THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA: LAST STAGE IN THE DECLINE OF THE EMPIRE.
The Peace of Westphalia is the first, and, with the exception perhaps
of the Treaties of Vienna in 1815, the most important of those
attempts to reconstruct by diplomacy the European states-system which
have played so large a part in modern history. It is important,
however, not as marking the introduction of new principles, but as
winding up the struggle which had convulsed Germany since the revolt
of Luther, sealing its results, and closing definitively the period of
the Reformation. Although the causes of disunion which the religious
movement called into being had now been at work for more than a
hundred years, their effects were not fully seen till it became
necessary to establish a system which should represent the altered
relations of the German states. It may thus be said of this famous
peace, as of the other so-called 'fundamental law of the Empire,' the
Golden Bull, that it did no more than legalize a condition of things
already in existence, but which by being legalized acquired new
importance. To all parties alike the result of the Thirty Years' War
was thoroughly unsatisfactory: to the Protestants, who had lost
Bohemia, and still were obliged to hold an inferior place in the
electoral college and in the Diet: to the Catholics, who were forced
to permit the exercise of heretical worship, and leave the church
lands in the grasp of sacrilegious spoilers: to the princes, who could
not throw off the burden of imperial supremacy: to the Emperor, who
could turn that supremacy to no practical account. No other conclusion
was possible to a contest in which every one had been vanquished and
no one victorious; which had ceased because while the reasons for war
continued the means of war had failed. Nevertheless, the substantial
advantage remained with the German princes, for they gained the formal
recognition of that territorial independence whose origin may be
placed as far back as the days of Frederick the Second, and the
maturity of which had been hastened by the events of the last
preceding century. It was, indeed, not only recognized but justified
as rightful and necessary. For while the political situation, to use a
current phrase, had changed within the last two hundred years, the
eyes with which men regarded it had changed still more. Never by their
fiercest enemies in earlier times, not once by the Popes or Lombard
republicans in the heat of their strife with the Franconian and
Swabian Cæsars, had the Emperors been reproached as mere German kings,
or their claim to be the lawful heirs of Rome denied. The Protestant
jurists of the sixteenth or rather of the seventeenth century were the
first persons who ventured to scoff at the pretended lordship of the
world, and declare their Empire to be nothing more than a German
monarchy, in dealing with which no superstitious reverence need
prevent its subjects from making the best terms they could for
themselves, and controlling a sovereign whose religious predilections
made him the friend of their enemies.
[Sidenote: The treatise of Hippolytus a Lapide.]
[Sidenote: Rights of the Emperor and the Diet, as settled in A.D.
1648.]
It is very instructive to turn suddenly from Dante or Peter de Andlo
to a book published shortly before A.D. 1648, under the name of
Hippolytus a Lapide[376], and notice the matter-of-fact way, the
almost contemptuous spirit in which, disregarding the traditional
glories of the Empire, he comments on its actual condition and
prospects. Hippolytus, the pseudonym which the jurist Chemnitz
assumed, urges with violence almost superfluous, that the Germanic
constitution must be treated entirely as a native growth: that the
'lex regia' (so much discussed and so often misunderstood) and the
whole system of Justinianean absolutism which the Emperor had used so
dexterously, were in their applications to Germany not merely
incongruous but positively absurd. With eminent learning, Chemnitz
examines the early history of the Empire, draws from the unceasing
contests of the monarch with the nobility the unexpected moral that
the power of the former has been always dangerous, and is now more
dangerous than ever, and then launches out into a long invective
against the policy of the Hapsburgs, an invective which the ambition
and harshness of the late Emperor made only too plausible. The one
real remedy for the evils that menace Germany he states
concisely--'domus Austriacæ extirpatio:' but, failing this, he would
have the Emperor's prerogative restricted in every way, and provide
means for resisting or dethroning him. It was by these views, which
seem to have made a profound impression in Germany, that the states,
or rather France and Sweden acting on their behalf, were guided in the
negotiations of Osnabrück and Münster. By extorting a full recognition
of the sovereignty of all the princes, Catholics and Protestants
alike, in their respective territories, they bound the Emperor from
any direct interference with the administration, either in particular
districts or throughout the Empire. All affairs of public importance,
including the rights of making war or peace, of levying contributions,
raising troops, building fortresses, passing or interpreting laws,
were henceforth to be left entirely in the hands of the Diet. The
Aulic Council, which had been sometimes the engine of imperial
oppression, and always of imperial intrigue, was so restricted as to
be harmless for the future. The 'reservata' of the Emperor were
confined to the rights of granting titles and confirming tolls. In
matters of religion, an exact though not perfectly reciprocal equality
was established between the two chief ecclesiastical bodies, and the
right of 'Itio in partes,' that is to say, of deciding questions in
which religion was involved by amicable negotiations between the
Protestant and Catholic states, instead of by a majority of votes in
the Diet, was definitely conceded. Both Lutherans and Calvinists were
declared free from all jurisdiction of the Pope or any Catholic
prelate. Thus the last link which bound Germany to Rome was snapped,
the last of the principles by virtue of which the Empire had existed
was abandoned. For the Empire now contained and recognized as its
members persons who formed a visible body at open war with the Holy
Roman Church; and its constitution admitted schismatics to a full
share in all those civil rights which, according to the doctrines of
the early Middle Age, could be enjoyed by no one who was out of the
communion of the Catholic Church. The Peace of Westphalia was
therefore an abrogation of the sovereignty of Rome, and of the theory
of Church and State with which the name of Rome was associated. And in
this light was it regarded by Pope Innocent the Tenth, who commanded
his legate to protest against it, and subsequently declared it void by
the bull 'Zelo domus Dei[377].'
