The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  This harsh teaching, so lacking in apparent comfort, had one quality which raised it above Luther’s. It was not merely a new theology, it was a new political theory. By the institution of Elders, Calvin entrusted the moral well-being of the community and the control of the ministers of God to laymen. This new theocracy, which set God above all, but the community above the priest, combined the authoritarian and the representative principles with the theory of the responsibility of the individual towards the community. As the organization and the doctrine spread, the monarchic governments of Europe found themselves challenged each in turn by a religion which supplied in itself a rival political formation.

  The Catholic Church of the Renaissance had reached a pitch of cultural civilization in which the ruder ethics of its founders were altogether out of place, and the priesthood of Rome had forgotten that the barbarians beyond the Alps demanded both more and less of their Pope than that he should stand first among European princes as a patron of the arts. The only answer which could now be made to the redoubled onslaught from without was reform within, and in this the Catholic Church proved its unexhausted vitality.

  The first step towards inner reform was taken in Rome when in 1524 the order of Theatines came into being. This pioneer order was not monastic, although its members took the triple vow of chastity, poverty, and obedience; its members were secular priests, leading a life partly of contemplation and study, partly of preaching and work among the people. Membership was confined to sons of noble families and its founders intended to make it the training place for a priesthood with renewed spiritual power. The appeal was too limited and the seminary became not a school for clergy but a forcing house for the future leaders of the Church; hence the Counter-Reformation drew not its parish priests but its Bishops, its Cardinals, its Popes.

  Only with the foundation of the Society of Jesus in 1534 did the Counter-Reformation truly begin. It was in a sense the last of the military orders and the greatest; in its ultimate development a hierarchy of highly trained men bound by an oath of unquestioning obedience to their superiors and controlled by the General, its organization was essentially that of an army. When the Catholic Church arose at length from the Council of Trent armed for conflict, it had a fighting force in the Jesuits who were prepared to carry the faith by any means and at any personal cost into any land of the globe. Under their influence the Inquisition, native in Spain, had been reestablished at Rome as the effective instrument for the discovery and extirpation of heresy.

  Calvinism gained ground in Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Austria, Hungary, France—but it had not the essential strength to maintain what it had won. A new religion, it could not strike deep down to the roots of tradition as the teaching of the Jesuits did. Moreover the Jesuits were a picked force, chosen for their vocation. The Calvinists, as their religion spread, became a heterogeneous mass of scattered communities without a central government. Besides which, although they were the most active and efficient of the new heretics, they could not fulfil the part of defenders and missionaries of the Protestant faith as the Jesuits did for the Church of Rome. They formed the militant left wing of the Protestants as the Jesuits formed the militant right wing of the Catholics, but with this difference, that the Jesuits championed a comparatively united cause, but the Calvinists hated their fellow-Protestants, the Lutherans in particular, almost more than the Papists themselves.

  The only serious opposition which the Jesuits encountered within their own Church was that of the Capuchins, and even this opposition took the form of rivalry rather than open enmity. A reformed branch of the Franciscans, the Capuchins had been founded some years before the Society of Jesus but had failed to make so definite a mark on the course of the Counter-Reformation. In the opening years of the seventeenth century they were, however, not far behind the Jesuits in their missionary zeal and far in advance of them in their understanding of political intrigue. They specialized in diplomacy and had constituted themselves the unofficial go-betweens of the leading Catholic monarchies, an office in which the Jesuits, always more interested in the actual propagation of the faith and the education of the young, did not attempt to replace them. Had the two orders worked together they had between them all the resources necessary to unite Catholic Christendom against the heretic. But as the years passed their rivalry developed into antagonism and widened instead of closing the estrangement between the Catholic governments of Europe. It is significant that the Jesuits were most influential in Spain and Austria, the Capuchins in France.

  In this way there was a fissure in the Catholic Church, not so apparent but actually as serious as that between the two leading Protestant Churches. When it came to a conflict between Rome and the heretic there was bound to be on both sides a division of interests which would gravely modify the alignment of the parties.

  Meanwhile hatred between the opposing religions gained in bitterness. Those who practised by some precariously held privilege a religion other than that of the country where they lived were in perpetual danger. In parts of Poland the Protestant pastors carried their lives in their hands; in Bohemia, Austria, Bavaria, Catholic priests went armed.[13] Travellers were not always safe; in the canton of Lucerne and in the Black Forest Protestant merchants had been seized and burnt.[14]

  In the first years of the Reformation the weakness of Catholic rulers had forced many of them to make concessions to their Protestant subjects, so that, officially at least, there were more Protestant communities in Catholic countries than there were Catholics in Protestant ones. Apart from Italy and Spain, almost all Catholic states tolerated some sort of a Protestant community in their midst. This fact undoubtedly increased the sense of injustice and danger among the Catholic party, just as the slightest infringement of Protestant privilege sent a tremor of indignation through the officially Protestant governments.

