The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  32. Roese, II, pp. 483, 509, 515–17; Avenel, VI, p. 114; VIII, pp. 306–7.

  33. Schulze, pp. 31–40.

  34. Ibid., pp. 44 f.

  35. Brefvexling, II, ii, pp. 215–16, 222, 230, 231–2; Avenel, V, pp. 514–674 passim; Puysegur, Mémoires sur les règnes de Louis XIII et XIV. Paris 1881, pp. 197 f.; Vincart, Relacion de la Campaña de Flandes en 1636. Madrid, 1873.

  36. Avenel, V, pp. 762–3; Dumont, VI, pp. 146–7.

  37. Lundorp, IV, pp. 576–80.

  38. Lundorp, p. 606.

  39. Briefe Ferdinands II und III an S. von Breuner. Archiv für Oesterreichische Geschichte. Vienna, 1852; Notizenblatt, II, ii, pp. 152–5.

  40. Annales, XII, p. 2415.

  41. Ibid., p. 2398.

  42. Dudik, Correspondenz Kaiser Ferdinands II, p. 278.

  43. Annales, XII, p. 2362.

  44. Hurter, Ferdinand II, X, p. 118.

  45. Morgenbesser, Geschichte von Schlesien, Breslau, 1908, pp. 235, 239; Nebelsieck, Geschichte des Kreises Liebenwerda. Halle, 1912, p. 36; Riezler, Geschichte, V, p. 421; Sierk, pp. 182, 186; Einert, p. 43.

  46. Annales, XII, pp. 1955–7; Czerny, Tourist, pp. 53–4; Lammert, p. 133.

  47. Riezler, Geschichte, V, p. 538; d’Elvert, I, p. 451.

  48. Bothe, Geschichte der Stadt Frankfurt. Frankfort, 1929, p. 450; Lammert, p. 185; Walther, pp. 31–2; Reuss, Alsace, p. 113; Duhr, II, i, p. 131; Wille, p. 167.

  49. Kayser, Heidelberg, p. 412; Pufendorf, VIII, p. 44; Reuss, Alsace, p. 129; Annales, XII, pp. 2357, 2359; Lammert, p. 228.

  50. Crowne, pp. 3–4, 8–12, 46, 60–1.

  51. Lammert, p. 168.

  52. Brefvexling, II, vi, p. 298.

  53. A. Mell, Der Windische Bauernaufstand. Mitteilungen des Historischen Vereins für Steiermark, XLIV, pp. 212–57.

  54. Annales, XII, pp. 1955–8; Czerny, Tourist, pp. 53–4.

  55. Chemnitz, III, pp. 39–40; Brefvexling, II, vi, pp. 856–63. There is an excellent plan of the battle in Tingsten, Baner och Torstensson.

  56. Schulze, Die Vermählung Friedrich Wilhelms von Brandenburg, p. 14.

  57. See Christina’s Autobiography in Arckenholtz, II, pp. 46, 63, 66.

  58. Munch, Geschichte des Hauses und Landes Fuerstenberg. Leipzig, 1832, Appendix, Vol. III, passim; Leupold, Journal der Armee des Herzogs Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar. Basler Zeitschrift, XI, pp. 303–8, 347–8, 354–61; Noailles, Épisodes de la Guerre de Trente Ans. Paris, 1908, II, pp. 269–80.

  59. Avenel, VI, p. 140.

  60. Pufendorf, De rebus Suecicis. Utrecht, 1686, VIII, p. 59.

  61. Fagniez, II, p. 355; Sverges Traktater, V, ii, pp. 424–9.

  62. Alemannia, XLII, pp. 55–8; Roese, II, p. 521.

  63. Fagniez, II, p. 409.

  64. Fiedler, p. 225.

  65. Roese, II, pp. 528 ff.

  66. Ibid., pp. 528, 536.

  67. Roese, II, pp. 539 seq.; Avenel, VI, pp. 408–10.

  68. Alemannia, 1915, p. 190. ‘Mors praecox et immatura, statuente sic aliud Jehova, festinantem et in media victoriarum via currentem pedem, sistere jussit et conatibus ejus ulterioribus finem imposuit.’

  69. Avenel, VI, p. 462.

  70. Ibid., p. 304.

  71. Brefvexling, II, ii, p. 655.

  72. Droysen, Bernhard von Weimar. Leipzig, 1885, II, p. 572.

  73. Roese, II, pp. 554–6.

  74. Brefvexling, II, ii, pp. 649, 660; Avenel, VI, p. 601.

  75. See Gonzenbach, General von Erlach. Bern, 1880–1, I, pp. 203 f.

  76. See Gonzenbach, I, p. 236 f.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE COLLAPSE OF SPAIN

  1639–43

  L’Espagne est comme le chancre qui ronge et mange tout le corps où il s’attache.

