71. Kriegstagebücher, p. 117; Klopp, I, p. 545.
72. Kriegstagebücher, pp. 114, 147.
73. Morel-Fatio, p. 340; Lonchay and Cuvelier, I, p. 553.
74. Lonchay and Cuvelier, p. 552.
75. Prinsterer, II, ii, pp. 571, 572.
76. A. Wilson, The History of Great Britain. London, 1653, p. 136.
77. Lundorp, II, p. 127.
78. M. A. E. Green, p. 153.
79. Wilson, p. 139.
80. Morel-Fatio, pp. 360 ff.
81. Aretin, Beyträge, VII, p. 162.
82. Theatrum Europaeum, I, p. 373.
83. See Reuss, Ernst von Mansfeld im böhmischen Kriege. Brunswick, 1865, pp. 86 ff.
84. Ibid., p. 89.
85. Aretin, Beyträge, III, i, pp. 88, 99, 100.
86. Kriegstagebücher, pp. 128–9, 176.
87. Aretin, Beyträge, III, p. 112; Berichte über dem Weissenberge, p. 142.
88. Annales, XII, p. 2405.
89. Kriegstagebücher, p. 171.
90. The best accounts are in Berichte über dem Weissenberge and Kriegstagebücher. Krebs, Die Schlacht am Weissenberge bei Prag, Breslau, 1879, is a careful reconstruction of events.
91. Annales, IX, p. 1116; Krebs, Schlacht, p. 126; Scott, Rupert, Prince Palatine, London, 1899, p. 5.
92. Berichte über dem Weissenberge, p. 133.
93. Ibid., p. 136.
94. Ibid., pp. 136, 158.
95. Höfler, p. 404.
96. Béthune, p. 347.
97. Palm, 1620, pp. 227 f.
98. Berichte über dem Weissenberge, p. 56.
99. Aretin, Beyträge, VII, p. 173; d’Elvert, III, p. 89; Palm, 1620, pp. 265 f.; Lundorp, II, p. 381.
100. Berichte über dem Weissenberge, p. 42.
101. Lundorp, II, p. 481.
102. Opel and Cohn, Der dreissigjährige Krieg. Halle, 1862, p. 122; Beller, Caricatures, passim.
103. Kriegstagebücher, p. 105.
104. Aretin, Beyträge, III, i, p. 56.
105. Kriegstagebücher, p. 72.
106. Krebs, Schlacht, p. 130.
107. Kriegstagebücher, pp. 138 f.
108. Haeberlin, XXV, p. 67.
109. Archaeologia, XXIX, p. 161.
110. Aretin, Beyträge, VII, pp. 174–5.
111. Lundorp, p. 243.
112. Ibid., II, p. 444.
113. Camon, Condé et Turenne, Paris, 1933, p. 3.
114. Kriegstagebücher, pp. 156–7.
115. Mansfeld’s Appollogie, p. 23.
116. Gindely, Geschichte, IV, p. 32.
117. Hurter, Ferdinand II, VIII, pp. 211–12.
118. Lundorp, II, pp. 307 f; Lünig, VI, i, pp. 88 f.
119. Lundorp, II, p. 377.
120. Lonchay and Cuvelier, I, p. 584.
121. Lundorp, II, p. 382.
122. Lundorp, II, p. 400.
123. Ibid., II, pp. 391 f.
124. Calendar of State Papers. Domestic Series, 1619–23, p. 198.
125. Béthune, p. 346.
126. Gindely, Geschichte, IV, p. 23.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE EMPEROR FERDINAND AND THE ELECTOR MAXIMILIAN
1621–5
L’Allemagne perdue, la France ne peut subsister.
RICHELIEU
1.
