Should the towns be unwilling, it was thought that a demonstration of imperial force would persuade them to accept the offer, and in June Wallenstein’s military commission was enlarged to cover the whole of the Empire.[15] He had already been as good as his word and stood ready on the Bohemian border with a well-equipped army, with which in the late summer he crossed into Germany and made northwards to join with Tilly. He had recently been elevated to the rank of a count palatine of the Empire, a patent which gave him the right to ennoble others at his discretion. During the summer he tacitly arrogated to himself the title of Duke of Friedland.[16]
With a new imperial army in the field and Breda lost, the situation was becoming untenable for the French in the Val Telline; Richelieu’s government had not the resources necessary to occupy the valley indefinitely and was still uncertain at home. Palace intrigue or local rebellion might at any moment throw him off his balance, and meanwhile in the north the great arc of his projected alliances was beginning to crack.
The King of Denmark and the King of Sweden burnt with equal ardour to intervene in Germany; both of them stormed Paris and London with their plans of campaign,[17] but each assumed that the other would act under his orders. France, on the whole, favoured the King of Sweden; the English government vacillated, was enthusiastic for the Swedish plan and then, as suddenly, was attracted by the Danish, and tactlessly asked Gustavus Adolphus to sign an alliance giving Christian IV full controlling powers.[18] The rage with which Gustavus heard this demand was not unjustified: he did not trust Christian of Denmark and he feared that, unless he had absolute military control, his armies and money would be exploited for the advantage of others.[19] Virtually he held a pistol to the heads of the English and French governments: he had made a truce with his old enemy the King of Poland, which would end in a few weeks—either he must be given the chief control of operations, or he would resume his war in Poland and leave Germany to take care of itself. The English and French governments remained unmoved, and on June 11th 1625 Gustavus Adolphus turned his back on the German war and launched a further attack on Sigismund of Poland.[20]
Of all the impressive group of projected allies, only one, the King of Denmark, appeared in the field for the Protestant Cause of Germany in the summer of 1625.
2.
Christian IV was not negligible. His misfortune was to reign at the same time as Gustavus of Sweden, so that popular report, dazzled by so brilliant a rival, has given him too small a place in European history. At the time of his intervention in Germany he was forty-eight years old and had been on the throne for thirty-seven years. He was a straight, broad-shouldered man, rather florid in complexion, his light brown hair by this time rather grey; his life of hard exercise interspersed with hard drinking had left him only the heartier. Monogamy had never suited his exuberant nature, and the number of his bastards grew in time to be a Danish problem and a European joke. In spite of his energetic tastes, he was an intellectual man and made use of his gifts; he had even conducted a learned correspondence in Latin with that prince of pedants, James I of Great Britain.[21] A good linguist, he was also a good talker. He had encouraged the arts and sciences in his northern capital as few had done before him, and his palaces at Kronberg and Copenhagen reflected in their opulent decorations, their lavish gold ornaments and plump plaster cherubs realistically tinted pink, something of their master’s warm and vigorous personality. ‘One could hardly believe that he had been born in so cold a climate,’ an Italian had once commented.[22]
As a king, Christian had shown outstanding ability, determination and courage, promoting the interests of his people both at home and abroad by combating the exorbitant claims of the nobility and encouraging overseas trade. If he did not altogether succeed, it was because he had to fight the rooted power of a selfish and irresponsible aristocracy at home, and abroad the transcendent genius of Gustavus Adolphus. Throughout Christian’s life too much always turned on the King himself: his intellectual powers and his character were always strained to their uttermost, for he had no deputies to lift the burden from him. His charm of manner, his masterful personality, his reckless courage, rough, astringent humour and moody temper had to be constantly at the service of his political acumen, and it was small wonder if the man was sometimes too tired to uphold the King unaided. In comparing his failure with the success of his rival the King of Sweden, it must not be forgotten that Gustavus was as fortunate in his servants as in his own gifts. Christian, from his majority to the day of his death, fought his battles alone.
