This was a very small straw in the wind, but Baner’s erratic conduct may well have been guided by private ambition; he was in any case becoming so quarrelsome that he was almost useless as an ally. With a sudden return of military energy, he again advanced to Erfurt, where in December 1640 he once more joined with the Bernardines under Marshal Guébriant and with them made a lightning march to Regensburg, even emptying a volley of cannon-shot into the city from the far side of the river. But the weather and his furious disagreements with Guébriant made campaigning impossible, and he withdrew gradually at the end of January 1641 to Zwickau in Saxony and finally to Halberstadt. His actions, in their periodic activity and indolence, in their perpetual shirking of the final attack, have the true stamp of the careerist soldier. He had continued in his efforts to suborn the Bernardines and had managed to provoke them to disorder.[70] But, like Wallenstein before him, Baner misjudged his army. He had never been personally popular and his first wife’s death removed a very real element of unity from the command. He was growing more and more careless of discipline, of pay, of provisions, and the army was alive with mutiny.[71] Before it could break out he died, at Halberstadt on May 20th 1641, and left the Swedish government to deal with a situation which had become as bad as he had ever painted it.
On the news of Baner’s death, Oxenstierna appointed Lennart Torstensson as his successor,[72] a soldier who had been trained under Gustavus Adolphus and in whom he felt he could place his trust. But it would be several weeks, if not months, before Torstensson, who was still in Sweden, could take up his post, and in the meantime the task of controlling the army fell upon Karl Gustav Wrangel, an able but not a popular soldier. Under his leadership in June 1641 the army beat off an imperialist force of Wolfenbüttel,[73] but very soon afterwards the murmurs, partially stilled by victory, rose again. Mortaigne, one of the leading officers and a soldier of considerable reputation, led the mutineers. They demanded immediate pay, in default of which they threatened to march off to the Rhineland with the Bernardines and leave the Swedish government without an army.[74] The coming of Torstensson saved the situation.
He arrived in mid-November, a harsh, commanding man, very ill with gout, but undiscouraged either by the doleful reports of Wrangel or by his own crippling illness. He brought with him seven thousand native Swedish troops and, by a stupendous effort, enough money to satisfy the more troublesome of the mutineers. By the judicious distribution of what he had, by leavening the army with the new Swedish recruits, by his own obstinate refusal to be intimidated or impressed by the mutineers, Torstensson at length induced calm.[75]
He was a more reliable leader than Johan Baner had been. His loyalty to the Crown was more certain and he had far greater organizing ability than his predecessor. He needed it. French subsidies were always insufficient and usually late, and they were the only definite resource that the Swedish army possessed. Torstensson evolved a new method: he no longer recruited men by offering to pay them for their services. To the distressed peasantry, from whom the troops were perpetually replenished, he offered food, clothing, arms, and whatever plunder they were clever enough to secure. He in fact accepted and legalized the situation which already existed, and was thus bound to find money only for the veterans who had been in arms before he came.[76] Plague, hunger, reckless living was year by year decreasing the proportion of such veterans.
A gang of licensed robbers could only be kept together and forced to do the office of an army by ferocious discipline, and Torstensson was the man for this. He neither cared for nor sought popularity; his men hated him, and he ruled them by terror from the cumbrous litter to which, for the greater part of the time, his illness kept him confined. Had he been a less able soldier he would hardly have escaped some catastrophic mutiny, but his worst enemy could have found no fault with his campaigning. He gave his men plunder and he gave them victory. They cursed his hangings and shootings and floggings, but they did not rise against him.
