House of Austria, and a member of the Empire, but peopled by hot,
impulsive Sclavs, jealous of their nationality, as well as of their
Protestant faith--Bohemia, whither the spark of Wycliffism had passed
along the electric chain of common universities by which mediaeval
Christendom was bound, and where it had kindled first the martyr fire of
John Huss and Jerome of Prague, then the fiercer conflagration of the
Hussite war. In that romantic city by the Moldau, with its strange, half
Oriental beauty, where Jesuitism now reigns supreme, and St. John
Nepemuch is the popular divinity, Protestantism and Jesuitism then lay
in jealous neighbourhood, Protestantism supported by the native
nobility, from anarchical propensity as well as from religious
conviction; Jesuitism patronized and furtively aided by the intrusive
Austrian power. From the Emperor Rudolph II., the Protestants had
obtained a charter of religious liberties. But Rudolph's successor,
Ferdinand II., was the Philip II. of Germany in bigotry, though not in
cruelty. In his youth, after a pilgrimage to Loretto, he had vowed at
the feet of the Pope to restore Catholicism at the hazard of his life.
He was a pupil of the Jesuits, almost worshipped priests, was
passionately devoted to the ceremonies of his religion, delighting even
in the functions of an acolyte, and, as he said, preferred a desert to
an empire full of heretics. He had, moreover, before his accession to
the throne, come into collision with Protestantism where it was
triumphant, and had found in its violence too good an excuse for his
bigotry. It was inevitable that as King of Bohemia he should attempt to
narrow the Protestant liberties. The hot Czech blood took fire, the
fierceness of political turbulence mingled with that of religious zeal,
and at a council held at Prague, in the old palace of the Bohemian
kings, Martiniz and Slavata, the most hated of Ferdinand's creatures,
were thrown out of a window in what was called good Bohemian fashion,
and only by a marvellous accident escaped with their lives. The first
blow was struck, the signal was given for thirty years of havoc.
Insurrection flamed up in Bohemia. At the head of the insurgents, Count
Thurn rushed on Vienna. The Emperor was saved only by a miracle, as
Jesuitism averred,--as Rationalism says, by the arrival of Dampierre's
Imperial horse. He suffered a fright which must have made him more than
ever prefer a desert to an empire full of heretics. By a vote of the
States of Bohemia the crown was taken from Ferdinand and offered to
Frederic, Elector Palatine. Frederic was married to the bright and
fascinating Princess Elizabeth of England, the darling of Protestant
hearts; other qualifications for that crown of peril he had none. But in
an evil hour he accepted the offer. Soon his unfitness appeared. A
foreigner, he could not rein the restive and hard mouthed Czech
nobility, a Calvinist and a pupil of the Huguenots, he unwisely let
loose Calvinist iconoclasm among a people who clung to their ancient
images though they had renounced their ancient faith. Supinely he
allowed Austria and the Catholic League to raise their Croats and
Walloons with the ready aid, so valuable in that age of unready finance,
of Spanish gold. Supinely he saw the storm gather and roll towards him.
Supinely he lingered in his palace, while on the White Hill, a name
fatal in Protestant annals, his army, filled with his own
discouragement, was broken by the combined forces of the Empire, under
Bucquoi, and of the Catholic League, under Count Tilly. Still there was
hope in resistance, yet Frederic fled. He was in great danger, say his
apologists. It was to face a great danger, and show others how to face
it, that he had come there. Let a man, before he takes the crown of
Bohemia, look well into his own heart. Then followed a scaffold scene
like that of Egmont and Horn, but on a larger scale. Ferdinand, it
seems, hesitated to shed blood, but his confessor quelled his scruples.
