The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  Ferdinand could not afford to disregard these complaints. He sent to ask Wallenstein’s withdrawal from the siege of Stralsund,[26] and protested several times about the nature and extent of the quartering, although it was commonly believed in Vienna that the general paid no attention.[27] Wallenstein obeyed, it was said, when he wished to obey. He had the discretion to perceive that it would be unwise to alienate all the Catholic princes of Germany, and for this reason he evacuated Swabia and Franconia, where many Catholic bishoprics were situated, to pour his troops the more ruthlessly into Saxony and Brandenburg. In north Germany from Krempe in Holstein to the borders of Prussia only Mecklenburg escaped his armies. Mecklenburg was his own estate and he carefully respected the imperial patent which exempted all that he owned from war contributions.

  4.

  In Vienna, meanwhile, Ferdinand pursued the less spectacular part of his policy. He was not a clever man but he had a certain unconscious ability for appropriating the ideas of clever men and converting them to his own uses. Just such a transformation he was now engaged upon. During the past year the Catholic princes, and particularly Maximilian, had pressed energetically upon his notice the excellent opportunity he now had of restoring the lands seized from the Church in the three-quarters of a century which had elapsed since the settlement of Augsburg.[28] This enthusiasm had not at first been reciprocated by the Emperor, who feared both the upheaval that the change might cause and the danger that Maximilian would make it an occasion for increasing his own power. He wanted Osnabrück for a cousin, and his brother had already engrossed the bishoprics of Münster, Liège, Hildesheim, and Paderborn with that of Cologne.[29]

  With the increasing strength of Wallenstein, Ferdinand’s attitude gradually altered. An Edict of Restitution properly carried out could be advantageous to the sovereign power of his dynasty. In the latter part of the year 1628 the idea assumed the first place in Ferdinand’s internal policy, and now the Catholic princes hung back,[30] for Maximilian had as much reason to contest an Edict of Restitution which gave lands and power to the Hapsburg as he had previously had reason to advocate one that would increase his own. Besides, there had been talk at different moments in his long career of making him the champion of the Church in place of Ferdinand—it had been partly his motive in founding the Catholic League and was being urged upon him now by the Pope himself—so that his rival’s sudden appropriation of the plan for restitution, at the best possible moment for himself and the worst for Maximilian, was acutely embarrassing. Ferdinand stole the thunder that the Bavarian ruler had been so carefully preparing.

  It would be unfair to Ferdinand to suppose that the processes of his mind were so deliberate or so cynical as they appear on analysis of the bare facts. He was genuinely devout, and if his education had made it impossible for him to distinguish between the needs of his Church and of his dynasty, the fault is one which is inherent in all political education. What political party, what political leader in the recorded history of the world could plead innocent? He had always wanted the restitution of the usurped lands of the Church: but when it was first suggested to him the occasion had not seemed propitious and now, in the course of the year 1628, it had become so.

  Ferdinand was supported in his plan by his confessor, Father Lamormaini; he was a Jesuit, and circumstances had inclined the Jesuits to regard the house of Hapsburg as the special instrument of Heaven in re-establishing the Catholic Church. It will for ever remain an undecided point whether the Jesuits were correct in their calculations and the Pope wrong. Ferdinand, Wallenstein and the united Catholic Church would surely have swept the Reformation out of Germany; but with the Church disunited by an irrelevant political issue, Cardinal Richelieu, Maximilian and Father Joseph could, with the blessing of Rome, be undoing in Munich and Paris all that Ferdinand and Father Lamormaini were doing in Vienna.

  Ferdinand had formulated a general and a particular plan, the first embracing all Germany, the second affecting the bishopric of Magdeburg only. The first and larger plan was to effect the return of all Church lands wrongfully usurped since 1555. Since no Diet could possibly be expected to vote for this, the scheme was to be executed on the strength of an imperial edict. This would serve the double purpose of expelling the Protestants and putting the Emperor’s power of government by proclamation to a decisive test.

