After so many years of fighting, news of the settlement at first seemed scarcely credible. A German poet in Nuremberg captured the surprise of many:
Something you never believed in
Has come to pass. What?
Will the camel pass through the Needle's Eye
Now that peace has returned to Germany?
Hans Heberle went to Ulm one last time to take part in the ‘thanksgiving and joyous’ festivities which, he claimed, ‘were celebrated as vigorously and thoroughly as one ever did Holy Christmas’.50 Over 40,000 copies of the peace agreement rolled off the printing presses and some of its provisions went into immediate effect: Protestants returned to the cities and territories from which they had been banned (provided Protestant worship had existed there in 1624), while church lands reclaimed under the Edict of Restitution changed hands again. Specific amnesties also took immediate effect. The son of Frederick of the Palatinate assumed a seat in the Electoral College, now expanded to eight, and those who had lost lands and property for supporting France or Sweden (although not those condemned for rebellion) received them back. Those who had sought refuge in Switzerland and elsewhere now returned.
Disengaging and disbanding the 200,000 troops under arms proved more difficult, not least because the soldiers continued to draw pay until the day of their demobilization: the Swedish army alone earned almost a million thalers a month, on top of the arrears agreed at Westphalia. Bad weather throughout northern Europe continued to complicate the task – widespread flooding ensued in spring 1649 when the snow eventually melted after ‘a winter that lasted six months'; the following year, parts of central Germany experienced rain or snow on a record 226 days (compared with a twentieth-century maximum of 180 days of precipitation) – but eventually the war-weary German governments collected enough money to allow the foreign troops to begin a phased withdrawal, on prearranged days, from the areas they occupied. Swiss troops returned to Switzerland; French forces to France; and in October 1650 the Swedish high command embarked at Wismar (a Baltic port not far from Stralsund, where Gustavus Adolphus had landed just over 20 years before) and sailed home. They found their fatherland on the brink of revolution.
Denmark and Sweden on the Edge
The extreme weather that afflicted most of Germany throughout the 1640s also ruined harvests in Scandinavia, causing bread prices to climb far beyond the reach of families already weakened by two decades of war. A remarkable combination of adverse social, dynastic and constitutional circumstances then almost brought both the Swedish and Danish monarchies to their knees between 1648 and 1651. Denmark suffered more. Although Christian IV did not intervene directly in Germany after his defeat in 1629 (page 222 above), he could not resist the temptation to exploit the continental involvement of his rival Sweden and (as Axel Oxenstierna once joked) ‘repeatedly chucked us under the chin to see if our teeth are firm in our heads’.51 Then in 1643 the Swedish army in Germany invaded Jutland while another occupied all Danish territories east of the Sound, and the Swedish navy routed the Danes. These hammer blows forced Christian to accept a humiliating peace that ceded several Danish territories and, more significantly, virtual exemption from the Sound Tolls to Sweden. Although the king retained considerable personal prestige as a sort of national patriarch – few Danes could recall any other monarch, since he had reigned for 60 years – he now had to defer to the nobles on the Council of the Realm. Moreover, when he died in February 1648, Christian left a constitutional crisis because the Estates had not yet recognized a successor. Even though his oldest surviving son, Crown Prince Frederick, was the only viable candidate, the Council of the Realm (which according to tradition acted as the executive during an interregnum) delayed his election until he agreed to a coronation charter that forbade the monarch to involve the kingdom in foreign wars.
The new king faced a difficult task. To begin with, the recent Swedish occupation had caused widespread damage to farms and a sharp drop in agricultural production; now disastrous harvests almost doubled the price of bread, and most areas also suffered from plague. These natural disasters came on top of sharp economic setbacks. The end of the war in Germany led both to a sudden drop in foreign demand for Danish agricultural produce and to the return of many demobilized soldiers in need of domestic employment. Then the Council imposed heavy taxes to liquidate the debts of previous wars – taxes from which its members, by virtue of their noble status, were exempt. This combination drove many smaller landowners into debt as they raised capital to repair the damage of the war years and pay their taxes at a time when their profits plunged, creating a dangerous divide between the great nobles who ran the government and everyone else.
