On the other hand, should the Emperor or the King of Spain make Frederick’s revolt into an excuse to seize the Rhenish Palatinate, France would feel the ill-effects only less than the United Provinces. A middle course seemed best, and with this in view an embassy left Paris for Germany in the early summer of 1620.
At Ulm the French ambassadors found the princes of the Protestant Union with their small army, sulky and undecided what action to take; on the opposite side of the river Maximilian of Bavaria was gathering the larger and better trained forces of the Catholic League, ready to march on Bohemia in accordance with his promise to Ferdinand. It was touch and go whether the armies should try the issue; none of the princes wished to be involved in Frederick’s war, but all feared that Maximilian would attack them or perhaps attempt to march through their lands. The French at once put forward a suggestion: if the Union would guarantee the lands of all Catholic princes from attack, would not the League give an equivalent guarantee to respect the neutrality of Protestant states? Maximilian of Bavaria warmly supported the plan, and the princes of the Union, who asked for nothing better than safety and freedom from responsibility, were easily persuaded to come to terms. On July 3rd the Treaty of Ulm was signed.[34]
French diplomacy was based on two assumptions: the first and correct assumption that Frederick would not be able to hold Bohemia; the second that the Union, freed from the menace of the League, would defend the Rhine from Spanish attack. The Treaty of Ulm was intended to neutralize the peril to which Frederick’s rashness had exposed the party of the German Liberties; he was to suffer alone for his folly, and the Hapsburg victory with its consequences was to be confined to Bohemia. The policy would have been sound had the members of the Union behaved as the French government expected, but instead they made the Treaty an excuse for total inaction, and the ministers of France realized too late that their diplomacy had removed the last check on Frederick’s enemies, without securing the Rhine.[35]
Almost at the same moment as the conclusion of the Treaty, the governors of the Spanish Netherlands informed the King of France that Spinola was preparing to march on the Palatinate. There were doubts in Madrid and Brussels as to how Louis would take this news; he took it as a good Catholic and showed no displeasure.[36] His advisers were trusting that the Union would avert the danger; only later did they hear that their emissaries, on leaving Ulm for Vienna, had found the imperial Court rotten with Spanish bribery, the Emperor wholly in the hands of the Spanish ambassador, and their own projects for moderation and compromise in Bohemia barely treated with civility.[37] It was too late then to initiate a new policy, for both the Queen-mother’s intrigues and the Huguenot rising had come to a head, and the French government, having casually destroyed the last barrier against the Hapsburg advance, slid out of European politics for the next three years.
Meanwhile the Hapsburg dynasty had united little by little in support of the deposed Ferdinand. Suspicious, apprehensive, doubtful of Ferdinand’s ability to hold Bohemia even if it were reconquered for him, and fearing the growing poverty and discontent of his country, Philip III of Spain at first hesitated. He wished to husband his strength for the renewal of the Dutch war.[38] In the Netherlands, nearer to the scene of action, the Archduke Albert and his advisers saw more clearly. For them, Frederick’s seizure of the Crown put a new face on Ferdinand’s cause: an excuse for invading the Palatinate and occupying that one dangerous Protestant outpost on the Rhine might never occur again. The lethargy of Philip III could not be allowed to stand between Spinola and his far-reaching strategy.[39]
Ambrogio Spinola, a Genoese nobleman and a natural soldier, had made his reputation fighting against Prince Maurice in the opening years of the century. Political cartoonists represented him as a gigantic spider weaving a web to entangle Protestant Europe.[40] In fact, he thought of little else but the coming war with the Dutch, slept little, ate sparingly without noticing what was set before him, worked for eighteen hours a day and spent the greater part of his private fortune on the improvement of the army.[41] For eleven years, since the truce with the Dutch, he had been building up the plan for their final defeat; Europe was to him but the outworks of his own problem, and that problem the control of the Rhine. At the first rumour of unrest in Germany, he tried to gain a voice in the military plans of the League. As soon as Frederick’s election was known, he began to collect and mass troops from Spain and from Spanish Italy, in the Milanese, the Netherlands, and Alsace.[42] Three years before, in 1617, Ferdinand had bought Spanish support for his candidature to the imperial throne by the offer of part of Alsace; now, in his anxiety for military help, he offered more. Spinola acted in the knowledge that, if he conquered Frederick’s lands on the Rhine, a share of them would fall to Spain, and with that the Protestant barrier between the source of his military power and his objective would be obliterated.
