From the outset everything went wrong. Horn, or his officers, botched the night advance. The infantry and the light artillery should have gone first, but instead some of the wagons and heavy cannon were sent with the advance guard, and these, sticking and overturning in the narrow muddy lane up the hill-side, caused a clatter which warned the enemy, and a delay which gave them time to entrench themselves ready for the attack.
By the bright sunrise of September 6th Horn had at last got his troops to a sheltered place under the incline of the hill. He intended now to attack with his infantry and, when these had engaged the foremost ranks of the imperialists, to finish the matter with a cavalry charge, taking them unawares in the flank. Having, as he thought, made his intentions plain, the general rode off towards the summit of the hill to reconnoitre the position by daylight. At once one of his colonels, mistaking the situation, ordered the cavalry to charge. Horn’s commands were thus reversed and, although his horse chased some of the imperialist defenders off the field, the Swedish infantry now had to attack unsupported by their cavalry and under relentless fire. Nevertheless, the attack was so vigorous and well-ordered that the imperialists, in whom a wholesome terror of the Swedes had reigned ever since Lützen, fled, deserting the batteries. Two accidents cheated the Swedes of their reward. Advancing rapidly upon the position, the two brigades of Swedish infantry each took the other for the enemy, and they could not for some time be separated. Meanwhile a store of gunpowder abandoned by the imperialists exploded in the midst of the victorious troops.
On the opposing side the two princes had found a happier solution of their double responsibility than had Horn and Bernard. As soon as the attack began, they had taken up their position on a small, exposed hillock whence they could follow the fate of both wings at once. Hence they saw the loss of the hill and hence, also, the sudden disorder among the conquering Swedes. At once the Cardinal-Infant detached a Spanish contingent, horse and foot, to prevent the flight of the Germans and renew the assault on the hill. Now would have been the time when Horn would have given anything for his cavalry, which was skirmishing among the fugitives far on the right flank. His disordered infantry collapsed before the Spanish advance, and within an hour he had again lost the summit of the hill.
As the infantry retreated to their first position, they saw through the clearings of the trees some of Bernard’s cavalry in flight, and panic which Horn had difficulty in checking began to spread among them. Bernard himself was fully engaged in the plain; by judicious and intermittent use of his batteries he sought to prevent his opponents from detaching troops against Horn, but, seeing himself now outnumbered, he dared not provoke a general attack.
Until midday, Horn continued on his hill-side, his lines raked by the enemy’s fire. Collecting his cavalry once again, he flung them, horse and foot in succession, against the Spanish position, but in vain. The Spanish infantry in the centre had a trick equal to any Swedish artifice. As the enemy advanced they knelt down so that the bullets passed over them and then, before the Swedes could reload, were up and had emptied a volley into the advancing ranks. It was their boast that they never wasted a shot.
Time and again the Swedes fell back, leaving their dead; time and again, under Horn’s unfaltering hand, they closed up the gashes in their lines and came forward. The Spaniards counted fifteen charges. Each failure increased Horn’s determination to succeed. A point had come at which so much had been done that it seemed folly not to do that little more which might turn the scale; always it seemed that the next time must bring the breaking-point. So it went on for seven hours, in the blinding smoke of the guns.
All the time Bernard was battering on the lines before the city, while from their escarpment the King of Hungary and the Cardinal sent couriers this way and that, strengthening here and there a weak point, rushing ammunition to the unceasing guns. Once a captain standing between them was shot down, and often they were implored to leave their exposed position, always in vain.[157] Superiority of numbers, reliable officers, and the superb discipline of the Spanish troops, might have won the battle of Nördlingen, without the untrained direction of the two princes, but for their courage at least they deserved the acclamation with which all Europe and their own soldiers later received them.
In the heat of midday, Horn’s men could do no more; he sent a scout to Bernard, saying that he was retiring across the valley, behind Bernard’s own lines, to a farther ridge where he could entrench himself for the night. He relied meanwhile on his colleague to cover him while he crossed the valley.
