PERIODS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY PERIOD V., 1598–1715.

In Eight Volumes. Crown 8vo. With Maps.

PERIODS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY

General Editor—ARTHUR HASSALL, M.A.,
Student of Christ Church, Oxford.

The object of this series is to present in separate Volumes a comprehensive and trustworthy account of the general development of European History, and to deal fully and carefully with the more prominent events in each century.

The Volumes will embody the results of the latest investigations, and will contain references to and notes upon original and other sources of information.

It is believed that no such attempt to place the History of Europe in a comprehensive, detailed, and readable form before the English Public has yet been made, and it is hoped that the Series will form a valuable continuous History of Mediæval and Modern Europe.

Period I.—The Dark Ages. A.D. 476–918. By C. W. C. Oman, M.A., Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. 7s. 6d.

Period II.—The Empire and the Papacy. A.D. 918–1272. By T. F. Tout, M.A., Professor of History at Victoria University, Manchester.

Period III.—The Close of the Middle Ages. A.D. 1272–1494. By R. Lodge, M.A., Professor of History at the University of Glasgow.

Period IV.—Europe in the 16th Century. A.D. 1494–1598. By A. H. Johnson, M.A., Historical Lecturer to Merton, Trinity, and University Colleges, Oxford. 7s. 6d.

Period V.—The Ascendancy of France. A.D. 1598–1715. By H. O. Wakeman, M.A., Fellow of All Souls College, and Tutor of Keble College, Oxford. 6s.

Period VI.—The Balance of Power. A.D. 1715–1789. By A. Hassall, M.A., Student of Christ Church, Oxford. 6s.

Period VII.—Revolutionary Europe. A.D. 1789–1815. By H. Morse Stephens, M.A., Professor of History at Cornell University, Ithaca, U.S.A. 6s.

Period VIII.—Modern Europe. A.D. 1815–1878. By G. W. Prothero, Litt. D., Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh.

THE ASCENDANCY
OF FRANCE

1598–1715

BY

HENRY OFFLEY WAKEMAN, M.A.

FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE

TUTOR OF KEBLE COLLEGE, OXFORD

AUTHOR OF ‘AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND’

PERIOD V

SECOND EDITION

London

RIVINGTON, PERCIVAL AND CO.

1897

[All rights reserved.]

PREFACE

I have not attempted in the following pages to write the history of Europe in the seventeenth century in detail. The chronicle of events can be found without difficulty in many other works. I have therefore endeavoured as far as possible to fix attention upon those events only which had permanent results, and upon those persons only whose life and character profoundly influenced those results. Other events and other persons I have merely referred to in passing, or left out of account altogether, such as for instance the history of Portugal and the Papacy, the internal affairs of Spain, Italy, and Russia. Following out this line of thought I have naturally found in the development of France the central fact of the period which gives unity to the whole. Round that development, and in relation to it, most of the other nations of Europe fall into their appropriate positions, and play their parts in the drama of the world’s progress. Such a method of reading the history of a complicated period may, of course, be open to objection from the point of view of absolute historical truth. The effort to give unity to a period of history may easily fall into the inaccuracy of exaggeration. The picture may become a caricature, or so strong a light may be shed on one part as to throw the rest into disproportionate gloom. It would be presumptuous in me to claim that I have avoided such dangers. All that I can say is, that they have been present to my mind continually as I was writing, and that I have been emboldened to face them both by the fact that the history of the seventeenth century lends itself in a very marked way to such a treatment, and by the conviction that it is far more important to the training of the human mind, and the true interests of historical truth that a beginner should learn the place which a period occupies in the story of the world than have an accurate knowledge of the smaller details of its history. To know the meaning and results of the Counter-Reformation is some education, to know the official and personal names of the Popes none at all.

With regard to the spelling of names I have endeavoured to follow what I humbly conceive to be the only reasonable and consistent rule, that of custom. It seems to me to be as pedantic to write Henri, Karl, or Friedrich, as it is admitted to be to write Wien or Napoli, and inconsistent on any theory except that of the law of custom to write anything else. But with regard to some names, custom permits more than one form of spelling. It is as customary to write Trier as Trêves, or Mainz as Mayence. These cases mainly arise with reference to names of places which are situated on border lands, and are spelt sometimes according to one language, and sometimes according to another. In these cases I have followed the language of the nation which was dominant in the period of which I treat, and accordingly write Alsace, Lorraine, Basel, Köln, Saluzzo, etc. The use of an historical atlas is presumed throughout.

H. O. W.

All Souls College, Oxford.

March, 1894.

CONTENTS

MAPS

GENEALOGICAL TABLES

CHAPTER I
EUROPE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Importance of the century—France at the beginning of the century—The States-General, the Parlement de Paris, Religious Toleration—Germany—The Emperor, the Imperial Courts, the Diet—Disunion of Germany—England—Spain—Italy.

Importance of the Seventeenth Century.

The seventeenth century is the period when Europe, shattered in its political and religious ideas by the Reformation, reconstructed its political system upon the principle of territorialism under the rule of absolute monarchs. It opens with Henry IV., it closes with Peter the Great. It reaches its climax in Louis XIV. and the Great Elector. It is therefore the century in which the principal European States took the form, and acquired the position in Europe, which they have held more or less up to the present time. A century, in which France takes the lead in European affairs, and enters on a course of embittered rivalry with Germany, in which England assumes a position of first importance in the affairs of Europe, in which the Emperor, ousted from all effective control over German politics, finds the true centre of his power on the Danube, in which Prussia becomes the dominant state in north Germany, in which Russia begins to drive in the Turkish outposts on the Pruth and the Euxine—a century, in short, which saw the birth of the Franco-German Question and of the Eastern Question—cannot be said to be deficient in modern interest. The map of Europe at the close of the seventeenth shows the same great divisions as it does at the close of the nineteenth century, with the notable exception of Italy. Prussia and Russia have grown bigger, France and Turkey have grown smaller, the Empire has become definitely Austrian, but in all its main divisions the political map of Europe is practically unchanged. The states which were formed in the general reconstruction of Europe after the religious wars of the sixteenth century are the states of which modern Europe is now composed. Great nations are apt to change their forms of internal government much more often than they do their political boundaries and influence; but it is a remarkable thing that, with the great exception of France, the principal European states possess at the present time not only a similar political position, but a similar form of government to that which they possessed at the close of the seventeenth century. In spite of the wave of revolutionary principles, which flowed out from France over Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, the principal states of Europe at the present time are in all essentials absolute monarchies, and these monarchies are as absolute now as they were then, with the two exceptions of Italy, which did not then exist, and France, which is now a Republic, but has been everything in turn and nothing long. The formation of the modern European states system is therefore the main element of continuous interest and importance in the history of the seventeenth century, that is to say, the acquisition by the chief European states of the boundaries, which they have since substantially retained, the adoption by them of the form of government to which they have since adhered, and the assumption by them, relatively to the other states, of a position and influence in the affairs of Europe which they have since enjoyed. The sixteenth century saw the final dismemberment of medieval Europe, the seventeenth saw its reconstruction in the modern form in which we know it now.

The condition of France, 1598.

Of the European nations which were profoundly affected by the Reformation, France was the first to emerge from the conflict. French Calvinism differed from the south German type by being more distinctly political in its objects, and the leaders of the French Catholics, especially the ambitious chiefs of the house of Guise, had quite as keen a desire for their own aggrandisement as they had for the supremacy of their religion. The religious wars in France soon became mainly faction fights among the nobles for political objects in which personal rivalry was embittered by religious division, and all honest and law-abiding citizens—that sturdy middle-class element which has always formed the backbone of the French nation—soon longed for the strong hand which should at any rate keep faction quiet. The authority of the Crown had ever been in France the sole guarantee of order and of progress. Under the weak princes of the House of Valois that guarantee ceased to exist. Shifty, irresolute, inconstant, they preferred the arts of the intriguer to the policy of the statesman, the poniard of the assassin to the sword of the soldier, and when Henry III., the murderer of the Duke of Guise, in his turn fell murdered by the dagger of the monk Clément, France drew a long sigh of relief. Like England after Bosworth Field, France after Ivry was ready to throw herself at the feet of a conqueror who was strong enough to ensure peace and suppress faction. The House of Bourbon ascended the French throne upon the same unwritten conditions as the House of Tudor ascended the English throne. It was to rule because it knew how to rule, and the conditions of its rule were to be internal peace, and national consolidation.

The States-General.

But the task before the first Bourbon was far more difficult than that which absorbed all the energies of the first Tudor. He had no machinery to his hand which he could use to veil the arbitrariness of his action, or to guide public opinion. Parliament in England had often been the terror of a weak king. The Tudors soon made it the tool of a strong king. In France Henry had to rely openly upon the powers of the Crown and upon military force. It is true that the States-General still existed, though they were seldom summoned, but their constitution and traditions rendered them unfit to play the part of an English Parliament. They met in three houses representing the Clergy, the Nobility, and the Commonalty, the latter house, the Tiers-Etat as it was called, being usually about as large as the other two put together; but instead of there being a political division running through the three estates of those for the policy of the Crown and those against it, as was usually the case in England, the tendency in France always was for the two privileged houses to coalesce against the Tiers-Etat. The Crown had therefore only to balance one against the other, and leave them to entangle themselves in mutual rivalries in order to gain the victory. In the long history of the English Parliament it is very rare to find serious questions raised between the two houses. Nobles and Commons have as a rule acted together for weal or for woe in attacking or supporting the policy of the Crown. The unity of Parliament has been its most significant feature. In France it has been quite otherwise. Mutual jealousy and social rivalry played their part with such effect that they destroyed the political usefulness of the States-General. Unable to act together they could not extort from the Crown either the power over the purse, or the right of legislation, which were the two effective checks upon the king’s prerogative exercised by the English Parliament. All that they could do was to present a list of grievances and ask for a remedy. They had no power whatever of compelling a favourable answer, much less of giving effect to it. The procedure was for each Estate to draw up its own list (cahier) of those matters which it wished to press upon the attention of the Crown. When the lists were completed they were formally presented to the king and a formal answer of acceptance or rejection was expected from him, but as the Estates separated directly the answer was given, the Crown was apt not to be over prompt in fulfilling its promises.

The Parlement de Paris.

As a constitutional check upon misgovernment the States-General in France were therefore of little use. That function, as far as it was discharged at all, had by accident devolved upon the Parlement de Paris. The Parlement was in its origin nothing more than a court of law which sat at Paris to administer justice between the king and his subjects, and between subject and subject. In course of time it grew into a corporation of lawyers and judges, not altogether unlike our Inns of Court in England amalgamated into one, having just that kind of political influence which a close and learned corporation, whose business it was to make by judicial decision a great deal of the law of the country, could not fail to have. In one point indeed the Parlement had almost established a definite right. As the highest court of the realm its duty was to register the edicts of the king, a duty which was easily turned into a right to refuse to register them if it so willed. Thus the Parlement claimed an indirect veto upon the royal legislation. It is true that the king could always override the refusal of the Parlement to register an edict by coming in person to its session and holding what was called a lit de justice; but this was a proceeding which involved a good deal of inconvenience, and was not unlikely to excite tumults; it would not therefore be resorted to except on critical occasions. Position of the Crown. So completely had the constitution of France become in its structure despotic, that there was absolutely no constitutional means of exercising control over the king’s will than this very doubtful right of the Parlement de Paris to refuse to register the king’s edict. And if there was no constitutional check upon the king’s will, there was also no machinery which the king could utilise in order to associate himself with his people in the task of government. He stood on a pedestal by himself in terrible isolation surrounded by his courtiers, faced by the nobility, backed by his army, unable to know his people’s wants, and unable to help them to know their own.

Religious toleration.

But this was not all. Henry IV. had to encounter open enmity abroad, and give an earnest of religious peace at home, as well as to crush civil dissensions. It was not till his conversion to Catholicism drew the teeth of Spain, and proved to the majority of his subjects that he desired above all things to be a national and not a party king, that he can be said really to have reigned. The peace of Vervins, concluded in 1598, marked the issue of France from the throes of her Reformation wars. Her religious struggle was over. Calvinism had made its great effort to win religious and political ascendency in France, and had failed. France was to remain a Catholic country, and the bull of absolution granted to Henry IV. by Pope Clement VIII. in 1595 duly emphasised the return of the Most Christian King into the pale of Catholic obedience. But if Calvinism had failed, neither had Papalism wholly won the day. Catholic, France had determined to be, but she was far from assuming as yet the mantle of the champion of rigid orthodoxy just laid down by Philip II. The Edict of Nantes. The same year which saw the death of Philip II. and the real beginning of the reign of Henry IV. saw also the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes with its announcement of the new policy of liberty of conscience. By this famous edict religious toleration and political recognition was accorded to the French Calvinists. They were to be allowed to worship as they pleased, provided they paid tithes to the Church, and observed religious festivals like other Frenchmen. They were to receive a grant from the State in return. They were to be equally eligible with Catholics for all public offices. They were to be represented in the Parlements, and were to have exclusive political control for eight years over certain towns in the south and west of France, of which the most important were Nismes, Montauban, and La Rochelle. Thus they obtained not merely toleration as a religious body, and part endowment by the State, but also recognition in certain places as a political organisation. The political settlement was evidently but a palliative, the religious settlement was a cure. No country as patriotic as France, no government as strong as an absolute monarchy could tolerate longer than was necessary an imperium in imperio under the control of a religious sect. But the toleration of Calvinism in a country professedly Catholic was a solution of the religious question thoroughly acceptable to the genius of the French nation. It enabled France at once to fix her whole attention upon the absorbing business of political aggrandisement. It excused her somewhat for not thinking it obligatory to play a purely Catholic rôle in the pursuit of that aggrandisement. The first of those nations of Europe, which had been seriously affected by the Reformation, to arrive at a satisfactory solution of the problem of religious division, she was able to set an example to Europe of a policy entirely outside religious considerations. Under a king who had conformed, but had not been converted, France, pacified, but not yet united, was ready to mix herself up in the web of political intrigue and religious rivalry in which Germany was helplessly struggling, with the simple if selfish object of using the misfortunes of her neighbours for her own advantage.

Germany: The Emperor.

The state of Germany was indeed pitiable. The Empire had become but the shadow of a great name. The successor of Augustus had nothing in common with his prototype but his title. Roman Emperor he might be in the language of ceremony, punctiliously might the imperial hierarchy of dignity be ordered according to the solemnities of the Golden Bull, but all the world knew that in spite of this wealth of tradition and of prescription, the Emperor could wield little more power in German politics than that which he derived from his hereditary dominions. The archduke of Austria must indeed be a figure in Germany under any circumstances, still more so if he happened to be also king of Hungary and king of Bohemia; but if the electors set the Imperial Crown at his feet and hailed him as Cæsar, though much was thereby added to his dignity and something to his legal rights, not one whit accrued to him of effective force. It is true that his legal position as head and judge over the princes accrued to him, not so much because he was emperor and the representative of Augustus and Charles the Great, as because he was German king and the successor of Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great. Nevertheless, the fact, from whatever quarter derived, that the German constitution gave to the Emperor the lordship over the other princes and the right of deciding disputes which arose between them, made him the only possible centre of German unity.

The Imperial Courts.

That right was exercised through a court (the Reichskammergericht) the members of which were mainly nominated by the princes themselves. For the purpose of ensuring the enforcement of its decrees, Germany was divided into circles, in which the princes and the representatives of the cities who were members of the diet met, and if necessary, raised troops to give effect to the sentences pronounced. Since the beginning of the Reformation, however, there had been a difficulty in getting this machinery to work owing to the religions dissensions, and the Emperor had begun the practice of referring imperial questions which had arisen to the Imperial or Aulic Council (Reichshofrath), which was entirely nominated by him and under his influence.

The Diet.

In all important matters of administrative policy the Emperors, since the middle of the fifteenth century, had been obliged to consult the Diet, but the Diet was in no sense a representative assembly of the classes of which the nation was composed, as were the Parliament of England and the States-General of France, but was merely a feudal assembly of the chief feudal vassals of the Empire. It was, in fact, a congress of petty sovereigns gathered under their suzerain. It was divided into three houses. The first consisted of six of the seven electors, three ecclesiastical, i.e. the archbishops of Köln, Mainz, and Trier, and three lay, the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg and the elector-palatine, for the fourth lay elector the king of Bohemia only appeared for an imperial election. The second was the House of Princes, the third that of the free Imperial Cities, but it was considered so inferior to the other houses that it was only permitted to discuss matters which had already received their assent. It is obvious that in an assembly so constituted the only interest powerfully represented was that of the princes, and the only influence likely to be exercised by it was in favour of that desire for complete independence, which was natural to a body of rulers who already enjoyed most of the prerogatives of sovereignty. German desire for unity. For there had ever been two divergent streams of tendency in German politics. Deep in the German heart lay a vague sense of nationality and patriotism, a dim desire that Germany should be one. This sentiment naturally centred round the Emperor as the visible head of German unity. If Germans ever were to be politically one, it could only be under the Emperor. There was no other possible head among the seething mass of jarring interests known geographically as Germany. The other tendency had sprung from the strong love of local independence characteristic of the Teutonic race. Desire for sovereignty among the Princes. Naturally each petty duke or prince tried to become as independent of outside authority as he could, and in the pursuit of this policy he found himself greatly aided by that spirit of local seclusion, which ever seeks to find its centre of patriotism in the side eddies of provincial life, rather than in the broad stream of the national existence. The Emperors of the House of Habsburg had fully recognised these facts, and, since the days of Maximilian I., had set themselves resolutely to the task of rebuilding the imperial authority, and making the imperial institutions the true and only centre of German unity. They might have succeeded, had it not been for two events, the concurrent effect of which was completely to shatter the half begun work. Effect of the Reformation. The first was the Reformation, the second was the long rivalry with France. The Reformation cut Germany rudely at first into two afterwards into three pieces. Lutheranism, which absorbed nearly all northern Germany between the Main and the Baltic, drew its strength especially from the support of the north German princes. Luther himself effected a closer alliance with the princes and the nobles than he did with the people. It was to them he appealed for protection in the days of his earlier struggles, on them that he trustfully leaned in the later days of his power. Naturally, therefore, Lutheranism gave a strong impulse and sanction to the desire, which the northern princes uniformly felt, to assert their independence of a Catholic emperor. Calvinism, spreading from republican Switzerland down the upper valley of the Rhine into the heart of Germany, had a no less fatal influence upon the centralising policy of the Emperors. Subversive in its tendencies and impatient of recognised authority, it intensified the spirit of dislike to autocratic institutions. Effect of the rivalry with France. Still, in spite of the terrible disruption of Germany caused by the Reformation, a sovereign so powerful and so cautious as Charles V. might have been able to weather the storm, without suffering any loss of prerogative or influence, had it not been for the constant and paramount necessity laid upon him of counteracting the machinations of an enemy ever wakeful and absolutely unscrupulous. As long as Francis I. lived Charles V. was never able seriously to apply himself to German affairs. When he was dead it was too late. The religious divisions of Germany had taken definite political shape, and were inspired with definite political ambitions. The Emperor had ceased to be the acknowledged political head of Germany. He had sunk into the inferior position of becoming merely the chief of one political and religious party.

Consequent disunion of Germany.

In this way the desire for political independence from the authority of the Emperor went hand in hand with the achievement of religious independence from the authority of the Church. The Emperors who followed Charles V. in the latter years of the sixteenth century, Ferdinand I., Maximilian II., and Rudolf II., so far from being able in the least to extend their prerogative in Germany, were barely able to retain what shreds of it yet remained. But towards the close of the century the onward and destructive march of Lutheranism and of Calvinism stopped. The Reformation spent itself as a living force. It had reached its utmost limits and slowly the tide began to turn. The Counter-Reformation, with the spiritual exercises of S. Ignatius in one hand and the sword in the other, went forth to win back half Germany to the faith. When the peace of Vervins set France free, Germany was at her weakest. Jarring interests, political dissensions, religious hatreds were rife through the length and breadth of that unhappy land. The Lutheran princes of the north had succeeded in throwing off the leadership of the Emperor without themselves producing either a leader or a policy. The Calvinist princes of the Rhineland, exasperated by the advance of the Counter-Reformation, were ready to throw all Germany into the crucible and rashly strike for a supremacy which they had not strength to win. In Bohemia men remembered with fierce glee the stubborn waggon fortresses of the unconquerable Ziska, and the concessions wrung from reluctant Pope and Emperor by the success of a rebellion. Meanwhile in Bavaria and the hereditary dominions of the House of Austria, by steady governmental pressure backed by the devotion and talent of the Society of Jesus, Protestantism was being gradually rooted out and swept away by the advancing tide of the Counter-Reformation. Yet the Emperor himself was incapable of directing the policy of his own party. A melancholy recluse given to astrology and fond of morbid religious exercises, Rudolf II. was the last man fitted to lead a crusade. He could not even inspire respect, much less command allegiance. Never certainly was a country in a more pitiable plight. Torn from end to end by religious dissension, pierced through and through by personal and provincial rivalries, without a single public man on either side sufficiently respected to command obedience, without unity of political or religious ideal even among the Protestants, without that last hope of expiring patriotism, the power of union in the face of the foreign aggressor, Germany at the close of the sixteenth century lay extended at the feet of her jealous rival, a helpless prey, whenever it pleased him to spring and put an end to her miseries.

England.

England, unlike France and Germany, had as yet escaped the necessity of making the sword the arbiter of religion, but she had not wholly settled her religious difficulties. Elizabeth, masterful in all things, had imposed upon the Church and the nation a solution of the religious question which was still upon its trial. The experiment of a Church, historically organised and doctrinally Catholic, but in hostility to the Pope, was hitherto unknown in the West, though common enough in the East; and it is not surprising that it soon found itself attacked from both sides by Roman Catholics and Protestants at once. During the reign of Elizabeth the personality of the Queen and the success of her policy, especially as the champion and leader of the national opposition to Spain which culminated in the defeat of the Armada in 1588, kept the disturbing elements in check. On the accession in 1603 of a prince who with some insight into statesmanship was wholly deficient in the faculty of governing, those elements rapidly gathered strength. When serious constitutional questions between the king and the Parliament were added to the religious complications, England soon became too much absorbed in her own internal affairs to be able to speak with authority in European politics. For fifty years after the accession of the House of Stuart, England became merely a diplomatic voice in Europe to which nations courteously listened but paid no attention.

Spain.

While England was failing to secure her newly won honours, Spain was trading upon a past reputation. Never was the retribution of an impossible policy so quick in coming. The transition from Philip II. to Philip III. is the transition from a first-rate to a third-rate power, and that without the shock of a great defeat. Enervated by a proud laziness, drained by a world-wide ambition, ruined by a false economy, depleted by a fatal fanaticism, Spain was already falling fast into the slough from which she is only just beginning now to emerge. Yet she was still a great power, great in her traditions, great in her well-trained infantry, great through her monopoly of the American trade. Had she but produced men instead of puppets for kings, and statesmen instead of favourites for ministers, she would quickly have recovered something of her ancient glory. Even under Philip III. she was always a power with which men had to reckon, and in strict family alliance with the House of Habsburg formed the kernel of the Catholic interest in Europe. By her possessions in the Netherlands, in Franche Comté and in the Pyrenees, she presented the most serious obstacle to the territorial aggrandisement of France.

Italy.

Patriotism was the very air the Spaniard breathed. In Italy it was a vice, for an Italian had no country for which to live or to die. Italy, since France and Spain had quarrelled over the division of its carcase, had ceased to be anything but a name. In the south, the Spanish House had made good its hold on Naples, in central Italy the States of the Church were thrust in like a great wedge to separate north and south. The north was still the battle-field between the rival powers. Venice lay entrenched along the eastern coast and commanded the mouth of the Brenner Pass, too formidable as yet to be attacked, too independent to be won, by either side. In the middle of the rich plain of Lombardy was the Milanese, which belonged to Spain, and was held by Austrian or Spanish troops, who kept up a precarious communication with Austria through the Valtelline and Tirol, or with Spain through the friendly republic of Genoa. To the west of the Milanese came Piedmont and Savoy, the duke of which from his geographical position was usually obliged to be on good terms with France, but respected the obligation no longer than necessary. Italy thus torn and divided was always ready to produce, whenever it was wanted, a crop of international questions of the greatest nicety for her neighbours to quarrel over, and, as the century advanced, she seemed more and more to find her appropriate function to lie in providing the necessary pawns for the game of diplomatic chess characteristic of the new European states’ system.

CHAPTER II
FRANCE UNDER HENRY IV.

Difficulties of Henry IV.—Henry IV. and Sully—Economical policy of Sully—His financial reforms—French taxation in the seventeenth century—Policy of Henry IV. towards the nobles—His foreign policy—Acquisition of Bresse and Bugey—The Cleves-Jülich question—Death of Henry IV.—Regency of Marie de Medicis—Mismanagement of affairs—The States-General of 1614—The Huguenot rising—Entry of Richelieu into the ministry.

Difficulties of Henry IV. 1596.

‘Now I am king!’ cried Henry IV. when he received the submission of the last of the Leaguers. He was right, for it was only then that he was able to turn his attention to the true business of a king, the good government of his people. The evils under which France groaned were mainly threefold: the selfishness and factiousness of the nobility, the religious dissensions, and the shameful financial mismanagement. As long as civil and foreign war was desolating the country, no steps could be taken to deal with these dangers, but directly the submission of the League and the absolution of Henry had produced internal quiet, and the treaty of Vervins restored external peace, Henry found his hands free to strike at the root of the evil. Twenty days before the treaty was signed the publication of the Edict of Nantes found the true solution of the religious difficulty. It secured to the Calvinists the freedom of conscience for which they had nominally fought, to the Catholics the religious ascendency which their numbers and traditions entitled them to demand. Nor could the most zealous of Leaguers refuse to recognise the justice of a compromise which the Pope himself had sanctioned. The dangers which threatened France from the factiousness of the nobility and the disorder of the finances did not admit of so simple a remedy. They required long years of patient, watchful and firm government, and Henry IV. was not able in the time allotted him to do more than make a beginning and set an example. For this purpose he called to his intimate counsels his old comrade in arms, the duke of Sully, whom he had known and valued since childhood. The whole internal administration of the country was confided to him under the king, and the title of Superintendant of the Finances, which was conferred on him in 1598, gave him special authority in that department.

Henry IV. and Sully.

For the twelve remaining years of the reign of Henry these two men were continuously and inseparably engaged upon the great work of the rehabilitation of the affairs of France. The very contrast between them in temperament and talents served to bind them the closer together and fit them for their joint work. Henry himself was a true Gascon, frank, open-hearted, open-minded, genial, generous, and perhaps boastful. Sully was severe, harsh, cold and reserved. With Henry pleasure, even dissipation, had ever held a foremost place. Unhappy in his marriage he had solaced himself with many mistresses and a large family of bastards, and even after he became king the recklessness of his expenditure, and the extravagance of his orgies occasioned scandal even in pleasure-loving Paris. Sully, on the other hand, was morose in manner and thrifty even to meanness in private life. Avaricious, incorruptible, indefatigable, intensely jealous of his authority, and proud of his services, he found his pleasure in the rooting out of abuse and his triumph in the overthrow of the evil-doer. Henry inspired love and loyalty in his people, Sully won their respect and their hatred. Yet neither was complete without the other. To Henry, gay, chivalrous and manly, human nature was a book more easily read, a tool more deftly used. His mind was more inventive, his heart more expansive, his conceptions far wider and deeper in their scope. In a word, he was a statesman, while Sully was an administrator, and France required the services of both. While Henry’s clear genius cut the knot of the religious question, and seized unerringly the moment to throw France boldly on to the track of her political greatness, Sully’s honest watchfulness was laying the foundations of economical resource, and purifying the streams of administrative policy, which alone could enable France to make the sacrifices necessary for the attainment of her political future.

Encouragement of agriculture.

The characteristic bent of Sully’s mind is most evident in his economical measures. He looked upon France as an essentially agricultural country, and he believed further that an agricultural population was a far more trustworthy support to the Crown than one engaged in industrial pursuits. Consequently he devoted all his efforts to the development of agriculture. France was to be the great producer of food for Europe. By the draining of the marshes, and the careful management of the forest-land, large tracts hitherto unproductive were brought under cultivation, and the country soon began to supply food products more than sufficient for her own wants. The removal of all export-duties on corn enabled her to sell this surplus to less favoured nations at considerable profit, without rendering herself dependent upon others for any prime necessity of national existence. In this Sully showed himself a true exponent of the economical ideas of the seventeenth century. At a period when Europe was torn with religious and political dissensions, when France especially was preparing to launch herself upon a career of aggrandisement, which was to evoke a hundred years of war, it seemed all important to politicians that a country should not be dependent upon any other for the chief necessities of life. It was not so much a principle of economical policy as a necessity of national safety which drove nations to make themselves as self-supporting as possible in days of almost universal war. They encouraged only such manufactures as were required by their own people, they prohibited the importation of foreign food products by high import-duties, they kept gold and silver as much as possible in the country, chiefly in order that the government might have ready to hand the means of waging war. It has been too much the fashion to look at the protective system of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the economical side alone. Its foundations are laid far more in the interests of prudent national policy than in those of a false economy, though it is true that hardly any statesman of the time fully realised how false the economy was. Sully certainly was no exception to the general rule. While encouraging agriculture as much as possible he deliberately depreciated manufactures, imposed duties on manufactured articles, prohibited the exportation of gold and silver, and did all in his power to hinder the establishment of new industries. Here the greater statesmanship of the king corrected the prejudices of the minister. Partial encouragement of manufactures. Henry at once perceived the political as well as the economical value of an industrial population and of national industries, encouraged the nascent silk manufactures of Lyons and Nismes, and the glass and pottery works of Paris and Nevers, promoted the construction of roads, and of the first of the great canals of France, that between the Loire and the Seine. In the department of foreign affairs, where the influence of Sully was less powerful, his efforts were even more observable. He renewed the extremely important capitulations with Turkey, which were the solid fruit of the alliance of Francis I. with the Sultan, and thus retained for France a predominant voice at the court of Constantinople and the larger share of the trade with that port. He made favourable treaties of commerce with England and Holland, which helped to encourage the exportation of French wines, and promoted the colonisation of Canada, where Champlain founded Quebec in 1608.

