Approaching down the right bank from Säckingen, Savelli’s advance guard was sharply beaten off by Bernard’s troops. They fell back to their main body and, making a detour through the hilly and wooded country, prepared to attack Bernard’s flank. In the brief respite which this manoeuvre gave him, Bernard hastily transported some of his artillery and cavalry over the ferry from the left bank. Time was short, and when Savelli reappeared about half Bernard’s army was still on the far side of the river.
He had drawn up those troops which he had collected to defend the bridge-head and prevent Savelli from relieving the town. The ground was uneven and the formation scattered, so the united action along the whole front was difficult, and the engagement resolved itself into a series of skirmishes. Savelli, coming in on Bernard’s left flank, drove him back in disorder. But on the other side of the field, Bernard’s right threw back the imperialist left. The result of these two movements was that both armies turned almost completely on their axes; Savelli, seizing the opportunity, slipped in between Bernard and the bridge; and the day ended with the troops facing each other in positions almost exactly the reverse of those in which they started.
The outlook for Bernard was gloomy. His losses, except in artillery, were not serious, but he was cut off from the rest of his army on the left bank of the river, and he allowed Savelli to master the bridge and thus control Rheinfelden. There was only one thing to be done—to withdraw to the nearest crossing place and attempt to reunite his army. With this in view Bernard fell back towards Laufenburg, evading, by a piece of undeserved good luck, the detachments which Savelli had left in the Black Forest. Here he crossed the Rhine, reassembled his forces and marched down the left bank for Rheinfelden.
Thus at a little after seven in the morning of March 3rd Savelli’s outposts were startled by the approach of an army which they believed to be utterly scattered. Leaving the guns they tumbled back towards Rheinfelden to give the alarm. Bernard stopped only to retrieve several light field-pieces of his own and, trundling these along with him, approached the town. Three times he fired at Savelli’s forces as they hastily assembled to defend the city, and before his final charge their lines were already wavering. They broke at once. Bernard’s cavalry pursued them, and further troops sallying from the town too late to the help of their comrades were caught between two fires. Half the imperialists fled, half surrendered. Savelli was ignominiously dragged out of a thicket, and Werth, on foot and alone, was recognized and taken in a neighbouring village.[58]
In Paris they sang a Te Deum for Werth’s capture,[59] and they had cause, for Bernard, his forces swelled by the prisoners, struck suddenly north again to reduce Breisach, now cut off on all sides.
Fighting a war through untrustworthy allies was a dangerous and skilful task, and Richelieu’s success depended on his ability to control both Bernard and the Swedes, and to imbue their separate actions with unity. No sooner was one recalcitrant ally brought into line than the other would be tugging at the halter: while Bernard after months of quiescence had at last justified himself, Richelieu was wrestling with a new Swedish problem. The treaty was running out and Oxenstierna, thinking the moment favourable to free himself of an alliance which had once been necessary but which was always dangerous, decided to make peace on his own account.[60]
He gauged rightly the new Emperor’s wish for peace. Should Ferdinand detach him from Richelieu, he would free his own flank of a ceaseless danger and be at liberty to give that help in the Low Countries, of which his cousin the Cardinal-Infant stood in need. Realizing the new danger, Richelieu dispatched an ambassador to Hamburg to argue with Oxenstierna’s plenipotentiary, Adler Salvius. Renewed promises of help, coupled with the Emperor’s unwillingness to yield Pomerania, and the hope that Baner might be yet more successful in arms, at length outweighed the Swedish need for peace, and she renewed her old alliance with France by the Treaty of Hamburg.[61]
Ferdinand had failed to detach the allies one from another, and on June 5th 1638, Bernard of Saxe-Weimar appeared at Breisach. Richelieu speedily made ready to send him French reinforcements, so that the opportunity of mastering this key place in the Hapsburg strategy might not be lost. Hurrying to the rescue, the Bavarian general Goetz was decisively defeated at Wittenweier on July 30th, and six days later Bernard joined with the French under Marshal Turenne. The siege was formed by the middle of August, and in October Charles of Lorraine, rushing troops to the help of the town at the imperial instigation, was cut off and annihilated by a rapid thrust of Bernard at Sennheim.
