The rising discontent was inadequately stilled in August 1635, Oxenstierna handling the rebellious officers as allies and equals, and signing a formal treaty with them for their allegiance. But the continued agitation of Saxon agents soon had the cauldron boiling again, and Oxenstierna, after a desperate effort to raise money from his allies,[6] left it to Baner to soothe his army by any means he could. The marshal, a coarse, outspoken ruffian, had neither the diplomacy necessary for such a situation nor enough of the brute force which he could doubtless have used effectively had the mutineers been in a minority. By October he was in despair; whole regiments disregarded his orders, and he frankly admitted to Oxenstierna that he intended either to surrender in person to John George or at best to bluff it out and make a private settlement for himself and his few loyal Swedes, letting the mutineers go their own way.[7] This imminent catastrophe, which would have meant the loss of the Elbe valley and the final cutting of communications between Stockholm and the Chancellor on the Rhine, was averted at the last minute of the eleventh hour. The truce signed with Poland released a great number of newly recruited Swedish troops who had been held in readiness against a possible Polish war, and these joined Baner just in time to swing the balance narrowly in his favour.[8] The mutineers, hopeful of a successful campaign and more booty, saw that they could probably get better terms from Baner than from John George. They agreed to remain loyal to Sweden. Actual mutiny was stilled; of the re-establishment of reasonable discipline there was still no question. ‘I must deplore the fact’, wrote Baner, ‘that every officer gives orders as he pleases.’[9] He could only deplore it, for any injudicious assertion of his authority might precipitate a new crisis. Nevertheless, he used the renewed loyalty of his army to effect a rapid advance before the winter, surprised the outpost of Dömitz on the Elbe and defeated the Saxons at Goldberg, thus encouraging his troops once again to believe in his leadership. There was one advantage to Sweden in the loss of her German allies; the troops could now consider all the country as hostile and replenish their stores by seizure even more drastic than that which they had permitted themselves while the farce of protective alliance continued.
Yet even this advance of the Swedish marshal and his mixed army concealed the controlling hand of France, for the intervention of a French diplomat, had alone completed the Polish truce in time to prevent Baner’s disaster.[10]
In the south and south-west matters had taken an even graver turn. After a siege of nearly six months Augsburg surrendered, the imperialists entering a city almost of the dead, in which the people looked like ghosts, and the very soldiers fainted at their posts. They had been eating cats, rats and dogs for three months past, and eight weeks before the surrender the citizens were cutting up the hides of cattle, soaking and chewing them. A woman confessed to having cooked and eaten the body of a soldier who had died in her house. In spite of all, the conquerors celebrated their victory by a banquet, carousing far into the night while the hungry burghers listened and wondered dumbly when and whence provisions would come for them.[11]
Hanau-on-the-Main, in conditions no less horrible,[12] held out with vain heroism for more than eighteen months. Once it was relieved, but was again re-invested and reduced; the commander, a Scot, Sir James Ramsay, by a curious concession obtained liberty to stay in the town as a private person.[13] The concession was misguided, for Ramsay at a later date used his influence to engineer a rising; the imperialists were too quick for him and he ended his bold if unscrupulous career as a prisoner in their hands.
