It was useless to attempt to hold the district round Wolfenbüttel. Already the neighbouring rulers were flinging themselves with every profession of loyalty into the arms of Tilly,[50] and of all his fair-weather allies, Christian had none left save his own son and the two dukes of Mecklenburg. He had no choice but to retreat northwards to the coast and fix his winter quarters at Stade in the flat plain to the southwest of the estuary of the Elbe.
Christian of Brunswick was dead. Christian of Denmark was shattered at Lutter. Mansfeld’s army in Silesia was useless, for the general himself had quarrelled with his second-in-command and made united action impossible. Bethlen Gabor, grown suddenly very old and weary, entered into negotiations for a final peace with the Emperor. Deserted by his ally and at odds with his own people, Mansfeld left his quarters in Silesia with only a few followers, and through the deepening autumn of 1626 made south-westwards to the Dalmatian coast. What his destination was on that last journey, or what his projects, no one knew. Some said he went to get the help of Venice, others of the Turks. Undoubtedly, scattered Turkish troops joined his army, though for little purpose beyond plunder. Mystery and legend surround his last days, but somewhere on the way to the Dalmatian coast among the hills above Serajevo, he died, leaving his leaderless companions to starvation or captivity.[51] It was rumoured untruthfully that the Turks had poisoned him, rumoured, too, perhaps with more truth, that when his body and soul were in their last struggle, he called for two of his men and, leaning a heavy arm on the shoulder of each, dragged himself to his feet so that he should die at least as befitted a soldier and the son of a noble house[52]—a defiant and futile gesture to end that defiant and futile life.
3.
The years 1625–6 had seen the rise and fall of a European movement against the Hapsburg dynasty. They had also seen the rise and fall of a more significant and tragic movement within the hereditary lands. The peasants of Upper Austria, sacrificed to pay the imperial debts, had been for five years under the rule of Maximilian of Bavaria, the most exacting of masters. Under his auspices the far-reaching religious edicts of the Emperor were rigorously enforced. All Protestant ministers and schoolmasters were expelled under penalties which did not stop short of death, no child might be educated abroad, no one might visit Protestant churches over the border. All officials of the government were to be Catholic; church-going and fasting were compulsory, all shops and markets were closed during the time of services, all goods which had at any time belonged to the Church were to be restored, and all Protestant books to be given up. Even the old nobility who claimed, and were supposed to receive, preferential treatment, were allowed no more than the empty privilege of calling themselves Protestant, without permission either to practise their religion or to instruct their children in it.[53]
The moral and economic depression of the peasantry, the result of the war, was aggravated by an upheaval in the administration of the district and the disappearance of those mild influences that local pastors and schoolmasters had exerted over the barren, laborious lives of the people. The Catholic Church could not replace the pastors quickly enough or, if it did, then local suspicion and prejudice against a faith too intimately connected with a sense of political oppression prevented the newcomer from filling the place of his predecessor. Moreover, the systematic weakening of the Protestant nobility removed the class which had stood as a bulwark between the people and the government, and left the peasant defenceless.[54]
Herbersdorf, Maximilian’s governor of Upper Austria, was neither ruthless enough to stamp out all opposition nor liberal enough to disarm it; a foreigner, in the eyes of the Austrian peasant, and the instrument of an unpopular regime, he evoked the bitterest hatred.[55] In the spring of 1625 he quelled an abortive rising and in the following October published a yet more stringent edict against the Protestants. Through the winter the peasants suffered inactively, but with the spring of 1626 they could bear no more. On May 17th there was a fight at Haibach between some of the imperial soldiers, sent to enforce the edicts, and the natives.[56] Before Herbersdorf had realized what was happening, the peasants were streaming across the province, sixteen thousand strong, towards Linz, the capital and seat of government. They carried black banners bearing a death’s head and the words ‘It must be’, because, as they grimly knew, the revolt would probably mean death for its leaders, whether they won or lost.[57]