  RICHELIEU

  1.

  In Madrid they blamed the Cardinal-Infant for the fall of Breisach; he should, said Olivarez unreasonably, have sent reinforcements to save it.[1] How he was to do this with dwindling financial support and in face of the perpetually contradictory orders he received from Spain, did not appear. But on the Spanish side of the contest troubles gathered so fast that the King and his favourite were only human in transferring the overwhelming blame to others. The disasters of which they were the chief cause were too much for them to bear alone.

  Public discontent, which had been an intermittent whisper under Philip II, swelled to a continuous murmur under Philip III, and became by the reign of Philip IV the deafening accompaniment to all he did. More inept tinkering with the currency had produced so startling an inflation that in some districts the people resorted to barter.[2] By the early forties it was estimated that about three-quarters of the goods which came to Spanish ports were carried in Dutch vessels; so ridiculously had the merchant and defence fleets dwindled that this illicit traffic—for the embargo on enemy ships continued—was not only impossible to stop but was actually necessary for the existence of Spain. In 1639 a great Spanish fleet, seventy-seven ships in all, was driven by the brilliant and daring Dutch admiral Tromp to take shelter in neutral English waters, and there, regardless alike of the laws of the sea and the impotent protests of the English government, attacked at a disadvantage. Seventy ships were sunk or taken. This colossal victory was the quietus of Spanish sea-power; staggering since the defeat of 1631, the hollow giant collapsed, never to rise again.

  Richelieu meanwhile stretched out his hand to control the border dukedom of Savoy, that small state astride of the Alps which the Hapsburg had long tried to use for a gateway to France. It was ruled now, in the name of her young son, by the widowed Duchess Christina, herself a sister of Louis XIII. By a sudden and almost brutal intervention in the internal affairs of the Duchy, Richelieu established his own control.

  As for Germany, Olivarez declared that the Electors of Bavaria and Cologne were in the pay of France, while the Emperor whose reign had opened so hopefully was now a liability. His ministers were faithless, his subjects disloyal.[3] Thus peevishly did Olivarez resent the efforts of Ferdinand to seek his own salvation rather than that of the Spanish monarchy.

  In Spain itself the bankrupt Court maintained its façade of dazzling splendour. The King was growing old, his health was failing and he was much given to melancholy and religion; he continued nevertheless to pour out money on masques and theatres, bull-fights, mistresses, and bastards.[4] Meanwhile the French defence crystallized into attack both in Flanders and on the Pyrenees. On both fronts the Spaniards still kept the invaders back, but it was a question merely of postponement unless some miracle happened in Madrid.

  No miracle happened. In 1640 Catalonia and Portugal burst into revolt. Within a year the mild Duke John of Braganza, borne unwillingly on the current of local discontent, was established under the title of John IV at Lisbon; he obtained a political treaty with France,[5] a truce with the Dutch,[6] commercial agreements with England and Sweden.[7] In Catalonia the revolt was even more dangerous; innocent of intervention until the rebellion broke out, Richelieu had communicated with the leaders as soon as he realized their importance: by December 1640 he had signed a treaty with the Catalans, and in the new year he was arranging to send the French navy to their help, while they in return elected Louis XIII Duke of Barcelona, independent of the Spanish Crown.[8]

  Thus the Spanish Netherlands were left, a rudderless ship drifting before the gale. The Madrid government, powerless to help them, yet would not renounce its control. Even had Philip been able to spare men or money, he could no longer send them safely by sea or land, for the Dutch held the Narrow Seas and the French Breisach. The great artery of the Hapsburg Empire, from Italy to Flanders, was blocked so that the Val Telline no longer mattered. By the significantly named ‘Perpetual Peace’ of Milan, the valley was given to the Grisons, and the now useless passes cynically guaranteed to the Spaniards.[9]

  In vain now the victory of Nördlingen, in vain the strategy of the Cardinal-Infant on the frontiers of Flanders and Brabant. In 1640 all help was withdrawn, a
nd instead the prince received an entreaty, phrased as a command, to send arms and ammunition to Spain for use against Portugal.[10] Battling with order and contradictory order from Madrid, appeal and counter-appeal, rumour and contradiction from Portugal and Catalonia,[11] the Cardinal-Infant worked unceasingly on. Throughout 1640 he held the Dutch back, and in 1641 all their efforts by land recovered them only Gennep, which they had lost six years before. It could not last; perpetual work, the strain of his uncertain relations with the Spanish Court, and physical exertion in the field wore out the prince’s unstable constitution. He sickened in the late autumn of 1641; on November 8th he checked and signed six dispatches to the King of Spain,[12] on November 9th he died. So strong the spirit to the end, so weak the flesh.

