Gardiner Samuel Rawson
The Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648
Section IV. —Assassination of Wallenstein
§ 1. The garrison of Prague abandons him.
Wallenstein thus hoped, with the help of the army, to force the Emperor's hand, and to obtain his signature to the peace. Of the co-operation of the Elector of Saxony he was already secure; and since the beginning of February he had been pressing Oxenstjerna and Bernhard to come to his aid. If all the armies in the field declared for peace, Ferdinand would be compelled to abandon the Spaniards and to accept the offered terms. Without some such hazardous venture, Wallenstein would be checkmated by Oñate. The Spaniard had been unceasingly busy during these weeks of intrigue. Spanish gold was provided to content the colonels for their advances, and hopes of promotion were scattered broadcast amongst them. Two other of the principal generals had gone over to the Court, and on February 18, the day before the meeting at Pilsen, a second declaration had been issued accusing Wallenstein of treason, and formally depriving him of the command. Wallenstein, before this declaration reached him, had already appointed a meeting of large masses of troops to take place on the White Hill before Prague on the 21st, where he hoped to make his intentions more generally known. But he had miscalculated the devotion of the army to his person. The garrison of Prague refused to obey his orders. Soldiers and citizens alike declared for the Emperor. He was obliged to retrace his steps. "I had peace in my hands," he said. Then he added, "God is righteous," as if still counting on the aid of Heaven in so good a work.
§ 2. Understanding with the Swedes.
He did not yet despair. He ordered the colonels to meet him at Eger, assuring them that all that he was doing was for the Emperor's good. He had now at last hopes of other assistance. Oxenstjerna, indeed, ever cautious, still refused to do anything for him till he had positively declared against the Emperor. Bernhard, equally prudent for some time, had been carried away by the news, which reached him on the 21st, of the meeting at Pilsen, and the Emperor's denouncement of the general. Though he was still suspicious, he moved in the direction of Eger.
§ 3. His arrival at Eger.
On the 24th Wallenstein entered Eger. In what precise way he meant to escape from the labyrinth in which he was, or whether he had still any clear conception of the course before him, it is impossible to say. But Arnim was expected at Eger, as well as Bernhard, and it may be that Wallenstein fancied still that he could gather all the armies of Germany into his hands, to defend the peace which he was ready to make. The great scheme, however, whatever it was, was doomed to failure. Amongst the officers who accompanied him was a Colonel Butler, an Irish Catholic, who had no fancy for such dealings with Swedish and Saxon heretics. Already he had received orders from Piccolomini to bring in Wallenstein dead or alive. No official instructions had been given to Piccolomini. But the thought was certain to arise in the minds of all who retained their loyalty to the Emperor. A general who attempts to force his sovereign to a certain political course with the help of the enemy is placed, by that very fact, beyond the pale of law.
§ 4. Wallenstein's assassination.
The actual decision did not lie with Butler. The fortress was in the hands of two Scotch officers, Leslie and Gordon. As Protestants, they might have been expected to feel some sympathy with Wallenstein. But the sentiment of military honour prevailed. On the morning of the 25th they were called upon by one of the general's confederates to take orders from Wallenstein alone. "I have sworn to obey the Emperor," answered Gordon, at last, "and who shall release me from my oath?" "You, gentlemen," was the reply, "are strangers in the Empire. What have you to do with the Empire?" Such arguments were addressed to deaf ears. That afternoon Butler, Leslie, and Gordon consulted together. Leslie, usually a silent, reserved man, was the first to speak. "Let us kill the traitors," he said. That evening Wallenstein's chief supporters were butchered at a banquet. Then there was a short and sharp discussion whether Wallenstein's life should be spared. Bernhard's troops were known to be approaching, and the conspirators dared not leave a chance of escape open. An Irish captain, Devereux by name, was selected to do the deed. Followed by a few soldiers, he burst into the room where Wallenstein was preparing for rest. "Scoundrel and traitor," were the words which he flung at Devereux as he entered. Then, stretching out his arms, he received the fatal blow in his breast. The busy brain of the great calculator was still forever.