Before the City Hall of Prague, and near the Thein Church, bearing the
Hussite emblems of the chalice and sword, amidst stern military pomp,
the Emperor presiding in the person of his High Commissioner, twenty-
four victims of high rank were led forth to death. Just as the
executions commenced a bright rainbow spanned the sky. To the victims it
seemed an assurance of Heaven's mercy. To the more far-reaching eye of
history it may seem to have been an assurance that, dark as the sky then
was, the flood of Reaction should no more cover the earth. But dark the
sky was: the counter-reformation rode on the wings of victory, and with
ruthless cruelty, through Bohemia, through Moravia, through Austria
Proper, which had shown sympathy with the Bohemian revolt. The lands of
the Protestant nobility were confiscated, the nobility itself crushed;
in its place was erected a new nobility of courtiers, foreigners,
military adventurers devoted to the Empire and to Catholicism, the seed
of the Metternichs.
For ten years the tide ran steadily against Protestantism and German
Independence. The Protestants were without cohesion, without powerful
chiefs. Count Mansfeldt was a brilliant soldier, with a strong dash of
the robber. Christian of Brunswick was a brave knight errant, fighting,
as his motto had it, for God and for Elizabeth of Bohemia. But neither
of them had any great or stable force at his back, and if a ray of
victory shone for a moment on their standards, it was soon lost in
gloom. In Frederick, ex-king of Bohemia, was no help; and his charming
queen could only win for him hearts like that of Christian of Brunswick.
The great Protestant Princes of the North, Saxony and Brandenburgh, twin
pillars of the cause that should have been, were not only lukewarm,
timorous, superstitiously afraid of taking part against the Emperor, but
they were sybarites, or rather sots, to whose gross hearts no noble
thought could find its way. Their inaction was almost justified by the
conduct of the Protestant chiefs, whose councils were full of folly and
selfishness, whose policy seemed mere anarchy, and who too often made
war like buccaneers. The Evangelical Union, in which Lutheranism and
political quietism prevailed, refused its aid to the Calvinist and
usurping King of Bohemia. Among foreign powers, England was divided in
will, the nation being enthusiastically for Protestantism and Elizabeth
of Bohemia, while the Court leant to the side of order and hankered
after the Spanish marriage. France was not divided in will: her single
will was that of Richelieu, who, to weaken Austria, fanned the flame of
civil war in Germany, as he did in England, but lent no decisive aid.
Bethlem Gabor, the Evangelical Prince of Transylvania, led semi-
barbarous hosts, useful as auxiliaries, but incapable of bearing the
main brunt of the struggle; and he was trammelled by his allegiance to
his suzerain, the Sultan. The Catholic League was served by a first-rate
general in the person of Tilly; the Empire by a first-rate general and
first-rate statesman in the person of Wallenstein. The Palatinate was
conquered, and the Electorate was transferred by Imperial fiat to
Maximilian of Bavaria, the head of the Catholic League, whereby a
majority was given to the Catholics in the hitherto equally-divided
College of Electors. An Imperial Edict of Restitution went forth,
restoring to Catholicism all that it had lost by conversion within the
last seventy years. Over all Germany, Jesuits and Capuchins swarmed with
the mandates of reaction in their hands. The King of Denmark tardily
took up arms only to be overthrown by Tilly at Lutter, and again at
Wolgast by Wallenstein. The Catholic and Imperial armies were on the
northern seas. Wallenstein, made Admiral of the Empire, was preparing a
basis of maritime operations against the Protestant kingdoms of
Scandinavia, against the last asylum of Protestantism and Liberty in
Holland. Germany, with all its intellect and all its hopes, was on the
point of becoming a second Spain. Teutonism was all but enslaved to the
Croat. The double star of the House of Austria seemed with baleful
aspect to dominate in the sky, and to threaten with extinction European
liberty and progress. One bright spot alone remained amidst the gloom.
By the side of the brave burghers who beat back the Prince of Parma from
the cities of Holland, a place must be made in history for the brave
burghers who beat back Wallenstein from Stralsund, after he had sworn,
in his grand, impious way, that he would take it though it were bound by
a chain to Heaven. The eyes of all Protestants were turned, says
Richelieu, like those of sailors, towards the North. And from the North
a deliverer came. On Midsummer day, 1630, a bright day in the annals of
Protestantism, of Germany, and, as Protestants and Germans must believe,
of human liberty and progress, Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, landed
at Penemunde, on the Pomeranian coast, and knelt down on the shore to
give thanks to God for his safe passage; then showed at once his
knowledge of the art of war and of the soldier's heart, by himself
taking spade in hand, and commencing the entrenchment of his camp.