Half a German, Christian spoke and wrote the language as well as his own, and he had influence and interests in Germany. He was Duke of Holstein, his son had just been elected to the vacant bishopric of Verden, and Christian claimed both Osnabrück and Halberstadt in his name; with these territories under his influence, and more particularly with the incontrovertible possession of Holstein to back him, Christian intended to put pressure on wavering neutrals. Unhappily, both he and his allies miscalculated the confusions of German politics. The Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, no less than Christian or the Emperor, had sons to provide for, and they too had nourished hopes of the bishoprics of Osnabrück and Halberstadt. Bitterly resenting the idea that a Hapsburg prince should snatch these prizes from their own children, they were equally unwilling to assist the King of Denmark to do the same. Both princes declared their continued loyalty to the Emperor.
Meanwhile the unhappy rulers of the Lower Saxon Circle continued in their quandary. They were still unwilling to abandon their neutrality, but were powerless to maintain it when Tilly’s troops were encamped within their southern border, and the King of Denmark was gathering his forces to the north. Christian proved the more successful intimidator and in May 1625 the bewildered Estates first elected him President of the Circle and then took an unwilling decision to arm.[23] This, in fact, meant only that Christian was free to recruit within their borders.
No declaration of war had hitherto passed between the King and the Emperor, so that Tilly met these activities by sending a note to Christian to ask his intention. The reply was a conciliatory letter explaining that as President of the Lower Saxon Circle he found it necessary to make arrangements for its defence.[24] There followed, all that autumn and winter, an interchange of exquisitely courteous letters between Ferdinand and the assembled Estates of the Circle, in which he attempted to win them generally and singly from their allegiance to the King of Denmark. Clinging to the shreds of neutrality, they wavered pitiably; at first they considered Ferdinand’s specious offer of a religious guarantee for the north German bishoprics, and then called off the deal when he tried to except Magdeburg. They were rapidly falling into that double distress which in time overtook all the neutral states of Germany, that of being at war with both parties.[25]
Meanwhile in the field nothing significant happened. Christian, advancing down the Weser, was checked at Hameln by a dangerous accident. Riding round his lines one evening, he was thrown from his horse eighty feet off the ramparts and only by a miracle survived. He was rumoured dead,[26] which gave Tilly courage to advance, but better information and shortage of food drove him back again.[27] Even the coming of Wallenstein with nearly thirty thousand men[28] increased rather than lessened Tilly’s difficulties, for there were now two armies to feed, on land which had already been eaten bare by one alone.[29]
A cold spring had deepened into a bitter summer; snow fell in June and the drenched crops rotted in the ground. Plague swept over Europe, checking political and economic life; in Austria and Styria, in Mecklenburg and Prussia, in Würzburg and on either side of the Rhine, from Württemberg to Aachen, it raged through the summer; sixteen thousand died in Prague.[30] By October eight thousand of Tilly’s eighteen thousand men were sick and the rest ill-clad; all were without safe or decent quarters for the winter.[31]
Wallenstein was more fortunate. The imperial name had more terrors than that of the League, and Tilly was amazed to see cities which had refused e
ntry to his troops open their gates to Wallenstein.[32] The imperial general seized as by right the best quarters, settling down in the bishoprics of Magdeburg and Halberstadt,[33] while Tilly, his men mutinous, hungry and deserting, had to do as best he could in the smaller and less prosperous diocese of Hildesheim.[34] The legitimate search for food degenerated into a scramble for plunder and women, in which the perverted cruelty of mankind, unloosed from the social controls of peace, found horrible expression. In vain townships and villages asked for guarantees of safety on the grounds of their loyalty; the general gave, but could not enforce them.
