THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR

  Richelieu used the epochal war we know as the Thirty Years' War (1618 – 1648) as the means by which the new French state was forged and French hegemony in Europe achieved. Indeed, the Thirty Years' War can be understood as the interlocking of two great struggles, to which France supplied the decisive key. This is partly explicable for geopolitical reasons: France happened to lie along both the borders of the territories where two separate wars were fought. For our purposes, however, it is equally important to observe that France underwent the transformation of the princely Valois state into the Bourbon kingly state, a centralization, secularization, and nationalization of state authority along absolutist lines famously identified with the principle of raison d‘état. By contrast, the two conflicts for which France provided the crucial nexus were themselves efforts of two different Habsburg states to perpetuate, on the one hand, and to greatly expand, on the other, the princely states that were the legacy of the division of the realms of Charles V.

  The first of these historic struggles was the Dutch war against Spain by which the Habsburg provinces of the northern Low Country rebelled in a religious, nationalist uprising against Madrid. The second struggle occurred in Germany, where the Emperor Ferdinand II, who was also a Habsburg prince, sought to subdue and re-Catholicize the German principalities that formed the empire (including his own hereditary kingdom of Bohemia), in order to forge a single princely state.

  The seam along which these two struggles met was a long corridor between the Habsburg provinces in Northern Italy and those in the Netherlands. This corridor provided the indispensable line of re-enforcement for Spain once the Dutch successfully denied Spanish access to Northern Europe by sea. Along this line ran the border between France and the Holy Roman Empire, that congeries of cities, principalities, and estates that was the remnant of the Roman Empire after Otto the Great combined the kingship of the Germans with the emperorship of Rome. Since 1438 the emperor, “Erwahlter Romischer Kaiser,”* had been a member of the Habsburg dynasty.19 To keep this strategic passageway secure necessarily meant the continental encirclement of France, and the strict control of the German principalities of the western Empire, including the rich Palatinate and its capital of Heidelberg.

  In the Peace of Augsburg (1555) that ended the first modern epochal war, the Habsburgs had appeared to relinquish their pursuit of a dynastic empire that would control Europe but in the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), they had wrung consent from Valois France to its encirclement, though one divided between Spanish and Austrian Habsburg branches to be sure. The cordon that bound France and connected Habsburg lands was a precarious line subject always to the vagaries of dynastic inheritance and political disintegration.

  The new French dynasty that came to power with the accession of the Bourbon prince Henry IV in 1589 aimed at breaking this encirclement. From the first decade of the seventeenth century until mid-century, with only the short interlude of the de Medici regency, France sought ways to sever this geopolitical cordon, to penetrate Germany and to cut the link between the Low Countries and Spain. First through the means of financial subsidies and covert aid, then later through open warfare, France entered both these great struggles and linked them together as politically as they were linked logistically.

  France's own constitutional evolution had made her the first kingly state in Europe. Efforts at constitutional centralization were undertaken by Ferdinand in Germany and by the Habsburg king of Spain, but both these princes clung to a dynastic fragmentation, which dissipated national unity, and a sectarian ideology, which constricted diplomatic and military freedom of action. Both were prisoners of the archetype of the princely state at a time when a new, more aggressive constitutional form of regime was being born. Spain's failure to restrict Dutch independence and the emperor's failure to destroy the independence of the German princes sealed the decline of their respective monarchies and delivered Europe to the ambitions of France. By contrast, France's adroit maneuvering during this period allowed her to exploit to her advantage these essentially consti-tutional struggles facing Spain and the Empire, and to succeed to the leadership of Europe when the heirs of Gustavus Adolphus were unable to build on his successful effort to make Sweden a dynamic kingly state.

