The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  The Elector of Brandenburg was in an equally uncomfortable and powerless position. His wife was Frederick’s elder sister, and she had persuaded him to give a refuge to her mother and youngest brother, while the latter prince had married a princess of Brandenburg, thus increasing the bond of obligation between the two families. The Bohemian persecutions had also turned the Elector of Brandenburg against the Emperor, but he was neither intelligent nor determined, his lands were troubled by the existence of a large Lutheran party personally opposed to his own Calvinism, and he had dynastic reasons for seeking to preserve peace. Besides, the King of Poland, Ferdinand’s brother-in-law, had once again made an opportune intervention by ceding the much-disputed province of Prussia to Brandenburg as a fief of the Polish Crown.[61] The Elector could hardly accept the bribe without committing himself to support the Hapsburg dynasty. Indeed, had he wished to oppose it, he had no army worth the name, nor were his Estates prepared to advance him money to raise one. His cue was to follow in the wake of Saxony and above all to make no rash decision.

  While the two Protestant Electors played for safety, Ferdinand could carry through his unconstitutional act. No effective power in Germany would prevent him.

  It was different in Europe. The Spaniards did not want the Electorate transferred to Maximilian. The Archduchess Isabella, with the approval of Madrid, had evolved the perfect scheme: Frederick should be made to abdicate in favour of his eldest son, a child of seven, who should then be dispatched to Vienna, educated with the Emperor’s family, and ultimately married to one of his daughters. This plan, which among other things saved the imperial constitution intact, for an abdication under pressure was allowable where a deposition would be illegal, was sponsored by Philip IV and James I, and even taken up by John George of Saxony. That Frederick refused to abdicate, refused to relinquish his son, and continued to demand an indemnity for the sufferings of the Protestant Bohemians, disturbed no one.[62]

  But Maximilian had not been idle in the defence of his own interests. The reconquest of the Palatinate had given him the opportunity to prove that he, no less than Ferdinand, was the champion of the Church. Every effort had been made to reconvert the people. As soon as Tilly’s troops were well established, missionaries had descended upon the hungry and plague-stricken populace, and orders had been promulgated forbidding emigration; the Protestant churches of Heidelberg itself had been closed, the University dissolved and the superb library packed into boxes and trundled in wagon loads over the Alps to Rome, Maximilian’s thankoffering to the Vatican.[63]

  Such bribery was, however, not necessary to enlist the Pope’s help. The plan of the Archduchess would have caused an increase in Hapsburg power which as an Italian prince he could not afford to allow. With the King of Great Britain supporting it, with the King of France apparently not strong enough to resist, Spain would in all probability reconquer the Dutch Netherlands and regain thereby all its lost prosperity. If the Hapsburg were not to master the world, Maximilian must be advanced as a counterweight within the Empire to the power of Austria, in Europe to that of Spain.

  All this time Ferdinand appeared to be cast about like a rudderless boat on the stormy currents of conflicting intrigue. On the one side the Pope pressed him to make a written promise of the Electorate to Maximilian,[64] on the other the King of Spain urged the English plan upon him, while the constitutionalist Elector of Mainz warned him of the dangerous enmity of Saxony, should he fulfil Maximilian’s desire.[65] Certainly in Europe the Emperor, who had apparently so few personal resources and no command of his own destiny, was an object of faintly contemptuous pity, and the result of the Regensburg negotiation was generally assumed to depend on the relative pressure exerted by Spain and Bavaria. It was to Ferdinand’s advantage that it should be so, for just as he seems to have had no doubt whatever as to his intentions, so also it was best for him to figure throughout as the victim of circumstances. If he enforced the cession of the Electorate to Maximilian his imperial power would be strengthened; if he failed, he could plead his innocence of all responsibility and be no worse off than before.

  In the meantime he was prepared to make a temporary sacrifice of Spanish interests for the furtherance of his own more subtle plans. Ultimately he would, like all his forebears, serve the interests of his dynasty, but he would serve them in a German, an Imperial, not a Spanish sense, and he saw salvation not through the reconquest of the Dutch Netherlands but through the reform of the Empire. Once imperial power had become a reality again, no nation in Europe, no reigning dynasty, would be able to stand against the Hapsburg. He was prepared to shelve the immediate demands of Spain, not indeed to please Bavaria, but to serve the larger ends of the dynasty.

  The Princes who met at Regensburg in January 1623 were few of them favourable to Ferdinand’s proposition. In order to avoid a difficult decision, the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg had not sent plenipotentiary ambassadors; therefore no decision would be legally binding on them. But what hair-splittings were these constitutional quibbles, when the only armed force in Germany belonged to the Duke of Bavaria and was at the Emperor’s disposal! What Ferdinand did would be effective whether it were legal or not, and the princes would have to recognize the accomplished fact.

