CICELY VERONICA WEDGWOOD (1910–1997) was born into an innovative and intellectual English family. Her father, a direct descendant of the potter Josiah Wedgwood, was the chief general manager of the London and North Eastern Railway and her mother was a novelist and travel writer. After success at Oxford, Wedgwood rejected an academic career and took up writing instead. She published her first history, The Thirty Years War (1938), before her thirtieth birthday, and in the years that followed wrote a succession of chronicles of seventeenth-century Europe that made her one of the most popular and best-known historians in Britain. Her most important works include The King’s Peace; The King’s War; and William the Silent: William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, 1533–1584, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography in 1944. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies, a Dame of the British Empire, and in 1969 became the third woman to be appointed a member of the British Order of Merit.
ANTHONY GRAFTON teaches the history of Renaissance Europe at Princeton University. His books include Joseph Scaliger, Cardano’s Cosmos, and Bring Out Your Dead.
THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
C. V. WEDGWOOD
Foreword by
ANTHONY GRAFTON
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
This is a New York Review Book
Published by The New York Review of Books
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © by the Estate of C. V. Wedgwood
Foreword copyright © 2005 by Anthony Grafton
All rights reserved.
First published by Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1938
Cover illustration: detail of “The Hanging” from The Miseries of War by Jacques Callot, 1633
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress Has Cataloged the Print Edition of This Book as Follows
Wedgwood, C. V. (Cicely Veronica), 1910–
The Thirty Years War / C. V. Wedgwood ; introduction by Anthony Grafton.
p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)
Originally published: London : J. Cape, 1938.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-59017-146-2 (alk. paper)
1. Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648. 2. Habsburg, House of. I. Title. II. Series.
D258.W4 2005
940.2'4—dc22
2004027336
ISBN 978-1-68137-123-8
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Germany and Europe: 1618
2. A King for Bohemia: 1617–19
3. Spanish Tocsin, German Alarum: 1619–21
4. The Emperor Ferdinand and the Elector Maximilian: 1621–5
5. Towards The Baltic: 1625–8
6. Deadlock: 1628–30
7. The King Of Sweden: 1630–2
8. From Lützen To Nördlingen—and Beyond 1632–5
9. The Struggle For The Rhine: 1635–9
10. The Collapse Of Spain: 1639–43
11. Towards Peace: 1643–8
12. The Peace and After
Bibliographical Note
Index
MAPS AND CHARTS
The Rhine, the Val Telline, and North Italy
Central Europe In 1618
GENEALOGICAL TREES:
Hapsburg Dynasty
Leading Protestant Dynasties
FOREWORD
Veronica Wedgwood had not yet turned thirty when The Thirty Years War appeared. But the book shows no signs of immaturity in content or style. Wedgwood carves her facts directly from the coalface, using the original documents in half a dozen languages that she would always prefer to the conclusions of any modern “Dr. Stumpfnadel.” More remarkably, she imposes a clear story line on a turbulent and chaotic war that raged from 1618 to 1648, and that can be understood only when set against an international background of high court politics and negotiation in a dozen countries. The foreground presents a scene of varied and almost inconceivable sufferings.
Wedgwood’s elegant prose, fluid, dynamic, and limpidly clear, evokes the deliberations of saturnine monarchs as vividly as the miseries of mercenary soldiers lying out in the cold and peasants robbed of their animals and crops. Early in the book she brings one of the war’s first defining events, the Defenestration of Prague, into focused, cinematic life. No reader can forget the extraordinary story of the Catholic members of the Bohemian Estates, hurled from the windows of the Hradcany Castle, only to survive—their fall was cushioned by a heap of refuse lying below—and sneak off or be carried away. In one crisp, breathless set piece, Wedgwood pulls off an astonishing range of literary effects, including a splendid virtual close-up: “Slavata fought longer, calling on the Blessed Virgin and clawing at the window frame under a rain of blows until someone knocked him senseless and the bleeding hands relaxed.” And she sustains the same energy and displays the same eye for the detail that makes a past character or scene live throughout her exhausting, wretched tale of human knavery, folly, and will to destroy.
The young author’s understanding of the seventeenth-century German world, in all its Baroque splendor and misery, is as impressive as the panache with which she stages its defining events. She lays her strongest emphasis on personalities—those of the great leaders who, she argues, made all vital decisions in this period. But she also justifies this approach with a striking discussion of the information systems of a time when “faulty transmission of news excluded public opinion from any dominant part in politics.” A series of brief but deeply researched sketches, no less detailed and compelling than her accounts of historical events, tells us about life in cities and on the land, about the development of military organizations and tactics, about theology and the pursuit of witches. Yet Wedgwood sets out not to explain the war but to recount its story. She denies any desire to offer deeper explanations, and argues here, as she would elsewhere, that most of the combatants had no high purpose, and that contingency determined its course and outcome. Her final judgment on the whole spectacle has the balance and power of a Latin epitaph: “Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its results, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.” The voice with which Wedgwood speaks here is Victorian in its clarity and almost eighteenth-century in its crisp, balanced clauses, but radically modern in its unsparing insistence that war has no higher meaning—a mature voice, appropriate to its century and better than the ones in which we speak now.