This was the moment for which the enemy had waited. They abandoned their position before the town and charged, imperialists and Spaniards together, on Bernard’s already tired troops, the cry ‘Viva España’ vibrating deafeningly through the dust. Desperately Bernard rallied his men, galloping from battery to battery, pouring curses on the sweating gunners, threatening the tortures of hell if they gave way an inch.[158] But he had no chance. Breaking in panic, his men fled, and Horn’s exhausted troops, at that moment crossing the valley, received broadside the full impact of the flight. Spent horses dropped under their riders; Bernard’s charger fell, but one of his dragoons gave him his own shabby little nag, still brisk and fresh, and on this the prince fled. The rest of the story was tersely dictated by the King of Hungary in his quarters that night. ‘The enemy scattered in such a way that ten horses are not found together. Horn is taken, Weimar—no one knows whether he be dead or living.’[159]
The victors reckoned the dead of the enemy at seventeen thousand, the prisoners at four thousand,[160] nearly all of whom, officers and men, went into imperial service. The Cardinal-Infant that night took up his quarters in a small farm, handing over the large house which had been found for him to the wounded.[161] Later, he sent fifty of the captured standards to Spain and an image of the Virgin, which he had found with the eyes put out, among the Swedish booty.[162]
A few days later the Emperor, at Ebersdorf near Vienna, on a hunting expedition, came in from his day’s sport to find the Empress waiting for him with a messenger newly come from Nördlingen. At the news of the victory, Ferdinand could find no words, the pride of the father, the devotion of the Catholic and the relief of the dynast finding spontaneous issue only in tears of speechless joy.[163] All that had been lost at Lützen had been won again at Nördlingen, and the enemy who had shattered Tilly and the troops of the Catholic League had fallen before the God-directed swords of Ferdinand of Hungary and Ferdinand of Spain.
6.
It looked like the end for the Protestant Cause and the German Liberties; it was the end for Sweden. Never again would Oxenstierna overawe Germany. Forty miles west of Nördlingen, at Göppingen in Württemberg, two days after the disaster, Bernard wrote to Oxenstierna. As late as September 9th, he still had not news of Horn, did not know whether he was alive or dead, captive or free, nor what had become of the Swedish army.[164] He sent messages to all the scattered garrisons in Franconia and Württemberg, ordering immediate evacuation, so that with such as he could collect of the fliers and with the fresh troops from the garrisons he could make a stand farther west—much farther west. He spoke of holding the Rhine, he who not ten months before had taken Regensburg, he whose troops had held the Wornitz and the Lech. It meant retreat to a defensive position a hundred and fifty miles behind his original line; it meant the total severance of all contact with the Saxons under Arnim, and the Swedes under Baner in Silesia. It meant the abandonment of the Duchy of Franconia whose title Bernard carried. And even then, he was uncertain whether he could hold the Rhine.[165]
The news reached Frankfort-on-the-Main, barely outdistancing the fugitive peasants who fled before the Catholic advance like birds before a storm. Once again Oxenstierna passed a sleepless night wrestling with his anxiety.[166] Feuquières was less distressed; for him the defeat of the Swedes, although too drastic to be altogether pleasing, had its fortunate side. The deputies of the Heilbronn League flocked to implore his protection, the two Sa
xon Circles, terrified at another possible advance of the Roman Church into the north, joined the alliance and all threw themselves on the mercy of Richelieu.[167]
From the religious point of view the Battle of Nördlingen was as shattering a victory for the Catholics as Breitenfeld had been a defeat; dynastically it raised the prestige of the Hapsburg to the heights; in the military field it was the death-blow to the reputation of the Swedish army and the crowning glory of the Spanish;[168] but politically it gave Richelieu the direction of the Protestant Cause and rang up the curtain for the last act of the German tragedy, in which Bourbon and Hapsburg fought out their struggle openly at last to the inevitable end.
