The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  67. Tägliche Aufzeichnungen des Pfarrherrn Garcaeus. Brandenburg, 1894, p. 75.

  68. Poyntz, p. 48.

  69. Krebs, Zacharias Allerts Tagebuch aus dem Jahre 1627. Jahresbericht der schlesischen Gesellschaft für Vaterländische Kultur, LXIV, pp. 24 f.

  70. Allerts Tagebuch, pp. 22–6.

  71. Opel, Das Kurfürstentum Brandenburg in den ersten Monaten des Jahres 1627. Historische Zeitschrift, LI, p. 194.

  72. Gebauer, Kurbrandenburg in der Krisis, p. 9.

  73. Opel, Das Kurfürstentum Brandenburg, p. 194.

  74. Opel, Das Kurfürstentum Brandenburg, pp. 199–202.

  75. Ibid., p. 202.

  76. Ibid., pp. 203, 205.

  77. Klopp, op. cit., II, p. 707.

  78. Gindely, Beiträge, pp. 155 f.

  79. Lundorp, III, pp. 1021–2.

  80. Gindely, Beiträge, pp. 223–4.

  81. Hallwich, Fünf Bücher, pp. 140–1.

  82. Ibid., III, p. 327.

  83. Moritz Ritter, Zur Geschichte Wallensteins. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, IV, pp. 24–38.

  84. Ritter, p. 31; Stieve, Wallenstein bis zur Übernahme des Generalats, p. 228.

  85. Hallwich, Fünf Bücher, I, p. 677; Ritter, Zur Geschichte Wallensteins, pp. 15–40.

  86. G. Droysen, Gustaf Adolf, Leipzig, 1869, I, pp. 286–7; J. G. Droysen, Geschichte der Preussischen Politik, III, i, p. 13.

  87. Droysen, Preussische Politik, III, i, pp. 52–3.

  88. Gindely, Die maritimen Pläne der Habsburger, pp. 4 f.

  89. Annales, X, p. 1227; Lundorp, III, pp. 941–80.

  90. Opel, Das Kurfürstentum Brandenburg, p. 204.

  91. Opel, Das Kurfürstentum Brandenburg, pp. 215–17.

  92. Lundorp, III, pp. 985–6.

  93. Opel, Das Kurfürstentum Brandenburg, pp. 205 f.

  94. Rusdorf, I, pp. 604, 611; Moser, Patriotisches Archiv, VI, p. 106.

  95. Moser, Patriotisches Archiv, VI, p. 109; M. A. E. Green, Elizabeth Queen of Bohemia, revised by S. C. Lomas. London, 1909, p. 258.

  96. Moser, Neues Patriotisches Archiv, I, p. 77.

  97. Lundorp, III, pp. 952–60; Rusdorf, II, passim.

  98. Gebauer, Kurbrandenburg in der Krisis, p. 2; Bricka and Fridericia, II, pp. 94–5; Lundorp, III, p. 461.

  99. Lundorp, III, pp. 977–9.

  100. Ibid., pp. 976–8.

  101. See Denis, La Bohème depuis la Montagne Blanche. Paris, 1903, pp. 107–19; d’Elvert, II, pp. 204 f., 266 f.

  102. d’Elvert, II, pp. 206 ff.

  103. Gindely, Geschichte der Gegenreformation, p. 514.

  104. Pistorius, Historische Beschreibungen, 1627–8, p. 47.

  105. Bretholz, Geschichte Böhmens und Mährens. Reichenberg, 1921, III, pp. 16–17.

  106. Gindely, Die maritimen Pläne der Habsburger, p. 17.

  107. Chlumecky, Wallensteins Briefe an Collalto. Brünn, 1856, p. 55.

  108. Gindely, Die maritimen Pläne der Habsburger, pp. 11–12.

  109. Ibid., p. 11.

  110. Ibid., p. 17.

  111. Lundorp, III, p. 1012.

  112. Gindely, Waldstein, I, p. 368.

  113. Lundorp, III, p. 1009.

  114. Lundorp, III, p. 996.

  115. Ibid., p. 998 f.

  116. Lünig, V, i, pp. 695–700.

  117. This was the contingency Ferdinand the elder is alleged to have feared: see Rusdorf, II, p. 367.

  118. Lundorp, III, pp. 1012–17.

  CHAPTER SIX

  DEADLOCK

  1628–30

  God send that there may be an end at last; God send that there may be peace again. God in Heaven send us peace.