[Sidenote: Loss of imperial territories.]
The transference of power within the Empire, from its head to its
members, was a small matter compared with the losses which the Empire
suffered as a whole. The real gainers by the treaties of Westphalia
were those who had borne the brunt of the battle against Ferdinand the
Second and his son. To France were ceded Brisac, the Austrian part of
Alsace, and the lands of the three bishoprics in Lorraine--Metz, Toul,
and Verdun, which her armies had seized in A.D. 1552: to Sweden,
northern Pomerania, Bremen, and Verden. There was, however, this
difference between the position of the two, that whereas Sweden became
a member of the German Diet for what she received (as the king of
Holland was, until 1866-7, a member for Dutch Luxemburg, and as the
kings of Denmark, up till the accession of the present sovereign, were
for Holstein), the acquisitions of France were delivered over to her
in full sovereignty, and for ever severed from the Germanic body. And
as it was by their aid that the liberties of the Protestants had been
won, these two states obtained at the same time what was more valuable
than territorial accessions--the right of interfering at imperial
elections, and generally whenever the provisions of the treaties of
Osnabrück and Münster, which they had guaranteed, might be supposed to
be endangered. The bounds of the Empire were further narrowed by the
final separation of two countries, once integral parts of Germany, and
up to this time legally members of her body. Holland and Switzerland
were, in A.D. 1648, declared independent.
[Sidenote: Germany after the Peace.]
[Sidenote: Number of petty independent states: effects of such a
system on Germany.]
The Peace of Westphalia is an era in imperial history not less clearly
marked than the coronation of Otto the Great, or the death of
Frederick the Second. As from the days of Maximilian it had borne a
mixed or transitional character, well expressed by the name
Romano-Germanic, so henceforth it is in everything but title purely
and solely a German Empire. Properly, indeed, it was no longer an
Empire at all, but a Confederation, and that of the loosest sort. For
it had no common treasury, no efficient common tribunals[378], no
means of coercing a refractory member[379]; its states were of
different religions, were governed according to different forms, were
administered judicially and financially without any regard to each
other. The traveller in Central Germany now is amused to find, every
hour or two, by the change in the soldiers' uniforms, and the colour
of the stripes on the railway fences, that he has passed out of one
and into another of its miniature kingdoms. Much more surprised and
embarrassed would he have been a century ago, when, instead of the
present thirty-two there were three hundred petty principalities
between the Alps and the Baltic, each with its own laws, its own
courts (in which the ceremonious pomp of Versailles was faintly
reproduced), its little armies, its separate coinage, its tolls and
custom-houses on the frontier, its crowd of meddlesome and pedantic
officials, presided over by a prime minister who was generally the
unworthy favourite of his prince and the pensioner of some foreign
court. This vicious system, which paralyzed the trade, the literature,
and the political thought of Germany, had been forming itself for some
time, but did not become fully established until the Peace of
Westphalia, by emancipating the princes from imperial control, had
made them despots in their own territories. The impoverishment of the
inferior nobility and the decline of the commercial cities caused by a
war that had lasted a whole generation, removed every counterpoise to
the power of the electors and princes, and made absolutism supreme
just where absolutism wants all its justification, in states too small
to have any public opinion, states in which everything depends on the
monarch, and the monarch depends on his favourites. After A.D. 1648
the provincial estates or parliaments became obsolete in most of these
principalities, and powerless in the rest. Germany was forced to drink
to its very dregs the cup of feudalism, feudalism from which all the
feelings that once ennobled it had departed.