Frederick had forfeited his lands by wilfully breaking the imperial peace, and the Emperor could dispose of them to his friends. On paper it sounded fair enough, and if in fact it was directly contrary to the oath that Ferdinand had sworn when he assumed the imperial Crown—the oath not to dispose of German lands without permission of the Diet[43]—this legal aspect of the matter could always be considered after the actual seizure had taken place. The decision to invade the Palatinate was taken in Brussels before the end of 1619,[44] the treaty between Ferdinand and the Spanish government was signed in February 1620, and the order which at length gave Spinola leave to march was dated at Madrid on June 23rd;[45] before it reached him the French had negotiated their treaty at Ulm, the Union had withdrawn their army and the Rhineland lay open to all comers.
4.
For the last ten years pamphleteers had been warning the people of the Spanish menace; for more than ten years the independent rulers of Germany had dreaded the increase of imperial power and an attack on their liberties. Anhalt had reckoned on these fears to bring the majority of the princes to Frederick’s side. Were they then so blind when the moment came that they could not guess, even if they did not know, what Spinola, Ferdinand, and the King of Spain intended?
The princes were not blind. At the imperial court everyone knew that Ferdinand’s two chief advisers, Eggenberg and Harrach, were under Spanish control,[46] and it was common knowledge too that no decision was taken without consulting Oñate, the Spanish ambassador.[47] No ruler of importance can possibly have been so ill-informed as to ignore the fact that Spinola was gathering troops, or so simple as to think that he was doing it for a pastime.
The princes of the Union were frankly afraid to act; their only anxiety was to establish their innocence of participation in Frederick’s revolt. But the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg and the Duke of Bavaria, these three, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic, had all alike declared themselves at one time or another firm defenders of the constitution. Did none of them now perceive that the constitution was in danger?
The Elector of Brandenburg could plead an excuse. George William, the eldest and Calvinist son, had succeeded his Calvinist father at Christmas 1619. The Lutheran Electress-mother wished to dethrone him in favour of her second Lutheran son and enlisted the help of John George of Saxony. The young Elector, with half his subjects ready to revolt against him, appealed for help to the neighbouring King of Poland. His mother immediately arranged for her eldest daughter to marry, without her brother’s consent, the King of Sweden, mortal enemy of the King of Poland. Cut off from Poland, George William offered to help the Bohemians in the hope that they in return would help him. At once the Elector of Saxony threatened to invade Brandenburg and raise the whole Lutheran population against him. There remained only one alternative for George William; to throw himself sycophantically on the mercy of John George and to order his policy as he was told.[48]
There was less obvious excuse for the behaviour of the Elector of Saxony. Whatever his jealousy of Frederick and resentment that he had not himself been chosen King, as a Protestant and as a constitutional ruler he was
expected to support the new monarchy against Catholic tyranny. If he valued the German Liberties he could not stand inactive while Frederick was crushed by troops from Spain and Flanders.
John George of Saxony was no selfless statesman; the desire for personal gain put an ugly face on many of his actions, but he was genuine in his respect for the German Liberties. He saw that Frederick by his provocative usurpation of Bohemia had seriously, perhaps fatally, compromised the Protestant and constitutionalist party. His object was therefore to redeem Frederick’s blunder. He achieved this, or tried to achieve this, by abandoning Frederick. At the Mühlhausen meeting he had shown that he disapproved of the seizure of the crown. Shortly after, he signed a treaty with Ferdinand, by which in return for his armed intervention he exacted a guarantee of the Lutheran faith in Bohemia and the recognition of all secularized Church land in the Lower and Upper Saxon Circles. The justification for this extraordinary move, which Frederick’s friends regarded as the most callous treachery, was that John George had seen the Spanish danger and adopted what he thought to be the best means of defence—that of making Spanish help unnecessary. Ferdinand restored by German Protestant arms as a constitutional monarch in Bohemia, Ferdinand owing his prestige as Emperor to the loyalty of a German prince, would be a thousand times safer than Ferdinand re-established by the help of Spanish troops and his own dynasty.
