It was not that. But it proved that while Mercy defended Würrtemberg, Turenne would have serious difficulty in joining forces with the Swedes under Torstensson. It also elevated Maximilian of Bavaria, the Master of Mercy and Werth, to the position of an indispensable ally to Ferdinand, and convinced the French government that they must buy Maximilian’s friendship once again if they wished to be certain of breaking imperial power. Their conclusions were confirmed by Mercy’s siege and reduction of Uberlingen in May 1644, and of Freiburg in July.[13] In a three days’ battle, in which he was pitted against Turenne and Enghien together, Mercy superbly defended his position; he was however outnumbered and Enghien, by a feigned outflanking movement, which threatened to cut him off from his base in Swabia, forced him to retire.[14]
The Battle of Freiburg was the occasion of so much valour and skill on the French side, that it was later much advertised, but in fact Mercy maintained his original position in Württemberg at the cost of heavy loss to the French army. Bavarian arms remained the chief bulwark of the Empire. So much was this so that when Maximilian threatened to make a separate peace, to withdraw Mercy and leave the gateway of the Empire open to Turenne, Ferdinand could not afford to disregard his threat.
Overreached by his own ally, the Emperor derived some hope from the weakening in the position of France. In the first place the new government was less secure than its predecessor. Richelieu, though never popular, had evoked a certain apprehensive admiration. The people did not feel the same about Cardinal Mazarin. The dapper little Sicilian with his petty personal vanities, his childlike ostentation, his delight in craft and cunning, had few impressive qualities. Equally he had not the comprehensive genius of Richelieu; he never understood or managed to control the internal politics of France.
Yet in some ways this littleness of Mazarin was fortunate. His cunning, his delight in intrigue, his understanding of minute and contradictory side-issues, were exactly suited to the complicated diplomacy of the peace congress at Münster. Richelieu could not have managed the situation better.
Even in internal affairs Mazarin’s character gave him one advantage. The late King had appointed the Queen as regent, with a council, for her five-year-old son. Anne of Austria, elder sister of the Empress, the King of Spain and the Cardinal-Infant, had been suspected of a leaning towards the Spanish cause while her husband lived, and on his death the Courts of Vienna and Madrid were filled with high hopes. These were rapidly dashed, for Anne of Austria immediately promised the Swedish Resident in Paris to stand by her husband’s policy[15] and she soon yielded all her powers willingly to Mazarin, who lost no time in reassuring Oxenstierna of his loyalty.[16] The relationship between the Queen and the minister will always remain doubtful; his letters to her are full of a flattering tenderness,[17] but he keeps his distance and one is reminded irresistibly of the reverential flirtation of a Disraeli and a Victoria. Neither Mazarin nor the Queen was yet fifty, and each was attractive to the other sex, the courtly little Cardinal with his bright, appraising eyes and ingratiating smile, the Queen with her indolent grace, smooth, clear complexion and lazy contemplative eyes. The gaiety of her youth had sunk into a tranquil middle age in which it is probable that she agreed to accept rather than to satisfy her minister’s adoration.
This friendship of Mazarin and the Queen, the backstairs gossip of the diarist, the ready-to-use material of the romancer, had a definite significance in European history. It kept the regency of France firmly fixed on the road traced out by Richelieu, and destroyed the vain hopes of the House of Austria.
But if the Spanish government could hope nothing from the new regency, it had grounds for hope in another direction. The Battle of Rocroy had destroyed the army which was the sole protection of Flanders; it had made room for France as the dominant power in Europe, not only in the arts but in arms. The doubts which had been growing in the United Provinces for the last thirteen years now became not the accompaniment but the theme of Dutch diplomacy; fear of France overtook and outran fear of Spain. By 1643 the peace and war parties in the Provinces had become respectively the Spanish and the French parties—and the Spanish party was the larger.