The centre of interest had shifted from the Moldau to the Rhine, and in Bohemia Ferdinand was laying the foundation of despotic power unhampered by foreign intervention. All four provinces had submitted, Silesia and Lusatia gaining generous terms from the Elector of Saxony,[1] Moravia and Bohemia yielding unconditionally to the Duke of Bavaria. Maximilian made a perfunctory promise to intercede for the lives and property of the rebels. So little did he care for his word that he explicitly requested Ferdinand to disregard it. Later he dispatched to Vienna a Capuchin friar, of whom it was reported that he spoke of the vengeance which God demanded on the Bohemians with the vehemence of a prophet breathing divine revelation.[2]
‘Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel’, had been the verse chosen by one of Vienna’s preachers on the news of the Bohemian surrender, and Ferdinand himself could not have chosen a better text. On Maximilian’s withdrawal he had appointed Karl von Liechtenstein governor in Prague. Liechtenstein was an undistinguished politician, timid, cautious, mildly dishonest and fairly shrewd; the Bohemians might have gained more from his intelligence and mercy, had he not been in all things merely the mouthpiece of the Emperor. Less than five weeks after the fall of Prague the Jesuits had returned, the exiled Catholic officials had been reinstated, the people disarmed, the press brought under control, the coinage of the usurper called in and the rebels prohibited from leaving the country.[3] Ferdinand was determined to reform but not to depopulate his reconquered lands; both in Moravia and Bohemia stringent measures were taken to prevent the emigration of Protestants.[4]
On the night of February 20th 1621, the leading rebels were arrested in Prague.[5] Thurn had fled with the King and was safe beyond the border, but the unhappy Schlick, hoping always for moderation and amnesty, had lingered in Silesia; he was seized in Friedland by Saxon soldiers and delivered up to join his compatriots in the dungeons of Prague.[6]
Ferdinand’s judgement on his unhappy country was pronounced soon after. Elective monarchy was abolished, and the Crown became henceforward hereditary in the Hapsburg dynasty. The Letter of Majesty, the charter of religious liberty, had been taken in the sack of Prague and sent to Vienna, where it was said Ferdinand had personally cut it in pieces. Rumour exaggerated, for the removal of the imperial seal served to make it valueless, and in this degraded condition the paper long survived its purpose. The Calvinist and Utraquist heresies were alike to be rooted out, and only in consideration of the promise made to the Elector of Saxony was the Lutheran Church still to be tolerated.[7] Ferdinand’s policy was three-sided. He desired the political and economic destruction of all who had been concerned in the revolt, the extinction of national privileges and the extermination of the Protestants. Liechtenstein’s anxious protests for mercy or at least for caution fell on deaf ears. The punishment of Bohemia was to inaugurate a new policy, by which the Hapsburg lands were to be moulded into one state united in religion and controlled from Vienna, the essential foundation for the rebuilding of Catholic Europe.
The first necessity was to impress Ferdinand’s power on his defeated subjects in letters of blood. The arrested leaders were tried by a special commission from which there was no appeal, and more than forty of them were sentenced to imprisonment and death. Foremost among them was Andreas Schlick, whose fortitude in these last hours gave strength to the most wretched of his fellow-prisoners. This was the last and perhaps the noblest service that he performed for those who had so persistently disregarded his counsels. Whichever side had won, the generosity and moderation for which he had pleaded would have been alike impossible; life had long lost its sweetness for him.
In the last week of May 1621, the sentences reached Vienna for Ferdinand’s signature.[8] He felt that it was his duty and knew that it was in his interest to strike hard, but when it came to condemning so many men to death, even his imagination was touched, and starting up from the council table he fled from the room, mopping the sweat from his forehead.[9] In the morning, after consulting his confessor, he was calm again, signed upwards of twenty death sentences without more ado and sent orders for immediate execution.[10]
They died in Prague on June 21st 1621, in the great square before the Rathaus, while seven hundred Saxon horsemen patrolled the city. But there was no demonstration as Liechtenstein had feared,[11] no attempt at rescue. They died for the most part silently, only one crying out, ‘Tell your Emperor I stand now before his unjust judgement; warn him of the judgement of God’, before the drums of the soldiery drowned his words. Twelve heads were spitted on the Charles Bridge and the right hand of Count Schlick, grisly reminders through ten long years of the revolt which had failed.[12]
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Prague acquiesced, its riches vanished, its trade stopped up, its people sick with fear, its leaders gone. Beyond Prague, beyond Bohemia, the Protestant news-letters screamed their indignation; men spoke of Alva and the Council of Blood[13] which fifty years before had roused the Netherlands to throw off the tyrant. But the Dutch had had a champion beyond their borders who had come back at a nation’s call. For Bohemia no deliverer came. The best of her manhood had died on the White Hill and in the market-place, by the sword and the axe. Beyond her borders there was only a fugitive king and a band of exiles, within them only the victorious party, the cowards, the indifferent, the widows and the children of the slain.
