The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  He opened this assembly on September 15th[37] and, this time without French intervention, carried it through to a happy conclusion. The birth of a son to the Archduchess Maria Anna, the young wife of the aged Maximilian of Bavaria, seemed like the blessing of Heaven on his return to the Hapsburg alliance. The two other secular Electors, driven to choose between servitude to the Emperor or to Oxenstierna, had chosen the former at the Peace of Prague, and confirmed their choice by declaring war on their one-time ally in the spring of 1636. Lastly, the military prowess and the personal popularity of the young King of Hungary added one puff of wind to the sudden breeze of political confidence which was carrying the tired ship of the old Emperor to port.

  On December 22nd 1636, at Regensburg, the King of Hungary was unanimously elected King of the Romans.[38] The princes demanded only that he should guarantee the appointment of German officers in the army as far as possible, should desist from unlimited quartering in the Empire, should prohibit his private Austrian chancery from meddling in imperial affairs, and should respect the constitution. This coronation oath was hardly more exacting, and was less likely to be effective, than that which the old Emperor had signed seventeen years before. Thus, at every point, the constitutional policy of Ferdinand II had succeeded: he had reconquered, strengthened and purified the Hapsburg lands of heresy, he had acquired his own army, forced the majority of the German princes to fight his war with and for him, and secured the succession of his son. Constitutionally the assembly of 1636 marks the highest point of Austrian imperial power in Germany.

  The rule of the Cardinal-Infant was popular in the Netherlands, and the King of Hungary was ready to ascend the imperial throne over the dead body of the constitutional party. The Val Telline was secure, the right bank of the Rhine occupied, France had been invaded and Paris had all but fallen. A nervous and deserted Oxenstierna and a divided government in the United Provinces alone clung to Richelieu; of the German opposition there were William of Hesse-Cassel with a small army in East Friesland, and George of Brunswick-Lüneburg with a smaller army on the Weser, both doing nothing. Bernard of Saxe-Weimar demanding French subsidies on the left bank of the Rhine, and the Elector Palatine enlisting the sympathy of the English nobility in London. In the conflict between Hapsburg and Bourbon, victory seemed assured to the House of Austria.

  3.

  Ferdinand II had been as active as ever throughout the Regensburg meeting, attending to the minutest details of every kind. He had busied himself about a stretch of the Danube embankment which had collapsed in Vienna, about a girl who had given herself out for a prophetess in Austria, about some game he had sent to the Queen of Hungary that he feared might have been tough.[39] But his infirmities, asthma in particular, were gaining on him, and he spoke, since the election of his son, cheerfully and hopefully of the next world. ‘The Roman Empire needs me no more’, he said contentedly, ‘for it is already provided with a successor and indeed an excellent one.’[40]

  He was only fifty-nine, but ceaseless exertion, heavy meals and religious austerities had made him already an old man. Even the bitter cold of the winter did not deter him from his devotions, and the Empress, waking sometimes in the night, would find him kneeling at the bedside in prayer and, stretching out her hand to take his, would implore him in vain to rest.[41] At Sträubing, on the way to Vienna after the meeting, he found his infirmities gathering upon him and wrote to Father Lamormaini for permission to curtail his lengthy morning devotions.[42] The father recognized at once that he must be seriously ill, and hastened to join him, but Ferdinand struggled forward on the long, cold journey back to Vienna, to reach his capital on February 8th 1637, a dying man.

