The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  In the second week of January 1641, a Swedish army under Baner appeared outside Regensburg, demanding its surrender. The Danube was frozen hard, and the general was prepared to cross the river and surround the town.[29] Ferdinand, with commendable courage and cool judgement, recognized this as a mere demonstration to disperse the meeting and prevent his triumph and realizing that the enemy had not the resources to maintain their position, refused to let the Diet break up. Instead he fortified the town and strengthened the outlying garrisons. His calculation was right, the river thawed and the enemy withdrew, leaving among other damage the skeletons of twenty of the imperial falcons which had fallen into their hands and which the men, taking them for pheasants, had cooked and eaten.[30] Ferdinand’s coolness and judgement won him the final approval of his subject princes. It was the height and the turning-point.

  The old constitutional party had collapsed at the Peace of Prague: John George of Saxony altogether, Maximilian of Bavaria for several years. The invasion of Germany by the French and the desertion of the Swedes by almost all their German allies had converted a civil into an external war, and any opposition to the Emperor after the Peace of Prague was bound, of necessity, to place its sponsor in an invidious position. Ferdinand had so arranged matters that imperial policy stood for the integrity of German soil against the French and Swedes. So long as he was not compromised by his Spanish cousins it was morally impossible for any German prince not actually in rebellion to oppose him. But suddenly, at the eightieth session of the Diet, an attack was launched against the Emperor from the Electoral College itself; the representative of Brandenburg emphatically declared that his master did not consider the Peace of Prague in any way suitable as a basis for negotiations. Immediately, in spite of the obstinate resistance of the Electors of Bavaria, Cologne, and Saxony,[31] the lesser Protestant princes began to accept the leadership of Brandenburg and to identify constitutional opposition to the Emperor with the extreme Protestant party.[32] Fear of external invasion alone had veiled a suspicion which had never ceased to exist, and an unlucky chance had transformed Ferdinand’s Diet from a demonstration of imperial unity to a revelation of imperial weakness.

  It was only a chance. Ferdinand had called and opened the Diet when old George William was still ruling in Brandenburg under the control of his chief minister Schwarzenberg, a Catholic and a devotee of the imperial house. But George William at little more than forty was already an invalid and his oppressed existence ended on December 1st 1640. The heir, Frederick William, was twenty years old and unlike his predecessor in all but the height and dignity of his person. Whereas within the manly frame of the father there lurked a timid, dull, unadventuring soul, the no less stalwart frame of the son was alive with a bold, decided, enterprising spirit. Born of the war generation, Frederick William had its opportunism, its unscrupulousness, its disregard of anything but practical considerations.[33] He would have risked and suffered anything for what he took to be the material welfare of his dynasty—to do him justice, perhaps even of his subjects. But he would not have risked a taler for a principle. Later in life he issued a notable manifesto urging the necessity of securing German waterways for the Germans; his object was to secure one particular waterway for himself. Later still he received French subsidies with cynical indifference and baffling secrecy. He bartered Pomerania for Magdeburg and redeemed it by a trick. His internal policy was harsh, salutary, effective and unpopular; his external policy created the Prussian state from the scattered nuclei his father had left him, and he must be judged by that creation.

  The new Elector’s character was still unknown when he succeeded. He had been partly educated in The Hague and had spent much of his time among his cousins, the children of Frederick of Bohemia. He had refused to come home when commanded by his father, and when he ultimately and unwillingly obeyed he had lived on the worst terms with Schwarzenberg, whom he seems to have suspected of an attempt to poison him.[34]

  Since the old Elector’s agreement to the Peace of Prague, his troops had been fighting for the Emperor against the Swedes, and ineffective as his military efforts had been, Ferdinand could not afford to lose him, least of all during the Diet where so much depended on an appearance of unity. But under Frederick William affairs in Brandenburg moved fast. The new Elector wanted, above all, peace for his country. He succeeded to lands altogether wasted, occupied by foreign troops or by his own undisciplined army which lived by robbery,[35] to a heritage stripped of all its finest estates by sale and pawn, to an income less than an eighth of that which his father had once enjoyed.[36] He was forced at first to live at Königsberg in Prussia because the roof of his castle at Berlin was falling in, and the province was too short of food to supply the Electoral household.[37] ‘Pomerania is lost, Jülich is lost, we hold Prussia like an eel by the tail, and we must mortgage the Mark’, lamented one of his advisers.[38]