Gustavus was the grandson of that Gustavus Vasa who had broken at once
the bonds of Denmark and of Rome, and had made Sweden independent and
Lutheran. He was the son of that Charles Vasa who had defeated the
counter-reformation. Devoted from his childhood to the Protestant cause,
hardily trained in a country where even the palace was the abode of
thrift and self-denial, his mind enlarged by a liberal education, in
regard for which, amidst her poverty, as in general character and habits
of her people, his Sweden greatly resembled Scotland; his imagination
stimulated by the wild scenery, the dark forests, the starry nights of
Scandinavia; gifted by nature both in mind and body; the young king had
already shown himself a hero. He had waged grim war with the powers of
the icy north; he bore several scars, proofs of a valour only too great
for the vast interests which depended on his life; he had been a
successful innovator in tactics, or rather a successful restorer of the
military science of the Romans. But the best of his military innovations
were discipline and religion. His discipline redeemed the war from
savagery, and made it again, so far as war, and war in that iron age
could be, a school of humanity and self-control. In religion he was
himself not an ascetic saint, there is one light passage at least in his
early life: and at Augsburg they show a ruff plucked from his neck by a
fair Augsburger at the crisis of a very brisk flirtation. But he was
devout, and he inspired his army with his devotion. The traveller is
still struck with the prayer and hymn which open and close the march of
the soldiers of Gustavus. Schools for the soldiers' children were held
in his camp. It is true that the besetting sin of the Swedes, and of all
dwellers in cold countries, is disclosed by the article in his military
code directed against the drunkenness of army chaplains.
Sir Thomas Roe, the most sagacious of the English diplomatists of that
age, wrote of Gustavus to James I.--"The king hath solemnly protested
that he will not depose arms till he hath spoken one word for your
majesty in Germany (that was his own phrase), and glory will contend
with policy in his resolution; for he hath unlimited thoughts, and is
the likeliest instrument for God to work by in Europe. We have often
observed great alterations to follow great spirits, as if they were
fitted for the times. Certainly, _ambit fortunam Caesaris_: he
thinks the ship cannot sink that carries him, and doth thus oblige
prosperity."
Gustavus justified his landing in Germany by a manifesto setting forth
hostile acts of the Emperor against him in Poland. No doubt there was a
technical _casus belli_. But, morally, the landing of Gustavus was
a glorious breach of the principle of non-intervention. He came to save
the world. He was not the less a fit instrument for God to work by
because it was likely that he would rule the world when he had saved it.
"A snow king!" tittered the courtiers of Vienna, "he will soon melt
away." He soon began to prove to them, both in war and diplomacy, that
his melting would be slow. Richelieu at last ventured on a treaty of
alliance. Charles I., now on the throne of England, and angry at having
been jilted by Spain, also entered into a treaty, and sent British
auxiliaries, who, though soon reduced in numbers by sickness, always
formed a substantial part of the armies of Gustavus, and in battle and
storm earned their full share of the honour of his campaigns. Many
British volunteers had already joined the standard of Mansfeldt and
other Protestant chiefs; and if some of these men were mere soldiers of
the Dugald Dalghetty type, some were the Garibaldians of their day, and
brought back at once enthusiasm and military skill from German
battlefields to Marston and Naseby. Diplomacy, aided by a little gentle
pressure, drew Saxony and Brandenburgh to the better cause, now that the
better cause was so strong. But while they dallied and haggled one more
great disaster was added to the sum of Protestant calamity. Magdeburgh,
the queen of Protestant cities, the citadel of North German liberty,
fell--fell with Gustavus and rescue near--and nameless atrocities were
perpetrated by the ferocious bands of the Empire on innocents of all
ages and both sexes, whose cry goes up against bloodthirsty fanaticism
for ever. A shriek of horror rang through the Protestant world, not
without reproaches against Gustavus, who cleared himself by words, and
was soon to clear himself better by deeds.
