Nor was there any secrecy surrounding the movements of these troops or the magnitude of the funds that had been allocated for their maintenance. As early as November 28, 1619, an English ambassador wrote to the principal member of James’s government that “this last week’s letters out of Germany… all of them, as well as those out of Italy and other parts, mention the sedulous care there is of raising men by the Catholic king and Catholic league against the next Spring.” Another English envoy in Germany warned the same minister on January 20, 1620, “In our neighboring provinces… there are levies made daily both of horse and foot… to succor the Emperor and invade the Inferior [Lower] Palatinate.” And, finally, from the English ambassador in Turin came the information on March 4 that “this last week… he [the Duke of Savoy] received order from the King of Spain to require… passage through his State for two regiments of Napolitans and one of Lombards, which the said King did pretend to send into Burgundy, and from thence to Flanders.” The diplomat went on to report that this was so patently a ploy, and that the soldiers were so clearly intended to be used against Bohemia, that the duke of Savoy had requested that the king of England be made aware of this development.
In vain did the members of James’s own government, overwhelmingly in favor of defending Frederick and Elizabeth, urge the need for speed in responding to this ominous massing of Catholic forces. “For commonly he that is first in the field, hath the advantage of that year; and the first year, though the quarrel may last longer, will in all reasonable conjecture either settle the crown forever on the new king’s [Frederick’s] head, or bring that kingdom, as a kingdom of conquest, into perpetual subjection under the house of Austria,” admonished the English representative stationed at The Hague. “All of his Majesty’s ministers except three or four, as I have already told you… [and] the whole nation takes the same side [Frederick’s], and all the kingdom declares its impatience of this prolonged irresolution,” the Venetian ambassador reiterated in a report to the doge from London on January 30, 1620.
But James stubbornly refused to commit himself to his son-in-law’s defense. Intimidated by Spain, whose friendship he craved, and vexed at Frederick and Elizabeth for forcing him to depart from his comfortable position of detached neutrality, he took a scholar’s refuge in disputation and minutiae. He demanded detailed evidence, supplemented by reams of written depositions from the various participants, that the election in Bohemia had been legitimate and not the work of a single faction. He parsed the clauses of the defensive treaty he had signed with the Princes of the Union to prove that he was not, after all, obligated to honor the terms that he himself had provided. He refused to refer to Frederick publicly as a king or to allow anyone else in England to do so. And he deliberately ignored the evidence of Spanish armament, observing to the Dutch ambassador as late as January 24, 1620, “his belief that, now that his son-in-law… was, as he understood, tolerably well established, he could not be in any need or danger for a year to come.”
So concerned was James with projecting an image of strict impartiality so that Philip III would not think that he had anything to do with his daughter and son-in-law’s advancement that he even declined to mark the birth of Rupert, his latest grandchild, by the ringing of church bells, a departure from tradition that caused the prince of Orange, who had agreed to honor his defensive commitments, to despair aloud that “he is a strange fellow that will neither fight for his children nor pray for them!”*
But of course James wasn’t being impartial or statesmanlike or above the fray. He was taking a side—the imperial side—and everybody knew it. “If the cause had been good, the King… would have declared himself before now,” the duke of Guise stated flatly, and France went to the empire. The duke of Savoy “doth still profess that if his Majesty will command him to stop the passage [of Spanish troops], he hath both the means and the will to do it,” the English ambassador at Turin reported as late as March 4, 1620. “But because that cannot be done but by violence… before he do embark himself, he would gladly be assured of protection against the Spaniards.” When no such promise was forthcoming, Savoy too, however reluctantly, sided with Ferdinand. In the absence of leadership or any encouragement whatsoever from England and faced with the certainty of an imperial onslaught, Protestant Germany also reneged on its agreement with Bohemia, especially as it was well known that Spain intended not simply to oust Frederick from Prague but also to annex his home territory of the Palatinate as a warning to others of the consequences of defying the Habsburgs. No one wanted to give Ferdinand an excuse to turn his army loose on one of their duchies.
It didn’t have to be this bad. There were ways of keeping the enemy guessing, so that Frederick did not lose so many allies so quickly, or at least of providing funds toward the war effort. But even when it came to finance, James managed to sabotage his son-in-law’s standing. When Frederick applied for a loan of £100,000 from the City of London, James refused to assist him. At this, even Bethlen Gabor, understanding that it took money to wage battle, gave up and made a side deal with Ferdinand. The king of England could not have been more destructive to Elizabeth and her husband, or to the cause of Protestantism in Europe in general, if he had been in the pay of Philip III. Indeed, the Spanish ambassador was so emboldened that, to the great bitterness of the members of the English government, he openly canvassed James’s Catholic subjects for donations to support the imperial cause.