  2.

  Less happy was the fate of his cousin, the Emperor Ferdinand III. While the Spanish monarchy collapsed, he exerted all his strength to keep the Austrian dynasty standing. So near did he come to success, in spite of the complaints and recriminations which assailed him from Madrid,[13] that the tragedy of his failure stood out the more darkly. As King of Hungary he had laid the foundation for a settlement in the imperial interests at the Peace of Prague. As Emperor it remained only for him to follow out the principles he had laid down. Little by little he won to his side, and arrayed in arms against Richelieu and Oxenstierna, all the princes of Germany save only three. One of these, the Elector Palatine, troubled him not at all, for he had no possessions. The second was the selfish dynast George of Brunswick-Lüneburg, who had entered into alliance with Gustavus at the outset and staked the increase of his fortunes on following the Swedes. The last was the Landgrave William V of Hesse-Cassel.

  The death of the Landgrave had filled Ferdinand with hopes that his widow, the regent for her young son, would seek peace. He reckoned without the indomitable personality of the Landgravine. A grand-daughter of William the Silent and in her own right Countess of Hanau, Amalia Elisabeth was a woman of immense determination and powerful intellect. She had principles, too, of a kind. She was intensely Calvinist, upright and true to her faith; she was also a dynast and felt it her duty to pass on her husband’s estates to her son lessened by not so much as a rood of land, increased if possible.

  From the beginning of the war, the ruling families of Hesse-Darmstadt and Hesse-Cassel had regarded each other with cold jealousy. At Darmstadt they had supported the Emperor, at Cassel they had drifted towards his opponents, their progress hastened by the brutal transference of much of their land to their cousins at the Regensburg Electoral meeting of 1623. Their importance to the Protestant party, to the Dutch and French in particular, was not in respect of their lands round Cassel, but because they owned also a great part of East Friesland. Added to this, William V was an able general and a respectable statesman, managing to hold his own as an ally of the King of Sweden. His widow was equally determined to make no ignominious peace and to maintain her position as an independent ally of France. Richelieu, she guessed, was likely to exploit her widowhood to force her into a dependent position, so that he could use the small but solid and competent Hessian army as his own.

  Amalia Elisabeth was not a far-sighted stateswoman. She has no claim, however nebulous, to have thought or acted on behalf of German integrity. Her principles were sound, but she was not unduly troubled by scruples. In so far as Hesse-Cassel and her son were concerned, she acted with shrewdness, consistency and discretion. The Emperor wooed her to make peace and she signed a truce, but with her eyes fixed on Richelieu, not on Ferdinand. The simple ruse worked. Anxious lest she should desert the alliance, the Cardinal, who could ill afford to lose her subsidies, her army or her possessions, hastened to offer her terms even more advantageous than those her husband had enjoyed. She signed in rapid succession treaties of independent alliance with the King of France and the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg; this done, she callously broke with Ferdinand. In the small circle of her Hessian politics the Emperor had served her turn and been thrown away.

  His failure with Amalia Elisabeth did not deter Ferdinand from his policy of separating the allies. An appeal to George of Brunswick-Lüneburg had been treated with contempt,[14] but he was still hopeful of separating Oxenstierna from Richelieu. Throughout 1639 and 1640 his envoys discussed the possibility of settlement at Hamburg. With the offer of Stralsund and Rügen to the Swedish government, Ferdinand came very near to achieving his end, for their treaty with the French was again running out, and there was strong feeling in Stockholm that Richelieu had not justified the hopes placed in him. Swedish diplomats began to demand the direct intervention of the French army in central Germany, complaining that allies who cared for nothing but the Rhine, and left them alone to defend the Elbe and attack the Austrian hereditary lands, were not worth having. Richelieu brought them to reason by cutting off supplies altogether, and having thus proved that they were too weak even to make peace without him, renewed the old alliance.[15]

  If he could not separate the allies, Ferdinand’s best chance was to free himself from his Spanish obligations, since these alone were the cause of French hostility. Trautmansdorff, his most trusted adviser, urged him in this direction, but he had at first to fight against personal prejudices and natural affections too strong to be overcome. The Spanish party was supported by the Empress, a wife as much beloved as loving, and by Ferdinand’s ambitious and too much cherished brother, Leopold.