  He had a tranquil death-bed, propped up among his pillows, fortified by the comforts of the Church, smiling from time to time peacefully at his wife and younger daughter watching by him.[43] In eighteen years of struggle he had never lost confidence in his mission, or in God and at the end he could say ‘Nunc dimittis’ with full contentment, for he had indeed achieved a large measure of his ambition. He had not altogether won back Germany from the heretic, but at the Peace of Prague he had asserted the right of the Church to all she had held in 1624, and this, with the purification of Austria and Bohemia, was a gain of which he might justifiably be proud. At Linz that very year, the sight of the converted people flocking into the churches had moved him to tears of thankfulness.[44] For the rest, he had reunited the Austrian dynasty within itself, grafted it by the marriage of his son to the Spanish tree, successfully reformed the administration of his own lands, destroyed the League and the Union and united most of the ruling princes, whether they would or no, beneath his controlling sceptre. It was an achievement which, seen in the light of his political morality, he might present at the judgement seat of God with a certain modest satisfaction. No qualm of doubt seems to have troubled the calm with which he prepared for his last account. On February 15th at nine in the morning his body and soul parted one from the other, the one to moulder in the vaults of Graz, the other to receive the reward for which he had laboured so long.

  His political achievement had cost dear for what it was, too dear had he ever stopped to reckon the cost. On paper, imperial authority might be paramount in Germany; in fact the soldiers alone ruled. The soldiers, not the generals; Baner frankly admitted that he had not the slightest control over his men, and tales were told of the sack of Kempten by the imperialists, of Landsberg by the Swedes, of Calw by the Bavarians, which froze the blood. The imperialists had slaughtered children in the cellars, thrown the women out of the upper windows of the houses and boiled a housewife in her own cauldron. The Swedes had sprinkled gunpowder on their prisoners and set fire to their clothes, the Bavarians under Werth had shut the citizens into Calw, fired the walls, trained guns on the gates and shot at the people as they tried to escape the flames. The stories were exaggerations but based on the increasing and now general barbarity of the war. In sober fact, civilian prisoners were led off in halters to die of exposure by the wayside, children kidnapped and held to ransom, priests tied under the wagons to crawl on all fours like dogs until they dropped, burghers and peasants imprisoned, starved and tortured for their concealed wealth to the uttermost of human endurance with the uttermost of human ingenuity.[45]

  The more rapid and widespread movements of the troops in the last six years had increased the ravages of plague and hunger and uprooted the population of central Germany from the soil, turning them into a fluctuating mass of fugitives. This is the only explanation of the total desertion of villages, the dwindling of towns to a tenth and less than a tenth of their original size. The desertion was temporary, and of those who fled many drifted back again, but in the meantime economic life came to a standstill, and some who went as wealthy burghers returned to the charred ruins of their homes with nothing but the rags they wore. Both Saxe-Weimar and Werth made it their business to burn everything they passed in hostile country; Fürth, Eichstätt, Creussen, Bayreuth, Calw, had been laid in ruins, not to speak of innumerable villages, while rats, breeding in huge quantities in deserted cellars and feeding fat in the wake of the armies, devoured the grain which the soldiers left, and ruined the harvests.[46] The gentry, in the effort to maintain their comforts, renounced their established duties and left their homes for the towns, or fell back on the old profession of robbery and raided the passing traveller as in days of old. In Moravia, government officials and local landowners allied themselves with wandering marauders and shared the booty.[47]

  The fugitives who fled from the south after Nördlingen died of plague, hunger and exhaustion in the refugee camp at Frankfort or the overcrowded hospitals of Saxony; seven thousand were expelled from the canton of Zürich because there was neither food nor room for them; at Hanau the gates were closed against them; at Strasbourg they lay thick in the streets through the frosts of winter, so that by day the citizens stepped over their bodies, and by night lay awake listening to the groans of the sick and starving until the magistrates forc
ibly drove them out, thirty thousand of them. The Jesuits here and there fought manfully against the overwhelming distress; after the burning and desertion of Eichstätt they sought out the children who were hiding in the cellars, killing and eating the rats, and carried them off to care for and educate them; at Hagenau they managed to feed the poor out of their stores until the French troops raided their granary and took charge of the grain for the army.[48]