This was not only the subsequent justification, it was probably the actual cause of John George’s action. Unhappily his dynastic ambitions were stronger than his political instinct. The guarantee of Lutheranism in Bohemia, the confirmation of the secularized lands in North Germany, these were so many pillars of John George’s constitutionalist, Protestant policy; but unfortunately he also asked for the cession of Lusatia to Saxony. This selfish stipulation weakened a position otherwise unassailable.
Maximilian of Bavaria, the Catholic counterpart of John George, had in his treaty with Ferdinand of the previous October followed the same line of thought. He too had sought to make the Emperor dependent for his restoration on German and not on Spanish arms, and he too had tripped over his dynastic ambition by stipulating for the Electorate of Frederick as his reward.
Although both John George and Maximilian were influenced by the same ideas, dynastic ambition prevented their alliance. When Maximilian heard of John George’s treaty, he became so jealous that he could only be satisfied by a guarantee that he himself should have the supreme direction of the war in Bohemia while John George confined his attack to Silesia and Lusatia.[49]
Intensely alive to immediate advantage, these partial patriots nullified their common policy. Neither of them realized that by bargaining with Ferdinand for lands and titles they were giving him a dangerous mandate for cutting up and redistributing the Empire in any way that he chose. Neither of them realized that Ferdinand did not forgo Spanish help when he sought theirs; nor did he give them any undertaking with regard to Frederick’s lands on the Rhine.[50]
5.
The tragedy of Frederick moved swiftly to a close. Some Catholic prophets had hoped that he would prove but a Winter King, and although he had now the spring and summer to his credit each month brought some new forewarning of disaster. Early in the year he visited the chief parts of his new realm, and at Brünn, at Bautzen, at Breslau, he was enthusiastically received. At Olmütz, however, the authorities filled the hall for his reception with peasantry and soldiers lest the absence of the Catholic gentry should be perceived. Frederick remained unaware that half his subjects in that town hated him because his party had desecrated their churches.[51] He was innocently busy planning future hunting parties for his Queen; in the cold season he had been persuaded to leave her in Prague. ‘Il m’ennuie fort de coucher seul’[52] he lamented in his letters.
Little by little he realized his danger. On the night of his coming to Brünn, a contingent of Polish troops crossed the frontier in answer to an appeal from Ferdinand, and the distant glare of flaming villages reddened the horizon. He did not speak of it in his letters to Elizabeth, admitting only that he was very tired—‘l’esprit rompu’.[53]
There was cause enough to break a stouter spirit. His friends failed him on every side, and the enthusiasm of his subjects evaporated with his hopes. They had elected him not for love of his person but for the help he could bring them,[54] and he had brought them none. At first his private means had sufficed to increase the Bohemian army by seven thousand men,[55] but by March 1620 he was appealing for a loan as far afield as London, by midsummer he was pledging his jewellery and persecuting the Jews and Catholics for ready money.[56] Conditions among his troops grew desperate; demoralized by camp-fever, penniless, hungry and insecure, they plundered the country bare. Anhalt’s spasmodic execution of culprits availed nothing, and here and there the peasantry, taking the law into their own hands, broke into revolt.[57] Efforts to organize conscription broke down: the province of Silesia managed to furnish only four hundred cavalry and those very bad, and at Olmütz in Moravia the conscripted peasants, finding no officers ready to take charge of them, dispersed within a few days to their homes.[58]
Short of horses, short of artillery, short of money, Ernst von Mansfeld still occupied Pilsen in Frederick’s name. In the summer he journeyed to Prague in search of pay for his men. He was followed at a little distance by a regiment which he had disbanded for lack of funds; led by their indignant officers they broke into Prague and surrounded his lodgings so that he had to cut his way out, sword in hand, and call up the royal life-guard to protect him.[59] These disbanded men were not alone in creating disturbances; the officers of the conscript army seized every excuse to abandon their dwindling forces and swagger about the streets and taverns of the capital.[60]
