Swedish, Dutch and Danish competition was all this while choking the Hanseatic League, and in all Germany only at Hamburg and at Frankfort on the Main were there signs of stable and progressive prosperity.
The decline of agriculture was even graver than that of the cities. After the Peasants War, mutual fear between the peasant and the landowner had altogether replaced the old sense of mutual obligation. Landowners grasped every opportunity to increase their power, and serfdom was either stationary or increasing.[46] The secularization of Church land in north Germany was another cause for discontent, since the peasants, even though they had now long been Protestant, did not feel the attachment to a lay master that they had felt towards the bishops and abbots of old.[47] The morality of the small free landowner, the ‘knight’ class, had undoubtedly declined; in general he was a lazy, irresponsible and exacting lord. The passion of the aristocracy for hunting caused destructive and dangerous game to be carefully preserved, and the peasant was forced to give his services free at the hunting parties of his master in the course of which his cultivation might be laid waste.[48]
Poverty, political unrest, religious divisions, conflicting interests and individual jealousies—these were tinder for a war. Fire was not lacking.
In 1608 a riot between Catholics and Protestants at Donauwörth, a free city on the Danube, kept the Empire for some months on the edge of disaster. The Reichshofrat, with imperial approval, divested Donauwörth of its rights and restored its church, wrongfully appropriated by the Protestants, to the Catholics. A storm of indignation from Protestant Germany met this decree and had any leader been forthcoming war must have ensued. But the dispute grew cold among the bickerings of parties, for the cities would not side with the princes nor the Lutherans with the Calvinists.
In 1609 an insurrection in Bohemia forced the Emperor to guarantee religious freedom in that country, but beyond weakening imperial prestige the incident had no immediate results.
In 1610 the death of the Duke of Cleves-Jülich without heirs brought the third and worst crisis. His lands, the provinces of Jülich, Cleves, Mark, Berg and Ravensberg, formed a scattered group on the Rhine from the Dutch frontier to Cologne and were an essential military base either for the Hapsburg or their opponents. Two claimants, both Protestants, presented themselves, and the Emperor immediately occupied the district with his own troops pending a decision. In order to prevent a serious clash between the rivals the Emperor could hardly have done less, but the Protestant princes interpreted his actions as an attempt to lay hold of the lands for his own dynasty, and Henry IV of France surmised that the King of Spain, anxious to secure this valuable district for his operations against the Dutch, had prompted the Emperor. Henry did not hesitate; acting in alliance with a group of German allies he made ready to invade, and only the chance of his murder averted European war. The leader gone, the controversy dragged from negotiation to negotiation until one of the claimants tried to solve the problem by becoming a Catholic. His rival, the Elector of Brandenburg, in the hope of gaining the support of the extreme Protestant party, became a Calvinist, but the step involved him in so many private difficulties that he was forced in the end to acquiesce in a temporary settlement which gave Jülich and Berg to his rival and left him only Cleves, Mark and Ravensberg.
As the Empire was flung from crisis to crisis, each time righting itself with more difficulty, individual rulers sought their own safety. Strong defences seemed essential, and a traveller in 1610 was amazed at the threatening show of arms in even the smallest cities.[49] An English tourist, who had been rapidly and roughly ejected from the precincts of a ducal palace, indignantly averred that ‘these inferior Princes’ houses are guarded with hungry halberdiers and reverent musty bill-men with a brace or two of hot shots so that their palaces are more like prisons than the free and noble courts of commanding potentates’.[50] Arms were supplemented by alliances until the bristling network of hostility was such that the ablest statesman living could not have told where the break would ultimately come and what groups would stand on either side. Solomon himself, said the Emperor’s chief adviser, could not have solved the problem of Germany;[51] inside and outside the Empire every diplomatist held his own views and acted on them, waiting for the inevitable explosion.
8.
As the second decade of the century drew to its close and the Empire continued to drift hazardously between the reefs, the conviction became general in Europe that the end of the Dutch truce in 1621 would be the signal for war in Germany.
