Never had Germany seen an army such as that which landed with Gustavus. There were twenty-eight warships and as many transports lying off the Pomeranian coast, sixteen troops of horse and ninety-two companies of foot with a strong detachment of artillery, thirteen thousand men in all.[16] This was a small army, but the King was already recruiting in Germany and he did not intend to win the war by numbers alone. Unlike the polyglot herds of mercenaries, his army had a collective knowledge of its purpose. The cavalry and the artillery were for the most part his own subjects, strong in the sense of national unity; from the tall, muscular men of southern Sweden with their pale hair and light eyes, to the squat, swarthy Laplanders on their shaggy ponies, whom the Germans imagined to be only half human,[17] and the lean, colourless Finns, children of a wintry land—all alike were subjects of the King and all alike his fellow-soldiers. He was their sovereign, their general, almost their god.
The infantry was different, having but a nucleus of Swedes, the rest mostly Scots and Germans with other soldiers of fortune recruited during the course of his wars. Gustavus did not despise the usual custom of enrolling prisoners in his army, but with this difference, that his principles were not those of other generals: he exacted loyalty not only to the banner but to the ideals for which he fought and for which he was himself prepared to die. He enlisted men of all religions, but Lutheranism was the official creed of his troops. Prayers were held twice daily and each man was provided with a pocket hymn-book of songs suitable for battle.
Discipline was faultless in theory and comparatively effective in practice. There was a standing order that no attack be made on hospitals, churches, schools, or the civilians connected with them. One quarter of the breaches of discipline mentioned in his military code were punishable by death; in the King’s absence his colonels were empowered to pronounce sentence out of hand.[18]
Even such severity might have been ineffective without the personality of the King. The chief cause of disorder in all armies was the lack of prompt and regular pay, and this neither Gustavus nor Axel Oxenstierna could prevent. Sweden was a poor country and could not be pressed too hard; the chancellor, who controlled the finances, attempted to pay for the war out of the tolls and customs raised at Riga and the lesser ports of the Polish seaboard,[19] but they were insufficient and the arrangements for distribution broke down very frequently. Gustavus paid his men in another currency. He cared unceasingly for their welfare, and if money was scarce they had at least proper food and clothing. Each man was equipped with a fur cloak, gloves, woollen stockings, and boots made of waterproof Russian leather.[20] Chiefly, as Sir Thomas Roe observed, the King ‘hath the singular grace to content his followers without money, because he is “commiles” with every man, and gives besides excellent words and good usage as much as he hath’.[21] In extreme cases, and only in extreme cases, he allowed his army a limited licence to raise the necessities of life by plunder.
There was a reverse side to the King’s admirable discipline. When for political or strategic reasons he wished to ruin a country, his men, released from the customary restraint, made up with interest for the opportunities they had been forced to miss.
Gustavus added a sense of publicity to his other qualities. His agent, Adler Salvius, had been stirring up north Germany with talk of the German Liberties and abuse of the imperial government for a month or more before the King sailed, and on the eve of his embarkation had issued a manifesto in five languages to the people and rulers of Europe, justifying the King’s espousal of the Protestant Cause.[22] As soon as he landed he issued a second manifesto, declaring that the intervention of Ferdinand in Poland had provoked him to take up arms for the oppressed. He had tried in vain to argue peaceably with the Emperor, but both at Lübeck and at Stralsund his ambassadors had been turned away, and at last perceiving that the German Electors would not protect their own Church, he had taken up arms to do it himself.[23]
On July 20th, he entered Stettin, the capital of Pomerania, insisted on seeing the unwarlike old Duke and forced him to become his ally and provide money. The unhappy man agreed but wrote immediately after to Ferdinand apologizing abjectly and pleading force majeure.[24] Should the promised monies not be paid, Gustavus proposed to hold Pomerania in pledge; thus within three weeks of landing he had already staked out Sweden’s claim to a valuable strip of the Baltic coast.