The burghers of the United Provinces feared several things. They feared France on their borders and French competition, they feared, superstitiously almost, the secret Roman Catholics in their midst, and they feared the despotism of the House of Orange. Frederick Henry, immensely popular for ten or fifteen years, had lost favour as he grew older.[18] Subject to recurrent attacks of gout and jaundice, he became unprepossessing in person and depressed in temper; the caution and moderation which distinguished him in his prime had become, as it were, softened into indecision and languor.[19] More and more he fell under the influence of his wife,[20] and the Princess, once the radiant young beauty Amalia von Solms, was now a stout, vain, exacting woman with ambitions for the dynastic security of her only son. In 1641 she and her husband had married their son, who was only twelve, to the nine-year-old daughter of the English King; this was a suspicious move to the minds of the republican Dutch, and when, very shortly after, civil war broke out in England between King and Parliament, the Dutch Estates sympathized with Parliament while the Prince of Orange unwisely allowed the English Queen and various of the nobility to use The Hague as a base for collecting troops and money for the King. Indeed, so well were the ambitions of Frederick Henry known that the Spaniards had tried to buy him into a private peace with an offer of important lands for his family.[21]
That Frederick Henry spoke French as his native tongue, was the son of a French mother, had married his son to a princess also half French, that Amalia received innumerable gifts from France,[22] all these things made the Dutch burghers suspect that the ambitions of the House of Orange were in some way supported by France. There was no evidence of this except in so far as the French government, a monarchy not quite at ease in dealing with a republic, gave the Prince of Orange the title of ‘Altesse’[23] and treated him rather too openly as though he were identical with the Dutch Estates, instead of being merely the Stadholder of six out of seven provinces.
The religious problem also drove the Dutch away from France and towards Spain. The question of toleration for Catholics within the Provinces had always been one of the points on which peace negotiations had foundered; but at least the Spaniards handled the question openly. Of recent years the Dutch had nourished a suspicion that the French too had designs on their religious integrity, designs all the more nefarious for being concealed. The French government passed from the hands of one Cardinal into the hands of another, and why were Catholic Cardinals in alliance with Protestant powers except for ulterior motives? Certainly the Catholics of the United Provinces had crystallized the suspicions of the Protestant majority by appealing to the French Queen to intervene in their behalf.[24]
With relations at this tension, one of the French ambassadors, on his way to Münster, passed through The Hague. Claude d’Avaux was a fairly intelligent man; he had done well at Hamburg in dealing with the Germans and the Swedes, but he did not know the Dutch. Very proud of his previous diplomatic successes, very contemptuous of the bovine Hollanders, and far too sure of himself to ask advice from Abel Servien, his colleague, who knew the situation better, he must needs stand up before the Dutch Estates on March 3rd 1644, and tell them that the King of France thought it would be an excellent thing if they would tolerate the Catholics.[25]
The tempest raised by his speech was so immediate and so violent as nearly to overset the boat of the Franco-Dutch alliance. Only by the most elaborate explanations and the French guarantee that nothing subversive had been intended was the storm momentarily calmed, and even then it was suspended rather than dispersed, and it lowered over the whole of the negotiations at Münster ready to burst again at any minute.[26]
One other danger threatened the French position. The aged Pope Urban VIII died in 1644 and was succeeded by Innocent X. Maffeo Barberini had been sympathetic to the interests of France; his succe
ssor, Giambattista Pamfili, was opposed to them. It would be too high an estimate of the new Pope’s policy to say that he was devoted to the interests of Spain. In so far as he stands out at all in Papal history, he stands out as a negative quantity. Depressed, nervous, well-intentioned, he was not a bad man and he was not a bad Pope. Perhaps he was scarcely a Pope at all. His fame with posterity rests on nothing that he did, but on the fact that Velasquez painted him. He lived in the Vatican, played bowls in its magnificent garden, set his hand to Papal bulls and went through the religious duties of the Holy Father, but his political and private life were alike swamped by the activities of an ambitious sister-in-law, who used his position as a mounting stone for her social elevation and a missile in her personal quarrels. As for his being a ‘Holy Father’ somebody unkindly commented, the very children ran away from him, ‘tant il était effroyable à voir.’[27]
His election, which they at once declared was simoniacal,[28] meant the removal of a very useful prop to the French government. The whole fantastic alliance of Protestant powers under a Catholic paymaster, of Sweden, the Provinces, Hesse-Cassel and the old Heilbronn League under France, had been justified in the eyes of the very Catholic French middle-classes by the sanction of the Pope. Besides, Urban had lived long enough to send his own nominee, Fabio Chigi, to represent the Vatican as one of the mediators of peace at Münster. Now Mazarin feared that Innocent would withdraw Chigi and send some Spanish, or Spanish-paid, nuncio to take his place.[29] In fact, he need not have worried, for Innocent was not a man of action and Chigi remained. His fears were justified only in Italy, where the policy of the new Pope led to the rupture of diplomatic relations between Paris and the Vatican, and a brawl in the Italian peninsula.[30] This was expensive and unnerving but had surprisingly little effect in the end on the peace congress in Westphalia.