2.
Absolute power was Ferdinand’s ambition; absolute power in his own dominions and throughout the Empire; he saw the future of the Hapsburg dynasty from this angle. The King of Spain, on the other hand, saw the safety and greatness of his family in the reconquest of the Netherlands and the renewed prosperity of Spain. While both ultimately desired the good of the dynasty above all, inevitably each was unwilling to sacrifice his policy to that of the other. The two policies came into conflict in the spring and summer of 1621.
The deaths of the Archduke Albert and of Philip III had substantially altered the relations of Spain with the Netherlands. The independence of the provinces ended with the life of the Archduke; superficially it seemed at first that the Spanish Crown would not take advantage of this, for the widowed Isabella continued to govern and Ambrogio Spinola remained the dominant power in the state.[14] But gradually the new rulers of Spain infringed the independence of those who were now legally no more than appointed deputies; these new rulers were a boy still in his teens and his favourite, Olivarez.
The new King, Philip IV, was slightly more intelligent and considerably less conscientious than his father; interested in music, painting and the arts, with a taste for display, for masques, dances and the drama, a devotee of hunting and bullfighting, and promising already to become an uncontrolled libertine, he was unimaginative in politics and bigoted in religion rather by education than by a natural bent.[15] Power passed entirely into the hands of Olivarez, a man whose immense energy and imagination made up for the lackadaisical indifference of his master. At his prompting, almost every minister of the late King was removed from office, and a new government came into being under the absolute control of the favourite.[16] Gaspar de Guzman, Count of Olivarez, was a man in the middle thirties; he had established his position with the King largely by means of a vivid personality, for he was not apparently the type of friend most acceptable to Philip. In person he was a stout, florid, robust man, with an easy flow of conversation, who disliked sport and was bored by frivolous amusements. He was devoured by a passion for power, and he commanded rather than advised the King. He had the good of the monarchy at heart but his faith in his own judgement was unalterable and he went through life guiding the fate of his country exclusively by the light of his own brilliant but unstable mind.[17]
In 1621 his chief concern was to find the surest means of controlling the Palatinate. He had a plan for restoring Frederick under Spanish protection. This scheme fulfilled a double purpose. England could always make herself dangerous in the Narrow Seas by hindering the ships which passed between Spain and Flanders, and the restoration of a chastened Frederick under Spanish influence was designed at least partly to pacify English public opinion. No scheme could have been more unwelcome to Ferdinand, who had determined to transfer the Electorate to Maximilian and also to pay off his debts by bestowing on him a large portion of the displaced Elector’s land.
Happily for Ferdinand, Frederick’s troops under Mansfeld and Sir Horace Vere were forced by hunger to resume the offensive, thus temporarily blocking the Spanish scheme. Better still, their movement provided a bait to tempt the Duke of Bavaria into compromising himself yet further. Torn between ambition and anxiety for the German constitution, Maximilian had half-realized the peril of his position, and when the execution of the ban against Frederick was entrusted to him,[18] with the suggestion that he should invade the Upper Palatinate, he had at first refused. In public he had even assumed a lofty detachment with regard to the ban itself. Alas that Maximilian, in appearance so subtle and so shrewd, had not the firmness to maintain this posture. When Mansfeld’s troops suddenly began to use the Upper Palatinate as a base for a new attack on Bohemia, Ferdinand had only to suggest that he would himself attack them, to bring Maximilian hurrying into the field lest he should lose his share of the spoils.[19]
On September 23rd 1620, Maximilian stormed and took the town of Cham on Frederick’s side of the German-Bohemian frontier. Mansfeld, strong in his army but hard pressed for funds, seized his opportunity; after brief negotiations he signed, in return for a large sum of money, an undertaking to fight no more for Frederick. No sooner was this done than he turned his face westwards and, with the most callous disregard for his promise, marched to join Frederick’s English allies in the Rhenish Palatinate. On October 25th, fifteen days after the signing of the treaty with Maximilian, the glad sight of his vanguard burst on the eyes of Vere’s hard-pressed garrison at Frankenthal.