Rarely in history has an experienced ruler of mature years deliberately allowed himself to be manipulated so obviously by a foreign power.* Philip III knew that he had only to question England’s neutrality to send James scurrying to refute the charge. The king of Spain could blithely deny that he was levying troops to invade Bohemia and the Palatinate, and his English counterpart would take him at his word and continue his round of hunting, refusing to credit the communiqués of his own agents. With disgust, the Privy Council realized that the Spanish ambassador could say anything, no matter how ridiculous, and the king would swallow it, as was witnessed in September 1620 when the news arrived that the Palatinate had been invaded by an imperial army led by a general named Spinola. The Spanish ambassador, called in and confronted with the charge of breach of promise, responded fatuously that “he was glad of it, and wished Spinola had all the rest, that his Majesty might see his power in having it released and restored!”*
ALL THROUGH THE WINTER and into the spring and summer of 1620, aware that Ferdinand and Philip III were at work assembling an army with which to take back Bohemia, Frederick and Elizabeth did what they could to prepare for an attack. Frederick made a progression throughout the realm and into Silesia and Moravia to recruit soldiers and raise funds. He secured a commitment from Bethlen Gabor (who, uncertain which side would ultimately prevail, was hedging his bets) to send a troop of Hungarian cavalry to supplement the Bohemian army. At a meeting of the diet in Prague in April, Frederick gave the prince of Anhalt, the general in charge of the Bohemian forces, 200,000 florins out of his own pocket to pay the soldiers’ wages. As a result of these efforts, when the general left the capital on May 15, 1620, he had an impressive army of 30,000 men under his command with which to defend the kingdom.
For her part, Elizabeth sent a flood of letters to England pleading for aid, if not for Bohemia, then at least for her husband’s home territory of the Palatinate, which had been left in the care of her mother-in-law. “My only dear brother,” she wrote to Charles in a missive that demonstrated her understanding of the deteriorating diplomatic and military situation she and her husband faced, “I… beseech you earnestly to move his Majesty [James] that now he would assist us… for, to speak freely to you, his slackness… doth make the Princes of the Union slack too, who do nothing with their army; the King hath ever said that he would not suffer the Palatinate to be taken; it was never in hazard but now… I doubt not but you will do it, since you have hitherto solicited his Majesty for us… which I beseech you to continue to her that is ever… your most affectionate sist
er.” But cautious Charles was no Henry. Although he supported his sister and brother-in-law and even contributed his own funds to their defense, he was unwilling to cross James.
This was all very worrying, of course, but Frederick and Elizabeth were both still in their early twenties, with the natural optimism that accompanies youth, and neither had any experience of war. The Bohemian army had already demonstrated its ferocity by trouncing Ferdinand’s troops the previous year, when they had far fewer regiments at their disposal. And then again, everything felt so normal in Prague. Ambassadors and friends came and went; the royal couple picnicked in the summer with Frederick’s mother, who arrived for a short visit to see her new grandchild. There were the usual rounds of hunting and dinners. Elizabeth found herself pregnant again. Frederick rather scandalized his subjects by his habit of bathing naked on hot days, and Elizabeth’s fashionable gowns were considered to show a little too much décolletage, but these were minor irritants. The greatest controversy to erupt in the first nine months of the year was when Frederick ordered the religious statues that adorned the main bridge in Prague destroyed as idolatrous, but he quickly reversed his decision when he saw the outcry this caused among the citizenry. In truth, Frederick and Elizabeth were much more concerned about Frederick’s home territory of the Palatinate than they were for themselves. They had an army of 30,000 war-hardened troops standing between them and the empire, more than enough to handle anything Ferdinand could throw at them. The Palatinate, which they had left to the good offices and army of the Princes of the Union, did not.
Frederick’s mother knew better. On August 17, 1620, as the Spanish soldiers mustered by Philip III descended on the Lower Palatinate, she sent an urgent letter to James. “My Lord,” she wrote, “seeing the necessity to which my children, who are also those of your Majesty, are reduced… it is impossible that this should not touch your Majesty’s heart, mine being so smitten with grief… I supplicate you most humbly to look at the peril in which they are, and to hasten a signal aid, by money or some diversion; otherwise it will be impossible for us to… preserve your dear children from the bloody hand of our enemies.” And as if this were not enough to send a chill through any parent’s soul, she continued forcefully: “Your Majesty will also know in what pain is the queen your daughter, and that she is about to be entirely surrounded with enemies; indeed the state in which I lately left her [a reference to Elizabeth’s pregnancy] makes me doubly pity her.”
It had begun.
THE IMPERIAL ATTACK PLAN was straightforward. Ferdinand had done everything he could in advance of the actual invasion to isolate Bohemia and the Palatinate and limit the scope of the war. Toward that end, he had offered incentives to Frederick’s German allies to switch sides, or at least remain neutral during the conflict. To the Protestant electors and the Princes of the Union, he promised that none of their lands would be touched by imperial forces, nor would their past support for Frederick be held against them if they remained loyal to the empire. So when the 24,000 Spanish troops under General Spinola destined for the Lower Palatinate began pouring into Germany in August, the army Frederick had solicited to protect his homeland before he left for Bohemia never materialized. Similarly, Ferdinand cleverly offered Frederick’s neighbor, the duke of Bavaria, the Palatinate itself, including the coveted title of elector and its concomitant imperial voting rights, as a reward if he would command the Catholic forces allied against Bohemia. This proposition turned out to be too tempting to resist, so the duke of Bavaria set out for Prague with a force of 22,000 men, intent on joining with the imperial army under General Buquoi, which was already marching through Austria on its way to Bohemia.* He sent a further 7,000 soldiers to the elector of Saxony, who had also taken the imperial side against Frederick, to be used in an attack from the north.