Some of Wedgwood’s qualities as scholar and writer can be explained by her formation. Born into a branch of the great china-making family, as a child she traveled endlessly with her father, a successful railway executive. She was educated at a private school in London, which she loved, and by governesses, and she studied German and French on the Continent before she went up to Oxford. There she deeply impressed her tutor, the young A. L. Rowse, and won the highest honors, first in honor moderations (classics) and then in history. She registered to write a dissertation with R. H. Tawney, Christian socialist and pioneering student of social and economic history. An academic career lay open before her, and she did, for a time, give tutorials at Somerville College, Oxford. But Wedgwood could never have forced herself into the academic straitjacket. She seems to have inherited, as so many of her generation did, something of the endless curiosity and courage of the great Victorians, however skeptically she regarded their religious and political verities. Reading history had obsessed her since childhood, when she plu
ndered her father’s rich library. So had writing: “By the time I was twelve,” she later recalled,
my writing had grown dangerously swift. There was a special kind of writing pad called “The Mammoth,” two hundred pages, quarto, ruled faint; under my now practiced pen Mammoths disappeared in a twinkling.
Wedgwood’s father, hoping to slow her down, suggested that she write history: “Even a bad writer,” he told her in another lost language, that of informed paternal admonition, “may be a useful historian.” After she left Oxford, he drew on his own network of friends to give her career some direction. His dazzling cohort of fellow students at Cambridge had included G. E. Moore, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the historian G. M. Trevelyan. Wedgwood spent a weekend with Trevelyan, and he in turn suggested that she drop her dry, analytical dissertation and instead write a biography of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, whose policy of “Thorough” supported Charles I’s efforts to impose an absolutist regime in England. Wedgwood delighted in the primary research needed to carry out this project, and with the help of Sir John Neale, she revised her first draft, which she later described to Ved Mehta as “very feminine and sentimental,” making it into a sharp, accessible work that followed with sympathy the career of a statesman who had been treated with disdain by most historians since his execution by the Long Parliament in 1641.
By 1935, when the trade publisher Jonathan Cape brought out Wedgwood’s first book, she was on the course she would continue to pursue. She lived and prospered as a professional writer of history. The Thirty Years War, which appeared just three years after Strafford, confirmed her reputation for learning and judgment and found a wide audience. When her royalties fell short of her needs—as they occasionally did—Wedgwood supported herself “very, very well” by turning out articles for Time and Tide, a feminist weekly, writing reviews for the Daily Telegraph, and doing translations—including one of Elias Canetti’s Auto da Fé. Throughout her career, she devoted herself, in opposition to the Why histories of the professional academics, to what she called How history: detailed, vivid narratives that eschewed any effort to provide structural or social or economic explanations for such great events as the English Civil War, to which she devoted two superbly written, rather Royalist volumes out of a planned three.
Wedgwood never lost her love for the documents—unlike many distinguished academic historians. “Nothing,” she once wrote,
seems to bridge the gap of the years so much as the folding and unfolding of ancient letters; sometimes minute particles of sand which had long adhered in some thick down stroke where the ink had been wet, detach themselves after three hundred years to blow away and join with yesterday’s dust.
When Strafford’s private papers became available, a generation after her biography of him came out, she worked through them and radically revised her original work. Her passion for research, moreover, never degenerated into a mere paper chase after new facts. Wedgwood never lost her eye for the supremely telling detail. Long before the new social and cultural history of the 1990s was born or thought of, she had seen, and shown, in essays as brief and vivid as Virginia Woolf’s, how the dress that Charles I wore for his last Christmas masque in 1639 or the words and gestures of a forgotten highwayman could give her readers a uniquely direct sense of the past.
Above all, Wedgwood never lost the humanity, the love for other people in all their whimsy, variety, and misery that characterized the great humane intellectuals of her day, like her sometime teacher Tawney or her fellow journalist Vera Brittain. Her ability to evoke the meaningless sufferings of the Germans in the seventeenth century reflected her firsthand knowledge of the results of war and inflation in the Germany of the twentieth century. This stalwart, compassionate woman, whose red hair, high forehead, and far-seeing eyes Lawrence Gowing portrayed in 1944, witnessed in her youth the age of displaced persons and Nansen passports. She worked tirelessly for refugees in England during the Second World War and remained an extraordinarily engaged citizen of England and the world thereafter. The greatest narrative historian of her century, Wedgwood told complex stories in precise, human terms. The formal perfection and clarity of her prose often recall the work of one of her heroes, Edward Gibbon. Yet she contemplated and described in rapid, vivid detail scenes of past and present horror that would have robbed even the unflappable historian of the Roman Empire of his marmoreal calm. The Thirty Years War shows her at her epic best.
—ANTHONY GRAFTON
TO
R. L. W. AND J. V. W.
INTRODUCTION
History reflects the period in which it is written as much as any other branch of literature. Although the historian’s material is much more rigidly circumscribed than that of the novelist or poet, he, like them, has to bring to the understanding and presentation of his material his own experience of life and the imaginative equipment peculiar to him and to his time.