Ambrogio Spinola, the Genoese general of the Spanish army, was cautiously completing his plan of attack. If he could bring the manpower of the north Italian plains into action in Flanders and ensure his communications from the Milanese to Brabant he had won his war. Dutch power and money were not inexhaustible. If, by way of Genoa and the Val Telline, Spinola could depend on the supply of bullion from Spain while the population of north Italy furnished his cannon fodder, he could exhaust the enemy. From Milan to Brabant his way was through the Val Telline, along the north shore of Constance, thence through Alsace and northwards down the left bank of the Rhine through the Catholic bishopric of Strasbourg. The lower Rhine was held by friendly powers, the bishops of Cologne and Treves and the new Duke of Jülich and Berg. But between the well-disposed lands of Strasbourg and Treves were fifty miles of the Palatinate, held by a Calvinist prince. So long as this prince was the ally of the Dutch the land route by the Rhine was dangerous and Spanish troops and money would have to be brought round by sea, interminably delaying Spinola’s plans. The subjection of this stretch of land was therefore essential.
His design, long suspected by the opposing party, made the Rhenish Palatinate the keystone of European policy and thrust the young man who ruled it into the front of diplomatic intrigue. The Elector Palatine did not stand entirely alone. The panic among the German cities caused by the attack on Donauwörth, the still greater panic among the Protestant princes caused by the imperial occupation of Cleves, had made it possible for his advisers to persuade some at least of the princes and cities to sink their animosity and enter into an alliance known as the ‘Union’. Theoretically Protestant, the Union was predominantly Calvinist. The nucleus of an opposition to the Hapsburg in Germany, it was not negligible and had gained the moral support of the Venetians and the financial support of the Dutch. Furthermore, the King of England had given his only daughter to the Elector Palatine to wife.
The conventions of royal marriages in the early seventeenth century were well enough marked for the English wedding to cause a stir. Princess Elizabeth, the only surviving daughter of James I, was among the most exalted brides in Europe and had been considered both for the heir of France and the heir of Spain, not to mention the King of Sweden. German Electors seldom entered the lists against such rivals and up to the last moment the bridegroom’s party feared that their diplomacy might break down. A prejudice in favour of a Protestant marriage, the emphatic interference of the Prince of Wales, and the immediate popularity of the pleasant young suitor both with the King, his ministers, the bride and the London mob, all played their part in preparing a triumph for Palatine diplomacy. The triumph was barren; the contracting parties had been at cross-purposes. European statesmen saw the Elector as the pivot of the Hapsburg problem, the necessary ally of the Dutch and the Protestant governments, a pawn of immense importance but only a pawn in their game. Yet inside the Empire he was the leader of the Protestant party and the chosen defender of the German Liberties. The Elector and his ministers were Germans; to their way of thinking the chief problem was the humiliation of the Emperor, the establishment of princely rights and unquestioned religious freedom in Germany. The animosity of Bourbon and Hapsburg, the imminent Dutch war, were to them merely cards to be ingeniously played in order to gain them the support of foreign powers.
For the Elector and his friends the storm-centre of Europe was neither Madrid, Paris, Brussels, nor The Hague, but Prague. The reason was simple: the reigning Empe
ror Matthias was old and childless, so that the occasion for breaking the Hapsburg succession to the imperial throne would be opportune at the next election, and a Protestant majority in the Electoral College would have an excellent chance of effecting it. There were three Catholic Electors, all bishops; there were three Protestant Electors, Saxony, Brandenburg, and the Elector Palatine. And then there was the seventh Elector, the King of Bohemia, for many elections past always a Catholic and always a Hapsburg. But the Bohemian Crown was elective, not hereditary, and the Bohemians were many of them Protestants. If some bold German prince could engineer a revolt in Bohemia, wrest the Crown and with it the right of voting at the imperial election from the Hapsburg family, then the Protestant party would outnumber the Catholic in the Electoral College by four to three and the imperial dynasty would be doomed.