He had foothold, or the possibility of foothold, in other parts of Germany. The exiled Dukes of Mecklenburg were his allies; he had declared himself ready to restore Frederick of Bohemia to the Palatinate,[25] and before the end of 1630 he had secured the alliance of the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. More important than any of these was the friendship of Christian William, the deposed Protestant administrator of Magdeburg. Magdeburg, the key fortress on the Elbe and one of the wealthiest cities of Germany, was the strategic base coveted by both Gustavus and Tilly. It had, moreover, sullenly resisted the crusading zeal of the Emperor, so that if Gustavus could hold it he would immediately justify himself as a Protestant Champion.
With the help of Swedish arms and men, Christian William re-entered the city on August 6th 1630, and declared that he would defend his bishopric, with God’s help and the King of Sweden’s, against all comers. In Germany, Protestant news-sheets published the statement in joyous verse, but at Magdeburg itself relief was tempered by fear, for while the majority of the burghers loved their religion they feared the consequences of revolt. When Christian William was reinstated in his episcopal chair, a flight of ravens wheeled screeching over the town, and in the angry sunsets of succeeding nights strange armies fought among the clouds, while under the lurid reflections of the sky the Elbe ran blood-red.[26] Europe applauded the splendid defiance, but at Magdeburg the people sulked, quarrelled and obstructed their defenders.
Gustavus wintered in Pomerania and the Mark of Brandenburg, but lack of supplies forced him early to take the field.[27] On January 23rd 1631 he was at Bärwalde on his way to Frankfort on the Oder, the next object of his campaign. Here he received the agents of Richelieu and signed the long-projected treaty of alliance.
The Treaty of Bärwalde was for liberty of trade and the mutual protection of France and Sweden. After this preliminary flourish came the more serious clauses. Gustavus was to keep on foot an army of thirty thousand foot and six hundred horse in Germany, at the expense or part-expense of France, while Richelieu undertook on every 15th of May and November to pay the equivalent of twenty thousand imperial talers into the Swedish treasury. In return for this support, Gustavus was to guarantee freedom of worship for Catholics throughout Germany, to leave the lands of Maximilian of Bavaria, France’s friend, unmolested, and to make no separate peace at least until the lapse of the treaty in five years’ time.[28]
Gustavus showed himself as good a diplomatist as he was administrator and soldier. He forced up Richelieu’s offer from fifteen to twenty thousand talers, and insisted that the sly Cardinal be openly compromised by the publication of this treaty with a Protestant power.[29] He knew well enough that if the treaty remained technically secret, men would whisper that he was ashamed to be the pawn of France. As a party to a secret treaty, he would seem a mere puppet, as a party to an open treaty, he was an equal ally.
Was it a distinction without a difference? In his struggle against the Hapsburg, Richelieu intended to make good use of the surplus energies of such inspired champions as the King of Sweden. The people of north Germany were already flocking to his banners, their ministers praying for him, their sons hastening to join his ranks. The Protestant Cause was alive again. But Richelieu and his secretaries in the stuffy anterooms of the Louvre imagined they knew better. The exploitation of courage and spiritual ardour has been the opportunity of the practical politician since the world began, and at Bärwalde the King of Sweden was—they thought—limed and taken.
They were mistaken. The King’s faith was genuine, his desire to help oppressed Protestants was sincere, but he was neither simple soldier nor fanatic. ‘He i
s a brave prince,’ Sir Thomas Roe meditated, ‘but wise to save himself, and maketh good private use of an opinion and reputation that he is fit to restore the public’.[30] He stood, the English diplomat considered, even now upon the banks of the Rubicon, but ‘he will not pass over unless his friend build the bridge’.[31] Richelieu would hardly have described his policy as building a bridge for the King of Sweden; rather the King of Sweden was to build a bridge for him. But the Cardinal and his agents had overreached themselves, and the King of Sweden had signed the Treaty of Bärwalde with his eyes open. With the help of French money he would shortly make himself independent of French policy: exploitation is a game that two can play.
3.