The coming of Lennart Torstensson destroyed the Emperor’s hope of better fortunes. The Swedish marshal opened his campaign in the spring of 1642 by striking straight at the dynastic lands. A Saxon army was heavily defeated at Schweidnitz, with the loss of much artillery and ammunition,[77] and Torstensson swept on unhindered into Moravia. There was little plunder left, but at a certain monastery the soldiers broke open the tombs and cut off the ringed fingers of dead abbots, smashed the vestment chests and marched on to Olmütz with chasubles and altar-cloths slung cloakwise over their dirty leather coats and waving banners with sacred devices.[78] Olmütz fell in June, and Torstensson, brutal and thorough, at once began to fortify the town. Plantations were ruthlessly cut down to build shacks against the winter; the students, the sick and the destitute were expelled as useless,[79] the imperial governor forced, as a dangerous traitor, to leave the town on foot with his wife and children.[80] The local peasantry were suspected of loyalty to the Emperor; Torstensson kept down their petty attacks by burning their villages, torturing and hanging the prisoners and issuing threats of horrible punishment against any who stole from the army.[81]
His outriders meanwhile were within twenty-five miles of Vienna before the imperial generals, the Archduke himself and Piccolomini, could gather a large enough force to march against him. Torstensson was cautious. With the main body of his forces he fell back through Silesia to Saxony, here thinking to bring the ill-armed John George to his knees before the imperialist army came up. He was besieging Leipzig when the Archduke Leopold came in sight on November 2nd 1642. Torstensson withdrew northwards in the direction of Breitenfeld, Leopold pursuing, impetuous for a second Nördlingen. It was a second Breitenfeld.
The Archduke attacked the Swedes by a terrific cannonade with which he hoped to cover his position while the cavalry on the wings formed for action. He used chain shot, still at that date enough of an innovation momentarily to unnerve the Swedish army. Torstensson, however, saw at once that he must engage the superior forces of the enemy while they were still unready and, braving the cannonade, he charged their left wing. The disordered ranks broke at once, and although the Archduke in person galloped to the spot and tried by oaths, threats, and blows to rally the fugitives, neither officers nor men took the least notice.
On the opposite side of the field, the imperialist cavalry had beaten back the Swedes, and the imperialist infantry pressed the Swedish centre. Torstensson’s victorious cavalry of the right, however, after dispersing the imperialists, came in to the help of the centre and forced the attacking infantry to withdraw. It remained now only for the whole of Torstensson’s forces to encircle the isolated right wing of the imperial horse. Some surrendered as they stood, most fled, and the Swedes pursued them for miles across the flat country. Whole companies and troops, flinging down their arms, surrendered to the conquerors and willingly agreed to enter Swedish service. At a low estimate, the Archduke lost a quarter of his army on the field and another quarter to the enemy. The Swedes estimated his dead at nearly five thousand and their prisoners at four thousand five hundred; they had also gained forty-six cannon, fifty wagons of ammunition and the papers and money of the Archduke.[82] He himself, barely escaping with life and freedom, retired to Bohemia. Here he tried by court martial the colonel and officers of one whole regiment, which he declared had broken first and wantonly shattered the resistance of the left wing. Defeat embittered his easy temper; he beheaded all the higher officers, hanged the lesser, shot every tenth man in the ranks and broke up the remainder among the rest of the army. This done, he retired to Pilsen to receive the sacrament in public and pray for help.[83]
A few weeks later, bad news came from the opposite quarter of the Empire. Wiederhold, that independent Protestant who had refused to surrender the castle of Hohentwiel to the Emperor eight years before, swooped down on the town of Überlingen on the north shore of Constance and seized it for the French.[84]
With the Hapsburg fortunes at this low ebb, the Elector of Mainz had called a Deputationstag at Frank
fort-on-the-Main to discuss the problems which had caused, or had subsequently arisen out of, the war.[85] Ferdinand hoped that his assembly would arrogate to itself the right to settle German problems, and that he would thus deprive France and Sweden of any claim to interfere in the affairs of the Empire at the peace discussions. The plan was ingeniously countered by a Swedish move; the Swedish plenipotentiaries at Hamburg issued a manifesto inviting all the Estates of Germany to bring their complaints to an international peace conference.[86]
In the meantime the places of meeting had been fixed at Osnabrück for Sweden, at Münster for France, and the date of assembly fixed for March 25th 1642. Ferdinand clumsily evaded the issue: he postponed the ratification of the arrangement until the date was past, and issued no credentials for his plenipotentiaries.