The city, indeed, provoked comparison with Sodom and Gomorrah, making merry under skies heavy with disaster. There were balls and banquets at the houses of the nobility, sleighing parties in the winter and bathing parties in the summer, while the King himself drove about the town in a bright red cloak with a yellow feather stuck jauntily in his hat. When the warm weather came he bathed stark naked in the Moldau before the Queen and all her ladies, so that the burghers of Prague strained disapproving eyes to catch every detail of the immodest spectacle.[61] Visitors flocked to stare at the gay young King and Queen who gave ‘free and bountiful entertainment to strangers in abundance’ and allowed the curious to gape at the state rooms in the Hradschin and even to dandle the latest royal infant. One of them deftly removed his woollen shoes for a souvenir.[62]
Seldom can such innocent and well-intentioned rulers have made themselves more readily disliked. Frederick’s one hope was to gain the devotion of his new subjects; but he provoked the contempt of his ministers and the hatred of the populace. Shy of his advisers, bewildered by the language and the peculiarities of the constitution he had pledged himself to defend, Frederick displayed even less than his usual intelligence. At the Protestant assembly of Nuremberg he answered an ambassador, repeating by heart the reply to a totally different question.[63] In Bohemia he scandalized his courtiers and advisers by receiving them always bare-headed, but turning to Anhalt for the answer to every question, by allowing his hand to be kissed far too often, by giving precedence to the Queen in public and letting her appear in dresses which no respectable Bohemian husband would have permitted to his wife.[64]
He annoyed the leading statesmen and above all the nobility of Bohemia by suggesting that serfdom should be abolished, by attempting to impose a new oath of allegiance and by urging the Estates to elect his five-year-old son as his successor.[65] He annoyed the people by blundering efforts to check the immorality of Prague,[66] and worst of all by desecrating their churches. The great church of the Jesuits and the cathedral were ruthlessly stripped of images, while Frederick’s chaplain sent his two maidservants to carry the relics away for firewood. The Queen, it was rumoured, had even wanted to break open the tomb of Saint Wenceslas, and she had certainly insisted with misplaced modesty that the ‘naked bather�
�� in the middle of the Charles Bridge be torn down. She was not obeyed, for the citizens came out armed to prevent the desecration of the crucified Saviour above the Moldau.[67]
Misguided as Frederick and his wife were, their subjects did little to help them. The Bohemians, Frederick’s advisers asserted, thought of nothing but ‘gratifying their brothers and friends’ in the administration both of the army and the State. Some of them were even said to have told the King, when he called a meeting at seven in the morning, that it was against their privileges to rise so early.[68] The State was honeycombed with disaffection, for the old animosities of nobility, burghers and peasantry were sharpened by the distresses of the country, and treason was suspected at the very Court of the King.[69]
So matters stood when on July 23rd 1620 Maximilian of Bavaria crossed the Austrian frontier with the army of the Catholic League, twenty-five thousand men[70] under his general, Count Tilly. The troops, mercenaries of many tongues, marched to the encouragement of Jesuit preachers, the twelve largest cannon were each called after an apostle, and their general’s especial patroness was the Virgin Mary. As a young man, Tilly had wished to enter the Society of Jesus, but later, deciding to fight God’s battles in another field, had maintained throughout his life in camps so strict a morality and so unfailing a devotion to his Patroness that he was popularly known as the ‘monk in armour’.[71]
Maximilian intended first to make certain of Austria where many of the Protestant gentry were in arms. Before Tilly’s forces the peasantry fled, carrying with them what they could, and Maximilian advanced in the blustering storms of a cold summer across a deserted country, and over roads strewn with the carcasses of cattle and swine wantonly slaughtered by his men.[72] At Linz on August 4th he enforced the submission of the Austrian Estates, who were unable to organize resistance to so large an army without help from Bohemia.
The Thirty Years War Page 13