Financial reform.

The greatest debt which France owed to Sully was the reform of the financial administration. It is a singular thing that a nation which has shown itself in other departments of administration so persistent in its adherence to fixed principles, should have been content to manage the important department of finance at haphazard. From the time that France became a nation, to the time of the Revolution, she produced but four great finance ministers, Suger, Sully, Colbert, and Turgot, and of them the two most important, Sully and Colbert, were not so much great financiers as honest and sensible administrators. The business of Sully was to produce order out of chaos, to defeat corruption, to govern justly. He made no attempt to reorganise the finances of France, to introduce a new and better system of taxation, still less did he venture to interfere with privileges which rendered anything like a just incidence of taxation impossible. Nor indeed would he have wished to do so if he had dared. On the contrary he accepted the system as he found it, and contented himself with enforcing its proper observance. The only important novelty which he introduced was the tax known as the paulette, by which the judicial and financial officials were permitted to hand on their offices to their heirs on payment of the tax. This was in fact to create a caste of hereditary officials, and to add yet one more to the many privileged classes of France.

French Revenue, the Taille.

The revenue of the country was chiefly drawn from four sources known as the Taille, the Gabelle, the Aides, and the Douanes. Of these, the taille was the most lucrative, and was originally a direct tax upon property. But in course of time its mode of assessment became varied in different parts of France. In the pays d’election, or those provinces which originally appertained to the monarchy of France, such as Normandy, Touraine, the Isle de France, etc., the taille was still a property tax and was levied upon each man personally according to a computation of what he was worth; but in the pays d’état, or those provinces which had been annexed to the crown of France in more recent times, many of which had on annexation secured fiscal privileges which they had been accustomed to enjoy—such as Burgundy, Guienne, Provence, etc.—it was levied only upon land and was in fact a land tax and not a property tax. In the pays d’élection the nobles, in the pays d’état the terres nobles, i.e. the lands which were or once had been in the possession of the nobility, were free from taille, and so were the lands of the Church, which paid their tenths (décimes) instead. In itself there was nothing unjust about the taille, excepting the fact that as, owing to the exemptions, it fell almost entirely on the classes which had no political power, the temptation to increase it abnormally was a very strong one to a needy finance minister who was anxious not to make powerful enemies. But the real evil of the tax lay in the method of its assessment and collection in the pays d’election. The gross sum to be raised from each province was fixed by the government, and a contract made with a capitalist on the best terms available for the letting to him of the sole right of raising that sum from that particular province. The Intendant, the financial agent for the province, then proceeded to assess the total sum to be raised upon the different parishes, and the farmer general in his turn farmed out the raising of these smaller sums to subordinate agents of his own. Finally the inhabitants of each parish elected a committee to levy the parochial quota upon individuals. Nothing could well exceed the wastefulness and injustice of such a system. Every parish which had made or could make interest with the Intendant, every inhabitant who had interest with the assessment committee got the quota reduced at the expense of less fortunate neighbours. Each farmer and sub-farmer wrung the most he could out of an unfortunate peasantry, and was protected by a government which had already received all that was due to it of the tax. The only nominal check upon the farmers was the supervision of their accounts by the chambre des comptes, but that was a mere farce, as no attempt was made to ensure the accuracy of the registers upon which they worked. A system by which it mattered not a sou to the government to see that the tax was fairly levied, while it was to the direct interest of the officials to take care that it was unfairly levied, stands selfcondemned, but it was a system which was universal throughout France. By farming out the different branches of the revenue to harpies who fattened on the misery of the people, the government shirked the difficulty of having to deal with venal servants of its own, and reaped the benefit of a sure though diminished income at the price of abdicating one of the chief functions of government, and subjecting the innocent tax-payers to the worst form of governmental tyranny, a taxation both capricious and corrupt. When Sully turned his attention to the abuses of the system, it is said that the people were paying 200 millions of francs in taxes while the government received only 50 millions!

The Gabelle.

If the taille was the most lucrative tax, the Gabelle or salt tax was the most oppressive. Salt was a government monopoly farmed out to capitalists in the usual way, but the special grievance with regard to the tax did not lie in the fact that it was a monopoly, or that the quality of the government salt was bad, but in the assessment of the tax. The government laid down by decree the amount of salt which every Frenchman was supposed to require, or at any rate had to buy, and each household was assessed therefore at a sum representing the amount of salt legally consumable by the number of persons of whom it was composed. There is something ludicrous in the idea of a paternal government dictating to its children the amount of salt which is good for them, but there was little of a joke in it to the over-burdened French peasant, who was compelled to pay an extortionate sum for a far larger amount of an inferior commodity than he could possibly use or dispose of. The door was thus thrown open wide to corruption and to smuggling—those two ogres which ever prey upon a faulty fiscal system—but the abuse not only lasted until the Revolution but grew in intensity with increasing civilisation. In 1781, eight years before the Revolution broke out, it was calculated that it cost 18 million livres a year to bring the treasury a revenue of 72 million livres from the gabelle; in other words, that a fourth of the produce of the tax was spent in collecting it, while the yearly convictions for smuggling amounted to between three and four thousand.

The Aides and Douanes.

The Aides and the Douanes, which answered roughly to the modern excise and customs duties, were not open to such obvious objections, but they too played their part in helping to discourage trade and impoverish the people. Each province, almost each district of France, had its own internal customs, and levied a toll which was nearly prohibitive on the circulation of wealth. Each branch of indirect taxation was farmed out, and gave rise to a needy host of agents, inspectors, and tax-gatherers, who looked to make their fortune out of the necessities of the tax-payers. But this was not all. Besides the taxes authorised by government and paid directly or through farmers to the national exchequer, there were, when Sully took charge of the finances, many other payments of a most oppressive nature exacted from the people, which were in fact part of the terrible legacy of the long civil wars. Military requisitions and charges upon revenue.Governors of provinces and commandants of garrisons levied what they considered necessary for the maintenance of the troops, without any authorisation from the treasury, and without rendering any account of the sums so raised. Many of the nobles whose assistance or whose neutrality Henry had found it prudent to buy, received their gratifications in the form of charges upon the revenue arising from certain districts, and, as there was no check exercised by the government over the amounts raised, they frequently levied upon the wretched people three or four times the sum originally due.

Administrative measures of Sully.

A system so badly conceived and so iniquitously administered as this was calculated both to impoverish the people and to dry up the sources of wealth. Sully did not attempt to deal with the larger problem except by encouraging agriculture and permitting the free exportation of corn, but he applied himself diligently to the humbler task of reforming the financial administration. In this he kept two principles steadily in view, to insist rigorously that the levy of all sums on the people should be definitely authorised by the government, and to enforce a proper system of audit of the national finances. Thus he obliged the military governors to apply to the treasury for the pay of their troops, he abolished a crowd of useless and expensive financial agents and forced them to refund their ill-gotten gains, he caused the assessment registers to be verified and corrected, and swept away at a blow a number of false claims for exemption which had been corruptly admitted. By such measures he soon succeeded in restoring order to the finances. In twelve years of rigorous and just administration he relieved the French people from paying unauthorised and illegal taxation, and this saved them more than 120 millions of francs annually, he remitted to them more than 20 millions of arrears, paid off or cancelled 330 millions of debt, provided the necessary resources for the maintenance of a large army, and an expensive court, and stored up in the cellars of the Bastille a treasure of 30 millions against unforeseen contingencies. Well may France look upon him and his master as the joint founders of her national greatness.

Relations between the Crown and the Nobles.

The restoration of order after thirty years of civil war was a task far more difficult and no less necessary than the purification of the financial system. In France the Crown had ever been the champion of order and centralisation, the nobles the representatives of disorder and local independence. In England the nobles were a class singled out from their fellow-countrymen by greater responsibilities, in France they formed a caste distinguished from the inferior people by special privileges. Their tendency therefore naturally was to magnify those privileges, and to intensify the distinctions which separated them both from the king and the Commonalty, to assert rights of their own rather than assist in vindicating the rights of others. Nothing is more significant in the history of England than the fact that throughout the constitutional struggles of the medieval period the nobles as a whole were anxious to make common cause with the people and content to share their victory with them. Parliament, the representative of the nation in its three estates, thus became by their common action the depositary and the safeguard of the national liberty. In France on the other hand the nobles are ever found fighting for their own class interests. Fenced round by their own privileges, regardless of the common weal, they aspired to an independence which could not but be destructive of national life. The people learned to look to the Crown as their protector from the licence of the nobles, to welcome its increasing power as representing greater security of life and property. A centralised and absolute Crown might possibly be a curse in the future, a decentralised and independent nobility was beyond question a curse evident and imminent in the present. And so the States-General, the representative of France in her three estates, was permitted to sink into oblivion by a Crown which would have no rival, and a nation which preferred the maintenance of its class jealousies to that union of classes which could alone secure liberty.

Policy of Henry IV. towards the nobles.

The religious wars had afforded a great opportunity to the nobles of asserting their independence. Many of them had embraced Calvinism, and so gained for their disintegrating aspirations a religious sanction and a political ideal. It is said that by the Edict of Nantes Calvinistic worship was legalised in 3500 castles. Faction is ever strong when the Crown is weak, and Henry IV. had to buy the doubtful allegiance of many of the smaller nobles by sheer bribery, before he could establish himself upon the throne. But no sooner had he made his position secure than the nobles found that they had a master. They might be courtiers but not politicians. Henry deliberately intrusted the affairs of government to men of business of inferior rank, dependent on himself, and jealous of the nobles. Rigid inquiry was made into the privileges claimed by the nobles, and those which could not be substantiated were rescinded. The institution of the paulette was intended to create a noblesse of the robe as a counterpoise to the noblesse of the sword. Duelling, that much-loved privilege of a gentleman, was absolutely forbidden, and the issue of letters of pardon to those who killed their adversary in a duel stopped. The nobles, accustomed to the licence of civil war, soon grew restive under the strong hand of Henry. The conspiracy of Biron, 1602. The maréchal de Biron, on the part of the Catholics, and the duc de Bouillon, the leader of the Huguenots, permitted themselves to enter into relations with Savoy and Spain, and to talk somewhat vaguely of a partition of France, in a way which was incompatible with loyalty to the king. When Henry struck he struck hard. The thirty-two wounds which Biron had received in the service of France failed to obtain his pardon. In 1602 he was executed, and his death gave the signal for the beginning of that war of revenge on the part of the Crown against the nobles, which was carried on with such relentless severity by Richelieu, and did not cease until the triumph of the Crown was assured under Louis XIV. The duc de Bouillon escaped to Germany, the comte d’Auvergne was imprisoned, the duc d’Epernon, frightened into submission, was pardoned. Perhaps Henry himself hardly dared to touch the former companion of Henry III., the governor of half France, and the proudest of all her proud nobility. Four years afterwards the vengeance of Henry was still awake though all the excitement and danger had long ago quieted down. In 1606 he travelled through the disaffected districts of the south and south-west accompanied by an army, destroyed several castles belonging to the nobles, and put to death, after sentences by special tribunals, those who had taken a prominent part in the late troubles.

MAP SHOWING THE TERRITORIAL GAINS OF FRANCE IN THE 17th CENTURY.

But it was in the sphere of foreign affairs that the genius of Henry IV. fully displayed itself. For many years France had played a sorry part in European politics. If Francis I. had done something to preserve Europe from falling under the yoke of Charles V., men also remembered that he was the perjured of Madrid, the abettor and the ally of the Turk. Foreign policy of Henry IV. Since his death France had fallen lower and lower in the scale of nations, until under the stress of the religious wars she seemed to bid fair to become another Italy, a plaything tossed to and fro among the nations of Europe. It was the stubbornness of the Dutch, and the craft of Elizabeth, not the patriotism of Frenchmen, which had saved France from the yoke of Philip II. in that terrible time. After the peace of Vervins Henry had to restore the national prestige, and regain the national influence which had died almost to nothing. The indefensible frontier of France. The great danger to France lay from the pressure exercised upon an indefensible frontier on all sides by the Austro-Spanish power. While Spain held Roussillon, Franche-Comté, and the Netherlands, and could reckon on the vassalage of Savoy, while the passes of the Vosges were in the hands of the Empire, the Austro-Spanish House held the gates of France. France could not breathe with the hand of her enemy on her throat. But the strength of a chain is that of its weakest link, and Henry’s eagle eye soon detected the weak place in the circle of iron which bound him. It lay in north Italy, the old battle-field of France and Spain. The Milanese was a rich open country, depending for its protection from attack upon its fortresses and its rivers. It was a fief of the Empire in the possession of Spain, and its communications with Spain by sea through the friendly port of Genoa were more easy than with Germany, through the tedious and often difficult mountain paths which connected the Valtelline with the Brenner pass and the valley of the Inn. It lay therefore invitingly open to attack from the mountains of Savoy on the west, and those of the Grisons on the north, and if once it fell into the hands of France, not only would the chain which bound her be broken, but a terrible counterblow would be dealt to the influence of the Austro-Spanish House in Europe, for through Milan ran the road by which Spain could best open communications in safety with south Germany and Franche-Comté. If that way was blocked, the only route possible for the troops and treasure of Spain was the long sea voyage by the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel to Antwerp and the Spanish Netherlands, a route fraught with peril from the storms which rage round Cape Finisterre, and from the English and French privateers which swarmed in the narrow seas.

Importance of Savoy.

In Italy, therefore, lay the opportunity of France, and Savoy held the key of the position. The duchy of Savoy, which still extended as far as the Rhone, and disputed with the king of France for the rule over Provence and Dauphiné, had been gradually pushed by its more powerful neighbour more and more towards Italy. Its duke had quite lately established himself in his capital of Turin at the foot of the mountain, and his ambition was to become an Italian prince. But though Piedmont and not Savoy had become the centre of his power, the border land of Savoy and not the Italian land of Piedmont became necessarily the centre of his policy. Situated on the mountains between France and the Milanese, Savoy held the gates both of France and of Imperial Italy. Through her mountain passes could pour, when she gave the word, the troops of France into the fertile plains of Lombardy, or those of the Habsburgs into the valley of the Rhone. A position so decisive and so dangerous rendered a consistent policy impossible. Courted by both parties, her opportunity lay in playing off one against the other as long as possible, but her safety necessitated the choice of the stronger for her ally in the end. A misreading of the political barometer at a critical moment would mean nothing less than national extinction. From the time that the rivalry between France and the Austro-Spanish power began to develop itself in Italy, the dukes of Savoy had been compelled to follow this tortuous policy. During the Italian expeditions of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. they were on the side of victorious France, but in the war between Francis I. and Charles V. Savoy veered to the side of the Emperor. Punished for this by the occupation of his country by French troops for twenty-five years, the duke was reinstated in his dominions at the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), subject to the continued occupation by France of six fortresses, including Susa and Pinerolo, which commanded the gates of important passes through the Alps. In the troubles which afflicted France under the later Valois kings, Charles Emmanuel of Savoy succeeded in obtaining possession of Saluzzo; and although it was provided in the treaty of Vervins that he should restore it, the provision remained a dead letter. This gave Henry IV. the opportunity he desired of recalling Savoy to the French alliance. In 1600, after the death of Gabrielle d’Estrées, he had procured a divorce from his first wife Marguerite de Valois, and had strengthened his influence in Italy by his marriage with Marie de Médicis, the daughter of the grand-duke of Tuscany. Cession of Bresse and Bugey to France. In the same year he marched upon Savoy and quickly overran it, but in January 1601 agreed to a treaty with the young duke Charles Emmanuel, who had succeeded Emmanuel Philibert in 1580, by which Saluzzo was left in the hands of Savoy, but France obtained instead the two small duchies of Bresse and Bugey. By this treaty Savoy was brought back into alliance with France at the price of the surrender of a distant possession, which, in the hands of France, could not but be considered a standing menace and a cause of hostility by the court of Turin.

Thus Henry IV. laid the foundations of the policy afterwards so successfully pursued in Italy by Richelieu. In fact, to both of these great statesmen the end to be attained was the same. The abasement of the Austro-Spanish House in the interests of France was the beginning and end of their foreign policy. But Henry had not the same opportunities of putting his designs into execution which were enjoyed by his successor. Attack upon the Austro-Spanish House. It is difficult to say how far the Great Design attributed to Henry in the Memoirs of Sully was ever more than a dream. The Great Design. Statesmen have often sought relief from the ennui engendered by the pettiness of diplomatic routine in the delightful task of building political castles in the air, and it is likely enough that Henry, in his more imaginative moments, conceived of a Europe in which religious wars should cease and national dissensions rest, at the bidding of an arbitration court which represented a confederacy of free states, and was the mouthpiece of a law of religious toleration. It is not less likely that his shrewd genius also foresaw that in a Europe whose unity depended on political confederacy, whose peace was secured by religious toleration, there would be no room for the Holy Roman Empire or for the monarchy of Spain. The destruction of the Austro-Spanish House was a condition precedent to the success of the Great Design. If Henry ever intended seriously to try to combine those who represented the political forces of Protestantism in a confederacy against Spain and the Empire, based on a recognition of the three religions, he must have abandoned the attempt as hopeless on the death of Elizabeth in 1603.

The Cleves-Jülich question.

A few years later, however, an opportunity presented itself of dealing a blow at the Austro-Spanish House in a less original but equally effective way. In 1609 John William,[1] duke of Cleves, Jülich, and Berg died without children, and the right of succession was claimed by two princes. John Sigismund, the elector of Brandenburg, whose wife was the child of the eldest daughter of William the Rich, brother and predecessor of the last duke, rested his wife’s claim partly on his descent from the elder branch, and partly on a will made by William the Rich in which he gave the descendants of the elder daughter preference over those of the younger. The count palatine of Neuburg had married a younger daughter of William the Rich, who claimed the inheritance as being the nearest of kin. The eldest sister of John William being dead, she made over her claim to her son Wolfgang William. The question was therefore mainly the old one of the eldest by descent against the nearest of kin, and was eminently one for the imperial courts to decide. But the matter was complicated by religious considerations. The three duchies lay along the course of the lower Rhine from the frontiers of the United Provinces nearly to Andernach, enclosing within their embraces a considerable part of the archbishopric of Köln. The population was Catholic but both the claimants were Lutherans, and on the principle of cujus regio ejus religio, laid down by the religious peace of Augsburg, if the duchies passed into Lutheran hands, there was a strong probability that they would before long not only become Lutheran themselves, but drag the vacillating archbishopric of Köln with them. The Emperor, Rudolf, in order to guard against this danger, at once claimed the right of administering the duchies until the question of the succession was settled, and sent an army to occupy Jülich. But if the Catholics could not permit the duchies to fall into Lutheran hands, still less could Protestant or French interests see unmoved the imperial armies encamped on the borders of the United Provinces, in close proximity to the frontiers of France and the Spanish Netherlands. An imperial army on the lower Rhine was a menace alike to north German Protestantism, to the hardly won Dutch independence, and to English and French jealousy.

League under Henry IV. against the Emperor, 1610.

Henry IV. seized the opportunity. He at once declared himself the protector of the rights of the elector of Brandenburg and the count of Neuburg, and put himself at the head of an alliance of the enemies of the Austro-Spanish House. England, the United Provinces, the German Protestant Union, Venice and Savoy responded to his call. Three French armies were set on foot, one was directed to the Pyrenees, the second under Lesdiguières was to co-operate with Savoy and Venice in the conquest of the Milanese, while the third, under the command of the king himself, attacked Jülich and occupied the duchies in conjunction with the Dutch and English contingents and the German Protestants. It seemed as if the death-knell of the Austro-Spanish power had sounded. Rudolf II., ignorant of politics and half-crazed in intellect, was implicated in serious quarrels with his unwilling subjects of Bohemia and Hungary. In Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, Ferdinand, the nephew of the Emperor, was, with the help of the Jesuits, waging an ardent and determined war against the Calvinism which threatened to take a strong root even in the hereditary dominions of the Habsburgs. Wanting in money, wanting in leadership, wanting in unity, the power of Austria had no troops on which it could depend, no subjects which it could trust. Nor was Spain in much better plight. Exhausted by the ambition of Philip II., misgoverned by a weak king and an incapable minister, she had chosen this very time gratuitously to deal a serious blow to her own prosperity by expelling from her borders the Moriscoes, the most laborious and intelligent of her working population. It was clear that she could do little more to help the cause than to defend her own frontiers, and hold the Milanese against the attacks of the allies. The forces of the Catholic League, the resources of Maximilian of Bavaria, and the genius of his general Tilly, were in fact all that Catholicism and the Austro-Spanish power had to rely upon in the death duel in which she had almost by inadvertence engaged herself. Assassination of Henry IV. Help came from a quarter the least expected. A terrible crime struck France with tragic suddenness to her knees and saved the House of Austria. As Henry IV. passed through the streets of Paris to visit his minister Sully, but two days before the date fixed for his departure for the campaign, a fanatic named Ravaillac plunged a dagger into his heart. With Henry IV. died the combination of which he was the head and soul, and the capture of Jülich from the imperialists by Maurice of Nassau, aided by a small English contingent, was the only step taken in the direction of realising the Great Design of the first of the Bourbons.

Marie de Medicis declared Regent.

The dagger of Ravaillac not only saved the Austro-Spanish House but plunged France into fifteen years of misery and dishonour. The young king Louis XIII. was but nine years old and a regency was inevitable. The duc d’Épernon was the only man who showed the necessary energy and presence of mind to deal with the crisis which had so suddenly arisen. Surrounding the palace and the Hôtel de Ville with his own troops and those of the other nobles on whom he could rely, he entered the chamber where the Parlement was assembled, and demanded that they should at once recognise the queen-mother as regent. Pointing significantly to his sword he said: ‘This sword is as yet in its scabbard, but if the queen is not declared regent before this assembly separates, I foresee that it will have to be drawn. That which can be done to-day without danger cannot be done to-morrow without difficulty and bloodshed.’ There were many in the Parlement who were not sorry to see that body thus suddenly raised into the unaccustomed position of the arbiter of the government of France. There were many more who found the arguments of Épernon too powerful to be resisted, and Marie was without further question recognised by a decree of the Parlement as regent of the kingdom during the minority of the king, and invested with the full powers of the crown. A Council of Regency was at once formed from among the leaders of the nobility, and thus fell in a moment the whole structure of government which Henry IV. and Sully had laboured so hard to erect. The nobles resumed their place at the head of affairs. Sully, who alone might have had influence enough to stop this disastrous counter-revolution, lost his courage, thought only of securing his own safety, and after a few ineffectual protests retired into private life. The treasure which he had so painfully amassed was squandered among the nobles to buy their adherence to the new government. Reversal of the policy of Henry IV. The regent, devoted in her inmost heart to Spain, and dreading the risk of foreign war, hastened to disband the larger part of the troops which Henry IV. had collected, and to set on foot secret negotiations with the court of Spain. After the capture of Jülich, on September 1st, 1610, by which all danger of Imperial aggression in the lower Rhineland was taken away, she openly announced her intention to withdraw altogether from the war, and to ally herself with Spain through the double marriage of her daughter Elizabeth to the heir to the Spanish crown, and of Anne of Austria, the eldest daughter of Philip III., to the young king of France. Six months after the murder of Henry IV. his whole policy at home and abroad had been reversed. The great combination against the House of Austria fell to pieces when France retired. The German Protestants and the Dutch made their peace with the Emperor by the truce of Willstedt, signed in October 1610. The duke of Savoy, betrayed by France, had to make his peace as best he could with Spain, and the key of Italy was once more thrown away. At home, disorder corruption and anarchy raised their heads again, and the selfish and factious nobility tore France in pieces in a struggle in which their desire for places and money was hardly disguised by a thin veneer of political ambition.

Influence of the maréchal d’Ancre.

For seven years Marie held the reins of government. She was a vain, irritable, and intriguing woman with little of the talent for rule hereditary in her family, and much of the dependence upon stronger natures characteristic of her sex. They were years of discord and disgrace. The real rulers of France were the Italian adventurers Leonora Galigai and her husband, whom the weakness of Marie actually raised to the dignity of a marshal of France, although he had never seen a shot fired in earnest. The nobles were justly enraged at the prostitution of an office, which they considered one of the chief prizes of their order, and bitterly jealous of the influence of a parvenu like the maréchal d’Ancre. Twice they rose in rebellion under the leadership of the worthless prince de Condé,[2] but d’Ancre and Marie knew well the sop to throw to that Cerberus. A quarter of a million of livres purchased the treaty of Ste. Menehould on May 15th, 1614, and six million that of Loudun in May 1616, and the Regent and her minister quietly pursued their policy unmoved by demands for reform which died in the presence of gold. The feeble ray of dying constitutionalism alone sheds a pale gleam of interest over the dreary years. Partly in the hopes of strengthening her own position, partly to take a cry, always dangerous, out of the mouth of Condé, Marie de Médicis consented to summon once more the States-General of France and ask their advice upon the grievances of the kingdom.

The melancholy interest which surrounds a deathbed attaches to this the last meeting of the States-General of monarchical France. Meeting of the States-General, 1614. The Estates assembled at Paris on the 14th of October 1614, according to their three orders. There appeared 140 representatives of the clergy, 132 of the noblesse, 192 of the Tiers État, but these last were not in any real sense representatives of the commonalty of France. The name of a merchant or a farmer or a small landowner does not appear among them. They were for the most part of the official and professional classes, officers of the petty districts into which France was divided, financial and municipal officers, with a sprinkling of lawyers and citizens, and they at once assumed the rôle which their composition marked out for them, and organised themselves as the official order in opposition to the other orders of the clergy and the noblesse. Quarrels between the orders. From the beginning the jealousy of the three orders among themselves, and the fatal determination of the Tiers État to defend the privileges of their own official class against the nobles, instead of urging the grievances of the country upon the Crown, rendered the possibility of obtaining any real check upon the Crown absolutely hopeless. The nobles not unnaturally looked with jealous eyes on the gradual formation of an hereditary privileged class of officials, by means of the purchase of offices and the right of transmission secured by the paulette, which could not fail to grow in a little time into a second noblesse, and they directed their efforts mainly to procuring the abolition of purchase in the civil services. The Tiers État on their side, numbering as they did but comparatively few of the privileged ‘exempt’ among their ranks, fixed their eyes on the inordinate pensions enjoyed by the great nobles, and demanded the abolition of the pension list and the reduction of the taille. This was to hit the nobles in their weakest place, and the contention between the two orders became so keen that the court had to interfere and bring about a reconciliation. Hardly however had the Tiers État finished their controversy with the nobles, than they became involved in a quarrel with the clergy. The magistracy, especially the lawyers, were strongly Gallican in their views of ecclesiastical government, that is, they maintained the right of the national authorities to govern the Church in France in all matters which were not directly spiritual in their nature, and repudiated interference from the Pope. Especially they disliked the Jesuits, and wished to avoid the recognition of the decrees of the Council of Trent, which had not as yet been formally accepted by France. The Tiers État accordingly drew up an article in their cahier, or list of grievances, which, under the form of asserting the right divine of the French kings, and denouncing the crime of regicide, impliedly denied the right of the popes to depose kings and absolve subjects from their allegiance. At once the whole question between the Gallicans and the Ultramontanes was raised, and for more than a month no other matter was discussed among the Estates. The nobles sided with the clergy, and agreed with them on twenty-four articles representing their common views, among which the recognition of the decrees of Trent and the maintenance of the authority of the Holy See assumed an equal place of importance with the union of Navarre and Béarn to France, and the abolition of the paulette and the purchase system. The Parlement supported the Tiers Etat, and by its interference introduced one more cause of dissension. Finally, the court had again to interfere and order the Tiers Etat to omit the objectionable article from their cahier. Reforms brought about by the States-General. Yet in spite of these suicidal quarrels, which proved the unfitness of the States-General to undertake constitutional responsibilities, their meeting was not wholly useless. Differing on almost all other questions, the three orders were agreed upon an attack upon the financial administration. Jeannin, the finance minister, was, in spite of the efforts of the court, forced to produce accounts, which, when produced, showed clearly enough that none had been kept which were fit for production. The consent of the Crown was obtained to a considerable reduction of the pension list, the suppression of the paulette, and the erection of a special court to control the finances. Endowed with no legislative power, all that the Estates could do in the way of ameliorating the government was to make representations and extort promises, and this they did as effectively as circumstances permitted in the most important department of administration. If it must be allowed that they did much to destroy their own influence and render themselves ridiculous by their jealousy and quarrelsomeness, it must also be remembered that no king ever dared to summon them again until monarchy was tottering to its fall.

Fall of the maréchal d’Ancre. Ministry of Luynes, 1617.

Louis was declared of age just before the meeting of the States-General in 1614, when he had reached his fourteenth year. In 1616 the hated double marriage with Spain was celebrated, and Marie’s triumph was complete. It was short-lived—Louis himself shared the universal hatred felt for the maréchal d’Ancre. Urged on by his friend and fellow-sportsman the count de Luynes, he determined to take the government into his own hands. A third rising of the nobles at the beginning of 1617 professed as its object the saving of the king from the hands of a foreigner. Only the queen-mother supported her favourite, but she was powerless against her son. As the maréchal entered the Louvre on the 25th of April 1617, he was ordered in the king’s name to surrender his sword. On his refusal the guard fired and he fell dead. His wife was not long in following him. Condemned on an absurd charge of sorcery, she was executed shortly after. The queen-mother was obliged to retire to Blois, and Louis, seeing his oppressors so successfully disposed of, felt that at last he was king. He was mistaken. He had only exchanged one master for another. Luynes, who succeeded to the power formerly exercised by the maréchal d’Ancre, soon proved neither more capable or honest in administration, nor more agreeable to the nobles. The queen-mother never ceased her intrigues to regain her power, intrigues which became daily more dangerous as they were directed by the unseen hand of Richelieu. In 1619 the old duke of Epernon, in 1620 the dukes of Mayenne and Vendôme, in alliance with the Huguenots under Rohan and La Tremouille, rose in her favour, and Louis and his favourite found themselves obliged to come to an arrangement with her.

Rising of the Huguenots, 1620.