  The possibility of a clash was constantly present. On the face of it Catholicism, as the older and the more united faith, should have emerged victorious from the conflict. Barely a century had passed since the Reformation, and the Catholic Church cherished the far from illusory hope of re-uniting Christendom. The attempt failed. No single cause can explain that failure, yet one stands out above all others. The fortune of the Church became fatally interwoven with that of the House of Austria, and the territorial jealousy evoked by that dynasty reacted upon the Catholic Church by dividing those who should have been her defenders.

  4.

  In 1618 the Hapsburg dynasty was the greatest power in Europe. ‘Austriae est imperatura orbi universo’ ran their proud device, nor within the narrow limits of the world as conceived by the average European was the boast unfounded. They owned Austria and Tyrol, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, all Hungary that was not in the hands of the Turk, Silesia, Moravia, Lusatia, and Bohemia; farther west Burgundy, the Low Countries and parts of Alsace; in Italy the duchy of Milan, the fiefs of Finale and Piombino, the kingdom of Naples which covered the whole southern half of the peninsula with Sicily and Sardinia. They were Kings in Spain and Portugal and reigned in the New World over Chile, Peru, Brazil and Mexico. A policy of marriage rather than conquest, they boasted, had made them great, but when heiresses were not to be had they strengthened the solidarity of the dynasty by marriages among themselves; it happened that one prince would be brother-in-law and son-in-law and cousin to another, thrice bound to him in love and duty.[15]

  The spectacle of so much concentrated power alone might have roused the envy of neighbouring princes, but in the half-century preceding 1618 the dynasty had given warrant for the enmity of its rivals by identifying its policy with two ideas. Its princes stood forth without compromise for absolutism and the Catholic Church and had so relentlessly pursued these convictions that the outside world no longer distinguished between the men and their actions.

  The head of the family was the King of Spain, the representative of the elder line; their policy was therefore identified with the militant right wing of Catholicism, that of Saint Ignatius and
the Jesuits. The subjection of the family’s interests to those of the Spanish King flung into relief one of the oldest feuds in Europe. The rulers of France and Spain had been rivals for the last three centuries: now that the King of Spain was head of a dynasty which controlled most of Italy, the Upper Rhine and the Low Countries, France was threatened on all the landward frontiers. For the last quarter of the sixteenth century the King of Spain had piled fuel on the fire by persistent interference in the internal politics of his neighbour in order to gain control of the Crown itself. He failed, and there emerged triumphant from the conflict the founder of a new French dynasty, the Bourbon, Henry of Navarre. His murder in 1610, at the moment when he had been ready to continue the contest, left his country to a regency too feeble to carry out his projects. Peace was made with Spain and the boy-king married to a Spanish princess. The temporary and deceptive friendship veiled but did not alter the latent enmity of Bourbon and Hapsburg. It remained the most important underlying factor in the European situation.

  The immediate problem was the Dutch revolt. The so-called United Provinces, the Protestant northern Netherlands, had rebelled successfully against Philip II; after forty years of fighting they signed a truce with his successor in 1609 by which they gained independence and immunity from attack for twelve years. But the provinces were too valuable to be lightly relinquished, and the Spanish government had granted the long armistice not as a prelude to peace but to give itself leisure to prepare the final reduction of the rebels. The end of the truce in 1621 would precipitate a European crisis—the opportunity for all Protestant rulers to defend a free republic from extinction, or the occasion for the Hapsburg dynasty and the Catholic Church to make a triumphant advance.

  The concealed enmity of Bourbon and Hapsburg, the imminent attack of the King of Spain on the Dutch—these dominated the actions of European statesmen in 1618.

  Spain was a favourite enigma among politicians who talked incessantly of her weakness and took every precaution against her strength. ‘Daily doth the weakness of the government . . . discover itself more and more unto me. The wisest and most judicious of the nation itself, are contented both to acknowledge and lament it. . . . Such is the extremity of their idleness and loose regard of their most important affairs . . . as it could not but lay open to the whole world, the nakedness and miseries of their estates,’ wisely proclaimed an Englishman as early as 1605, while both Dutch and Italian travellers confirmed his views.[16] Yet the King of England assiduously wooed a Spanish alliance for years to come. The Spaniards were a race of priest-ridden decadents, declared German pamphleteers, yet in the same breath they told of gigantic armies and secret fortresses on the Rhine that were a strange comment on the decadence of those who raised them.[17]

  The truth was midway between the two. The economic decline of Spain had begun and was gaining in speed while the population, particularly in Castile, dwindled with terrifying rapidity. The economic policy of the government was equally unconstructive both in industry and agriculture, and financial policy there was none. So great had been the demands on the royal revenues for the past three generations that many of the taxes were now paid directly to the creditors of the Crown without passing through the royal treasury. In 1607 the government had repudiated its debts for the fourth time in fifty years without gaining more than the briefest respite. The exemption of the clergy from the financial burdens of the community increased the pressure on the middle classes and the peasants and further hampered the possibility of recovery. In spite of all this, a great state in its decline may yet be more powerful than a small state not yet arrived at greatness. England was more prosperous than Spain but she was not a quarter as powerful, and even France could not in a crisis have drawn on such resources as were still at the disposition of this once great and now sickening monarchy. The enfeebled government rested on four strong supports—the silver mines of the New World, the recruiting grounds of northern Italy, the loyalty of the southern Netherlands and the genius of a Genoese soldier, Ambrogio Spinola.[18] The government still had an army, reputedly the best in Europe, could still pay it since the bullion of Peru was reserved for little else,[19] had a base in Flanders whence to re-conquer the Dutch, and a general who could do it. Should the prosperous northern provinces be regained, economic recovery would be possible for the whole of the Spanish Empire.