After this there was no further hope of relief; yet the garrison of Breisach held out from week to week, hoping always that supplies might fail the besiegers as much as the besieged. Hunger alone could reduce Breisach, situated on a steep eminence and protected on one side by the swift-flowing Rhine. Bernard’s assaults failed, but time was on his side, for short as supplies might be in his camp, they were shorter still in the town. By November rich burghers’ wives were seen in the market bartering their jewellery for a little flour. Horses, cats, dogs, mice were all sold for human food, and the skins of cattle and sheep were soaked and cooked. On November 24th one of Bernard’s soldiers, a prisoner, died in the castle; before the body could be taken away for burial his comrades had torn it in pieces and devoured the flesh. In the ensuing weeks six other prisoners died and were eaten. On a single morning ten bodies were found in the centre square of the town, citizens who had dropped dead of hunger, and by December it was being whispered that poor and orphan children had disappeared.[62]
It seemed impossible that Breisach should hold out so long and so hopelessly. And at this moment, when fortune at last crowned Richelieu’s long planning, when the key to the Rhine was all but his, Father Joseph fell ill; day after day they waited in Paris for news of Breisach’s surrender, and still the fortress held; day after day the old Capuchin slackened his hold on life. A kindly legend lends to Richelieu one sudden flash of human tenderness. Hastening into the room of the dying man with well-simulated joy, he is supposed to have leaned over the narrow bed and called to him, saying: ‘Father Joseph, Breisach is ours.’[63] Twenty-four hours before he died, on December 17th 1638, Breisach surrendered. They did not know in Paris until the 19th.
Alsace was now occupied from end to end by troops in French pay; Breisach, the key to the Rhine and the gateway to Germany, had fallen. In the east Baner defeated John George near Chemnitz, occupied Pirna and, throwing back the defending army at Brandeis, invaded Bohemia. In Flanders the Cardinal-Infant, unable to check new French inroads, could send no help to Germany, where his fellow-victor of Nördlingen, now Emperor, struggled vainly with inadequate subsidies and bad generals to hold back the rising tide. Piccolomini had gone to the Low Countries, Arnim had resigned, Werth was a prisoner in French hands. In their place Ferdinand relied on Gallas, who grew every year more casual, drunken and incompetent;[64] on Hatzfeld, once a colonel of Wallenstein’s who had indeed made short work of a ridiculously small army under the Elector-Palatine at Vlotho on the Weser, but was otherwise an ungifted hack; on Goetz, a renegade from the other side, of very mild ability, who had replaced Werth as the leader of the Bavarian contingent. Recruiting from the horribly decreased population, raising taxes on the hereditary lands already drained of all blood, paying and feeding the army, weighed ever more heavily on Ferdinand. But in the spring of 1639 a sudden crisis on the Rhine checked Richelieu and gave the Emperor time to consider his line of action.
Bernard of Saxe-Weimar asserted his rights against the Crown of France. By the treaty to which he had agreed in 1635 he was to be rewarded by permission to keep Alsace; now that his troops held it he demanded categorically that it should be ceded to him outright, without further consideration of French needs or claims; in the meantime he asserted that Breisach had surrendered not to the King of France but to him, and he intended to hold it. He demanded the integrity of German soil under a German prince, and the right to be treated as an ally on equal terms with Sweden.[65]
5.
The soldier of fortune and his reward had been a problem since the beginning of the war. Mansfeld had wanted Hagenau, Wallenstein had wanted Mecklenburg, the Rhenish Palatinate, Brandenburg and Bohemia, the Swedish marshals had asked for estates, Bernard had claimed Franconia and now Alsace. There may have been no more in this than personal ambition, but the peculiar significance of Alsace in later history has invested Bernard’s transactions with an aureole which is wholly lacking from those of Mansfeld and the Swedish marshals, if not altogether from those of Wallenstein.
Bernard’s reputation as a patriot rests above all on his behaviour in the months succeeding the fall of Breisach. During that time he showed almost open hostility to Richelieu over the question of Alsace, demanding unqualified cession and refusing all compromise. But he was ineffective, if not insincere, as a patriot, because he made no effort either to form a party within the Empire or to win the sympathy of the more influential rulers. On the contrary, he deliberately rejected a plan for the formation of a German party which had been laid before him by the Landgravine of Hesse.