Count Tilly was now in sole command on the Catholic and Imperial side.
Wallenstein had been dismissed. A military Richelieu, an absolutist in
politics, an indifferentist in religion, caring at least for the
religious quarrel only as it affected the political question, he aimed
at crushing the independence of all the princes, Catholic as well as
Protestant, and making the Emperor, or rather Wallenstein in the name of
the Imperial devotee, as much master of Germany as the Spanish king was
of Spain. But the disclosure of this policy, and the towering pride of
its author had alarmed the Catholic princes, and produced a reaction
similar to that caused by the absolutist encroachments of Charles V.
Aided by the Jesuits, who marked in Wallenstein a statesman whose policy
was independent of theirs, and who, if not a traitor to the faith, was
at least a bad persecutor, Maximilian and his confederates forced the
Emperor to remove Wallenstein from command. The great man received the
bearers of the mandate with stately courtesy, with princely hospitality,
showed them that he had read in the stars the predominance of Maximilian
over Ferdinand, slightly glanced at the Emperor's weakness, then
withdrew to that palace at Prague, so like its mysterious lord, so regal
and so fantastic in its splendour, yet so gloomy, so jealously guarded,
so full of the spirit of dark ambition, so haunted by the shadow of the
dagger. There he lay, watching the storm that gathered in the North,
scanning the stars and waiting for his hour.
When the Swedes and Saxons, under Gustavus and the Elector of Saxony,
drew near to the Imperial army under Tilly, in the neighbourhood of
Leipsic, there was a crisis, a thrill of worldwide expectation, as when
the Armada approached the shores of England; as when the allies met the
forces of Louis XIV. at Blenheim, as when, on those same plains of
Leipsic, the uprisen nations advanced to battle against Napoleon. Count
Tilly's military genius fell short only of the highest. His figure was
one which showed that war had become a science, and that the days of the
Paladins were past. He was a little old man, with a broad wrinkled
forehead, hollow cheeks, a long nose and projecting chin, grotesquely
attired in a slashed doublet of green satin, with a peaked hat and a
long red feather hanging down behind. His charger was a grey pony, his
only weapon a pistol, which it was his delight to say he had never fired
in the thirty pitched fields which he had fought and won. He was a
Walloon by birth, a pupil of the Jesuits, a sincere devotee, and could
boast that he had never yielded to the allurements of wine or women, as
well as that he had never lost a battle. His name was now one of horror,
for he was the captor of Magdeburg, and if he had not commanded the
massacre, or, as it was said, jested at it, he could not be acquitted of
cruel connivance. That it was the death of his honour to survive the
butchery which he ought to have died, if necessary, in resisting sword
in hand, is a soldier's judgment on his case. At his side was
Pappenheim, another pupil of the Jesuits, the Dundee of the thirty
years' war, with all the devotion, all the loyalty, all the ferocity of
the Cavalier, the most fiery and brilliant of cavalry officers, the
leader of the storming column at Magdeburg.
In those armies the heavy cavalry was the principal arm. The musket was
an unwieldy matchlock fired from a rest, and without a bayonet, so that
in the infantry regiments it was necessary to combine pikemen with the
musketeers. Cannon there were of all calibres and with a whole
vocabulary of fantastic names, but none capable of advancing and
manoeuvring with troops in battle. The Imperial troops were formed in
heavy masses. Gustavus, taking his lesson from the Roman legion, had
introduced a more open order--he had lightened the musket, dispensed
with the rest, given the musketeer a cartridge box instead of the
flapping bandoleer. He had trained his cavalry, instead of firing their
carbines and wheeling, to charge home with the sword. He had created a
real field artillery of imperfect structure, but which told on the
Imperial masses.
