The Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648
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1623
§ 3. Breach between England and Spain.
England, at last, was giving signs of warlike preparation. Prince Charles had paid a visit to Madrid in hopes of bringing home a Spanish bride, and of regaining the Palatinate for his brother-in-law. He had come back without a wife, and with the prospect of getting back the Palatinate as distant as ever. He had learned what the Spanish plan was, that wonderful scheme for educating Frederick's children at Vienna, with all ostensible guarantees for keeping them in their father's faith, which were, however, almost certain to come to nothing when reduced to practice. And so he came back angry with the Spaniards, and resolved to urge his father to take up arms. In the spring of 1624 all negotiations between England and Spain were brought to an end, and Parliament was discussing with the king the best means of recovering the Palatinate.
§ 4. English plans.
In the English House of Commons there was but little real knowledge of German affairs. The progress of the Emperor and the League was of too recent a date to be thoroughly comprehended. Men, remembering the days of Philip II., were inclined to overestimate the power of Spain, and to underestimate the power of the Emperor. They therefore fancied that it would be enough to attack Spain by sea, and to send a few thousand soldiers to the aid of the Dutch Republic.
§ 5. Question between the king and the House of Commons.
James, if he was not prompt in action, at all events knew better than this. He believed that the Imperial power was now too firmly rooted in Germany to fall before anything short of a great European confederacy. From this the Commons shrunk. A war upon the continent would be extremely expensive, and, after all, their wrath had been directed against Spain, which had meddled with their internal affairs, rather than against the Emperor, who had never taken the slightest interest in English politics. The utmost they would do was to accept the king's statement that he would enter into negotiations with other powers and would lay the results before them in the winter.
§ 6. The French Government and the Huguenots.
James first applied to France. He saw truly that the moment the struggle in Germany developed into a European war the key to success would lie in the hands of the French government. In that great country, then as now, ideas of the most opposite character were striving for the mastery. Old thoughts which had been abandoned in England in the sixteenth century were at issue with new thoughts which would hardly be adopted in England before the eighteenth. In France as well as in England and Germany, the question of the day was how religious toleration could be granted without breaking up the national unity. In England that unity was so strong that no party in the state could yet be brought to acknowledge that toleration should be granted at all. But for that very reason the question was on the fair way to a better settlement than it could have in France or Germany. When the nation was once brought face to face with the difficulty, men would ask, not whether one religion should be established in Northumberland and another in Cornwall, but what amount of religious liberty was good for men as men all over England. In Germany it could not be so. There the only question was where the geographical frontier was to be drawn between two religions. Neither those who wished to increase the power of the princes, nor those who wished to increase the power of the Emperor, were able to rise above the idea of a local and geographical division. And to some extent France was in the same condition. The Edict of Nantes had recognised some hundreds of the country houses of the aristocracy, and certain cities and towns, as places where the reformed religious doctrines might be preached without interference. But in France the ideal of national unity, though far weaker than it was in England, was far stronger than it was in Germany. In order to give security to the Protestant, or Huguenot towns as they were called in France, they had been allowed the right of garrisoning themselves, and of excluding the royal troops. They had thus maintained themselves as petty republics in the heart of France, practically independent of the royal authority.
Section V. —Rise of Richelieu
§ 1. Lewis XIII.
Such a state of things could not last. The idea involved in the exaltation of the monarchy was the unity of the nation. The idea involved in the maintenance of these guarantees was its disintegration. Ever since the young king, Lewis XIII., had been old enough to take an active part in affairs he had been striving to establish his authority from one end of the kingdom to the other.
§ 2. His ideas.
The supremacy and greatness of the monarchy was the thought in which he lived and moved. His intellect was not of a high order, and he was not likely to originate statesmanlike projects, or to carry them out successfully to execution. But he was capable of appreciating merit, and he would give his undivided confidence to any man who could do the thing which he desired to have done, without himself exactly knowing how to do it.
§ 3. Early years of his reign.