But no sooner had the treaty of Angoulême, made in February 1619, and confirmed in 1620, restored harmony between Louis and his mother and the nobles, than the Huguenots, who wished to take advantage of the troubles of the court in order to increase their political independence, threw all the south of France into a blaze. Frightened by the forced restoration of Catholicism in Béarn in 1620, they struck boldly for independence, dreamed of a Huguenot republic in the south of France, and were content to see the dismemberment of the nation, if by it they could satisfy their personal ambition. Wherever the eye turned among the various interests of which France was composed, whether upon Luynes and the courtiers, upon the queen-mother and her rival court, upon Condé and the nobles, upon Rohan and the Huguenots, the same picture of self-seeking ambition and personal aims was everywhere presented. Each one for himself and no one for the country was the motto of all among the leaders of France with two exceptions. The king himself and Richelieu the young bishop of Luçon, at that time in disgrace with his patroness Marie de Médicis, were the only ones in whose breasts the love of France burned with a pure and unsullied flame, and the hour had not yet struck which was to bind them together in a common work for the common weal. Meanwhile the crisis was a serious one, and Louis set himself manfully to meet it. The clash of arms, and the threat of danger, always brought out the stronger parts of his nature. He confirmed the Edict of Nantes, then at the head of a large army, after quieting the north, he marched towards the great Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle and captured S. Jean d’Angely in spite of the efforts of Soubise. Leaving the due d’Epernon to form the siege of La Rochelle, he directed all his energies to the capture of Montauban, the great Huguenot stronghold of the south, while Montmorency subdued the Cevennes. For three months the stout city resisted all the ill-directed efforts of the royal army, and in November 1621 the king sullenly withdrew the remnants of his perishing troops. The death of Luynes from a fever caught in camp did much to make peace possible, and the victory of Louis and Condé over Soubise in the marches of Rie in April 1622 brought it near. The Huguenots had come to see that without foreign assistance their cause was hopeless. The duc de Bouillon remained immovable in the north. Lesdiguières, the old Huguenot leader, became a Catholic and received the bâton of Constable. La Force, the heroic defender of Montauban, accepted the rank of marshal of France and a gift of 200,000 crowns. Rohan alone remained steadfast, but he too was forced to accept the inevitable, when it became clear that Montpellier, the last Huguenot fortress of the south, must surrender. The peace of Montpellier, 1622. Entry of Richelieu into the Ministry. The peace of Montpellier, signed on the 19th October 1622, marks the first great step taken by the Crown towards the destruction of the Huguenots as a political organisation. By it religious toleration was secured to them, but they were forbidden to hold political assemblies of any kind whatever. All fortifications recently raised by them were to be demolished, and La Rochelle and Montauban were to be for the future the only guaranteed towns. The victory of France over the Huguenots had results far more extended than appeared upon the surface. The restoration of civil order in the country naturally led to an attempt to restore personal harmony at court, and under the auspices of La Vieuville, who now exercised the chief influence in the ministry, a settlement of the questions still at issue between the king and his mother was effected. One of the conditions of this settlement was the entry of Richelieu into the royal council. From that day a new era dawned for France.

CHAPTER III
THE COUNTER-REFORMATION AND RELIGIOUS TROUBLES IN GERMANY

Causes of the Counter-Reformation—The weakness of Protestantism—The revival in the Church—The influence of the Jesuits—Beginning of the Counter-Reformation in Poland, in Germany, in the Austrian dominions—Questions still unsettled in Germany, the position of the Calvinists, the secularised lands, the ecclesiastical reservation—Dangerous position of the Calvinists of the Rhineland—The troubles of Donauwörth—Formation of the Calvinist Union and the Catholic League—Constitutional difficulties between the Emperor and the Bohemians—Revolt of the Bohemian Protestants—The throwing from the windows.

Causes of the Counter-Reformation.

The reaction against Protestantism in Europe began to make itself felt in the concluding years of the sixteenth century. Like all great movements in the religious, as in the political, sphere, it owed its existence to many complex causes. To some extent racial distinctions asserted themselves. The Romance-speaking nations and the Sclavonic peoples, roughly speaking, after a moment of hesitation declared plainly against Protestantism. To a larger extent political reasons dictated the attitude of governments, and governments were able to do much towards defining the religion of their subjects. The determined stand made by Spain in defence of Catholicism was greatly affected by the ambition of Philip II. to make himself master of Europe. The effective opposition to the domination of Spain offered by Elizabeth was far more due to zeal for the independence and commercial prosperity of England than to differences of faith. The final resolve of France to remain distinctly Catholic was, as we have seen, due to the fact that she prized her unity before everything, and the Huguenots were the party of disruption.

Inherent weakness of Protestantism.

But after making all allowance for the influence of other considerations, the reasons which determined the course of events remained always religious. Protestantism was at the first the expression of a great moral revolution. The religious and moral nature of man rose in rebellion against a distorted faith, and an immoral system which seemed incapable of reform. Based mainly on a negative theology, it was at its strongest as long as its work was almost wholly destructive. The overthrow of moral abuse, the attack on wrongly defined faith was easy to men inspired with the zeal of a crusade on behalf of truth. But when it, in its turn, was called upon by the necessities of controversy to attempt to construct a system of its own, to lay down principles, to explain truth, its weakness became evident. Quickly divided into the two great schools named after Luther and Calvin, in hopeless and virulent antagonism, it was soon seen that in each division the tendency was still further to define and still further to divide. Confession followed confession in the hopeless attempt to arrive at unity through the expression of self-evident, perfect, truth in human language. The only result was greater division. Lutheranism, to avoid the danger of disruption, took refuge under the wing of the State, and as it became more and more merely the moral department of governments, it lost more and more its powers over mankind. From the middle of the sixteenth century its progress began to cease, and when progress stops in a religious movement, reaction begins. Calvinism showed more vitality. It was more aggressive and lent itself as readily to the aid of those opposed to governmental centralisation, as Lutheranism did to the assistance of the governments themselves. Its stern creed, with its strong tendency to fanaticism and bigotry, produced a type of character always concentrated and effective, and often lofty and severe. It was seen at its best when combined with the spirit of patriotism and liberty in the Dutch and the Swiss, at its worst when degraded into a pretext for selfishness and faction in France and in Germany. At one time it looked as if it was going to carry everything before it. Firmly rooted in Scotland, Switzerland, the upper Rhineland, and among the Dutch, it was rapidly winning over to its flag England, France, and Hungary, was making rapid strides in the hereditary dominions of the House of Austria, and had even made good its footing in north Italy and Spain. But like Lutheranism it was more fitted to attack than to defend, to win than to consolidate, and gradually the tide began to ebb. The long and bitter struggle in the Netherlands ended in a division of territory. The seven northern provinces became independent and remained Calvinist, in spite of the utmost efforts of Philip II., but south and west of the Scheldt the country adhered to Spain and Catholicism. England in her national expression of religion, under the guidance of Elizabeth, definitely refused to become Calvinistic, though many Englishmen became Calvinists. France, as we have seen, having to choose between Calvinism and unity, not only chose to remain Catholic and united, but set herself deliberately to root out the political influence of the Huguenot organisation.

Religious revival in the Church.

But after all, it was not the inherent weakness of Protestantism, either in its philosophical, religious, or political aspects, which finally put an end to its progress, and turned back the tide. It was the greatly increased strength of Catholicism. The power of Protestantism lay, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in its protest against wicked lives and a degraded system. By the end of the century that protest was no longer needed, and no longer effective. The Church, which had refused to reform itself after the horrors of the great schism under the pressure of the councils of Constance and Basel, and had answered the trumpet call of Savonarola with an excommunication at the hands of Alexander VI., had at length been forced into reform by the success of Protestantism. The Council of Trent left its mark upon the Roman Church in two special ways. By the establishment of the seminaries, and the enforcement of residence, it reformed the clergy and taught them to be the teachers of the people. By the acknowledgment of Papal supremacy it centralised the organisation of the Roman Church, as an army is centralised under the absolute command of its leader, to whom unquestioning obedience is due. From that time the Pope has exercised influence over a smaller area of Europe than before the Reformation, but with far greater power of compelling obedience among his own adherents. The institution of new religious orders, and the remarkable revival of the religious life in the Roman Church in the century following the Reformation, is perhaps the proof rather than the cause of the renewal of personal piety and the spirit of self-sacrifice, but the foundation of the Society of Jesus marks a turning-point in the religious history of the world. Influence of the Jesuits. Ignatius Loyola was a soldier before he was a priest, and his Society was a military organisation for religious purposes. The conquest of heresy and infidelity was its object, obedience and renunciation of personality were to it the first of virtues. A Jesuit, who was thoroughly imbued with the principles of his order, lost his individuality and became but a part of a great machine. He lived, moved, felt, thought, but in his Society and for it alone. Trained on one system, directed by the will of one man, bound by its constitution to implicit obedience to the Pope, the Society of Jesus, as it spread over the whole world in the ardour and pure enthusiasm of its earlier years, formed a power in the hands of the Papacy, which, from the intense concentration of its government, and the immense diffusion of its activity, has never been equalled in the world’s history. In Europe, where Protestantism was the great enemy to be overthrown, it seized with characteristic dexterity upon education as its chief work.

Their educational work.

Protestantism, though born of the Renaissance, had done little to satisfy the demands for increased knowledge which the growing spirit of free inquiry was making so loudly. It had trained some scholars, it had done little for general education. The Jesuits seized the opportunity. They offered to the world the best education attainable free of cost, and before long they had far distanced all competitors. The value of this to the Church in countries where Protestantism was powerful but not dominant can hardly be exaggerated. It was a guarantee that the rising intelligence of the country should be trained in the most uncompromising school of churchmanship. No Catholic power found itself able to dispense with their support. Even in France where Calvinism was strong, under a king whose religion was always tempered by policy, the Jesuits managed to make good their footing in spite of the most virulent and active opposition of the Sorbonne. To the rulers of Bavaria and Austria, who were sincerely anxious for the rooting out of Protestantism, they were simply invaluable. Thus by the end of the century the tables had become completely turned. Zeal, devotion, learning, self-sacrifice, religious enthusiasm, were now on the side of the Church. Superior in organisation, superior in religious effort, superior in concentration, the Church presented a united and effective front to her enemies, and was prepared, when the opportunity should come, to initiate a crusade by the help of the Jesuits against Protestantism in Europe, while a new world was being won for her across the ocean by their missionary efforts.

The opportunity was not long in coming. In the concluding years of the sixteenth century men attained to power in central Europe, whose youth had been trained under the influences of the Catholic revival. Already by the efforts of Philip II. and S. Carlo Borromeo, with the assistance of the Inquisition, the movement in favour of Protestantism in Spain and Italy had been crushed, and heresy driven back behind the Alps and the Pyrenees. In 1587 Sigismund, the son of John of Sweden and Catherine Jagellon, was elected to the throne of Poland. The Counter-Reformation in Poland. Sigismund was a staunch Catholic, and owed his election to the efforts of the Catholics. He at once set himself to restore Poland to Catholicism. He used the royal patronage, which was extremely extensive in Poland, in favour of Catholics only. He called the Jesuits to his assistance, supported them with money, and encouraged the sons of the nobility to attend their schools. In disputed questions as to the right to the ecclesiastical buildings he used the influence of the crown in favour of the Catholics, and was so successful in this, that it is said that Dantzig was the only town of importance in Poland where the Protestants retained the use of the parish church. Thus in a few years the whole of the official classes became Catholic; while large country districts, especially in Livonia and Lithuania, were won back to the old faith by the efforts of the Jesuit missionaries. In Germany. In Germany recourse was had to still stronger measures, for in virtue of the principle of the religious peace of Augsburg of 1555 it was held that every ruler had the right of dictating the religion of his subjects. Accordingly at Christmas 1595, the bishop of Bamberg issued an edict banishing from the diocese all who refused to receive the Eucharist according to the Catholic rite. Emboldened by his success, the bishop of Paderborn followed his example a few years afterwards, and established and endowed a Jesuit college in his cathedral city. In the first years of the new century the electors von Bicken and Schweikard of Mainz, Ernest and Ferdinand of Köln and Lothaire of Trier, partly by governmental pressure, partly by personal influence, restored Catholicism permanently in the three archbishoprics of the Rhine. In Styria. But it was in south Germany that the greatest results were obtained. In 1596 Ferdinand, the cousin of the emperor Rudolf II., came of age, and succeeded to the duchies of Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, formerly held by his father the archduke Charles. Ferdinand was a man of resolute will and deep religious convictions, which had been developed by his Jesuit teachers into something little short of fanaticism. He looked upon the restoration of Catholicism as the special work of his life, and kneeling before the shrine of Loretto the year after his accession, he solemnly swore to eradicate Protestantism from his hereditary dominions. He did not sleep upon his promise. In 1598 edicts were issued ordering all Protestant ministers to leave the country within fourteen days. In the following year commissions were sent through the country to enforce the edicts. The Protestant churches were thrown down, the pastors ejected, and the inhabitants compelled to conform to Catholicism. In Austria and Moravia. The Emperor, seeing his cousin’s success, followed in his footsteps, and from 1599 to 1603 similar commissions were issued for Upper and Lower Austria, and the Protestant ministers were driven out. Not content with this, Rudolf proceeded to follow a similar policy in his other dominions. In 1602 he suppressed the meetings of the Moravian brethren in Bohemia and Moravia, and gave armed assistance to the efforts of the Hungarian bishops to convert their Protestant flocks. In Bavaria. Meanwhile by the exertions of William, duke of Bavaria, and his son Maximilian, who came to the throne on the abdication of his father in 1696, powerfully assisted by the great Jesuit college at Ingolstadt, Catholicism had completely won the upper hand in Bavaria.

The beginning of the seventeenth century therefore saw the reaction in favour of the Church in full flood tide of prosperity. At its head stood a pope, Paul V. (Borghese), who, if somewhat deficient in the grandeur of mind of Sixtus V., and the fervour of piety which distinguished Pius V., yielded to none of his predecessors, not even to Hildebrand himself, in the lofty conception he had formed of the nature and prerogatives of his office, and in the determination to make them respected. In Philip III. of Spain, Maximilian of Bavaria, Ferdinand of Styria, and Sigismund of Poland, he had lieutenants who had made the restoration and increase of Catholicism the first object of their policy. Already their efforts had been crowned with success in Poland and in south Germany, and the influence of the movement had made itself felt all over the debatable land subject to the Empire, which was not as yet definitely attached to one side or the other. Even the imperial institutions themselves were affected by its progress, and men noticed that the decisions of the imperial courts of appeal were biassed by the religious opinions of the judges and of the Emperor. Questions regarding the peace of Augsburg. This was all the more important as it happened that these particular courts were at that time being called upon to decide a most interesting political question. The peace of Augsburg, concluded in 1555, which attempted to establish peace between the Church and the Lutherans in Germany, had left three problems unsolved, which were certain sooner or later to be decided by the sword, if no peaceful compromise could be arrived at in the meantime. 1. Position of the Calvinists. In the first place it only applied to the Lutherans, for at the time of its conclusion the Protestant princes of the Empire were all Lutherans, and they merely thought of securing their own interests. Calvinism therefore had no rights whatever in the Empire, and had still to win its recognition from the law. 2. The secularised lands. Secondly, it had been laid down by the peace that the Church should no longer have any rights over Church property lying within the territories of Lutheran princes, which had been secularised by them or applied by them to Lutheran purposes, before 1552; but differences had since arisen between the two parties as to the bearing of this provision upon lands secularised subsequently to 1552. It was argued by the Catholics, that the very fact that lands secularised before 1552 were expressly exempted from all the claims of the Church, clearly implied that lands secularised after 1552 were not subject to that exemption, and had therefore been taken from the Church illegally and ought to be at once restored. The Lutherans, on the other hand, maintained that the treaty intended to lay down a general rule, which was to apply to all lands secularised under similar circumstances, and the date only referred to the convention of Passau, which led to the religious peace, and was not meant to create two different classes of secularised lands. Following out this somewhat broad construction of the peace, large quantities of Church land had been secularised since 1552 by Lutheran and even by Calvinist princes, and used by them as a very convenient endowment for younger sons and other relations. 3. The Ecclesiastical Reservation. A further difficulty arose with regard to what was called the Ecclesiastical Reservation. It frequently happened, during the earlier years of the Reformation, that a bishop or abbot, who was a territorial prince in right of his bishopric or abbacy,—of which there were a great number in Germany—became a Lutheran. In order to preserve the rights of the Church in such a case, it was provided by the peace of Augsburg, that a bishop or abbot who became a Lutheran should at once vacate his dignity. But the Protestants maintained that this Ecclesiastical Reservation, as it was called, was only intended to apply to cases where a bishop or abbot, who had been elected by a Catholic Chapter as a Catholic, became a Protestant, and did not affect those cases where a Chapter which had itself become Protestant elected a Protestant to be their bishop or abbot. In virtue of this contention, eight of the great bishoprics of north Germany and many abbacies throughout the country became practically secularised. The Protestant bishop or abbot made no pretence to ecclesiastical position or functions. He was merely a territorial prince who enjoyed the title of bishop, or sometimes administrator, instead of that of duke or landgrave, but his right to his title and his lands had never been admitted by the imperial courts or the Diet.

As long as the tide was flowing in the direction of Protestantism the Protestant view of these matters naturally prevailed, as being that of the stronger party, and the Catholics had to content themselves with protests. Danger of the Rhineland Calvinists. But with the advent of the Counter-Reformation things became very different. The division in the Protestant party was so envenomed, that no Lutheran would stir a finger to claim the privileges of the religious peace for Calvinists. The Catholics had now powerful friends to back them in demanding back the secularised lands. It was almost certain if the question could be brought before the imperial courts that the decision would be in their favour. The Calvinists of the upper Rhineland therefore found themselves in a dangerous position. Situated between the Spanish power on the one side and Bavaria on the other, without a shadow of legal claim to the protection of the religious peace of Augsburg, without the chance of deriving any assistance from the Lutheran princes of the north, they were in danger of being the next victims of the Emperor and Maximilian, just flushed with their triumph over heresy at home. The troubles of Donauwörth, 1607. A little incident showed how real the danger was. In 1607, at Donauwörth, a free city on the Danube, in which the Protestants were in a large majority, a Catholic procession was insulted and a religious quarrel excited. The matter was at once brought to the notice of the Imperial (Aulic) Council, a body entirely composed of nominees of the Emperor. The ban of the Empire was pronounced against Donauwörth, and Maximilian of Bavaria appointed to carry it out. He at once occupied the town with his troops, but not content with establishing order and taking security for the payment of his army, he proceeded to eject the Protestants from the churches and restore the Catholic worship, on the plea that the establishment of Protestantism there had been illegal, and was not protected by the peace of Augsburg. The immediate result of this action on the part of Maximilian, which was looked upon by the Protestants as a distinct and indefensible act of aggression, was to bring about the organisation of the two parties in two rival camps. Christian of Anhalt, one of those sanguine and turbulent spirits, whose advent to the leadership of affairs is a sure presage of war and dissension, seized the opportunity to bind together the Protestant states of the Rhineland in 1608 into a Union for self-defence, which, when once formed, he hoped to be able to lead to the attack against the House of Austria. Formation of the Calvinist Union, 1608. In the next year the Union was joined by the important free cities of Strasburg, Nuremberg, and Ulm. The Elector Palatine was acknowledged as its head, and Christian of Anhalt and the Margrave of Baden-Durlach appointed its generals, and German Calvinism thus stood ready to defend its interests to the death against the encroachments of the Counter-Reformation. Nor were the Catholics far behind in their preparations for war. Formation of the Catholic League, 1609.In 1609 the Catholic League was formed among the Catholic bishops of south Germany, under the leadership of Maximilian of Bavaria, to defend Catholic interests. The Pope gave it his approval and Spain promised assistance. With the long head of Maximilian to direct its policy, with his long purse to provide the sinews of war, with his trained army under Tilly to fight its battles, and with Spain and the Pope to fall back upon, the Catholic League bid fair to distance its rival in the game for leadership in South Germany, which was being played.

Weakness of the Emperor.

But just at this moment occurred two events which rapidly swung the balance to the opposite side. The disputed succession to Cleves and Jülich—followed as it was by the intervention of the Emperor and the occupation of Jülich on his behalf, while the elector of Brandenburg and the count palatine of Neuburg made themselves joint masters of Cleves—brought about, as we have seen, a most formidable combination of Protestant powers under the leadership of France, to overthrow the House of Austria and put a stop to the progress of Catholicism in Germany. At the very moment when he was thus threatened by foreign attack, the unfortunate Rudolf found himself at the mercy of his own revolted subjects. Already in 1606 his brother Matthias had taken advantage of the unpopularity caused by the forcible restoration of Catholicism in Austria and Hungary, especially among the nobility, to put himself at the head of a combination of the estates of those countries, in order to win for himself the sovereignty over them at the price of granting religious toleration. The revolt was completely successful. Religious toleration in Austria and Bohemia, 1608–1609. In 1608 Rudolf made over to his brother the government of Austria and Hungary, and Matthias, in his turn, appointed a Protestant to be palatine in Hungary, and guaranteed the free exercise of their religion, public and private, to all his subjects. The Emperor was thus left with Bohemia and Moravia alone faithful to him, but the Bohemians were no less quick than the Austrians had been to see the profit that might be made out of the weakness of their king. In 1609 the Bohemian estates extorted from him the Royal Charter (Majestätsbrief) as the price of their loyalty, by which freedom of conscience was secured to all who belonged to certain specified creeds, and freedom of worship granted on all Crown lands; but on private estates, and in towns, the consent of the landowner and the town authorities was made necessary to the erection of any church or the establishment of any religious worship. An arrangement so one-sided as this, by which the king was obliged to grant freedom of worship, while his subjects were not, was thoroughly unpractical. Difficulties at once broke out about its interpretation, which ended in 1611 in the deposition of Rudolf, and the recognition of Matthias as king of Bohemia. Death of Rudolf. Accession of Matthias, 1612. In 1612 Rudolf died and Matthias was elected emperor. The change was in favour of peace. The death of Henry IV. in 1610, and the consequent withdrawal of France and England from the combination against the House of Austria, made the Union less ready to follow the fiery counsels of Christian of Anhalt. The Cleves-Jülich question remained in abeyance after the imperial troops had been expelled from Jülich, but was somewhat further complicated by the conversion of the count palatine of Neuburg to Catholicism, and of the elector of Brandenburg to Calvinism. Settlement of the Cleves-Jülich question, 1614. Eventually by the treaty of Xanten in 1614, subsequently modified in 1630, a division of the duchies between the two claimants was agreed upon, by which the elector of Brandenburg acquired Cleves, the Mark and Ravensberg, while Jülich, Berg, and Ravenstein fell to the house of Neuburg. For eight years Germany, freed from the impending horror of a desolating war, enjoyed a truce; but still in Bohemia were to be heard murmurs that the Royal Charter was not observed by Matthias, still flowed steadily and surely the stream of the Counter-Reformation, and Maximilian of Bavaria reinforced his army and amassed treasure, awaiting the day when the sword, and the sword alone, should decide the religious question in Germany.

The succession of Ferdinand to Austria, Hungary and Bohemia recognised.

The truce was broken by the Emperor himself. Matthias was an old man without children. His brothers, who were but little younger than himself, were like him childless, and all the hopes of the Austrian House were centred upon Ferdinand of Styria as the only Habsburg who had an heir to succeed him. It became therefore the cardinal point of the policy of the Emperor, during his later years, to secure the succession of Ferdinand to the various dominions of the Austrian House in Germany, and, if possible, his eventual election to the Empire. The succession to the hereditary dominions of the Habsburgs only required the consent of the senior members of the family and the approval of Spain, and presented but little difficulty; but that to the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia was a different matter altogether, as the crown in both kingdoms was elective. By mingled address and assurance the policy of Matthias triumphed for the time. The estates of Hungary duly elected Ferdinand to be the successor of Matthias, and he was crowned at Pressburg without a murmur of opposition being heard. In Bohemia courage won the day. The estates were suddenly called together in 1617, and required to acknowledge Ferdinand as the lawful successor to Matthias by hereditary right, and evidence was brought to show that they had in former times acknowledged that the crown of Bohemia was rightfully hereditary. Taken by surprise and subjected to pressure from the court the estates acquiesced in this new assumption. No leader appeared to question or refute the imperial case. Ferdinand was recognised and crowned as hereditary king of Bohemia, and at his coronation swore to observe the Royal Charter. But no sooner was Ferdinand seated on the throne than the Bohemian Protestant nobility began to realise what had been done. They had not only assisted in placing the most determined enemy of their religion over them, but, by setting aside the elective character of their monarchy, they had dealt the greatest possible blow to their own importance. The discontent found an able leader in count Henry of Thurn, who, like another Christian of Anhalt, was not a man to let scruples stand in the way of his determination to effect the dethronement of Ferdinand, and the overthrow of the House of Austria. Revolt of the Protestants in Bohemia. The ‘throwing from the window,’ 1618. A meeting of the Protestant members of the estates was summoned, and a petition to the Emperor agreed upon. On the reply proving unfavourable, Thurn, at the head of a body of nobles, forced his way into the palace at Prague on May 23d, 1618, and seizing the two regents of the kingdom, Martinitz and Slavata, who were accused of being the real authors of the obnoxious reply, threw them with their secretary Fabricius out of the window in old Bohemian fashion. They fell sheer seventy feet into the ditch below, but strange to say not one of them lost his life. Thurn hoped by this deed of violence to render peace between Austria and Bohemia impossible. He little thought that he had given the signal for a war which was to desolate his country and all Germany for thirty years, and throw them back in the race of civilisation for a century.

CHAPTER IV
THE BEGINNING OF THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR

Character of the Bohemian Revolution—Help sent by Savoy and the Silesians—Accession of Ferdinand of Styria—Revolt in Austria—Ferdinand elected Emperor, deposed as King of Bohemia—Acceptance by Frederick, Elector Palatine, of the Crown of Bohemia—Alienation of England and the Lutheran Princes from Frederick—Bavaria, Spain, and Saxony support Ferdinand—Battle of the White Mountain—Settlement of Bohemia and Silesia—Conquest of the Palatinate—The Electorate transferred to Bavaria—The war spreads to the north—Interference of England and Denmark—Wallenstein raises an army for the Emperor—His character and views—Campaigns of 1626–1627—Defeat of Denmark—Peace of Lübeck—Edict of Restitution—New questions raised by the success of Wallenstein and the issue of the Edict.

Character of the Bohemian Revolution.

It is probable that when count Thurn and his companions threw the regents out of the window at Prague, they only intended to snap the cord which bound Bohemia and the House of Austria together, and pictured to themselves as the result of their rash act an independent Protestant Bohemia, ruled by themselves and their brother nobles under the nominal sovereignty of a puppet king of their own choosing. At first it seemed as if they were right. Germany was inclined to let king and rebellious subjects fight out the battle by themselves. John George of Saxony and Maximilian of Bavaria refused to interfere. Spain promised aid but did not send it. Matthias and Ferdinand had but fourteen thousand men under Bucquoi, a Spanish general who had served with distinction in the Netherlands, upon whom to rely. Behind that army lay an empty treasury and a discontented people. If the Bohemian revolution had had in it anything of the spirit of calm and disinterested patriotism, capable of making all sacrifices, and determined to face all consequences, which was characteristic of the Swiss and the Dutch revolutions, the knell of the House of Austria must have sounded. But it was not so. The unconquerable spirit was with Ferdinand. A mean desire to make other people bear the burdens, while they enjoyed the fruits, of successful rebellion marked the conduct of the Bohemian leaders. A body of directors, thirty in number, was formed under the guidance of Ruppa, the ablest and most honourable of the insurgents. A diet was held to carry on the affairs of the country while Thurn took command of the army. Orders were given to raise troops, but the question at once arose who was to pay for them? The first suggestion was that the towns should have that honour, but the towns not unnaturally refused the heroic rôle of self-sacrifice so thoughtfully proposed to them by the nobles. Fresh taxes were then voted, but no one even attempted to raise them. On the news of the advance of Bucquoi towards Budweis, a Catholic town which still remained true to the Emperor, a panic seized the directors and the diet. A general levy of the male population was ordered, the raising of the taxes already voted was proposed, but rather than face so disagreeable a question the members of the diet slunk quietly home. It was like schoolboys playing at rebellion. Some of the levies made their appearance in the camp of Thurn, but there were no arms to put into their hands, no officers to train them, no money to pay them. It is not thus that successful revolutions are made. The Bohemian nobles were but a faction, fighting for licence and for power under the sacred names of liberty, of patriotism, and of religion. They must have met the fitting reward of their selfishness and their arrogance at the hands of Bucquoi and his fourteen thousand half-starved and badly paid troops, had it not been for the timely interference of other powers.

Charles Emmanuel of Savoy had not abandoned his enmity to the Austro-Spanish House because he had been obliged to make his peace with Spain after the death of Henry IV. Interference of Charles Emmanuel of Savoy. Of a restless and ambitious nature, but by no means devoid of natural prudence, no sooner did he hear of the revolution in Bohemia than he determined to do all in his power to assist it, provided he could do so secretly. With this object he opened negotiations with Frederick V., Elector Palatine. Frederick had succeeded to the electorate on the death of his father in 1610. Young, handsome, enthusiastic, he was readily attracted by the difficulties of an undertaking, without having sufficient mental power to surmount them. In politics he was a pupil of Christian of Anhalt, in religion a zealous Calvinist, and he looked upon himself, and was looked upon by others, as the natural leader of the German Calvinists, and the determined foe of the House of Austria and the Counter-Reformation. His political opinions had lately become of more importance to the world, through his marriage with the beautiful Elizabeth, the daughter of James I. of England. It was known that James was bent upon an alliance with Spain, and desired nothing less than to be mixed up in an European war. Still it was equally certain that he had by no means resigned the position of ally and defender of Protestantism, which he had inherited from his predecessor; and that there was a large and influential party in England, who looked upon the marriage with the Elector as a guarantee of a more decided Protestant policy.

