Gardiner Samuel Rawson
The Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648
Section II. —Spanish Successes
§ 1. Failure of the French attack on the Netherlands.
Precisely in the most ambitious part of his programme Richelieu failed most signally. The junction with the Dutch was effected without difficulty; but the hoped-for instrument of success proved the parent of disaster. Whatever Flemings and Brabanters might think of Spain, they soon made it plain that they would have nothing to do with the Dutch. A national enthusiasm against Protestant aggression from the north made defence easy, and the French army had to return completely unsuccessful. Failure, too, was reported from other quarters. The French armies had no experience of war on a large scale, and no military leader of eminent ability had yet appeared to command them. The Italian campaign came to nothing, and it was only by a supreme effort of military skill that Bernhard, driven to retreat, preserved his army from complete destruction.
§ 2. Spanish invasion of France.
In 1636 France was invaded. The Cardinal-Infant crossed the Somme, took Corbie, and advanced to the banks of the Oise. All Paris was in commotion. An immediate siege was expected, and inquiry was anxiously made into the state of the defences. Then Richelieu, coming out of his seclusion, threw himself upon the nation. He appealed to the great legal, ecclesiastical, and commercial corporations of Paris, and he did not appeal in vain. Money, voluntarily offered, came pouring into the treasury for the payment of the troops. Those who had no money gave themselves eagerly for military service. It was remarked that Paris, so fanatically Catholic in the days of St. Bartholomew and the League, entrusted its defence to the Protestant marshal La Force, whose reputation for integrity inspired universal confidence.
§ 3. The invaders driven back.
The resistance undertaken in such a spirit in Paris was imitated by the other towns of the kingdom. Even the nobility, jealous as they were of the Cardinal, forgot their grievances as an aristocracy in their duties as Frenchmen. Their devotion was not put to the test of action. The invaders, frightened at the unanimity opposed to them, hesitated and turned back. In September, Lewis took the field in person. In November he appeared before Corbie; and the last days of the year saw the fortress again in the keeping of a French garrison. The war, which was devastating Germany, was averted from France by the union produced by the mild tolerance of Richelieu.
§ 4. Battle of Wittstock.
In Germany, too, affairs had taken a turn. The Elector of Saxony had hoped to drive the Swedes across the sea; but a victory gained on October 4, at Wittstock, by the Swedish general, Baner, the ablest of the successors of Gustavus, frustrated his intentions. Henceforward North Germany was delivered over to a desolation with which even the misery inflicted by Wallenstein affords no parallel.
§ 5. Death of Ferdinand II.
Amidst these scenes of failure and misfortune the man whose policy had been mainly responsible for the miseries of his country closed his eyes for ever. On February 15, 1637, Ferdinand II. died at Vienna. Shortly before his death the King of Hungary had been elected King of the Romans, and he now, by his father's death, became the Emperor Ferdinand III.
§ 6. Ferdinand III.
The new Emperor had no vices. He did not even care, as his father did, for hunting and music. When the battle of Nördlingen was won under his command he was praying in his tent whilst his soldiers were fighting. He sometimes took upon himself to give military orders, but the handwriting in which they were conveyed was such an abominable scrawl that they only served to enable his generals to excuse their defeats by the impossibility of reading their instructions. His great passion was for keeping strict accounts. Even the Jesuits, it is said, found out that, devoted as he was to his religion, he had a sharp eye for his expenditure. One day they complained that some tolls bequeathed to them by his father had not been made over to them, and represented the value of the legacy as a mere trifle of 500 florins a year. The Emperor at once gave them an order upon the treasury for the yearly payment of the sum named, and took possession of the tolls for the maintenance of the fortifications of Vienna. The income thus obtained is said to have been no less than 12,000 florins a year.
§ 7. Campaign of 1637.
Such a man was not likely to rescue the Empire from its miseries. The first year of his reign, however, was marked by a gleam of good fortune. Baner lost all that he had gained at Wittstock, and was driven back to the shores of the Baltic. On the western frontier the imperialists were equally successful. Würtemberg accepted the Peace of Prague, and submitted to the Emperor. A more general peace was talked of. But till Alsace was secured to one side or the other no peace was possible.
Section III. —The Struggle for Alsace
§ 1. The capture of Breisach.