On the Rhine, Philippsburg and Treves fell to the Spaniards in rapid succession, and Richelieu failing to send troops in time, Bernard could not relieve Heidelberg. In November Gallas invaded Lorraine and here came up with the newly recruited French army under the King in person. ‘They were clad all in horsemen’s coats of scarlet colour and silver lace’, wrote one of Gallas’s astonished men, ‘the next day they were all in bright armour and great feathers, wonderful beautiful to behold.’[14] The filthy, vermin-ridden veterans of the imperial army had not for many years seen anything so fine, but cold, hunger and disease made shorter work of the plumed Frenchmen than of Gallas’s less decorative troops. Little by little, before the watchful eyes of the imperialists, the gay cavaliers ‘sneaked and stole away’, leaving Gallas master of the field.[15] But it was winter and bitterly cold; in the hungry land there was little fodder for man or beast. Plague, bred that year by a drenching spring and a tropical summer, disorganized armies and states alike. Gallas withdrew towards Zabern, took up his winter quarters, commanding the gap in the Vosges and threatening France; but plague and hunger among his men nullified the threat.[16]
That year in the Low Countries the French, invading unexpectedly almost at the same moment as their declaration of war, defeated the Spanish forces near Namur[17] and marched to join the Prince of Orange at Maestricht; he however was dilatory in joining them,[18] and the States ungratefully suggested that the French should leave Flanders alone and attack Spain itself.[19] The behaviour of the cautious Dutch arose more from political discretion than military negligence, but it proved more disastrous than could have been wished. It was doubtless difficult to strike a mean between fighting the Spaniards to the death and merely holding them off, but Frederick Henry had altogether miscalculated the zeal and popularity of the Cardinal-Infant.[20] Before the end of the year the French had retired in indignation, and Frederick Henry found that he had lost Diest, Goch, Gennep, Limburg, and Schenk. His borders were thus threatened in three places, and Maestricht, his most valuable conquest, was all but cut off.
French arms were more successful in the south, where Richelieu again contemplated forming a North Italian League against the Spaniards,[21] and launched two successful invasions, one against Franche-Comté[22] and another on the Val Telline. This latter was carried out by Rohan, the quondam leader of the Huguenot party, whose religion, it was felt, would endear him to the Protestant anti-Spanish party in the Grisons. This expectation was justified, for the Swiss rose under one of their pastors, the intransigent Jürg Jenatsch, and marched to the conquest and conversion of the Val Telline. Troops were sent from Tyrol and Milan to hold the key position; defeated in four successive engagements, they left Rohan master of the valley for the Swiss pastor and the French King. But this was the only outstanding achievement of the year 1635, and Richelieu owed it far more to the personality, enthusiasm and religion of Rohan than to his troops.
The diplomacy of the Cardinal and his political ambitions were out of proportion to the military strength of the country. The knowledge of this had driven him to avoid open war for as long as he could. When it became inevitable he urged Feuquières to recruit for him in Germany,[23] complaining anxiously that the troops raised in France were unreliable, ill trained, inclined to desert and in the main Protestant.[24] The nobility presented another difficulty; since the feudal theory of the army persisted still, it was hard to wage a war without increasing the power of any young nobleman who chose to recruit a troop or even a regiment on his lands, and the nobility as a class, and young noblemen in particular, were Richelieu’s bane. He was afraid of any recrudescence of their pretensions against the monarchy. Besides they made insubordinate soldiers. One young gentleman, who was told that the bad condition of his company would be reported to the King, struck his senior officer a blow on the head, saying: ‘Report that to the King.’[25] With troops of this kind Richelieu was unfitted to oppose the Hapsburg and their Spanish army.
Since 1633 he had been trying to win over Bernard of Saxe-Weimar. As always, his actions had a political as well as a military significance; Feuquières had warned him that the German princes were suspicious of French aggression on the Rhine, and he imagined that if he had a German general in his employ he would be more welcome as an ally than if he merely sent French marshals to fight for him.
Bernard had refused the offers made in 1633 because they were not good enough. In 1635 he proved more amenable; he had lost his duchy of Franconia
at the battle of Nördlingen, and he knew now that Richelieu, and not Oxenstierna, might secure him something in its place. Already he had settled what that something was to be—the landgravate of Alsace. His ambition sorted well enough with Richelieu’s designs, for Alsace conquered by a German in the pay of France would be as useful to him as Alsace conquered by French troops, while the distinction without difference would serve to calm the suspicions of his German allies. By June 1635, he was already spreading the rumour that Alsace was to be ear-marked by the French government as a reward for Bernard.[26]
The prince was not altogether easy to treat with, even though an understanding was ardently desired by both sides. He suspected the French methods of secrecy and took the same pleasure as the King of Sweden in exposing the discreet offers of their government to the judgement of the world. Feuquières approached him quietly one evening as he was riding round his camp with some of his staff and, choosing a moment when Bernard was a little separated from the others, made in low tones an offer of subsidies for the war and a reward afterwards. To his astonishment Bernard, raising his voice to a stentorian shout, announced that he was glad the French government was about to help him and he would hold them to their word, for certainly his men deserved some recompense.[27] Blunt as this method was, it was astonishingly cunning and effective; Richelieu’s offer was soon known throughout the army, so that withdrawal was impossible, while Bernard’s skilful mention of the interests and deserts of his men naturally enhanced his reputation among the ranks. For the mercenary leader the good opinion of his men was worth more than gold.