The climate also contributed to a remarkably similar crisis in the Swedish Monarchy. A prolonged period of cold weather had reduced crop yields and trade, and the harvest of 1650 ‘was the worst Sweden had known for fifty years, or was to know for near fifty more’, and in March the Stockholm bakers fought each other at the city gates to secure some of the scarce flour.52 As in Denmark, the harvest failure coincided with unprecedented fiscal pressure to liquidate the debts created by Sweden's ‘continental war’. Although no foreign troops had crossed the frontiers of the kingdom and caused damage, the constant demand for taxes and recruits created widespread hardship. The remarkable territorial gains secured at Westphalia did not impress Gabriel Oxenstierna (brother of Axel and a member of the Swedish Council of the Realm): ‘The common man wishes himself dead,’ he opined. ‘We may indeed say that we have conquered our lands from others, and to that end ruined our own’, because although ‘the branches expand, the tree withers at the roots’.53
Queen Christina, Gustavus Adolphus's daughter who came of age in 1644, did nothing to solve these problems. Not only did she spend vast sums on herself (court expenses soared from 3 per cent of the state budget in 1644 to 20 per cent in 1653), she also alienated so many crown lands that her revenues fell by one-third. Once her officers and soldiers returned from Germany, demanding their wage arrears and rewards for their services, ‘donations were given faster than the land registers could record them [and] sometimes were given twice over’. Christina also doubled the number of noble families in Sweden within a decade, creating a new title almost every month. As in Denmark, such prodigality caused bitter divisions among the queen's subjects. So did the continuing political dominance of Axel Oxenstierna and his aristocratic allies, who by 1648 held 20 of the 25 seats on the Council, a concentration of power that provoked a spate of angry pamphlets.54
The opposition drew strength from the fact that Christina lacked an heir. After she made clear in 1649 that she did not intend to marry, she worked towards securing the succession for her cousin Charles Gustav (commander-in-chief of Sweden's troops in Germany), for which she required the approval of the Diet (Riksdag). The queen therefore summoned delegates to assemble in Stockholm in July 1650, despite the probability that they would seize the opportunity to air their numerous grievances.
The Swedish Diet, which included not only noble, clerical and urban chambers but also a peasant estate, began their 1650 session with a concerted attack by the representatives of the towns on the increased number and excessive privileges of the nobles. ‘Do they want to introduce into Sweden the same servitude for men born free that prevails in Poland?’ they asked indignantly. The clerical estate also criticized noble abuses. ‘Is it just,’ they demanded, ‘that a small number of people should be the only ones to benefit from the return of peace, to the exclusion of the other groups who have contributed so powerfully, by sacrificing their lives and goods, and nonetheless must now live in servitude without enjoying the allure of liberty?’ Both groups complained that the queen preferred to appoint nobles to all the best positions in Church and State, depriving them of valuable career opportunities – a development that caused especial frustration because, as in so many early modern states, Sweden now boasted more university graduates than ever before.55
The grievances of the peasan
ts were both more vehement and more extensive. They complained not only of excessive demands from their lords (some claimed that their farms had to provide 500 and 600 days’ service annually; others that they had to travel 100 miles to reach the place where they had to perform their services), but also about the alienation of crown lands, which delivered peasants to noble control. This not only decimated crown revenues, because the noble lands paid less tax (or no tax at all) to the state, but also reduced the size of the Estate of the Peasants in the Diet, because only peasants on crown lands could take part.56 These issues proved a rallying cry for all three non-noble Estates because, in the words of Archbishop Lennaeus of Uppsala,
