and her allies. But his life was cut short by an assassin, and his widow only thought of sending a small French force to join the English and the Dutch in maintaining the claims of the two princes, who were ready to unite for a time against a third party.

1613

§ 17. The box on the ear.

It was not easy to bring the princes to an arrangement for the future. One day the young Prince of Neuburg proposed what seemed to him an excellent way out of the difficulty. 'He was ready,' he said, 'to marry the Elector's daughter, if only he might have the territory.' Enraged at the impudence of the proposal, the Elector raised his hand and boxed his young rival's ears. The blow had unexpected consequences. The injured prince renounced his Protestantism, and invoked, as a good Catholic, the aid of Spain and the League. The Elector passed from Lutheranism to Calvinism, and took a more active part than before in the affairs of the Union. That immediate war in Germany did not result from the quarrel is probably the strongest possible evidence of the reluctance of the German people to break the peace.

1612

§ 18. John George, Elector of Saxony.

The third party, the German Lutherans, looked with equal abhorrence upon aggression on either side. Their leader, John George, Elector of Saxony, stood aloof alike from Christian of Anhalt, and from Maximilian of Bavaria. He was attached by the traditions of his house as well as by his own character to the Empire and the House of Austria. But he was anxious to obtain security for his brother Protestants. He saw there must be a change; but he wisely desired to make the change as slight as possible. In 1612, therefore, he proposed that the highest jurisdiction should still be retained by the Imperial Council, but that the Council, though still nominated by the Emperor, should contain an equal number of Catholics and Protestants. Sentences such as that which had deprived Donauwörth of its civil rights would be in future impossible.

§ 19. His weakness of character.

Unhappily, John George had not the gift of ruling men. He was a hard drinker and a bold huntsman, but to convert his wishes into actual facts was beyond his power. When he saw his plan threatened with opposition on either side he left it to take care of itself. In 1613 a Diet met, and broke up in confusion, leaving matters in such a state that any spark might give rise to a general conflagration.

CHAPTER II.

THE BOHEMIAN REVOLUTION