  The Regensburg meeting lasted for six weeks, every kind of argument being adduced both by the princes and by the Spanish ambassador to prevent the transference of the Electorate. The claims of Frederick’s innocent children, four healthy sons, were urged in vain against those of Maximilian; no less, the rights of Frederick’s younger brother and of the Prince of Neuburg, a Catholic and a nearer relation of the rebellious prince than was Maximilian of Bavaria. But Maximilian and Ferdinand stood to their decision, Maximilian earning the opprobrium and Ferdinand the pity of the assembly.

  The Duke was playing into the Emperor’s hands. His personal ambitions blinded him to the breach he was making in the German Liberties. His old father, who had been nearly thirty years in retirement, thrust himself forward for one last moment to warn his son to consider his actions. But Maximilian, himself grown grey in government, would not stop to listen to a voice from the past century.[66]

  Ferdinand made only one concession to the doubts of the princes. The electorate was bestowed for life only, and there would be the possibility of restoring it to Frederick’s children on Maximilian’s death; the Duke was already old and his wife past the age of child-bearing.[67] On February 23rd 1623, Frederick was deposed, and two days later Maximilian was invested with his titles.[68] The hall was dismally deserted at his investiture, for neither the representatives of Saxony and Brandenburg nor the Spanish ambassador had come. The Elector of Mainz performed the ceremony with an embarrassed air, frequently stopping to scratch his head as if for inspiration, and Maximilian’s speech of gratitude lacked polish and confidence;[69] at that last moment, too late to retract, perhaps even he began to wonder whither his dynastic ambition had led him. He had gained a personal advantage at the expense of those very Liberties by which he, no less than all the princes of Germany, maintained his power. He might stand tomorrow in the place in which Frederick stood today, for he had put a weapon into the Emperor’s hands that Ferdinand would not fear to use. The time was fast approaching when he would regret that he had sacrificed the constitution of Germany to the ambition of Bavaria and made way for the unimpeded rule of violence. He, who of all men had been most jealous lest imperial power should increase, had lent his hand to the destruction of the constitution which he had championed.

  5.

  The elevation of Maximilian evoked a storm of protest for which Ferdinand had not been unprepared. The Spanish ambassador offered no congratulations, the Archduchess Isabella openly expressed her disapproval and regret.[70] The Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg jointly refused to recognize their new colleague, and the Regensburg meeting came to an untimely end because the Protestant delegates would not take their seats with the so-called ‘Elector’ of Bavaria.[71]

  Ferdinand now kn
ew the limit of his power. It stretched as far and no farther than his armed force could carry it, and for that armed force he still depended on the Catholic League and Maximilian of Bavaria. The Protestant delegates at Regensburg had expressed their disapproval by refusing any further grants of money for the war; they might be too weak to resist, but they were not quite so simple as to subsidize an attack on their Liberties. The transference of the Electorate had completed the work of the ban by forcing the constitutionalist party into sympathy, if not alliance, with the dispossessed Frederick.

  On the other hand, the cleavage between Catholic and Protestant princes had been dangerously widened at Regensburg, where the delegates of the Catholic League had naturally supported Maximilian, their president and paymaster, and some of the more indiscreet had foolishly boasted that the Church would soon reconquer all Germany. As a result, the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg held a protest meeting, at which there was talk on Saxony’s part of forming a new Protestant Union, and on Brandenburg’s of an appeal to force. The chief result of these gestures was merely to cement more firmly than before the alliance between Ferdinand and the League.[72]

  The delegates of the League, under the auspices of Maximilian, had been holding their own annual meeting at Regensburg in the intervals of imperial business. Exploiting his new triumph, Maximilian overrode the doubts of the more timorous members and persuaded the gathering to vote for the continued maintenance of Tilly’s army.[73] He saw well enough that after the unmasking of Catholic and dynastic ambition which had taken place, it would be essential to check by a show of arms all possibility of Protestant and constitutionalist attack. The resources of his allies and of Bavaria itself were already strained, and for the last months Tilly had had difficulty in keeping his troops satisfied;[74] nevertheless, the new Elector’s arguments were unanswerable, and the members of the League prepared to raise yet more money from their subjects.

  The second essential for Maximilian was to strengthen his hold over Ferdinand, which was not difficult to accomplish when the Emperor needed armed force and the League alone could provide it. By the end of March 1623, the original alliance had been renewed; Ferdinand, it was estimated, already owed the Elector of Bavaria between sixteen and eighteen million florins for his original services, a debt which showed every sign of increasing and none of being paid. To redeem this immense sum he now contracted to give Maximilian control of the revenues of Upper Austria and the complete possession of the Upper Palatinate at least for the time being.[75] Although a final transference of these tracts of land was not made, no one who understood the rudiments of Hapsburg policy could doubt that Ferdinand meant in course of time to buy back Upper Austria by the total cession of the Palatinate. He was feeling his way towards the redistribution of the Empire and once again he was concealing his policy under cover of his obligations to Maximilian.

  Ferdinand had successfully defied the limitations on imperial power which had crippled his predecessors since Charles V, but the victory would be wasted unless he could carry it to its logical conclusion. So long as he remained indebted to any party in the state, Catholic or Protestant, his despotism would be an illusion and there would come a point at which it would no longer be safe to exploit the ambitions or the convictions of one prince for the destruction of another, a point at which the power of Bavaria might become dangerous to the Hapsburg dynasty itself. After all, Maximilian had once been mentioned as a possible candidate for the imperial throne.