  The change that Ferdinand intended to force upon his subjects was little less than revolutionary. It entailed the alteration of boundaries over all north and central Germany; princes who had grown rich on secularized property would sink at one blow to the level of minor nobility. The Duke of Wolfenbüttel alone held the lands of thirteen convents and a great part of what had once been the bishopric of Hildesheim, while the situation in Hesse, Württemberg, and Baden was nearly as grave, and the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg were not safe. Ferdinand had indeed guaranteed the lands of Saxony as the price of John George’s initial alliance, but now that he could safely dispense with that alliance, there was no further security for his word; he had not kept his promise to maintain freedom for the Lutherans in Bohemia.

  More perilous still was the position of the free cities. Augsburg, the greatest Lutheran city in Germany, was in the heart of a Catholic bishopric and had been Catholic in 1555; the conversion of the small German town had been the work of the latter part of the sixteenth century, and what was to happen at Dortmund, with all its churches now Protestant and only thirty Catholics in it?[31]—at Rothenburg, at Nördlingen, at Kempten, at Heilbronn? The return to the situation of 1555 would mean the destruction of property rights that had the sanction of three generations, the expulsion of noblemen from their estates and burghers from their towns; if the principle of cujus regio ejus religio was to be enforced in the lands restored to the Church, there would be a disturbance in the actual population which could not but lead to widespread distress and the stopping of all such commercial activity as had so far survived the war.

  Moreover, Ferdinand was making no allowance for the size of the Catholic party in Germany in relation to the amount of new land it would have to digest. Even in Bohemia he had had difficulty in finding Catholic overlords fast enough for the estates, and Catholic priests fast enough for the people. He did not himself realize the enormity of the change that he wished to effect in Germany, if he imagined that the Jesuits and the Hapsburg dynasty alone would be able to engross the restored lands of the Church.

  This was the general aspect of the question. The particular case of Magdeburg revealed Ferdinand’s intentions at their simplest. This bishopric covered a large stretch of country on the Elbe between the small principality of Anhalt to the south and the Electorate of Brandenburg to the north. Since the Elbe was the chief highway between the Hapsburg dominions and the North Sea, the land was of the utmost strategic importance. The old Wendish name of the great episcopal town, Magataburg, had been slurred into the popular German form which meant the virgin city, and the accidental corruption had acquired in the last century a romantic significance from the prolonged resistance of the burghers to the attack of Charles V. Over their chief gate was the wooden statue of a young girl with a virgin’s wreath in her hand and the device, ‘Who will take it?’ Although her burghers were for the most part Lutheran, Magdeburg had been technically a Catholic bishopric at the time of the Augsburg settlement. In 1628 she still tolerated just within her walls a small and harmless monastery, and among her thirty thousand inhabitants there were a few hundred Catholics. The cathedral and all the churches had been long since seized and the bishopric had passed into the hands of a Protestant administrator.

  Christian William, a prince of the house of Brandenburg, who had been administrator when the Danish King invaded, had rashly entered into open alliance with him. Forced to abandon his bishopric at the approach of Wallenstein, he had since then fled for help to the King of Sweden, while his forsaken subordinates, anxious only for peace, had elected a son of the neutral Elector of Saxony in his place.[32] It was too late, for already th
e Emperor had declared the bishopric sequestrated in favour of his son Leopold. This was an enterprise, said Ferdinand, on which ‘the salvation and happiness of many thousand souls depended, nay the rest and well-being of our house, as well as of the whole realm, the Holy Catholic Church and true religion’.[33] But if the Emperor had his way, the salvation and happiness of many thousand souls would also depend on the spiritual guidance of a twelve-year-old boy who was appalled at the prospect of becoming a priest.[34]

  With Wallenstein ready to seize Magdeburg for the young Archduke,[35] and his troops holding all north Germany in check, Ferdinand sent a draft of the proposed Edict of Restitution to Maximilian of Bavaria and John George of Saxony. It was a challenge to the constitutionalists, Catholic and Protestant alike, but it was a safe challenge. John George could not object without risking a quarrel with Ferdinand that he was too weak to sustain alone, Maximilian could not object without compromising that position of Catholic leader which he was so carefully building up. Gradually Ferdinand was forcing his concealed enemies to abandon either their enmity or their concealment.

