Two hundred years later, in the liberal nineteenth century, a monument was erected on the field, bearing one significant phrase: ‘Freedom of belief for all the world’. The monument still stands, set back from a quiet country road in the shade of a line of trees. Three centuries have smoothed every scar from that placid landscape, even as the philosophy of the New Germany has submerged the spiritual landmark. ‘Freedom of belief for all the world’—forgotten yearning of an age forgotten among men who have no choice but to believe what they are told.[86]
5.
The remains of the imperial army separated in order to stem the tide of invasion, Tilly fell back southwards to Nördlingen in the Upper Palatinate, Pappenheim to the Weser to check the advance of the King’s subsidiary army along the northern coast. The League treasury was lost in the retreat and only the inadequate imperial funds were left to pay the army.
All Europe confidently expected that Gustavus would march on Vienna. John George urged him on; they had agreed before that battle that, in the event of victory, the Elector should keep watch on central Germany while the King invaded Bohemia. After the battle Gustavus reversed the plan: his reasons were simple and sound. He did not trust John George. It would be a fine thing if he should find, on his arrival in Vienna, that his ally had come to an understanding with his enemies, and that he must either make a bad peace or fight his way back to the coast. But if he forced the Elector to invade the Hapsburg lands himself, he would be less able to make his peace with the offended Emperor, and, even if he did, Gustavus would still control central and northern Germany with the roads back to the coast. These reasons were strong, but there was another. Wallenstein had offered to surrender Prague;[87] Gustavus, while he encouraged this cool treachery, knew that Wallenstein would act in the last resort only as best suited his own advantage. He might hand over Prague, or he might merely use the King’s advance to hold a pistol at the head of the imperial government, resume his old command and, with the help of his immense resources, entrap the advancing army.
The latent enmity of Gustavus and John George clashed in a brief struggle. The Elector wanted to use the King merely as an instrument to bring Ferdinand to reason; the King wanted to be the dominant power in Germany. His national egoism and his desire for the north German waterways mingled with his devotion to the Protestant Cause. Justifiably he could not believe in the ability of John George, or of any German prince, to defend that Cause, and justifiably therefore, as it seemed to him and many of his contemporaries, he set himself up as the arbiter of Germany.
The Elector was in no position to protest against the new arrangement, for the flight of his troops at Breitenfeld had robbed him temporarily of the power to deal with Gustavus on equal terms. The circumstances were ignominious and, being himself partly to blame for what had happened, he did not improve matters by parading his indignation and threatening to hang every one of the fugitives. He would have to begin by hanging himself, an English volunteer impertinently declared;[88] the laugh was certainly against John George.
There was nothing for it but to yield, and in the early days of October 1631 the Saxon troops under Arnim crossed the Silesian border to redeem their shattered reputation in the imperial lands. On the 25th they were over the Bohemian frontier, on November 10th Wallenstein withdrew from his trust at Prague, and on the 15th Arnim occupied the town in the name of the Elector, while from a hundred hiding places the silenced Protestants crept out to welcome him.[89]
Meanwhile the King of Sweden marched westwards into the heart of Germany, blazing his trail down the Pfaffengasse, the ‘Priests’ alley’, the hitherto unspoiled lands of the great Catholic bishoprics. On October 2nd he entered Erfurt. On the 14th he was at Würzburg, which he carried by assault on the fourth day. Here, for the first time, the vindictive cry ‘Magdeburg quarter’ resounded through the streets as the Swedish soldiers cut down the garrison, but the civilians, both citizens and fugitives from the surrounding country, were spared, and order was restored more rapidly and effectively than it had been at Frankfort-on-the-Oder. Nevertheless, great was the booty collected, and the King exacted a ransom of eighty thousand talers.[90]
At Frankfort-on-the-Main, the Catholic Princes had assembled for that futile discussion of the Edict of Restitution to which the Protestant Electors had refused to come; in the small hours of October 14th the Bishop of Würzburg woke the town with the lamentable news that he was a fugitive before the invader, and the deputies scattered in ignominious flight.[91] On November 11th Gustavus occupied Hanau, on the 22nd Aschaffenburg, on the 27th he entered Frankfort-on-the-Main, the constitutional centre of the Holy Roman Empire. Hither he called his Chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, to direct the administration of his conquests.