‘Our lives, our faith, hang on our sword,
Endue us with thy courage, Lord,’
they chanted, with an almost mystical enthusiasm, and they headed the manifestos that they issued to the countryside with the words ‘At our Christian camp’.[58]
A small farmer, Stephan Fadinger, had established himself as leader and under his direction they raided the neighbouring garrisons and strong places for artillery, until they had thirty cannon, and demanded one grown man from every house in each village through which they passed, to swell their numbers. Defeated at Wels, the governor fell back on Linz itself, where on June 24th the peasants shut him in; fortunately for Herbersdorf, he had a reliable garrison, for Stephan Fadinger sent in a manifesto demanding his immediate personal surrender on pain of the total destruction of the town.[59]
Both Ferdinand and Maximilian sent troops, and the death of Fadinger, killed by a chance shot, brought the revolt to a temporary standstill, but the imperialist soldiery avenged themselves on the peasants with such barbarity that revolt flamed up from its smouldering ashes again in August,[60] and once more Linz was threatened. The peasants with frantic zeal blocked the fairway of the Danube with iron chains, to prevent help from the river side, and although the city itself was relieved by superior forces on August 30th, the rebels again defeated the imperial troops at a second battle fought at Wels on October 10th.
At length, on November 8th 1626, new reinforcements crossed the frontier under Gottfried Heinrich, Count Pappenheim, the son-in-law of Herbersdorf, a soldier trained in Spanish service. The peasants had the advantage of numbers, they knew their country, they had artillery, and they had the friendship of the people among whom and for whom they fought, but they had to face the picked troops of Bavaria under a commander of more than ordinary skill. The issue was never really in doubt. Pappenheim outmanoeuvred them, forced them back westwards from Wels, charged and scattered them at Wolfsegg in the open hilly country on the fringe of the district from which the greater number of the rebels came. The army of the peasants dwindled by desertion; Pappenheim’s cavalry out-marched them and came between them and their homes, forcing them southwards up the Traun into the steep defiles of the Höllengebirge. Surrounded and crushingly defeated at Gmunden, the remnants scattered towards the open country, were pursued and finally defeated in two more murderous fights at Vocklabrück and Wolfsegg.[61]
Count Pappenheim presented a gilded statue of Saint George to the Church at Gmunden, as a thank-offering for his inevitable victory,[62] and at Linz in the following spring twenty of the leaders died by the judgement of their rulers. They had prophesied rightly when they blazoned the death’s head on their banners: whoever lost or gained by the war, whatever religion throve or prince grew rich, they paid and suffered for all.
4.
The old year went out stormily on the northern coasts and the new year came in wet, cold and gloomy,[63] the New Year of 1627, heralding the tenth year of the war. Outside Germany, the Val Telline was open to Spain, and the Huguenot revolt continued to spread. The favourite who governed England, Buckingham, made nonsense of the diplomacy of the past two years by declaring war on France and sailing to help the rebels at La Rochelle, while Richelieu, to save the monarchy, swung full circle on his alliances and sued for the friendship of Spain.
Within Germany, Tilly’s forces held the bishopric of Hildesheim, Wallenstein’s were in Magdeburg and Halberstadt, in Brandenburg and parts of Bohemia. The Rhineland was occupied by Spanish and Bavarian troops; Austria, Bohemia, Hungary supported detachments of the Imperial army. Mansfeld’s mercenaries were in Silesia
and Moravia, and Christian’s soldiers on the western plain of the Elbe. Over the whole of western Germany, the harvests had failed,[64] and there was famine in Franconia, Württemberg, and the Rhine valley.[65] Plague had been very bad at Strasbourg, in Brandenburg round Stendal and Kottbus, in Silesia, at Sagan, at Goldberg, in Nassau, in the Saar, in Württemberg.[66] Disease could not be checked with the armies passing; typhus, scurvy, smallpox, syphilis, marched under the banners and bred in the countryside. Diseased horses and cattle trailed along among the baggage wagons, spreading contagion in the farms through which they passed.
