In 1618 the Archduke Ferdinand was forty years old, a cheerful, friendly, red-faced little man with a reassuring smile for everyone. Frank good nature beamed from his freckled countenance and shortsighted, prominent, light blue eyes. Sandy-haired, stout and bustling, he presented a wholly unimpressive figure, and the familiarity of his manners encouraged his courtiers and his servants to take advantage of him. Friends and enemies agreed that an easier tempered man was not to be met with. His rule in Styria was conscientious and benevolent; he had started public schemes for the care of the sick and destitute and the provision of free legal defence for the poor in the law courts. His charity was boundless; he had a memory for the faces of his humblest subjects and a kindly curiosity into their private troubles. His two overwhelming passions were the Church and the chase; he was punctilious in his devotions and he hunted three or four times a week. His relations with his children and his wife were extraordinarily happy. Only the practice of certain morbid austerities throws an unexpected light on his otherwise ordinary private life.[63]
General and private opinion flattered the archduke’s virtues but not his ability. Kindly contemptuous, the greater number of his contemporaries wrote him off as a good-natured simpleton wholly under the control of his chief minister Ulrich von Eggenberg. Yet Ferdinand’s apparent lack of personal initiative may have been a pose; as a young man he had been taught by the Jesuits to cast the onus of political decision on to others in order to spare his own conscience.[64] He does not appear to have taken political advice from his confessors, and his subjection to the Church did not prevent him from laying violent hands on a Cardinal and defying the Pope in pursuit of what he himself felt to be right. Repeatedly in the course of his life he twisted disaster into advantage, wrenched unexpected safety out of overwhelming danger, snatched victory from defeat. His contemporaries, unimpressed, commented on his astonishing luck.[65] If it was luck, it was certainly astonishing.
Baffled by the apparent contradiction between Ferdinand’s well-known kindliness and his ruthless policy, they evolved the explanation that he was, politically speaking, merely a puppet, and they did not grasp the fact that, for a puppet, he showed phenomenal resource and consistency. The only evidence in support of this common view was the relationship between Ferdinand and Eggenberg. He was certainly devoted to the minister whose suave manners, unruffled temper and clear judgement made a strong appeal to him. When Eggenberg was ill, Ferdinand would be for ever trotting off to his bedroom with matters of state to discuss.[66] This is proof that Ferdinand did not act without Eggenberg’s approbation. It is not proof that Eggenberg initiated Ferdinand’s policy. When, much later, another minister gradually took Eggenberg’s place, Ferdinand’s policy did not alter. That Ferdinand trusted him above all men and depended much on him for advice, there is no doubt; but there was here no such subjection of one will to another as there was between the Elector Frederick and Christian of Anhalt.
Personal good-nature and political ruthlessness are not mutually exclusive qualities, and if Ferdinand’s ability was not of a kind to show itself either in conversation or in writing, that is still no proof that he had none. In fact, men hoped for or feared the coming of Ferdinand because they believed him to be the instrument of his dynasty and the Jesuits, because they believed him to be bound by sacred vows to the extirpation of heresy, because they believed he had no will but that of the immense forces of militant Catholicism behind him. They would have been wiser to fear him because he was one of the boldest and most single-minded politicians that the Hapsburg dynasty ever produced.
9.
Ferdinand of Styria was the candidate for the imperial throne. Frederick, Elector Palatine, was the leader of the party of the German Liberties. Neither of these men stood for the solidarity of the German nation. Between the extremes there were two men whose interests were exclusively German, whose policy held a middle course, and whose inclination to one side or the other would be decisive. The Elector John George of Saxony and the Duke Maximilian of Bavaria–these two were the basis of that possible centre party which might yet save the German nation intact from the wreck of the Holy Roman Empire.