  Frederick William intended neither to mortgage the Mark, nor to lose any more land or money for the Emperor. He at once gave orders that his troops should confine themselves to defensive action; when the Swedes invaded his land he asked them on what terms they would grant him neutrality. In desperation Schwarzenberg tried to work up a mutiny. In January he was dismissed, and died shortly after, probably of the shock.[39]

  By the beginning of March 1641, Ferdinand at Regensburg had heard enough to fear a private peace between Brandenburg and Sweden. By May the Elector had dispatched ambassadors to Stockholm; early in July the Swedish government agreed to a military truce, while a longer armistice was contemplated,[40] by the 24th the terms of an indefinite abstention were privately signed;[41] and early in September the news that Brandenburg and Sweden had suspended hostilities altogether was published by the Electoral representative at Regensburg.[42]

  Frederick William had forced Ferdinand’s hand. The Emperor genuinely wanted peace, but it must be on terms that did not sacrifice too large a part of what his house had gained after so many years of fighting. He stood by the Peace of Prague, probably not himself realizing that a settlement which had seemed generous before Richelieu’s direct intervention in 1635 was not a settlement but a cry of ‘no compromise’ in 1640. The new Elector of Brandenburg broke down the pretence. An imperial ally, he disregarded the negotiations at Regensburg and made his own truce. It was as if he had stood up openly before Ferdinand’s face and accused him of refusing to make peace.

  The significance of Frederick William’s action was emphasized by a book published some months previously under the title Dissertatio de ratione status in Imperio nostro Romano-Germanico. This work was written with such impetus, dramatic skill, and logical force that it achieved almost immediately an immense popularity. The identity of its writer was concealed under a punning pseudonym, Hippolithus à Lapide, but he was in fact Bogislav von Chemnitz, later historiographer to the Crown of Sweden. In this well-timed work he analysed the manner in which the Hapsburg dynasty had exploited the imperial constitution for the widening of their personal influence, and revealed with merciless logic the actual weakness of their position, resting as it did on cunning and force and on the exploitation of emergency against the still existent rights of the princes.

  Ferdinand had opened the Diet in September 1640 with what he himself thought was an olive branch in his hand. By May 1641 it was the common talk of Europe that he wanted nothing but war,[43] and the negotiations at Regensburg were but a repetition of the brilliant trick he had played at the Peace of Prague: a new and more coercive attempt to hold his allies together and keep the opposing party in the wrong.

  Ferdinand was no fool. He saw what had happened and he did the only thing possible to meet it. He had held out an olive branch and been told that it was a naked sword. His only hope of saving the reputation of his government lay in proving that his contention was the right one. When he had news that the truce between Sweden and Brandenburg was signed past all revocation, he took it with an excellent grace, the spontaneous pleasure of the genuine peacemaker. This deft move
ment turned the blow, for Ferdinand’s suave agreement disarmed the pugnacious supporters of Brandenburg. Taking the occasion, he asked them to reconsider their views on the Peace of Prague as a basis for general peace. Only the opposition of Brandenburg and the extremists, he asserted, now prevented the opening of a general peace conference. Thus skilfully he threw the accusation of obstruction on to Brandenburg.[44] To evade it the Elector’s representatives agreed to the propositions.[45] On November 10th 1641, Ferdinand dissolved the Diet in person, with this decision: that plenipotentiaries should be chosen for the discussion of peace terms with the rebels and the invaders, on the basis of the Peace of Prague and a general amnesty.[46]

  The crisis was postponed, not avoided. Sooner or later Ferdinand would have to open peace negotiations in earnest, and with Frederick William drifting towards friendship with Sweden and France, such peace negotiations might be very disadvantageous to imperial prestige. Sooner or later the sword of war, so indignantly repudiated by both Ferdinand and Frederick William, would have to be lifted again by one or the other.