  Diary of HARTICH SIERK (a peasant), 1628

  1.

  Everything depended on the judgement of the Emperor Ferdinand. He had before him a choice: either he could yield to Maximilian and the Catholic princes, and gain the succession of his son to a throne neither stronger nor weaker for ten years of war, or he could place himself unreservedly in the hands of Wallenstein, risk the open hostility of an ever wider circle of princes, and rely on force of arms to build him a sovereignty such as no Emperor had enjoyed for centuries.

  Wallenstein stood for the military autocracy of the Emperor, but he also stood for an Empire of Central Europe unconnected with Spain. As a practical man he objected to an alliance which was geographically impossible, and in his apparent acceptance of the Spanish Baltic plan he never intended to go beyond the point at which it was useful to his own ambition. The centre of the Spanish conflict was the plain of the Netherlands, but Wallenstein’s interests lay in Bohemia; just as the Rhine valley formed the spinal column of the Hapsburg Empire, so the valley of the Elbe was the connecting passage between the Hapsburg lands and the northern seas, the central nerve of the state that Wallenstein projected.

  Albrecht von Wallenstein was a visionary; the most practical of men in the management of financial affairs, the most unimaginative in his dealings with human beings, his politics soared to fantastic heights, into that borderland between genius and insanity. It is impossible to study his career or his writings without realizing that something more than the self-interest of each particular moment guided his actions, impossible equally to grasp what that something was. The historian asks the nature of his patriotism in vain—was he a Czech at heart, or a German?—for Wallenstein’s dreams defied a national circumscription. His ambition was always imperial, although at the end he abandoned the thought of Ferdinand as the figure-head; he was not interested in the rights of individuals, of races or religions; to his thinking, north-eastern Germany and Bohemia could form one block with the southern domains of the Hapsburgs and become a powerful state dominating the Turks on one side and Western Europe on the other.

  Basing his power on the nucleus of his own lands, he had extended his influence by purchase over a large part of Bohemia, so that the reorganization of his estates alone was a consolidating force in Ferdinand’s regenerated kingdom. From this Slavonic base, Wallenstein, with sublime indifference to national distinctions, now stretched out his hand to pluck Mecklenburg. It was rumoured that if he could goad the Elector to open war he would pluck Brandenburg as well.[1]

  Whether this Central European Empire was the Empire which Ferdinand wished to govern remains doubtful; Wallenstein, with that over-confidence in himself which was to be his downfall, forgot the dynastic prejudice which dominated Ferdinand’s policy. The Emperor disliked all foreign customs; he could not, or would not, speak Spanish;[2] he had never visited Spain, he had no personal knowledge either of his nephew,[3] the present King, or of the Archduchess Isabella. But he had never for one moment forgotten the ultimate advantage of the dynasty. Stronger than any personal feelings, the pressure of tradition held the family together. Poor himself, the Emperor needed the financial help of others, and since he must mortgage his policy to one paymaster or another, he would get what he could from Wallenstein but in the last resort call in the King of Spain to buy him free. Deep under the alliance of Ferdinand and his general ran this hidden fissure.

  Ferdinand was prepared to call on the resources of Spain when he wished to be rid of Wallenstein. He was also prepared to sacrifice Wallenstein to gain the support of the German princes for his son. But not in March 1628. The ultimatum from the Electors at Mühlhausen showed Ferdinand clearly one thing: that he could buy the election of his son as King of the Romans by the sacrifice of Wallenstein. Reverse the threat of the Electors, and what else did it mean? Ferdinand cannot at once have embraced the scheme of throwing his general to the wolves; dismissing Wallenstein would be difficult and dangerous now that he was among the most powerful men in Germany. Ferdinand was always more than a little afraid of the act itself.[4] Nevertheless, it is clear from the passage of events during the next two years that he calculated for no less. But he was determined to exploit his general’s power to its uttermost before renouncing him.

  The princes, meanwhile, concentrated on overthrow
ing Wallenstein before his army should rob them both of their rights and the means to protect them. Again, for the undoing of Germany, two parties and not one stood in opposition to the Emperor and to each other. One party, consisting of Maximilian and the Catholic princes, demanded the stabilization of Germany in the condition prevailing after the Battle of Lutter and before the elevation of Wallenstein to the dukedom of Mecklenburg. Opposed to this party was the Protestant constitutionalist group headed by John George of Saxony, who with the Elector of Brandenburg, demanded the restitution of Frederick to the Palatinate. Their position was more logical than that of the League princes, who were fiercely indignant about the transference of Mecklenburg, but ignored, for obvious reasons, the transference of the Palatinate.