Nördlingen, in so many ways a more dramatic and a more immediately catastrophic battle than Breitenfeld, marks no period in European history. The applause of the one side, the lamentations of the other, which echoed at the time no less loudly than after Breitenfeld, faded into silence. In the struggle between the two dynasties the Bourbon, with sounder politics and more resilient power, must defeat the Hapsburg, cankered with the dry-rot of Spain. The Battle of Nördlingen, the advance which followed, the rejuvenation of the dynasty under the two princes, was nothing but the sudden flaring of a guttering candle. The princes who, on the day after the battle, rode along their lines to the re-echoing shouts of ‘Viva España’[169] went on their way—the one to long years of anxiety and defeat, the other, happier perhaps, to die in Brussels before the final extinction of the hopes which he had raised.
Immediately after the victory, the King of Hungary urged his cousin to stay in Germany for the autumn and complete the work, but the Cardinal-Infant, not without reason, wished to reach Brussels as soon as he could.[170] The Netherlands were, after all, his true destination. Ferdinand’s entreaty did not prevail, and almost immediately after the battle the Spanish and imperialist armies again divided, the Cardinal-Infant making for the Rhine with some German auxiliaries under Piccolomini, the King of Hungary striking westwards across Franconia and Württemberg.
Victory had re-established the morale of the imperial troops, and in the advance across Württemberg they carried everything in front of them. Johann von Werth, the leader of the Bavarian cavalry, a soldier risen from the ranks, and Isolani, the commander of the Croatian contingent, bore down the feeble resistance of the last Protestant outposts. Göppingen fell on September 15th, Heilbronn on the 16th, Weiblingen on the 18th; on the 20th the King of Hungary entered Stuttgart and established the control of the Emperor over all Württemberg. Meanwhile, Piccolomini and the Spaniards made towards the Rhine; on September 18th they took Rothenburg, on the 19th crossed the Main, on the 30th seized Aschaffenburg, on October 15th Schweinfurt, while the Heilbronn League removed hastily from Frankfort to the supposed safety of Mainz. Oxenstierna remained to receive the flying troops, a bare twelve thousand men, demoralized, mutinous and unpaid.[171] He saw that to save the situation he had no choice but to make Bernard sole commander-in-chief and implore money from Richelieu.[172]
The tide of disaster mounted still, the limbs of the Heilbronn League were lopped off before Oxenstierna’s despairing eyes. Nuremberg had been taken on September 23rd, on October 5th Kenzingen, on October 21st Würzburg. In south Germany only Augsburg and the fortress of Hohentwiel held out; on the Main, Hanau; in the southern Rhineland, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg. Two of the four Circles in the original Heilbronn League were altogether lost, and of the towns all the chief members in central and south Germany save Augsburg alone. No money could be raised on the taxes of an already exhausted Sweden, where they were talking wildly of immediate peace,[173] and the resources of the German allies were cut off one by one. From Baner in Silesia came depressing news that the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg were both ready to abandon the Swedes, that the hungry and ill-clad troops in north Germany could get no money from the people, that quarters had been refused to them in Silesia,[174] and that they must withdraw as far as Magdeburg and Halberstadt for the winter.[175]
In these circumstances Bernard and the remnant of the Heilbronn League negotiated desperately with Richelieu. On November 1st 1634, they signed the so-called Treaty of Paris, by which Louis XIII offered twelve thousand men and half a million livres to be paid at once,[176] in return for a guarantee for the Catholic faith in Germany, the cession of Schlettstadt and Benfeld in Alsace, and the control of the bridge-head at Strasbourg. No truce or peace was to be made without France, nor was her government bound to enter the war openly, nor to promise more than the twelve thousand men.[177] Axel Oxenstierna, who had had to agree to the negotiations, here made his last stand, refusing to ratify the completed treaty in the name of the little Queen of Sweden.[178] His judgement was accurate, for he saw that Richelieu, jubilating in the downfall of his too powerful ally, had not yet realized how great was his own peril. When he grasped that, as he must, he would modify his terms. Cool in the midst of overwhelming danger, Oxenstierna played for time.
Early in November the Cardinal-Infant crossed the Flemish frontier and entered Brussels in state, not as a priest but as a soldier, dressed in scarlet and cloth of gold, and girt with the sword of his Burgundian ancestor, Charles V.[179] On the Rhine, Bernard of Saxe-Weimar withdrew to the left bank to join the French troops hastily raised to help him,[180] and the comparative peace of winter settled on Germany.