The duke of Bavaria’s army crossed into Bohemia at Linz, on the border with Austria, on September 8. They met so little resistance that they caught up to Buquoi’s forces by the 20th and together the two generals converged on Budweis, about 150 miles south of Prague. The imperial soldiers, resolved on looting and murder, were brutally merciless to the civilians who stood in their path. Even their commanding general was appalled. “I cannot conceal from your Imperial Majesty that, notwithstanding my many well-intended admonitions, this army has spread along the line of its march robbery, plundering, fire, and the indiscriminate slaughter even of innocent Catholics of both sexes, attended with demands of ransoms from the loyal, seductions of matrons and maidens, and the most ruthless plundering of churches and monasteries,” the duke of Bavaria wrote grimly to Ferdinand. “The common people are ruined, and driven to the extreme of desperation, and will not in many years be able to recover themselves.” So destructive were the invaders, and so intent on stealing everything they could lay their hands on, even to stripping the houses of wood, that an eyewitness described the villages left in their wake as so empty that they looked as though they had been “swept with a broom.”
The progress of the enemy troops was carefully monitored in Prague, and by the second week of September the situation was regarded as sufficiently threatening that Elizabeth’s guard recommended that the queen retire from the capital and seek the safety of friendly territory. This Elizabeth adamantly refused to do. Frederick was preparing to join the army and she knew that if she abandoned Prague, it would be taken as a sign of impending defeat; it was her task to stay behind and keep up the morale of the citizenry. The couple did, however, manage to smuggle six-year-old Frederick Henry out of the country and all the way to Holland, one of the few principalities that had remained resolutely loyal to their cause. This journey was undertaken with the utmost stealth, as it meant traveling through enemy lines where, if the child’s identity were known, he would surely be apprehended and held for ransom—or worse. Frederick and Elizabeth were extremely fortunate that he got away safely. At almost the same time, Frederick’s aging mother, faced with the prospect of invasion by the Spanish soldiers under the command of General Spinola, gathered up three-year-old Karl Ludwig and one-year-old Elizabeth and fled south to Stuttgart, to the duke of Württemberg, the only member of the former Princes of the Union willing to offer her protection.*
But all was not completely lost. The Bohemian army still stood between the emperor and Prague. A decisive victory against Ferdinand’s forces could yet turn the momentum of the war in Frederick and Elizabeth’s favor, and all the allies they had lost would come rushing back. When at the end of September, with everything at stake, Frederick mounted his horse, kissed his wife good-bye, and left to join his troops in the field, Elizabeth, despite an acute understanding of their isolation, refused to give in to despair. “Spinola is still in the Low Palatinate, fortifying those places he hath taken, and the Union looks on and doth nothing,” she reported in a letter to England. “The king is gone to the army… you see we have enough to do, but I hope still well, in spite of all,” she ended courageously.
A MILITARY UNIT OF 30,000 well-maintained seasoned soldiers fighting to preserve their homeland and equipped with artillery was indeed a formidable force in the seventeenth century. Unfortunately for Frederick, this was not the condition in which he found his army.
He caught up with them at Rakovnik, about thirty-five miles southwest of Prague, hunkered down behind the medieval walls of the citadel. Having spent the summer hunting and skinny-dipping with his wife and friends, and not with his troops in the field, he must have been somewhat shocked to discover the quality of the divisions upon which he had been relying for his defense. On the day he arrived, his army—what was left of it, at any rate—was in full mutiny. It was difficult to blame them; they had not been paid for months. The 200,000 florins that Frederick had advanced out of his own funds in May had never arrived, having been stolen by highwaymen, who operated with impunity on the roads. His soldiers had been forced to plunder the stores of their own countrymen in order to eat, and even that was insufficient. Between starvation, illness, desertion, and skirmi
shes with Buquoi’s troops over the summer, Frederick had already lost somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 men (although these numbers were mercifully supplemented by the arrival of 8,000 Hungarian horsemen sent by Bethlen Gabor). Those who remained were refusing to fight at all unless their wages were paid.
This revolt was quelled by assurances that the promised money was on the way, a necessary imperative, as the enemy, which had met no resistance on its drive toward Prague and had consequently made excellent time, had discovered the Bohemian position and was eager to give battle. Frederick’s troops were rather less enthusiastic, and in one of the first forays, he was treated to the sight of a regiment of 250 of Bethlen Gabor’s much-heralded dragoons abandoning their posts in panic at an energetic charge conducted by eighteen imperial cavalrymen. Frederick immediately wrote home to his wife, who was nearing her seventh month of pregnancy, and told her to get out of Prague.
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