The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  So experienced a mercenary as Mansfeld did not act without good knowledge of European diplomacy. He knew that there were two powers, France and, in a lesser degree, England, whose decision to act, belated though it was, might yet be decisive for the Protestant Cause. By the spring of 1624 a change had come over the diplomacy of these two hitherto timorous governments; of this change he hastened to take advantage.

  King James’s plan for the Spanish marriage of his son and the imperial marriage of his grandson, Frederick’s eldest child, had fallen to the ground. At the very time when Frederick, worn out with the arguments of his father-in-law and crushed by the defeat of Stadtlohn, had agreed to countenance the scheme, James’s policy had broken down. His son and his favourite Buckingham, indignant at their reception in Spain whither they had gone to hasten the negotiations, returned to England and declared themselves unwilling to participate further in the unholy alliance. The London mob had been demanding war with Spain for months past, and the prince and Buckingham were for taking the tide of popular feeling at the flood. The two governments drifted rapidly towards the final breach. In December 1623, James was already toying with the idea of an alliance with the King of Denmark and Bethlen Gabor on behalf of his son-in-law. In January 1624, he was about to approach the United Provinces, and when Mansfeld came to London the King gave him permission to recruit twelve thousand men at England’s expense.[131]

  A change of policy made itself felt at the same time in France, where a minister had newly arisen who had something more to recommend him to the King than the excellent knowledge of falconry which had distinguished Luynes. Armand Jean du Plessis, Bishop of Luçon and Cardinal de Richelieu, was slowly acquiring that control over the King’s actions which only death was to dissolve. The son of a noble but not a wealthy family of Poitou, he had been intended first for a soldier, but the death of an elder brother had caused him to be hastily ordained, that he might succeed to the little bishopric of Luçon, long the perquisite of the family. Richelieu’s ambitions had never been confined to the narrow boundaries of his see, although he fulfilled his episcopal duties, as he did everything in his intricate career, with scrupulous thoroughness. Attaching himself at first to the party of the Queen-mother, he had gained his first ministerial appointment in 1616; since then he had contrived to maintain, except for a short interlude, his foothold on the slippery ground of advancement. He had not risen without abandoning his old friends and protectors, without arousing many bitter enemies—the Queen-mother the bitterest of all—but in the larger field of politics his ambitions were impersonal and he had used intrigue as the means to a greater end. He had the organizer’s careful ability, the percipience of the statesman and that unrestrained ambition to serve his country regardless of domestic happiness which is often the accompaniment of political genius. The national egoism of the ardent patriot mingled in him with a belief in monarchy as the essential form of government for France. France, he said, had two diseases—heresy and liberty. Sooner or later he and his King would cure them both. She had one imminent and dangerous enemy: the house of Hapsburg, whose power and influence encompassed her on the landward frontiers, on the Pyrenees, on the Alps, on the Rhine, in Flanders. His ambition was to see a united France freed from this perpetual menace, assuming her natural part as the protectress of European peace. But meanwhile he must unify and defend this exposed country of industrious and unarmed peasants, shut in between the Hapsburg lands and the sea. The guiding motive of Richelieu’s policy was not aggression but defence.[132]

  The Cardinal was barely forty in 1624, a thin, dark man with a commanding presence and cultured manners. His interests did not end with politics: he had time to be a connoisseur in jewels, antiques, works of art and music; the theatre was above all his passion and he held himself inferior to none as a critic. He even fancied himself as a poet. ‘In what do you think I take the greatest pleasure?’ he once asked a friend who tactfully answered, ‘In creating the happiness of France.’ ‘Not at all,’ countered Richelieu, ‘in writing verses.’[133] Doubtless he practised an innocent self-deception, for when his fortune momentarily forsook him he had not taken kindly to the prospect of turning verses at Luçon for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, the pretence in itself indicated the peculiar nature of his generous and civilized genius. However much he gave himself up to the service of the State, however much he appeared to make the monarchy his God, and subject all to that overwhelming deity, he had too clear a sense of proportion to assume that man was made for the State, not the State for man. He was a despot, but never a totalitarian.