  By the irony of fate the wine harvest of 1634, which should have been excellent, was trampled down by fugitives and invaders after Nördlingen; that of 1635 suffered a like fate, and in the winter, from Württemberg to Lorraine, there raged the worst famine for many years. At Calw the pastor saw a woman gnawing the raw flesh of a dead horse on which a hungry dog and some ravens were also feeding. In Alsace the bodies of criminals were torn from the gallows and devoured; in the whole Rhineland they watched the graveyards against marauders who sold the flesh of the newly buried for food; at Zweibrücken a woman confessed to having eaten her child. Acorns, goats’ skins, grass, were all cooked in Alsace; cats, dogs, and rats were sold in the market at Worms. In Fulda and Coburg and near Frankfort and the great refugee camp, men went in terror of being killed and eaten by those maddened by hunger. Near Worms hands and feet were found half cooked in a gipsies’ cauldron. Not far from Wertheim human bones were discovered in a pit, fresh, fleshless, sucked to the marrow.[49]

  The English ambassador and his suite, travelling to the Electoral meeting at Regensburg, had looked in amazed horror upon a country where the villagers, instead of welcoming them, fled at their approach, thinking them to be more invading soldiers, where the roads were so unsafe that several of the ambassadorial train were set on and murdered within a stone’s throw of the highway and not four miles from Nuremberg. The journey was a nightmare to the peaceful Englishmen, and the man who recorded it writes with the air of one not trusting his own eyes, as though he were recording a dream, not a reality. ‘From Coln hither [to Frankfort] all the towns, villages and castles be battered, pillaged and burnt’; at Neunkirchen they ‘found one house burning when we came and not anybody in the village’, and later stumbled on two bodies in the streets, one of which had been newly ‘scraped out of the grave’. At Eilfkirchen they ‘dined with some reserved meat of our own for there was not anything to be found’; at Neustadt ‘which hath been a fair city, though now pillaged and burnt miserably . . . we saw poor children sitting at their doors almost starved to death’; at Bacharach ‘the poor people are found dead with grass in their mouth’; at Rüdesheim ‘His Excellency gave some relief to the poor which were almost starved as it appeared by the violence they used to get it from one another’; at Mainz there were ‘divers poor people lying on the dunghills . . . being scarce able to crawl for to receive His Excellency’s alms’; here too the town was ‘miserably battered’, so that the travellers slept and ate in their boat on the river, throwing the remains to the beggars on the quay, ‘at the sight of which they strove so violently that some of them fell into the Rhine and were like to have been drowned’.[50]

  Things were worst along the Rhine, but they were bad elsewhere. At Munich Spanish troops passing through left a plague which, within four months, carried off ten thousand.[51] Baner averred there was not a grain of corn left for his men in Anhalt or Halle.[52]

  Even in Ferdinand’s Styria there had been a rising of the peasants which sent thirty-six of them to the galleys and five to the scaffold.[53] Madness and idealism flickered up among the oppressed in occasional tongues of flame. A dispossessed Protestant farmer in Austria, Martin Leimbauer, collected a band of followers by preaching and prophesying against the government. Arrested, he was released as a lunatic, but came back twice again to trouble the government. The third time his own people betrayed him, his headquarters was surrounded and he himself was dragged ignominiously from his hiding-place under the outspread skirts of two old women and carried with his young wife prisoner to Linz. Here, after declaring that God had made him his deputy on earth, he broke down under sentence of death and went to the block penitent and a Catholic. His wife, sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, escaped with the hangman’s assistant on the eve of her husband’s execution.[54] With its gross humour, its cynical morality and its touch of spiritual grandeur, the story is typical of its time.

  4.

  Ferdinand’s death fell on the rising trend of a Swedish revival, just before it reached its highest point. He was taken before his eyes could see the real decline of all his hopes. Imperialist troops had been sent to Brandenburg to join with the Saxons against Baner, but the marshal, supported by his able compatriot Torstensson and two Scottish officers, Leslie and King, turned the tables on his assailants. By ingenious manoeuvring he cut off their joint forces at Wittstock on the Dosse, a tributary of the Havel. Here, on October 4th 1636, the imperialists took up their position on a hill protected from Baner’s troops by a long, narrow belt of wood, dug themselves in, set up their batteries and formed their wagons into a stockade about them. Baner’s plan was to draw them out of this strong position and surround them in the plain. Accordingly he arranged that he and Torstensson should march through the wood with half the cavalry and draw the enemy out by appearing, apparently at their mercy, on the lower slopes of the hill. Meanwhile Leslie with the infantry and King with the remaining cavalry should come up through the shelter of the wood and take the enemy unawares on flank and rear.