The Austrian subterfuges were, however, denounced by this time even by Ferdinand’s Catholic allies. Maximilian of Bavaria, whose ever-wandering loyalty had been fixed momentarily by his marriage to the Archduchess, now leaned again to France and carried the Electors of Mainz and Cologne with him. Situated as they were, all three naturally sought to conciliate the dominant power on the Rhine, Mainz and Cologne to secure immediate protection, Bavaria to obtain the confirmation of his Electorate and Rhenish conquests.
Division within the family broke down Ferdinand’s powers of resistance. On the death of his cousin, the Cardinal-Infant, Olivarez had at first decided on the Archduke Leopold as his successor.[87] The prince had not shone in Germany, but he was not unintelligent, had something of the Cardinal-Infant’s easy charm and was likely to be well received as a prince of the blood by the snobbish Brussels mob and the Flemish officials. Philip of Spain, at first amenable to the suggestion, suddenly changed his mind and declared instead his intention of satisfying the passion for royalty of the Flemish people by appointing his own son, Don John, as governor.[88] Don John was the King’s son, it is true, but his mother was the actress Maria Calderon; he was by all reports virtuous and intelligent,[89] but he was only twelve years old. The people, from the officials down, were righteously indignant that a bastard was to be set over them, and the inner circle of the government recognized at once that, by appointing a child, Philip was trying to tighten still further the hold of Madrid on their oppressed state. Deferential but persistent protests at length induced Philip to postpone the sending of Don John indefinitely, and in the meantime to appoint Don Francisco de Melo as regent in the Netherlands.[90]
The situation was not saved. The Austrian family had been bitterly wounded that, after so many years of alliance, the King should prefer his bastard before the eldest Archduke, the avowed leader of the Spanish party in Vienna. The moral bond thus broken by Philip’s inept arrogance, it needed only the incompetence of Melo to plunge the Spanish Netherlands into final disaster and give the Emperor one additional stimulus to save himself from the sinking ship of the Spanish monarchy.
4.
The war between France and Spain progressed fitfully but with an ever-growing balance in favour of France. Richelieu’s constant difficulty was his army; he needed his best men for Germany, where the danger was greatest, and he did not always trust the noblemen who commanded for him in the Pyrenees, Flanders or Burgundy. He had nevertheless singled out for particular confidence the Duc d’Enghien, eldest son of the Prince de Condé, a man in his early twenties of whom he expected much.[91] At his instance this gentleman was made commander-in-chief of the forces on the Flemish frontier in the winter of 1642.
The Duc d’Enghien had given proof to others of a character less reliable than that with which Richelieu credited him. His temper was so violent, so moody and at times so desperate, when he was a boy, that it had been doubted whether he would grow into sane manhood. By his twenty-second year he had outgrown these failings, but he retained a singularly impulsive and startlingly unconventional manner with a great dislike of contradiction.
The French army, too, had altered during the last years. Richelieu, attempting to save money and curb the power of the commanders, particularly of the nobility, had concentrated more on technical skill than on numbers.[92] With the support of the King he had tried to enforce a more rigorous discipline, threatening Draconian punishments for such minor offences as swearing;[93] he had attempted to reduce the number of camp-followers, and particularly of women, among the troops, not always with success.[94] Furthermore, by smoothing the way as far as possible for promotion by talent and not by influence he had opened a tempting career to the ambitious, intelligent sons of peasants, artisans and shopkeepers, and of course of the impoverished aristocracy. Thus, in the last decade, a highly trained machine, particularly remarkable for skill and endurance in siege warfare, had rapidly developed. Nor was it perpetually adulterated by the inclusion of the deserters and prisoners from the opposing side. It evolved and maintained a sense of nationality as strong as that of the Swedes had once been, while prisoners were either rapidly exchanged or, with constructive brutality, drafted into the French navy as galley-slaves.[95]
Richelieu did not live to see the crowning of his long political work by the victory of his last important nominee. The year 1642 was marked by the explosion of the final and most dangerous mine in his path. The King’s beautiful favourite Cinq Mars revolted, carrying with him several of the nobility—too few to save his cause, but enough to shake the Cardinal’s confidence.[96] For the last time Richelieu triumphed, and Cinq Mars followed earlier leaders of revolt to the scaffold. His victor outlived him less than three weeks. On November 28th 1642, he was taken seriously ill, and four days later asked permission to resign his office. His body, so long tormented by intermittent and increasing illness, was exhausted at last. The King would not accept the resignation; instead he came to see his minister, sat at his bedside, and fed him with the yolk of eggs, showing in his restrained, inhibited fashion all the tenderness of which he was capable.[97] Their contacts had always been those of the mind only, unsoftened by one touch of emotion, the Cardinal holding to the King as the ‘tree-trunk’ of the State, the King to the Cardinal as the foundation of his power. Their union had occasionally suffered by those infatuations of the sick and listless for some young, vivid, healthy thing which could give him the emotional happiness he had found neither in marriage nor in power, but with Louis, for all his unbalanced longings, the head was stronger than the heart, and the domination of Richelieu remained firm.