He was now approaching that country which had been occupied by Spanish garrisons for over ten years, but he feared the King of Spain as little as or less than the Emperor. At Höchst he was joined by the Landgrave William of Hesse-Cassel with reinforcements, with whom he crossed the Rhine and marched for Heidelberg. But the season being advanced and the land well garrisoned, he turned back, leaving his ally, the young Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, to win his spurs by seizing Mannheim. He himself, five days before Christmas, occupied Mainz; the Elector fled, the Spanish garrison surrendered before overwhelming odds.
Everywhere on his victorious march he had been received with jubilation by the Protestants, with gratitude by all, as the fame of his discipline spread. At Schweinfurt they spread rushes before him in the streets and hung banners from their windows, and ‘they adored him wheresoever he came like a God come from Heaven’.[92] One after another, now with ease, now with difficulty, he plucked the German rulers from allegiance to the Emperor. By Christmas he had the Dukes William and Bernard of Saxe-Weimar serving in his army, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel and the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg as his allies in arms, the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, the regent of Württemberg, the Margraves of Ansbach and Bayreuth, the free city of Nuremberg and the Franconian Circle all under his protection.[93] The alliance of the Dukes of Mecklenburg he had always had, and in The Hague Frederick of Bohemia was preparing to join him.
He had seven armies and nearly eighty thousand men within the Empire. On the Rhine, he had fifteen thousand under his personal command, in Franconia under Marshal Horn eight thousand, in Hesse eight thousand, in Mecklenburg four thousand, in the Lower Saxon Circle thirteen thousand, near Magdeburg twelve thousand, in Saxe-Weimar four thousand, and the rest in garrisons over the country. He intended to raise another hundred and twenty thousand men in the course of the winter, of which a bare nine thousand were to come from Sweden.[94] His conquests made both recruiting and feeding so huge an army comparatively easy.
The King’s name was spoken from end to end of Germany with joy and fear; he was prayed for in a thousand churches, known to great and small by a hundred names, the Golden King, the Lion of the North, biblically as Elias, as Gideon, as the Lion from Midnight.[95] In the winter, his Queen was expected and in her honour he had the initial letters of her name Marie Eleanore Regina traced in the brickwork of the fortifications he was building at Mainz. She joined him at Hanau on January 22nd 1632; a tall, handsome, slender woman, who, before the whole assembly, putting her arms round the neck of the conqueror, greeted him with, ‘Now you are my prisoner’.[96]
6.
At Vienna in the drizzling rain, a procession of penitents besought their God to turn his wrath away; among them went the Emperor, on foot in the mud, the water trickling down his neck.[97] His prayers were not heard. His appeals to Rome brought only the cold answer that the Pope did not consider the war to be one of religion.[98] Letters to Madrid served only to confirm the truth that the reserves of Spain were, for the moment at least, exhausted. An embassy to Warsaw received the same unhelpful reply.[99]
Thrown on his own resources, Ferdinand had no choice but to look once again towards Wallenstein. The general’s friends had been agitating for his recall since the preceding spring,[
100] but at first the Emperor hesitated, torn between his inclination and his necessity. His own son, the younger Ferdinand, pleaded to be made commander-in-chief,[101] but even the fond father had to realize that his appointment would not solve the financial problem. The army could only be fed, clothed, and paid again by the man whose resources had fed, clothed, and paid it before. Three times, between November and December 1631, the Emperor wrote imploring Wallenstein to come back; the last time he penned the letter throughout in his own hand.[102] On December 10th, he sent an embassy, not so much to suggest terms as to find out what terms the general himself would offer.[103] Not until the last day of the old year did Wallenstein yield to persuasion, and then he merely guaranteed to raise a new army by the following March, but agreed neither to pay nor to lead it beyond that date.
The situation of the Spaniards on the Rhine was even more perilous than that of Ferdinand at Vienna. Not only were Mainz and Mannheim lost and the troops in the remaining garrisons unpaid, mutinous and hungry, for the land from which their support naturally came was overrun by the advancing Protestants, but the Swiss at Gustavus’s suggestion had closed the passes,[104] the Dutch had offered him subsidies for the coming year,[105] and on the left bank of the Rhine the French, without any declaration of war, had moved threateningly forward.