  The ingenious plan all but failed. Baner’s advance drew the enemy, but their attack was murderous, the Swedish troops were heavily outnumbered, and for an intolerable time neither Leslie nor King appeared. And when Leslie came with the infantry, his onslaught on the imperialist flank only gave Baner and Torstensson a much-needed breathing space, and did not dislodge the imperial batteries from the hill-top. King, who had found the ground impassable and had taken his troops round by a long detour, appeared just as Leslie and Baner thought all was lost. He was just in time, and his coming ended the battle in a matter of minutes; attacked on three sides, the enemy commanders preferred flight to surrender. Nineteen standards and over a hundred and thirty-three cannon, with all the baggage and fresh stores of weapons, were left on the hill-top. They were only saved from capture by blowing up the wagons.[55]

  As a feat of military tactics, Baner’s plan had been risky and expensive but successful, and although the victory did not stand in the same rank of importance with Nördlingen, Lützen or Breitenfeld, it went far in popular report to re-establish the shaken reputation of the Swedes. More immediately important, it crippled the military power of the Saxons and left the incompetent George William of Brandenburg defenceless. His lands were rapidly reoccupied, and by May 1637 the armies had made themselves fast on the border near Torgau and were intimidating even John George by savage terrorization. Leipzig had been all but taken, and in the west the Swedish vanguard had driven forward almost into Thuringia and occupied Erfurt.

  An alteration in the Stockholm government was partly responsible for the revival of Swedish arms. Abandoning the control of German affairs to Richelieu, since he had no other choice, Oxenstierna had returned to his own country to lay a firm hand on the government. He arrived in the capital to find the Queen-mother with her clique of supporters already planning to marry her daughter to a Danish prince;[56] in the meantime she had taken up her residence in a room of which even the windows were covered in black hangings, and was proposing to immure Christina here for the whole length of her childhood, with no better amusement than a collection of fools and dwarfs whose elvish gestures aroused nothing but repulsion in the little Queen. Axel Oxenstierna rescued Christina both from the marriage and the imprisonment. He earned the undying and occasionally effective resentment of the Queen-mother for his pains, but the gratitude of the little Queen, which in the years to come when she became an intelligent woman with a policy of her own, stood often between him and her displeasure.[57]

  With Oxenstierna once again in power at Stockholm, the Swedish marshals could be
certain of supplies both of men and money in any serious emergency, of support at all times, and of the firm defence of their north German and Baltic communications against any onslaught from Denmark.

  The pendulum which had swung so madly out of equilibrium righted itself slowly. The Swedish advance was paralleled by a signal success in the Low Countries. After a siege which was the talk of Europe for the better part of a year, Breda fell to Frederick Henry on October 10th 1637. It had been twelve years in the hands of the Spaniards, and its loss, besides exposing the border of Brabant, was the first serious check to the Cardinal-Infant. His failure to relieve it discredited him as much as failure in the like case had discredited the Prince of Orange twelve years before.

  These two advances at once relieved the pressure on the Rhine, so that Bernard, obeying at last the insistent demands of the French government, after more than two years of a penurious defensive, made ready to cross the river. He moved early in February 1638, making for the important bridge at the little town of Rheinfelden, a few miles to the east of Basel. At this point the river runs almost due east and west, Rheinfelden lying on the south or left bank. Bernard invested it on the south side, and using the ferry at Beuggen a little farther east, transported some of his men to outposts on the north side, whence he intended to attack the bridge-head. The assault was fixed for March 1st, but before it could be made the imperialists under Savelli, an Italian mercenary, and Werth, had hastened up from the Black Forest.