The King came on December 2nd; on the following night Richelieu received extreme unction and sank slowly into coma. Towards midday on December 4th he died, and the Parisians, more in curiosity than in sorrow, crowded in to take their last farewell of the man who had never been popular yet always respected, always feared, always in the crisis of their fortunes called upon and trusted.
In the ensuing spring, Enghien, with l’Hôpital and Gassion, two experienced commanders, began operations on the Flemish border. A shadow of uncertainty hung over the campaign for, in Paris, Louis XIII was ill, and his physicians saw little hope for recovery. Richelieu’s policy had been taken over, unaltered, by his own latterday confidant and right-hand man, Cardinal Mazarin. But if the King were to die, his successor would be a child of barely five, under the regency of his mother and a council. While the King lived the restless powers of France, the nobility and the Paris mob, might stomach the guidance of Mazarin, but when that feeble barrier fell it was not likely that they would tolerate the rule of the Spanish queen and the Italian Cardinal.
Under the shadow of these fears, Enghien moved his troops to defend the line of the Meuse. In the Louvre the King lay on his huge bed day after day, but his unhealthy body, which had for the last years never seemed truly alive, was unable to die. The pulse beat obstinately on in the wasted skeleton. Day after day he lay almost motionless, sometimes sinking into troubled sleep, sometimes half-conscious, sometimes speaking, while his wife cried noisily at his bedside. Courtiers and doctors came and went, and among the pompous grandeur and sordid sights of the sick-room, the Dauphin and a lit
tle friend played quietly while the Duke of Anjou, on the lap of a strange countess, cried loudly for his nurse who was not privileged to cross the threshold.[98] A little before his death the King woke from a short sleep to see Condé watching him. ‘Monsieur de Condé’, he said, ‘I dreamt that your son had won a great victory’.[99] Early in the morning of May 15th 1643, he died.
On the evening of the 17th, Enghien had the news, where he lay with his troops somewhere between Auberton and Rumigny,[100] in the flat country to the west of the Meuse, on his march to the relief of Rocroy, a strong frontier fortress besieged by Melo. He thought it wiser at first to say nothing, lest there should be a panic in the army; on the following morning at Rumigny he called a meeting of the officers and informed them of his plans. Rocroy itself stands on an eminence above the surrounding country, but the ground between it and Rumigny is flattish, sandy, and much broken with scrubby woods and narrow marshy streams. Before the town the country opens out and the woods recede. Melo lay with eight thousand horse and eighteen thousand foot between Enghien and the town, well entrenched. The prince’s plan was to advance through the narrow defiles of the woods towards Rocroy, leaving the baggage and cannon behind. Should this movement draw Melo from his position, then they would outflank him and approach Rocroy from the rear; should it fail to draw him, then they would force him to try the issue before the town. This scheme laid down, with Gassion’s agreement and l’Hôpital’s disapproval, Enghien informed the officers of the King’s death and appealed for their loyalty to the new sovereign and the regency.[101]
The Thirty Years War Page 50