  The Thirty Years' War (1618 – 1648) was an epochal war composed* of the Bohemian and Palatine War (1618 – 1623); the War of the Graubünden (1620 – 1623); the Swedish-Polish War (1621 – 1629); the Danish War (1625 – 1629); the War of Mantuan Succession (1628 – 1631); the Swedish War (1635 – 1648); the War of Smolensk (1632 – 1634); and the French and Swedish War (1635 – 1648). The reason why it is convenient to treat these sometimes overlapping, sometimes episodic conflicts as a single war, despite intervening peace treaties, changes in the parties, and even some switching sides, is that a single constitutional issue was at stake through-oout: would the princely states of the Habsburg dynasty impose their consti-tutional form of the state—the militantly sectarian and multinational dynastic state—on the contested areas of Germany and the Netherlands, whose constitutions were in play? That is, would the United Provinces of the Netherlands emerge as a Spanish possession, re-Catholicized, an example of the archetypal princely Habsburg state? Would the German and central European Protestant states of the empire be remade into a Catholic, German princely state under the Austrian Habsburg heir? Or would the secular relationships among the national, absolutist monarchs of the new kingly states of France, Sweden, and Britain prevail instead?

  The behavior of France and Spain is exemplary in its contrast between these two forms of the State. In the struggle to reunify the states of Germany under Catholicism, Richelieu (a cardinal and devout Catholic) resolutely continued the foreign policy of Henry IV and opposed Spanish re-Catholicization in Germany as a long-term threat to France. Yet when Olivares wished to aid the Protestant Huguenots in France, as a way of weakening the French state that was assisting the Netherlands in its efforts to throw out the Spanish, Philip would not consent. Nor would he permit an end to the hemorrhage in the Low Countries that, more than anything else, destroyed Spanish power in Europe, because the Habsburgs could not in good conscience abandon this territory to heresy. Nor could they strike a bargain with heretics, such as was brokered by the imperial warlord Wallenstein, that would have pacified the Empire. Thus were the interests of Spain sacrificed to the interests of the Habsburg dynasty, including its hereditary claims in Italy and the Netherlands, and to the sectarian convictions of Habsburg rulers. At the same time, Richelieu was pursuing a domestic policy of persecuting the Protestant Huguenots while hiring the Protestant Swedes as allies, and giving subsidies to the Protestant Dutch on the condition that they abandon their support for the Huguenots. One cannot imagine the Spanish forging an alliance with the infidel Ottoman Turks, as Richelieu did, enabling France to harass the Austrians by proxy and thereby divert Habsburg resources from the struggle in Germany.

  The 1618 revolt of the Protestant aristocracy in Bohemia against their new Habsburg ruler, Ferdinand II, had escalated rapidly, quickly encompassing many issues. Eventually it embraced the struggle for independence of the Low Countries from Spanish rule, a revolt that had begun in the 1540s; a revolt by the electors and princes of the Holy Roman Empire against the Habsburg emperor; and a religious war between the Evangelical Union, made up mostly of German principalities, and the Catholic League. Confirming its status as an epochal war, Gustavus Adolphus said of this conflict, “All the wars of Europe are now blended into one.”20

  In the early stages of the war, the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand's forces were successful, and by the late 1620s, Wallenstein, the imperial war commander, seemed to be poised to seize all of Germany. This provoked Gus-tavus Adolphus, the Swedish king, to enter the conflict on the side of the Protestants. His manifesto was that of the head of a kingly state, however, not that of a religious fanatic. Upon joining the war he explained his rationale simply: “It will be sufficient to say that the Spaniard and th
e house of Austria have been always intent upon a Universal monarchy….”21

  Gustavus Adolphus, with his minister Axel Oxenstierna, had in Sweden created one of the first and most formidable kingly states. Through a series of reforms, the treasury and tax system, education and the courts—indeed the entire state administration of Sweden was centralized. The nobility, which had so bedeviled Gustavus's father, was induced to take up state service as an ideal.