This breach of trust gave Maximilian the justification for which he had been waiting, to attack Frederick’s lands on the Rhine. Even less than Ferdinand did he wish to see the Spaniards established there in sole command, and quick as thought he despatched his general Tilly in pursuit of Mansfeld. It would be something to have his own troops on the Rhine next to those of Spain, but if Maximilian hoped that Tilly could rush the Spaniards into action on his behalf he was mistaken. Spinola was in the Netherlands organizing a frontal attack on the Dutch; neither the governments at Brussels nor Madrid wished to waste money fighting for a strip of country they could get more safely by treaty, and their general on the Rhine, Cordoba, obeyed their orders. Tilly, unable to attack Mansfeld alone, had to retire disappointed to winter quarters in the Upper Palatinate while Cordoba remained inactive, Vere entrenched his minute forces on both banks of the Rhine, and Mansfeld crossed over into Alsace in search of food and shelter for his army.
Bohemia, the Rhenish Palatinate, the Upper Palatinate, the Rhine bishoprics, Alsace—gradually the war was spreading. ‘God help those where Mansfeld comes!’ was a cry by this time well known in Germany.[20] His troops had carried plague across the heart of Franconia leaving the virulent infection to smoulder in towns and villages;[21] he brought typhus into Alsace, and of the refugees who fled before him to the safety of Strasbourg, hundreds died in the ensuing months. The winter came early with heavy snows, and Mansfeld’s troops wasted the country for food, burning and breaking what they could not carry off. From the walls of Strasbourg a man might count sixteen fires at once flaming through the night, and none dared leave the city for fear of straggling plunderers. Those peasants that could drove their cattle and swine before them into the city, but many left their beasts to die of hunger or to be driven off by the soldiery.[22] In the Catholic bishoprics the soldiers fell upon the churches, tearing down all that they could carry off, wrenching the Christs from the crosses and gibbeting them like thieves on trees along the roadways. As far south as Ensisheim and Breisach spread the marauders, and it was reported that for fifteen miles round the citadel of Hagenau they had set fire to every house they passed.[23]
A year had gone by since the battle of the White Hill, and peace was still far off. Olivarez at Madrid and the Archduchess at Brussels made a united front with the King of Great Britain in favour of Frederick’s restoration to the Palatinate, but Ferdinand was warmly if unintentionally assisted in his efforts to prevent it by Frederick himself. Confident in the new forces which he was building up with Dutch help, bound by his treaty with the Provinces to go back to his lands as a conqueror at the head of Dutch-paid armies, he had no intention of creeping home under Spanish protection. He was as willing to fight as Ferdinand. The Anglo-Spanish plan foundered on the opposition of both the principals. And peace receded.
Theoretically
there was still no civil war between factions within Germany, but a war directed against a single breaker of the peace. Whether Ferdinand altogether wished that it should remain so is doubtful: he was annoyed by the deadlock created by the Spaniards on the Rhine, but rather because he wished to settle with Maximilian than because he feared the international complications which might arise out of it. In his earliest youth he had chosen the warlike device ‘Legitime certantibus corona’, and the idea of fighting justly for the rights of the imperial crown cannot therefore have been displeasing to him. Optimistic as he was, he had never thought to increase his power as Emperor without conflict, and he regarded the prospect of continued war with conventional distress only. He had not the imagination which grasps the meaning of famine, fire and sword in their effect on individuals, and he resembled the greater number of his contemporaries in thinking it more dreadful that the Protestant soldiery should spike out the eyes of an image of the Virgin than that they should hunt the peasants into their burning houses. Ferdinand was as unwilling to accept plans for mediation and peace as Frederick or Mansfeld, but politically and morally his position was stronger because he could put the onus of responsibility for further war on to them. Confident that his own and not the Spanish view was safer for the dynasty, confident that the Dutch or Frederick himself would soon make the Anglo-Spanish scheme impossible, confident that some nervous ineptitude on the part of the Protestant princes would shortly provide him with yet another excuse to attack their power in Germany, he saw that the situation was unrolling itself for him with singular felicity. There is a gift in knowing when to move and when to be still, when to interpose a guiding finger and when to let the world drift. This was Ferdinand’s gift. In the winter of 1621 he had only to wait.
3.
Had Frederick and Elizabeth acquiesced in the Anglo-Spanish plan and gone back to Heidelberg on terms, there would have been no Thirty Years War.
Neither of these young people—their united ages were still under fifty—showed the least inclination to do any such thing, Frederick had convictions if he had not strength of character, and Elizabeth had courage enough for two.
The Thirty Years War Page 16