During the first years of his reign everything seemed falling to pieces. As soon as his father's strong hand was removed some of the nobility fell back into half-independence of the Crown, whilst others submitted to it in consideration of receiving large pensions and high positions in the state. To this Lewis was for the time obliged to submit. But the privileges of the Huguenot towns roused his indignation. It was not long before he levied war upon them, determined to reduce them to submission to the royal authority.
§ 4. The intolerant party at Court.
All this foreboded a future for France not unlike the future which appeared to be opening upon Germany. There were too many signs that the establishment of the king's authority over the towns would be followed by the forcible establishment of his religion. There was a large party at Court crying out with bigoted intolerance against any attempt to treat the Huguenots with consideration, and that cry found an echo in the mind of the king. For he was himself a devout Catholic, and nothing would have pleased him better than to see the victories of his arms attended by the victories of the Church to which he was attached.
§ 5. Lewis jealous of Spain.
If Lewis was not a Ferdinand, it was not because he was a nobler or a better man, but because he had his eye open to dangers from more quarters than one. When the troubles in Germany first broke out, French influence was exerted on the side of the Emperor. French ambassadors had taken part in the negotiations which preceded the treaty of Ulm, and had thrown all their weight in the scale to secure the safety of Maximilian's march into Bohemia. But in 1622 the conquest of the Palatinate brought other thoughts into the mind of the King of France. His monarchical authority was likely to suffer far more from the victorious union between the two branches of the House of Austria than from a few Huguenot towns. For many a long year Spain had planted her standards not only beyond the Pyrenees, but in Naples, Milan, Franche Comté, and the Netherlands. Frankenthal and the Western Palatinate were now garrisoned by her troops, and behind those troops was the old shadowy empire once more taking form and substance, and presenting itself before the world as a power hereafter to be counted with. In 1622, accordingly, Lewis made peace with the Huguenots at home. In 1623 he sent some slight aid to Mansfeld. In 1624 he called Richelieu to his counsels.
§ 6. Richelieu's accession to power.
It would be a mistake to suppose that the cool and far-sighted Cardinal who was thus suddenly placed at the head of the French ministry had it all his own way from the first. He had to take into account the ebb and flow of feeling in the Court and the country, and the ebb and flow of feeling in Lewis himself. There was still with Lewis the old anxiety to crush the Huguenots and to make himself absolute master at home, alongside with the new anxiety to shake off the superiority of the House of Austria abroad. It was Richelieu's task to show him how to satisfy both his longings; how to strike down rebellion whilst welcoming religious liberty, and how, by uniting Catholic and Protestant in willing obedience to his throne, he might make himself feared abroad in proportion as he was respected at home.
§ 7. Marriage of Henrietta Maria.
Richelieu's first idea was not altogether a successful one. He encouraged Lewis to pursue the negotiation which had been already commenced for a marriage between his sister and the Prince of Wales. At the wish either of Lewis himself or of Richelieu the marriage was hampered with conditions for the religious liberty of the English Catholics, to which the prince, when he afterwards came to the throne as Charles I., was unwilling or unable to give effect. These conditions were therefore the beginning of an ill feeling between the two crowns, which helped ultimately to bring about a state of war.
§ 8. Foreign policy of Lewis and Richelieu.
Nor were other causes of dispute wanting. James and his son expected France to join them in an avowed league for the recovery of the Palatinate. But to this Lewis and Richelieu refused to consent. Lewis was proud of the name of Catholic, and he was unwilling to engage in open war with the declared champions of the Catholic cause. But he was also King of France, and he was ready to satisfy his conscience by refusing to join the league, though he had no scruple in sending money to the support of armies who were fighting for Protestantism. He agreed to pay large subsidies to the Dutch, and to join the King of England in promoting an expedition which was to march under Mansfeld through France to Alsace, with the object of attacking the Palatinate. At the same time he was ready to carry on war in Italy. The Spaniards had taken military possession of the Valtelline, a valley through which lay the only secure military road from their possessions in Italy to the Austrian lands in Germany. Before the end of the year a French army entered the valley and drove out the Spaniards with ease.