Frederick had been the first German prince to congratulate the Bohemians on their rebellion, and offer them assistance. In July 1618 he sent a confidential agent to Prague to report upon the state of affairs, and to assure the directors of the support of the Protestant Union, should Spain or Bavaria send help to the Emperor. It was at this juncture that Charles Emmanuel appeared upon the scene, and offered through the Elector Palatine to send Mansfeld with two thousand men at once to the assistance of the Bohemians, if it could be made to appear that the troops were sent by the Elector himself. Frederick at once agreed. Mansfeld sent to assist the Bohemians. The real truth was known only to the Elector Palatine, Christian of Anhalt, and the margrave of Anspach, and when Mansfeld arrived at the scene of war in September 1618, and formed the siege of Pilsen, all the world believed that he was acting on behalf of Frederick, and many concluded that the Elector would not have dared to take so serious a step, unless he had reason to reckon on the support of England. The relief was well-timed, but the arrangement was not very creditable to any of the parties concerned, for Mansfeld, though an able soldier, was one of that class of military adventurers ever bred in times of war to be the bane and scourge of the helpless and inoffensive people. To put such a man in command, at the beginning of a national struggle, was to stamp it at once as a war of brutality and plunder. Further assistance sent from Silesia. His arrival, however, at Pilsen changed the face of affairs. The Silesians hearing the action, as they thought, of the Elector Palatine resolved to interfere, and sent three thousand men to the assistance of the Bohemians. Bucquoi in the face of these reinforcements, not only checked his advance on Prague, but was soon obliged to fall back to Budweis, where he was besieged by Thurn. On the 21st of November Pilsen surrendered to Mansfeld, and by the end of the year Budweis with its beleaguered garrison was all that was left to the Emperor of his Bohemian kingdom and army.

Death of Matthias. Accession of Ferdinand, 1619.

The year 1619 opened still more darkly for the House of Austria. The worn-out Emperor sank at last into his grave on the 20th of March, and men felt that with the accession of Ferdinand the time for compromise had passed. If they wanted to win the day, they must strike quickly before he could rally to his aid the unwieldy forces of the Empire and of Spain. Negotiations which had been begun at Eger were at once stopped. The diets of Silesia Moravia and Lusatia openly joined the Bohemian cause, and arranged with Bohemia the contingent which they should each provide for the common army, and the proportion of votes which they were to have in the election of a new Bohemian king. Revolt in Austria. The estates of Upper and Lower Austria, who were mainly Protestant, adopted the cause of the Bohemians as their own, voted men for the war, seized and administered the archducal estates, and summoned Thurn and the Bohemian army to their aid. Nothing loth Thurn, leaving Hohenlohe to watch Bucquoi, swooped down upon Vienna hoping to end the war and secure the success of the revolution by a brilliant coup de main. On June 2d, Ferdinand, defenceless, harassed, hopeless, had consented to give audience to a deputation of the estates, who were to urge upon him, as the only chance of deliverance, the recognition of the Bohemian revolution, and the establishment in Austria of a separately organised Protestant government. None knew better than Ferdinand himself that if he refused those terms the gates of Vienna would be opened to Thurn and his army. That very night might find him a prisoner in the hands of his greatest foe. Yet at this crisis of his life, and of the fate of Europe, he never faltered. ‘If it be God’s will,’ he said, ‘let me perish in the struggle.’ He was ready to perish, not an inch would he yield. The deputation became excited. They pressed round him clamorously. Eagerly they urged, imperiously they demanded the acceptance of their terms. One deputy had actually, it is said, his hand upon the archduke’s person, when suddenly there rang through the hall a trumpet blast, and the streets were alive with the confused noise which heralds the arrival of soldiers. It was a regiment of loyal cavalry, the vanguard of reinforcements ordered up from the country by Ferdinand.

The crisis was over. The deputation dispersed abashed and afraid for their own safety. The very next day Thurn arrived before the gates of the city, and found them shut, and the walls manned. He had not resources for a siege, and retired back again across the frontier as quick as he had come. He was only just in time, Bucquoi had at last received reinforcements from the Spanish Netherlands, and leaving part of his army to watch Hohenlohe at Budweis suddenly fell upon Mansfeld, who was marching to join Hohenlohe at Zablat, and completely destroyed his army. The siege of Budweis was at once raised, and Bucquoi advanced into south Bohemia driving Hohenlohe before him, until he was suddenly recalled to defend Pressburg and Vienna from the advance of Bethlen Gabor, Prince of Transylvania, who had just declared for the Bohemians. Among those who distinguished themselves at the battle of Zablat was a Bohemian noble, who commanded one of the Walloon regiments of cavalry, count Albert von Waldstein.

Ferdinand elected Emperor, 1619.

Hardly had Ferdinand escaped from the attack of his enemies at Vienna, than he had to betake himself to Frankfort to support his interests at the approaching imperial election. At first sight there seemed little doubt of his success, as he was certain of the three ecclesiastical votes, which, with his own vote as king of Bohemia, would give him the majority. But the elector of Saxony took a formal objection to the exercise by Ferdinand of the Bohemian vote, until the settlement of the Bohemian question had made it clear that the Crown was rightfully his, and all felt that it would not be safe to proceed to an election until so formidable a legal point had been decided. The way therefore was still open to the Calvinist representatives, the Elector Palatine and the margrave of Brandenburg, by clever management to avoid the election of Ferdinand, if they could not actually secure that of their own nominee. If they had at once supported with their whole strength the policy of John George, they would have at least postponed the election of Ferdinand indefinitely, and united the Protestant interest. But the Elector Palatine, led by Christian of Anhalt, could not bring himself to play second fiddle to the elector of Saxony. They wished themselves to be emperor-makers. Christian of Anhalt had gone a weary journey to Turin to try and make terms with Charles Emmanuel of Savoy. Maximilian of Bavaria was sounded, but gave a definite refusal, and so it happened that when the electoral diet met on the 20th of July, the Calvinists were without a candidate and without a policy. John George, nettled at seeing his own policy contemptuously set aside and nothing put in its place, shrank from intrusting the institutions of the Empire to such rash and incapable hands. He instructed his representative to withdraw his objection to the vote of Ferdinand for Bohemia, and to record his own vote in his favour. Frederick and the elector of Brandenburg, seeing that a majority was now obtained irrespective of Ferdinand’s own vote, made a virtue of necessity. On the 28th of August Ferdinand was unanimously elected, and all that Christian and Frederick had achieved by their notable policy was to attach John George firmly to the Emperor’s side.

Deposition of Ferdinand as king of Bohemia by the revolutionary party. Election of Frederick Elector Palatine.

The evil consequences of this suicidal step were quickly seen. Ten days before Ferdinand was elected at Frankfort he had been solemnly deposed at Prague. On the 27th of August the Elector Palatine was elected king of Bohemia in his place, and was called upon to decide whether or not he would accept the Crown. The decision was a momentous one. No longer could the question be treated merely as one between the House of Austria and one of its dependencies, if the struggle against Ferdinand was to be headed by the leader of the Calvinists and an elector of the Empire. German interests of the greatest magnitude were involved. In such a quarrel the welfare of Germany was no less at stake than that of Austria or of Bohemia. Importance of the crisis. If Frederick and the Calvinists successfully established themselves in Bohemia, the balance of power at present existing among the princes of the Empire and the two divisions of the Protestant world would be rudely shaken, and the traditional leadership of the German Protestants would pass from Dresden to Heidelberg. Men were not prepared to see Christian of Anhalt the dictator of Germany, or Geneva victorious over Rome and Wittenberg alike. On the other hand, was it likely that Maximilian of Bavaria and the ecclesiastical princes would stand tamely by while the champion of their religion was dispossessed of his territories and his power scattered to the winds? Nor did the danger end there. Spain had already sent money and troops to the aid of Ferdinand,—would she be deterred by the prospect of the English marriage alliance, so strenuously urged upon her by James I., from throwing her whole weight into the struggle, when it once became clear that the war was a war of religion as much as a war of politics? Would the Pope hesitate to preach a crusade against the aggression of Frederick, and prepare a second St. Bartholomew for the Calvinists of Germany? And if the Catholic powers banded themselves together against the Elector, and determined to risk all rather than suffer the tide of the Counter-Reformation to be forced back, could James I. himself be so deaf to natural affection, so unmindful of the traditions of England, so careless of English opinion, as to refuse to draw the sword to save his son-in-law and Protestantism from ruin at the hands of Spain and the Pope? Sober men asked themselves these questions. Before their frightened eyes rose the spectre of a religious war which should desolate not merely Germany but Europe. They applied themselves earnestly but unavailingly to make Frederick understand the gravity of the situation. His own mother and councillors, the ambassador of France, even the landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, urged him to decline the tempting offer. Only Christian of Anhalt and his followers shut their eyes to the inevitable and forced him on. Acceptance of the Crown of Bohemia by Frederick. Frederick himself wished to delay his answer until he could find out from England if his father-in-law would support him, but delay would not suit the Bohemians or Christian of Anhalt. Urged on by his own vanity and his leader’s ambition, he plunged blindly into the abyss which opened out before him. On the 25th of September 1619, he formally notified his acceptance to the Bohemian diet, and on the 4th of November was crowned with great state in the cathedral of Prague.

Alienation of England and the Lutheran Princes.

The evil consequences which had been threatened at once made their appearance. James I. had never approved of the Bohemian revolution, but he had endeavoured to make use of it in order to mediate between Catholics and Protestants in Germany and establish peace. His son-in-law’s rash act destroyed at once what little chance of success James might have had. But there was worse still behind. It was bad enough that Frederick should have dared to act on his own responsibility, before James had had sufficient time to decide from a study of the Bohemian constitution whether the Bohemian revolution was legally justifiable or not. It was worse still that he should have taken a step which might alarm the susceptibilities of Spain, and endanger the success of the negotiations for a marriage between the prince of Wales and the infanta Maria of Spain, upon which James had set his whole heart. James at once repudiated all complicity with his son-in-law’s conduct, and was fretfully indignant with him for having by it injured his own pet scheme for Europe. If all hope of assistance from England was gone, still less chance was there of aid from Savoy, or from the Lutheran princes of Germany. The Protestant Union only agreed to defend the Elector’s hereditary dominions, in case they were attacked while he was occupied in Bohemia. Frederick had to face the coming struggle with his own resources. Even Bethlen Gabor, the drunken but able prince of Transylvania, who had taken advantage of Ferdinand’s weakness to advance to the gates of Vienna, pillaging as he went, deserted the cause of the Bohemians when he found he could obtain no money from them. On the 17th of January 1620 he made a treaty with the Emperor, by which he was secured in the sovereignty over the larger part of Christian Hungary. Ferdinand on the other hand had no difficulty in obtaining allies, when once it had been recognised how great a menace to German institutions was implied in the action of the Elector Palatine. Alliance between Ferdinand, the League, Spain and the Pope. Maximilian of Bavaria took the lead. Stipulating as his reward the electoral hat which was to be torn from the head of Frederick, and the right of occupying upper Austria as security for his expenses, he placed his army and the resources of the League at Ferdinand’s disposal. In March 1620, under his auspices, a meeting of the League was arranged with the elector of Saxony at Mülhausen, and an agreement arrived at by which the League undertook not to attempt to recover the lands of the Protestant bishops and administrators in north Germany, as long as they continued loyal to the Emperor. This arrangement, though no solution of the question of the ecclesiastical lands, secured at any rate for the time the neutrality of Saxony and the Lutheran princes. The Pope sent money to swell the resources of the League, and Philip of Spain agreed to march troops from the Netherlands to attack the Palatinate.

The war national and religious.

The campaign of 1620 opened, therefore, under very different circumstances from those of 1619. The war had already become a German war. With the certainty of the intervention of Spain and the Pope, with the possibility of that of England, it threatened to assume an European character. With the League on the one side and the Union on the other, it was a war of creeds. Importance of Bavaria. Policy of Maximilian. From a military as well as a political point of view, the accession of Maximilian of Bavaria to the cause of the Emperor made all the difference. Weak in health, and unpleasing in appearance, he concealed under an insignificant exterior an iron will and a faultless judgment. He alone among his contemporaries in Germany had the statesman’s faculty of knowing exactly what was possible. He never struck except to succeed. He never ventured without being sure of his ground. Succeeding to an impoverished exchequer, and a territory disjointed in extent and divided in religion, he had set before himself as the objects of his policy, the supremacy of Catholicism, the consolidation of his dominions, and the acquisition of the electoral dignity. By thrift and good management he had amassed considerable treasure, and had carefully trained a powerful army, which he had intrusted to the command of the Walloon Tilly, who had the reputation of being the greatest general of the day. His opportunity was now come, and he threw himself zealously into the war of ambition and religion with the proud consciousness that he was the real leader of the Catholic cause and the saviour of the House of Austria. In June the toils began to close round the ill-fated Frederick. Philip III., convinced through Gondomar’s diplomacy that James I. would not break his neutrality even though the Palatinate was invaded, sent the necessary orders to Spinola, and by August the Spanish army was at Mainz. At the end of June, Tilly crossed the frontier into Austria, effected a junction with Bucquoi, and advanced slowly into Bohemia, capturing the towns as he went, and driving the enemy back upon Prague. On November 8th, he came in sight of the city, and found Christian of Anhalt and the Bohemian army drawn up on the White Mountain just outside the walls. Battle of the White Mountain, 1620. Regardless of Bucquoi’s desire for delay, Tilly insisted on an immediate attack. Frederick was inside the city when the attack began. Hurrying out to put himself at the head of his troops, he found he was already too late. The army was flying in panic from the face of Tilly’s veterans. Frederick himself was hurried away in the crowd. His own dominions were already in the possession of the Spaniards. An outcast and a fugitive, he fled for his life through Germany, and rested not till he found an asylum with Maurice of Nassau at the Hague. He will only be a winter-king, the Jesuits had sneeringly said, when the summer comes he will melt away. The prophecy was fulfilled almost to the letter, save that it was not the heat of summer but the floods of autumn which swept him to his destruction.

The victory of the White Mountain marks the end of the attempt of Protestantism to establish its supremacy in Bohemia. Ferdinand at once sent for the Royal Charter and tore it up with his own hands. Suppression of Protestantism in Bohemia. The leaders of the revolution were executed, and their lands confiscated. Frederick was placed under the ban of the Empire, and his lands and titles declared to be forfeited. The Protestant clergy were for the most part banished, and a heavy war indemnity exacted from the rebels whose lives and possessions were spared. A new race of landowners, Catholic and German, became the possessors of the confiscated lands, and by their means Catholic worship was gradually restored throughout the country districts. Jesuit colleges were planted in the chief towns to complete by persuasion what force had begun, and before another generation had passed away Bohemia was definitely ranged among the Catholic countries of Europe. Only Silesia and Lusatia succeeded in retaining something of their old rights and much of their old religion. The war against these allies of Bohemia had fallen to the lot of John George of Saxony, and when the battle of the White Mountain had made it plain that they must treat for peace, they did not find the Lutheran leader a hard taskmaster. Toleration granted to Silesia, 1621. On his own responsibility, he concluded peace with the Silesian estates by an instrument known as the Accord on January 21st, 1621, by which they recognised Ferdinand as their duly elected and crowned king and supreme duke, and agreed to pay a fine of 300,000 florins on condition that their political and religious liberties were respected. Ferdinand when he heard of this was naturally very angry at the mention of the words ‘elected king,’ but found it prudent to accept the treaty rather than affront the elector of Saxony.

Continued success of Ferdinand and Maximilian, 1621–1622.

By the beginning of 1621, Ferdinand and Maximilian found their policy completely crowned with success. The Bohemian revolution was crushed, the lower Palatinate was in the hands of the Spaniards, Frederick had been declared to have forfeited his electoral dignity, the Counter-Reformation was victorious in Austria, Moravia, and Bohemia. In April 1621 the Protestant Union itself was dissolved. Yet there were rocks ahead which would require very careful seamanship to avoid. The Spanish court was indignant at the idea of the transference of the Palatine Electorate to Bavaria. James of England was so moved by the seizure of his son-in-law’s hereditary dominions, that he authorised the enlistment of Englishmen under Vere to defend the lower Palatinate against Spinola, and made its restoration to Frederick the central point of the long negotiations he was carrying on with Spain for a family alliance. The truce of Antwerp between the Spaniards and the Dutch had just come to an end by lapse of time, and Maurice of Nassau was minded to place his unrivalled military talents in the scale against the House of Austria. The German princes of the Rhineland were frightened at the success of the League, and were looking out for allies even beyond the limits of Germany. But at present no one stirred except the margrave of Baden-Durlach and Christian of Brunswick, both of whom held large estates which had been secularised since the peace of Augsburg, and were consequently in danger from the success of the Counter-Reformation. Christian, besides being Protestant bishop of Halberstadt, was a military adventurer of the knight-errant pattern. He liked fighting for its own sake and loved still better to surround it with a halo of romance. Fired by a glance from the beautiful eyes of the queen of Bohemia, and wearing her glove on his helmet, he posed before the world as the chivalrous protector and avenger of beauty in misfortune. The new allies of Frederick did not avail him much. In October 1621, Mansfeld had to abandon the upper Palatinate and take refuge across the Rhine in Alsace. In the summer of 1622, in conjunction with the margrave of Baden and Christian of Brunswick, he advanced to the recovery of the lower Palatinate, but Tilly crushed the margrave at Wimpfen on the Neckar on May 6th, and Christian at Höcht on the Main on the 20th of June. Christian and Mansfeld with the remnants of their armies had to retire across the Rhine into Lorraine, where they lived at free quarters upon the wretched inhabitants. On September 16th Heidelberg surrendered to Tilly, and on November 8th Mannheim followed the example of the capital, and by the end of the year Frankenthal was the only city in his hereditary dominions which still belonged to the unfortunate Elector. Deprived of his land and his resources, he was now obliged to deprive himself of his own remaining army, and formally dismissed from his service Christian of Brunswick and Mansfeld on finding himself without authority over them and yet looked upon by Europe as responsible for their crimes. Fortune had still one more blow in reserve. Transference of the Electorate from Frederick to Maximilian, 1623. On February 13th, 1623, Ferdinand, having succeeded in pacifying the opposition of the elector of Saxony and the Spaniards, solemnly transferred the electorate to Maximilian of Bavaria for his life at the meeting of the diet at Regensburg, and gave him the administration of the upper Palatinate as additional security for the expenses of the war.

Extension of the war to Northern Germany, 1623–1624.

The transference of the electorate to Maximilian of Bavaria fitly marks the close of the first act of the great drama of the Thirty Years’ War, namely, that signalised by the Bohemian Revolution, for he was the person to whom the success achieved was due. His army had won the victories, his head had directed the policy, his purse had paid the soldiers—could he only now have enforced a peace upon a reasonable basis, he would have stood forth before the world as the greatest statesman in Germany, and the saviour of the House of Austria. The difficulties in the way were serious. The Dutch, since the expiration of the truce of Antwerp, had been at open war with the Spaniards, and at the beginning of 1623, being hard pressed by Spinola, summoned the brigand bands of Mansfeld and Christian of Brunswick to their aid. Insensibly the war was beginning to affect the north German princes. Many of them felt that if the Emperor succeeded in crushing the bishop of Halberstadt, other Protestant bishoprics might prove too tempting a prey to be resisted, and rallied to the standard of Christian. The lower Saxon circle, animated by similar fears, actually began to arm. With these dangers looming in the distance, it was impossible for the League to lay down its arms. Even the crushing defeat inflicted by Tilly upon Christian of Brunswick at Stadtlohn in the bishopric of Münster in August 1623 was not a sufficient guarantee of peace, whilst Mansfeld was still at large; and so the war simmered on through 1623 and 1624, and the opportunity for a satisfactory peace in which German interests alone should be consulted passed away never to return.

Interference of England, 1624.

Ere the first day of 1625 had dawned it was too late. Germany was already the prey of foreign intervention, but it was as yet the intervention of foreigners who had distinct interests in Germany. James of England had at last been forced to acknowledge the hopelessness of trying to settle the affairs of Europe after his own wishes, by means of an alliance with Spain. The rash visit of prince Charles and Buckingham to Madrid in 1623 had at length opened their eyes to the fact, which all the rest of the world had understood long ago, that Spain only valued the negotiations for the proposed alliance as a means of preventing James from drawing his sword in the German quarrel, and the alliance itself as a stepping-stone to the eventual recovery of England to the obedience of the Pope. Angry at the discovery, the prince and the favourite pushed the old and timid king unwillingly into war. In 1624 English envoys hurried between the courts of Sweden and Denmark and the princes of the lower Saxon circle, eager to negotiate a general alliance to win back the Palatinate. James himself received Mansfeld graciously in London, permitted him to enlist 20,000 men for the war in the Palatinate, and obtained permission from Louis of France for the army to march through France to its destination. The English dockyards resounded with preparations for a great maritime expedition against the ports of Spain and the treasure ships from the Indies. In March 1625, James died, and Charles and Buckingham, no longer hampered by an old man’s caution, threw themselves into the German war with a lightness of heart and want of foresight worthy of Frederick himself. Christian IV. of Denmark was the victim who fell into the trap which was so innocently but unerringly laid. Interference of Denmark, 1625. He, like other Lutheran princes, had watched with nervous anxiety the spread of the war into northern Germany, and had winced under the blow dealt to the Lutheran cause by the establishment of Catholicism by Ferdinand and Maximilian in Bohemia and the upper Palatinate. He was nearly concerned too in the question of the ecclesiastical lands, for he had secured for one of his sons the Protestant bishopric of Verden and the succession to that of Bremen. Alliance of England, Denmark, and part of north Germany against the Emperor and Spain, 1625. So when the offer came from England to pay him £30,000 a month, in addition to the sending of the naval expedition against the coasts of Spain, Christian felt that religion and interest combined to urge him to action. In May 1625, a treaty was made on those terms between Charles I. of England, Christian of Denmark, and the lower Saxon circle, and the first instalment of the English subsidy was duly paid.

Ill-success dogged their well-meant efforts from the first. In the previous year, Louis had at the last moment found reasons to recall his verbal permission to Mansfeld to cross the soil of France, and the troops had been sent instead into the Low Countries, where, unpaid and unprovided with necessaries, they fell victims to disease. The naval expedition, which, under Wimbledon’s leadership, arrived at Cadiz in the October of 1625, achieved nothing but disaster and contempt. In England quarrels broke out between Charles and his Parliaments, which effectually prevented the payment of the promised subsidies to Christian IV. Difficulties of Ferdinand. Nevertheless the united forces of Mansfeld, Christian of Brunswick, and Christian of Denmark, ill provided as they were, far outnumbered the army of Tilly and the League, and it was clear to Ferdinand and Maximilian that with discontent seething in Silesia, Bohemia, and Austria, with Bethlen Gabor again threatening the frontiers of Hungary, and the Danish forces invading upper Germany, it was absolutely essential to place another army in the field. Yet where was it to come from? The Emperor could not stoop to employ a brigand army paid by plunder like that of Mansfeld, but the resources of Maximilian and the League were strained to the utmost. Spain, threatened alike by England and France, could spare nothing, and Ferdinand’s treasury was as usual empty.

Wallenstein.

It was in this crisis that a man stepped forward to the help of Ferdinand, who is in some ways the most interesting figure of the Thirty Years’ War. Albert von Waldstein, or Wallenstein, was the younger son of an illustrious Bohemian family of Sclavonic blood. Educated partly by the Moravian Brethren and partly by the Jesuits, he never surrendered himself dogmatically to either creed, but out of the mysticism of both constructed for himself a religion, which, not unlike that of Napoleon afterwards, chiefly expressed itself in an unfailing belief in his own star. Thus removed somewhat apart from the controversies of the day, he was able to see more clearly through the mists which darkened the eyes of ordinary politicians. Statesmanship as well as interest and tradition led him to devote himself to the cause of the Emperor, as the one stable element in Germany among the disintegrating influences of rival religions and personal jealousies. True patriotism made common cause with ambition to urge him to risk much to keep the foreigner out of Germany. Common sense allied with dogmatic indifference made him see more clearly than others, that in toleration for all creeds lay the only possibility of civil unity. But statesman and patriot though he was in his conception of the real needs of Germany and the necessity of resisting foreign interference, his statesmanship and his patriotism were never allowed to free themselves from the trammels of an overmastering ambition. In the settlement of Germany, it was he who was to dictate the terms. In the ousting of the foreigner and the crushing of the factions, it was he who was to receive the lion’s share of the spoil. He was an imperialist, but only on condition of military independence. He was a patriot, but only on condition of being also a dictator. As long as the stream of his own policy and personal aggrandisement flowed in the same channel with that of the Emperor and his allies, all would be well. But should they diverge, Germany could no more contain a Ferdinand and a Wallenstein, than France could afterwards contain a Directory and a Napoleon.

Character of Wallenstein’s army.

Such difficulties were, however, in the womb of the future. For the present Ferdinand required a disciplined army and a capable general, and had not the means to provide himself with either. Wallenstein offered to raise 20,000 men without putting any additional strain on the treasury of the Empire, provided he might be allowed to support them by requisitions on the country in which they were quartered. As with Napoleon, war was to support war, not by the unlicensed waste and brutal plunder of a Mansfeld, but by orderly and methodical requisitions couched in the form of law. The Emperor accepted the conditions, though he well knew that the constitution of the Empire gave him no authority to levy requisitions. Directly the standard of Wallenstein was raised men flocked to it from all sides. Soldiers of fortune, peasants ruined by the war, younger sons who had to make their own way in the world, adventurers of all religions, and all nationalities, hastened to serve under a leader who had already carved for himself by his sword and his wits a colossal fortune out of the spoils of the Bohemian revolution. In the autumn of 1625, he found himself at the head of an army of 50,000 men, whose only bond of union was their allegiance to himself, and he advanced into the dioceses of Magdeburg and Halberstadt and spent the winter there in training his forces for the coming struggle.

The campaign of 1626.

The plan of campaign arranged by the king of Denmark and his allies was a simple one. Christian himself, with his own troops and those paid by the English subsidies, was to advance up the Weser against Tilly and the army of the League, thus securing the bishoprics of Bremen and Verden, and driving the enemy, as it was hoped, out of Halberstadt back to the line of the Main. Meanwhile Mansfeld was to operate against Wallenstein on the Elbe, push him back into Bohemia, and force him either to let go his hold upon the upper Palatinate, or lay Vienna open to a combined attack from the army of Mansfeld and that of Bethlen Gabor, who was again stirring on the side of Hungary. The plan, however, was better conceived than executed. No subsidies arrived from England, and Mansfeld had to begin his attack without the co-operation of Christian. Wallenstein awaited him withdrawn behind the line of the Elbe, having carefully fortified the bridge of Dessau, which was the key of his position. On April 25th, Mansfeld dashed himself in vain against the fortifications of the bridge, and Wallenstein, seizing the moment when the enemy, thrown into confusion by the repulse, was retiring in some disorder, took the offensive, and by a brilliant counter-attack turned the repulse into a complete rout.

Foiled in his attempt to force Wallenstein’s position on the Elbe by a front attack, Mansfeld now determined to turn it, and by making a long flank march through discontented Silesia, to effect a junction with Bethlen Gabor in Hungary, and advance upon Vienna from the east. The plan was not creditable to Mansfeld’s military genius. A long flank march, in the presence of a victorious force acting on interior lines, is one of the most hazardous operations in war; and with an army of soldiers of fortune dependent on plunder for their support, and ignorant of discipline, was doomed to certain failure. Wallenstein, leaving 8000 men to co-operate with Tilly against Christian, contented himself with moving slowly after Mansfeld on an interior circle covering Vienna, and finally entrenched himself at Gran on the Danube, about half-way between Pesth and Pressburg, where he awaited the combined attack. Mansfeld did not dare to risk another bridge of Dessau with his attenuated and dispirited force, recruited though it was by the half barbarous levies of the Transylvanian prince, while Bethlen himself saw that he could gain more by negotiation than by war. A truce was quickly made by which Mansfeld was obliged to leave Hungary. Death of Mansfeld, 1626. Ill in mind and body, the indefatigable adventurer attempted to make his way across the mountains to Italy in the depth of winter, in the hope of stirring up the Republic of Venice to greater exertions, but as he struggled on through Bosnia, death overtook him on the 30th of November. Thus suddenly disappeared from the scene one who by his military talents had been the chief obstacle to the success of the imperialists, and by his total want of morality and patriotism had been the greatest foe to the peace of Germany. His removal unfortunately came too late. The dragon’s teeth which he had sown produced a crop of military adventurers all over the soil of Germany as reckless and as able as himself, and already round the carcase of prostrate Germany were gathering the foreign powers, who did not scruple to use such auxiliaries for their own selfish purposes. For the moment the death of Mansfeld made the restoration of peace between the Emperor and Bethlen Gabor more easy, and on the 28th of December the treaty of Pressburg was signed by which Bethlen was to retain the sovereignty over the thirteen counties of Hungary, and the army of Mansfeld was disbanded.

Battle of Lutter.

Meanwhile the forces of the League had achieved a still greater success on the Weser. Christian IV. could not complete his armament without the English subsidies, but no money came, or could come, from England, where Charles I. was quarrelling with one Parliament after another. Tilly accordingly advanced slowly down the Weser and captured Minden and Göttingen. After the defeat of Mansfeld at Dessau, he was further reinforced by 8000 men from Wallenstein’s army, and Christian felt that if he was to assume the offensive at all, there was no time to be lost. Accordingly in August he hastily advanced into Thuringia, hoping to throw himself upon Tilly and crush him before the imperialist forces arrived, but he was too late. The junction was effected on the 22d of August, and Christian finding himself in the presence of superior numbers retreated. Tilly at once followed, overtook the Danish army on the 26th of August at Lutter, just as it was about to plunge into a narrow defile, and inflicted upon them a severe defeat. Christian, leaving 8000 men and all his artillery on the field of battle, and 2000 prisoners in the enemies’ hands, retired into Holstein and Mecklenberg, while Tilly overran the duchy of Brunswick and quartered his men for the winter along the lower Elbe, and an imperialist detachment occupied the mark of Brandenburg.

Further successes of Tilly and Wallenstein.