The French position was not weakened, in the long run, as much as the Spaniards hoped in 1644. They were encouraged nevertheless by current events, by the increasing willingness of the United Provinces to make peace, and their increasing dislike of the French, by the removal of Papal support from Mazarin, to seize the opportunity of making an advantageous peace. Their hope in war destroyed at Rocroy, they snatched at the diplomatic opportunity.
To the French way of thinking, the congress called at Münster and Osnabrück was to settle the war in Germany, in fact to force peace from the Emperor and thus detach him from Spain. The last thing Mazarin wished to see was a general peace in which Spain was included. She was not to creep out of the war to nurse her wounds and come back ten years later, refreshed, to the struggle with France. She was to be left isolated, sword in hand, to fight on to the death. Great, therefore, was the indignation of the French ambassadors when, on arriving at Münster in March 1644 after a bitterly cold journey through melting snow,[31] they found not only an imperial but a Spanish delegate waiting for them. With ready resource they announced that they could not possibly treat with him, since his credentials referred to the King of Spain as King of Navarre and Portugal and Duke of Barcelona;[32] their master, they pointed out, was the only King of Navarre and Duke of Barcelona, and they recognized John of Braganza as the only King of Portugal. Having thus neatly held up the Spanish question, they proceeded to postpone meetings for a still longer period, by a furious dispute with the Spanish delegate as to the precedence of their respective masters.[33]
The dispute between the Emperor and the German Estates, the weakening of the French position and the intervention of Spain, delayed the congress. Its very existence was threatened by the break between Sweden and Denmark which took place at the same time. Ever since his withdrawal in 1629, Christian of Denmark had offered at intervals to ‘mediate’ between the combatants, and in 1640 he had established himself more or less effectively by means of his delegates as the ‘unprejudiced party’ in the deliberations at Hamburg. The Swedes, however, had been very far from accepting his impartiality at its face value; he had assisted in the abduction, with her own consent, of the Queen-mother of Sweden, an event which might easily have led to serious internal trouble in Sweden. He had signed a commercial treaty with Spain. He had married his son to a daughter of the Elector of Saxony, an open imperial ally. In the spring of 1643 he blockaded Hamburg, and his raising of the Sound tolls in order to meet the perpetual deficit of his budget injured Swedish trade and made him the most hated man on the Baltic.
At this juncture, when Christian had not a friend in the North, Oxenstierna acted, sending instructions to Torstensson in September 1643 to attack the Danish dominions. Waiting only to make certain of his defences on the orders of Bohemia and Moravia, the marshal to the amazement of the Danes turned north-east with the greater part of his army, invaded Holstein in December and overran Jutland before the end of January 1644. Not until this had been accomplished did the Stockholm government deign to issue a manifesto justifying their action. Declaration of war there was none.