John George, Elector of Saxony, was a little over thirty; a blond, broad, square-faced man with a florid complexion. His outlook on life was conservative and patriotic; he wore his beard in the native fashion, clipped off his hair and understood not a word of French.[67] His clothes were rich, simple and sensible[68] as befitted a prince who was also a good Christian and the father of a family, his table generously supplied with local fruit, game and beer. Three times a week he attended a sermon with all his court and partook of the sacrament in the Lutheran fashion.[69] According to his lights John George bore out his principles, leading an unimpeachable private life in an oppressively domestic atmosphere.[70] Although hunting was a mania with him he was not without culture, took an intelligent interest in jewellery and goldsmiths’ work and above all in music.[71] Under his patronage, Heinrich Schüts performed his miracle of welding German and Italian influences into music that foreshadowed a later age.
In spite of these claims to culture, John George had preserved the good old German custom of carousing in a manner that shocked men under French or Spanish influence, Frederick of the Palatinate and Ferdinand of Styria. John George, who scorned foreign delicacies, had been known to sit at table gorging homely foods and swilling native beer for seven hours on end, his sole approach at conversation to box his dwarf’s ears, or pour the dregs of a tankard over a servant’s head as a signal for more.[72] He was not a confirmed drunkard; his brain when he was sober was perfectly clear, and he drank through habit and good fellowship rather than weakness. But he drank too much and too often. Later on it became the fashion to say whenever he made an inept political decision that he had been far gone at the time, and the dispatches of one ambassador at least are punctuated with such remarks as, ‘He began to be somewhat heated with wine’, and ‘He seemed to me to be very drunk’.[73] It made diplomacy difficult.
But it did not alter the situation, for John George, drunk or sober, was equally enigmatical. Nobody knew which side he would support. There was no harm perhaps in keeping the two parties guessing if John George himself knew which side he favoured; unhappily he was as much in the dark as his suitors. He wanted above all, peace, commercial prosperity, and the integrity of Germany; unlike Frederick or Ferdinand he had no mission and did not wish to risk present comfort for doubtful future good. Seeing that the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was in danger of collapsing, he knew no remedy save that of shoring it up again. Between the two parties that were wrenching the structure apart, between German liberties and Hapsburg absolutism, he stood for the solidarity of ancient things. First and last he was a constitutionalist.
Of the three leaders he was probably the most intelligent, but he had neither Ferdinand’s self-confidence nor Frederick’s confidence in others; he was one of those who, seeing both sides to every question, have not the courage to choose. When he did act his motives were wise, honest and constructive, but he always acted too late.
Two people exercised great though not decisive influence on him, his wife and his Court preacher. The Electress Magdalena Sybilla was a woman of character, virtuous, kind, conventional and managing. Her insight was limited; she believed that Lutheranism was right, that the lower orders should know their place and that a public fast was a seemly way of meeting a political crisis. She controlled the Electoral children and the Electoral household admirably and was partly responsible for the close sympathy engendered between her husband and his people, being one of the first princesses to recognize the importance of a middle-class standard of respectability in building up the prestige of a royal family.[74]
The Court chaplain, Doctor Höe, was an excitable Viennese of a noble house, whose education among Catholics had given him some understanding of their outlook;[75] the Calvinists, he said, had forty times four more errors in their creed.[76] On the other hand, he was a sincere
Protestant and like his master a constitutionalist. As venomous a writer as he was an eloquent speaker, he had an unslaked passion for print, first displayed in his sixteenth year,[77] and was known as a controversialist all over Germany. The Calvinists, making a play on the pronunciation of his name, called him the high-priest[78]–Hohepriester. Intellectually vain and socially exclusive, the learned Doctor was an easy target for ridicule. ‘I cannot thank God enough,’ he had been heard to say, ‘for the great and noble gifts that His holy omnipotence has bestowed on me.’[79]
Posterity has not been kind to John George and his advisers. As the defenders of a nebulous constitution and a divided people they had a thankless task, and as events showed they performed it badly, but the Elector must at least have credit for some qualities unusual enough in the years to come. He was always honest, he always said what he meant, he worked sincerely for peace and for the commonweal of Germany, and if now and again he put Saxony first and grasped more than he should for himself, the fault was of his time and at least he never asked the foreigner to help him. History knows him as the man who betrayed the Protestants in 1620, the Emperor in 1631, the Swedes in 1635. In fact he was almost the only man who preserved consistent policy among the veering schemes of enemies and allies. Had he been different he might have found a via media for his country that would have saved her from disaster. It is one of the major tragedies of German history that John George was not a great man.