In the next year the tide of victory rolled on. Wallenstein, now made duke of Friedland, marched into Silesia with irresistible forces, and sent fifty standards to Vienna as evidence of his conquest. Then, joining hands with Tilly on the lower Elbe, the united armies poured into Holstein, and overran Denmark until stopped by the sea, and forced the unfortunate Christian to take refuge in the islands. In February 1628, Ferdinand, following the precedent of the Elector Palatine, put the dukes of Mecklenberg to the ban for the assistance they had given to Christian, declared their lands forfeited, and authorised Wallenstein to occupy and administer them in pledge for the expenses incurred. Sweeping over the country the imperial general seized upon the ports of Wismar and Rostock, obliged the duke of Pomerania to put the long coast line of his duchy under the care of the imperial troops, and was only checked in his career of conquest in March 1628 by the marshes and the fortifications of Stralsund. Siege of Stralsund, 1628. For five long months the imperialist army lay before the city, attempting the almost impossible feat of the capture of a defended city open to the sea by an attack from the land side only, for none knew better than Wallenstein himself the importance of the issue. All the southern coast of the Baltic from Dantzig to Lübeck, except Stralsund, owned his authority. Across the water lay the only foe he had now to fear. Sovereignty over the Baltic as well as over the Baltic provinces was necessary to him if he was to be safe from the attacks of Sweden. To further this policy, he had already obtained from the Emperor the title of admiral of the Baltic, and he was negotiating with the Hanse towns to provide him with a fleet, which should make the title something of a reality. As long as Stralsund afforded to the enemy an open door into the heart of Germany, the first steps necessary to gain that sovereignty were not complete. Nor was that all. Hitherto the opposition to the Emperor in Germany had been led by furious partisans like Christian of Anhalt, military adventurers like Mansfeld and Christian of Brunswick, or self-seeking politicians like Christian of Denmark and the other holders of the ecclesiastical lands. The German people and the cities of Germany had, as a rule, kept themselves aloof from the struggle, or extended their sympathies to the Emperor as the representative of order. But the siege of Stralsund showed that new forces were coming into play. It was the citizens, not their leaders, who insisted on fighting to the last gasp. The independent spirit of civic liberty was determined not to submit to a military dictatorship. The religious spirit of staunch Protestantism was determined not to make terms with the victorious Counter-Reformation. When Wallenstein, foiled and exasperated, drew off his army on August 3d from before the walls of Stralsund, he at least understood that among the cities of Germany there were those who would throw themselves into the arms of the foreigner, and risk all they had, rather than submit to military government and religious persecution. Nor was Stralsund alone in its victory. Glückstadt proved to Tilly as difficult a morsel to digest as Stralsund had been to Wallenstein, and in January 1629 he was forced to raise the siege. Matters had now reached a deadlock. Christian could not venture on the mainland and his enemies could not reach him at sea. The peace of Lübeck, 1629. Wallenstein saw the importance of bringing the Danish war to an end before Sweden appeared on the scene, and opened negotiations for peace. In May the treaty of Lübeck was signed. Christian surrendered all his claims upon the ecclesiastical lands in Germany and received back his hereditary dominions.

Causes of the Imperialist success.

Ten years had elapsed since the fatal day when the revolted Bohemian diet elected Frederick, Elector Palatine, to the throne of Bohemia, and the margrave of Anspach had exultingly cried, ‘Now we have the means of upsetting the world.’ In those ten years the German world had indeed been upset but not in the sense of the margrave’s prophecy. It was the very fact that in their attack upon the House of Austria the Calvinists were attempting to upset the world of Germany, were attempting to revolutionise German institutions, and were not in any way representing the rights of Protestantism, or the independence of the German princes, that deprived them of support in Germany outside their own body. Cautious and shrewd rulers like John George of Saxony looked upon them as the party of anarchy, and upon the Emperor as the representative of order. The recklessness with which Frederick and his advisers let Mansfeld and Christian of Brunswick loose upon the unoffending people, and outraged the sacred name of religion with burning homesteads and tortured peasants, lost them the respect of every right-thinking man. Men felt that to revolutionise Germany and to plunder Germans was not the way to defend the cause of Protestantism, and welcomed the successes of Maximilian and the League in Bohemia, and even in the Palatinate, as securities for the restoration of order upon the traditional lines.

Change brought about by Wallenstein and his army.

But since then a great change had taken place. The advent of Wallenstein upon the scene, with his personal army and transcendent military talents, brought new forces into play. Germany found itself threatened by the rule of the sword. Ferdinand found at his back a power capable of enforcing his will upon Germany, and, if need be, of superintending the reconciliation of German Protestantism to the Church. After the peace of Lübeck, who was to say him nay if he boldly entered upon a policy of Catholic aggression? The Protestant sympathies of his Austrian subjects had been drowned in blood. In Bohemia and Moravia, under their new Catholic landowners, Protestantism was suppressed, and all Protestants had been banished by the Reforming Commissions issued under the new constitution in 1627. Silesia had lately felt the heavy hand of Wallenstein and was in no condition to rebel. The upper Palatinate and part of the lower, lately made over to Maximilian, were already being rapidly converted to Catholicism. Secure then in his own dominions and sure of Maximilian’s support, what opposition was he likely to receive in Germany? The smaller princes of north Germany had been for the most part implicated in the Danish war, and their lands were in the occupation of the armies of the Emperor and of the League. John George of Saxony, the elector of Brandenburg, and the duke of Pomerania, were not likely at such a time to forfeit the protection of the agreement of Mülhausen, which had been faithfully observed on both sides hitherto. Possibly a few free cities, such as Magdeburg and Hamburg, might object, and the king of Sweden across the water might interfere, but no great end was ever achieved without running some risk. In 1627 the Catholic electors and the duke of Bavaria had urged upon Ferdinand that the time was now come to assert the rights of the Church under the peace of Augsburg, and Ferdinand was too strongly himself in favour of the policy to say that they were wrong. On March 29th, 1629, he issued the Edict of Restitution, restoring to the Church all the land secularised since the peace of Augsburg was signed. The Edict of Restitution, 1629. At one stroke the archbishoprics of Magdeburg and Bremen, the bishoprics of Minden, Verden, Halberstadt, Lübeck, Ratzeburg, Misnia, Merseburg, Naumburg, Brandenburg, Havelberg, Lebus and Camin, and about one hundred and twenty smaller foundations were taken away from their Protestant bishops and administrators, and restored to the Church. Never was greater mistake made. To resume lands in the name of the law, which had been from fifty to eighty years in the undisputed possession of Protestant holders, was in itself a straining of the letter of the law in violation of its spirit, which only intensified the sense of wrong brought about by the confiscation. In itself it armed the public opinion of all Germany against the Emperor. It roused the ardent Protestants to frenzy. But to do it in dependence on mere brute force was political suicide. Without the armies of Tilly and Wallenstein the Edict of Restitution was a dead letter, with them it was a military revolution. By it the Emperor stood out to the world as the author of a religious and political revolution, the success of which depended entirely upon military despotism, and was without any moral basis whatever. Germany would not be revolutionised by such measures as these.

CHAPTER V
THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR FROM THE PEACE OF LÜBECK TO THE PEACE OF PRAGUE

Difference between Wallenstein and the Emperor—Opposition of the League to Wallenstein—Dismissal of Wallenstein—Critical state of Protestantism in Germany—Condition of Sweden—Policy of Gustavus Adolphus—His wars with Denmark, Russia, and Poland—His interference in Germany and Alliance with France—The Campaign of 1631 and sack of Magdeburg—Alliance between Saxony and Sweden—Battle of Breitenfeld—Military successes and political difficulties of Gustavus—Wallenstein appointed dictator—Gustavus baffled by Wallenstein at Nuremburg—Battle of Lützen—The League of Heilbronn—The murder of Wallenstein—The battle of Nördlingen—The Peace of Prague—Policy of John George of Saxony.

Difference of policy between Wallenstein and Ferdinand.

The recklessness with which Ferdinand had undertaken to revolutionise Germany soon made itself apparent. To crush the political opposition of Denmark and the lower Saxon circle, he had had to call to his aid Wallenstein and his personal army. To carry out the far more difficult task of transferring from Protestants to Catholics large districts of north Germany, which had been for eighty or ninety years in the hands of Protestants, and of forcibly converting to his own religion thousands of Protestant Germans, he had but the same force upon which to rely. It was idle to think that the Edict of Restitution could be carried out without the help of soldiers. It was certain that Tilly and the troops of the League would not suffice to enforce the Edict and resist the threatened advance of Sweden. To whom could the Emperor turn except to Wallenstein and his 60,000 men? Yet it was just here that he was least sure of his ground. Wallenstein himself strongly disapproved of the policy of the Edict. It ran counter to the principle of religious equality upon which he had organised his own power. His army was the only place in Europe where Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists met on equal terms and served loyally one with another as comrades. To put an army organised on such a basis to the work of ousting Protestant clergy and superintending conversions would split it to its very foundations. More than that. It was no mere caprice which had led Wallenstein to make religious equality the basis of the organisation of his army. He believed strongly that it was the only possible basis for the reorganisation of Germany, and he looked forward to the time when, as dictator of Germany, he might at the head of an irresistible force impose upon the fanatics of both sides the boons of peace and religious toleration. For the first time in his career his own convictions and his own ambition led away from the policy and interests of his suzerain.

Opposition of the League to Wallenstein.

Just at this time the leaders of the League were becoming on their side very much dissatisfied with Wallenstein. They disliked his opinions. They feared his ambition. They distrusted his loyalty. His system of supporting his army by requisitions, though venial enough when exercised at the expense of the Protestant enemy, became sheer plunder when Catholics were the victims. During the winters 1626–27 and 1628–29, his drums had been beating continuously in all the chief towns of Germany, and not unnaturally it appeared intolerable that the Emperor’s own general should be even more oppressive to his friends than to his enemies.

The Diet of Regensburg, 1630.

The opposition came to a head at the diet held at Regensburg in July 1630. The lead was taken by Maximilian of Bavaria. Father Joseph, Richelieu’s accomplished diplomatist, laboured indefatigably and successfully in fomenting the discontent, and Ferdinand soon found that he had to choose between Wallenstein and the League. There was no middle course possible. He must part with one or the other. To a man of lofty soul, high ambition, and bold courage, there was much to attract in the prospect held out by Wallenstein. If Ferdinand could only make up his mind to risk all in order to gain all, throw himself without reserve into Wallenstein’s arms, and at the head of 100,000 men impose upon Germany a new constitution, in which the imperial power should be established upon the ruin of that of the princes, a new era would dawn for the Emperor, the supremacy of the House of Austria in Europe would be assured. But a policy such as this was too revolutionary and too venturesome for a conscientious and commonplace nature like that of Ferdinand. It certainly involved the overthrow of the traditional relations between the Emperor and the princes. It certainly necessitated the withdrawal of the Edict of Restitution. It might not improbably make the Emperor the slave of his too successful general instead of the lord of the world. It was not given to Ferdinand to drive the horses of the Sun. For him there was no alternative. He was nothing if not traditionally legal. Dismissal of Wallenstein, 1630. Wallenstein was the disturber of precedent and law, and Wallenstein must be sacrificed. A few weeks after Gustavus Adolphus had landed on the coast of Pomerania, Ferdinand, at the bidding of the Catholic powers of Germany, dismissed the only general capable of withstanding the Protestant champion.

Critical state of Protestantism in Germany.

With the coming of Gustavus Adolphus the war was lifted for a while into a higher region of politics. It became ennobled by higher motives and a greater policy. Hitherto what nobility of motive had been discoverable was all on the Catholic side. The maintenance of the authority of the Emperor and the institutions of the Empire, the establishment of the authority of the Church, in the teeth of a factious and reckless nobility, were at least nobler objects to fight for than the winning of a crown, or the command of an army, or the right to provide for younger sons out of secularised church lands. But the victories of Tilly and Wallenstein and the issue of the Edict of Restitution had brought a great change. With Christian of Denmark beaten to his knees, with the troops of the League and the Emperor in occupation of north Germany, with Wallenstein, admiral of the Baltic and duke of Mecklenberg, in possession of the Baltic coast and harbours, the questions at stake were no longer the maintenance of the authority of the Emperor, but the independence of the north German princes, and the sovereignty of the Baltic. By the publication of the Edict of Restitution, not merely were the secularised lands endangered, but Protestantism itself in north Germany was threatened.

Objects of Gustavus Adolphus.

The Thirty Years’ War is the last of the great wars of religion, and the first of the great wars of politics. In Gustavus Adolphus, the hero of the war, both aspects are united. When he landed in Pomerania in July 1630, he came distinctly as the champion of Protestantism, to save German Protestantism from being overwhelmed by brute force; but he came no less distinctly as the national king of Sweden, to defend and establish that supremacy over the Baltic sea and the Baltic coast, which was essential to the prosperity and existence of his country. It was a defensive war that he came to wage, a war in defence of his religion and in defence of his kingdom, though it necessarily took from the circumstances of the case an aggressive form. Between the policy of Gustavus in 1630 and that of Richelieu in 1635 there is the whole difference between patriotism and aggrandisement.

Condition of Sweden.

No one who looked attentively at Sweden at the beginning of the seventeenth century would for a moment have anticipated the fortune which in fact was about to attend her. Poor in material resources, sadly deficient in roads and means of communication, sparsely populated, frost-bound for half the year, cut off almost wholly by her old conqueror Denmark from the ocean, she seemed to be doomed to be pressed out of existence by her more fortunately placed neighbours. From this fate she was saved by one of the most remarkable races of kings of whom history makes mention. The monarchy. From Gustavus Vasa, the emancipator of Sweden from the tyranny of the Danes, who ascended the throne in 1523, to Charles XII., the terror and pride of Europe, who lost his life in 1718, there was not one sovereign of the House of Vasa who did not in some ways show the marks of fine and original genius. Well may the historian of Sweden exclaim, ‘The history of Sweden is the history of her kings,’ for in few countries have national characteristics and national development been so intimately bound up with the monarchy. The Lutheran Church. Gustavus Vasa achieved the independence of Sweden, and established his new monarchy on the ruins of the Church. Seizing with the eye of a statesman the close affinity between Lutheranism and state power, he introduced the Reformation into Sweden as a political measure, enriching the Crown and purchasing the support of the nobles by the confiscation of the Church lands. From that time Sweden had two enemies to contend against, the hostility of Denmark, and the power of the nobility; to which, under John III., the husband of Catherine Jagellon, the heiress of the Jagellon kings of Poland, a third was added, namely the Counter-Reformation. At the beginning of the seventeenth century this last was the most pressing danger, for Sigismund, the son of John III. and Catherine Jagellon, was an ardent Catholic. Attempt of Sigismund to restore Catholicism, 1592–1604. He had become king of Poland by election in 1587, and had done much to re-establish Catholicism in that country before he succeeded by inheritance to the crown of Sweden in 1592. On his attempting a similar policy in Sweden he found himself at once opposed by the self-interest of the nobility, who held so large a share of the Church lands, and by a spirit of nationality among the people, who resented the interference of Poles and Italians with a sturdy independence, which reminds us of the hatred of the medieval English for all ‘outlandish’ people. These feelings found a representative in Charles, the youngest son of Gustavus Vasa, and uncle of Sigismund, who after a brief contest expelled his nephew from Sweden and seated himself on the throne in his stead in 1604.

Reign of Charles IX., 1604–1611.

This dynastic revolution strengthened Sweden by making her religion the symbol and the test of her liberty. Lutheranism became the political as well as the religious faith of the country. It weakened her by adding another to the number of her hereditary foes. If Denmark could not forget that she had once been the ruler of Sweden, neither could Poland forget, at any rate during the life of Sigismund, that her king had by law no less right to rule at Stockholm than at Warsaw. If, however, Charles IX. increased the external he diminished the internal difficulties of his country. Nobles and king had united together against foreign influence, and when raised to the throne, Charles succeeded by his wise administration in making the bond still closer and was able to hand on to his son, the young Gustavus Adolphus, the government of a united and prosperous nation. Nevertheless, patriotic and religious as Sweden was on the accession of Gustavus Adolphus in 1611, she had not yet passed through that crisis common to the infancy of nations, when extension of territory and influence becomes essential to the preservation of national-life. Since she had become an independent nation her mineral wealth had been much developed by her kings. Education and civilisation had made great strides. Since she had become Protestant, she had naturally been drawn into political and commercial relations with the English and the Dutch, who were rapidly establishing their commercial supremacy in the northern seas, and especially in the Baltic, on the ruins of the Hansa. Weakness of Sweden. But as yet Denmark held the southern provinces of the Swedish peninsula. Only in one place, at the mouth of the river Gota, where the fortress of Elfsborg stood and the houses and wharves of Gottenburg were beginning to rise, did Sweden touch the outer sea. For all practical purposes her trade was a purely Baltic trade, and could only reach the outside world by the permission, and subject to the regulations, of Denmark, who held the Sound and imposed tolls on all ships which passed through.

Policy of Gustavus Adolphus.

Within the confines of the Baltic itself the position of Sweden was by no means assured. The coast line which she held was large, but only because it included the inhospitable and semi-barbarous Finland. She had not a city, not even Stockholm, which could vie in riches or in trade with Lübeck or with Dantzig. Since the days of Ivan the Terrible, Russia had made her appearance in the north as a power which must be reckoned with, and threatened to claim her share of the Baltic. In the ‘troublous times’ which preceded the rise of the Romanoff dynasty Sweden saw her opportunity, and under Eric and Charles IX. had stretched across the sea, and made good her hold over the first of her Baltic provinces in Esthonia and Livonia; but situated as they were between hostile Poland and semi-hostile Russia, they could not be looked upon in any other light than that of an outpost to be withdrawn or reinforced as occasion might serve. Exceedingly precarious therefore was the position of the young monarchy. A combined attack by its three enemies must at any moment destroy it. Steady hostile pressure under the forms of peace might gradually stifle it. Sweden could not be safe until she had obtained supremacy in the Baltic, she could not be prosperous until she had gained free access to the ocean, she could not be dominant in the north until she had secured her supremacy over the Baltic by the acquisition of a substantial foothold on its eastern coast. These were the three main objects of Swedish national policy steadily pursued by Gustavus Adolphus, and after his death by his friend and chancellor Oxenstjerna. They necessitated an aggressive policy. To sit still was to die. The martial instincts and the youth of the king combined with motives of policy to urge him to a bold course, and the nation well understanding the nature of the crisis seconded him nobly.

War with Denmark, 1611–1613.

Denmark was the foe upon whom Gustavus was called to whet his virgin steel. Taking advantage of the confusion caused by the minority of the new king, Christian IV. had seized upon Elfsborg and Calmar early in 1611. Directly Gustavus had been pronounced of age he marched to recover the fortresses, and learned his first lesson in the art of war in a year of frontier hostilities, which were ended through the mediation of James I. by the peace of Knarod in January 1613. By this treaty Calmar was at once restored to the Swedes, and Elfsborg covenanted to be restored on the payment of a million dollars, which were duly raised and paid in two years. Relieved from all present anxiety from the side of Denmark, Gustavus at once turned his attention to the growing power of Russia, now gathering itself together under Michael Romanoff. War with Russia, 1614–1617. In 1614 he invaded Ingria, and spent three years in desultory fighting, in which he was uniformly victorious in battle, and slowly occupied the country. Again England, who had trade relations with Russia, offered her mediation, and by the treaty of Stolbova, signed in February 1617, Sweden obtained from Russia the cession of Ingria and Carelia, thus gaining a continuous coast line on the Baltic from Calmar to Riga, and shutting Russia from the sea altogether. ‘The enemy,’ said Gustavus triumphantly, ‘cannot launch a boat upon the Baltic without our permission.’

War with Poland, 1617–1629.

Hardly was the peace of Stolbova signed, than an invasion of Swedish Livonia by Sigismund of Poland forced Gustavus to enter upon his third war. Poland was a much more difficult nut to crack than Russia had been, for behind Sigismund lay the forces of the Counter-Reformation, but from various circumstances neither side could press the war with vigour. Two armistices (from 1618–1621 and from 1622–1625) interrupted its lethargic course, and enabled Sweden to recruit her failing energies, and her king to perfect the improvements in military tactics for which he is famous. In 1625 he resumed the war in earnest, and crossing the Dwina overran and occupied Courland, pushing the Polish generals back into Lithuania. But neither Riga nor any of the Courland towns gave him what he most wanted, a place of first-rate importance, which he might make the centre of his operations; so in the next year he directed his attack on Dantzig, although it involved the violation of the neutrality of his brother-in-law, George William of Brandenburg. Dantzig was a town strongly fortified on the land side. The Swedish fleet was too weak to enforce the attempted blockade by sea. Hence, like Stralsund and La Rochelle, until cut off from the sea it was impregnable. For four weary years Gustavus attempted unsuccessfully to reduce it. Eventually in 1629, when the affairs in Germany rendered it essential for him to have his hands free, he consented to make peace without gaining the desired end. Yet the Polish war was not thrown away. By the treaty of Stuhmsdorf, Sweden gained the whole of Livonia, and some places in Prussia, and by the training both of himself and of his army in the four Polish campaigns, he had unconsciously made Sweden one of the most formidable military powers of the day.

Negotiations between England and Gustavus in 1624.

While the Thirty Years’ War was in progress, the eyes both of Catholics and Protestants in Germany had often been turned towards Gustavus in fear and in hope. He himself looked forward with eagerness to the day when his assistance might be necessary, for he longed to cross swords with Tilly and the imperial generals, but it was eagerness tempered with prudence. He would enter into the war at his own time, and on his own terms, or not at all. In 1624 he was asked by England to formulate those terms, and he laid down three conditions as indispensable, that he should have the sole military management of the war, that England should provide the money for 17,000 men, and pay the subsidies for five months in advance, that he should be protected from attack from Denmark, while at war in Germany, and have two ports made over to him to secure his communications. Unlike Christian of Denmark, he would not be content with fair promises, but insisted on performance before he would move. The terms were too onerous for acceptance at that time, but the fate of Christian proved their wisdom and necessity. The defeat of the Danes, and the establishment of Wallenstein on the Baltic coast, brought the danger nearer home. What chance was there for Sweden to obtain supremacy over the Baltic with Mecklenberg and Pomerania in the hands of the imperial admiral? Clearly she would have to fight for her independence, let alone her religion, if Wallenstein was suffered to make himself duke of Mecklenberg. Gustavus recognised the necessity at once. Alliance between Sweden and Denmark, 1628. In April 1628 he made an alliance with his old enemy Christian IV. of Denmark, by which all foreign ships, except those of the Dutch were excluded from the Baltic. In the summer of the same year, he sent 2000 men under Alexander Leslie to defend Stralsund against Wallenstein. Landing of Gustavus in Germany, 1630.In September 1629 he put an end to the Polish war by the treaty of Stuhmsdorf, and on the 24th of June 1630 he landed on the island of Usedom, at the head of an army of 13,000 men, which was raised to 40,000 before the end of the year.

Measures of Gustavus.

Gustavus timed his invasion with great judgment. The diet of Regensburg was still sitting, and the army of Wallenstein was demoralised by the approaching sacrifice of its chief. Hardly a month after the landing of the Swedish king that sacrifice was consummated, a large part of Wallenstein’s army was disbanded, and the rest put under the command of Tilly, who was becoming in his old age extremely dilatory in his movements. Gustavus accordingly found himself for six months practically unopposed, and he at once employed the time in establishing for himself a strong basis of operations on the Baltic and in the enlistment of fresh troops. In January of the next year came a most welcome assistance. Richelieu had long fixed his eyes upon Gustavus, as one of the most formidable weapons capable of being used against the House of Austria, and he desired to put it into the armoury of France. Negotiations had been opened with this object in the spring of the year but had failed. Alliance between Gustavus and Richelieu, 1631. He had found Gustavus more stubborn than he had expected, and quickly realised that if he wanted the king of Sweden’s help he could have it only on the king of Sweden’s terms. Gracefully submitting to the inevitable, on January 23rd 1631 he concluded with Gustavus the treaty of Bärwalde, by which he undertook to supply the king with 200,000 dollars for six years, on condition that Gustavus maintained an army of 36,000 men, promised to respect the imperial constitution, observed neutrality towards Bavaria and the League as far as they observed it towards him, and left the Catholic religion untouched in those districts where he found it established. The alliance of the foreigner was the only voluntary aid which the liberator of Germany could obtain. Jealousy of Gustavus in Germany. The old duke Boguslav of Pomerania was as submissive in the hands of Gustavus as he had been in the hands of Wallenstein, but it was helplessness not friendship which put his resources at the disposal of the invader. John George of Saxony and George William of Brandenburg steadily refused to break their neutrality, or take one step in the direction of the dismemberment of the Empire. In March a great gathering of Protestants was held at Leipzig to consider the situation. They agreed to raise troops for their own defence in case they were attacked. They assured the Emperor of their continued loyalty, if only he would withdraw the Edict of Restitution. They said not one word about assistance to the foreigner.

The campaign of 1631.

German patriotic feeling was against Gustavus. It was clear that he would have to make his way by the sword, and the sword alone. At the end of March the campaign began. Tilly suddenly dashed at Neu Brandenburg, captured it on March 29th, and destroyed its garrison of 2000 Swedes, thus thrusting himself in between Gustavus in Pomerania and Horn in Mecklenburg. Gustavus saw the danger. By forced marches he succeeded in circumventing Tilly and effecting his junction with Horn, and the old marshal sullenly retreated to the Elbe, where he formed the siege of Magdeburg, which had of its own accord declared against the Emperor, and asked for a Swedish garrison. Meanwhile Gustavus had marched to the Oder, and captured the important fortress of Frankfort, which was garrisoned by the imperialists. From there he designed to move to the relief of Magdeburg, now hard pressed by Tilly and Pappenheim. Every motive of honour and policy impelled him to ensure its safety. But unforeseen obstacles presented themselves. In order to march to Magdeburg, it was necessary to cross the territories of Brandenburg and Saxony, and neither of the electors would for a moment think of permitting an act which might seem to the Emperor a violation of their neutrality. While Magdeburg was in its death throes fruitless negotiations continued. Both the electors remained stubbornly immovable. At last in desperation Gustavus appeared at Berlin with a more potent argument at his back in the shape of an army, and forced the unwilling George William to throw open to him the fortress of Spandau. But it was too late. Saxony had still to be dealt with, and while Saxony was deliberating Magdeburg fell. Fall of Magdeburg. On May 20th, Pappenheim stormed the town. Amid the confusion of the assault the houses caught fire. The imperialist soldiers, maddened by victory and plunder, lost all self-control, and amid the roar of the flames and the crash of falling houses ensued a scene of carnage, of outrage, and of horror, at which Europe stood aghast. By the next morning the cathedral alone showed gaunt against the sky, amid a mass of blackened ruins, to say where Magdeburg once had been.

The sack of Magdeburg is one of the darkest spots on the page of history. For many years it has been allowed to stain the reputation of the veteran Tilly, unjustly, for he was far away at the time, but upon Gustavus must rightly rest some part of the fearful responsibility. Responsibility of Gustavus. Magdeburg had risen against the Emperor trusting in him. He had sent one of his own officers to lead the defence. He knew to what desperate straits the town was reduced, and though he could not have anticipated the actual horrors of the sack, he knew well enough what the storming of a town by soldiers of fortune meant in those brutal days. Yet for two critical months he allowed his march to be checked, and his honour compromised, by the mulish stubbornness of the two electors, who had no force at their command sufficient to resist his advance, had he nobly acted upon the necessity which knows no law. It is just possible that by such an action he might have driven the electors to throw themselves into the arms of the Emperor, but it is not likely. Gustavus had not hesitated in 1626 to seize Pillau by force from the elector of Brandenburg, when he wanted a basis of operations against Dantzig. In this very campaign, when too late, he had to use force to gain possession of Spandau, yet the elector was not moved from his neutrality by either of these high-handed acts. Surely the least which Magdeburg might fairly ask of him in her distress was not to be more scrupulous about violating neutrality for her safety than he had been for his own advantage.

Retreat of Gustavus.

From a military point of view the loss of Magdeburg was a crushing blow. The incipient movements in favour of Gustavus, which had begun to show themselves among the Protestant towns, at once ceased. No German princes except William of Hesse-Cassel and Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar joined him. As Gustavus slowly fell back down the Elbe, and entrenched himself at Werben, he must have felt that all the imperialist leaders had to do was to leave him alone, and his power would melt away of itself. But to leave things alone was just what Ferdinand and Maximilian in the flush of their anticipated victory could not do. In April peace had been signed at Cherasco between Ferdinand and France, and the Italian army of the Emperor had now crossed the Alps and reinforced Tilly. Forty thousand men followed his standard, and in the hope of quelling all opposition and ending the war at a blow, orders were sent to the marshal to procure the dismissal of the Saxon troops, and then to march against the Swedes. Invasion of Saxony by Tilly. But John George unexpectedly resented this interference with his independence. He refused to dismiss his troops. Tilly immediately occupied Merseburg and Leipzig and began harrying the country. The sight of his burning villages, and the invasion of his cherished independence, roused the sluggish elector at last. He sent messengers post haste to Gustavus offering his alliance and demanding his help. By one fatal blunder Ferdinand had done more to destroy his own cause, than all his foes together had hitherto succeeded in doing. He had driven Saxony over to the enemy. Alliance between Saxony and Sweden. It was not so much the material resources which the elector possessed, which made his friendship so important to Gustavus, as the position which he held in Germany. Drunken, sluggish, obstinate, irresolute as he was, men recognised in him a strenuous loyalty to the constitution of the Empire as it then existed, a hearty dread of revolutionary proposals, and a certain political shrewdness. It was these qualities, quite as much as his hereditary position as the leader of the Lutheran party, which had hitherto determined the attitude of the north German princes both towards Frederick and Christian of Denmark. That he should now join his forces to the Swedes meant that to him the foreigner and the invader appeared less of a revolutionary than the legal head of the Empire himself.

The battle of Breitenfeld.