Hints of this kind had been dropped at the time of the Elector Palatine’s wedding.[52] The Bohemian project was therefore known to all those who signed the alliance, but while the Elector’s advisers assumed that James I would help them to put it into action, the King had equally assumed that these remote German follies would never enter into the actual politics of Europe.
These were the two problems: European diplomacy forming a wide circle about Madrid, Paris, Brussels, and The Hague; German diplomacy groping round the control of imperial power and the Bohemian Crown. Connecting the two and essential to both was the Elector Palatine. Seldom in the history of Europe have such immense consequences hung upon the character of one man.
The Elector Frederick V was in the twenty-second year of his age and the ninth of his reign in 1618. Slender and well made, he added to pleasing features and fine eyes a singular charm of expression.[53] Apart from an intermittent moodiness he was a gracious host and a good companion, high-spirited and easily pleased. Gentle, trustful, equally incapable of anger, hatred, or resolution, he strove conscientiously to fulfil his responsibilities although the pleasures of hunting, playing tennis, swimming and even lying in bed were very tempting to him.[54] Ironic fate had given him no vices, and all the virtues most useless to a ruling prince. He was strong neither in body nor in spirit, and the gentle education which had been planned to stimulate his timorous nature[55] and to fit him for the arduous championship of a cause had softened out of existence what little character he had.
His mother, a daughter of William the Silent, had with admirable fortitude remained unswervingly devoted to her diseased and drunken husband, but she had removed her son from the range of his father’s uncontrolled humours by sending him to be educated by her sister at Sedan in the court of her sister’s husband, the Duke of Bouillon. This nobleman was the acknowledged leader of the Calvinist party in France.
A backward boy of fourteen, Frederick had been brought back to Heidelberg at his father’s death and his education had been completed under the care of his own and his father’s chancellor, Christian of Anhalt. Sensitive and affectionate, the young prince allowed himself to be moulded into the pattern his elders chose, believed unquestioningly in the mission they had planned for him, subjected his judgement utterly to theirs and turned as by second nature to Bouillon, to his chaplain or to Anhalt for advice.
None of these men had the qualities necessary to meet a European crisis; Bouillon was the turbulent nobleman of an earlier age, brave, chivalrous, ambitious but without any profound insight. The chaplain, Schultz, was like most of his kind, an academic bigot, intoxicated with the power he had obtained over his conscience-ridden master.
Christian of Anhalt, the most important of the three, was a prince in his own right, but he had abandoned the little state of Anhalt-Bernburg to deputies in order to find a better outlet for his talents in the Palatinate. He was an immensely confident, managing little man with a mop of startlingly red hair.[56] In arms, in administration and in diplomacy he showed a superficial excellence. How brilliant for instance had been his management of the English marriage! But he had not paused to consider that a day of reckoning would come when the English King realized that he had been inveigled into a German war. Anhalt’s diplomacy, with England, with the United Provinces, with the German princes and later with the Duke of Savoy, was based on a simple principle: he always promised everything. He calculated that when the German crisis came his allies would fulfil their side of the bargain before they called on him to fulfil his. He calculated wrong: when the moment came, not one of his far-sought alliances bore the strain.
His masterstroke outside Germany was the English marriage, inside Germany it was the Protestant Union. Acting on the panic caused by the judgement at Donauwörth, he had brought that confederation into being and kept it alive ever since. But Christian of Anhalt was not a man who inspired confidence, and the princes and cities of the Union already suspected that he exploited the Protestant Cause and the German Liberties for the aggrandizement of the Elector Palatine. The Elector himself was so obviously in the hands of his minister that he could do nothing to alleviate these growing doubts. It was Frederick’s misfortune to be wholly inoffensive and wholly inadequate, so that his allies drifted with him to the approaching abyss without gaining confidence to support him or finding the occasion to break with him.