The year 1638 was to decide the question. Bernhard was looking to the Austrian lands in Alsace and the Breisgau as a compensation for his lost duchy of Franconia. In February he was besieging Rheinfelden. Driven off by the imperialists on the 26th, he re-appeared unexpectedly on March 3, taking the enemy by surprise. They had not even sufficient powder with them to load their guns, and the victory of Rheinfelden was the result. On the 24th Rheinfelden itself surrendered. Freiburg followed its example on April 22, and Bernhard proceeded to undertake the siege of Breisach, the great fortress which domineered over the whole valley of the Upper Rhine. Small as his force was, he succeeded, by a series of rapid movements, in beating off every attempt to introduce supplies, and on December 19 he entered the place in triumph.
§ 2. The capture a turning point in the war.
The campaign of 1638 was the turning point in the struggle between France and the united House of Austria. A vantage ground was then won which was never lost.
§ 3. Bernhard wishes to keep Breisach.
Bernhard himself, however, was loth to realize the world-wide importance of the events in which he had played his part. He fancied that he had been fighting for his own, and he claimed the lands which he had conquered for himself. He received the homage of the citizens of Breisach in his own name. He celebrated a Lutheran thanksgiving festival in the cathedral. But the French Government looked upon the rise of an independent German principality in Alsace with as little pleasure as the Spanish government had contemplated the prospect of the establishment of Wallenstein in the Palatinate. They ordered Bernhard to place his conquests under the orders of the King of France.
§ 4. Refuses to dismember the Empire.
Strange as it may seem, the man who had done so much to tear in pieces the Empire believed, in a sort of way, in the Empire still. "I will never suffer," he said, in reply to the French demands, "that men can truly reproach me with being the first to dismember the Empire."
§ 5. Death of Bernhard.
The next year he crossed the Rhine with the most brilliant expectations. Baner had recovered strength, and was pushing on through North Germany into Bohemia. Bernhard hoped that he too might strike a blow which would force on a peace on his own conditions. But his greatest achievement, the capture of Breisach, was also his last. A fatal disease seized upon him when he had hardly entered upon the campaign. On July 8, 1639, he died.
§ 6. Alsace in French possession.
There was no longer any question of the ownership of the fortresses in Alsace and the Breisgau. French governors entered into possession. A French general took the command of Bernhard's army. For the next two or three years Bernhard's old troops fought up and down Germany in conjunction with Baner, not without success, but without any decisive victory. The French soldiers were becoming, like the Germans, inured to war. The lands on the Rhine were not easily to be wrenched out of the strong hands which had grasped them.
Section IV. —French Successes
§ 1. State of Italy.
Richelieu had other successes to count besides these victories on the Rhine. In 1637 the Spaniards drove out of Turin the Duchess-Regent Christina, the mother of the young Duke of Savoy. She was a sister of the King of France; and, even if that had not been the case, the enemy of Spain was, in the nature of the case, the friend of France. In 1640 she re-entered her capital with French assistance.
§ 2. Maritime warfare.
At sea, too, where Spain, though unable to hold its own against the Dutch, had long continued to be superior to France, the supremacy of Spain was coming to an end. During the whole course of his ministry, Richelieu had paid special attention to the encouragement of commerce and the formation of a navy. Troops could no longer be despatched with safety to Italy from the coasts of Spain. In 1638 a French squadron burnt Spanish galleys in the Bay of Biscay.
§ 3. The Spanish fleet in the Downs.
In 1639 a great Spanish fleet on its way to the Netherlands was strong enough to escape the French, who were watching to intercept it. It sailed up the English Channel with the not distant goal of the Flemish ports almost in view. But the huge galleons were ill-manned and ill-found. They were still less able to resist the lighter, well-equipped vessels of the Dutch fleet, which was waiting to intercept them, than the Armada had been able to resist Drake and Raleigh fifty-one years before. The Spanish commander sought refuge in the Downs, under the protection of the neutral flag of England.
§ 4. Destruction of the fleet.
The French ambassador pleaded hard with the king of England to allow the Dutch to follow up their success. The Spanish ambassador pleaded hard with him for protection to those who had taken refuge on his shores. Charles saw in the occurrence an opportunity to make a bargain with one side or the other. He offered to abandon the Spaniards if the French would agree to restore his nephew, Charles Lewis, the son of his sister Elizabeth, to his inheritance in the Palatinate. He offered to protect the Spaniards if Spain would pay him the large sum which he would want for the armaments needed to bid defiance to France. Richelieu had no intention of completing the bargain offered to him. He deluded Charles with negotiations, whilst the Dutch admiral treated the English neutrality with scorn. He dashed amongst the tall Spanish ships as they lay anchored in the Downs: some he sank, some he set on fire. Eleven of the galleons were soon destroyed. The remainder took advantage of a thick fog, slipped across the Straits, and placed themselves in safety under the guns of Dunkirk. Never again did such a fleet as this venture to leave the Spanish coast for the harbours of Flanders. The injury to Spain went far beyond the actual loss. Coming, as the blow did, within a few months after the surrender of Breisach, it all but severed the connexion for military purposes between Brussels and Madrid.