  Too wise to rely wholly on his own judgement, Richelieu learnt early to assume a quiet confidence that he was far from feeling. Few men have faced more exacting problems with less help for so long a period. The only confidant in whom he entirely trusted was the devout monk, François le Clerc du Tremblay, known in religion as Father Joseph, and popularly throughout France as ‘l’Éminence grise’. This ardent Capuchin, who had devoted his whole life to the propagation of the faith, saw in Richelieu the possible leader of a united Catholic power that would not subordinate the interests of religion to those of a dynasty. Being a Capuchin and not a Jesuit, Father Joseph shared the papal suspicion of the motives of the Hapsburg Crusade. Under his influence the religious element, one might almost say the Crusading element, in Richelieu’s policy was never altogether submerged in the political.

  The Cardinal had been forced to remain in the background during the ineffective ministry of Luynes and his incompetent successor, Sillery, whose fall in January 1624 made the way at last clear. Meanwhile Louis XIII had grown from an oppressed neurotic adolescent, ready to fall under the control of the first affectionate and flattering friend, into a secretive, moody, intelligent, critical young man with an acute judgement and a will of his own. His reign, and Richelieu’s, was beginning.

  With the alteration in the politics of France and England the deadlock was at an end. All once again began to move towards an assault on the Hapsburg position. No sooner had the Spanish marriage fallen through than Richelieu suggested Madame Henriette, sister of the French King, as a bride for the Prince of Wales, at the same time covering this Protestant alliance from criticism at home by demanding guarantees of protection for Catholics in England.[134] The changed policy of the French government had immediate repercussions, not only in England but farther north. The King of Sweden turned his attention suddenly towards Germany, recklessly lengthened an existing truce with the Poles in order to have his hands free, and offered to sink his differences of opinion with the King of Denmark.[135] Christian of Denmark seemed amenable; his eyes also were fixed on Germany, where he hoped to secure the bishoprics of Halberstadt and Osnabrück for his son and had, in preparation, already offered his ‘protection’ to the Estates of the Lower Saxon Circle. The offer had been welcomed by the Estates, powerless as they were against the advancing Catholic army, but when they innocently appealed to the Emperor to confirm the King of Denmark’s son as Bishop of Halberstadt, he responded indirectly but effectively by ordering Tilly to make his winter quarters in the Circle. Faced by so clear an indication that his son should only retain Halberstadt over Ferdinand’s, or at least Tilly’s, dead body, Christian of Denmark enthusiastically accepted an offer of French subsidies and prepared to enter the lists for the German Liberties, the Protestant Cause, and his son’s bishopric.

  Richelieu did not intend to confine the war to north Germany. The House of Hapsburg was his enemy, but he feared Spain rather than Austria, and his object was to hold Austria in check in Germany while the main onslaught was upon Spain on the Rhine and in North Italy. Savoy and Venice had been approached even before he came to power, and he continued in that friendship. Above all, the United Provinces must enter the coalition. The exiled Frederick and Elizabeth, allied by marriage to almost all the Protestant rulers of Europe, became the central link of the chain which was to draw England, Denmark, Sweden and the provinces into one grand alliance with Savoy, Venice and
France. Bethlen Gabor himself was to play his part in attacking Hungary, so that the Hapsburg power should be simultaneously assaulted on flank and front and rear. Richelieu had given substance at last to those airy schemes which Frederick and his ministers had evolved vainly year by year.

