The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  In the Netherlands, Frederick Henry, a commander as thorough as he was unspectacular and by now the idol of his people, carried all before him. On August 19th 1629, he took Wesel, a fortress on the German border whence he could guard the passage of the Rhine, and hardly a month later the great town of Hertogenbosch on the frontier of Brabant. In Flanders, defeat after defeat demoralized the army and the civilian population and undermined the once popular rule of the Archduchess among her Flemish subjects.[51] Meanwhile Dutch ships infested the Narrow Seas and prevented the transport of bullion to the Flemish ports. In 1628 the Dutch Admiral, Piet Hein, captured the entire fleet off Cuba with spoils in bullion and goods valued at eleven and a half million Dutch florins—the shareholders of the Dutch West India Company received a fifty-per-cent dividend in 1629 from money that had been meant for the Spanish army in Flanders.

  Ill-feeling spread among the unpaid Spanish soldiers, flaming at last into mutiny. Sheets of paper with the superscription, ‘Money! Money! Money! We will not fight without money!’ were thrown into the officers’ quarters at Breda; at Herstall the men despoiled the neighbouring woods for faggots and supported themselves by selling these to the burghers; at Liège they were with difficulty prevented from plundering the town; at Sanfliet desertion thinned three full companies to less than sixty men. The discipline of the far-famed Spanish infantry was breaking down, and small wonder, for the troops went hungry and ill-clad, and in the winter two sentries at Liège had been found dead at their posts, frozen in their threadbare rags. The Archduchess staved off disaster first by pawning her jewellery and later by raising exceptional levies from the people; the arrangement was unpopular and could not last.[52] In this extremity Ferdinand alone could help. The Spanish government called upon him to stigmatize the Dutch as breakers of the imperial peace by their operations across the frontier at Wesel, and thus to force the German princes to take action against them.

  This exertion of Spanish pressure on Ferdinand had two results. The first was that he had to divide his attention in Germany between persuading the princes to elect his son and forcing them to make war on the Dutch; the other that he had to sacrifice Wallenstein earlier than he intended. Frankly, Wallenstein’s interest in the Baltic plan and the restitution of Church lands lasted only so long as he could use them to advance his own scheme for a German-Slav Empire, centred about the Elbe, commanding the northern seaboard and dominating the lands to east and west. He wanted Brandenburg silenced, Saxony quiescent, Poland and Transylvania as tributary allies, Denmark and Sweden humbled. In so far as he had any views on the subsequent policy of this reformed Empire, he wanted it to attack the Turk. Born in eastern Europe, fighting his first campaign in a Turkish war, Wallenstein conceived of the Turk as the great hereditary enemy.[53]

  The first essential was a quiescent north Germany, and while the general undoubtedly believed that his troops could silence opposition, the economist and the politician in him revolted against the enforcement of the Edict of Restitution. By his campaigns against the King of Denmark, Wallenstein had reduced the northern provinces to political submission; why provoke the Protestant powers of Europe or rouse any remnants of resistance in the north by interfering unnecessarily with religion? After the battle of Lutter he was said to have in-advisedly burst out with a statement that he would redeem no more abbeys for the Church until she had better men to send to them.[54] Since the promulgation of the Edict of Restitution Wallenstein had provoked ever sharper criticism from Vienna by the way in which he occupied the lands in question without facilitating the task of the priests and monks who were sent to take charge.[55]

  He had shown a curious lack both of political and of human understanding in exploiting the schemes of the Spanish government; for, while they might in time have forgiven him had he refused to handle their Baltic plan, they could never forgive him for both appropriating the plan and excluding them from its execution. At a comparatively early period he had advised the Emperor to refuse Spain’s help and leave the building and management of the Baltic fleet entirely to him,[56] a line of conduct which had ended in the failure of both parties to raise ships and the successful defiance by Stralsund.

  Wallenstein had miscalculated; he had never reckoned on serious opposition from the Baltic ports, and in 1629 he found himself in a position of unexpected danger. The resistance of Stralsund and her alliance with the King of Sweden had seriously affected the King of Poland; now that Gustavus Adolphus had got Pillau from Brandenburg and Stralsund, he could wage war on Poland with such dangerous effect that Sigismund III would be bound to give up the struggle.[57] The Polish watchdog being thus chained up, nothing would prevent the King of Sweden from invading Germany. The Hanse towns, which would not receive Wallenstein, would many of them joyfully receive Gustavus Adolphus, and he could thus make himself master of the Baltic and stretch out a hand to the oppressed Protestants of Germany.