  3.

  On November 30th 1641, the imperial decree of amnesty was nailed up at Kölln on the Spree, in the Elector of Brandenburg’s lands, but wind and rain reduced it to shreds in the night and buffeted the fragments contemptuously about the street.[47] The incident was too nearly akin to the general opinion of the Emperor’s peaceful intentions not to cause cynical comment among contemporaries.

  At Hamburg meanwhile imperial, Swedish, and French agents were settling the preliminaries of a peace conference. In succession Ferdinand sent three different ambassadors, not one of whom convinced the Swedes or the French that the imperial government was in earnest. ‘They substituted Lützow for Kurtz, Aversberg for Lützow. The men changed but the same tale was told’,[48] complained the French ambassador. In fact the situation suited him admirably, since the government in Paris was convinced that delay would bring fresh disasters to the Hapsburg; the government at Vienna was of the opposite opinion. Between them they held up negotiations for weeks and months on one pretext after another. The French demanded a title for the Duchess of Savoy which the Austrians refused to give, and great was the annoyance of both parties when the Danish envoy evolved a solution of the difficulty which neither of them could decently repudiate.[49] The Austrians, however, brought about another deadlock by ratifying the preliminaries in a document of such startling vagueness and irregularity that the French refused to accept it, and the game of postponement went happily on, each party hotly accusing the other of delaying the settlement.[50]

  The imperial government showed that easy optimism for which Austria later became famous, and allowed its hopes to be perpetually and unduly raised by small things. Shortly after the Diet the intransigent Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg died and his heirs deserted the Swedes to make their private peace with the Emperor,[51] thus leaving only Hesse-Cassel and the exiled Elector Palatine in open revolt. Ferdinand counted also on the enmity between Sweden and Denmark, but although he had managed to have Christian IV appointed as a mediator at the peace negotiations, an appointment of which the Swedes loudly and justly complained,[52] there was as yet no open breach.

  There was trouble also between Sweden and Brandenburg. The young Queen was unwilling to marry the Elector, and the possession of Pomerania was a cause of animated disagreement. Ferdinand had reason to hope for a complete estrangement.[53]

  The hostility between Sweden and Denmark, the tension between Brandenburg and Sweden, raised hopes at Vienna which were partly confirmed by events in the field. The situation in the Swedish section of the conflict was singularly dangerous in the two years succeeding Bernard of Saxe-Weimar’s death. Johan Baner was a marshal under the Swedish Queen, but he was a nobleman of ancient family and son of a man who had suffered death for rebellion under Charles IX. Like most of the military commanders, Swedish or not, he was ambitious for lands in Germany, and his behaviour during the last years had clearly indicated that he was no less ambitious for private power. The careers of men like Mansfeld, Wallenstein and Bernard opened up possibilities to which no man of ambition could be indifferent. Baner was ambitious, domineering, and unscrupulous. Furthermore, the destruction of the greater part of Horn’s army at Nördlingen had placed him in a very strong position. For years he remained the one asset of his government. He was the only bastion against imperialists, Saxons, and Brandenburgers in north Germany. He safeguarded the communication line between Sweden and the Rhine or central Germany; withdrawal would render Oxenstierna’s alliance valueless to Richelieu and force Sweden into an ignominious peace.