§ 5. France and England.
Charles at first took no umbrage at the insult. He still hoped that Richelieu would forward his nephew's interests, and he even expected that Charles Lewis would be placed by the King of France in command of the army which had been under Bernhard's orders. But Richelieu was in no mood to place a German at the head of these well-trained veterans, and the proposal was definitively rejected. The King of England, dissatisfied at this repulse, inclined once more to the side of Spain. But Richelieu found a way to prevent Spain from securing even what assistance it was in the power of a king so unpopular as Charles to render. It was easy to enter into communication with Charles's domestic enemies. His troubles, indeed, were mostly of his own making, and he would doubtless have lost his throne whether Richelieu had stirred the fire or not. But the French minister contributed all that was in his power to make the confusion greater, and encouraged, as far as possible, the resistance which had already broken out in Scotland, and which was threatening to break out in England.
§ 6. Insurrection in Catalonia.
The failure of 1636 had been fully redeemed. No longer attacking any one of the masses of which the Spanish monarchy was composed, Richelieu placed his hands upon the lines of communication between them. He made his presence felt not at Madrid, at Brussels, at Milan, or at Naples, but in Alsace, in the Mediterranean, in the English Channel. The effect was as complete as is the effect of snapping the wire of a telegraph. At once the Peninsula startled Europe by showing signs of dissolution. In 1639 the Catalonians had manfully defended Roussillon against a French invasion. In 1640 they were prepared to fight with equal vigour. But the Spanish Government, in its desperate straits, was not content to leave them to combat in their own way, after the irregular fashion which befitted mountaineers. Orders were issued commanding all men capable of fighting to arm themselves for the war, all women to bear food and supplies for the army on their backs. A royal edict followed, threatening those who showed themselves remiss with imprisonment and the confiscation of their goods.
§ 7. Break-up of the Spanish monarchy.
The cord which bound the hearts of Spaniards to their king was a strong one; but it snapped at last. It was not by threats that Richelieu had defended France in 1636. The old traditions of provincial independence were strong in Catalonia, and the Catalans were soon in full revolt. Who were they, to be driven to the combat by menaces, as the Persian slaves had been driven on at Thermopylæ by the blows of their masters' officers?
§ 8. Independence of Portugal.
Equally alarming was the news which reached Madrid from the other side of the Peninsula. Ever since the days of Philip II. Portugal had formed an integral part of the Spanish monarchy. In December 1640 Portugal renounced its allegiance, and reappeared amongst European States under a sovereign of the House of Braganza.
§ 9. Failure of Soissons in France.
Everything prospered in Richelieu's hands. In 1641 a fresh attempt was made by the partizans of Spain to raise France against him. The Count of Soissons, a prince of the blood, placed himself at the head of an imperialist army to attack his native country. He succeeded in defeating the French forces sent to oppose him not far from Sedan. But a chance shot passing through the brain of Soissons made the victory a barren one. His troops, without the support of his name, could not hope to rouse the country against Richelieu. They had become mere invaders, and they were far too few to think of conquering France.
§ 10. Richelieu's last days.
Equal success attended the French arms in Germany. In 1641 Guebriant, with his German and Swedish army, defeated the imperialists at Wolfenbüttel, in the north. In 1642 he defeated them again at Kempten, in the south. In the same year Roussillon submitted to France. Nor was Richelieu less fortunate at home. The conspiracy of a young courtier, the last of the efforts of the aristocracy to shake off the heavy rule of the Cardinal, was detected, and expiated on the scaffold. Richelieu did not long survive his latest triumph. He died on December 4, 1642.
Section V. —Aims and Character of Richelieu
§ 1. Richelieu's domestic policy.
Unlike Lewis XIV. and Napoleon, Richelieu counts amongst those few French statesmen whose fortune mounted with their lives. It is not difficult to discover the cause. As in Gustavus, love of action was tempered by extreme prudence and caution. But in Richelieu these ingredients of character were mingled in different proportions. The love of action was far less impetuous. The caution was far stronger. No man had a keener eye to distinguish the conditions of success, or was more ready to throw aside the dearest schemes when he believed them to be accompanied by insuperable difficulties. Braver heart never was. There was the highest courage in the constancy with which he, an invalid tottering for years on the brink of the grave, and supported by a king whose health was as feeble as his own, faced the whole might of the aristocracy of France. If he was harsh and unpitying it was to the enemies of the nation, to the nobles who trod under their feet the peasant and the serf, and who counted the possession of power merely as the high-road to the advancement of their private fortunes. The establishment of a strong monarchical power was, as France was then constituted, the only chance for industry and commerce to lift up their heads, for the peaceable arts of life to develop themselves in security, for the intellect of man to have free course, and for the poor to be protected from oppression.