§ 5. Reason of his failure.
The attempt to snatch at a wise and beneficent peace by mingled force and intrigue had failed. Other generals – Cæsar, Cromwell, Napoleon – have succeeded to supreme power with the support of an armed force. But they did so by placing themselves at the head of the civil institutions of their respective countries, and by making themselves the organs of a strong national policy. Wallenstein stood alone in attempting to guide the political destinies of a people, while remaining a soldier and nothing more. The plan was doomed to failure, and is only excusable on the ground that there were no national institutions at the head of which Wallenstein could place himself; not even a chance of creating such institutions afresh.
§ 6. Comparison between Gustavus and Wallenstein.
In spite of all his faults, Germany turns ever to Wallenstein as she turns to no other amongst the leaders of the Thirty Years' War. From amidst the divisions and weaknesses of his native country, a great poet enshrined his memory in a succession of noble dramas. Such faithfulness is not without a reason. Gustavus's was a higher nature than Wallenstein's. Some of his work, at least the rescue of German Protestantism from oppression, remained imperishable, whilst Wallenstein's military and political success vanished into nothingness. But Gustavus was a hero not of Germany as a nation, but of European Protestantism. His Corpus Evangelicorum was at the best a choice of evils to a German. Wallenstein's wildest schemes, impossible of execution as they were by military violence, were always built upon the foundation of German unity. In the way in which he walked that unity was doubtless unattainable. To combine devotion to Ferdinand with religious liberty was as hopeless a conception as it was to burst all bonds of political authority on the chance that a new and better world would spring into being out of the discipline of the camp. But during the long dreary years of confusion which were to follow, it was something to think of the last supremely able man whose life had been spent in battling against the great evils of the land, against the spirit of religious intolerance, and the spirit of division.
Section V. —Imperialist Victories and the Treaty of Prague
§ 1. Campaign of 1634.
For the moment, the House of Austria seemed to have gained everything by the execution or the murder of Wallenstein, whichever we may choose to call it. The army was reorganized and placed under the command of the Emperor's son, the King of Hungary. The Cardinal-Infant, now eagerly welcomed, was preparing to join him through Tyrol. And while on the one side there was union and resolution, there was division and hesitation on the other. The Elector of Saxony stood aloof from the League of Heilbronn, weakly hoping that the terms of peace which had been offered him by Wallenstein would be confirmed by the Emperor now that Wallenstein was gone. Even amongst those who remained under arms there was no unity of purpose. Bernhard, the daring and impetuous, was not of one mind with the cautious Horn, who commanded the Swedish forces, and both agreed in thinking Oxenstjerna remiss because he did not supply them with more money than he was able to provide.
§ 2. The Battle of Nördlingen.
As might have been expected under these circumstances, the imperials made rapid progress. Ratisbon, the prize of Bernhard the year before, surrendered to the king of Hungary in July. Then Donauwörth was stormed, and siege was laid to Nördlingen. On September 2 the Cardinal-Infant came up with 15,000 men. The enemy watched the siege with a force far inferior in numbers. Bernhard was eager to put all to the test of battle. Horn recommended caution in vain. Against his better judgment he consented to fight. On September 6 the attack was made. By the end of the day Horn was a prisoner, and Bernhard was in full retreat, leaving 10,000 of his men dead upon the field, and 6,000 prisoners in the hands of the enemy, whilst the imperialists lost only 1,200 men.
§ 3. Important results from it.
Since the day of Breitenfeld, three years before, there had been no such battle fought as this of Nördlingen. As Breitenfeld had recovered the Protestant bishoprics of the north, Nördlingen recovered the Catholic bishoprics of the south. Bernhard's Duchy of Franconia disappeared in a moment under the blow. Before the spring of 1635 came, the whole of South Germany, with the exception of one or two fortified posts, was in the hands of the imperial commanders. The Cardinal-Infant was able to pursue his way to Brussels, with the assurance that he had done a good stroke of work on the way.
§ 4. French intervention.