When the nobility have all the peasants subject to themselves, then the Estate of Peasants will no longer have a voice at the Diet; and when the Estate of Peasants goes under, [the Estates of] Burghers and Clergy may easily go under too … ; and since the Estate of Nobles has all the land in the kingdom under its control, where is the crown's power? For he who owns the land is the ruler of the land.57
The three Estates therefore held joint meetings, forged common resolutions, claimed that the will of the majority of the four Estates should prevail, and refused to discuss the crown's proposals before it had redressed their grievances. Led by the burgomaster and town secretary of Stockholm (both lawyers), and the Historiographer Royal, they cloaked their demands in appeals to the ‘Fundamental Laws’ of the kingdom, and published them in a joint Supplication drawn up in October 1650. The document included demands ‘that all without distinction shall enjoy equality before the law’ and ‘that all private prisons and torture … may be abolished’. No crown lands should be alienated in future, and those already alienated should be recovered if the Estates demanded it. The Supplication even condemned Sweden's foreign policy: ‘What have we gained beyond the seas, if we lose our liberty at home?‘58
Hundreds of printed copies of the Supplication circulated, serving as a rallying call to all opponents of the central government. One week later a delegation from the lower Estates of the Diet met Oxenstierna and the Council of the Realm, but the delegates’ complaints about high taxes by the state and extensive abuses and exactions by their lords made little impression. On the former, Oxenstierna pointed out that ‘wars were not what they are now’: although in the past, the crown had financed its armed forces from domain revenues, ‘The German War was a very different affair from any that preceded it: it needed more men, more ammunition, higher pay; and how far would the old revenues have gone in such circumstances?’ When a peasant delegate complained that the lords ‘take from us all that we have’, another councillor blurted out ‘You may complain of your burdens all you like; but I tell you that you have never had it better than now … Clergy, burghers and peasants, they are all in clover these days’ – but then, recalling the appalling weather and failed harvests, he conceded ‘though just at the moment, perhaps, they may be suffering some hardship as a result of the unexpected scarcity which prevails this year’. At this, Archbishop Lennaeus chimed in: ‘What [the peasants] say is true, all the same; we know it, because whereas in former times there was a handsome income from tithes, they have now dropped very much. And I am afraid that there are more of those who treat the peasants badly than of those who help them. There are certainly grievances.‘59
Yet the opposition failed to achieve any of its goals, mainly due to its lack of coordination. Sweden possessed no plausible alternative leader except Prince Charles Gustav, Christina's heir presumptive, and he had nothing to gain from overthrowing his cousin. The major nobles likewise had nothing to gain from overthrowing Christina, and in any case they had plenty of examples around them of where rebellion led. The Swedish council regularly received and discussed the latest news about the uprisings in other states – especially in England. According to one councillor, just as the troubles ‘there in England originated with impatient priests, so it is also occurring here. It sets the worst possible example and does much harm’.60
Queen Christina skilfully exploited her critics’ divisions. She won the nobles’ goodwill by promising not to revoke the grants of crown land she had made to them. She divided the other Estates by offering limited concessions to each of them: the clergy received some of the privileges they asked for (such as a guarantee that the crown would favour only orthodox Lutheran theology); the leading townsmen were promised open access to some crown offices (albeit mostly in remote areas); and the peasants won some limitations on the labour services they could be required to perform for their lords. In October 1650 the deputies recognized Charles Gustav as heir presumptive and dispersed.