  The army under him, ill-paid as it was and often driven into ill-provided quarters by the attacking forces, was singularly unreliable. His reports to Oxenstierna frankly admitted as much. ‘Quartermaster Ramm . . . has stayed behind in Mecklenburg without my consent, and I do not know what has become of him’,[54] he wrote, and again, ‘I could do no more than promise [to pay] them again and again in Her Majesty’s name . . . with the most plausible excuses I could think of’;[55] and later, ‘There would be no serious gaps in their numbers if only the stragglers, plunderers, and robbers, whose irresponsibility there is . . . no means of checking would come back to their colours’.[56] He admitted that there was no longer any discipline,[57] that the foot soldiers repeatedly exchanged their equipment for food,[58] and over and over again that matters had now reached the last extremity, beyond which there could be no future.[59]

  Baner painted the conditions in his army with a full brush, for in fact he managed to carry on. He intended, doubtless, to create the impression that his own resource and intelligence staved off disaster, a story based on the truth if sometimes exaggerated in the telling. It was certainly true, and Oxenstierna knew it, that the government in Stockholm would have been powerless alone to deal with the mutinous bands, and must therefore treat the marshal with the utmost consideration. Rapidly and surely Baner became to Oxenstierna what Bernard had been to Richelieu. At the time of Bernard’s death, only lack of money prevented Baner from buying Erlach and the masterless troops over Richelieu’s head.[60] Failing in this, he set himself to establish his position by a spectacular offensive. In 1639 he invaded Bohemia, and, but for the skilful defence of Prague by Piccolomini, the unwillingness of the peasants to rise in his favour,[61] and above all the lack of food, would have made himself master of the whole province. ‘I had not thought to find the Kingdom of Bohemia so lean, wasted, and spoiled,’ he wrote to Oxenstierna, ‘for between Prague and Vienna all is razed to the ground and hardly a living soul to be seen in the land’.[62]

  He made good use of his opportunities, nevertheless, and the Swedish government was soon electrified by the news that he had opened peace negotiations independently and had toyed with the offer of estates in Silesia and the title of Prince of the Empire.[63] The discovery of his schemes temporarily wrecked them, but he opened a new campaign in 1640 by a spectacular march southward to Erfurt, where he joined with the Bernardine army under the French marshal Guébriant and a contingent from Hesse and Brunswick. Although he now had over forty thousand men, a certain hesitancy appeared in his actions. The imperialists manoeuvred, evading a battle, and he made no effort to reach the Danube; instead he followed the ancient example of Wallenstein and opened negotiations with the Archduke Leopold. Behind the imperial lines, the Emperor himself regarded these overtures with the utmost suspicion,[64] while in the Franco-Swedish camp an equal uncertainty of Baner’s intentions culminated in the resignation of Peter Melander, the Hessian general, who subsequently and somewhat inconsequently took a command in the Bavarian army. The French commander, Guébriant, had more reason to complain, for Baner had again coolly attempted to suborn the Bernardines into leaving the French service for his own.[65]

  Failing in this, Baner fell back on the Weser with nothing achieved. His active but unsubtle brain was softening at last under the effect of the heavy drinking in which he had indulged for many years; he was deeply affected by
the death in June 1640 of his wife Elizabeth. She had been with him for the greater part of his campaigning, a gracious, gentle, determined woman, who alone knew how to manage her ill-tempered, ambitious, impatient husband. The soldiers, it was said, looked upon her with reverence and affection as a mother, and civilians had often asked her to stand between them and her husband’s exactions; in one town the municipality had even thought it wise to be on good terms with her maid.[66]

  At the funeral of his wife the marshal set eyes on the young daughter of the Margrave of Baden, to whom with the disequilibrium of extreme grief he at once addressed his vigorous but now unoccupied affections. The marriage took place within a scandalously short time, and the marshal, with his young bride, proceeded, to the annoyance of the army officers, to spend three-quarters of every night carousing with their friends, and three-quarters of every day in bed.[67]

  If this marriage owed its inception largely to Baner’s maudlin grief and ill-restrained desires, it owed something also to the lady’s standing in Germany. Baner, as son-in-law to the Margrave of Baden, had got for himself a stake within the Empire which might be useful when he wished to assert himself against the Swedish Crown. He could use the alliance to make himself a party among the German princes. He had had to receive in his camp, much to his annoyance for he detested the amateur soldier,[68] one of the younger brothers of the Elector Palatine, who was learning the art of war. His manner to this prince, offensively cold at first, mellowed into an arrogant familiarity on his marriage and consequent elevation—in his own estimation—to the same social standing.[69]