§ 9. Mansfeld's expedition.
Mansfeld's expedition, on the other hand, never reached Alsace at all. Before the troops of which it was composed were ready to sail from England, Richelieu had found an excuse for diverting its course. Spinola had laid siege to Breda, and the Dutch were as anxiously seeking for means to succour it as they had sought for means to succour Bergen-op-Zoom when it was besieged in 1622. The French averred that Mansfeld would be far better employed at Breda than in Alsace. At all events, they now declined positively to allow him to pass through France.
1625
§ 10. Failure of the expedition.
James grumbled and remonstrated in vain. At last, after long delays, Mansfeld was allowed to sail for the Dutch coast, with strict orders to march to the Palatinate without going near Breda. He had with him 12,000 English foot, and was to be accompanied by 2,000 French horse under Christian of Brunswick. No good came of the expedition. James had consented to conditions appended to his son's marriage contract which he did not venture to submit to discussion in the House of Commons, and Parliament was not, therefore, allowed to meet. Without help from Parliament the Exchequer was almost empty, and James was unable to send money with Mansfeld to pay his men. Upon their landing, the poor fellows, pressed a few weeks before, and utterly without military experience, found themselves destitute of everything in a hard frost. Before long they were dying like flies in winter. The help which they were at last permitted to give could not save Breda from surrender, and the handful which remained were far too few to cross the frontier into Germany.
§ 11. The rising of the French Huguenots.
Richelieu had hoped to signalize the year 1625 by a larger effort than that of 1624. He had mastered the Valtelline in alliance with Venice and Savoy, and French troops were to help the Duke of Savoy to take Genoa, a city which was in close friendship with Spain. There was further talk of driving the Spaniards out of the Duchy of Milan, and even intervention in Germany was desired by Richelieu, though no decision had been come to on the subject. In the midst of these thoughts he was suddenly reminded that he was not completely master at home. The peace made with the Huguenots in 1622 had not been fairly kept: royal officials had encroached upon their lands, and had failed to observe the terms of the treaty. On a sudden, Soubise, a powerful Huguenot nobleman with a fleet of his own, swooped down upon some of the king's ships lying at Blavet, in Brittany, and carried them off as his prize. Sailing to Rochelle, he persuaded that great commercial city to come to an understanding with him, and to declare for open resistance to the king's authority.
§ 12. Interruption to Richelieu's plans for intervening in Germany.
If Richelieu intended seriously to take part in the German war, this was cause enough for hesitation. Cleverly availing himself of the expectations formed of the French alliance in England and Holland, he contrived to borrow ships from both those countries, and before the autumn was over Soubise was driven to take refuge in England. But Rochelle and the Huguenots on land were still unconquered, and Ferdinand was safe for the moment from any considerable participation of France in the German war. Whether Richelieu would at any time be able to take up again the thread of his plans depended in the first place upon his success in suppressing rebellion, but quite as much upon the use which he might make of victory if the event proved favourable to him. A tolerant France might make war with some chances in its favour. A France composed of conquerors and conquered, in which each party regarded the other as evil-doers to be suppressed, not as erring brothers to be argued with, would weigh lightly enough in the scale of European politics.
CHAPTER V.
INTERVENTION OF THE KING OF DENMARK
Section I. —Christian IV. and Gustavus Adolphus
§ 1. Denmark and Sweden.
Whilst France was thus temporarily hindered from taking part in German affairs, and whilst James and his son were promising more than their poverty would allow them to perform, the rulers of Denmark and Sweden were watching with increasing interest the tide of war as it rolled northwards.
§ 2. Christian IV.