Although a political victory, the Diet proved a fiscal failure: only the general recovery of alienated crown land (a process known in Sweden as a Reduktion) could have solved the financial crisis facing the Swedish Monarchy. Therefore, despite imposing new indirect taxes, the queen could not pay the wages of her soldiers, sailors and household servants, and she lacked any resources for relief when the harvest of 1652 failed all over Scandinavia. Shouts of ‘Death to the nobles’ and ‘Devil take the bailiffs’ soon rang out and, in one area, the peasants elected a ‘king’, with councillors, and drew up a list of nobles whom they intended to murder; but when Christina sent troops to repress the insurgency, the peasant king ended up broken on a wheel while his councillors (one of them a priest) were hanged.61
An ambassador who travelled through the areas affected by the uprising remarked on the overall poverty of the population, the neglect of the roads and the dead animals in the fields; and one might wonder why these dire conditions failed to provoke broader unrest. The central government believed that the answer lay in its military system. ‘The only means to keep the peasant under discipline is conscription,’ according to one councillor: that is, the constant forced migration of Swedish and Finnish young men to fight on the continent removed both potential leaders and marginal (and therefore dangerous) elements.62 The detailed records of the parish of Bygdeå (which, with only 1,800 inhabitants scattered over 1,200 square miles, was already thinly populated) give some idea of the impact. The parish had 500 adult males in 1620 but 20 years later only 365, whereas the number of adult females rose from 600 to 655. Moreover, all but 14 of the 230 men who left for Germany during those two decades died there.63
Although the detailed records of Bygdeå end in 1639, data from other parts of the Swedish Monarchy reveal the heavy cost of conscription elsewhere. Of the 25,000 Swedish and Finnish soldiers sent to Germany in 1630 and 1631, more than half died within two years; and of over 1,000 conscripts in one regiment within that same period, one-third died of disease, one-sixth died of wounds, and one-eighth deserted. As young men began to realize that military service was virtually a sentence of death, recruiting efforts faltered. Thus, over the course of the Thirty Years War, Finland supplied some 25,000 young men to fight on the continent – equivalent to perhaps one-quarter of its total adult males – but although six conscription drives in Viborg province during the 1630s produced some 4,000 men, eight drives in the 1640s produced fewer than 3,500, and eight more in the 1650s produced fewer than 2,500. Those who managed to avoid the draft included deserters (some ‘hid in the forest’ before the first muster, others fled during the march to the coast), the injured (some of them clearly with a self-inflicted wound), and the sick – including the unusual if not unique claim of Jakob Göransson who, when conscripted in 1630, asserted that ‘every month he has a period like a woman and during that time he lies as if he were dead’.64 Yet whether they served, deserted or menstruated, no conscript could take part in peasant insurgency. The war that ruined so much of Germany probably provided a safety valve for both Finland and Sweden and thus paved the way for the abdication of Christina and the peaceful succession in 1654 of her cousin as King Charles X Gustav.
The Second Crisis of the Dutch Republic
As soon as peace was concluded with Spain in 1648, some inhabitants of the Dutch Republic looked back on the war years with nos
talgia. ‘War, which has made all other lands and countries poor, made you rich,’ wrote one pamphleteer in 1650: ‘Your country used to overflow with silver and gold; the peace [with Spain] makes you poor.‘65 At first sight, such claims seem ridiculous. By the 1640s, almost 90 per cent of the total expenditure of the Dutch Republic went on defence, creating a huge tax burden, above all in the form of indirect taxes: in the city of Leiden, excise duties accounted for 60 per cent of the price of beer and 25 per cent of the price of bread. Still, revenues fell far short of the Republic's military and naval spending: between 1618 and 1649, the debt of the States of Holland soared from under 5 million to almost 150 million. At the same time, the war had harmed the Republic's economy in other important respects. Villages near the frontiers paid ‘protection money’ to enemy garrisons or else risked being ravaged; merchants who shipped goods abroad risked having them confiscated; privateers in Spanish service not only caused serious direct losses – in 1642 alone, they captured 138 Dutch ships – but also forced up freight and insurance rates.
Many in the Republic, led by the States of Holland (which, thanks to its critical role in financing the war, had regained some of the power lost in 1618: page 219 above), therefore favoured a settlement with Philip IV. In 1635 France had declared war on Spain and, in concert with the Dutch, launched an immediate assault on Philip's possessions in the Netherlands. Although French forces made little progress before 1640, thereafter they made some major gains. Each victory caused alarm in the Republic. ‘France, enlarged by possession of the Spanish Netherlands, will be a dangerous neighbour for our country,’ declared the States of Holland; it would be ‘Hannibal at the gates’ echoed a pamphleteer.66 Popular opinion shifted towards concluding peace before Spanish power collapsed totally. Nevertheless, hammering out a settlement acceptable both to the Stadholder, now Maurice's brother Frederick Henry, and to all seven provinces, proved difficult. Zealand held out (mainly because its privateers prospered from the war) but after prolonged haggling, in January 1646 the delegates of the other six provinces left for Münster in Westphalia, headquarters of the Spanish delegation at the peace congress.
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