The Treaty of Bärwalde was open to any German ruler who wished to join in throwing off the oppression of the Emperor. This was a direct invitation to the Protestants to take up arms against Ferdinand. Eleven years before, when Bohemia was in revolt, they had had a like opportunity to band themselves against the Emperor. They had lost it. Now in 1630 it was given them again. As in 1619, John George of Saxony stood out for the stability of the constitution against those who sought to overthrow it. He who had once held the balance between Ferdinand and Frederick, now held it between Ferdinand and Gustavus. In 1619 he had had to choose between Protestantism and Catholicism, the one openly, the other surreptitiously attacking the German constitution. But now, in 1630, there was virtually no constitution to defend, and the choice between Catholic and Protestant had lost its meaning. Hapsburg aggression had driven the Papacy and Catholic France, the one into sympathy, the other into alliance with the Protestants, and Europe no longer presented even the approximate outline of a religious cleavage. The political aspect of the conflict had destroyed the spiritual.
The statesman, no less than the fanatic, will always simplify a complex situation in order to see his way more clearly. Thus for Gustavus and Ferdinand, for the great man as for the small man, the issues were much the same as they had been in 1619. To their thinking, religion still dominated the conflict. For John George everything had altered. He saw on one side Ferdinand with his unconstitutional demands, and on the other Gustavus with his menacing foreign power, and crushed between the two, the forgotten interests of Germany as an Empire and as a nation.
The choice between Ferdinand and Gustavus was easier for John George than had been that between Frederick and Ferdinand—for Frederick had at least been a German. Gustavus was a foreigner, an invader, a trespasser on the soil, and in the politics, of the Holy Roman Empire. John George could decide clearly and immediately against Gustavus. But to decide was one thing, to act another.
To understand what happened in Germany in the next two years, it is necessary to see one thing clearly. The real enemy of Gustavus was not Ferdinand, but John George of Saxony, whatever his open policy. Ferdinand was the simplest, the most frank, the most considerate of enemies; he stood fair and square without pretence, extending the whole front of his religious and dynastic policy before the onslaught of the Swedish King. There was no concealment here. But he was fighting for a cause that, with the desertion of the Pope, had ceased to have any reality. He was nothing but the target for Gustavus’s attack. And Gustavus himself, sincere as was his religion, was fighting for the material aggrandizement of Sweden and the Baltic seaboard. His enemies were not the Catholics but all who stood for the solidarity of Germany. Of these the leader was John George.
There were three elements in the situation. There was the conflict between Catholic and Protestant, the open issue between Ferdinand and Gustavus, which for all its unreality still seemed to the average European the ultimate and only question. There was the political rivalry between Hapsburg and Bourbon which dominated the official policy of Paris, Madrid, and Vienna. Buried under these there was the direct issue between the native German and the Swedish invader.
This is a discussion of facts, not of motives. There can be no doubt of Gustavus’s sincerity. He had, like many great leaders, an unlimited capacity for self-deception. In his own eyes the Protestant champion, in Richelieu’s eyes a convenient instrument against the House of Austria, he was in sober fact the protagonist of Swedish expansion on German soil. Sweden stood to gain, Protestantism stood to gain, but the German people stood to lose. John George alone saw the danger through the emotional smoke and the diplomatic mirage which blinded Europe, and guided his policy by his conviction.