  The southern provinces of the Netherlands, the base for the coming attack, had emerged from the war with the Dutch in 1609 impoverished and increasingly dependent on Spain. They presented, nevertheless, the appearance of prosperity. Given as the dowry of the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Philip II, when she married her cousin the Archduke Albert, they were technically independent at least until the death of her husband, when, as the marriage had been childless, they would revert to the Spanish Crown. Naturally, therefore, in spite of their conscientious employment of native officials and encouragement of national self-respect, the aged Archduke and his wife guided their policy to suit their inevitable heir—the King of Spain.[20]

  Active, generous, benevolent and just, they had long devoted themselves to the service of their people. A profound religious revival gave vigour and unity to national life, an intelligently extravagant Court made Brussels the artistic centre of Europe, while the well-disciplined and punctually paid army caused a temporary but beneficial economic activity throughout the country. Gracious and impressive, the Archduchess Isabella had sought and won the love of her people;[21] her popularity made for the popularity of the government while the immediate activity and independence of the provinces concealed the fact that they had no future.

  An arbitrarily drawn frontier, corresponding merely to the best defensive line which the Dutch had been able to maintain, divided the southern provinces from the northern. This frontier was itself the symbol of undecided conflict, for it corresponded to no line of religious or linguistic cleavage; Dutch was spoken south of it in Flanders and Brabant and there were Catholics north of it in Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht, as there were Protestants to the south.[22] The armistice had solved no problem of race or faith and by removing the pressure of attack it had all but destroyed the precarious unity of the rebels.

  The Spanish Netherlands, whatever their inner weakness, were at least united under a strong and popular government. But each of the seven United Provinces claimed independent privileges in despite of the general good. The people feared that minority of secret Catholics which was menacingly large in at least three of the provinces, and the Protestants themselves were divided into two irreconcilable factions. The only element of unity was provided by Maurice, Prince of Orange, the son of William the Silent, who commanded the army and was stadholder of five out of the seven provinces. He was not without enemies; a growing party suspected him of dynastic ambition and feared that their country had escaped the tyranny of the Hapsburg to become subject to that of the House of Orange. The two religious factions which divided his Protestant people corresponded more or less to the supporters and the opponents of Prince Maurice. Sooner or later there was bound to be a clash.

  The internal danger was increased by external threats. The phenomenal development of Dutch trade had provoked the enmity of the English, once her firm allies, not to mention the Danes and Swedes. Dependence on commerce, and the devotion of a great part of the agricultural land to dairy-farming made the provinces dependent on Poland and Denmark for corn, on Norway for wood. In the cities, successful enterprise had piled up the national wealth in a few hands so that there was great poverty and great discontent among the populace.

  England, the most important of the three northern powers, was in 1618 at cross-purposes with herself and therefore the less likely to play any significant part in Europe. The governing class were too Protestant and too much opposed to the absolutist principle to favour a Spanish alliance while their economic fears prevented them from helping the Dutch.

  The other two northern powers, Sweden and Denmark with its subordinate Norway, were less likely to remain qui
escent. Both countries were Lutheran. In both the centralizing authority of the Crown was checked by an ambitious nobility and both were under the government of highly gifted kings who intended by the encouragement of the merchant and professional classes to subdue the aristocracy. Of these two monarchs the youthful Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden was likely to be the more successful: his father had already partly reduced the nobility, and after defeating the Tsar of Russia he had secured for his traders an important stretch of the southern coast of the Baltic. On the other hand, Christian of Denmark was master of the Sound where he exacted a toll from every passing ship; the proceeds were used to strengthen the power of the Crown. As overlord of Holstein he had an important foothold in northern Germany.

  There was one other northern power, or rather the shadow of one—the Hanseatic League. This once important confederation of trading ports was now sinking into decadence while those of its members who still flourished were emancipating themselves from its control.

  Denmark, Sweden, the Hanseatic League—all were alike jealous of each other and of the Dutch. They might form ephemeral alliances within the group but a joint defensive league against the Hapsburg was out of the question.

  There was one other state on the Baltic, linked both to north and central Europe. This was Poland, with an eastern frontier on Russia and Turkey, a southern on the Hapsburg dominions in Silesia and Hungary. The king, Sigismund, was bound to the dynasties of both north and south. Son of a Swedish king, he was by hereditary right King of Sweden but had lost that country through his religion. He was a devout Catholic and a pupil of the Jesuits, so that both his faith and his policy—he had fought doggedly against the demands of the Polish Diet—inclined him towards an alliance with the Hapsburg. Twice he had chosen himself a wife from that family.