The evidence is once again inconclusive; he may very well have doubted the Landgravine’s sincerity. But his failure to make any constructive suggestion himself proves that, whatever the plan behind his opposition to France, it was either chiefly personal or still so rudimentary as to be valueless in German politics.
Bernard made his initial demands in February 1639, asking for the full cession of Breisach and the four so-called ‘forest cities’, Laufenburg, Säckingen, Waldshut, and Rheinfelden.[66] Throughout the spring repeated letters from Paris failed to move him, and when, in June, Marshal Guébriant joined him with fresh troops and further entreaties from Paris, he found him as obstinate as always.[67] No solution could be found, short of confirming that dominating military and territorial power which Bernard claimed—elevating him to the uncontrolled position of a Wallenstein.
Fate stepped in between him and his ambitions. ‘Untimely and premature death, for such was the decision of God, commanded the hastening foot to stay in the very midst of its victorious race and marked out the limit to his further ambition.[68] So runs the grandiose Latin of the contemporary account. Less than a week in time divided Bernard the menacing rival from Bernard the lamented hero, for whom the whole Court was commanded to wear black.[69]
He had been intermittently troubled by fever for some months past,[70] and about the middle of July a rapid consuming illness seized him and ended his life in a few days. The end was so timely for Richelieu that many believed that he had poisoned him.[71] The legend is false; an over-tired young man who has for years lived to the uttermost of his strength is as likely to die of a fever as a rash soldier to be killed in battle. Richelieu was as lucky in the death of Bernard as he had been six years before in that of Gustavus.
Bernard himself soon realized that his death was near and, insisting that his doctors keep him alive from hour to hour with stimulants, he composed and dictated his will.[72] On the will, above all, his reputation as a patriot stands. He left Alsace to his elder brother if he would take it—and surely he must have known that William of Weimar had neither strength nor inclination to do so—failing his brother, to the King of France. Certainly he stipulated that such cession was for the length of the war only, but he took no precaution to guarantee this. He left his army entire to his second-in-command, Erlach, a gentleman of Switzerland in whom he had always trusted. He left his best horse to Guébriant, a consolation for his wasted diplomacy.[73] With death so close and so untimely upon him, Bernard might have lifted the veil from his true ambitions by making some last-minute effort to achieve them. But the will, in spite of the undiscouraged efforts of his apologists, remains as obstinately inconclusive as the rest of his policy. It proves nothing save that he realized that Richelieu alone was strong enough to defend the Protestant Cause, and that he had no party in Germany on which to bestow either Alsace or his army.
He made a good end: coldly virtuous, he had few personal sins to trouble him, and as for his public responsibilities, he probably cared as little for the desolation of the Rhineland, for the foul destruction of Landshut or the burning of Bavaria, as had the late Emperor Ferdinand for the total ruin of the Empire. The cause justified all and, whatever his ambitions, there is no doubt that Bernard was as devout a Protestant as Ferdinand had been a Catholic. ‘Into thy hands, Lord Jesus, I commend my spirit’, he whispered with his last, unwilling breath. He was thirty-five when he died.
On such evidence as there is he can neither be altogether condemned nor altogether acquitted. Death cut short the hearing, opposing to all judgements for good or evil the inconclusive verdict—‘not proven’.
6.
How little Bernard had prepared the German princes for any assertion of national interests was shown by the events which immediately succeeded his death. The masters of Alsace and Breisach were Bernard’s soldiers, and their master was Erlach. Whoever could come to terms with Erlach gained the Upper Rhine. Of all the rulers in Germany, precisely one made the effort.
Charles Lewis, Elector Palatine, was twenty-three years old, a hard-headed, egocentric, conscientious young man who had learnt early to fend for himself. His misanthropic disbelief in human kind—at home he was nicknamed Timon—was tempered at this period by the reckless optimism of youth. In October 1638 the army he had raised with the help of English money had been destroyed at Vlotho, his younger brother had been taken prisoner, and he himself had barely escaped with his life. Undeterred by this sorry escapade, he set out less than a year later to make himself master of Bernard’s army and thereby of the Upper Rhine.