The excuse had been given by Charles of Lorraine. Closely attached to the interests of the Hapsburg, this reckless and unscrupulous young man watched for advantages against the Bourbon. In 1631 an abortive intrigue of the Queen-mother against Richelieu ended in the full confirmation of the Cardinal’s power and the flight of the dowager Queen of Brussels, while her younger son, Gaston of Orleans, fled to Lorraine. The meaning of this flight was clear; the malcontents threw themselves on the mercy of the Hapsburg and their allies, against their own dynasty. Charles of Lorraine, encouraged alike from Brussels and Vienna, joyfully espoused their cause. On the first news of Breitenfeld, even Maximilian of Bavaria, panic-stricken, added his urgent plea.[106] But the Duke was an optimistic rather than a reliable ally. On January 3rd 1632, he defied Richelieu and sowed the seeds of perpetual conflict by marrying his sister Margaret to the apparently infatuated Gaston; but fear, with the fat Duke of Orleans, was a stronger passion than love, and at the advance of a French army towards Nancy, he abandoned his young wife on their wedding night and fled to Brussels. On January 6th the Duke of Lorraine, unequal to the invasion, ceded the strong places on his frontier at the ignominious Peace of Vic. His rash intervention merely served as an excuse for trapping the Spanish garrisons on the Rhine between the armies of Gustavus and Richelieu.
Worse still, the Electors of Treves and Cologne, the two remaining Catholic princes on the Rhine, thought to save their skins by placing themselves unreservedly under the protection of France. The Elector of Cologne went even further, and refused passage to troops which were bound for the strengthening of the Spanish Netherlands.[107]
The Hapsburg position was thus in less than eighteen months completely undermined. So far from reconquering the northern provinces of the Netherlands, the government at Brussels feared for its own safety, robbed alike of naval defence and financial support. Seldom had the Spaniards been more unpopular in Flanders, among populace and nobility alike. The cry ‘Long live the Prince of Orange!’ had been heard in the streets of Brussels,[108] and the danger of internal conspiracy was added to that of external attack.
In the face of so many perils—the joint attack in the Empire and the Low Countries, and the gathering of the French, Dutch and northern Protestant interests into so dangerous a coalition—the two branches of the Hapsburg dynasty once again made a formal treaty of offence and defence.[109] Meanwhile, the criticism of a certain section of Catholic society drove the Pope to give a little grudging support. ‘Is His Holiness by chance a Catholic?’ ran a significant pasquinade, with the suggestive answer, ‘Hush! He is most Christian.’[110] Under persuasion, Urban VIII at length made a small grant on Church lands in Spain, to be employed to support the German Catholics.[111]
Yet although disaster had swept down upon the Hapsburg dynasty, there was little jubilation at Paris. Indeed, Richelieu was far from satisfied with his Swedish ally; French policy in Germany for the last hundred years had been based on the establishment of France as the ‘protector of the German Liberties’, on gaining and using the alliance of the princes to curb the power of the Emperor. But the King of Sweden had shown as little respect for French policy as for Saxon, and had established himself incontrovertibly as the arbiter of German destinies.
The situation was grave for Richelieu. His policy was anti-Hapsburg but it was Catholic, and much depended for him on the maintenance of a good understanding between Maximilian’s League and the French Court. Gustavus first distressingly compromised the Cardinal by proclaiming the alliance of Bärwalde to all the world, and secondly by plunging straight across the bishoprics of central Germany, not altering their form of worship, it is true, but driving out their bishops and slicing the lands up as gifts for his marshals with cheerful unconcern. It was hardly surprising that Maximilian and the League turned on Richelieu to ask what his intentions had been when he subsidized the King of Sweden.