Wantonly destructive, the soldiery set fire to villages and slaughtered such cattle as they did not drive off. In their lust for plunder they dug up the graveyards for concealed treasure, combed the woods in which the homeless peasants had taken refuge, and shot down those they found, in order to steal their ragged bundles of savings and household goods. They wrecked the churches, and when a pastor, braver than the rest, denied them entrance, they cut off his hands and feet and left him bleeding on the altar, a mangled sacrifice to his Protestant God. Nor did they spare those of their own faith; at the convent of Amelungsborn they ripped up the vestments and shattered the organ, carried off the chalices and ransacked even the graves of the nuns.[35]
Wallenstein’s men were on the whole less destructive than Tilly’s. His quartering and provisioning were far better organized, and although his exactions in money fell more heavily than those of Tilly on the leading burghers of the towns he occupied, he saw to it that his men were contented, and thereby lessened the chances of wanton plundering.[36] Out of the monstrous contributions which he levied on the occupied country, he kept his troops punctually paid, and accumulated a reserve to replace and improve the artillery.[37] Against all emergencies, he had in his own granaries in Bohemia the means to keep the army fed should all else fail.[38]
Throughout the desolate summer and autumn of 1625, the Danish King strove to tighten the ring of his alliances. In December he signed a treaty with England and the United Provinces,[39] hoping that these two wealthy States would feed his troops with money. Short-lived expectations, for money belonged to individuals not to the government; the Dutch Estates voted him less than he expected, the English Parliament nothing. They had given money to Mansfeld in 1624, to Christian of Brunswick in 1625, and they felt that it was enough to send a small troop of pressed men under Colonel Morgan to help the King of Denmark.[40]
Final catastrophe came when the support of France was withdrawn. Richelieu was the Atlas upholding this tottering world of allies; in the spring of 1626 a Huguenot revolt broke out in France and he was forced to recall his troops from the Val Telline to meet the graver danger at home. To salvage the wreck, the Prince of Orange fitted out a small fleet to sail against the Huguenot fortress of La Rochelle, but the Dutch sailors refused to man the boats against fellow-Protestants and by this mistimed zeal contributed to the collapse of the Protestant Cause in Germany. By the Peace of Monzon on March 26th 1626, Richelieu withdrew from the Val Telline, and the passes were once more open to Spain. The blood flowed again in the veins of the Hapsburg Empire.
There remained for the defence of the Protestant Cause and the German Liberties Christian of Denmark, Christian of Brunswick, and Ernst von Mansfeld. The King of Denmark had the largest army and was the natural director of the war, but Mansfeld, with forces which he had once again swelled by new recruiting, regarded himself as the leader who, par excellence, understood the situation; Christian of Brunswick, on the other hand, with an army which he recruited from the peasants as he passed and armed primitively with heavy iron-bound sticks,[41] was willing to act under the King of Denmark but not on any account under Mansfeld.[42] Three separate operations were therefore indicated, since a concerted attack would lead only to bickering; and besides, a divided enslaught was more likely to separate the combined armies of the enemy. Mansfeld was to invade the bishopric of Magdeburg, Wallenstein’s headquarters, thus drawing his fire, circumvent him if possible, and make for Silesia where Bethlen Gabor had promised to join him. Christian of Brunswick was to evade Tilly’s outposts and make for Hesse, where he was to raise the Landgrave Maurice for the Protestants and fall on Tilly’s rear, while Christian of Denmark, advancing down the Weser, took him full in front.
Christian of Brunswick’s attack failed utterly. Worn out at twenty-eight, broken in reputation and fortune, ravaged by disease, he urged his tattered forces across the Hessian border, only to find that the Landgrave, without an army, without resources, already sentenced to the loss of his estates and terrified lest the imperial judgement should be put into force, would have nothing to do with the projects of the King of Denmark. Utterly dejected, Christian fell back on Wolfenbüttel where on June 16th 1626 he died, his vitals, so the Catholics reported, gnawed by a gigantic worm: the death of Herod.
Mansfeld was hardly more successful. Advised of his movements, Wallenstein himself marched with a large detachment of his army to Dessau on the Elbe, where he knew the Protestant army must cross, and where, on April 25th 1626, Mansfeld appeared with twelve thousand men. For both generals much depended on the issue of that day; Mansfeld, the veteran of his trade, whose ill-luck was becoming proverbial in Europe, relied on a brilliant passage of the Elbe to revive his withering reputation. Wallenstein, still a beginner in the art of mercenary leadership, had all his reputation yet to make. In the previous year he had been slow to march northward and had arrived too late in the field to show his mettle; since then they had been saying in Vienna that he was an empty boaster, an expensive luxury not worth the Emperor’s favour, useless as a soldier, dangerous as a subject. A faction wished to depose him from the head of the troops he had raised and give the command to an experienced Italian professional, Collalto. In the very ranks of his army there were officers who took down his chance words and sent them to Vienna with their own interpretations; so at least the Lorrainer, Colonel Aldringer.[43] The action at the Dessau bridge was to Wallenstein something more than the defence of the Elbe; it was the defence of his own reputation.[44]
Mansfeld made the fatal mistake of under-estimating his enemy. When he stormed the bridge-head at Dessau, he had not realized that he had to do with a man whose thoroughness made up for his lack of experience. With the best artillery that had yet been seen in the war, with his troops concealed to minimize their apparent strength, Wallenstein made the Dessau bridge a death-trap, and Mansfeld who trusted in the experience of his soldiers and the massed weight of his charges fell back that night, leaving one-third of his army dead under Wallenstein’s guns.
