More influential than any of these, Wallenstein for a short while stood guard over imperial policy. He had now unquestionably the greatest military power in Germany, so that his desire for peace had the best prospect of becoming effective. Whether he had in fact any such desire is the crux of the Wallenstein problem, and also the starting-point of those historians who have seen in the last two years of his life the struggle of a nobly constructive statesman to impose a native peace on a Court suborned by Spanish bribes. The theory is equally incapable of proof or disproof. This alone is certain: that if Wallenstein wished for peace he showed phenomenal stupidity in his approach to it, and that his contemporaries credited him neither with honesty nor with public spirit. Wallenstein wanted to retire, more probably because he was growing old and ill than because he longed for general peace. One element alone is constant in all his negotiations at this time—his demand for personal reward. True to the colours of the mercenary, he expected a return for his investment in the war, and it was for that, rather than for the peace of Germany, that he staked his reputation and his life.
Outside the Empire three rulers wanted a settlement: the Archduchess Isabella, the Prince of Orange and the Pope. Urban VIII had already sacrificed his reputation among devout Catholics to the fruitless task of preventing a clash between Hapsburg and Bourbon. He was prejudiced in his methods, but he genuinely sought to lessen the danger of European war.[1] A scandalous outburst in the consistory had been the only result of his well-intentioned but clumsy policy. The Spanish Cardinal Borgia openly accused him of neglecting the interests of the Church, and in the furious tumult which ensued one prelate, speechless with wrath, was perceived to tear his biretta in pieces. The forcible conclusion of the session by the Pope’s Swiss Guard did no good, for Borgia printed and published his speech throughout Rome.[2] To save his face, Urban had to give some grudging help to the Hapsburg cause in Germany.[3]
While there was enmity between France and Spain, Cardinal Carafa had once pronounced, there could never be peace in Germany. Those who wanted the war to continue were Richelieu, Oxenstierna and Olivarez. Richelieu needed it to maintain his power on the Rhine, Oxenstierna needed it because the venture had hitherto been so expensive that he could not return to Sweden without ample indemnification; Pomerania, the price of his withdrawal, could not be had without further fighting, since the Elector of Brandenburg must be satisfied for the robbery by the gift of equivalent land elsewhere. Olivarez wanted war because the Swedish King’s death renewed his hope of a Hapsburg advance in Germany and a successful attack on the United Provinces.
Oxenstierna and Richelieu between them could undermine the peace treaty in Protestant Germany and Europe; Olivarez could assert the financial control of Madrid over Isabella at Brussels and Ferdinand at Vienna. German hopes of peace were in pawn to the political necessities of these three men—and irredeemably.
2.
Since the marriage of the Infanta Maria to the King of Hungary in February 1631, things had moved towards a renewed co-operation between Vienna and Madrid. Richelieu must therefore prevent peace both in the Empire and in the Low Countries, and in the opening weeks of 1633 he dispatched two agents, Hercule de Charnacé to The Hague, Manassés de Pas, Marquis de Feuquières, to Germany.[4] Heartless as this behaviour appears, considering the condition of the Empire, it was politically justified and followed naturally from that fear of Spanish power which was the motive force of Richelieu’s foreign policy.
Oxenstierna’s interests marched with Richelieu’s in so far as neither wished for peace. In other respects they were bitterly, although tacitly, in opposition. In his last letter, written on November 9th 1632, Gustavus had stressed the importance of excluding the King of France from the control of any land in Germany.[5] But after Lützen Richelieu grasped the opportunity to establish the dominance of his master over the Protestant allies. With this in view, he instructed Feuquières to play off the members of the coalition against each other. Saxony was to be prevented from making an independent peace, Brandenburg to be told that the King of France would guarantee Pomerania against the Swedes, Oxenstierna to be dazzled by the suggestion that his son with the help of the French King could secure the hand of Queen Christina. As the same proposition was to be made to the Elector of Saxony, it was touched on with the utmost discretion in both cases. A Protestant confederation was to be formed under John George, through which the King of France could be deftly insinuated into the place left empty by the King of Sweden.[6]
Axel Oxenstierna was in a precarious position. The government at Stockholm had given him unlimited powers in Germany,[7] but it was weak, for the accession of the child Queen encouraged the intrigues of a nobility whom the King had controlled but not undermined. The indiscreet, extravagant, and vain Queen mother, a woman still possessing and still conscious of her beauty, was likely to give trouble to Oxenstierna, not because she was essentially hostile to him but because she was easy to prejudice and flatter. With this background, his prosecution of Gustavus’s plans in Germany was bound to be slow and uncertain. The foolish bribery of the French ambassadors could not, but necessity might, force him in time to make a partial sacrifice of independence to Richelieu, in order to maintain his position at all.