  Grasping unhesitatingly at the same defence, the two electors demanded a Diet to discuss the matter.[36] Ferdinand declared that the wounds of the Church could not wait for a Diet to heal them, and on March 6th 1629, he promulgated his Edict of Restitution to a defenceless Germany.

  It was a searching document. In the first place it denied legitimate existence to the Calvinists. In the second place it denied the right of a Protestant to buy Church land, for Church land was inalienable and could not legally be sold. Thus even those who had honestly acquired the quondam spoils of the Church were to suffer. In the third place, and this was the most important of all, it denied the validity of any previous legal judgements in respect of Church land, thus asserting the private right of the Emperor to alter laws and legal decisions according to his will. The commissioners were instructed furthermore that if any complained that the Edict had not the sanction of a Diet, they should expound to them the doctrine of imperial absolutism.[37]

  Ferdinand took little notice of the instant outcry from the administrative circles of Swabia and Franconia, where a very large proportion of land would have to change hands as a result of the Edict; he paid only polite attention to the lengthy and highly constitutional protest of the Elector of Saxony, answering it in a letter scarcely less long and quite as complicated.[38] He was, however, anxious to pacify Maximilian and took the occasion to offer him the sees of Verden and Minden for his family as soon as the Archduke Leopold had been appointed to Magdeburg, Halberstadt and Bremen. But Maximilian could not be so easily calmed when the property rights of all the princes in Germany were endangered and the Emperor was frankly enforcing his will at the sword’s point—Wallenstein’s sword.

  Soldiers were pouring into the bishopric of Halberstadt, and the Duke of Wolfenbüttel, who already owed more than the market value of all his lands in war contributions, was to be forcibly divested of about a third of his territory, wrongfully appropriated from the Church; in Württemberg fourteen convents had already been seized by the troops.

  Ferdinand was ingenious in using Wallenstein’s army for the enforcement of the Edict, since he could plead the advancement of the Church as an excuse for maintaining the general’s power. Surely the League would not wish to hinder the cause of true religion by attacking its mightiest supporter? But true religion or no, the members of the Catholic League had their own princely rights nearer at heart, and in December 1629 they demanded drastic reductions in the army. The fact that they did not definitely ask for the general’s dismissal must be attributed to one of those temporary changes of front which were a disturbing feature of Maximilian’s policy,[39] he appears at this moment to have wanted the army reduced but the general kept. In fact, he got neither, for Ferdinand issued a disingenuous order by which Wallenstein was forbidden to form new regiments, but given a free hand to enlarge his old ones, and his recruiting went forward unchecked.[40]

  All this while Ferdinand built his power stone by stone, not on his own strength but on the weakness of his people. Rather than submit to the Edict of Restitution, stormed the Protestant pamphleteers, ‘The Germans would cast away all laws and customs and let their country become a wilderness once more.’[41] The angry broadsheet, the popular song, the formal protest—these they issued in hundreds, but of active resistance there was none.

  The city of Augsburg had, since the celebrated Confession of Augsburg, a special significance which made it almost sacred to Lutherans.[42] An attack on this town might reasonably be expected to awaken a new spirit of resistance in the Empire. Although the so-called Catholic bishopric of Augsburg had never ceased to exist, the town itself, unlike Magdeburg and Halberstadt, was a free city of the Empire, independent of the bishop. By reason of this divided control, the citizens exercised the religion they had chosen, while the bishop retired to a residence outside the boundaries of the free territory and continued to administer his episcopal lands.

  When Wallenstein enforced the Edict of Restitution at Magdeburg he was partly at least within the letter of existing laws. There was no specific constitutional fault in the Edict itself, only the weight of tradition against it. Magdeburg was an episcopal town, not a free city. The question of Augsburg was on an altogether different plane, for the right of a free city had never yet been contested with impunity. Ferdinand had only to look back twenty years and remember what had happened when even the petty little Donauwörth had been deprived of its rights by an imperial judgement. But Ferdinand had never yet hesitated because a task was dangerous. The challenging and subduing of Augsburg was worth the supposed risk: it would put the power of the free cities to the test and it would prove the effectual force, if any, of the Protestant opposition.