  Had these groups coalesced as the Elector of Mainz had hoped four years earlier,[5] there would have been some chance of forcing the will of the princes on the Emperor and ending the war by settlement. But the generous, intelligent John Schweikard of Mainz had died, and his successor was kept from decisive action by fear of Wallenstein’s troops. The two parties remained divided. The group led by John George held to his firm principles, sought no help abroad and was totally without effect on imperial policy; the group led by Maximilian exploited the enmity of the Bourbon for the Hapsburg, and with foreign support reached up again to grasp the helm of government. Steering the ship clear of the Spanish quicksand, they wrecked her on the French reef.

  2.

  For Wallenstein the centre of Europe was the Slavonic block at the sources of the Elbe and Oder; for Ferdinand it was the group of German-speaking states on the upper Danube; for the Kings of France and Spain it remained the Rhine, the Low Countries and the north Italian passes. In the Rhine and its tributary valleys two minor incidents had wakened again the feud of Bourbon and Hapsburg. At Verdun, occupied by a French garrison since 1552 in accordance with an ancient treaty, the bishop, whose sympathies were with the Hapsburg, had excommunicated the French soldiers for attempting to build a fortress. In answer Richelieu burnt the excommunication and tried to seize the bishop. The bishop, in turn, appealed to Wallenstein to send troops, while Ferdinand urged the Spaniards to arm in Luxemburg. There the incident ended; it served to show which way the wind was blowing. Not long after, the French government quarrelled with the new Duke of Lorraine, Charles III, over the suzerainty of Bar. The Duke immediately appealed to the Emperor and for the time being the quarrel lapsed.

  In fact Richelieu did not want war.[6] France, he said, suffered from four evils: ‘the unbridled ambition of Spain, the excessive licence of the nobility, the lack of soldiers and the absence of any reserve of savings for the prosecution of war’. Clearly the abolition of the first evil depended on the previous settlement of the other three. In 1628 they were not yet settled. The French army consisted of recalcitrant local levies—the Bretons asserted that only wars with England concerned them—which were under the control of the nobility. War automatically increased the power of the aristocracy, and by a dangerous feudal survival the King himself was not absolute master of his own army, the ultimate control lying with the Constable of France.[7] Besides this underlying trouble, the Huguenot rebels were still making head against the government, and a long siege had not yet reduced their great stronghold at La Rochelle.

  In the Low Countries, meanwhile, a gradual change had come over the face of affairs. Frederick Henry had failed to relieve Breda, but his intelligent and vigorous government neutralized the effects of its capture. The strain of war was beginning to affect the unstable finances of the Spanish Netherlands; the army was less regularly paid, the expenditure of the Court had diminished and the ephemeral prosperity of the state melted away. The emigration of the artisan population grew annually more serious and legislation was of no effect.[8] In the long run the temporary blocking of the Val Telline had told on the army, and the persistent harrying of Spanish ships by Dutch in the narrow seas checked the stream of subsidies from Madrid. It had been the Spanish custom to lie in English waters off the Downs until a good moment came to make the harbour of Dunkirk without Dutch interference;[9] but from 1624 the English were at war with Spain and gave no shelter to her vessels. In 1626 Frederick Henry took Oldenzaal with immense store of arms and ammunition, thereby making good the defence of his eastern frontier.

  But it was in north Italy that the serious crisis came. The Duke of Mantua died, leaving as his nearest heir Charles, Duke of Nevers, a subject of the French Crown. While nobody cared particularly who owned Mantua, the Spanish Hapsburg were determined that the small related county of Montferrat, with its fortress of Casale on the borders of the Milanese, should not pass into the hands of a Frenchman. Richelieu was equally determined not to lose this happy occasion of obtaining foothold in northern Italy. On the flimsy pretext that the Duke of Nevers had not asked the imperial permission, Ferdinand unloosed the Mantuan war on April 1st 1628, by declaring Montferrat and Mantua sequestered. Charles of Nevers retaliated by urging the French government to free Italy from the Spanish yoke.[10] Immediately, the Spaniards occupied Montferrat, all except Casale, for the reduction of which Spinola himself was shortly afterwards recalled.