Axel Oxenstierna received the news of the King’s death on the road to Frankfort-on-the-Main.[8] He was on his way to assemble the representatives of the four Circles which were to form the nucleus of the projected Corpus Evangelicorum. Postponing this assembly until the following spring, he turned back from Hanau and travelled rapidly to Saxony. At Christmas he was in Dresden.
The reason for this move was simple. Immediately after the battle of Lützen, Wallenstein had retired to Bohemia. Heavy as his losses had been, they did not account for this hasty action, the springs of which were political. He wished, by proving his goodwill to John George, to tempt him to peace. Even if the Elector refused this bait, he would undoubtedly use the occasion of the King’s death to reassert his own interests against those of Sweden. Immediately after Lützen, for instance, he had tried to secure the services of Bernard of Saxe-Weimar for himself.[9]
Oxenstierna had to face yet another peril. No sooner was the death of Gustavus known than the King of Denmark offered to mediate a general peace in the Empire.[10] If there was one thing above all others that must be prevented, it was the dictation of terms by a jealous Denmark.
Hastily pacifying the Elector of Brandenburg by the renewed promise of Queen Christina’s hand for his son,[11] Oxenstierna concentrated on the problem of Saxony. Seldom can he have passed a more unprofitable Christmas than that which he celebrated at Dresden in 1632. The intentions of John George and Arnim were clear from the outset, nor did the eloquence of the Chancellor move them an inch. John George wanted either a separate or a general settlement, Arnim a general peace.[12] Disregarding all protests, they agreed to discuss terms with Wallenstein.
The alliance being all but broken, there ensued a struggle between John George and Oxenstierna for the leadership of the Protestant party in the Empire. On March 18th 1633, the Chancellor opened the long-planned meeting of the four Circles at Heilbronn, ingeniously evading quarrels over the privileges connected with chairs, stools, and benches by arranging for the deputies to stand throughout.[13] Five weeks later the four Circles agreed to a Treaty with Sweden, creating what was to be known as the League of Heilbronn for the defence of the Protestant Cause in the Empire under Oxenstierna’s direction. On two succeeding days he concluded further treaties, one with the free knights of the Empire and one with Philip Lewis of Pfalz-Zimmern, brother of Frederick of Bohemia and regent for the sixteen-year-old Elector Palatine, Charles Lewis, who had succeeded to his father’s debts.[14]
These treaties established Oxenstierna in the eyes of the world as the virtual successor of Gustavus. John George, who had thought to wreck the meeting by not attending, had once again miscalculated. By his refusal to come he had tacitly renounced his claim; far from wrecking the assembly, his absenc
e merely ensured the election of Oxenstierna himself as supreme director of the war. If the Chancellor had failed to hold John George to his original obligations, he had effectively saved the situation for Sweden by destroying at a blow all the prestige and half the influence of the lost ally.
Oxenstierna’s handling of the French intervention was less effective. Here he was not fighting the drink-sodden John George but the unscrupulous and intelligent Marquis de Feuquières. The French ambassador shone particularly in those qualities on which the reputation of French diplomacy has been built: flexible of method and tenacious of purpose he choked the more rugged growth of Oxenstierna’s diplomacy as the ivy chokes the tree. Both of them wanted the support of the German States, and either of them would have used any means to get it. Feuquières had one unfair advantage: his government was more able than that of Sweden to pour out money in bribery.[15] Otherwise his advantage over Oxenstierna was merely that he was apter at diplomacy, saw the opportunity better and struck more swiftly than the northerner, who appears, by contrast, a ponderous bungler. The intentions of both were equally honourable, since each was actuated by the desire to do the best for his country and his religion, Oxenstierna to secure indemnification for Sweden’s blood and money, and safety for the Protestants of Germany, Feuquières to protect France from Spain, and the German Catholics from the aggression of their Protestant compatriots. Both acted with equal inhumanity to Germany, but then neither was a German.