Whatever excuse the Swedes had for this conduct, they were much and justly criticized for their manner of action. Popular feeling in The Hague was emphatically for the unoffending Danes. Mazarin was equally indignant, the source of his annoyance being his fear of an untimely revival in Swedish strength which would make them less docile as allies. Indeed he shortly after took the drastic decision of cutting off all subsidies unless Torstensson immediately withdrew from Jutland.[34]
Two Danish delegates, all this while, had taken up their residence at Münster and Osnabrück. They now beset the Swedish ambassadors for an explanation of the attack, and getting no satisfaction angrily withdrew from the conference. The gesture proved totally ineffective; the remaining delegates agreed to continue the congress in spite of the rupture.[35]
Nevertheless, the outbreak for peace was sadly clouded in the spring of 1644. The Emperor supported the Danes and risked what was left of his resources on equipping an army to help them. This was to attack Torstensson in the rear and force him to surrender. The plan was sound, but the execution would have been laughable had it not been tragic. Gallas, by now rarely more than half-sober, pushed forward unhindered almost as far as Kiel; here Torstensson, leaving Wrangel to prosecute the war in Jutland, slipped past the ineffective outposts and marched for the now undefended Hapsburg lands. Gallas, lumbering after him, was met and crushingly defeated at Aschersleben. With what was left of his troops he somehow drifted back to Bohemia.[36] This time no Archduke Leopold stepped forward to say that he was an excellent but much misunderstood commander; of all his army he had brought back a little less than a third—one rumour said only a tenth—and he was commonly known throughout the Empire by the unflattering name of ‘der Heerverderber’, the spoiler of armies. In the face of bitter and justified abuse he resigned and retired to indulge in private the weakness which had been his undoing.
The Danish war petered out. The King himself, commanding his own fleet in a prolonged engagement off Kolberg, prevented an assault on Copenhagen from the sea, but it was clear when Gallas failed him that he would no longer be able to support the war on land.
Meanwhile in Sweden, on September 18th 1644, Queen Christina, at eighteen years old, became the active ruler. The effect of this change of government was to be felt very soon both at the congress and in the Danish war, for the Queen was no cipher, easily flattered and deceived, but a young person of obstinacy and intelligence. Very much the daughter of her father, she had the courage necessary for the situation and was able the more boldly and easily to abandon a sentimental adherence to his policy. She wanted peace above all things, above even the territorial aggrandizement of Sweden.
With her accession the government at Stockholm ceased obstruction and began to move actively towards a settlement.[37] From that moment the Danish war was virtually discontinued, and the signing of a peace, which was later concluded at Brömsebro, was a foregone conclusion when in November 1644 the Stockholm government agreed to submit the dispute to the mediation of Brandenburg.[38]
The chief obstacles being thus
partly smoothed away and all further excuse for delay overridden, the congress was opened on December 4th 1644, eighteen months after the Emperor had given it his sanction, and thirty-two months after the date originally fixed for its meeting by the delegates at Hamburg. For all that period, as for three years and ten months after its meeting, the war continued in Germany.
2.
There never had been within the Empire any corporate expression of feeling, or any channel through which the desire for peace could be expressed. The ruling powers—not merely the princes but any organized body with a means of making itself heard—asked for peace always in a general sense: when it came to practical action they were always prepared to fight for a little longer in order to gain their own particular end—and make a more lasting peace. Even in the last years, at the congress in Westphalia, it was the same. Not only the Elector of Brandenburg, the Landgravine of Hesse-Cassel, the Elector Palatine and a dozen others were prepared to go on and on, always a little longer, to avoid or to obtain something, but even so forlorn a group as the Bohemian Protestant exiles were left at the conclusion of peace still demanding that it be not ratified until their cause could be vindicated.
There was, and had been from the beginning, a deep desire for peace in Germany; but it was the mute desire of those unable to express their wrongs, that class from whom the war drew its sustenance, both men and food and money, and who had no means to control or prevent it. The peasant had only one means of making his sufferings known—by revolt; that such revolt invariably ended in defeat for all, and death for the leaders, was no deterrent. Often enough, those who led it had no hopeful illusion that they would be luckier than others, but fought merely for the relief of expressing in action sufferings that they could voice in no other way.
The Thirty Years War Page 52