  Ceding to the insistence of this party, Ferdinand agreed to make Leopold commander-in-chief.[16] The appointment was a bad one, for the Archduke was no soldier. He was a poor judge of men and none of opportunity. No sooner had he arrived at headquarters than he allowed himself to fall under the influence of the maudlin Gallas. The General had been much blamed for the condition of the troops and for his own intemperance. The Archduke, however, informed Vienna that the lesser officers were to blame and that the general himself had been driven to drink by unsympathetic criticism.[17] Such simplicity does Leopold little credit, and it comes as no surprise that the Archduke was defeated on every occasion when he appeared in battle. Possessed of some real intelligence and great good nature, he was nevertheless incurably conceited; when disappointment finally shook his self-confidence he became unexpectedly embittered and revengeful. The unhappy Leopold, who had imagined himself a more competent Emperor than his brother, proved himself a far less competent general.

  The circumstances were certainly not easy, for on both sides theoretical strategy had become useless. The provision of food in an exhausted country was the guiding consideration of warfare. The movements of the troops could no longer be directed by purely strategic considerations. Great bodies of troops, on either side, would take possession of a district and remain static from seed time until harvest, sowing and reaping their own grain in country where the peasants were too few to cultivate the soil for them, and selling any surplus.

  In the imperial army the decline of Spanish subsidies prevented regular payment, and the commissariat was abominably mismanaged, neither Gallas nor the Archduke having any gift for organization. ‘We might be our own carvers for we had no other pay’,[18] wrote one of their men. Central control was relaxed on both sides, and captains took off their companies to forage far afield. An officer with a flair for successful raiding could establish himself as a petty Wallenstein and defy authority indefinitely. The desertion of soldiers from one regiment to another had always been difficult to check, and now the men drifted from one company to another wherever they saw the booty and food were best, without inquiring to what party the captain belonged. ‘I wandered . . . I knew not whither and followed I knew not whom’,[19] confessed the English mercenary Poyntz without compunction. Ragged bands were scattered across Germany, caring nothing for the cause, knowing nothing of any planned strategy, their chief care to scratch nourishment out of the soil and to avoid serious fighting. They fought only their competitors for food, of whatever party.

  This phenomenon created the confused campaigns of the last decade of the war. Fighting
was uncoordinated and spasmodic, the headquarters staff being unable to move the mass of the troops easily or with purpose. The main line of Swedish-imperialist-Saxon warfare was down the Elbe into the Hapsburg lands, the main line of French-imperialist-Bavarian fighting was on the Upper Rhine and across the Black Forest. But intermittent fires, sputtering everywhere, robbed the central offensive of its force and interminably delayed the conclusion. Hard as was a soldier’s life, it was the only livelihood open to a great section of the population, and as the proportion of soldiers to civilians increased, the problem of disbanding these great masses of humanity when peace came grew more terrifying.

  While the armies, like creeping parasites, devoured the Empire, Ferdinand was planning for peace. At an Electoral meeting at Nuremberg early in 1640, he had gone so far as to indicate that he would modify the settlement of the Peace of Prague if he could thereby induce the rulers of Hesse-Cassel and Brunswick-Lüneburg and the Elector Palatine to lay down their arms. He found the Electors much of his opinion; even Maximilian grudgingly admitted that he would consider disgorging some of the land he had seized in the Palatinate.[20] With the consent of all the Electors, the Emperor decided to call a Diet before the end of the year.

  Ferdinand III opened the Diet of Regensburg on September 13th 1640, and closed it on October 10th 1641. During that time the turning-point of the reign was reached, and the slight but definite upward slant of his fortune reached its apex and turned sharply down.

  Until January 1641 everything went well. The Emperor’s initial appeal for peace and good understanding was well received.[21] On October 9th the Diet agreed to issue safe-conducts to ambassadors from Hesse-Cassel and Brunswick-Lüneburg;[22] on November 4th they agreed to Ferdinand’s request that, owing to a Swedish advance, he might quarter troops in and about the city—a demand which at any time in the previous fifty years would have been furiously rejected as an attempt to overawe the meeting,[23] on December 21st they confirmed the present size and subsidization of the imperial army;[24] on the 30th they agreed to an amnesty throughout the Empire, to discuss the question of Swedish satisfaction, and to consider terms for a general settlement on the basis of the Peace of Prague.[25] By January they had even got as far as offering a safe conduct to Elizabeth of Bohemia and her daughters, should they wish to claim the pension and dowries suitable to a German prince’s widow and children.[26] No safe conduct was offered to her son the Elector Palatine[27] and his brothers, which was hardly remarkable, since one of them was active in the Dutch army, one in the Swedish, one was in Paris, and one had been the Emperor’s prisoner for over two years and lost no opportunity of asserting the rightness of his father’s cause to his exasperated jailers.[28]