The harvest had been reaped, and a strong wind blew clouds of dust over
the bare autumn fields, when Count Tilly formed the victorious veterans
of the Empire, in what was called Spanish order--infantry in the centre,
cavalry on the flanks--upon a rising ground overlooking the broad plain
of Breitenfeldt. On him marched the allies in two columns--Gustavus with
the Swedes upon the right, the Elector with his Saxons on the left. As
they passed a brook in front of the Imperial position, Pappenheim dashed
upon them with his cavalry, but was driven back, and the two columns
deployed upon the plain. The night before the battle Gustavus had dreamt
that he was wrestling with Tilly, and that Tilly bit him in the left
arm, but that he overpowered Tilly with his right arm. That dream came
through the Gate of Horn, for the Saxons who formed the left wing were
raw troops, but victory was sure to the Swede. Soldiers of the old
school proudly compare the shock of charging armies at Leipsic with
modern battles, which they call battles of skirmishers with armies in
reserve. However this may be, all that day the plain of Breitenfeldt was
filled with the fierce eddies of a hand-to-hand struggle between mail-
clad masses, their cuirasses and helmets gleaming fitfully amidst the
clouds of smoke and dust, the mortal shock of the charge and the deadly
ring of steel striking the ear with a distinctness impossible in modern
battle. Tilly with his right soon shattered the Saxons, but his centre
and left were shattered by the unconquerable Swede. The day was won by
the genius of the Swedish king, by the steadiness with which his troops
manoeuvred, and the promptness with which they formed a new front when
the defeat of the Saxons exposed their left, by the rapidity of their
fire and by the vigour with which their cavalry charged. The victory was
complete. At sunset four veteran Walloon regiments made a last stand for
the honour of the Empire, and with difficulty bore off their redoubtable
commander from his first lost field. Through all Protestant Europe flew
the tidings of a great deliverance and the name of a great deliverer.
On to Vienna cried hope and daring then. On to Vienna; history still
regretfully repeats the cry. Gustavus judged otherwise--and whatever his
reason was we may be sure it was not weak. Not to the Danube therefore
but to the Main and Rhine the tide of conquest rolled. The Thuringian
forest gleams with fires that guide the night march of the Swede.
Frankfort the city of empire opens her gates to him who will soon come
as the hearts of all men divine not as a conqueror in the iron garb of
war but as the elect of Germany to put on the imperial crown. In the
cellars of the Prince Bishop of Bamberg and Wurtzburg the rich wine is
broached for heretic lips. Protestantism everywhere uplifts its head,
the Archbishop of Mainz, chief of the Catholic persecutors becomes a
fugitive in his turn. Jesuit and Capuchin must cower or fly. All
fortresses are opened by the arms of Gustavus, all hearts are opened by
his gracious manner, his winning words, his sunny smile. To the people
accustomed to a war of massacre and persecution he came as from a better
world a spirit of humanity and toleration. His toleration was politic no
doubt but it was also sincere. So novel was it that a monk finding
himself not butchered or tortured thought the king's faith must be weak
and attempted his conversion. His zeal was repaid with a gracious smile.
Once more on the Lech Tilly crossed the path of the thunderbolt.
Dishonoured at Magdeburg, defeated at Leipsic, the old man seems to have
been weary of life, his leg shattered by a cannon hall he was borne
dying from the field and left the Imperial cause headless as well as
beaten. Gustavus is in Augsburgh, the queen of German commerce, the city
of the Fuggers with their splendid and romantic money kingdom, the city
of the Confession. He is in Munich, the capital of Maximilian and the
Catholic League. His allies the Saxons are in Prague. A few marches more
and he will dictate peace at Vienna with all Germany at his back. A few
marches more the Germans will be a Protestant nation under a Protestant
chief and many a dark page will be torn from the book of fate.