Christian IV. of Denmark had every reason to look with anxiety upon the future. As Duke of Holstein, he was a member of the Lower Saxon circle, and he had long been doing his best to extend his influence over the coasts of the North Sea. By his new fortifications at Glückstadt he aimed at intercepting the commerce of Hamburg, and his success in procuring for one of his sons the Bishopric of Verden and the coadjutorship and eventual succession to the archbishopric of Bremen was doubtless specially grateful to him on account of the position he thus acquired on the Elbe and the Weser. The question of the Protestant bishoprics was therefore a very important question to him personally, and he was well aware that a real national empire in Germany would make short work with his attempts to establish his dominion over the mouths of the German rivers.
§ 3. His early interest in the war.
His attention was not now called for the first time to the progress of the war. Like all the Lutheran princes, he had thoroughly disapproved of Frederick's Bohemian enterprise. But when Frederick was a fugitive he had seen that a strong force was needed to stop the Emperor from a retaliation which would be ruinous to the Protestants, and he had in the beginning of 1621 given a willing ear to James's proposal for a joint armament in defence of the Palatinate. Had the war been undertaken then, with the character of moderation which James and Christian would have been certain to impress upon it, the world might perhaps have been spared the spectacle of Mansfeld's plunderings, with their unhappy results. But James came too soon to the conclusion that it was unnecessary to arm till mediation had failed; and Christian, auguring no good from such a course, drew back and left the Palatinate to its fate. But the events which followed had increased his anxiety, and in 1624 his mind was distracted between his desire to check the growth of the imperial power and his hesitation to act with allies so vacillating and helpless as the Lower Saxon princes were proving themselves to be. In his own lands he had shown himself a good administrator and able ruler. Whether he was possessed of sufficient military capacity to cope with Tilly remained to be seen.
§ 4. Gustavus Adolphus.
Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, was a man of a higher stamp. His is the one of the few names which relieve the continental Protestantism of the seventeenth century from the charge of barrenness. Possessed of a high and brilliant imagination, and of a temperament restless and indefatigable, to which inaction was the sorest of trials, he was never happier than when he was infusing his own glowing spirit into the comrades of some perilous enterprise. Christian of Brunswick was not more ready than he to lead a charge or to conduct a storm. But he had, too, that of which no thought ever entered the mind of Christian for an instant – the power of seeing facts in their infinite variety as they really were, and the self-restraint with which he curbed in his struggling spirit and his passionate longing for action whenever a calm survey of the conditions around showed him that action was inexpedient. In all the pages of history there is probably no man who leaves such an impression of that energy under restraint, which is the truest mark of greatness in human character as it is the source of all that is sublime or lovely in nature or in art.
§ 5. His conflict with Poland and Russia.
Such a man was certain not to be a mere enthusiast embarking heedlessly in a Protestant crusade. Neither would he be careful for mere temporal or political power, regardless of the higher interests of his time. His first duty, and he never forgot it, was to his country. When he came to the throne, in 1611, Sweden was overrun by Danish armies, and in an almost desperate condition. In two years he had wrested a peace from the invaders, under conditions hard indeed, but which at least secured the independence of Sweden. His next effort, an effort which to the day of his death he never relaxed, was to bring into his own hands the dominion of the Baltic. He drove the Russians from its coasts. 'Now,' he said triumphantly in 1617, 'this enemy cannot, without our permission launch a single boat upon the Baltic.' He had another enemy more dangerous than Russia. Sigismund, King of Poland, was his cousin, the son of his father's elder brother, who had been driven from the throne of Sweden for his attachment to the Catholic belief. And so Gustavus was involved in the great question which was agitating Europe. The bare legal right which gave the whole of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands to Spain, which gave Bohemia to Ferdinand, and the Protestant bishoprics and the secularized lands to the Catholic clergy, gave also Sweden to Sigismund. Was it strange if Gustavus stood forth to combat this doctrine to the death, or if in his mind the growth of the two branches of the House of Austria, by whom this doctrine was maintained, became inextricably blended with the creed which that doctrine was to favour? Was it strange, too, if Protestantism and the national right of each separate country to go its own way untrammelled by such a doctrine appeared in his eyes, as in his days for the most part they really were, but two forms of the same spirit?