The victories of mere force are never fruitful of good. As it had been after the successes of Tilly in 1622, and the successes of Wallenstein in 1626 and 1627, so it was now with the successes of the King of Hungary in 1634 and 1635. The imperialist armies had gained victories, and had taken cities. But the Emperor was none the nearer to the confidence of Germans. An alienated people, crushed by military force, served merely as a bait to tempt foreign aggression, and to make the way easy before it. After 1622, the King of Denmark had been called in. After 1627, an appeal was made to the King of Sweden. After 1634, Richelieu found his opportunity. The bonds between France and the mutilated League of Heilbronn were drawn more closely. German troops were to be taken into French pay, and the empty coffers of the League were filled with French livres. He who holds the purse holds the sceptre, and the princes of Southern and Western Germany, whether they wished it or not, were reduced to the position of satellites revolving round the central orb at Paris.
§ 5. The Peace of Prague.
Nowhere was the disgrace of submitting to French intervention felt so deeply as at Dresden. The battle of Nördlingen had cut short any hopes which John George might have entertained of obtaining that which Wallenstein would willingly have granted him. But, on the other hand, Ferdinand had learned something from experience. He would allow the Edict of Restitution to fall, though he was resolved not to make the sacrifice in so many words. But he refused to replace the Empire in the condition in which it had been before the war. The year 1627 was to be chosen as the starting point for the new arrangement. The greater part of the northern bishoprics would thus be saved to Protestantism. But Halberstadt would remain in the hands of a Catholic bishop, and the Palatinate would be lost to Protestantism for ever. Lusatia, which had been held in the hands of the Elector of Saxony for his expenses in the war of 1620, was to be ceded to him permanently, and Protestantism in Silesia was to be placed under the guarantee of the Emperor. Finally, Lutheranism alone was still reckoned as the privileged religion, so that Hesse Cassel and the other Calvinist states gained no security at all. On May 30, 1635, a treaty embodying these arrangements was signed at Prague by the representatives of the Emperor and the Elector of Saxony. It was intended not to be a separate treaty, but to be the starting point of a general pacification. Most of the princes and towns so accepted it, after more or less delay, and acknowledged the supremacy of the Emperor on its conditions. Yet it was not in the nature of things that it should put an end to the war. It was not an agreement which any one was likely to be enthusiastic about. The ties which bound Ferdinand to his Protestant subjects had been rudely broken, and the solemn promise to forget and forgive could not weld the nation into that unity of heart and spirit which was needed to resist the foreigner. A Protestant of the north might reasonably come to the conclusion that the price to be paid to the Swede and the Frenchman for the vindication of the rights of the southern Protestants was too high to make it prudent for him to continue the struggle against the Emperor. But it was hardly likely that he would be inclined to fight very vigorously for the Emperor on such terms.
§ 6. It fails in securing general acceptance.
If the treaty gave no great encouragement to anyone who was comprehended by it, it threw still further into the arms of the enemy those who were excepted from its benefits. The leading members of the League of Heilbronn were excepted from the general amnesty, though hopes of better treatment were held out to them if they made their submission. The Landgrave of Hesse Cassel was shut out as a Calvinist. Besides such as nourished legitimate grievances, there were others who, like Bernhard, were bent upon carving out a fortune for themselves, or who had so blended in their own minds consideration for the public good as to lose all sense of any distinction between the two.
§ 7. Degeneration of the war.
There was no lack here of materials for a long and terrible struggle. But there was no longer any noble aim in view on either side. The ideal of Ferdinand and Maximilian was gone. The Church was not to recover its lost property. The Empire was not to recover its lost dignity. The ideal of Gustavus of a Protestant political body was equally gone. Even the ideal of Wallenstein, that unity might be founded on an army, had vanished. From henceforth French and Swedes on the one side, Austrians and Spaniards on the other, were busily engaged in riving at the corpse of the dead Empire. The great quarrel of principle had merged into a mere quarrel between the Houses of Austria and Bourbon, in which the shred of principle which still remained in the question of the rights of the southern Protestants was almost entirely disregarded.