An unexpected ally came to his aid in the winter of 1630. George William, the handsome, well-intentioned Elector of Brandenburg, had spent the eleven years of his reign in a state of gloomy bewilderment. Under the influence of his chief minister, the Catholic Schwarzenberg, this Calvinist ruler of a Lutheran state had played for neutrality. It was not an easy thing to do, for he had married a sister of Frederick of Bohemia, and harboured in Berlin his mother-in-law who ceaselessly urged him to perform some valiant action for her dispossessed son. Inconveniently, too, Gustavus Adolphus had, at an early period, carried off and married his sister, thus plunging him into an aggressively Protestant alliance. In spite of all, George William clung doggedly to his imperial loyalty, urging the defeatist excuse that he thought it would be safest for the dynasty. Unhappily, he reaped no benefit for what the English agent not unnaturally described as ‘too cold and stupid a neutrality’;[32] Wallenstein used his lands for campaigning against the Dane, Gustavus Adolphus made them a base against the Pole, and the wretched Elector, driven to desperation, was forced to realize that Wallenstein, if not the Emperor himself, actually wanted to declare war so that there would be an excuse for depriving him of his Electorate.[33]
In 1630 the worm turned at last. At their meeting at Annaburg in April and December of that year, John George persuaded George William to disregard Schwarzenberg’s advice, first to refuse to go to Regensburg and secondly to call a Protestant Convention at Leipzig to discuss Ferdinand’s policy.[34]
Here John George in his opening speech declared that the purpose of the assembly was to establish trust between the two parties for the peace of Germany;[35] undoubtedly, he hoped that the sight of Brandenburg and Saxony united against him would induce Ferdinand to compromise with them, lest they should join the King of Sweden. Even he knew by this time that it was no good speaking gentle half-hints to Ferdinand, and he had opened his diplomatic campaign by advertising the news that he was arming for the defence of his lands and the rights of the German Protestants. On March 28th, the Leipzig meeting issued a manifesto which had the nature of an ultimatum. They cited the Edict of Restitution as the root cause of continued disturbance in the Empire, in the next place the imperial and League army; they lamented the decay of princely rights, the disregard of the constitution, and the straits to which the war had reduced the country. If Ferdinand would not immediately join with them for the remedying of these evils, they could not be responsible for the consequences. The manifesto was, in fact, a qualified declaration of war. It was signed by the Elector of Saxony and his cousins the princes of the lesser Saxon principalities, by the Elector of Brandenburg, by the representatives of Anhalt, Baden, Hesse, Brunswick-Lüneburg, Württemberg, Mecklenburg, and innumerable independent nobility, not to mention the Protestant Abbess of Quedlinburg, the towns of Nuremberg, Lübeck, Strasbourg, Frankfort-on-the-Main, Mühlhausen, and the lesser independent cities of Swabia.[36]
Incontrovertibly, John George had done the best thing to save Germany. He had stood forth with his colleague of Brandenburg as the defender of Protestantism and the constitution, and he had the great majority of Protestant opinion behind him. Calvinists and Lutherans were standing side by side at last. Even the Dukes of Mecklenburg and the Landgrave of Hesse, allied as they were with the King of Sweden, had shown by signing the Leipzig manifesto that they were not unwilling to settle without foreign intervention. That left only Magdeburg, the Duke of Pomerania, and Frederick of Bohemia as the unqualified allies of Gustavus. John George’s position was a strong one and he used it.
If he could frighten the Emperor into
a compromise settlement, he would have defeated the King of Sweden without a blow. For Gustavus, everything depended on his reception in Germany. If the army that John George was now straining every resource to raise, the army for which he had secured Wallenstein’s best commander, Hans Georg von Arnim, a Brandenburger and a Protestant, if this army were to assert the neutrality of Germany in the face of the King’s advance, to challenge him in the recruiting grounds of the northern plain and drain away to its own ranks the man-power that he relied on for his, then Gustavus had best sail back to Sweden and think matters over. John George’s army was not yet very large or very well-trained, but no one, least of all an experienced soldier like the King of Sweden, would be so foolish as to discount any army under the command of Hans Georg von Arnim.
Arnim was about forty years old, a soldier by taste and not by necessity. He had been largely responsible for the victorious Silesian campaign of 1627, in which Wallenstein’s reputation had been made. A deeply religious man and the loyal subject of the Elector of Brandenburg, Arnim had taken service with the imperialists for much the same reasons that John George had joined Ferdinand in 1620. He did not at first regard the war as a religious war, but rather as a war against rebels and disturbers of the imperial peace. But the Edict of Restitution had forced him, as it had forced John George, to change his mind.
Protestant Germany, therefore, had leaders at last in John George and George William, a programme in the Leipzig manifesto, and a soldier who understood how to make good a threat. The Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg were offering the support of united and armed Protestant Germany to Ferdinand if he would yield over the Edict of Restitution. Should he refuse, they could not be answerable for the consequences, for the intervention of Gustavus made further neutrality impossible; Ferdinand could not expect the Protestants to let themselves be crushed between his own advance and that of the Swedish King. If they were not against the King of Sweden, they would have to be with him.
The Thirty Years War Page 31