The summer’s campaign was over before the treaty was signed. Bernard and a force of French auxiliaries under Cardinal de la Valette, after crossing the Rhine at Mainz, were forced to retire again to the left bank for the winter, since Bernard asserted with exaggeration that his officers were threatening to desert and his men were mutinous for lack of money.[28] The situation was grave, but Bernard was clever enough as a diplomatist to make the best use of it for the purpose of forcing up the terms which the French government offered. Richelieu could afford to haggle no more, but in October 1635 signed a contract with Bernard which was subsequently enlarged and ratified after a personal meeting in Paris; Bernard was to support an army of eighteen thousand men, six thousand horse and twelve thousand foot, for which the French government promised him four million livres in the year, together with a personal allowance of two hundred thousand and the supreme command over any auxiliary troops they cared to send. Peace was not to be concluded unless he received full satisfaction for his losses, and he was to receive as his reward a yearly pension of a hundred and fifty thousand livres and, by a secret clause, the county of Hagenau and the landgravate of Alsace. It was not entirely clear whether Bernard’s possession was to be wholly independent, but since the French government had no right save that of conquest by which to dispose of imperial land, the obvious interpretation was that Bernard should conquer Alsace for France and hold it under her. This at any rate was Richelieu’s view: Bernard was later to give proof of a somewhat different interpretation. Another secret clause bound the prince to submit to orders from Paris for the duration of the war.[29] Fertile in expedients, Richelieu took the additional precaution of trying to arrange for the marriage of his new ally to Rohan’s daughter and for their double conversion to the Catholic faith.[30] By this scheme he would detach Bernard from his intractable Germanism and make him one with the French nobility; but beyond escorting the young lady two or three times to the theatre, Bernard does not appear to have lent himself to this plan.
Bernard’s attitude to the treaty is one of the problems with which the nationalist has been busy for the last hundred years. With Alsace as with Franconia, Bernard may have had some plan for the detachment of these lands from foreign influence and the setting up of a German party based on his own territorial power. With Bernard as with Wallenstein, the sudden ending of his career before the completion of the plan leaves the historian groping. Bernard was highly conscious of his nation and theoretically at least of his duties towards it. He was devout, self-disciplined, masterful—qualities which easily produce in the mind of their possessor that belief in a mission common among fanatical leaders. That he should regard the freeing and uniting of Germany as such a mission is very possible. But such evidence as has survived is inconclusive and much of it at least is capable of another explanation. By profession a leader of one of those dangerous polyglot formations, an army of mercenaries, Bernard had at least some of the characteristics of a mercenary leader. More like Mansfeld than like Wallenstein in the smallness of his own personal resources, a younger son and landless, he was acquisitive of personal possessions. Franconia and Alsace may have meant more to him than Hagenau did to Mansfeld, but there is no proof that they did. The two aspects of Bernard’s policy are not irreconcilable; throughout the course of history the patriot has often merged into the adventurer, the adventurer into the patriot, and Bernard himself was probably neither wholly the one nor wholly the other.
Richelieu had now an army, such as Ferdinand had had when he employed Wallenstein. He could not altogether rely on it, he could certainly not command it to do as he chose, but he could rest assured that the soldier of fortune would do nothing to endanger his own future, and something to ensure the success of the government on which he relied for his reward. The only serious danger lay in Richelieu’s inability to raise the money for his part of the contract. The Cardinal’s administration, so brilliant in other respects, was financially unsound. He had no genius for the organization of revenue and had found the privileges and customs which obscured French finance too thick to cut down. Consequently, now that he had to bear the whole brunt of the war and keep armies on the Flemish, Italian and Spanish frontiers as well as pay Bernard and patrol the coasts, he had no resource but to raise the taxes.