Gustavus did not let the grass grow under his feet. He set out at once for Saxony with the elector of Brandenburg, effected a junction with the Saxon army, and marching towards Leipsig met the army of Tilly drawn up in battle array on the field of Breitenfeld on September 17th, 1631. Tilly marshalled his men to the number of 32,000 in one long line of battle along rising ground overlooking the little stream of the Loderbach. In the centre were posted as usual the solid squares of pikemen flanked by musketeers, which formed the main battle according to the tactics of the Spanish school. On the right wing was Furstenberg with the horse of the Italian army, while the left was guarded by the fiery Pappenheim and his famous cavalry. Between the wings and the centre were placed the heavy guns, probably between thirty and forty in number. Tilly himself on his well-known white horse put himself among his Walloon fellow-countrymen in the centre. The arrangement adopted by Gustavus was somewhat different. The army was drawn up in two lines, with a reserve of cavalry behind each line, and a final reserve also of cavalry behind the centre of the whole army. The extreme left opposed to Furstenberg was occupied by the Saxon troops under the elector in person. On the right of the Saxons, and in touch with the Swedish centre, was Horn with the Swedish cavalry. Gustavus himself took command of the right wing, opposed to Pappenheim, with the rest of the cavalry; but between each division of cavalry on both wings in the first line was a detachment of two hundred musketeers. The infantry occupied the centre, marshalled in very much smaller squares than those of Tilly, and having a much greater proportion of musketeers to pikemen, while in front of each regiment was the light or field artillery. The heavier guns, in all about one hundred, under the command of Torstenson, were placed in the left centre. In numbers Gustavus was decidedly superior. His own army amounted to some 26,000 men while the Saxons could not be less than 15,000. His guns, too, though not so heavy as those of Tilly, were far more numerous, and could fire three shots to one of the imperialists. The wind and the ground favoured Tilly. The battle began with an artillery duel in which the quick-firing Swedish pieces wrought fearful havoc among the dense masses of the imperialist army. Yet the stubborn old marshal remained immovable amid the hail of the balls. Pappenheim, younger and less disciplined, lost patience. Without orders he suddenly launched his cavalry on the Swedish right, but Gustavus was ready for him. The musketeers received him with a volley which made him reel, and Baner at the head of the reserve cavalry, and Gustavus himself with the right wing, dashed upon him at the moment and drove him fairly off the field. Meanwhile on the extreme imperialist right Furstenberg in his turn threw himself upon the Saxons, drove back their cavalry first on to their guns and then on to their infantry, until the whole mass in wild confusion broke and ran, carrying the elector with them to Duben, and even to Eilenburg, pursued by the victorious imperialists. Tilly saw his opportunity, and ordered his centre to advance to take Horn in the flank left exposed by the flying Saxons, but the well-disciplined and mobile Swedes falling back a little formed a new front on their old flank and defended themselves vigorously. In making this flank movement Tilly had necessarily left his artillery undefended, and Gustavus, checking his pursuit of Pappenheim, wheeled back his cavalry, and sweeping the position originally occupied by Tilly from left to right, captured the guns and turned them against their own masters, while he himself with his horsemen swooped down upon Tilly’s rear. Caught between Horn’s foot in front and Gustavus’s cavalry in the rear, with their own guns directing a plunging fire into their flanks, the imperialist infantry proved themselves worthy of their reputation. They fought like heroes, but the longer they fought the more hopeless became the struggle, the more decisive the defeat. When the autumn sun went down on the field of blood, but six hundred men remained in disciplined array to make a ring round their veteran leader and carry him in safety from the field. The imperialist army was entirely destroyed as a fighting force. About 10,000 men were left on the field of battle, as many more were taken prisoners, and according to the custom of the time took service with the victors. One hundred and six standards and all the guns remained to grace the conqueror’s triumph. Tilly retreated on the Weser, gathering up the fragments of his defeated army as he went, but he found no rest there. Pressed back by the advance of the victorious Swedes to the Danube and even across the Danube, he did not dare to make head against Gustavus again until the following spring.

March of Gustavus to the Main.

The victory of Breitenfeld placed all north Germany at the feet of the Swedish king. Perceiving at a glance that even a successful attack upon Vienna would not end the war, and recognising that his first duty was to the troubled Protestants of the centre and of the south, Gustavus marched straight into the heart of Germany on the Main and the Rhine, disregarding the characteristic suggestions of Wallenstein that they should divide Germany between them at the expense of the Emperor and the Catholic party. On October 10th he occupied Würtzburg. The 18th of November saw him at Frankfort on the Main, the old capital of Germany. He spent Christmas Day at Mainz, and there in the fair and rich Rhineland he rested his tired troops, while in the north Tott was completing the reduction of the Mecklenberg coast line, and the Protestant administrators who had been ousted under the Edict of Restitution were being replaced. No one, however, knew better than Gustavus on what slender foundations his power rested. Richelieu was already beginning to think that his ally was becoming too powerful. Louis XIII., it was said, had been heard to mutter ‘It is time to put a limit to the progress of this Goth.’ Force, far more than inclination or policy, had brought him the Saxon alliance, and force might easily break the bond which it had forged. Tilly was mustering new forces beyond the Danube, and at any moment a general of reputation might stamp his feet and produce an army of soldiers of fortune on his flank or in his rear. Even the Protestants could not be trusted should misfortune come. Except at Nuremberg and a few other places, which had felt the hand of the oppressor, there was no enthusiasm in Germany for the Protestant Liberator. Two things were necessary to secure the fruits of the victory which he had won. His schemes for a general Protestant alliance under Sweden. He must crush the enemy before he had time to recover from the blow of Breitenfeld, and he must gain a basis of military operations and political influence by uniting the Protestant states in a firm league under his leadership. With Tilly destroyed, and the Corpus Evangelicorum formed, and trusty Swedish captains placed in occupation of the ecclesiastical lands of central Germany, then and not till then might Gustavus consider his work secure.

Advance upon the Danube to Munich, 1632.

The first thing was to crush military opposition. At the end of March the Swedes were again in the field. On the 31st Gustavus entered Nuremberg in triumph and received an enthusiastic welcome. On April 5th he captured Donauwörth, on the 14th he found Tilly entrenched behind the Lech, forced the passage of the river, stormed the enemies’ position, and drove back the old marshal to Ingolstadt wounded to death. Bavaria was at his feet. Side by side with the Elector Palatine he rode into Munich on the 7th of May. There was now no enemy left to be dealt with except the Emperor, and the dominions of the Hapsburgs were still in far too disorganised a state to be able to offer much opposition. Even the Saxons had marched unopposed into Bohemia, and when Gustavus was celebrating his triumph with the winter-king at Munich, John George, who had done more than any one else to oust Frederick from Bohemia, was keeping high festival himself at Prague.

Wallenstein appealed to by the Emperor.

It was not for long. There was but one man in all wide Europe who could save Ferdinand from the storm just breaking upon his head, for there was but one capable of drawing to himself and binding together into an organised army the soldiers of fortune who were scattered all over the civilised world. In December, Eggenberg, Ferdinand’s most trusted counsellor, had been sent to Wallenstein to ask him to forgive the past and strike one more blow for the defence of the House of Austria. Wallenstein eagerly seized the opportunity, for circumstances had played singularly into his hand. The victories of Gustavus had drawn the teeth of Maximilian and the League. The necessities of the Emperor must force him to agree to whatever terms were demanded. The long wished for moment had arrived when he at the head of an army, wholly his own, owing no allegiance to the Emperor, might become the dictator of Germany, and, ousting from her soil all foreigners except himself, might impose peace upon Germany on the basis of religious toleration. His terms. The terms which he exacted from the Emperor forbid any doubt as to his intentions. No army was to be allowed in the Empire except under his command, he alone was to have the right of pardoning offenders and confiscating lands. Appointed dictator. The Edict of Restitution was to be withdrawn. In other words, he was to be the military and political dictator of Germany. The terms were accepted, his standard raised. From Italy, Scotland, Ireland, as well as from every part of Germany, flocked to him men eager for distinction and more eager for plunder, without distinction of nationality and without distinction of religion. In May 1632, his organisation was completed. His plan of campaign. Falling suddenly upon the Saxons at Prague he drove them headlong out of Bohemia, then turning swiftly to the left directed his main army upon the rich and Protestant Nuremberg, while Pappenheim scoured the Rhine country at the head of his horse. Gustavus saw the crisis, threw himself into Nuremberg and fortified it, then, summoning to his assistance his outlying detachments, offered Wallenstein battle in the hope of crushing this new enemy by another Breitenfeld. But Wallenstein had made up his mind to show Gustavus quite another sort of warfare. He knew the great difficulties which the Swedes experienced in conducting their operations in a country, largely hostile, at such a distance from their base. He knew also the value of his own superiority in light cavalry in provisioning his own army, and in hampering the commissariat of the Swedes. He did not trust the discipline of his own recent levies on the battle-field, and so, forming a huge entrenched camp on an eminence overlooking the plain on which Nuremberg stands, he prepared to force Gustavus away by sheer starvation.

The camp at Nuremberg.

At the end of June the camp was finished, and the duel between the two greatest soldiers of the day began. But it was not only a duel between soldiers, it was also a duel between rival policies. The crisis of the fate of the Empire was being then decided. On the one side was military dictatorship and religious toleration in connection with the traditional institutions of the Empire, on the other Protestant supremacy and political federation under the leadership of the foreigner. Stubbornly the question was fought out, not by arms but by endurance, but day by day it became clearer that Wallenstein had calculated rightly, and that Gustavus must starve the first. By the beginning of September the strain was growing intolerable, discipline was becoming relaxed, and the king felt that he must stake all on one last attack. On September 3d he led his army against Wallenstein’s entrenchments, but in vain. After heroic efforts he had to retire baffled. Retreat of Gustavus. A few days afterwards he marched out of Nuremberg, leaving the best part of his army dead before the ramparts of the Alte Veste, or dying in the hospitals of the town. Invasion of Saxony by Wallenstein. Wallenstein, following out determinedly the plan he had laid down for himself, never attempted to pursue, but turning north into Saxony prepared somewhat leisurely to choose a position between the Elbe and the Saale, where he might entrench himself for the winter, and apply the gentle pressure of his marauding and requisitioning bands to the ever-vacillating will of John George, and detach him from the Swedish alliance. Gustavus had in the previous year lost Magdeburg by a want of decision. He was not going to lose Saxony in the same way. Summoning Oxenstjerna and Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar to his aid, he flew through Thuringia as quick as he could go, and seized Erfurt and Naumberg before Wallenstein quite realised what had happened. It was now the beginning of November, the weather had suddenly turned piercingly cold, and Wallenstein, making up his mind that Gustavus would not pursue his operations further that winter, prepared to entrench himself between Merseburg and Torgau, and gave permission to Pappenheim to return to the Rhineland capturing Halle as he went. It was a great blunder. Gustavus dashed forwards on Wallenstein’s main army to crush it before the mistake could be repaired. Wallenstein finding a battle inevitable sent messenger after messenger to bring Pappenheim back, and hastily throwing up some field entrenchments and deepening the ditches which intersected the plain, awaited the onslaught of the Swedish king at Lützen on the 16th of November.

Battle of Lützen, 1632.

As at Breitenfeld the Swedes were drawn up in two lines, and the imperialists only in one, but Wallenstein, unlike Tilly, seems to have interspersed bodies of musketeers among the troops of the cavalry, and posted a strong reserve behind his centre. The battle began as usual with the artillery in the early morning, then, as the autumn mist cleared away, the Swedes advanced to the attack about ten o’clock. There was no room for generalship. It was hard hand-to-hand fighting. For two hours the battle swayed backwards and forwards, the hardest of the fighting being on the Swedish right, where the king himself was engaged with Piccolomini’s black cuirassiers. Bit by bit the Swedes were gaining ground, when Wallenstein bringing up his reserves directed a terrible charge upon the Swedish centre, and forced it back with fearful loss, especially among the officers. Death of Gustavus.Gustavus, at the head of such horsemen as he could muster, flew to the rescue, and as he made his way through the mist which had gathered again for a few moments in the hollow, found himself unexpectedly in the middle of a troop of the enemy’s cavalry. A shot broke his left arm, another pierced his back, and he fell heavily to the ground, where he was soon despatched by a bullet through the head. His white horse, riderless and bloodstained, tore on through the enemy into the Swedish ranks and announced the loss of their leader. Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar took the command, and rallying the army with the cry of vengeance, renewed the charge with an enthusiasm which carried all before it. Just then Pappenheim and his cavalry appeared on the right flank of the Swedes, and the battle again settled down to hard hand-to-hand fighting for three hours more. Pappenheim himself fell dead in the first charge, but his men, like their enemies, fought on the more fiercely to avenge the fall of their captain. At last as the darkness fell the Swedes nerved themselves for a supreme effort, and drove the imperialists from their entrenchments just as the leading columns of Pappenheim’s infantry appeared upon the field.

Results of his death.

The honours of the battle were with the Swedes, its fruits were with Wallenstein. As regards mere numbers the Swedish loss was probably heavier than that of the imperialists, and their army more weakened as a fighting force. But if Gustavus had been the only man killed on that side, his death would have more than counterbalanced the whole of the imperialist losses, for not only was he the general and the king, not only was the one man capable of uniting the forces of Protestantism, the one who could successfully cope both with the ambition of Richelieu and the fanaticism of Ferdinand, but he was also the only man still in power in Germany who ennobled the struggle with a distinct moral ideal. Whether Protestants in Germany had sufficient powers of cohesion and strength of conviction to follow a common policy, whether Sweden, even under Gustavus, could have become sufficiently German in interests and sympathies to command the allegiance of Germans, may be doubtful; but at any rate it was a policy worth trying, it was a policy based on the moral and political needs of the people, and not upon the personal ambition of the successful general. If it failed it would fail only because Protestantism in Germany had not the qualities necessary to make it succeed. But when Gustavus Adolphus died on the field of Lützen all moral and religious ideal died too out of the Thirty Years’ War. On the one side was the personal ambition of a military dictator, on the other the national ambition of a foreign aggressor, and the very followers and companions of the noble Gustavus himself soon sank to be little more than ‘condottiere’ bent only upon gorging themselves and their country out of the spoils of helpless Germany.

The lead taken by Oxenstjerna.

On the death of Gustavus the supreme direction of Swedish affairs passed into the hands of Oxenstjerna, whose one object was to carry out the policy of his dead friend and king; but Oxenstjerna was no general, and being without the supreme authority which Gustavus wielded, had often to persuade where he would have commanded. His first step showed the change which had taken place. Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, like other military adventurers, required his reward before he would venture his life further in the cause, and a duchy had to be carved for him out of the bishoprics of Bamberg and Würtzburg. It was the first confiscation of Catholic lands by the Protestant forces, the first forcible subjection of a Catholic population to a Protestant ruler. However justifiable it might be as an act of retaliation for the Edict of Restitution, it was but too evident a proof of the increasing tendency to consider the interests of the German people as of no value in comparison with the political and military necessities of their so-called saviours. The League of Heilbronn, 1633. Sure of the assistance of Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, Oxenstjerna was enabled to unite the circles of Swabia Franconia and the upper and lower Rhine to Sweden by an offensive and defensive league, which was signed at Heilbronn in April 1633. Bernhard took command of the forces raised by the circles, and prepared in conjunction with the Swedish army to resume the attack on Vienna.

The supreme word on military affairs for the moment lay not with Bernhard or with Oxenstjerna but with Wallenstein. Schemes of Wallenstein. The death of Gustavus left him, as he well knew, without a rival in Germany, and retiring slowly from Lützen behind the mountains of Bohemia, he surrendered himself to the illusion that he could now dictate peace to Germany on his own terms. Secure, as he thought, of the support of his army, contemptuous of the politics both of Ferdinand and of Oxenstjerna, he prepared to enforce his own conditions of peace upon the Emperor and upon the Swedes alike. The Edict of Restitution was to be withdrawn, the Swedes to be compensated by some places on the Baltic coast, while he himself, the peacemaker, would exchange the duchy of Mecklenberg for the Rhenish Palatinate, or possibly the crown of Bohemia. During the summer of 1633 he was pressing these terms upon Oxenstjerna and upon John George. In June he had almost obtained the consent of the latter, but Oxenstjerna, cautious and hostile, would not trust him. Couriers went quick and often between the two, and rumours of treachery were beginning to be heard behind Wallenstein’s back, not merely at Vienna, but, a far more serious thing, in the camp. The more they were canvassed the more did Wallenstein’s proposals seem hateful to important interests in Europe. Opposition of the Jesuits, the Spaniards and the army. The Jesuits and the Catholics were not willing to give up so soon the policy of the Edict of Restitution. The Spaniards and the French would risk anything rather than see Wallenstein lord of the Palatinate. Conservative statesmen and the loyal soldiers resented the attempt to impose terms on the unwilling Emperor by the brute force of an army nominally his own. The soldiers of fortune, especially the officers, did not want an end put to a war which had been so lucrative and promised to be more lucrative still. In January 1634, the Spaniards were plying the Emperor with accusations, and demanding the dismissal of Wallenstein, just as Maximilian and the League had done four years ago. Wallenstein contented himself with binding his officers closer to him by an oath. Sure of their support he could face the world. But in the beginning of February his support began to give way underneath him. Piccolomini, Gallas and Aldringer deserted him, and Ferdinand boldly threw himself into the arms of the Spaniards. Dismissal and murder of Wallenstein, 1634. He dismissed Wallenstein from his command, branded him as a traitor, released his army from its obedience to him, and put a price upon his head. The breach was complete but still Wallenstein did not quail. Summoning the colonels to meet him at Pilsen he obtained from them on February 20th an undertaking to stand by him against his enemies, and moved to Eger to meet Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, in the hope of inducing the Swedes to make common cause with him, and oblige the Emperor to accept the peace. There also came four soldiers of fortune, two Irishmen and two Scots, who, finding in the declaration issued by the Emperor a warrant for their own dark plots, like Fitzurse and his companions five centuries before, determined to take upon themselves the responsibility of ridding their master of too powerful a servant. At nightfall on the 25th of February, Wallenstein’s chief supporters were invited to a banquet and there murdered. Devereux, an Irish captain, reeking from the butchery, made his way to the general’s quarters, and struck him down to the ground as he arose from his bed alarmed at the noise. So perished Wallenstein in the height of his fame and power, and with him perished the last chance of keeping the foreigner out of Germany.

At first the star of Ferdinand seemed to shine the brighter in spite of the dark shade cast by the murder of Wallenstein. Battle of Nördlingen, 1634. The army placed under the orders of the young Ferdinand, king of Hungary, captured Regensburg in July, stormed Donauwörth, and laid siege to Nördlingen. There the king was joined by the cardinal-infant, Ferdinand of Spain, who was on his way to assume the government of the Netherlands, at the head of 15,000 men. In spite of inferior numbers Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, ever sanguine and ever impetuous, prevailed on the wary Horn, who commanded the Swedes, to risk a battle; but the evening of the 6th of September 1634 saw him a fugitive, and Horn a prisoner with 16,000 men hors de combat. The battle of Nördlingen was one of the decisive battles of the war. Just as Breitenfeld had made the conquest of north Germany by the Emperor and the success of the Edict of Restitution impossible, so did Nördlingen render the conquest of south Germany by Protestantism impossible. The Catholic bishoprics were recovered, Bernhard’s duchy of Franconia vanished, and the line of the Main became once more the boundary between the religions.

Peace of Prague, 1635.

In May 1635, the negotiations for peace which had been going on so long with Saxony were brought to a happy conclusion, and a treaty embodying the terms agreed upon was duly signed at Prague between John George and the Emperor. The question of the ecclesiastical lands was settled by taking the year 1627 as the test year. Whatever belonged to Protestants at that time was to remain Protestant, whatever was then Catholic was to be Catholic still. This arrangement secured nearly all the northern bishoprics to Protestantism. Lusatia was to be made over to Saxony, and Lutheranism in Silesia guaranteed by the Emperor. Lutheranism was still to remain the only privileged form of Protestantism. These conditions were intended to form a basis for a general peace. It was hoped that other states would accept them, and so gradually put an end to the war. To some extent the anticipation was realised. A considerable number of the cities and smaller states of north Germany accepted the treaty of Prague, but that it would ever form a satisfactory basis for a general peace was impossible, as long as it provided no security whatever for the Calvinists, and did not attempt to deal with the dangers of foreign intervention.

By the treaty of Prague Saxony ranged itself once more upon the side of the Emperor. It is easy to sneer at the want of public spirit and the narrowness of aim which marked the policy of John George throughout this difficult time. Policy of John George of Saxony. Yet it will be found by an attentive observer that from first to last there was a singular consistency in his action, which sprang not from weakness of will or sluggishness of temperament, but from settled principles of policy from which he never budged. In imperial politics John George was a conservative, in ecclesiastical matters a Lutheran, and he remained steadily, even stubbornly, consistent to those two conceptions. As a conservative and a Lutheran he hated the destructive policy of Christian of Anhalt and Frederick Elector Palatine, and consequently secured to Ferdinand his election to the Empire, and actually supported him in arms against his revolted subjects. When Frederick threw himself into the arms of Mansfeld, when his co-religionists in the north began to feel alarmed, when Christian of Denmark determined to fight for his religion and his son’s bishoprics, John George remained sturdily, obstinately, neutral; for he believed that it was better to run some risk of aggression on the part of the Emperor than to throw all the institutions of the Empire into the crucible. The Edict of Restitution was the first thing that shook him, but even that would not have weighed against the danger of allowing the foreigner a footing in Germany, had not the Emperor actually had recourse to violence. If John George had to break his neutrality, if he was obliged to have a hand in the work of destruction of Germany, if conservatism was no longer possible, then he would rather join a Gustavus than a Wallenstein or a Tilly. But he never felt happy in that alliance. His sense of the desolation of the country, of the destruction of war, was too great for him ever willingly to remain long under arms. When the Emperor had been beaten back, when the Edict of Restitution had become an impossibility, when Wallenstein was dead, and France beginning to interfere actively in the affairs of Germany, it was time for John George once more to range himself side by side with the Emperor, for once more the Emperor had become the champion of German institutions against revolution. The treaty of Prague represents no high ideals of policy. It shows that the great religious ideals with which the war began are over. No longer do men believe that they are fighting for the Church or for Protestantism, for the highest interests of nations and of souls. Seventeen years of war have disabused them of that illusion. But next to religion among the ennobling influences of life comes that of patriotism, and John George retiring from alliance with the foreigner, as the Swede and the Frenchman prepare to put Germany on the rack for thirteen more weary years for their own aggrandisement, is a figure which shows at any rate something of patriotism and of policy, among the heartless dissensions of ambitious brigand chiefs.

CHAPTER VI
THE AGGRANDISEMENT OF FRANCE

Foreign policy of Richelieu—Territorial aggrandisement—Questions of the Valtelline and the Mantuan Succession—Intrigues of Richelieu in Germany—Interference of France in the Thirty Years’ War—Alteration of the character of the war—Unsuccessful operations of France—Conquest of Alsace—Revolt of Portugal and Catalonia—Position of France at the death of Richelieu—Policy of Mazarin—Battle of Rocroy—Conquest of the Upper Rhineland—Campaign of Turenne—Negotiations for peace—The peace of Westphalia—The solution of the religious difficulty—The beginning of modern Europe—Permanent advance of France—Desperate condition of Spain—Outbreak of the Fronde—Alliance of Mazarin and Cromwell—The peace of the Pyrenees.

Foreign policy of Richelieu.

When Richelieu in 1624 took the reins of government into his hands in France, the Thirty Years’ War was just about to envelope the whole of Germany in its fell embraces. The princes of the lower Saxon circle had begun to arm, the king of Denmark was about to take the lead of the Protestant forces, England had already taken active steps for the recovery of the Palatinate, and the reduction of the power of Spain. There was every probability that the whole energies of the Austro-Spanish House would be absorbed in the affairs of Germany for many years. The necessity of Spain and the Empire was ever in the seventeenth century the opportunity of France, and Richelieu realised by a flash of genius that the hour had arrived, which was to make or mar the influence of France in the world. Three things were necessary to the establishment of French supremacy in Europe, national unity, monarchical centralisation, and the extension and security of the frontiers. To attain these three objects, Richelieu devoted his life, and he was sensible enough to see that complete success in foreign affairs must do much to render success in the other two inevitable. If the crown of France by military and diplomatic conquest could push back the French frontier towards the Rhine, the Scheldt, and the Pyrenees, it need have little to fear from its internal foes. So Richelieu took up again the threads of policy, which had dropped from the lifeless hands of Henry IV., and directed all his energies to the resumption of the attack upon the Empire and upon Spain. But there was this difference between the two men. Henry IV. had dreamed of establishing the peace and good order of the world upon the ruin of the Habsburgs. Richelieu cherished no such illusions. Nakedly and avowedly he sought but the supremacy of France.

Its character.

Richelieu stands out upon the canvas of history as the first of that long line of statesmen who were actuated by purely selfish national interests. Unaffected by moral ideals, such as did so much to disguise the personal ambitions of the wars of the Middle Ages, uninfluenced by the religious motives, which often ennobled, even though they intensified, the ruthlessness of the wars of the sixteenth century, the rulers of the eighteenth and the latter half of the seventeenth centuries made war upon each other purely in the interests of their crowns and of themselves. Personal glory, territorial aggrandisement, commercial advantage were the motives which led to the great wars of Europe from the peace of Westphalia to the Congress of Vienna. Before the fierceness of those appetites the rights of nations, of races, even of humanity itself weighed not a feather in the balance. Germans must lose their speech and their fatherland, that France may push her boundaries to the Rhine. Poland must be wiped out of the map of Europe, that Prussia and Russia may be bigger and greater. Even African negroes must be torn from their homes, and sold as chattels in the market-places of the West, that the pockets of Englishmen and of English colonists might swell with gold. And if amid the dark scene of selfishness and rapacity there shines at times the nobler light which hallows the wars of liberty against the oppression of Louis XIV. and Napoleon, yet the shadows deepen as they gather round the career of Frederick the Great, and the closing acts of the Napoleonic drama at Vienna, and the historian has sadly to acknowledge that in them are to be found the characteristic scenes of eighteenth century diplomacy and war. It is the triumph of Macchiavellianism on the large scale in international politics. It is the adaptation to the affairs of nations of Hobbes’s description of the natural man. Homo homini lupus. Everything is permissible to a sovereign which tends to the security and greatness of his power, and nations are to one another as wild beasts. Man in his personal relations is civilised Christian and refined. Nations in their ordinary intercourse with one another are punctilious, courtly and even deferential, but when once selfish aggrandisement is possible, it becomes allowable. The thin veneer of civilisation and of consideration is rudely broken through, and nation stands out against nation in open and barbarous hostility on the principle of the old moss-trooper’s rule, that they shall win who have the power and they shall keep who can.

Territorial aggrandisement necessary to France.

From the point of view of the needs of the French monarchy, there was no doubt that Richelieu was right in urging France to a policy of territorial aggrandisement. She was better able to pursue it than were her neighbours, for she was sufficiently free from religious difficulties to be able to throw her sword into the Protestant or the Catholic scale as her interests might suggest. She had more to gain from such a policy than any other nation in Europe, for almost on all sides her land frontiers were a source of weakness. In the south the Spanish provinces of Cerdagne and Roussillon lay on the French side of the central ridge of the Pyrenees, and gave easy access to the Spanish armies into rich and disaffected Languedoc. The Italian frontier was in the keeping of the duke of Savoy, who, as long as he preserved his independence, was as likely to admit Spanish and imperialist troops into the valley of the Rhone, as French troops into the plain of Lombardy. To the east and to the north-east the frontier was still more insecure. Following roughly the streams of the Saone, the Meuse and the Somme, it brought the Empire and Spain dangerously near to Paris, especially as the intervening country was not easily defensible. It is true that on the eastern side a considerable access of strength had been gained by the occupation of the three bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun in 1552, which secured to France the important fortress of Metz, but they were not yet formally annexed to the crown of France, but only administered by French officials. A glance at the map will therefore show that the danger from Spain was considerable, and that, until she had succeeded in breaking the chain which bound her almost from the Pyrenees to the Straits of Dover, France could not make full use of her unrivalled geographical position.

Question of the Valtelline, 1622.

Such were the influences which impelled Richelieu to make the rectification of the frontier of France on the side of the Netherlands, the Rhine, and the Pyrenees, the first object of his foreign policy; and to launch France on that career of conquest and aggrandisement at the expense of the House of Habsburg, which has been from his time almost to the present day the central feature of European politics. From the battle of Nördlingen to the battle of Solferino, there has hardly been a great war in Europe in which the armies of France and of the House of Austria have not been arrayed against each other as enemies. Spain was the first foe to be dealt with, for Spain was the most dangerous to neglect, and the easiest to attack. The Spaniards who garrisoned the Milanese had, in 1622, seized upon the valley of the Valtelline, and occupied it by force, in order to secure their communications with the Empire; and had even obliged Chur, the chief town of the League of the Grisons, to receive an imperial garrison. This was undoubtedly an act of aggression on their part, and gave Richelieu the opportunity of striking a deadly blow at his enemy. The Valtelline is a broad and rich valley which runs in a north-easterly direction into the heart of the Rhaetian Alps from the top of the Lake of Como. About half-way up the valley a mountain pass, practicable for the passage of troops, leads to the east into the valley of the Adige a little north of Trent, from which by the well-frequented Brenner Pass communication with Innsbrück and south Germany was easy and safe. This was the only route which was certain to be available for the passage of troops and stores from the Empire to Milan, as the other mountain passes, which led direct from Tirol and Carinthia into Italy, opened into the territory of the republic of Venice, and Venice was usually not inclined to welcome the arrival of imperial troops. Provided, however, that the passage of the Valtelline was secured, the rest of the way was safe, as it lay through imperial territory. Hence the command of the Valtelline was absolutely essential to the maintenance of the power of the Habsburgs in Italy, but the valley itself was politically subject to the League of the Grisons, which as long ago as 1509 had come under the protection of France. So then, when Spain moved troops into the Valtelline, built a fortress in the valley, and obliged the Grisons to admit an imperial garrison at Chur, Louis XIII. as the protector of the Grisons had the right to interfere.

Its recovery for the Grisons, 1626.

Richelieu took his measures promptly. In 1624 he helped to bring about a marriage alliance between Charles prince of Wales and Henrietta Maria, the sister of Louis XIII., by which he hoped to gain the assistance of England against Spain on the sea and in the Netherlands, while he struck at the Valtelline. An army of the mountaineers of the Grisons under French leadership drove the imperial troops from Chur, and the papal troops from the Valtelline, where they had replaced the Spaniards. Lesdiguières, at the head of a French force, marched to the assistance of Savoy against Genoa. But just at that time the Huguenots of La Rochelle flew to arms, and Richelieu, afraid of finding himself involved at once in war at home and abroad, came to terms with Spain at the treaty of Monzon, concluded in March 1626, by which the Valtelline was to remain under the control of the Grisons.