‘God gave me the good fortune to smite Mansfeld on the head’, wrote Wallenstein to the Emperor.[45] A few days later he accused and upbraided Aldringer for his meddling letters to Vienna, flinging the parting taunt ‘ink-swiller’[46] at his discomfited subordinate; it was a jibe which struck home to the self-made man who had been a secretary before he held a commission:[47] a light word thrown out in the heat of anger, but a word which Aldringer would remember when Wallenstein had forgotten.
Divided from Christian of Denmark, on the wrong bank of the Elbe, Mansfeld turned north-eastward into neutral but defenceless Brandenburg, sent out his officers to make good his losses by recruiting and waited for news from Bethlen Gabor. Angry, dejected, ill, but obstinate in his purpose, he planned to strike down the line of the Oder into Silesia when his strength should be sufficiently recruited.
The triumphs in the north had not only saved Wallenstein’s reputation. They had brought up for consideration in Brussels a plan which had long been maturing. This was no less than a scheme to establish a naval base for the Spanish fleet on the Baltic and thus reduce the Dutch by an attack on both sides at once. On July 1st a Flemish envoy met the two generals at Duderstadt and offered them the financial and military help of Spain if they would occupy Lübeck. Tilly and Wallenstein both shrugged their shoulders. The enterprise, they said, would not be worth the risk. This was certainly true as things then
stood in north Germany, and the envoy travelled back with nothing achieved.[48] But Wallenstein did not forget the interview. The fruits of the Duderstadt meeting ripened slowly.
In the meantime there were disturbing reports of Mansfeld’s movements: before the end of July he had collected enough recruits to cross the Silesian border and was making gradually southwards to join with Bethlen Gabor. Early in August, Wallenstein, leaving Tilly alone to deal with Christian of Denmark, set off in pursuit. The decisive separation of the forces gave the Danish King the opportunity for which he had waited all the summer in vain. Leaving his base in the Duchy of Brunswick, he marched south towards Thuringia, intending to strike between the divided armies of his enemies for the heart of unarmed south Germany.
Informed of his advance, Tilly sent scouts after Wallenstein, and Christian soon learnt that Tilly, strengthened by the return of eight thousand of Wallenstein’s men, was marching against him. Christian swung round and raced back to his base in Brunswick. On August 24th, 25th, and 26th the rear of his army held the road against the swiftly advancing enemy, beating them off each time with trifling losses. By the 27th, however, he saw that he could not hope to cover the remaining twenty miles to Wolfenbüttel without disaster and, taking up a position across the road just outside the small fortified village of Lutter, he prepared to challenge the advancing army. Woods and a slight inequality of the ground afforded him a little advantage. He placed his twenty cannon where they could sweep the road, and disposed the greater number of his musketeers singly among the trees and hedges through which the enemy were bound to advance. He had a few hundred more cavalry, but his infantry were outnumbered and fled before Tilly’s determined charge. The cavalry did better, and the King himself, a reckless rather than a gifted commander, three times rallied his broken lines for a renewed resistance before the seizure of the cannon turned the day hopelessly against him. Some of the cavalry attempted to make a stand at the Castle of Lutter but, deserted by the main body of the army with which Christian himself had fled, they surrendered that evening. The numbers of the taken were reckoned at two thousand five hundred, the numbers of the dead at six thousand on the Danish side. Even allowing for the faulty statistics and habitual exaggerations of the time, Christian had lost more than half his army. All his cannon were gone, and he was lucky to have escaped with life and liberty, for in his headlong courage he had been surrounded by the enemy, his horse had been shot under him, and he had with difficulty been saved by the self-sacrifice of one of his officers.[49]
The Thirty Years War Page 23