  All through 1629 this danger came nearer. In February the King of Sweden arranged a meeting with the King of Denmark; Christian, a defeated man suing for peace,[58] might at last be willing to accept the position of subordinate ally to the King of Sweden. But Gustavus Adolphus had left it just too late. A year before, Christian IV had some tenuous hope of redeeming his good name; after the defeat of Wolgast he had none.

  In vain Gustavus plied him with tales of Wallenstein’s hypothetical fleet and urged him to meet the danger half-way. The King of Denmark shrugged his shoulders; the German princes would not help, he said, and his poor, exhausted country, half overrun by the enemy, could raise not another penny. Gustavus waxed enthusiastic; Sweden had been fighting continuously for thirty years, he boasted, and would go on if he said so. As for himself, he had a bullet in his shoulder and would carry three if it were the will of God, and with that he invited the King of Denmark to feel the scar. Christian remained unmoved. A dissertation on the duties of Protestants to their religion, on which the King of Sweden embarked some time later, at length stirred the older and defeated man to a cogent protest. ‘What business has Your Majesty in Germany?’ he suddenly threw in his face. Gustavus, for the fraction of a second, was at a loss. ‘Is that worth asking?’ he shouted indignantly, and then, launching again into his discourse, inveighed against the enemies who wronged the Protestant Churches. Quivering with emotion, he bore down on the King of Denmark, shaking his fist almost under his nose. ‘Your Majesty may be sure’, he cried, ‘that be he who he will that does this to us, emperor or king, prince or republic or—nay, or a thousand devils—we will so take each other by the ears that our hair shall fly out in handfuls.’ His histrionics were lost on Christian of Denmark; the only possible retort was that he regretted that the King of Sweden had not felt so strongly five years before. With astonishing restraint Christian did not make it.[59]

  The chief effect of the meeting was that Wallenstein sent reinforcements to Sigismund of Poland, so that he might engage the Swedes for as much longer as he could,[60] and hastened to soften his terms of peace for the King of Denmark. They were still hard enough: Christian was to give up the north German bishoprics and accept the imperial sovereignty over Holstein, Stormarn, and Ditmarschen, but whatever his opinion of the treaty, and it was not favourable,[61] he had little choice but to accept it. ‘If he has not lost his wits he will grasp at it with both hands,’ said Wallenstein dryly.[62] In June 1629 peace was concluded at Lübeck.

  The Peace of Lübeck did not end the danger in the north, for in the early part of the year the Elector of Brandenburg, driven at last to desperation by Wallenstein’s exactions, had made overtures to the United Provinces,[63] and later joined in a suspicious correspondence with the King of Sweden.[64] Worse still, agents of France and England arranged a truce between Gustavus and Sigismund of Poland[65] and before the end of the year a French ambassador visited the Swedish King at Upsala, to find him already discussing with his council the project of invading Germany.[66]

  In these circumstances only one solution presented itself to Wallenstein�
��to increase his army so that a landing in north Germany would be possible. Only in this way could the Baltic plan be brought to completion.[67] This determination of Wallenstein precipitated his quarrel with the Spanish monarchy. Early in 1629 Richelieu had invaded Italy, occupied Susa, relieved Casale and signed a treaty with Savoy, Venice, and the Pope.[68] Olivarez struck him in the back by assisting the Huguenots,[69] but Richelieu by skilful diplomacy brought this inner peril to an end at the Peace of Alais. The attack on Italy was postponed, not prevented; the Hapsburg had gained breathing space only. To the disgust of the belligerent Olivarez, Spinola advised settlement by treaty and not by war; he was over-ruled.[70] Henceforward the ungrateful government at Madrid sought only to undermine the veteran general.[71] In his place they demanded that Wallenstein’s army should be sent them from Germany. What was the use of that great force on the Baltic, now that the naval project had failed and the only remaining enemy was the petty King of Sweden? So argued Olivarez, and Ferdinand, even if he were better informed, had no choice but to obey.