§ 2. His designs only partially accomplished.
All this was in Richelieu's heart; and some little of this he accomplished. The work of many generations was in this man's brain. Yet he never attempted to do more than the work of his own. As Bacon sketched out the lines within which science was to move in the days of Newton and of Faraday, so Richelieu sketched out the lines within which French statesmanship was to move in the days of Colbert and of Turgot, or in those of the great Revolution itself.
§ 3. The people nothing in France.
"All things for the people, nothing by the people." This maxim attributed to Napoleon embodied as well the policy of Richelieu. In it are embalmed the strength and weakness of French statesmanship. The late growth of the royal power and the long continuance of aristocratic oppression threw the people helpless and speechless into the arms of the monarchy. They were happy if some one should prove strong enough to take up their cause without putting them to the trouble or the risk of thinking and speaking for themselves. It is no blame to Richelieu if, being a Frenchman of the seventeenth century, he worked under the only conditions which Frenchmen of the seventeenth century would admit. We can well fancy that he would think with scorn and contempt of the English Revolution, which was accomplishing itself under his eyes. Yet in the England of the Civil War, men were learning not merely to be governed well, but to know what good government was. It was a greater thing for a nation to learn to choose good and to refuse evil, even if the progress was slow, than to be led blindfold with far more rapid steps.
§ 4. His foreign policy.
Richelieu's foreign policy was guided by the same deep calculation as his home policy. If at home he saw that France was greater than any faction, he had not arrived at the far higher notion that Europe was greater than France, excepting so far as he saw in the system of intolerance supported by Spain an evil to be combated for the sake of others who were not Frenchmen. But there is no sign that he really cared for the prosperity of other nations when it was not coincident with the prosperity of France. As it is for the present generation a matter of complete indifference whether Breisach was to be garrisoned by Frenchmen or imperialists, it would be needless for us, if we regarded Richelieu's motives alone, to trouble ourselves much with the later years of the Thirty Years' War.
§ 5. His support of rising causes.
But it is not always by purity of motive only that the world's progress advances. Richelieu, in order to make France strong, needed help, and he had to look about for help where the greatest amount of strength was to be found. An ordinary man would have looked to the physical strength of armies, as Wallenstein did, or to the ideal strength of established institutions, as Ferdinand did. Richelieu knew better. He saw that for him who knows how to use it there is no lever in the world like that of a rising cause, for a rising cause embodies the growing dissatisfaction of men with a long-established evil, which they have learned to detest, but which they have not yet learned to overthrow.
§ 6. And of those causes which were in themselves good.
In England Richelieu was on the side of Parliamentary opposition to the crown. In Germany he was on the side of the opposition of the princes against the Emperor. In Italy he was on the side of the independence of the states against Spain. In the Peninsula he was on the side of the provinces against the monarchy. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that he cared one atom for any of those causes except so far as they might promote his own ends. Yet in every case he selected those causes by which the real wants of the several countries were best expressed.
§ 7. Contrast between Richelieu and later French politicians.
It is this which distinguishes Richelieu from those who in later times have measured the foreign policy of France by French interests alone. They have taken up any cause which promised to weaken a powerful neighbour, without considering what the cause was worth. They favoured Italian division in 1860, and German division in 1870. Richelieu had a clearer insight into the nature of things than that. There can be no doubt that he would far rather have attacked Spain and Austria through the instrumentality of the League than through the instrumentality of Gustavus and the Protestants; but he saw that the future was with Gustavus and not with the League. He sacrificed his wishes to his policy. He coquetted with the League, but he supported Gustavus.
§ 8. He has no exorbitant aims.
When once Richelieu had gained his point, he was contented with his success. He never aspired to more than he could accomplish: never struck, excepting for a purpose: never domineered through the mere insolence of power. He took good care to get Alsace into his hands, and to make himself master of the passes of the Alps by the possession of Pignerol; but he never dreamed of founding, like Napoleon, a French Confederation of the Rhine, or a French kingdom of Italy. His interference with his neighbours was as little obtrusive as possible.
1643
§ 9. Death of Lewis XIII.
Richelieu was quickly followed to the grave by the sovereign in whose name he had accomplished so much. Lewis XIII. died on the 14th of May, 1643.