  The issue was still far from simple. ‘I mean to make use of all religions to compass my ends’, the King of Great Britain had said,[136] but if it seemed as easy as that to James I, it was not so easy for Richelieu. He was embracing the Protestant Cause in Europe in order to break the Hapsburg dynasty, but whatever cynical indifference to religion reigned among the nobility and in diplomatic circles, the Cardinal had to reckon with the still profoundly devout French bourgeoisie, and he could not do anything too extravagantly unorthodox, for fear of shaking the stability of the monarchy. Happily for Richelieu, an election in Rome, completed on the very day of the defeat of Stadtlohn, had placed Cardinal Barberini in the chair of St Peter. Urban VIII, as he was now called throughout Christendom, was a comparatively young and vigorous man. A keen politician, he had for many years acted as legate in France, had held Louis XIII himself at the font and admitted on this account to a peculiar affection for him. Urban VIII was to reign twenty-one years, a time almost exactly coeval with the ministry of Richelieu. Without him the Cardinal’s policy would have been, if not impossible, at least very much more difficult of realization, for Urban VIII, although he sincerely desired the peace of Christendom, regarded the Hapsburg dynasty as a perpetual menace. He wanted peace in Europe, but if that could not be, he would not withhold his approval from those who curbed Hapsburg aggression, so that the Catholics of France could sleep contented while their taxes were poured out in subsidies to Dutch and German heretics.

  The excuse, and it was a good one, was that the inextricable combination of temporal and spiritual interests which characterized Hapsburg policy was harmful to the Church. In spite of the conversion of Bohemia, in spite of the route of Calvinism in Germany, there was much to be said for the view held by Richelieu and the Pope. It was a view equally and fanatically held by the Capuchins. If both the Hapsburg Crusade and the Papal and French opposition arose from nonreligious roots, both could be justified with equal fervour on purely spiritual grounds. The tragedy for the Catholic Church was that neither party could win a complete victory over the other.[137]

  With European dangers closing in upon him, Ferdinand must make redoubled efforts to establish his position in Germany. The weak Spanish monarchy, on whose account alone he was to be attacked, did not help him. Philip IV, the head of the dynasty and the master of the Peruvian mines, was still wholly under the control of the erratic Olivarez. The favourite, after persistently sacrificing Ferdinand to his own plan for an English alliance, had lamentably failed to complete that alliance itself. Lastly, in Flanders the Archduchess Isabella, starved of financial support by the incompetent government at Madrid, was concentrating all her forces on the comparatively weak defences of the Dutch; her only salvation lay in the reconquest of the rebellious United Provinces and she had no help to spare for Ferdinand.

  The position throughout 1624 was pregnant with danger for Austria. In the early summer it was believed that Bohemia and Moravia, too hard-pressed by confiscations and penalties, were about to revolt[138]—the alarm was false but none the less dismaying while it lasted. In the summer a French agent visited the Elector of Brandenburg, and at Vienna doubts were entertained as to his loyalty, doubts which appeared to be confirmed when his sister was given in marriage to Bethlen Gabor.

  The Elector of Saxony was wavering. In dudgeon since the elevation of Maximilian, he would not for many months be pacified, and when he was at length reconciled to the new Elector, it was in circumstances not calculated to reassure Ferdinand. The President of the Electoral College, the Elector of Mainz, asked John George to meet him at Schleusingen in July 1624, where in the intervals of hunting and carousing the wily bishop showed him a newly printed selection of documents relating to the Bohemian affair, which had been discovered in the castle of Heidelberg. Better propaganda for Maximilian against Frederick could not have been found, for here lay revealed to all the world the secret machinations behind the Bohemian revolt. John George was shocked to the depths of his honest soul. Mainz pressed home the advantage, showed the anxious prince how the King of Spain stood behind the Emperor, the Prince of Orange and perhaps the King of France behind Frederick, and that the only hope for German integrity lay in friendly union between the Electors of Bavaria and Saxony, honest native princes, opposed to foreign factions. Over-persuaded, John George recognized Maximilian’s Electorate, not to please Ferdinand, but to further the formation of the constitutional opposition to him.[139]