  In May 1630 he asked Wallenstein for thirty thousand men to be sent to Italy, not under the general’s personal command but under the Italian mercenary, Collalto, in whose favour the Spanish party in Vienna had long sought to oust him. Wallenstein replied categorically that he could not spare a soldier.[72] The crisis between Ferdinand and the man to whom he owed his greatness had come.

  Early in that same month the King of Sweden’s councillors had let their master persuade them that Sweden’s very life depended on an immediate invasion of Germany.[73] Thus on May 29th, having commended his only child, the Princess Christina, to the protection of his council, he set sail from Stockholm.[74] He was ‘the rising sun’ to Richelieu,[75] the ‘Protestant Messiah’ to Maximilian of Bavaria,[76] but to Ferdinand of Hapsburg he was nothing but the insignificant usurper[77] of a frozen country on the arctic edge of civilization. Since the King of Denmark had been so easily overcome, surely he could snap his fingers at the ‘Schwedische canaglia’.[78] This was Wallenstein’s term, but his theoretical contempt, unlike Ferdinand’s, was not reflected in practice. He thought it wiser to prevent the Swedes from landing than to have to expel them subsequently, and had he been allowed to keep the north coast satisfactorily guarded, no landing would have been possible. Ferdinand would not agree, Wallenstein was overruled and thirty thousand men marched south for Italy.

  Wallenstein’s power was threatened. ‘I wage more war with a few ministers than with all the enemy,’ he declared;[79] and it was true. The imperial councillors had all turned against him. His occupation of the hereditary lands was draining the meagre resources of the Crown; and his exactions elsewhere were making Ferdinand unpopular. ‘No one knows’, wailed the Elector of Brandenburg in a letter to Vienna, ‘how long I shall remain Elector and master in my own land’; he complained that he had not only to support the troops quartered on his country but to pay contributions for others and, he added bitterly, ‘the actual cause of this war is unknown to me’.[80] He did well to mention this, for since the Peace of Lübeck there was, theoretically, no war.

  Far more serious was the menacing attitude of the exasperated Maximilian. He had openly admitted to the French envoy in Munich that he intended to force the Emperor to disarm. For some time a rumour had been current that he would now, at this eleventh hour, make that effort to break the Hapsburg succession to the imperial throne which he had failed to make in 1619. He would himself contest the election of the Emperor’s son by standing for the title of King of the Romans. The French agent had whispered it to the English agent in the previous year as they hung about the draughty encampment of the King of Sweden in Prussia. ‘I pray God this be not a French nightingale that sings sweetly but is all voice’, the Englishman wrote home.[81] When a little later the League, under Maximilian’s influence, voted money to keep Tilly’s army ready against emergencies,[82] notwithstanding the Peace of Lübeck, it seemed indeed that Maximilian had learnt a lesson from the technique of Wallenstein and that the nightingale would not be all voice.

  In March 1630 the Elector of Mainz issued a summons to his colleagues to attend an Electoral meeting at Regensburg[83] in the summer, and thither towards the end of May Ferdinand set out. For his own part he wanted to buy the election of his son by the sacrifice of Wallenstein, a movement for which the time was now well ripe. But for the sake of his Spanish cousins he had to add another demand, namely that the Electors should agree to send troops against the Dutch. Wallenstein’s dismissal might conceivably buy one or the other concession from the weakened princes, but could it possibly buy both? The government of Spain was forcing Ferdinand to risk the success of his own policy by merging it with theirs. It had done worse; it had conjured up the power of France to play an active part in Germany. Moving darkly on the edge of imperial politics, Richelieu had first delivered the King of Sweden from the Polish danger, had then committed himself to an alliance with the Dutch, and now made ready to send representatives to the Electoral meeting itself who, under cover of negotiating for the French Duke of Mantua, would tamper with the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire.

  Ferdinand alone might have been a match for the divided princes, but Ferdinand harassed by his Spanish cousins could never be a match for the German princes and Richelieu together. The meeting at Regensburg in 1630 was a prelude to the conflict between Bourbon and Hapsburg, not an epilogue to the German war, and Ferdinand neither wholly abandoned nor wholly completed his policy; it was tacitly superseded.