  A clever statesman in Ferdinand’s position would have played off one party against the other, John George of Saxony against Maximilian of Bavaria. A religious fanatic would have sold himself body and soul to the Catholic League and reconquered Germany for the Church, at whatever cost to imperial prestige. Ferdinand, by the peculiarities of his birth and out-look, could do neither. He was ardently, intensely Catholic, and therefore to speak of his ‘exploitation’ of the Catholic League is to do an injustice to his convictions, for, in so far as the League served the Church, Ferdinand’s heart was with it; but when the League began to endanger his dynasty a new force came into play. His political and religious convictions were inextricably mingled; he genuinely believed that the Hapsburg dynasty alone could restore Germany to the Church and that, if the League endangered the stability of his dynasty, it endangered the welfare of Catholic Europe. This profound conviction alone justifies his actions and explains the apparent insincerity of his conduct. He had won half his battle with the help of the Catholic League; he had now to find some new weapon with which to bring the League itself under control. It is probable that Ferdinand, being a simple man, and more given to exercise than thought, hardly conceived of the problem in explicit terms, but henceforward two motives dominated his policy: he must strengthen the Hapsburg power in the dynastic lands themselves, and find means whenever possible to evade all further obligations to Maximilian of Bavaria. This he set out to achieve in the time conscientiously allotted to state affairs between prayers and hunting.

  He had to help him in his task two men of exceptional ability, his friend and chief minister, Eggenberg, and the Jesuit father, Lamormaini,[76] who together exerted the only permanent influences on his pliable but slippery judgement. Eggenberg had been his leading councillor for several years, but Lamormaini only became Ferdinand’s confessor in 1624. He came from Luxemburg, of well-to-do peasant stock, a lean, tall man with an ugly limp, the deformity which had driven him as a boy into the shelter of the seminary. His manners were austere, his habits simple, his convictions fanatical. Ferdinand had never cherished any illusion as to the political sanctity of the ministers of the Church. Although he showed a meticulous respect to the merest village priest, he had thought nothing of arresting and forcibly detaining a Cardinal[77] and, as a young man, he had removed the confessor of one of his brothers because he did not approve of the way in which he used his influence. Nevertheless, a clever man could establish such relations with him as would make the confessional a potent if never guiding instrument of policy. Lamormaini suited Ferdinand admirably: he took a genuine and sympathetic interest in his family and his hunting, avoided all appearance of political dominance and gave his advice when it was asked with that logic, accuracy and clearness which Ferdinand had learnt to expect of the Jesuits.

  On April 5th 1623, Ferdinand left Regensburg for Prague,[78] there to initiate his policy for the strengthening and stabilizing of Hapsburg power. In his suite travelled the Papal Nuncio, Cardinal Carafa, one of the ablest members of that family from which the greatest of the Counter-Reformation Popes had sprung. He was the man to whom Ferdinand looked to restore Bohemia to the Church.

  Five years had passed since Ferdinand last travelled to Bohemia, and the country through which he went showed cruel signs of change. From Regensburg to the frontier his road lay across the Upper Palatinate, where the troops of Tilly had made horrible devastation. The peasantry of the country seem to have had a real devotion to their dispossessed Elector[79] and had often refused food and shelter to the Catholic soldiery, thus bringing down on themselves the unbridled fury of the invaders.[80] Maximilian, to prevent further trouble, had had the whole province forcibly disarmed;[81] meanwhile the natural protectors of the peasantry, the local gentry, less loyal than their people, had made haste to come to terms with the new government, leaving their peasants to suffer undefended. Shortage of pay had undermined the discipline of Tilly’s army as early as the summer of 1621. They had avenged their poverty, with the licence of a conquering army, on the wretched villages of the Palatinate. In the towns they had even broken into and plundered the hospitals and pest-houses, thus spreading disease through their own ranks and carrying it across the province.[82] Crossing the Bohemian border, Ferdinand came upon the track of Mansfeld’s depredations, nor were other parts of his land less affected. The province of Moravia had for the past two years been safeguarded by Cossack troops against the possible invasion of Bethlen Gabor; their destructive depredations had caused a famine.[83]

 
; Ferdinand had not come to organize relief, and the measures which he adopted were not calculated to pour balm on the sores of Bohemia. In the preceding autumn he had issued an edict that every participant in the recent revolt was to forfeit part or all of his lands,[84] and he now came to see the effect of his orders. Six hundred and fifty-eight families in Bohemia, fifty towns, and land amounting to one half of the whole province, came within the scope of the decision, while in Moravia over three hundred landowners were affected, the greatest culprits losing the whole of their estates, the lesser as little as a fifth. Neither Ferdinand nor his councillors were blind to the advantage of keeping the spoils in the hands of the Crown, but the immediate need for money to meet the expenses of the State was too great to allow of argument. They had to sell.