  While the crisis between Hapsburg and Bourbon drew near, the heads of the Austrian and Spanish lines made a significant movement towards closer union. The Emperor’s eldest son was marriageable and the bride chosen for him was the Infanta Maria of Spain, his first cousin, who had four years before been wooed in vain by the Prince of Wales. The graceful Infanta, with her German blue eyes and pink complexion, had always been considered something of a beauty in Spain; reports of the Archduke, on the other hand, were unnecessarily gloomy, and his bride formed the apprehensive impression that he was ugly and stupid. Knowing her duty, she did not complain and, having prepared herself to meet a deformed and short-witted husband, contrived to fall in love at first sight out of mere relief at finding the Archduke normally shaped and normally gifted.[11] In the meantime, nobody consulted the inclinations of the bride and bridegroom. Long before they met the marriage contract was irrevocably signed.[12]

  3.

  The Baltic plan went steadily on towards completion. Ferdinand offered alliances to Lübeck and Hamburg,[13] and when his overtures were received without enthusiasm, Wallenstein introduced a second line of argument by sending an army against Stralsund. The show of violence fluttered the Hanseatic League but still had not the desired effect, for, instead of accepting imperial friendship, the deputies of the Hanse merely offered Wallenstein eighty thousand talers to withdraw.[14] He proved incorruptible and on July 6th 1628 arrived in person before Stralsund.

  The city lies on the coast of Pomerania, opposite the island of Rügen which forms a natural shelter for its harbour. The indentation of the sandy coast at that point is such that Stralsund itself is all but an island. Three days before Wallenstein’s coming, the municipality signed a treaty with the King of Sweden by which he was to protect them for thirty years, while they in turn provided a base and landing place for him in Germany.[15] Strong in this defence, the burgomaster and councillors of Stralsund rejected Wallenstein’s offers. ‘The town shall yield though it were bound with chains to Heaven’, the general is alleged to have challenged them in mounting anger.[16] From the distance of Prague he had set great store on the reduction of this key port on the Baltic,[17] but when he had twice attacked in vain he recognized that it was impregnable. He was still without a fleet, while the King of Sweden’s ships were off the coast and the King of Denmark, with a new army, was waiting to disembark. On July 28th he himself withdrew and a week later the army broke camp before the walls.

  The check was more effective morally than physically. In fact neither Ferdinand nor Wallenstein was worse off than before, but this first successful resistance was seized on by the pamphleteers of the opposing party as a presage of Hapsburg defeat. ‘Eagles’, the polemists facetiously asserted, ‘cannot swim’.[18]

  The King of Denmark’s unquenchable optimism gave Wallenstein the chance he
needed to redeem his reputation. Christian had landed to the south-east of Stralsund on the sandy dunes of Pomerania, swooped upon the town of Wolgast and made ready to invade Mecklenburg. He was safe in his sand-hills, Wallenstein admitted, but report asserted that the King was drinking heavily and would soon do something foolhardy. ‘If he ventures out’, boasted Wallenstein, ‘he is ours for sure.’[19] He was right. On September 2nd 1628, he intercepted the Danish forces just outside Wolgast and slaughtered all that did not surrender or fly. Christian himself took refuge with his ships, fled to Denmark and sued for peace.

  Wallenstein’s success brought down fresh complaints on Ferdinand. At a conservative estimate, the general had a hundred and twenty-five thousand troops under arms and was still recruiting[20]—three times the number of men that Tilly had once declared to be the utmost any general could want against an enemy in normal conditions.[21] After the final defeat of Christian there was not even an enemy.

  The complaints which most perturbed the Emperor came from his own allies. ‘We shall repent in the end of the excessive power given to Friedland’, wrote Ferdinand’s brother, Leopold of Tyrol.[22] The Elector of Saxony, on whose lands Wallenstein had, without any permission, quartered a detachment of his swelling armies, burst out in bitter lamentation both to Ferdinand and to Maximilian of Bavaria.[23] Most persistent in his complaints was Maximilian himself[24] who, for the last two years, had received plentiful intimation of Wallenstein’s enormities. His general, Tilly, had suffered and protested ever since the winter of 1626. Wallenstein persistently forced him to quarter his troops in the most inconvenient and barren places, so that they deserted in great numbers and were re-enlisted by Wallenstein’s officers. Worse than this systematic weakening of the actual manpower of Tilly’s army was the undermining of the morale of his officers who, seeing that the rival general paid better and provided a more pleasant life, waited impatiently for the close of their contracts to leave the Bavarian service for the imperial. Pappenheim himself had considered transferring his allegiance.[25]