The Mantuan succession, 1627.

For the next three years the whole energies of Richelieu and of France were engaged in the reduction of La Rochelle, and in the war with England, which followed hard upon, and indeed sprung out of, the marriage treaty of 1624. In 1629 he was once more at liberty to turn his attention to Italian affairs. In 1627 the duke of Mantua and Montferrat had died. His nearest heir was a Frenchman, the duke of Nevers. But the Emperor, at the instigation of Spain, not wishing to have a French prince so near the Milanese, determined to sequester the territory on the pretext of a disputed succession. Spanish troops at once overran both Mantua and Montferrat, and driving the duke of Nevers into Casale besieged him there. The Italian princes, however, were not inclined to submit without protest to this exercise by the Emperor of obsolete and doubtful rights. The Pope (Urban VIII.), who was strongly French in sympathy, combined with Venice to ask the assistance of France, and in January 1629 Louis and Richelieu crossed the Mont Genèvre at the head of a large army, captured Susa, relieved Casale, and forced the duke of Savoy to make peace. Again, however, a rebellion of the Huguenots obliged Louis to draw back in the hour of victory (March 1629), and in the summer of that year fresh troops, set free by the imperialist successes in Germany, invaded Italy under Spinola and formed the sieges of Mantua and Casale. In spite of the most strenuous efforts of Louis himself, who crossed the Alps at the head of the French armies in the winter of 1629–30, the combined forces of Spain and the Empire were too strong to be dislodged from Mantua or Montferrat. Peace of Cherasco, 1631. But the invasion of Germany by Gustavus Adolphus, promoted by France and even by the Pope, made the Emperor anxious for peace, and through the diplomatic skill of the papal agent, Giulio Mazzarini—afterwards to become so celebrated in French history—a truce was arranged, which afterwards ripened into the definitive peace of Cherasco (April 26th, 1631). By this treaty the duke of Nevers was invested with the duchy, and the fortresses were restored on both sides, except Pinerolo, which was still held by the French.

So ended the first great effort made by Richelieu against the House of Habsburg. Like most of his plans it was better conceived than executed, but it must be remembered that in carrying it out, he was sorely hampered by opposition to his authority at home both from the Huguenots and from the nobles. His Italian policy must not be considered by itself. It is part of a great whole. While he was openly attacking the imperial forces in Italy, his diplomacy was undermining the imperialist power in Germany, and if in 1631 he thought it best to rest content with the reduction of Savoy, and the acquisition of a passage through the Alps, it was because at that particular moment he could best effect his purpose by shifting his method from direct to indirect hostility, and the scene from Italy to Germany.

Intrigues of Richelieu in Germany, 1630.

Already he had endeavoured to keep the flame of opposition to Spain alive by granting subsidies to the Dutch, and directing Mansfeld’s army in 1624 to the Netherlands. In July 1630, he sent his most trusted agent the famous Capuchin, Father Joseph, to the meeting of the diet of Regensburg, where he laboured with notable skill and success to bring about the dismissal of Wallenstein, and to pave the way for detaching Maximilian of Bavaria and the League from their close alliance with the Emperor and Spain. In the autumn of the year before, another well-trained diplomatist, Charnacé, had travelled as far as Dantzig to offer the mediation of France in the quarrel between Sweden and Poland, and so removed one of the obstacles which made Gustavus Adolphus hesitate to take part in the German War. At that time Richelieu seems to have thought that he could use Gustavus merely as a fighting tool, and by offering him French money and a French alliance could make him fight the battles of France against the Emperor. But he was quickly undeceived. Gustavus definitely refused to allow his political or military independence to be impaired. He was quite willing that France should interfere openly in the war, if she chose to do so, provided she would limit her operations to the left bank of the Rhine; but he would not tolerate for a moment any interference with his own command. The utmost that Richelieu could obtain from him by the treaty of Bärwalde in 1631, in return for French gold, was the promise to observe friendship or neutrality towards Bavaria and the League, so far as they would observe them towards him. Nor was this promise of much avail, for when, after the battle of Breitenfeld, Gustavus determined to march upon central and southern Germany instead of on Vienna, all hope of detaching Bavaria from the Emperor had to be laid aside.

Open interference in Germany, 1632–1634.

As long as Gustavus Adolphus lived there was but little room for Richelieu in German politics. Had he survived a few years longer, it is not improbable that the world would have seen an alliance of the Moderates in Germany, under the leadership of Richelieu, supported possibly by both Maximilian and Wallenstein, against the Emperor and the king of Sweden. But the death of Gustavus quickly put the decisive voice in German affairs into the possession of France. Already in 1632 French troops had appeared upon the Rhine, and garrisoned the new fortress of Ehrenbreitstein at the invitation of the elector of Trier. In the same year Richelieu became a party to the League of Heilbronn, and so secured the right to interfere in German affairs. In 1633 a French army entered the old German territory of Lorraine and captured its capital Nancy, owing to the incessant intrigues against the all-powerful cardinal of which the duke had been guilty. The battle of Nördlingen in 1634 put Protestant Germany at the feet of Richelieu. The soil of Germany, harried and plundered, could with difficulty sustain the armies which devastated it. Sweden, poor and exhausted, could make no sacrifices. England was too much occupied with pecuniary difficulties at home to be able to send assistance to Germany. Declaration of war against Spain, 1635. France was the only power both able and willing to provide the sinews of war. She became the protector and director of the League of Heilbronn, took Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar and his army into her pay, claimed from the Swedes the custody of the fortresses held by them in Alsace, and on 19th May 1635 formally declared war against Spain.

The character of the war altered by French interference.

From that moment the character of the Thirty Years’ War profoundly alters. It is no longer a war of religion, to set limits to the progress of the Counter-Reformation or to save Catholicism or Protestantism from extinction. It is no longer a war of institutions, to maintain the authority of the Emperor or to preserve the sovereign rights of the princes. It is no longer a war of property, to resist the undoing of the territorial settlement of 1555. It is no longer a war for the re-settlement of Germany upon a new basis by military force. German interests no longer have a place in this terrible war waged for the destruction of Germany on German soil. Primarily, it is a war between the House of Bourbon and the House of Habsburg, to break the power of Spain and increase that of France, through the acquisition by the latter of Alsace and Lorraine. Secondarily, it is a war between the Swedes and the Empire, to gain for the former out of German soil an adequate compensation for the money which they had spent and the blood which they had shed. Two points of interest alone remain in tracing the melancholy story of the weary years, the gradual development of the power of France, and the brilliant achievements of skilful generalship.

The entrance of France into the war did not at first check the tide of imperialist success. Richelieu overestimated the resources and the military strength of France. Unsuccessful campaigns on the frontiers of France, 1635–1637. He put into the field no less than four armies, amounting in the aggregate to 120,000 men; but unaccustomed to war, ill disciplined, ill fed, ill paid, and badly commanded, they were no match for the veterans of Spain and the Emperor. It was the first time that the new monarchy in France had made war upon a grand scale, and it had to buy its experience. The campaigns of the years 1635, 1636, and 1637 told a story of almost unrelieved failure. In Italy the French armies just managed to hold their own. In Alsace and the Netherlands they were everywhere out-generalled and beaten back. In 1636, a Spanish army actually invaded France and threatened Paris. Had it not been for the skilful generalship of Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar in the Rhineland, and the signal success which attended the efforts of the Swedish army, it is not at all improbable that the Emperor would have been able to impose upon all Germany the conditions of the peace of Prague, and by procuring the retirement of the Swedes have narrowed the issues involved to the simple one of a national war between France and Austro-Spain. Already Bavaria and Catholic Germany, as well as Saxony, Brandenburg and nearly all the Lutheran powers, had accepted the treaty. Oxenstjerna and the Swedes had refused after protracted negotiations, only because the Emperor and John George would not hear of making over to them an inch of German soil. On their side they would not be content merely with a money indemnity. Saxony and Brandenburg accordingly joined their forces to those of the Emperor and determined to drive the Swedes back across the sea to their own country. Success of Baner in Germany, Battle of Wittstock, 1636. It was a critical moment. Had the Saxons pressed on vigorously after the final rupture of the negotiations in the autumn of 1635, they could hardly have failed to have crushed Baner the Swedish general at Magdeburg with their superior forces, but the opportunity was allowed to slip. Baner withdrew in safety to the north, and was there strongly reinforced. He now had under his orders an army sufficient to cope with his enemies, and after some marching and countermarching succeeded in throwing himself upon the Saxons and imperialists at Wittstock on the Mecklenberg frontier of Brandenburg on October 4th 1636, before the Brandenburgers could come to their assistance. The victory was one of the most complete won by the Swedes during the whole war. The elector’s army was almost annihilated, and Baner became as paramount in northern Germany as the imperialists were upon the Rhine until the following autumn when he was again driven back into Pomerania.

It is noticeable that both in diplomacy and war Richelieu improved his position year by year. Gradually he learned how to win campaigns, as he had learned gradually how to rule France. In the last four years of his life, he gathered the fruits for which he had so patiently laboured in the previous years. Capture of Breisach by Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, 1638. In 1638 Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar succeeded in making himself master of the upper Rhineland, and having defeated the imperialists at Rheinfelden occupied Freiburg in Breisgau, and on December 19th captured the important fortress of Breisach. Richelieu when he heard the news hurried to the bedside of his dying friend the Capuchin Joseph, ‘Courage, père Joseph,’ he cried, ‘Breisach est à nous,’ and with this characteristic viaticum to console and strengthen him in his last agony, the wily diplomatist passed from this world of intrigue, of which for the last ten years his subtle brain had been the master and the mainspring. Death of Bernhard. His army put under French command. In July of the next year Bernhard himself died, and his army, together with the conquests which it had made, passed directly under the command of the French. French governors ruled in the Alsatian towns, and from that time the annexation of Alsace to the French monarchy became one of the recognised objects of the policy of the Bourbons. The success of Richelieu did not stop with the land. Ever since the fatal day, when the capture of a few French ships by the Huguenot Soubise in the port of Blavet had sent the proud cardinal on his knees to England and the Dutch to borrow ships to use against the revolted Rochellois, Richelieu had devoted special care to the formation of a navy. In 1639 for the first time a French fleet appeared in the Channel, ready to cope with the huge galleons of Spain, and to cut the bond which united her to the Netherlands. France was now to play the same game at the expense of Spain which had been played by Elizabeth of England in the century before. But the time had not yet come when France was to wrest from Spain the command of the sea. Defeat of the Spanish Fleet in the Downs, 1639. The Spaniards succeeded in escaping the French fleet, but only to fall into the hands of their allies the Dutch. Sorely bestead by their quick-sailing antagonists, they took refuge in the Downs under the neutral flag of England, but even there the Dutch admiral pursued them, burned some of their ships, captured others, and forced the remnant to seek the friendly shelter of Dunkirk. From that time the passage of the Channel was closed to a Spanish fleet as long as Spain was at war with the Dutch or the French. Revolt of Portugal and Catalonia, 1640. In the next year still more serious misfortunes awaited the crown of Spain. Portugal assisted by French subsidies successfully reasserted its independence, and re-established its monarchy under the House of Braganza in December 1640, while earlier in the year the revolt of the high spirited Catalans effectually saved France from all danger of invasion from the south and opened her path to Roussillon, while in Italy the French flag was successfully planted on the walls of Turin. The two following years served to make good the ground thus won, and when Richelieu died in December 1642, he had the satisfaction of feeling that he had got his hand upon the throat of his huge antagonist and was choking her. With French armies strongly encamped on the Rhine and the plain of Piedmont, with French governors established in Alsace and Lorraine, with Roussillon and Cerdagne and the passes of Savoy in the possession of France, she had indeed acquired a frontier which not only preserved her from all danger of sudden invasion, but enabled her to strike a swift and deadly blow at her enemies, before they could have time to concentrate their forces against her. Improved position of France at the death of Richelieu, 1642. Richelieu in his eighteen years of power had given France concentration, unity, and a scientific frontier. Seated between the two seas, bounded by the Pyrenees the Alps and the Vosges, with her hand upon the Rhine and the Scheldt, France was prepared to strike for the supremacy of Europe.

Richelieu’s policy continued by Mazarin.

The direction of the policy of France passed on the death of the stern and uncompromising Richelieu into the hands of the supple and intriguing Mazarin, but the change made no difference to the conduct of foreign affairs. Louis XIII. followed his great minister quickly to the grave, and during the minority of his young son, Louis XIV., Anne of Austria, the queen-mother, who was entirely devoted to Mazarin, became regent, and the policy of aggrandisement at the expense of the Austro-Spanish House was vigorously carried on. Within a few months of the accession of the young king, his reign was graced by the most splendid success which had attended the arms of France since the capture of Calais by the duke of Guise. Don Francisco Mello, who had succeeded the cardinal-infant in the government of the Netherlands in December 1641, thought to take advantage of the weakness caused by the change of rulers in France; and sent the count of Fuentes at the head of all the available troops which he could muster, across the frontier. Mazarin, following his habitual policy of trying to attract the princes of the blood to his side, intrusted the command of the French army to the young duc d’Enghien, the eldest son of the prince of Condé, who found the Spaniards on the 19th of May 1643 strongly posted among the marshes which surround the little fortress of Rocroy. Condé, to give him the name by which he is best known, though he never in the course of a long training in war developed any of the higher qualities of a general, had that magnetic personal power over his men which is all-important on the battle-field. Destruction of the military power of Spain at Rocroy, 1643. They would follow him anywhere. The furia francese, which had been often remarked upon in the Italian wars of the sixteenth century, had been but the mad rush of an undisciplined mob, like the rush of African dervishes. Condé was the first great leader to utilise this power among disciplined troops, and to make the peculiar élan of the French charge into one of the most decisive tactics of the battle-field. Ever since the days of the great captain, Gonsalvo da Cordova, the Spanish infantry had been the finest in the world. The solid mass of pikemen, wedged close together in a fortress-like formation, by their stubborn endurance could resist all cavalry attack, and by sheer weight bear down all opposition. But if once the mass became disorganised, it could never reform. Once break the ‘hedgehog’ of pikes, and the day was won. Gustavus Adolphus had shown at Breitenfeld how the superiority of artillery and musketry fire might open lanes in these mighty masses, into which the heavy cavalry might throw themselves, and overcome weight by weight in the shock of hand-to-hand conflict. Condé at Rocroy illustrated a similar principle by his mobile and disciplined infantry. Plunging a deadly fire into the dense immovable masses of the Spaniards, he waited for the moment when the falling men began to create confusion in the ranks, then against their front, and into their flanks he poured the lithe and well-trained infantry with irresistible effect. It was the story of the Armada and the English ships retold on land. The huge masses could do nothing against their swarming antagonists. Taken flank, front, and rear, they could not alter their formation, they could not adapt themselves to this new kind of warfare, they would not break and run, there was nothing left but to die. There is something inexpressibly pathetic in the figure of the old count of Fuentes, seated on his chair in the middle of the fast diminishing square of his choicest troops, for the gout would not permit him even to stand, calmly and patiently awaiting inevitable death, as the defending ranks became thinner and thinner, without the thought of surrender, without the power even of striking a blow in self-defence, the type of his country, and his country’s greatness, which was passing away with the shouts of victory which hailed the young conqueror of Rocroy.

Conquest of the Upper Rhineland by the French, 1644–1645.

The victory of Rocroy made France the first military power of Europe, but it was on the Rhine and not in the Netherlands that she put forth all her energies. During the remaining years of the war, the chief struggle was for the possession of the upper Rhineland. France wished to secure her hold over Alsace by occupying both banks of the great river, and making herself permanently mistress of the fortresses of Breisach and Philipsburg. The Emperor and Maximilian fought stubbornly, the one to save the Breisgau, one of the oldest possessions of the House of Habsburg, from falling into the hand of the enemy, the other to defend the frontiers of Bavaria from insult and plunder. In the cautious Mercy, and the dashing Werth, they obtained the services of generals not unfit to be matched with Condé and Turenne. At Freiburg in Breisgau for three days the impetuous Condé dashed himself in vain against the intrenchments of Mercy in August 1644, neglecting the wiser counsel of Turenne, who showed how easily a flank march through the mountains in the rear must compel the Bavarian general to retire. Just a year afterwards, on August 3d, 1645, Condé won a Pyrrhic victory at Nördlingen by his reckless and irresistible attack, but at too great an expenditure of life to permit him to make use of it, although the Imperialists were sore beset at the time, and Vienna itself threatened by the Swedes under Torstenson.

The honour of giving the final determination to the war belongs to Turenne. In 1646 he found himself for the first time at the head of an adequate force, and his own master, and he at once determined to put a stop to the ruinous system of frittering away advantages by acting on two different centres. Campaign of Turenne and Wrangel, 1646–1647. By combining his army with that of the Swedes, he saw that he could oppose an overwhelming force to the enemy, and end the war at a blow. Having procured the assent of Wrangel to his plan, who had replaced Torstenson in command of the Swedes, Turenne crossed the Rhine at Wesel, below Köln, and effected his junction with Wrangel on the Main. Slipping cleverly between the archduke Leopold William and the Bavarians, who sought to bar their passage, the united armies marched straight upon the Danube, seized Donauwörth, and spread themselves over the rich plain of Bavaria, plundering and burning up to the gates of Munich, and even penetrating as far as Bregenz in the Vorarlberg. Maximilian in despair deserted the Emperor, and signed a separate truce with the allies in May 1647. He did not keep it long. Stung in conscience, and afraid of after all losing the electoral hat, which he had risked so much to win, he again joined the Emperor in September of the same year. Terrible was the retribution which awaited him. Turenne and Wrangel returned into Bavaria with an army swollen with campfollowers to the number of 127,000. Beating the elector’s troops at Zusmarshausen on May 17th, 1648, they fastened like locusts on the land, and soon reduced it to the state of desolation in which the rest of Germany lay. Maximilian summoned Wallenstein’s old general Piccolomini to his aid, and prepared to strike one more blow for house and home, but before the armies met, the welcome news came that peace had been signed on the 24th of October at Münster, and the Thirty Years’ War was at an end.

Negotiations for peace, 1642.

For some years the desire for peace had been getting stronger and stronger. In Germany it was felt that the main obstacles to peace had passed away with the chief actors in the struggle. Ferdinand II. had died in the year 1637, and his son Ferdinand III. was not bound in conscience or in policy to the Edict of Restitution. The Elector Palatine, Frederick V., had preceded him in 1632. Christian of Anhalt, Christian of Brunswick, Wallenstein, Gustavus Adolphus, and Bethlen Gabor had long passed away, and the policies which they had represented had taken other forms. There was no German question left seriously difficult of solution. The real obstacles of peace were the ambition of France, and the determination of Oxenstjerna to carve a territory for the Swedes out of the Baltic provinces of Germany. But they could not prevent the beginning of negotiations, though they could do much to hinder their progress, and in 1642 it was agreed that representatives should meet in Westphalia, at the towns of Münster and Osnabrück, to discuss the preliminaries of a treaty. Congress of Münster and Osnabrück. So many were the obstructions thrown in the way that it was not till 1644 that the congress actually met. At Münster, which was the meeting-place of the Catholic powers, there appeared under the presidency of the papal nuncio (Chigi) and the ambassador of Venice—the two mediating powers—the representatives of the Empire, of France, of Spain, of the Catholic electors, and the Catholic princes of the Empire. At Osnabrück were gathered the representatives of Sweden, of the Protestant electors, and the Protestant princes and cities of the Empire, together with envoys of France, which was thus represented at both places. It was one thing to get the representatives to meet, it was quite another to get them to set to work. The proposal of an armistice during the negotiations had been definitely refused, and consequently it became to the interest of each of the chief combatants in turn to delay or promote the conclusion of peace as the fortune of war shifted from one side to the other. Questions of precedence and etiquette, always dear to the diplomatic mind, raised themselves in plenty from the side of France or Spain or Sweden, whenever things seemed to be going too quick. Months accordingly passed away and no progress was made.

Separate treaties made by Brandenburg, Saxony, and Bavaria.

The German princes, who saw their lands devastated, their villages burned, their towns depopulated, their subjects obliged to turn soldiers or brigands, or, where that was impossible, driven to stave off the pangs of hunger by eating grass and roots, and even human flesh, in order that France might annex Alsace, or Sweden seize Pomerania, soon lost all faith in the tortuous dealings of the diplomatists in Westphalia, and began to shift for themselves. On the 24th of July 1642, the young elector of Brandenburg, Frederick William, made a separate treaty of neutrality with the Swedes, which practically withdrew Brandenburg from the area of the war. On the 31st of August 1645, John George of Saxony followed the example of Brandenburg but on far worse terms. In 1647, as we have seen, even Maximilian of Bavaria was induced under stress of the invasion of Turenne to conclude for a short time a separate truce. These acts showed how passionately Germany longed for peace, but its actual conclusion was due to the pressure exercised upon the Emperor and Maximilian by the successes of Turenne, and upon Oxenstjerna and the Swedes by their young queen. Interference of Christina of Sweden in favour of peace. Christina, the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, had come of age in the year 1644, and had at once begun to show that masterful spirit and commanding ability which were to make her one of the most interesting characters of the century. Partly from a real desire to end the barbarities of the war, partly from the necessities of her crown, she at once applied herself to bring the Westphalian negotiations to a successful issue, sent a special embassy to the court of Paris, and insisted, sorely against the old chancellor’s will, upon accepting in behalf of Sweden far less than had hitherto been demanded.

The peace of Westphalia, 1648.

By the peace of Westphalia, signed at last on the 24th of October 1648, exactly thirty years and five months since the regents were thrown out of the window at Prague, the religious difficulty in Germany was met by the extension to the Calvinists of all the rights enjoyed by the Lutherans under the religious peace. 1. Solution of the religious questions. The first day of the year 1624 was taken as the test day by which the question of the ecclesiastical lands was to be settled. All that was in Catholic hands on that day was to remain Catholic, all that was in Protestant hands was to remain Protestant. Roughly speaking the line thus laid down was the line which answered to the facts. It preserved the bishoprics of the south, which were avowedly Catholic, to the Catholics; and the secularised lands of the north, such as Bremen and Verden, Halberstadt and Magdeburg, where the Protestants were in a large majority, to Protestantism; and it secured to Catholicism the victories of the Counter-Reformation in the hereditary dominions of Austria, in Bohemia, in Bavaria, and in the upper Palatinate. Finally, the treaty provided for the equal division of the two interests in the imperial court of justice. There was little difficulty in thus finding a satisfactory solution of the questions connected with religion, which had been at the beginning of the war so grave and alarming. 2. Territorial compensation. Both sides had by the process of time become aware that they could not destroy the other, and had learned, if they did not admit, the necessity of toleration. The serious problems for solution were those connected with compensation. Eventually, however, the following arrangements were agreed to.

MAP SHOWING THE MARCH OF GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS, AND THE TERRITORIAL CHANGES EFFECTED BY THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA.

1. Maximilian of Bavaria retained the electorate, which was made hereditary in his family, and was permitted to add the upper Palatinate to his duchy of Bavaria.

2. A new electorate was created for Charles Lewis, the eldest son of Frederick, Elector Palatine, and the lower Palatinate was restored to him.

3. Sweden received western Pomerania, including the mouth of the Oder, and the bishoprics of Bremen and Verden, which gave her a commanding strategical and commercial position on the German rivers, and the right of being represented in the German Diet.

4. Brandenburg was compensated for her loss of western Pomerania by the addition of the bishoprics of Halberstadt, Camin, Minden, and the greater part of Magdeburg, to her dominions; and by the confirmation of her inheritance in eastern Pomerania. In addition to this, she now obtained control over the duchies of Cleves, Mark and Ravensberg, which had been apportioned to her by the treaty of Xanten in 1614, but during the war had been occupied by the rival armies of the Spaniards and the Dutch.

5. France obtained possession of Austrian Alsace, including Breisach, and the right to garrison Philipsburg; but the free city of Strasburg was expressly reserved to the Empire. The three bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun were formally annexed to the crown of France, while in Italy she received the fortress of Pinerolo.

6. Saxony retained Lusatia, and acquired part of the diocese of Magdeburg, and the independence of the Dutch and the Swiss was finally acknowledged.

The Peace, a solution of the religious difficulty.

The peace of Westphalia, like the war to which it put an end, marks the close of one epoch and the beginning of another. It closes the long chapter of the religious troubles in Germany, which grew out of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and it did so in the most satisfactory manner possible, not by laying down any great principle of religious toleration or religious domination, but simply by recognising accomplished facts. Calvinism had worked its way to an equal position with Lutheranism among the religious forces of Germany, and that fact was accordingly recognised. The supremacy of each prince in his own dominions over the religious as well as the political conduct of his people had been recognised by the peace of Augsburg in 1555, and been uniformly acted upon by Catholic and Protestant alike ever since. It was now definitely, if tacitly admitted, and possible evils guarded against by drawing the territorial line between Catholicism and Protestantism as nearly as possible to coincide with the actual difference of belief. It was still possible for a Protestant prince in the north to oppress his Catholic subjects, it was still possible for a Catholic prince of the south to banish all Protestants from his dominions, but the question henceforth was but a local one, a matter solely between the prince and his subjects, which imposed upon Protestants and Catholics elsewhere in Germany no greater duty and gave them no more right to interfere, than did the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. in France. Such a solution may not have been from the point of view of morals the best conceivable. It was under the circumstances of the time the best possible. To modern ideas it may seem that the negotiators of Westphalia lost a great opportunity of forcing into the unwilling hands of Germany the priceless boon of religious toleration. Had they attempted to do so, they would only have kept alive the spirit of religious animosity, and given to political ambition the right again to shelter itself under the claims of religion and renew the flame of war. By making the question wholly one between prince and people, they ensured that all the conservative forces of human nature, the forces that make against novelty, disturbance, and revolution, the forces which impel men and governments so powerfully to take the line of the least resistance, should be enlisted on the side of religious peace. If the door was still left open to an archbishop of Salzburg to banish all Protestants from his dominions, the paucity of such instances of oppression after the peace of Westphalia, is alone sufficient proof of the truce in religious affairs which it practically brought about; while the danger of a hundred such acts of tyranny cannot weigh as a feather in the balance against the unspeakable horror of a renewal of the war.

The Peace the beginning of modern Europe.

The peace of Westphalia is also the beginning of a new era. It marks the formation of the modern European states system. In Germany itself the central fact registered by the peace is the final disintegration of the Empire. The machinery it is true was still left intact. There was an Emperor and a diet, electors and an imperial court of justice, but all reality had passed away from them as a governing power in Germany. The German people were governed by the German princes, who had all the rights of sovereignty. They could coin money, make war, organise armies, and send representatives to other courts. 1. The Empire becomes Austrian. The central authority was reduced to a minimum, and if the Emperor was still a power in Germany, it was not because he was Emperor, but because he was archduke of Austria and many other German duchies, king of Bohemia, and king of Hungary. The effect is at once visible in the policy of the House of Austria. The Emperor still maintained his interests in Germany and on the Rhine, still he stood forward as the champion of Germany to prevent France from dominating over Europe, still from time to time he waged war to check the growing power of Prussia, to develop schemes of commercial enterprise in the Netherlands, but nevertheless, irresistibly, in spite of tradition, and of association, his real attention became fixed more and more irrevocably on the east and on the south. His policy in fact in its heart of hearts ceased to be imperial or even German and became purely Austrian. He sought compensation on the Danube for his losses on the Rhine. He sacrificed much for a hold over Italy, which should give to his impoverished and land-locked country the riches of the plain of Lombardy and ports on the Adriatic. Insensibly and steadily he pushed his territorial frontier more and more to the east and south, while Brandenburg actuated by similar forces was pushing hers to the west and to the north.

2. Sovereignty of the German princes.

Set free from even the shadow of imperial centralisation, Germany was enabled to follow unimpeded her own laws of development. In central Germany the spirit of disintegration, and the fearful desolation caused by the war conquered all desire for unity. Almost to the present day it has remained a heap of undistinguished and undistinguishable atoms. 3. Growth of Brandenburg and Bavaria. But in north Germany, the natural tendency of small states to coalesce with larger states began to show itself, and Brandenburg at once started on that career of conquest and aggrandisement which has brought her in our own day to the headship of Europe, while Bavaria, in alliance with France, bid with some success against the House of Austria for the leadership of south Germany, which since 1866 she has practically attained. Thus, with regard to the internal politics of Germany, the peace of Westphalia set in motion the forces, which, by ousting the Emperor from predominance in Germany, throwing the energies of the House of Austria towards Italy and the lower Danube, and enabling the House of Hohenzollern to strike for the leadership of north Germany and the command of the Rhine, have during the last two hundred years permanently affected the balance of power in Europe and the condition of the German people.

4. Diminished influence of the Papacy.

Outside the boundaries of Germany, the treaties of Westphalia mark no less a change in the relations of the great powers of Europe. It is the last time that the Pope appears as the mediator of the peace of nations. His refusal to sanction the treaties was simply set on one side by Catholic and Protestant powers alike, and from that time his influence in the international politics of Europe ceased. 5. Transitory character of Swedish greatness. France and Sweden are the two nations who have most right to claim the peace of Westphalia as marking an epoch in their national history. With Sweden it is the high-water mark of her European influence. The treaties recognised her as one of the great powers of Europe, and secured to her the supremacy of the Baltic, and the right to claim the allegiance of north Germany, if she could win it. But the task proved beyond her capacity, and she slowly shrank before the advancing power of Brandenburg and of Russia, until before a hundred years had passed it had become abundantly clear that with regard to Sweden the peace did not mark the permanent inclusion of a new power among the great nations of Europe.