§ 6. His visit to Germany.
The peace concluded by Gustavus with Russia in 1617 was accompanied by a fresh outbreak of the war with Poland; and this renewal of the contest with the old rival of his house naturally drew the king's attention to affairs in Germany; for Ferdinand, now rising into power, was the brother-in-law of Sigismund, and likely to give him what aid he could in his Swedish enterprise. And Gustavus, too, was not quite a foreigner in Germany. Through his mother German blood ran in his veins, and when, in the summer of 1618, he visited Berlin in secret, he was won by the lovely face of the daughter of that energetic Elector of Brandenburg who after boxing the ears of the rival candidate for the dukedom of Cleves had adopted the Calvinist creed and had entered the Union. The death of the Elector delayed the marriage, and it was not till 1620 that, on a second visit, Gustavus wrung a consent from the new Elector, George William, whose weakness and vacillation were to be a sore trial to the Swedish king in after years. In strict incognito, Gustavus travelled as far as Heidelberg, at a time when the Elector was far away, in the midst of his short-lived splendour at Prague. Gustavus learned something from that visit which he never forgot. He saw the rich luxuriance of that fair Rhine valley, stretching away till the western hills are but dimly visible in the blue distance, and which, compared by Venetian travellers to the green Lombard plain, must have caused strange sensations of wonder in the wanderer from the cold and barren north. And he saw another sight, too, which he never forgot – the wealth and magnificence of the Rhenish prelates. 'If these priests were subjects to the king my master' (he spoke in the assumed character of a Swedish nobleman) 'he would long ago have taught them that modesty, humility, and obedience are the true characteristics of their profession.'
§ 7. His daring and prudence.
Plainly in this man there was something of Christian of Anhalt, something of the desire to overthrow existing institutions. But there was that in him which Christian of Anhalt was ignorant of – the long and calm preparation for the crisis, and the power of establishing a new order, if his life should be prolonged, to take the place of the old which was falling away.
§ 8. Renewed war with Poland.
Gustavus returned to carry on the war with Poland with renewed vigour. In 1621 Riga surrendered to him. The next year he concluded a truce which gave him leisure to look about him.
§ 9. His interest in the German war.
The year 1624 brought with it fresh alarm. The empire, hostile to Sweden and the religion of Sweden, was growing terribly strong. Unlike Christian of Denmark, Gustavus had sympathized with Frederick's Bohemian undertaking, although he had expected but little from an enterprise under Frederick's guidance. And now the tide of victory was running northward. An empire with a firm grasp on the shores of Mecklenburg and Pomerania would soon call in question the Swedish dominion of the Baltic. If this was to be the end, Gustavus had gained but little by his victories over Russia and Poland.
§ 10. Character of his policy.
It all sounds like mere selfishness, – Christian alarmed for his family bishoprics, and his hold upon the Elbe and the Weser; Gustavus providing against an attack upon his lordship in the Baltic. But it does not follow that with both of them, and especially with Gustavus, the defence of the persecuted Gospel was not a very real thing. Historians coolly dissect a man's thoughts as they please, and label them like specimens in a naturalist's cabinet. Such a thing, they argue, was done for mere personal aggrandizement; such a thing for national objects; such a thing from high religious motives. In real life we may be sure it was not so. As with Ferdinand and Maximilian, the love of law and orderly government was indissolubly blended with the desire to propagate the faith on which their own spiritual life was based; so it was with Gustavus. To extend the power of Sweden, to support the princes of Germany against the Emperor's encroachments, to give a firm and unassailable standing ground to German Protestantism, were all to him parts of one great work, scarcely even in thought to be separated from one another. And, after all, let it never be forgotten that the unity which he attacked was the unity of the Jesuit and the soldier. It had no national standing ground at all. The Germany of a future day, the Germany of free intelligence and ordered discipline, would have far more in common with the destroyer than with the upholder of the hollow unity of the seventeenth century.