  Had the moment come for that nebulous centre party to take form at last, for the German princes to assert themselves against Hapsburg and Bourbon? The Electors of Saxony and Mainz fought in vain against the current which was dragging their fellows towards French and Dutch alliances. George William of Brandenburg, seduced by French and Swedish counsels, refused to recognize Maximilian’s Electorate and signed a provisional treaty with the United Provinces. Maximilian of Bavaria himself, on whose army both the Electors of Saxony and Mainz counted to give reality to their constitutional party, had for the last eighteen months steered a doubtful course. He hated and suspected the Spanish monarchy and had proved it openly by denying to the agents of the Archduchess Isabella any influence in, or even access to, those lands on the Rhine occupied by his own troops under Tilly.[140] Moreover, after the battle of Stadtlohn he had forbidden Tilly to pursue the defeated army into the United Provinces.[141] Under Capuchin influence, he had next attempted a rapprochement with France; one of the monks, who acted as his unofficial ambassadors, cherished the hope of uniting Europe for a crusade,[142] and a scheme was breathed for the formation of an international Catholic League consisting of France, Venice, Savoy, and Bavaria.[143] Maximilian’s plan to secure the friendship of France foundered on the Palatinate question: the King of Great Britain was arranging a French marriage for his son to further the restitution of his son-in-law on the Rhine, and Richelieu could not stretch out his right hand to the kin of the dispossessed and his left hand to the usurper simultaneously. In vain Maximilian attempted to settle the difference by suggesting the marriage of his niece to Frederick’s eldest son;[144] the scheme found little favour and Richelieu rejected his alliance for that of the English King.

  Panic gripped Maximilian; he had information that England, Denmark, Savoy, and Venice were arming; that England, Denmark, and Sweden were tampering with the princes of north Germany. If this meant danger for the Hapsburg power, it meant danger too for his ill-gotten titles; his only safety lay in combating the new champions who had sprung up for the defeated Frederick, even if in so doing he had to assist the Hapsburg. In the spring of 1624 he called a meeting of the Catholic League at Augsburg and persuaded his fellow-members to strengthen Tilly’s army against possible danger.[145] The move stirred both Olivarez and Richelieu to descend upon Maximilian; Richelieu, too late in the day, offered friendship.[146] Olivarez flattered him with praise of the League as Christendom’s one bulwark and offered to stand his friend in the Rhenish Palatinate. Maximilian seemed to waver towards the Spanish alliance, perhaps for safety, perhaps to frighten the French. Going back on his constitutionalism yet again, he openly declared that he would ‘live and die for the House of Austria.’[147]

  Vainly the constitutional party fought against the gathering storm; Saxony and Mainz suggested that a Diet should be called, or at least an Electoral meeting, to discuss and if possible to settle the problems of the Empire before Danish, French, and English soldiery flooded in.[148] Without the support of Maximilian, without his prestige and his money, little could be done. Intentionally or no, Ferdinand had robbed the constitutional party of its strongest defender when he gave Maximilian the Electorate of Frederick.

  Except for Bavaria, the circle of Richelieu’s alliances closed in about the common enemy. On J
une 10th 1624, at Compiègne, the governments of France and the United Provinces signed a treaty of friendship: the fundamental rival and the chief antagonist of the Hapsburg dynasty were in alliance at last. Five days later England entered the bond; on July 9th the Kings of Sweden and Denmark came to terms; on the 11th France, Savoy, and Venice agreed on joint intervention in the Val Telline; on October 23rd the Elector of Brandenburg allied himself with the United Provinces; on November 10th Henrietta of France was betrothed to the Prince of Wales.

  Meanwhile the Protestants of the Grisons had risen and defeated Ferdinand’s brother, the Archduke Leopold, with heavy loss; before Christmas they seized Tirano and blocked the Val Telline. With the melting snows of spring 1625, the Duke of Savoy, with French and native troops, descended from his highland dukedom, fell upon Asti and encircled Genoa from the precipitous heights his mountaineers could guard so well.

  The vital line was cut. With the Val Telline blocked, with hostile English ships watching the narrow seas, the King of Spain could send bullion to Flanders and Austria neither by sea nor land. It seemed that the contest whose causes lay outside Germany had ended outside Germany, and that Ferdinand who had fastened the prestige of his dynasty on that of the Empire had been wrong. Spinola had seized the Rhine in vain, and the diplomacy of Richelieu had undone the victories of Tilly from the White Hill to Stadtlohn.