  Yet this would hardly have seemed likely in 1611 when Gustavus, still a minor, inherited the throne usurped by his father, Charles IX. The Swedish Diet took this opportunity to extort the Charter of January 1, 1612, from him, which bound the monarchy to rule in terms of the constitution, a restraint that had not troubled Charles. The charter provided that the consent of a Council was required for all new laws, major acts of foreign policy, and the summoning of the Diet. No new taxes could be imposed, and no new troops levied, without the consent of the relevant constitutional parties. Gustavus Adolphus had no choice but to accept this document in an apparent blow to royal authority and in favor of aristocratic constitutionalism. But what appeared to be a casting away of royal power was apparent only: accepting the charter brought not only reconciliation but also the services of Oxenstierna, its main drafter, to the chancellorship. Together these two very different men—“Gustavus dynamic, impetuous, ‘ever allegro and courage‘; Oxenstierna imperturbable, tireless, unhurry-ing; the one supplying inspiration, the other ripe wisdom and many-sided administrative ability”22—creatively exploited this reconciliation to fashion a powerful, absolutist state. There was a resolute effort by the king to abandon the arbitrary rule of his father with its judicial murders and political tribunals. In time the ability and popularity of the king induced a consensus in the society that enabled him to rewrite the charter in practice. He did not feel bound to obtain the consent of the State Council in high matters of state, nor did he so much submit to the Diet requests for new taxes and conscription as insist on their confirming these orders.

  It is not a question of whether I have the right to make impositions without advice, nor of what your privileges may permit; what we have to look to is the temper of the commonalty and the necessity of the times; and it is not a question of what they are bound to pay, but of what they can pay.23

  Roberts sums up the constitutional development well:

  Thus against all probability, Gustavus emerged from the crisis of his accession with regal authority essentially unimpaired; and monarchy remained personal, after 1611 as before. But with a difference. In the first place, the attempt which Charles had made to exercise direct supervision over all branches of government was abandoned; the business of state was now too heavy for such methods… There had to be delegation, and Gustavus recognized this. In the second place, there was a difference of personality, tone and manner. Charles IX had ruled against the grain of the nation: Gustavus ruled with it. His popularity, his personal prestige, enabled him to enlist the institutions of government—the Council, the Diet, the provincial administration, the Church—behind the policies he considered necessary; and consultation produced an appearance of collaboration which was not wholly illusory, since it in fact reflected something like a national consensus. Without such a consensus, the sacrifices which his policies demanded would scarcely have been tolerable to his people.24

  Thus Sweden moved from the condition of a princely state—wherein the state apparatus functions to implement the will of the prince in virtually all matters—to a kingly state, in which the state apparatus is delegated direct supervision over state matters, and in which the king plays a role of inducing patriotic collaboration by essentially becoming the state in a person. The two qualifications on regal authority described by Roberts are in fact like two halves of a scissors: the absolutist regime requires both more delegation and greater consensus. Gustavus and Oxenstierna provided this constitutional innovation at a time when it was necessary to do so in order to effect the strategic innovations that would determine the course of the Thirty Years' War.

  The internal factor [that accounts for Sweden's swift rise to dominance from unpromising foundations] was the well-known series of reforms instituted by Gustavus Adolphus and his aides…. In developing the national standing army… in training his troops in new battlefield tactics, in his improvements of the cavalry and introduction of mobile, light artillery and finally in the discipline and high morale which his leadership gave to the army, Gustavus [produced] perhaps the best fighting force in the world when he moved into northern Germany… during the summer of 1630.25