  On August 8th 1629, after certain preliminary discussions with the municipality, the exercise of the Protestant religion was altogether forbidden and its ministers were exiled from the city.[43] Augsburg collapsed without a sword drawn or a shot fired. Eight thousand citizens went into exile, among them an old man, Elias Holl, who had been master-mason for thirty years and had but recently completed the town hall which was the burghers’ greatest pride.[44] It stands to this day, massive and grey, a monument to that forgotten Germany which the Thirty Years War destroyed.

  Great was the indignation of the Protestants, but no man raised a finger save only John George of Saxony who wrote his habitual letter of dignified protest.[45] The reason was clear: there was neither courage nor hope left in Germany.

  5.

  Within the Empire, Ferdinand had never been stronger; he had a power unequalled since the days of Charles V, a power which might with time and skill be the foundation of a revivified, re-united German state in which princely rights would be limited and Hapsburg absolutism with the Catholic Church reign supreme.

  Outside the Empire, the storm gathered against him. It gathered in Mantua and the Low Countries, it was to break in the north from Sweden, and the cause behind it was the enmity between France and Spain. Ferdinand paid dearly for the faults of his Spanish cousins; he might have achieved a renewed power alone, he could not drag the carcass of Spain with him. Financially the master of imperial policy, Philip IV was politically worse than a dead-weight, he was dangerous. He introduced complications into Ferdinand’s straight course which ruined him: he drew off the military strength of Germany to Italy, he forced the man who was rebuilding the Empire as a Catholic federation to quarrel with the Pope, he made him risk the solidarity of his new creation by driving him into war with the Dutch. Last of all, the fear of Spanish aggression prompted Richelieu to arrange a truce between the Kings of Poland and Sweden, thereby unleashing a Protestant champion against the rising Catholic Empire to destroy it for ever.

  First came the Mantuan war. When Ferdinand, on a hint from Spain, sequestered the duchy, the Pope was at once in terror of further Hapsburg intervention in Italy. In vain Ferdinand, supported by his confessor, Father Lamormaini,[46] hun
g back to avoid this crisis; the Spanish King rated him soundly for not acting more emphatically against the French Duke of Mantua,[47] and Ferdinand was compelled to send imperial troops to Italy. The indignant Pope wavered only for a little; at the desire of the nuncio in Vienna he made one mild effort to buy Ferdinand off by sending him a relic,[48] but when this did not check the Mantuan campaign he turned almost brutally against him. He would not canonize either Wenceslas of Bohemia or Stephen of Hungary at his request; he refused to give him the right to appoint bishops to the reclaimed sees—a refusal which Ferdinand disregarded; he insisted that monastic lands should be given back to the orders from whom they had been taken and not to the Jesuits.[49] An excitable, talkative little man, Urban VIII soon let the whole of Rome know which way the wind blew. He could not speak above a whisper, he announced, because of Spanish spies in the Vatican, and he slept so ill at nights for worry over Mantua that he had all the birds in his gardens killed lest they should disturb him with untimely chirruping.[50]

  Insignificant in itself, the Mantuan crisis was the turning point in the Thirty Years War, for it precipitated the final division of the Catholic Church against itself, alienated the Pope from the Hapsburg dynasty and made morally possible the calling in of Protestant allies by Catholic powers to redress the balance.

  The year 1629, the twelfth year of the war, was more eventful in theory than in fact. Not in the field but in the chancelleries of Europe things moved towards a new formation. The Spanish monarchy asserted itself over the Empire and turned Ferdinand’s hitherto successful policy into a difficult and dangerous channel. Spanish interests in Mantua thrust Ferdinand into opposition against the Pope; Spanish interests in the Low Countries forced him to risk his new-found imperial power on a Dutch war and to risk it in vain. While Ferdinand had been successful in Germany his Spanish cousins had been unsuccessful in Flanders, and they turned now not so much to ask as to exact help from him.