Violence and insecurity were the accompaniment of life. ‘13th May 1626. Catherine, my old servant, shot’, entered a pastor of Brandenburg in his diary without further comment.[67] Savage reprisals followed the least attempt at resistance. At Weisskirchen in Moravia the people paid dearly for refusing shelter to Mansfeld’s men for, as an English mercenary recorded, ‘we entered killing man, woman and child: the execution continued the space of two hours, the pillaging two days’.[68]
From the north-east, bitter complaints assailed the Emperor. A deputation from Silesia arrived at Vienna in February, honest burghers who did not take their task too heavily and found time to visit the sights and get drunk in the intervals of their more serious business.[69] Silesia had suffered less than either Moravia or Bohemia. On the way to Vienna their emissaries found evidence of conditions far worse than those of which they came to complain. At Glatz the suburbs had been altogether destroyed; beyond Mittelwalde on the Bohemian border the peasants had left the fields untilled, weary of sowing harvests to be wantonly destroyed or stolen from them.[70]
Conditions were worse in Brandenburg, where Wallenstein had established his troops at Crossen on the Oder, as well as at Stendal and Gardelegen in the basin of the Elbe, whence he would be able to prevent the junction of the Danes with the remains of Mansfeld’s army in northern Silesia.[71] Here his quartermasters demanded not only food and drink for the soldiers but clothes and shoes; the obligation of the province was assessed at sixty-six thousand gulden, and when the local authorities failed to raise it they were seized by the soldiers and held as hostages against payment. Unlike Tilly’s veterans, Wallenstein’s men were young, the sons of poverty-stricken peasant families, ruffians still in their teens, inexperienced, unmanageable and demoralized by spreading sickness; at Gardelegen they were burying their dead daily, twenty together, in open pits.[72] ‘Is there then no God in Heaven that will take our part?’ wailed the Brandenburgers to their Elector who had prudently fled to Prussia. ‘Are we then such utterly forsaken sheep? . . . Must we look on while our houses and dwellings are burnt before our eyes?’[73]
The answer was self-evident, for George William’s piteous embassy to Vienna brought no relief. Ferdinand received the ambassador personally and impressed him with his courtesy—it was noticeable that he lifted his hat every time the name of the Elector was mentioned—but the upshot of the interview was merely that certain ‘inconveniences’ could not be avoided in war-time, and the ambassador must apply to Eggenberg for further help. Eggenberg’s reception was no less courteous although illness confined him to bed at the time. Having no hat, he saluted the ambassador by graciously removing his night cap, and repeated in more detail the observations made by his master. Elsewhere the ambassador learnt that Wallenstein’s conduct in Moravia was worse than in Brandenburg, and it stood to reason, his informant added, that if the Emperor could not protect his own lands he could hardly protect those of others.[74]
The insistence of the ambassador at last forced the imperial government to draw up a memorandum pointing out to Wallenstein that he was quartering in Brandenburg without the Emperor’s leave. At the last minute the sentence was altered to ‘without the Emperor’s knowledge’, confirming the ambassador’s nascent suspicion that the government itself was afraid of its general.[75]
The Elector of Brandenburg now took the task into his own hands and wrote two personal letters to Wallenstein, without eliciting the least response. He learnt later that he had given mortal offence by addressing the general merely as his ‘well-beloved friend’ instead of ‘well-beloved lord and friend’ as did the more tactful Elector of Saxony.[76] The experience of a rash deputation from Halle had shown that Wallenstein was not to be trifled with: he had imprisoned its members in chains and declared that he would shoot any further complainants out of hand.[77]