The French taxes were paid in great measure by the poorest and stubbornest class in the country, the peasantry, and these people, the great majority of the population, were the foundation on which the country rested. Thrifty, hardworking and obstinate, they were quick to resent oppression. As early as 1630 the taxation had provoked riots at Dijon, in 1631 in Provence, in 1632 at Lyons. From 1635 onwards the disturbances increased in gravity and frequency, in the Bordeaux district, throughout Gascony and Périgord, in Anjou, in Normandy.[31] Inevitably this tried the resources of the government and drew off troops which should have been used on the frontiers. The complaints of Bernard, whose subsidies remained unpaid and whose troops were poorly reinforced, were met only with useless promises of help.[32]
The weakness of France caused Maximilian of Bavaria once again to initiate a policy. An immediate attack on Paris, he pointed out to the Emperor, would very probably bring the Cardinal to terms and end the war. The plan, received doubtfully at first, at length won the enthusiastic support of the Cardinal-Infant. At midsummer 1636 he asked Maximilian to send him Johann von Werth and the best of the Bavarian cavalry to co-operate with his own troops in Picardy, while Ferdinand arranged with Gallas to invade simultaneously by way of Franche-Comté.[33]
The Cardinal-Infant’s sloth in accepting the plan unhappily robbed it of part of its effect. Werth, imagining that the project was shelved, had allowed the equipment of his troops to get into a bad condition. Nevertheless, he joined the Cardinal-Infant at La Capelle, and the two with an army thirty-two thousand strong[34] swept into Picardy. Together they overran the country between Somme and Oise and sent the French defenders straggling back to Paris. On August 14th they occupied the commanding fortress of Corbie, close to Amiens on the Paris road.
In the south Gallas, assisted by Charles of Lorraine, advanced through the Belfort gap and occupied all Franche-Comté. Meanwhile Werth, outriding the main body of the army, took Roye and Montdidier and reached Compiègne. In Paris all was in tumult. The people cried out against Richelieu, and those nearest to the Court predicted his immediate fall, but both he and his master redeemed their popularity in t
he crisis. The Cardinal, constant in the face of overwhelming danger, won back the favour of the mob by his rapid measures for the safety of the city, and the King rode out in person to join his troops at Senlis and die in defence of his people.[35]
But the advance suddenly stopped, for Gallas was held up between Champlitte and Langres by Bernard of Saxe-Weimar until his troops melted with desertion and plague, and news of a Swedish advance in Brandenburg forced him to withdraw. The Cardinal-Infant could not risk the attack without him, and in November Maximilian, perturbed by the movements of the Hessian army in his rear, recalled Werth. The invaders both north and south sulkily withdrew.
The failure of the invasion was partly balanced for the Hapsburg by unexpected disaster to Richelieu’s policy in the Val Telline. So long as Rohan, the Huguenot leader, was fighting the Catholic Spaniards to win back the valley for the Swiss Protestants, all went well; but when he set about making a peace which would be satisfactory both from the military and the religious point of view to the Government of Catholic France, the Swiss leaders grew indignant. Objecting bitterly to the terms he wished to impose, they went without his knowledge to consult with the Spaniards and, finding them now prepared to buy the right to use the valley at the cost of religious concessions, abandoned their French alliance and virtually expelled Rohan and his troops.[36] In that wild and mountainous country success depended wholly on the goodwill of the people; when Rohan lost that, he lost everything.
While the Hapsburg dynasty maintained its renewed strength in Europe, the Emperor Ferdinand was planning a decisive demonstration of imperial unity in Germany. But for the dispossessed Palatine princes, for Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, for William of Hesse-Cassel and the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, he had all the rulers of Germany on his side. Three electors, Bavaria, Brandenburg, and Saxony, were actually in arms for his cause; never before had he had so good a chance of achieving that final confirmation of his power, the election of his son as King of the Romans. To this end, and also for the propagation and confirmation of the Peace of Prague, he called an Electoral meeting at Regensburg for the autumn of 1636.
The Thirty Years War Page 45