Richelieu hastily sent one ambassador to pacify Maximilian[112] and another to call the King of Sweden to order. The task of the first was hard, that of the second impossible. The Cardinal’s brother-in-law, Brézé, had instructions to secure neutrality for the League. In return the League was to ally itself with France and to yield the key fortresses on the Rhine as guarantees of good faith.[113] The instructions of Brézé reveal how far Richelieu still under-estimated Gustavus. As Arbiter of Germany, the King knew that he must keep control of the Rhine, and had no intention of yielding up his conquest. When Brézé in despair hinted that he could have north Germany for his own if he would only guarantee the Rhine to France, the King exploded with rage and stormily told the ambassador that, speaking for his own part, he was the protector and not the betrayer of Germany. A second ambassador, Hercule de Charnacé, who had negotiated the earlier treaty with the King, was hurried to Frankfort to calm the infuriated ally,[114] but weeks of enervating arguments resulted only in his gaining a partial guarantee of neutrality for the Elector of Treves,[115] while Brézé was pacified with the gift of a gold hatband worth sixteen thousand talers as a parting gift.[116]
The bewildered annoyance of Richelieu was shared by the German princes. Although he had been approached by the Emperor and the Spanish ambassador,[117] although Wallenstein had opened a second line of negotiations with Arnim,[118] John George dared not make peace now that Gustavus was so powerful in Germany. In vain he urged the King to make a settlement while the occasion was favourable; his ally met these demands with a galling mixture of anger, contempt, and suspicion. He believed that Arnim and Wallenstein were treating secretly, or that his old rival the King of Denmark had tampered with John George, and he flung off the repeated entreaties of the Saxon ambassador at length with the apocalyptic words that he ‘had begun this work with God, and with God he would finish it.’[119]
Adler Salvius, the King’s most persuasive agent, had been busy soothing the Elector of Brandenburg ever since the march across central Germany began, and temporarily flattered him into acquiescence by the suggestion that the only daughter and heiress of Gustavus should marry his eldest son.[120] But when early in 1632 the Elector’s ambassadors at Frankfort mentioned peace to the Swedish King, he informed them that, in the interests of Protestant Germany, he could not possibly consider it. Protestant Germany, at least as represented by its quavering rulers, thought, not without justification, that further conquest would only embitter the Catholic party and rouse fresh enemies; better take a stand on what they had than risk the position to gain more. But Gustavus was thinking in terms of imperial conquest; he had drastically reorganized the conquered lands, was encouraging trading schemes and commercial enterprises, planning to unite the Calvinist and Lutheran Churches,[121] projecting in fact the destructi
on of the old chaotic Empire and the creation of another. Taking the long view, he may have been justified in fighting for a better conclusion; taking the nearer view and looking more closely at the spreading distress of the country, one sympathizes with the princes.
What part Gustavus planned for himself in the new Empire is doubtful. Officially he spoke of himself merely as the defender of the Protestants: unofficially he had certainly let slip to the Duke of Mecklenburg a phrase beginning: ‘If I become Emperor . . .’[122] There was nothing intolerable in the idea: the Empire was not theoretically a national German state, but an international state of which the vicissitudes of fortune had left only the German-speaking fragment. French and even English kings, Italians, Spaniards, and the King of Denmark had considered standing at past elections. The Swedish King, with his Baltic interests, his Protestant religion and his fluent German speech, was a no less suitable Emperor than Ferdinand with his Spanish obligations, his Italian interests and his Catholic religion. In the north he was a more suitable candidate. Besides which he had an only daughter, and his wife was unlikely to have other children; if this daughter were married according to plan to the heir of Brandenburg, there would be a progressive Germanization of the Swedish dynasty and of Sweden itself, until it became merged in the more advanced and thickly populated states of Germany.
In spite of this, the idea of substituting Gustavus for Ferdinand appealed not at all to the leading German princes. From the purely selfish viewpoint they did not wish to be saddled with a ruler who with his own army and a career of conquest behind him was even more potentially despotic than Ferdinand. The rift between the north and south of the German-speaking world having not yet become inevitable, it was obvious to any German statesman of ordinary acumen that the elevation of Gustavus to the imperial throne would lead only to a schism, and the domination of a Protestant ruler would force the Catholic princes into firmer alliance among themselves and with Ferdinand. Whatever the merits of Gustavus’s plan, in practice it rested on the goodwill of the German rulers, which, with few exceptions, he never had. Speaking of them he himself had said, ‘I fear stupidity and treachery more than force’.[123] By appearing to aim at Empire and by redistributing German land among his marshals,[124] he did not increase his popularity.
The Thirty Years War Page 34