  6.

  In the summer of 1630 there was no war in Germany. With the withdrawal of the King of Denmark, the last armed resistance of the Protestants ended. It should have been the mission of the assembled Electors to give sanction to that peace by settling the still outstanding problems and demobilizing the army. It was high time.

  In ten years of war more than half the Empire had borne the actual occupation or passage of troops, the immediate disaster leaving a train of evils behind—disease among the cattle, famine for man and beast, the ineradicable germs of plague. Four bad harvests in succession between 1625 and 1628 added their burden to the tale of German misery. Plague took terrific toll of the hungry people and wiped out whole encampments of wretched refugees. Poverty and starvation robbed a naturally industrious people both of hope and of shame, so that it was no longer a disgrace to beg. Once-respected burghers were not ashamed to knock for alms at their neighbours’ houses,[84] and charity was exhausted not for lack of sympathy but for lack of means. Exiled pastors wandered about the country looking for those not who would but who could take them in, and looking in vain. In the Upper Palatinate the Catholic priests, to make room for whom they had been expelled, implored the government to relieve their now starving predecessors.[85]

  In Tyrol in 1628 they ground bean-stalks for bread, in Nassau in 1630 acorns and roots.[86] Even in Bavaria starved bodies lay unburied on the roads.[87] The harvest of 1627 on the banks of the Havel had promised well, but retreating Danes and pursuing imperialists destroyed it.[88] ‘I hear nothing but lamentations nor see variety but of dead bodies,’ wrote Sir Thomas Roe from ‘miserable Elbing’ on the gulf of Danzig in 1629. ‘In eighty English miles not a house to sleep safe in; no inhabitants save a few poor women and children vertendo stercorarium to find a corn of wheat.’[89]

  No matter what the destitution of the people, the soldiers continued their exactions and plied their nefarious sports. The sword to till the land, and plunder for their harvest, such was the burden of their outspoken songs,[90] and they practised what they sang. At Kolberg alone they burnt five churches with all the barns and storehouses belonging to them, and this as often for the fun of the bonfire as for any other purpose; they would let off their pistols for sport into the haystacks, and once they deliberately set fire to a quarter of the town and came back when the houses were in ashes to plunder the people who were camping in the church with all that was left of their goods.[91] At nearly every occupied town the pleasant suburbs where th
e burghers tended their fruit and vegetable gardens were burnt to make room for fortifications.[92]

  On the back of an exorbitant list of demands the burgo-master of Schweidnitz scribbled a prayer:[93] it seemed the only possible comment. Tilly’s officers had had the church spires torn down and melted for the lead when money could not be found, and along the Elbe they had improvised new tolls to satisfy their demands.[94] Even if a town could supply all that was needed, there was no guarantee that the money or provisions would be used to satisfy the soldiers and prevent further disturbance; one commander was commonly reported to have melted down the plate he had confiscated to make himself a dinner service,[95] and Wallenstein fulminated against officers who kept their companies below strength in order to appropriate the pay given them for the men.[96]

  In Thuringia a party of Wallenstein’s men, who had dined too well in one of those eating places in the cellars of the town-hall for which Germany is still famous, discovered that they could have fine sport firing at the feet of the passers-by through the low-set windows of the cellar.[97]

  In the Mark of Brandenburg they carried off respectable burghers as hostages, dragged them for miles along the rough roads bound to their horses’ tails and tied them like dogs under tables and benches for the night.[98] The virulent hatred between soldiers and civilians, rising almost to a frenzy, increased the horrors of war. Civil war between the peasants and the troops raged in Ditmarschen with daily killings, burning, raiding of camps and answering attacks on villages.[99] In his nightmare novel, Grimmelshausen speaks of soldiers thrusting the peasants’ thumbs into their pistols, thus improvising a hideously effective thumbscrew; of the cord twisted round the head until the eyes began to start; of roasting and smoking over fires and in ovens; of pouring liquid filth into the mouths of the victims, which was later known as the Swedish drink. It was sport to shoot the prisoners tied in long rows one behind the other, and lay wagers on the number that one charge of shot would penetrate.[100]