  When Sweden entered the war, Gustavus introduced new tactics on a scale that only such a state can field and in so doing he utterly transformed the fortunes of the Protestant side. Gustavus Adolphus, perhaps more than any other leader, used the potentiality of the kingly state to exploit the military revolution begun by gunpowder. His father had been enamored of Maurice's tactical theories, but his attempts actually to employ them in a campaign against Poland had met with disaster. The son realized that constitutional as well as strategic reform was necessary. Rejecting the idea that conscripts could never fight on equal terms with professional mercenaries, Gustavus personally drew up the Ordinance for Military Personnel in 1620, which instituted a reformed conscription. A draft was cheaper than hiring mercenaries; it could invoke patriotism in order to win sacrifice on the battlefield; it relied on a relationship between subject and monarch so that the duties it imposed were matters of obedience to orders and not interpretations of a contract. The king could prescribe what weapons and formations his men would use, regardless of their personal preferences. As Roberts has observed, “The Ordinance of Military Personnel was much more than a successful regulation… It was a social landmark…. Not the least important of [its] characteristics was the state's unremitting control of its subjects.” The scope of the Thirty Years' War was too broad for Sweden's manpower, and mercenaries were mainly employed; but the kernel of the armies was always Swedish. The mercenary forces Gustavus enlisted were put through training under Swedish officers to relearn their trade along Swedish lines. Gustavus and Oxenstierna had drafted the Articles of War of 1621 as a code of military law. These differed from earlier instruments in that they were devised as direct orders from a sovereign and not a matter of negotiation between the prince and military entrepreneurs. To take two examples: there were explicit provisions commanding troops to entrench when ordered to do so, and there was a code of military justice providing for courts martial.

  Gustavus Adolphus modified Maurice's linear formations, though with much the same objectives of flexibility and increased fire in mind. Like those of the Dutch school, Gustavus's battle orders provided for two or three lines, small units, and a high proportion of officers and NCOs, but where Maurice's lines were ten deep, Gustavus limited them to six to make the troops easier to command. Cavalry was drawn up at no more than three deep at the battle of Lützen, and it was intended to operate in a revolutionary way. By 1627 Gustavus had begun to attach musketeers to his cavalry to discharge volleys into the enemy ranks, enabling the cavalry to charge through the gap in the pikemen that was thus opened up; the musketeers would reload while the cavalry charged and returned. Similarly, he used pikemen in a charge once an opening in the opposing formation had been blasted through by musket volleys. Not Maurice's rolling fire, but instead a series of shattering blasts was Gustavus's goal, and so he trained his men in the salvo whereby platoons of musketeers fired simultaneously instead of successively. This rhythmical alteration of shot and charge, of fire and shock, depended upon disciplined coordination no less than Maurice's choreographed sequences, and therefore it too required careful and extensive training.26

  Gustavus's tactics served a strategy of annihilation, and thus represented a profound change in thinking from Wallenstein's strategy of attrition or the siege tactics of Maurice.27 Gustavus sought a decisive resolution through massed force in order to strengthen the State rather than allowing its power to be
diffused through lengthy and indecisive campaigns.

  When, despite Gustavus's death at Lützen in 1632, the fortunes of war did not shift, Olivares dispatched a new Spanish army to aid the Austrians in 1634. That year the Spanish defeated the main Swedish army at Nördlingen. This, however, had the effect of bringing French forces into the war in 1635. Now Spain turned directly to confront France, and Olivares looked across the Pyrenees at Richelieu. “Either all is lost, or else Castile will be head of the world,” wrote Olivares in that year as he planned an invasion of France on three fronts for 1636.

  At this point, however, the fundamental strategic weakness of the constitutional order of the Habsburg realm made itself felt. Unlike France, Spain was not a kingly state. Nor was the Empire, though Wallenstein appears to have hoped to make it so. Wallenstein's goal was to secure a stable, absolute monarchy for the whole of Germany. His great wealth—from confiscated Protestant estates—enabled him to propose that he would raise a large army at his own expense and lend the emperor the money to maintain it. This would render the emperor free of Maximilian I, elector of Bavaria, and of Tilly, Maximilian's general, as well as of the other German princes who cherished their independent roles. In our terms, Wallenstein—meritocratic in his promotions, indifferent to religious affiliations—sought to transform the empire into a German kingly state. Neither his emperor nor the princes and electors would permit that, however, and despite Wallenstein's remarkable military gifts, eventually these men conspired in his assassination.

  Nor were Olivares's efforts to consolidate the Iberian state as successful as those of his French counterpart. Indeed, the most disastrous failure to mobilize resources lay in Spain itself, where the crown's fiscal rights were in fact very limited. Each of the three realms of the crown of Aragon had its own laws and tax systems, and as a result each had considerable autonomy.