Maximilian of Bavaria although not an Elector had of all the princes in Germany the greatest reputation abroad. A distant cousin of the Elector Palatine, he, too, belonged to the family of Wittelsbach whose prestige in some parts of Germany stood higher than that of the less ancient Hapsburg. In the opinion of his contemporaries he was the ablest prince in Germany; a man of infinite resource, patience and calculation, he had ruled Bavaria for over twenty years, since the abdication of his father, and was now at forty-five one of the most successful and the least prepossessing rulers in Europe. By economy and supervision he had built up so great a reserve of treasure in his coffers that he not only controlled the Bavarian Estates when he deigned to let them meet, but when he entered into an alliance with another potentate he was accustomed to pay the lion’s share and dictate the joint policy.
Coldly benevolent, accurately just and rigidly moral, Maximilian did not spare himself in the arduous task of government. He had built hospitals and organized public relief, encouraged education and the arts and given to his people the sense of security which comes of stable and solvent government. But he decreed the death penalty for adulterers; he traded some of his criminals yearly to the galleys and he had assisted at the interrogation of witches by torture. He had a standing army and had organized conscription throughout his country. He even interfered in the most private concerns of his subjects: no one, not even a nobleman, might possess a carriage until he was fifty-five years old, so that the breed of riding horses and the skill of his people as cavalrymen might not be impaired, and within three years he passed seven restrictions on dress, so that the clothes of his subjects might not only be more seemly but more practical in warfare. There was no corner but he would be ferreting out crime in it. Scandalized at the immorality of the peasantry, he prohibited their dancing and insisted that men and women labourers should not sleep in the same shelters, nor does it appear to have crossed his mind that the poor have few pleasures and are not always responsible for the conditions under which they live.[80] His meanness was a by-word in Europe;[81] he had cut down the allowance of his old father because he considered it to be excessive for one who was no longer a ruling prince, and although he paid his servants regularly he paid them very little and ruled his household by respect and fear.
Unattractive in his political life, Maximilian was equally unattractive in his personal characteristics. Fate had unkindly bestowed upon him a singularly unimpressive presence; he was lanky, lean and small with mouse-coloured hair and a pasty complexion, his speech and features much affected by adenoids. His manners were polished and his conversation fluent and well-informed, but the shrill pitch of his voice startled those who were not prepared for it. In honour of his wife, a princess of Lorraine, he affected the French fashion, whose elegant elaborations can hardly have concealed the shortcomings of nature.[82]
Abler and more politically effective than John George, Maximilian had not that dogged honesty which was the saving grace of the Elector of Saxony. Cautious to a fault, he would never commit himself and thereby raised delusive hopes in all who courted him. Like John George he was sincere in striving for the common good of Germany, but unlike John George he had a clear sense of policy and an accurate judgement. His excuse was the less when, like John George, he allowed his individual advantages to take precedence. In this respect both the Elector of Saxony and the Duke of Bavaria failed their country, but Maximilian always with the more shameless egoism. Never was man more anxious that others should sacrifice their gains for the general good; never did man stand more jealously, more fatally by his own.
Doubly allied by marriage to the Archduke Ferdinand,[83] Maximilian had begun his reign as an ardent supporter of the Counter-Reformation, and in all Germany his lands were said to be the cleanest of heresy.[84] In 1608 he had been chosen to carry out the judgement passed on Donauwörth. His immediate acceptance of this task was calculated to place him irrevocably on the side of imperial authority. So unpopular did he become with the defenders of the German Liberties that he founded the Catholic League almost out of self-defence as an answer to Christian of Anhalt’s Protestant Union.