Playing on the Protestant Cause, on his father’s wrongs, on his own undoubted German origin and consequent fitness to succeed a fellow German prince, hinting at subsidies from his supposedly wealthy uncle the King of Great Britain, Charles Lewis made himself a party in Bernard’s army large enough to cause anxiety to Richelieu. He made one childish mistake. Setting out to join the troops, he journeyed straight across France. Richelieu pounced upon him at Moulins and sent him prisoner to Vincennes,[74] where he remained in impotent disgust until Erlach had bartered the army to Louis XIII.
If Bernard is to be a hero, Erlach who contracted his army into the service of Richelieu on his death, and put Alsace and Breisach at their disposal, is the lowest of traitors. But if Bernard was merely an ambitious mercenary leader, then Erlach was neither better nor worse than he, since all he did was to find a new employer for the men whose feeding and pay lay at his charge. The blame, if any, for the loss of Bernard’s army to France, lies not with Erlach but with the princes of Germany who made no offer to him. He had to take the best he could get, and the best was Richelieu.[75]
On October 9th 1639, a treaty was signed between the King of France and the troops henceforward known sometimes as the Weimarians, sometimes as the Bernardines. They were to continue in the pay of the French government, and to follow the French commander-in-chief on the Rhine. They were to keep their own separate entity and their own general who could alone appoint the lesser officers, and they were to hold certain fortresses, Breisach in particular, under the French Crown. As Erlach wrote almost apologetically to the Elector Palatine, ‘it was impossible to preserve any longer an army which had already suffered much and which the approach of winter threatened with inevitable ruin’.[76]
The treaty, following on the death of Bernard, marks the final abdication of the German patriots, such as they were, from any even partial control of their allies’ war. The rulers of Hesse-Cassel continued to assert their independence and stood in relation to Richelieu and Oxenstierna as equal allies, but they steered a narrow course of their own, having neither the military nor the territorial power to affect the progress of the war. Whatever Bernard’s intentions, while he had lived there had at least been a German commander exerting an influence which neither Richelieu nor Oxenstierna could afford to disregard. With his death and the passing of his troops under
foreign control, the war degenerated altogether into a contest between the Kings of France and Spain, fought on German soil.
1. Feuquières, III, p. 41.
2. Gualdo Priorato, Historia delle Guerre, Part I, p. 240.
3. Lonchay and Cuvelier, III, pp. 18–19.
4. Lorentzen, p. 53.
5. Händlingar rörande Skandinaviens Historia, XXXVI, pp. 368 ff.
6. Ibid., p. 375.
7. Brefvexling, II, vi, p. 225.
8. Lorentzen, p. 63.
9. Brefvexling, II, vi, p. 254.
10. Lorentzen, p. 63.
11. Chronik des Jakob Wagner, pp. 55–69; Annales, XII, p. 1765.
12. Wille, Hanau im Dreissigjährigen Krieg. Hanau, 1888, p. 690.
13. Lundorp, IV, pp. 687–8.
14. Poyntz, p. 120.
15. Poyntz, loc. cit.
16. Chronik des Jakob Wagner, p. 32.
17. Avenel, V, p. 30.
18. Ibid., IV, p. 757.
19. Prinsterer, II, iii, pp. 78–9.
20. Relazione dagli Ambasciatori, Spagna, II, p. 108.
21. Avenel, V, pp. 103–8.
22. Ibid., pp. 209–10.
23. Ibid., IV, p. 606.
24. Ibid., pp. 603, 606, 690.
25. Le Comte de Caix de Saint-Aymour, L’enlèvement d’une princesse de Hohenzollern au XVIIe. siècle. Revue des Deux Mondes, July 1915, p. 146.
26. Avenel, V, p. 47.
27. Feuquières, III, pp. 211–13.
28. Ibid., pp. 260–77.
29. Lünig, VIII, pp. 430–2.
30. Brefvexling, II, ii, p. 169.
31. Avenel, V, p. 485; Fagniez, Le Père Joseph à Ratisbonne. Revue Historique, XXVIII, pp. 306–7.
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