The one excuse for Anhalt’s transparent dishonesty was that he invariably deceived himself; no one could have been more aggressively certain that he was master of the situation. Added to his confidence he had other qualities calculated to enslave the respect of his master. He was a model of all the private virtues, the most devoted of husbands and beloved of fathers, while his household might have served as a pattern for all the princes of Germany. It is easy to understand why the Elector so far violated all the conventions of his time as to address his minister as ‘Mon père’, and subscribe himself ‘your very humble and very obedient son to do you service’.[57]
There was one other influence to be reckoned with in the household of the Elector Palatine, his wife Elizabeth. This princess combined buoyant health and high spirits with character, intelligence and beauty. Her loveliness was that of colour and animation, and her begrimed and faded portraits can do no more than indicate a forgotten glory. The splendour of auburn hair, the subtlety of flushed cheek and swift gesture, the expressive changes of the shrewd, observant eyes and witty mouth, mirrors of that ‘wild humour’ which scandalized and bewitched her contemporaries—these are lost for ever. Her letters give us fragmentary flashes of the brave, frivolous soul, fragments too of the harder substance beneath, a courage matched by resolution in which obstinacy and pride played their part.
A contract which had been arranged for the most prosaic reasons had quickened into a marriage of love. Elizabeth despised her husband’s language and never learnt it, quarrelled with his family and made chaos of his household affairs, but with the Elector himself she lived in a perpetual honeymoon, bestowing on him a pet-name from the fashionable love-story of the day,[58] sending him little gifts and indulging in the most delightful disputes and reconciliations. But it was not the moment for an idyll and the Elector Palatine was not the man.
The Protestant party in Europe and the supporters of the German Liberties looked towards Frederick and his elegant Court at Heidelberg. Those who believed in the political and religious mission of the Hapsburg dynasty looked towards Graz in Styria where the Archduke Ferdinand, cousin of the reigning Emperor, kept his duller Court. Since the death of Philip II there had been a dearth of effective ability within the family. His successor as head of the line, Philip III of Spain, was an undistinguished and insignificant man. His daughter, the gifted Infanta Isabella, now ruling in the Netherlands with her husband the Archduke Albert, was debarred by her sex and childlessness from playing a leading part in dynastic politics. Her cousin, the old Emperor Matthias, had only one ambition—to postpone the crisis until he should be safely in his grave. He, too, was childless and the family had selected his cousin Ferdinand of Styria to succeed him. The support of Philip III for this candidature had been bought by a significant concession: on his ele
ction to the imperial throne Ferdinand agreed to make over the Hapsburg fiefs in Alsace to his Spanish cousins. This was tantamount to a promise to give the King of Spain every possible help in the transport of troops for the Dutch war. Spinola had been consulted as to the terms of the treaty long before it was actually signed.[59] Once again the internal problems of Germany were linked to those of Europe.
A godson of Philip II,[60] Ferdinand had early conceived the idea of completing the work begun by his godfather. His duty to the Church had been impressed upon him in childhood, for he had been educated at the Jesuit College of Ingolstadt. Later he had made a pilgrimage to Rome and Loreto, where it was widely but falsely believed that he had made a vow to eradicate heresy from Germany.[61] Ferdinand had no need of such vows. His was an unquestioning mind, and the mission to which he had been educated was as natural to him as the breath he drew.
No sooner did he attain his majority than he enforced Catholicism in Styria with more conviction than caution. The Protestants formed so large a minority that his father had never dared to attack them; Ferdinand took the risk–taking risks was to be the hall-mark of his career. Once he declared that he would sooner lose everything than tolerate the heretic, but he was shrewd enough to see that his own authority depended very much on the growth of the Catholic faith. It was generally, and not unjustifiably, believed in his family that all opposition to the secular government came from the Protestants.[62]
Ferdinand’s policy combined cunning with boldness; he undermined the Protestants by civil disabilities, seduced the younger generation by education and propaganda, and gradually tightened the screw until the Protestants realized too late that they had no longer the means to resist. The triumph of this policy in Styria was a warning to Germany. The religious settlement of 1555 rested on custom only; by a remarkable oversight it had never been ratified. What if there should come an Emperor who chose to disregard it?
The Thirty Years War Page 6