7.
The winter of 1634–5 was the last respite before the open conflict between Bourbon and Hapsburg, the last moment, in theory at least, when peace for the Empire was possible. It was the period at which John George, dragging the Elector of Brandenburg after him, made a stand for and obtained a settlement; but the terms intended to secure peace were twisted into a new alliance for war.
The negotiations which led to the Peace of Prague on the one hand, to the declaration of war by France on Spain on the other, are significant of a new epoch. The imperial situation had developed a further problem, and the background of the conflict, insensibly changing for the past seventeen years, had completed its metamorphosis. The ageing Emperor, the Electors of Saxony, Brandenburg, and Bavaria, the Swedish Chancellor and Richelieu, these still held on their course, but all around them had arisen a new generation of soldiers and statesmen. War-bred, they carried the mark of their training in a caution, cynicism and contempt for spiritual ideals foreign to their fathers.
When lust and private interest gain the upper hand of disorganized society, the most religious of crusades must lose its sacred character, but the Thirty Years War lost what little spiritual meaning it had for other causes. ‘The great spiritual contest’, says Ranke, ‘had completed its operation on the minds of men.’[181] The reason was not far to seek. While increasing preoccupation with natural science had opened up a new philosophy to the educated world, the tragic results of applied religion had discredited the Churches as the directors of the State. It was not that faith had grown less among the masses; even among the educated and the speculative it still maintained a rigid hold, but it had grown more personal, had become essentially a matter between the individual and his Creator.
Frederick of Bohemia had lost his crown because he had offended his subjects in order to obey his Calvinist chaplain; his son, Prince Rupert, Calvinist in religion and morality, fought in England for Anglicans and Catholics against Presbyterians and Independents, because his religion was for him, as for most of his generation, nobody’s business but his own.
Inevitably the spiritual force went out of public life, while religion ran to seed amid private conjecture, and priests and pastors, gradually abandoned by the State, fought a losing battle against philosophy and science. While Germany suffered in sterility, the new dawn rose over Europe, irradiating from Italy over France, England, and the North. Descartes and Hobbes were already writing, the discoveries of Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, had taken their places as part of the accepted stock of common knowledge. Everywhere lip-service to reason replaced the blind impulses of the spirit.
Essentially it was only lip-service. The small g
roup of educated men who appreciated the value of the new learning disseminated little save the shadow of their knowledge. A new emotional urge had to be found to fill the place of spiritual conviction; national feeling welled up to fill the gap.
The absolutist and the representative principle were losing the support of religion; they gained that of nationalism. That is the key to the development of the war in its latter period. The terms Protestant and Catholic gradually lose their vigour, the terms German, Frenchman, Swede, assume a gathering menace. The struggle between the Hapsburg dynasty and its opponents ceased to be the conflict of two religions and became the struggle of nations for a balance of power. A new standard of right and wrong came into the political world. The old morality cracked when the Pope set himself up in opposition to the Hapsburg Crusade, and when Catholic France, under the guidance of her great Cardinal, gave subsidies to Protestant Sweden. Insensibly and rapidly after that, the Cross gave place to the flag, and the ‘Sancta Maria’ cry of the White Hill to the ‘Viva España’ of Nördlingen.
If Ferdinand of Hungary, who was rapidly filling his father’s place at the head of the state, was to control the new situation he must make one essential choice. He must choose whether he would be a German or an Austrian sovereign. He chose Austria. It had long been inevitable that he should. The dynasty belonged in temperament and character to the south; Ferdinand’s northward thrust had been buffeted back by the King of Sweden, and he had himself sacrificed Wallenstein’s Empire of the Elbe to Spain. Religion, his weapon for the unification of Germany, so powerful long ago in Styria when his world was young, had broken in his hand; all that emerged from his life’s work were the confederate states of Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Silesia, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Tyrol, the rough outline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The Thirty Years War Page 42