Feuquières’ first problem was that his instructions were incorrect. In Paris, Richelieu had imagined John George to be master of the situation on the death of Gustavus; he had estimated Oxenstierna too low. No sooner had Feuquières seen the Swedish Chancellor than he recognized this error. Sweden, not Saxony, was the power without whose alliance nothing could be achieved in Germany, and he had the courage to act in the light of his own convictions against the instructions of the Cardinal.[16]
At Heilbronn, to Oxenstierna’s unconcealed annoyance,[17] Feuquières persuaded the delegates to accept the King of France as their protector in conjunction with the Swedish government.[18] It might seem that this was a minor achievement, for it gave the King no dominant control in the war, but inevitably the ally with the greater resources would prove the more influential in the end, and Oxenstierna fought the decision to the last. Feuquières inserted another wedge into the Chancellor’s arrangements when, by the renewal of the Treaty of Bärwalde, he refused to pay the semi-annual subsidy of half a million livres to the Swedish alone, but insisted that it should go to them on behalf of the Heilbronn League. Oxenstierna, who could not afford to forgo the subsidy, thus had to agree to receive it on terms which bound his German allies still more closely to France and degraded him to the position of a middleman.[19] The only advantage he gained over Feuquières was on the question of Maximilian, for the preservation of whose neutrality the French government still pleaded in vain.[20]
The foundation of the Heilbronn League marked the virtual end of John George’s plans for a general peace. Dismay and distress in Dresden knew no bounds; the threatened dictatorship of the King of Sweden had been replaced merely by that of Oxenstierna.[21] Above all, Arnim’s hopes were destroyed. Judging the moment of disillusionment to be favourable, Wallenstein here intervened, suggesting to the general that he bring the Saxon forces over to join the imperialists and that together they drive the Swedes out of Germany, as six years before they had driven out the Danes. Perhaps it would have been the right thing to do; perhaps it would have succeeded and peace have been the outcome. But here Wallenstein struck against that hard unimaginative honesty which was the core of Arnim’s character. Possibly he saw with his brain that the scheme was feasible, but with Arnim the heart was stronger than the mind, and that rigid, almost tragic sense of honour, the Aufrichtigkeit which knows no compromise, the strength and the undoing of the German, stood between him and the betrayal which might have saved his country.[22]
From this moment yet another fissure creeps across the already divided Protestant party, the fissure between the Elector of Saxony and the general of his army. John George was prepared to desert Oxenstierna and make his own peace with Ferdinand. Arnim was not, and in so far as he had power, he still worked for general peace or nothing. He did not, or he would not, see that the League of Heilbronn had so closely riveted the welfare of Protestant Germany to the interests of Oxenstierna and Richelieu that there could now be no general peace within the Empire until either Hapsburg or Bourbon had shattered the other.
3.
Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, Richelieu on the one hand and Olivarez on the other destroyed all hope of peace. In 1632 the Prince of Orange, invading unhindered, had seized Venloo, Roermond, and last of all the great fortress of Maestricht. A more daring and less perceptive leader would have marched on Brussels. Frederick Henry was held back by two considerations: in the first place he was uncertain whether his army would be strong enough to hold the line of communications between the frontier and the Flemish capital,[23] and in the second neither he nor the government of the United Provinces was altogether certain that the fall of Brussels was desirable. There had been a secret agreement with Richelieu to split the Spanish Netherlands from end to end, France absorbing the southern and the Dutch the northern half.[24] But Frederick Henry saw that the destruction of Hapsburg power was leading already to the unbalanced aggrandizement of the Bourbon, and was henceforward determined to preserve at all costs the buffer state between himself and the rising monarchy. Unknown to the Brussels government, the Dutch, their open enemies, were becoming the guarantors of their existence against the aggression of France.[25]
If the ageing Archduchess Isabella hardly grasped this turn in the situation, she understood at least that the retreat of the Dutch meant a tendency towards peaceful settlement, and at this straw she snatched with all that was left of her failing strength. She had good reason. The advance of the Prince of Orange had been assisted by widespread treachery among the Flemish nobility,[26] and although the plot had been discovered in time, its existence revealed to Isabella that the ground, once so firm under her feet, had become a quagmire. The States General, called in September 1632, were loud in their outcry for peace; the occupation of a now ill-paid army, the increase in taxes, the decline of trade as warfare and Dutch competition strangled ports and cities, all drove the deputies to beg for a cessation.[27] With the consent of Madrid, Isabella willingly yielded; a truce was established and deputies chosen to discuss terms with the United Provinces.[28]
The delegates met in the winter of 1632; by the end of November two messages had reached Brussels which changed the face of affairs: the first that the King of Spain’s brother was appointed as Governor in succession to the Archduchess, the second that the King of Sweden had been killed at Lützen.[29] The appointment of the Infant Ferdinand, the Cardinal-Infant as he was commonly called, indicated a new effort to revivify Hapsburg influence and popularity in Brussels; the death of the Swedish King meant that the Emperor might again be able to help. In spite of all, the Archduchess, old and wise, would have preferred peace; so would Frederick Henry. But the swelling animosity of Bourbon and Hapsburg struck the power out of their hands. Hercule de Charnacé talked over the Prince of Orange and worked up the war party in the United Provinces,[30] while Olivarez and the King of Spain ceased to treat the peace negotiations with respect. After thirteen months of wasted argument the delegates dispersed.[31]
The King of Sweden’s death gave an impetus to the revival which had been for some months preparing in the heart of the Hapsburg dynasty itself. In the younger generation two princes were emerging, on whom the renewed hopes of the family were fixed. By tact, courtesy and discretion, the youthful Cardinal-Infant, brother of Philip IV, and as yet in his early twenties, had insinuated himself into the graces of Olivarez[32] and thereby smoothed his way to the governorship of the Netherlands. Destined for the Church and raised to the Cardinalate in his childhood, the prince had chafed bitterly at the restraint thu
s placed alike on his pleasures and his ambition. Nevertheless, he had had the intelligence to exploit the independence of fraternal control to which his ecclesiastical position entitled him.[33] On his appointment to the governorship of the Netherlands he was requested by the Archduchess to lay by his priestly robes as far as possible, since Cardinals as governors had still an unsavoury reputation in Brussels.[34] Nothing could have suited the Cardinal-Infant better, and henceforward the scarlet robe and biretta disappear from his portraits, the slender, oval face is framed in shining flaxen curls, a moustache of startling ferocity garnishes the long upper lip, and the prince, clad in full armour, appears with marshal’s baton in hand astride a prancing charger.
There was more in this military gear than mere boyish caprice. The Cardinal-Infant had studied the art of war thoroughly and intended to arrive in the Netherlands at the head of an army. Furthermore, a plan was maturing by which this new army was to be transported overland and used as it passed through Germany to clear the Rhine of enemies.
The second moving spirit of this plan was the cousin of the Cardinal-Infant, the Archduke Ferdinand, King of Hungary and Bohemia, and husband to the Cardinal’s sister, the Infanta Maria. It was he who had optimistically approached his father, the Emperor, in the previous years, asking that he, not Wallenstein, be appointed commander-in-chief of the imperial armies. In the ensuing months he had placed himself at the head of a party hostile both to Wallenstein and to Maximilian. This group, if not entirely under the dominance of the Spanish ambassador at Vienna, was at least in very close communication with him. Its chief object was the raising of an army to co-operate with the Cardinal-Infant. The answer which suggested itself in the course of the year 1633 was: Wallenstein’s army and Wallenstein’s resources but without Wallenstein.
The general had forfeited whatever respect or gratitude he had enjoyed at Vienna by his conduct in 1631, his deliberate starvation of Tilly, his betrayal of Mecklenburg to the Swedes, his unscrupulous negotiations with Gustavus and John George, even with the Bohemian exile, Thurn. Bitter necessity alone had caused his recall, and he had shown his animosity towards the Hapsburg dynasty, or so they thought, by quartering his troops in the winter of 1632–3 on imperial lands. In point of fact, military necessity gave him no choice, for he was anxious to caress Saxony into peace by careful treatment and he could have gone nowhere else without grave danger to his and the imperial army.
The Thirty Years War Page 38