6. Permanent advance of France.

With France the case was quite different. The peace is but one step on the long road of territorial aggrandisement on which she had definitely entered at the bidding of Richelieu and Mazarin. She became by the war the first military power in Europe. By the peace she was planted securely upon the Rhine and acquired not merely a scientific frontier for offence and defence in the virgin fortress of Metz, the mountains of the Vosges, and the strongholds of Breisach and Philipsburg, but an incentive to future exertion, and a spur to criminal ambition, in the desire to make her hold upon the Rhine but the beginning of a vaster scheme of conquest. The damnosa hereditas of the Rhine frontier for France, sanctioned in part by the peace of Westphalia, has been the chief disturbing element in European politics for nearly two centuries and a half, and the malignancy of its poison shows even now no signs of abatement. The great questions, which have agitated Europe during the years which have elapsed since the Thirty Years’ War, have mainly centred round the rivalry of Russia and of Austria for the command of the Danube and the inheritance of the Turk, and the rivalry of France and Germany for the possession of the Rhine. The great settlements of European affairs, which have taken place since that time at Utrecht, at Vienna, at Paris, and at Berlin, have been but the hatching of the fully developed chicks from the eggs laid in Westphalia in 1648.

Desperate condition of Spain, 1648.

Spain was not included in the peace of Westphalia. The war between her and France still continued for twelve years more, though at the time the peace was signed at Münster it seemed as if the unwieldy monarchy was on the brink of dissolution. Portugal had asserted its independence, Catalonia assisted by a French army was in full revolt. Roussillon and Cerdagne were in French hands. Flanders and the port of Dunkirk had fallen under the spell of the conqueror of Rocroy. In 1646 a naval battle off the coast of Tuscany made the French for the first time masters of the Mediterranean. Finally in 1648 Naples revolted at the bidding of a fisherman named Masaniello, and, had Mazarin shown a little more vigour and decision, might have been entirely lost to the Spanish monarchy. Freed from the necessity of exertion on the side of the Rhine, Mazarin had but to press his victories home in the Netherlands and Catalonia to force Spain to a dishonourable peace. Spain saved by the outbreak of the Fronde, 1648. But suddenly all these advantages were lost, and the tables completely turned, by the grotesque outbreak of personal ambition, and constitutional factiousness, known as the Fronde. For six years the nobles and the citizens of Paris played at revolution, in order to wrest power out of the hands of Mazarin and transfer it to their own. Maddened by the spirit of faction, they did not hesitate to call in the enemy and join themselves to Spain, if thereby they could wreak their vengeance on the hated minister. Even Turenne and Condé were found at different times leading armies against France. But in the end the cleverness of the minister, the stubbornness of the queen-mother, and the influence of the royal authority prevailed; and in 1653 Mazarin returned from his second exile to take up again the reins of government which he held until his death.

Weakness of France after the Fronde, 1653.

How different were the circumstances under which he again resumed the war against Spain! The resources of France had been squandered, the armies of France had become demoralised, the authority of the government weakened, while Spain had profited by the difficulties of her enemy to recover the Netherlands and Catalonia, and, through the treason of Condé, was enabled to place one of the best generals of the day at the head of her armies. In 1653 he invaded France and threatened Paris, but was foiled by the superior strategy of Turenne, and obliged to retreat. In the three following years France slowly won back the frontier towns of the Netherlands. It was clear that neither side was able to inflict upon the other such a defeat as would end the war. Alliance between Mazarin and Cromwell, 1657. So in 1656 Mazarin, cardinal and absolutist though he was, sought for the alliance of Cromwell, the Protestant hero of the English revolution. Cromwell looked upon Spain with the eyes of Elizabeth, and saw in her but the chief supporter of Popery in Europe, and the chief obstacle to English trade. An agreement was soon arrived at by which 6000 of Cromwell’s soldiers, probably the best in Europe, were put at the disposal of Mazarin. In 1657 a change was quickly perceived in the war. Turenne, with the assistance of his new allies, defeated the Spaniards at the battle of the Dunes, captured Mardyke and Dunkirk, which was handed over to England, and overran the country almost up to Brussels in June 1658. This blow determined the Spanish government to treat for peace. Conferences were held between the ambassadors of the two countries on the Bidassoa during 1659, and on November 7th the peace of the Pyrenees was signed. The Peace of the Pyrenees, 1659. By it France acquired Artois, Roussillon, and Cerdagne, and the towns of Thionville, Landreçies, and Avesnes. She agreed to restore the duke of Lorraine to his duchy, on condition that the fortifications of Nancy were destroyed, and the armies of France allowed free passage through the country. Condé was pardoned and restored to his property and dignities. Finally the alliance was cemented by the marriage of Louis XIV. to Maria Theresa, the daughter of Philip IV., who on her marriage renounced on the part of herself and her children all claim to the throne of Spain, on receipt of a dowry of 500,000 crowns. This dowry was never paid, and in consequence it became a question whether the renunciation was of any effect at all.

Commanding position of France, 1660.

The peace of the Pyrenees is the complement of that of Westphalia. It marks the completion of the scientific frontier of France to the south. The primary work of Richelieu had been accomplished. On the south, on the south-east, and on the east, France was now possessed of a frontier not merely defensible, but equally available for offence or defence. Through the passes of the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Vosges, her armies could pour at a moment’s notice into the valleys of the Ebro, the Po, and the Rhine. Only to the north was the frontier still unmarked by natural boundaries. The annexation of Artois removed the danger some few miles farther away from Paris, but that was all. So grew up on the side of the Netherlands a desire for the Scheldt and the Demer as the natural boundaries of France to the north, analogous to the passion so fondly cherished by all French statesmen with regard to the Rhine to the east. The politics of the future were coloured and affected by the rivalry of the French and the Dutch on the Scheldt, as by the rivalry of the French and the Germans on the Rhine. Among the fondest dreams of French statesmen, second only to the acquisition of the Rhine, has been the annexation of the Netherlands as a legitimate object of French ambition, and it may be questioned whether any policy has cost France more blood and treasure than that which has turned some of the fairest and richest districts of the world into the cockpit of Europe. To Spain the peace of the Pyrenees is a great epoch. The peace of Vervins marked her failure, the peace of the Pyrenees marked her fall. She had once bid for supremacy over Europe and had failed. She had then entered the lists as the equal and rival of France and had been beaten. France issued from the contest victorious both by land and sea, and could condescend to take her former rival into protection and partnership. After the peace of the Pyrenees, France and Spain from being deadly rivals tended to become more and more the closest of friends, until the time came when, owing to the provisions of the peace, France stretched out its hands to absorb its mighty neighbour, and the family compacts of the Bourbons dominated the politics of the world.

CHAPTER VII
FRANCE UNDER RICHELIEU AND MAZARIN

Character of Richelieu—The principles of his government—Defects of his policy—Character of Louis XIII.—Position and organisation of the Huguenots—The rising of 1625—Edicts against the nobles—Conspiracy of Vendôme—War with England—Siege of La Rochelle—Destruction of the political power of the Huguenots—Administrative reforms—The Day of Dupes—Rising of Montmorency—Conspiracy of Cinq Mars—Centralising policy of Richelieu—The regency of 1643—Character of Mazarin—Outbreak of the Fronde—Constitutional claims of the Parlement—Unpopularity of the prime ministership—Weakness of the Parlement—The lead taken by the nobles—Factiousness of the movement—Flight of Mazarin—The Fronde in the provinces—End of the Fronde—Last years of Mazarin.

Character of Richelieu.

The well-known portrait of Richelieu in the gallery of the Louvre shows us the features of a man who under the outside of an aristocratic calm conceals a highly nervous and anxious temperament. There is not a trace of brutality, not a suggestion of coarseness, in the finely moulded features. At the first glance there seems almost a want of power in the delicate oval of the pale and attenuated face. Here is no Henry VIII. to trample on the laws alike of God and man in order to satisfy the demands of an imperious will, and rivet the chains of slavery on a panic-stricken people. Here is no Cromwell to march ruthlessly to his goal, over the constitution of his country, through the blood of his king, in the fervid enthusiasm of a divine mission. Here surely is no Napoleon to treat in callous selfishness human life and national faith as nothing in comparison to military glory and personal ambition. Yet the charges against Richelieu writ large on the page of history are precisely those which his portrait repudiates. Indiscriminate severity, ruthless barbarity, inordinate ambition, personal tyranny, such are the accusations levelled against him as a statesman and as a man. He is depicted as one who governed, and who preferred to govern, by terrorism and espionage, who struck down remorselessly and indiscriminately all who dared to oppose him, who established the ascendency of a gaoler over the weaker nature of the miserable king, who made France drink deep of the intoxicating potion of military glory in order that she might not feel the ever tightening chains of civil slavery. Even those who applaud his patriotism, and recognise him as the author of the greatness of France admit the charges of ruthlessness and barbarity made against his government by apologising for them.

Principles of his government.

The home policy of Richelieu, less perhaps than that of any other statesman, admits of palliatives and excuses. It is etched sharply on the plate of history in white and black. There are no neutral tints. He took for his motto that of the Romans of old, Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos, and if ever such a principle is admissible in human affairs it was admissible in France in the days of Richelieu. But it is clear the principle must be pronounced justifiable, not merely excusable, before the muse of history can smooth over the harsh black lines of the portrait which she has been accustomed to draw. A statesman may in the course of difficult affairs be betrayed into the commission of a great crime, as was Theodoric in his participation in the murder of Odoacer, and his character may yet stand out from among men noble and true, though his name must go down to posterity linked with a thousand virtues and one crime. But the conduct of a ruler, who deliberately from first to last acts upon an immoral principle of government, and steadily carries it out through his whole career, admits of no palliation. He may blunder perhaps into a noble and patriotic action as did Napoleon in the restoration of Christianity in France, but that cannot affect the general severity of the condemnation. So it is with Richelieu. We cannot pick and choose among his actions, admit that in one execution he was right, in another he was wrong. We cannot plead that a policy of terrorism is criminal, but in his particular case there was much to diminish the guilt. He will have none of such compromises and such excuses. Deliberately, unhesitatingly, in his lifetime he chose a policy stern, terrific, pitiless, and he carried it out relentlessly but not revengefully. Men accuse him of never sparing even the dupe and the fool, they do not accuse him of destroying the innocent. Not like Henry VIII. did he ever put men to death because they might at some future time prove seditious. Not like Charles II. did he permit innocent lives to be sworn away wholesale rather than face the danger of a popular tumult. No, all who suffered under him were legally guilty, but nearly all who were legally guilty suffered. It was a terrible policy—the extermination of the evil-doer, the establishment of the structure of firm government in the blood of its enemies,—but it is the policy which Richelieu adopted and defended in his lifetime, and for which for two centuries and a half he has stood at the bar of public opinion, pleading, as every line in his portrait shows, not palliation, not excuse, but the calm conviction of a man who knows that he is in the right.

Their justification.

There are times in the history of nations as in the history of individual man, when the only possibility of safety and health lies in the rigorous application of the knife. Such a state of disease the body politic had reached in France, as it seemed to Richelieu, in the seventeenth century. The poison of separation and anarchy had been imbedded too deep in the system by the civil wars of the last century, for the ordinary remedies of steady and firm government to have any effect. As long as the Huguenots were forming themselves into a political organisation in rivalry to the government of France, and as long as the nobles were bent upon making all government impossible in order that they might personally profit from the evils of anarchy, there was a cancer eating into the heart of France which made national death inevitable. The only hope of saving life lay in the unsparing excision of the malignant tissue. If only one fibre was left it would soon become a fresh root of the fell disease. For it must be remembered that Richelieu had to deal with a nation which had no power of defending itself against the evils which threatened to destroy it. There was too little cohesion among the various provinces seignories and towns, of which France was made up, to admit of any united action. Excepting so far as the royal authority made itself felt, the administration of the country districts was still feudal, in the hands of the seigneurs and their officers, and that of the towns was aristocratic, in the hands of the richer citizens and their officers. The whole of the local administration was thus absorbed by the aristocracy and the official classes. Intensely jealous both of the king above them and of the people below them, they were still too divided in rank and too narrow in sympathies to take the direction of affairs into their own hands. When they met together as in the States-General of 1614 they disclosed the most deep-seated rivalries. The days of the political triumphs of their natural leaders, the great nobles, had been the darkest and most miserable which France had ever experienced. Incapable of good they were potent only for evil. Their privileges, their authority, their prestige barred the way of the simplest administrative reforms. Equal administration of justice, equal taxation, free circulation of commodities within the country were impossible as long as the seigneurs held their special fiscal and judicial powers in their own districts. From classes whose one idea of government was the maintenance of personal and class privilege nothing could be hoped. They formed an impenetrable barrier of obscurantism in the way of good government. Interested in the maintenance, not in the suppression, of abuse, they kept the people down with one hand in misery and degradation, while with the other they sought to terrify the king into tutelage. Duller eyes than those of Richelieu might easily have seen that with such an enemy there was no middle course possible. Feudalism as a political power must be stamped out or it would kill France.

Limitations of his policy.

If Richelieu had lived three centuries earlier or a century later he might have endeavoured, as Edward I. or Burke would have endeavoured, to plant the roots of his new government deep in the affections of the people by enshrining it in permanent institutions. A wise and thoughtful statesmanship, which, in destroying the power of feudalism utterly, could have replaced it by an alliance of the powers of the Crown and of the people, would have been indeed an unique blessing not only for France but for Europe. Institutions which could have brought into mutual contact the interests of the peasant, the bourgeois, and the roturier, and could have combined them with the interests of the Crown, would soon have given a quick-witted people like the French what they most wanted—political education. An aristocracy as capable and as generous as the French noblesse would not long have sulked like Achilles in his tent, but would soon have been found in its proper place as the leader of the people, claiming the privilege of the post of danger by the right of truest worth. But a policy such as this was possible only for one who combined sympathy for the people with rare political foresight. Richelieu possessed neither, and was born in an age unfavourable to both. A clear sharp eye to the present and immediate future, indomitable courage, quick decision, inflexible will, such were the gifts he brought to the service of France. For her service he used them without a thought for any one else. He gave her national unity. He secured for her religious peace. He centralised all the forces of the nation under the Crown. He made that Crown the chief among the powers of Europe. He planted the seeds of a colonial empire, and nourished the budding germs of artistic and literary excellence. But he effected no financial or judicial reform. He stirred not a finger to relieve the social burdens of the people. He even increased their misery and would not listen to their complaints. Everything for the people and nothing by the people has been taken as the motto of beneficent despotism. Richelieu cannot lay claim even to that. For France collectively he had an intense and vivid love. For her greatness he willingly spent himself. For the French people considered as social units, as individuals, or as classes, he cared not an atom. He struck to the earth the political power of the nobles, because as long as it existed France could neither be great nor united. He never attempted to interfere with one of their social privileges, though it was by those that they made the lives of the bulk of the French peasants hideous and miserable. As a benefactor of the French people he is as infinitely below Sully and Colbert as he is above them in statesmanship. A wretched financier, an incapable administrator, prompt to demand the obedience of the people whom he governed, and careless of their happiness, without one spark of sympathy, without one touch of weakness, Richelieu stands before us as the embodiment of intellect and of will. His business was with la haute politique. That he understood. To that he devoted all his energies. In that he shone supreme. With unerring quickness of intellectual judgment he singled out at once the true obstacles to the greatness of France. He found them in the national disintegration brought about by the civil wars, and largely fostered by the Huguenots, and in the anarchical tendencies of the higher nobility. With true political insight he saw that with a professional army at his back and the sentiments of loyalty and national unity to support him, there was nothing which could stop the ultimate victory of the Crown, save the weakness of the Crown itself. For some years the struggle was intense, but his indomitable will in the end gained the day. When he had once won the confidence of the cautious and suspicious king the contest was practically over, and he was free to turn his attention almost wholly to foreign affairs. By a policy eminently skilful, if morally unjustifiable, he contrived to hide the scars of civil dissension by the lustre of military glory, and to provide a more congenial and patriotic sphere for the energies of a nobility whom he had deprived of political influence, by summoning them to win for France the victories which were to make her king the leader of Europe.

Character of Louis XIII.

The greatness of the reign of Louis XIII. begins with the ministry of Richelieu, and the death of the king followed so close upon the death of the minister that the fame of the master has become wholly overshadowed by the greatness of the servant. When Richelieu was on the stage there was indeed but little room for any one else. Yet it does not appear on closer inspection, that Louis was either the personal or political nonentity which he has often been described. His character was indeed singularly unlike that of his father or his son, and in so many respects different from the ordinary French type, that perhaps French historians have done him but scant justice. His temperament was cold, heavy, and passionless, his mind slow and reserved, but tenacious, and at times obstinate. A man of few friends and no intimates, hardly if at all susceptible to the influence of women, without strong desires or ambitions, without many interests, yet one who kept a shrewd and watchful eye upon the world. Very cautious and patient in making up his mind, suspicious of all but a very few, when his decision was taken he acted firmly, boldly, straightforwardly, and never went back. Strangely enough his real interests were in the more strenuous affairs of out-door life. Like James I. he was passionately fond of hunting, unlike him he was almost more fond of war. No mean soldier himself, he was a very good judge of military capacity in others, and was never so well and never so happy as when on campaign. Many of the officers who did so much to establish the credit of the French armies at the beginning of the next reign, like Fabert, owed their promotion to the skilled eye and firm friendship of Louis XIII. His relations with his mother Marie de Medici and his great minister show him to have been a man of more than ordinary tact. It was by no means easy to keep the peace between the two, when Marie believed herself to have been basely deserted, and Richelieu had not a friend at court save the king himself. It was still less easy to maintain the minister against the incessant and malevolent attacks of his enemies, and yet preserve the independence of action and reserve of judgment necessary to prevent the king from degenerating into the partisan. But in this he succeeded remarkably well. He trusted Richelieu far more sincerely than Richelieu trusted him, and it is interesting to notice in their correspondence at critical moments, that it is the king who becomes more calm, more collected, more dignified, as the intensity of the crisis increases, while Richelieu is torn by doubts and hesitations and seems overwhelmed by anxieties and fear. But in reality Richelieu never had any good reason to doubt the friendship or support of the king. Louis had the gift, rare in men in his position, of knowing when to act and when to remain quiet. He never suffered his minister to forget that he was a minister and not a king. Richelieu never assumed so large a part of the functions of royalty as did Buckingham in England. He was a Wolsey, not a maire du palais. But on the other hand Louis had the sense to see that if a king is fortunate enough to have a Richelieu for his minister he must give him a free hand. He held the scales of justice even between his minister and his court, he suffered no mean motives of jealousy to detract from the fulness of his confidence, and he was content to be classed by posterity among the makers of the French monarchy, because he had had the fortune to be the maker and master of the greatest of French ministers.

Position of the Huguenots, 1622.

The peace of Montpellier, concluded between Louis and the revolted Huguenots in October 1622, was one of those treaties which are not so much a conclusion of a struggle as a preliminary to its recommencement. It left the questions at issue not merely unsolved but intensified. Huguenotism, always quite as much a political as a religious movement, had derived its aspirations and drawn much of its strength from the desire of independence arising from the jealousy of the king of Paris, which was characteristic of the south of France, and from the jealousy of the French crown, which was characteristic of the French nobility. It was among the towns of the south of France and among the smaller nobility—the country seigneurs—that it spread with the greatest rapidity. Its strongly self-centred and individualistic creed fell in naturally with their passionate love for their privileges and their intense dread of the central government. Ever since the Huguenots became a power in the land, the tendency of their policy had been towards independence, all the more significant because it came about without any defined cry for separation. Aided by the weakness of the crown Huguenot towns, such as La Rochelle, Montauban and Nismes, during the civil troubles became self-governing communities independent of the French government, and had been practically recognised as such by various treaties during the wars, and by the Edict of Nantes. Their organisation. Huguenot organisations under the name of ‘circles’ parcelled France out into districts under regular officers for the purposes of defence and offence from end to end. In many parts of the country this organisation consisted merely upon paper, but in the north where the influence of the duke of Bouillon was great, and over large districts of the south it was a dangerous and menacing reality. In the strong words attributed to Richelieu, the Huguenots shared the government of France with the king. In the revolt of 1621, although the leaders probably never intended to do more than frighten the Crown and secure their own political position, many of the rank and file were openly fighting for independence. To the Crown therefore it had become essential to crush the power of the Huguenots if it wished to be supreme over France. To the Huguenots it was no less essential to conquer the Crown if they wished to secure their independence.

In such a state of affairs the treaty of Montpellier was obviously but a breathing space in the combat. Both sides saw that at that moment neither of them could win a decisive victory, and both were content to wait for a more favourable opportunity. Rising of the Huguenots, 1625. That opportunity seemed to have come to the hot-headed Soubise, the brother of Rohan and the head of the circle of La Rochelle in 1625. The new minister was hardly yet settled in his saddle. It was no secret that he was surrounded by enemies of all kinds, from the king’s brother Gaston of Orléans down to the pages of the royal household. He had just engaged the forces of France in the question of the Valtelline, and had incurred the enmity of the more strenuous of the Catholic party by making war upon the soldiers of the Pope. Surely a rising of the Huguenot organisations at such a moment could not fail to be successful at least in overturning the rash and unpopular minister. Since Richelieu had been in power he had been diligently forming a nucleus of a royal navy, and at the beginning of 1625 the six vessels of war, which were the outcome of his efforts, were gathered in the little port of Blavet in Brittany. Soubise by an act of happy daring seized the whole of them on the 17th of January 1625, and, establishing himself on the islands of Rhé and Oléron, prepared, now that he was undisputed master of the sea, to defy any attack which the royal forces might direct against the walls of La Rochelle. But Richelieu was not so easy out-generalled. He at once withdrew from the affairs of Italy, procured ships from Holland and England, after long and tortuous negotiations in which he completely outwitted Buckingham, and manning them with French sailors inflicted a crushing defeat upon Soubise in September 1626, and forced him to take refuge in England. The crisis had been, however, sufficiently acute to show Richelieu that it was not safe to undertake responsibilities abroad as long as his enemies at home were so watchful and unsubdued. He must establish his authority on a firm basis in France, before he could run the risk again of having to deal with foreign war and internal revolts together. On the 5th of February he put an end to the Huguenot rising by renewing the terms of the treaty of Montpellier. In March the treaty of Monzon relieved him for the moment of all danger from the side of Spain, and he felt that the time had then arrived when he might safely proceed to strike the first blow at the power of the nobles.

Edicts against duelling and private castles, 1626.

In the summer of 1626 two edicts were issued in pursuit of this policy. By the first all duelling was declared punishable by death. By the second the destruction of all fortified places not situated on the frontier was ordered. These two laws struck at two of the most cherished privileges of the nobles and the greatest dangers of the state. The right of an independent tribunal of arms, by which all personal questions arising in their own order should be adjudicated, was one incompatible with civilised and authoritative government. The fortified town and the fortified castle formed the natural home of both sedition and oppression, and Richelieu, in determining to sweep them away in France, was merely taking a course which all restorers of order in all countries had felt themselves obliged to take. Like Henry II. of England he found that fortresses in the hands of a territorial nobility were inconsistent with the power of the Crown. But the nobles were not going to submit to legislation of this sort without attempting a counter stroke. Suppression of the conspiracy of Vendôme and Chalais, 1626. Gaston of Orléans, the king’s brother, with the duc de Vendôme the son of Henry IV. and Gabrielle d’Estrées, the comte de Soissons another prince of the House of Bourbon, the duchesse de Chevreuse a friend of the queen and a born intrigante and tireless enemy of the cardinal, became the leaders of a plot to depose the king, to assassinate Richelieu, and put Gaston on the throne. It was soon discovered. Gaston to save his own life basely surrendered his friends and associates to the ruthless mercy of Richelieu. The comte de Chalais suffered for him on the scaffold, another of his associates, Ornano, in prison. The duc de Vendôme, the duc de la Valette son of the old duc d’Epernon, Madame de Chevreuse, the comte de Soissons were all banished, and Richelieu rid himself at one blow of the most dangerous of his enemies. The nobles were astonished at his audacity. They could not believe that any one would dare so to treat the noblest of their order, but in the following year they received a lesson which startled them still more. Execution of Montmorency-Bouteville, 1627. The comte de Montmorency-Bouteville, one of the famous family of Montmorency and a noted duellist, fought a duel in open day in the midst of Paris in disregard of the royal edict. Richelieu had him immediately arrested and put to death on the scaffold on the 21st of June 1627. The execution of one of the noblest of French subjects, for the exercise of one of the commonest and most cherished privileges of the French nobility, showed them more clearly than anything else had yet done, that the minister at the head of the government was determined to be their master.

War with England, 1627.

Hardly had Richelieu emerged in triumph from his first contest with the nobles, than he found himself involved in an unnecessary war with England and the Huguenots. The treaty between France and England on the occasion of the marriage between Henrietta Maria and Charles I. contained provisions which were absolutely certain to lead to mutual recriminations sooner or later. Charles had promised publicly to permit his wife to keep her French household, and have complete control over the education of the children till they were thirteen years of age. Privately he had bound himself to tolerate Roman Catholicism in England. But he very soon found that, in the excited and unreasonable temper of the English people, it was impossible for him even to pardon Roman priests condemned under the penal laws. Neither in the interests of his domestic life could he permit a band of mischief-making women to alienate from him the affections of his child-wife. In both these matters he found himself compelled to break his word. Louis on his side set at naught his own verbal promise to permit Mansfeld and the English contingent to march across France to attack the Palatinate, and so in the eyes of the English court became largely responsible for the terrible misfortunes of the year 1626 in Germany. When Richelieu in further pursuance of the treaty had demanded from Charles a loan of ships to use against Soubise and the revolted Huguenots, Buckingham had set his wits against those of Richelieu to avoid carrying out his obligation in fact, while he outwardly professed to be eager to do so, and even condescended to the trick of organising a sham mutiny on board the fleet. But in the end he was outwitted, and the spectacle of English ships in the French fleet, which defeated Soubise and the Huguenots, so exasperated the Protestant party in the English Parliament, that Buckingham from motives of self-defence as well as from those of wounded pride declared war against France in order to shift the odium from himself to Richelieu, and to pose before the world as the champion of the Protestant cause. Siege of La Rochelle, 1627. In July 1627 Buckingham, at the head of a large but ill-appointed fleet, appeared before La Rochelle, and occupying the island of Rhé besieged the fort of S. Martin. The Rochellois much against their will felt compelled to make common cause with the English, and the Huguenots in the south of France seized the opportunity once more to rise into revolt under Rohan. Richelieu found himself again threatened by a formidable combination of foreign and domestic enemies, and determined this time to have recourse to no half measures. In November Buckingham was obliged to withdraw from before the unconquered S. Martin and sail back to England for reinforcements. Richelieu himself formed the siege of La Rochelle. Recognising at once the impossibility of capturing a city open to the sea and surrounded by marshes by attack on the land side only, he began the gigantic work of building a mole right across the mouth of the harbour. Thus he hoped to cut off the city wholly from the possibility of relief from the sea, while the rigid lines of circumvallation drawn round the town prevented any attempt at introducing provisions from the land side. For five months the weary work went on. It was a race against time. All depended on the question whether the mole could be finished before the English fleet reappeared. Day and night in spite of many blunders and some misfortunes the huge mass slowly grew. The two wings approached nearer to each other, garnished with towers and palisades and batteries, until by the end of April 1628 the aperture between the two was small enough to be closed by a bridge of boats made into floating batteries, and fastened together by stout iron chains and defended by wooden stockades. It was hardly finished when the English fleet was sighted. For fifteen days the English hurled themselves with renewed and despairing vigour against the fortifications, but without success. On the 18th of May they sailed home and left La Rochelle to starve. Capture of La Rochelle, 1628. Victory was now but a question of time. Early in October the English fleet reappeared, but did not even dare to face the now impregnable defences of the besiegers. On the 28th the heroic Guiton worn out by famine accepted the inevitable. La Rochelle surrendered to the royal forces, its municipal privileges were abolished, its fortifications destroyed, its government placed in the hands of royal officials. Liberty of conscience was guaranteed to the citizens, but all vestige of independent authority was absolutely taken away.

Pacification of the south, 1629.

After the capture of La Rochelle it was a comparatively easy matter to crush out the rebellion in the south. Early in 1629 the king put himself at the head of his army, marched into Languedoc and the district of the Cevennes, capturing the towns and destroying the castles. Rohan and the Huguenot leaders finding they could get no material assistance from Spain were obliged to submit. By the peace of Alais concluded in June 1629 the Huguenots ceased to retain any political power in France. Their guaranteed towns were handed over to the royal government, their fortresses were razed, their organisation was destroyed, their right of meeting was taken away, but their liberty of worship remained unimpaired.

The peace of Alais marks the end of the first act of the great drama which was being played by Richelieu in the history of France, the completion of the first, if not the most difficult, of the tasks to which he had devoted himself. Destruction of the political power of the Huguenots. By it the policy of the Edict of Nantes was carried to a legitimate conclusion. Religious peace was ensured by the recognition of religious division, while the danger that religious division should impair the national unity was effectually removed. It was a policy of national unity not of national uniformity. Richelieu did not care that all Frenchmen should be made outwardly to profess the same religious or political creed, should wear outwardly the same religious or political dress, as long as they were whole-hearted in the service of the Crown, as long as their liberty was not a weakness to the state. That it could not fail to be a source not merely of weakness, but of serious danger, to the state, as long as it was based upon political privilege and defended by political organisation, had already been abundantly proved in the course of the reign of Louis XIII. Every time that France had been threatened by the hostility of her neighbours, whether of Spain or England, a rising of the Huguenots had turned a serious foreign war into an acute national crisis. Every time that the Huguenots had risen in revolt they had allied themselves with the national enemies. Twice already had Richelieu’s plans for the development of France been thwarted by the determination of the Huguenots to prefer their independence to their patriotism, and to look upon the foreign entanglements of the government merely as their opportunity. When a powerful political organisation deliberately sets itself to profit by the dangers of the nation, and to pursue its own interests to the detriment of those of the nation, it must either crush the government or be crushed by it. Richelieu enlisted the whole forces of the state in the campaign against the Huguenots, because he saw clearly that as long as their religious privileges were based on the possession of political power, the political exigencies of their position, and the fancied necessities as well as the inherent tendencies of their religion, must make them the enemies of France. The destruction of La Rochelle and the peace of Alais changed them at once from a formidable political party into a harmless religious sect. They ceased to be a danger to the state through their want of patriotism and desire for independence. They became a strength to France through their frugality, their manual skill, and their morality. Grateful for religious toleration and satisfied with it, in less than a generation they were found among the staunchest supporters of the monarchy, and effectually proved their gratitude by never stirring a finger to increase the embarrassments of the Crown in the perilous days of the Fronde.

Administrative reforms.