§ 8. Condition of Germany.
Horrible as the war had been from its commencement, it was every day assuming a more horrible character. On both sides all traces of discipline had vanished in the dealings of the armies with the inhabitants of the countries in which they were quartered. Soldiers treated men and women as none but the vilest of mankind would now treat brute beasts. 'He who had money,' says a contemporary, 'was their enemy. He who had none was tortured because he had it not.' Outrages of unspeakable atrocity were committed everywhere. Human beings were driven naked into the streets, their flesh pierced with needles, or cut to the bone with saws. Others were scalded with boiling water, or hunted with fierce dogs. The horrors of a town taken by storm were repeated every day in the open country. Even apart from its excesses, the war itself was terrible enough. When Augsburg was besieged by the imperialists, after their victory at Nördlingen, it contained an industrious population of 70,000 souls. After a siege of seven months, 10,000 living beings, wan and haggard with famine, remained to open the gates to the conquerors, and the great commercial city of the Fuggers dwindled down into a country town.
1636
§ 9. Notes of an English traveller.
How is it possible to bring such scenes before our eyes in their ghastly reality? Let us turn for the moment to some notes taken by the companion of an English ambassador who passed through the country in 1636. As the party were towed up the Rhine from Cologne, on the track so well known to the modern tourist, they passed "by many villages pillaged and shot down." Further on, a French garrison was in Ehrenbreitstein, firing down upon Coblentz, which had just been taken by the imperialists. "They in the town, if they do but look out of their windows, have a bullet presently presented at their head." More to the south, things grew worse. At Bacharach, "the poor people are found dead with grass in their mouths." At Rüdesheim, many persons were "praying where dead bones were in a little old house; and here his Excellency gave some relief to the poor, which were almost starved, as it appeared by the violence they used to get it from one another." At Mentz, the ambassador was obliged to remain "on shipboard, for there was nothing to relieve us, since it was taken by the King of Sweden, and miserably battered… Here, likewise, the poor people were almost starved, and those that could relieve others before now humbly begged to be relieved; and after supper all had relief sent from the ship ashore, at the sight of which they strove so violently that some of them fell into the Rhine, and were like to have been drowned." Up the Main, again, "all the towns, villages, and castles be battered, pillaged, or burnt." After leaving Würzburg, the ambassador's train came to plundered villages, and then to Neustadt, "which hath been a fair city, though now pillaged and burnt miserably." Poor children were "sitting at their doors almost starved to death," his Excellency giving them food and leaving money with their parents to help them, if but for a time. In the Upper Palatinate, they passed "by churches demolished to the ground, and through woods in danger, understanding that Croats were lying hereabout." Further on they stayed for dinner at a poor little village "which hath been pillaged eight-and-twenty times in two years, and twice in one day." And so on, and so on. The corner of the veil is lifted up in the pages of the old book, and the rest is left to the imagination to picture forth, as best it may, the misery behind. After reading the sober narrative, we shall perhaps not be inclined to be so very hard upon the Elector of Saxony for making peace at Prague.
CHAPTER X.
THE PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE
Section I. —Open Intervention of France
§ 1. Protestantism not yet out of danger.
The peacemakers of Prague hoped to restore the Empire to its old form. But this could not be. Things done cannot pass away as though they had never been. Ferdinand's attempt to gain a partizan's advantage for his religion by availing himself of legal forms had given rise to a general distrust. Nations and governments, like individual men, are "tied and bound by the chain of their sins," from which they can be freed only when a new spirit is breathed into them. Unsatisfactory as the territorial arrangements of the peace were, the entire absence of any constitutional reform in connexion with the peace was more unsatisfactory still. The majority in the two Upper Houses of the Diet was still Catholic; the Imperial Council was still altogether Catholic. It was possible that the Diet and Council, under the teaching of experience, might refrain from pushing their pretensions as far as they had pushed them before; but a government which refrains from carrying out its principles from motives of prudence cannot inspire confidence. A strong central power would never arise in such a way, and a strong central power to defend Germany against foreign invasion was the especial need of the hour.