This does not mean that his results will necessarily be either wrong or inaccurate: but they will be partial. The characteristics of his own outlook and the atmosphere in which he lives and writes will inevitably make him understand some aspects of his subject better than others; he will emphasize these because they seem important to him and neglect others which lie beyond the scope of his imagination or experience.
I wrote this book in the thirties, against the background of depression at home and mounting tension abroad. The preoccupations of that unhappy time cast their shadows over its pages. I wrote with the knowledge, sometimes intimate, sometimes more distant, of conditions in depressed and derelict areas, of the sufferings of the unwanted and uprooted—the two million unemployed at home, the Jewish and liberal fugitives from Germany. Preoccupation with contemporary distress made the plight of the hungry and homeless, the discouraged and the desolate in the Thirty Years War exceptionally vivid to me. Human suffering of this kind is one of the major themes of the book.
I do not regret this. When all allowance has been made for exaggeration, hard luck stories, and propaganda, the weight of the evidence still shows that the human suffering caused by the war was appalling. I feel now, as I did twenty years ago, that one task of the political historian is to show the repercussions of policy on the lives of the governed and to arouse in the reader imaginative sympathy with those multitudes of fellow beings who were victims as well as actors in the events of the past.
But there is another aspect to be considered. The sufferings caused by the Thirty Years War have a rather special place in the traditional view of German history. The war has been represented as the cause of almost every German calamity, economic, moral, national, and social; it is loosely said to have put German civilization back by two hundred years, whatever that may mean. I do not believe this to be true. On the contrary, I believe the effect of the Thirty Years War on German history to have been greatly and even damagingly exaggerated. The economic decline of Germany ante-dates the war by many years, while Germany’s political disintegration was a cause rather than an effect of the war. The after-effects of the war were neither so general, so prolonged nor so disastrous as they have been popularly presented. All this I have tried to explain in those sections of my first and last chapters which deal with the state of Germany, and I must ask the reader to measure what is said there against the tale of immediate destruction and physical suffering which marked the course of the war.
In my bibliographical note I draw attention to further research on some individual questions, but nothing has happened in the relevant fields of research during the last twenty years to make me change my views on the war as a whole. Admittedly, the atmosphere of the nineteen thirties had something to do with my choice of subject as well as with my methods of treatment. Many of my generation who grew up under the shadow of the First World War had a sincere, if mistaken, conviction that all wars were unnecessary and useless. I no longer think that all wars are unnecessary; but some are, and I still think that the Thirty Years War was one of these. It need not have happened and it settled nothi
ng worth settling. No doubt it assured the replacement of Spain by France as the dominating power in Western Europe, an event of some importance in the history of the western world. But the same result might have been achieved at far less cost and without a generation of war among the Germans who were only very indirectly concerned in the matter at all. Several statesmen of genius outside Germany from time to time dominated the course of the war; no statesman of genius inside Germany appeared to put a stop to it. The dismal course of the conflict, dragging on from one decade to the next and from one deadlock to the next, seems to me an object lesson on the dangers and disasters which can arise when men of narrow hearts and little minds are in high places.
London, 1956
C. V. WEDGWOOD
Chapter One
GERMANY AND EUROPE
1618
How many stand around waiting to share thy[1] garments? Are they not already promised to many, who await only the hour of thy destruction? How long dost thou think to continue in prosperity? Verily, for as long as Spinola wills it.
PAMPHLET, 1620
1.
The year 1618 was like many others in those uneasy decades of armed neutrality which occur from time to time in the history of Europe. Political disturbances exploded intermittently in an atmosphere thick with the apprehension of conflict. Diplomatists hesitated, weighing the gravity of each new crisis, politicians predicted, merchants complained of unsteady markets and wavering exchanges, while the forty million peasants, on whom the cumbrous structure of civilization rested, dug their fields and bound their sheaves and cared nothing for the remote activities of their rulers.
In London the Spanish ambassador demanded the life of Sir Walter Raleigh while the people, crowding about the palace, shouted imprecations at a King too weak to save him. In The Hague the rivalry of two religious factions broke again and again into open riot, and the widow of William the Silent was hissed in the streets. Between France and Spain relations were strained to the uttermost, each government claiming control of the Val Telline, the key pass between Italy and Austria. In Paris they feared immediate rupture and European war;[2] in Madrid they doubted whether the recent marriage of the Infanta Anne to the young King of France would withstand the strain. At seventeen, Louis XIII treated his wife’s advances with an icy indifference,[3] so that the dissolution of an unconsummated marriage might at any moment remove the last guarantee of friendship between the ruling dynasties of France and Spain. In vain the Austrian cousins of the Spanish King intervened from Vienna with the tentative offer of a young Archduke for a French princess;[4] the regency government in Paris, disregarding the suggestion, opened negotiations for a marriage with the eldest son of the Duke of Savoy, the avowed enemy both of the Austrian and the Spanish rulers.
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