Ferdinand and Maximilian had sought counsel of the dying Tilly. Tilly
had given them counsel bitter but inevitable. Dissembling their hate and
fear they called like trembling necromancers when they invoke the fiend
upon the name of power. The name of Wallenstein gave new life to the
Imperial cause under the very ribs of death. At once he stood between
the Empire and destruction with an army of 50,000 men, conjured, as it
were, out of the earth by the spell of his influence alone. All whose
trade was war came at the call of the grand master of their trade. The
secret of Wallenstein's ambition is buried in his grave, but the man
himself was the prince of adventurers, the ideal chief of mercenary
bands, the arch contractor for the hireling's blood. His character was
formed in a vast political gambling house, a world given up to pillage
and the strong hand, an Eldorado of confiscations. Of the lofty dreamer
portrayed in the noble dramatic poem of Schiller, there is little trace
in the intensely practical character of the man. A scion of a good
Bohemian house, poor himself, but married to a rich wife, whose wealth
was the first step in the ladder of his marvellous fortunes, Wallenstein
had amassed immense domains by the purchase of confiscated estates, a
traffic redeemed from meanness only by the vastness of the scale on
which he practised it, and the loftiness of the aim which he had in
view. Then he took to raising and commanding mercenary troops, improving
on his predecessors in that trade by doubling the size of his army, on
the theory, coolly avowed by him, that a large army would subsist by its
command of the country, where a small army would starve. But all was
subservient to his towering ambition, and to a pride which has been
called theatrical, and which often wore an eccentric garb, but which his
death scene proves to have been the native grand infirmity of the man.
He walked in dark ways and was unscrupulous and ruthless when on the
path of his ambition; but none can doubt the self sustaining force of
his lonely intellect, his power of command, the spell which his
character cast over the fierce and restless spirits of his age. Prince-
Duke of Friedland, Mecklenburgh, and Sagan, Generalissimo of the armies
of the House of Austria,--to this height had the landless and obscure
adventurer risen, in envy's despite, as his motto proudly said, not by
the arts of a courtier or a demagogue, but by strength of brain and
heart, in a contest with rivals whose brains and hearts were strong.
Highest he stood among the uncrowned heads of Europe, and dreaded by the
crowned. We wonder how the boisterous soldiers can have loved a chief
who was so far from being a comrade, a being so disdainful and reserved,
who at the sumptuous table kept by his officers never appeared, never
joined in the revelry, even in the camp lived alone, punished intrusion
on his haughty privacy as a crime. But his name was victory and plunder;
he was lavishly munificent, as one who knew that those who play a deep
game must lay down heavy stakes, his eye was quick to discern, his hand
prompt to reward the merit of the buccaneer; and those who followed his
soaring fortunes knew that they would share them. If he was prompt to
reward, he was also stern in punishment, and a certain arbitrariness
both in reward and punishment made the soldier feel that the commander's
will was law. If Wallenstein was not the boon companion of the
mercenaries, he was their divinity, and he was himself essentially one
of them--even his superstition was theirs, and filled the same void of
faith in his as in their hearts; though, while the common soldier raised
the fiend to charm bullets, or bought spells and amulets of a quack at
Nuremburg or Augsburg, Seni, the first astrologer of the age, explored
the sympathizing stars for the august destiny of the Duke of Friedland.
Like Uriel and Satan in Paradise Lost, Gustavus and Wallenstein stood
opposed to each other. On one side was the enthusiast, on the other the
mighty gamester, playing the great game of his life without emotion, by
intensity of thought alone. On one side was the crusader, on the other
the indifferentist, without faith except in his star. On the one side
was as much good, perhaps, as has ever appeared in the form of a
conqueror, on the other side the majesty of evil. Gustavus was young,
his frame was vigorous and active, though inclined to corpulence, his
complexion fair, his hair golden, his eye blue and merry, his
countenance frank as day, and the image of a heart which had felt the
kindest influences of love and friendship. Wallenstein was past his
prime, his frame was tall, spare, somewhat bowed by pain, his complexion
dark, his eye black and piercing, his look that of a man who trod
slippery paths with deadly rivals at his side, and of whose many letters
not one is to a friend. But, opposites in all else, the two champions
were well matched in power. Perhaps there is hardly such another duel in
history. Such another there would have been if Strafford had lived to
encounter Cromwell.