Later, as he grew more apprehensive of the interference of the Spanish Crown in Germany, he altered his policy. He first attempted to drive all Hapsburg princes out of the Catholic League. Then he dissolved it altogether and founded a new League consisting only of princes subservient to his influence. Writing to the Elector Palatine, he represented this body as a purely political association for the maintenance of the constitution[85] and suggested its fusion with the Protestant Union in an undenominational bond. The suggestion was not at the time as ridiculous as the subsequent history of the two bodies was to make it appear, and there is no reason to suppose that he was not in earnest.
Both Catholics and Protestants had breathed of a scheme to put Maximilian forward as a rival candidate to Ferdinand at the next election. His reputation would be equal to the honour and he had no dangerous foreign commitments. Outside Bavaria he had shown no particular enmity towards the Protestants and he had been extremely friendly to the Elector Palatine. This would give him the support of the three Protestant Electors; of the three Rhenish bishops, Cologne was his own brother, Mainz could be intimidated by the Elector Palatine, and Treves was under the control of the French Court.[86] Thus all save the King of Bohemia would be favourable. But in June 1617 Ferdinand of Styria himself had been elected King of Bohemia. If somebody could wrest the Crown from him . . . But the conjecture was neither here nor there since Maximilian himself had so far taken no decision to stand. He had the ability to choose, but his caution was stronger than his judgement; he lacked the unhesitating yet careful boldness which knows when and for what cause to take a risk.
There were few other princes in Germany who counted for anything. The Elector John Sigismund of Brandenburg, a Calvinist ruling over a people who were for the most part Lutheran, was an insignificant old man harassed by palace intrigue. Besides, he had just acquired Prussia as a fief of the Polish Crown and dared not move an inch against the Hapsbury dynasty lest they should loose their watch-dog, the King of Poland, to worry him. In general he drifted drearily in the wake of Saxony.
Of the three spiritual electors, John Schweikard of Mainz was an intelligent, conscientious and peaceful man but with small influence outside the Electoral College. Treves was a nonentity, so much so that one may read the great mass of the literature of the period without so much as finding his name, yet it was an outstanding name in history, for it was Metternich: enough that this scion of the family a
dded nothing to its reputation. Cologne too was insignificant save as Bavaria’s brother.
At Vienna the Emperor Matthias tottered towards the grave. Dreadful things would happen when he was gone, he gloomily predicted. But he had not even the barren contentment of dying in time. In common with Europe he miscalculated the crisis by three years. The signal for war was given not by the end of the Dutch truce in April 1621, but in May 1618, by revolt in Bohemia.
1. Germany.
2. La Nunziatura di Francia del Cardinale Guido Bentivoglio. Lettere a Scipione Borghese . . . ed. L. de Steffani. Florence, 1863–79, II, p. 409.
3. Nunziatura di Bentivoglio, II, pp. 394, 520; N. Barozzi and G. Berchet, Relazioni dagli Ambasciatcri Veneti, Francia. Venice, 1856–78, II, p. 101.
4. N. Barozzi and G. Berchet, Relazioni dagli Ambasciatori Veneti, Francia. Venice, 1856–78, II, p. 99.
5. Nunziatura di Bentivoglio, II, pp. 435, 498.
6. Taylor his Travels: from the Citty of London in England to the Citty of Prague in Bohemia . . . with many relations worthy of note. London, 1620.
7. J. V. Andreae, Vita. Berlin, 1849, IV, p. 120.
8. Hermann Wäschke, Eindrücke vom Kurfürstentag zu Regensburg, 1630. Deutsche Geschichtsblätter, XVI, iii and iv, p. 67.
9. Streckfuss, 500 Jahre Berliner Geschichte. Berlin, 1900, pp. 206–7.
10. Riezler, Geschichte Bayerns. Gotha, 1903, VI, p. 129.
11. Janssen, VI, p. 500.
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