Germany was not yet a ruined country, but unless some limit was set to the spreading war, she soon would be. With Christian of Denmark defeated and France at peace with Spain, it seemed that the hostilities must end, and in the winter it was confidently prophesied that Wallenstein’s army would be partly disbanded and he himself dismissed.[78] Of all the German princes only the Dukes of Mecklenburg, the Protestant administrator of Magdeburg, and the exiled Frederick remained unreconciled to imperial power. All the rest were either indifferent or in arms for the Emperor. The occupied country was almost without exception neutral country; the town of Magdeburg and its district had, for instance, emphatically disassociated itself from the rebellion of its ruler.[79] There was nothing to prevent peace. Yet in the New Year of 1627, Wallenstein, who had recruited his army to nearly a hundred and forty thousand fighting men,[80] was sending his officers out with their commissions as far afield as the Rhineland, and had brought down upon Ferdinand the complaints of all the ecclesiastical Electors.[81]
The emissary from Brandenburg had imagined that the Emperor was afraid of his general, but there was a more profound reason for Ferdinand’s behaviour. Wallenstein had digested the Spanish Baltic plan and was prepared to execute it. Hence his preliminary occupation of the Mark of Brandenburg, and his intention to carry the war forward into Mecklenburg on one side and Holstein on the other in the coming spring. He seems, however, to have been already working on his own authority, for he had made himself unpopular with the court by occupying part of the imperial lands for winter quarters, and the Spaniards had lost confidence in him since the previous summer. Already at the time of the Battle of Dessau the Emperor owed Wallenstein half a million gulden[82] for the expenses of the army, and as the months passed the debt grew; no great political acumen was needed to see that the general was gaining a dangerous hold over the government. The Spanish party were right in their view that the Baltic plan would be most conveniently carried through by Wallenstein’s army without Wallenstein himself.
They were right, but Wallenstein already had too strong a hold to be dislodged. On the first rumour of complaint to Vienna, he threatened to resign incontinently, an action which would have left the imperial government with the dangerous task of taking over his army without money to pay it. A little later he met Eggenberg at Brück on the Leitha to discuss his future policy.
What took place at that meeting will for ever remain doubtful; the evidence is tainted and no biographer of Wallenstein is able to approach it in an impartial spirit. The interpretation of his career is too closely involved in that occasion. The most balanced of German historians[83] considers that in fact Wallenstein merely discussed details of organization, and that the report which depicted him outlining the Baltic plan and foreshadowing the spreading power of the Hapsburg was a forgery for the especial deception of Maximilian of Bavaria. This much, however, is true: that there was a Baltic plan; that shortly after the meeting at Brück the whole yield of the taxes in Bohemia was ear-marked for the use of Wallenstein’s army, and that he himself was invested with full sovereign rights within his own large estates;[84] that Maximilian of Bavaria heard of the Baltic plan and of Wallenstein’s part in it in some probably exaggerated form.[85]
Ferdinand was in some sort intoxicated by the victory of Lutter and the collapse of the Danish King. He was justified, if he was not right, in thinking Christian the most powerful of the northern monarchs. If he could be so easily shattered, neither the King of Sweden nor the King of Great Britain seemed dangerous, and within Germany itself no other prince had power to stand alone against
imperial arms.[86] Thus the victory of Lutter did not dispose Ferdinand to peace; on the contrary it disposed him very much to war. With Wallenstein’s army he could establish his authority in the northern bishoprics and gain control of the Baltic Sea.
Now, if ever, was the moment for Maximilian to return to his honourable German policy and make a stand for peace before Ferdinand’s power overtopped all bounds. He called the Catholic League to Würzburg in January 1627, and here, for the sake of peace and the stability of princely rights, threatened to withdraw support from Ferdinand unless the power of Wallenstein was curtailed. The members of the League feared the consequences of Ferdinand’s aggression more than they desired the re-establishment of the Catholic Church throughout Germany. They demanded peace and inevitably they suggested Louis XIII as a mediator—a Catholic king who had shown friendship to Maximilian. The suggestion of peace died with the naming of the mediator, for the government in Vienna suspected Richelieu’s motives, and the Protestant party, such as it was, had not yet forgiven him his betrayal. Maximilian had signally failed either to establish an armistice or to curb Wallenstein.
The Thirty Years War Page 24