§ 2. The allies of France.
In the failure of the Elector of Saxony to obtain some of the most reasonable of the Protestant demands lay the best excuse of men like Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar and William of Hesse Cassel for refusing the terms of accommodation offered. Largely as personal ambition and greed of territory found a place in the motives of these men, it is not absolutely necessary to assert that their religious enthusiasm was nothing more than mere hypocrisy. They raised the war-cry of "God with us" before rushing to the storm of a city doomed to massacre and pillage; they set apart days for prayer and devotion when battle was at hand – veiling, perhaps, from their own eyes the hideous misery which they were spreading around, in contemplation of the loftiness of their aim: for, in all but the most vile, there is a natural tendency to shrink from contemplating the lower motives of action, and to fix the eyes solely on the higher. But the ardour inspired by a military career, and the mere love of fighting for its own sake, must have counted for much; and the refusal to submit to a domination which had been so harshly used soon grew into a restless disdain of all authority whatever. The nobler motives which had imparted a glow to the work of Tilly and Gustavus, and which even lit up the profound selfishness of Wallenstein, flickered and died away, till the fatal disruption of the Empire was accomplished amidst the strivings and passions of heartless and unprincipled men.
§ 3. Foreign intervention.
The work of riving Germany in pieces was not accomplished by Germans alone. As in nature a living organism which has become unhealthy and corrupt is seized upon by the lower forms of animal life, a nation divided amongst itself, and devoid of a sense of life within it higher than the aims of parties and individuals, becomes the prey of neighbouring nations, which would not have ventured to meddle with it in the days of its strength. The carcase was there, and the eagles were gathered together. The gathering of Wallenstein's army in 1632, the overthrow of Wallenstein in 1634, had alike been made possible by the free use of Spanish gold. The victory of Nördlingen had been owing to the aid of Spanish troops; and the aim of Spain was not the greatness or peace of Germany, but at the best the greatness of the House of Austria in Germany; at the worst, the maintenance of the old system of intolerance and unthinking obedience, which had been the ruin of Germany. With Spain for an ally, France was a necessary enemy. The strife for supreme power between the two representative states of the old system and the new could not long be delayed, and the German parties would be dragged, consciously or unconsciously, in their wake. If Bernhard became a tool of Richelieu, Ferdinand became a tool of Spain.
§ 4. Alsace and Lorraine.
In this phase of the war Protestantism and Catholicism, tolerance and intolerance, ceased to be the immediate objects of the strife. The possession of Alsace and Lorraine rose into primary importance, not because, as in our own days, Germany needed a bulwark against France, or France needed a bulwark against Germany, but because Germany was not strong enough to prevent these territories from becoming the highway of intercourse between Spain and the Spanish Netherlands. The command of the sea was in the hands of the Dutch, and the valley of the Upper Rhine was the artery through which the life blood of the Spanish monarchy flowed. If Spain or the Emperor, the friend of Spain, could hold that valley, men and munitions of warfare would flow freely to the Netherlands to support the Cardinal-Infant in his struggle with the Dutch. If Richelieu could lay his hand heavily upon it, he had seized his enemy by the throat, and could choke him as he lay.
§ 5. Richelieu asks for fortresses in Alsace.
After the battle of Nördlingen, Richelieu's first demand from Oxenstjerna as the price of his assistance had been the strong places held by Swedish garrisons in Alsace. As soon as he had them safely under his control, he felt himself strong enough to declare war openly against Spain.
§ 6. War between France and Spain.
On May 19, eleven days before peace was agreed upon at Prague, the declaration of war was delivered at Brussels by a French herald. To the astonishment of all, France was able to place in the field what was then considered the enormous number of 132,000 men. One army was to drive the Spaniards out of the Milanese, and to set free the Italian princes. Another was to defend Lorraine whilst Bernhard crossed the Rhine and carried on war in Germany. The main force was to be thrown upon the Spanish Netherlands, and, after effecting a junction with the Prince of Orange, was to strike directly at Brussels.