[Sidenote: Feudalism in France, England, Germany.]
It is instructive to compare the results of the system of feudality in
the three chief countries of modern Europe. In France, the feudal head
absorbed all the powers of the state, and left to the aristocracy only
a few privileges, odious indeed, but politically worthless. In
England, the mediæval system expanded into a constitutional monarchy,
where the oligarchy was still strong, but the commons had won the full
recognition of equal civil rights. In Germany, everything was taken
from the sovereign, and nothing given to the people; the
representatives of those who had been fief-holders of the first and
second rank before the Great Interregnum were now independent
potentates; and what had been once a monarchy was now an aristocratic
federation. The Diet, originally an assembly of magnates meeting from
time to time like our early English Parliaments, became in A.D. 1654 a
permanent body, at which the electors, princes, and cities were
represented by their envoys. In other words, it was now not a national
council, but an international congress of diplomatists.
[Sidenote: Causes of the continuance of the Empire.]
Where the sacrifice of imperial, or rather federal, rights to state
rights was so complete, we may wonder that the farce of an Empire
should have been retained at all. A mere German Empire would probably
have perished; but the Teutonic people could not bring itself to
abandon the venerable heritage of Rome. Moreover, the Germans were of
all European peoples the most slow-moving and long-suffering; and as,
if the Empire had fallen, something must have been erected in its
place, they preferred to work on with the clumsy machine so long as it
would work at all. Properly speaking, it has no history after this;
and the history of the particular states of Germany which takes its
place is one of the dreariest chapters in the annals of mankind. It
would be hard to find, from the Peace of Westphalia to the French
Revolution, a single grand character or a single noble enterprise; a
single sacrifice made to great public interests, a single instance in
which the welfare of nations was preferred to the selfish passions of
their princes. The military history of those times will always be read
with interest; but free and progressive countries have a history of
peace not less rich and varied than that of war; and when we ask for
an account of the political life of Germany in the eighteenth century,
we hear nothing but the scandals of buzzing courts, and the wrangling
of diplomatists at never-ending congresses.
[Sidenote: The Empire and the Balance of power.]
Useless and helpless as the Empire had become, it was not without its
importance to the neighbouring countries, with whose fortunes it had
been linked by the Peace of Westphalia. It was the pivot on which the
political system of Europe was to revolve: the scales, so to speak,
which marked the equipoise of power that had become the grand object
of the policy of all states. This modern caricature of the plan by
which the theorists of the fourteenth century had proposed to keep the
world at peace, used means less noble and attained its end no better
than theirs had done. No one will deny that it was and is desirable to
prevent a universal monarchy in Europe. But it may be asked whether a
system can be considered successful which allowed Frederick of Prussia
to seize Silesia, which did not check the aggressions of Russia and
France upon their neighbours, which was for ever bartering and
exchanging lands in every part of Europe without thought of the
inhabitants, which permitted and has never been able to redress that
greatest of public misfortunes, the partitionment of Poland. And if it
be said that bad as things have been under this system, they would
have been worse without it, it is hard to refrain from asking whether
any evils could have been greater than those which the people of
Europe have suffered through constant wars with each other, and
through the withdrawal, even in time of peace, of so large a part of
their population from useful labour to be wasted in maintaining a
standing army.
[Sidenote: Position of the Empire in Europe.]
[Sidenote: Weakness and stagnation of Germany.]
The result of the extended relations in which Germany now found
herself to Europe, with two foreign kings never wanting an occasion,
one of them never the wish, to interfere, was that a spark from her
set the Continent ablaze, while flames kindled elsewhere were sure to
spread hither. Matters grew worse as her princes inherited or created
so many thrones abroad. The Duke of Holstein acquired Denmark, the
Count Palatine Sweden, the Elector of Saxony Poland, the Elector of
Hanover England, the Archduke of Austria Hungary and Bohemia, while
the Elector (originally Margrave) of Brandenburg obtained, on the
strength of non-imperial territories to the north-eastward which had
come into his hands, the style and title of King of Prussia. Thus the
Empire seemed again about to embrace Europe; but in a sense far
different from that which those words would have expressed under
Charles and Otto. Its history for a century and a half is a dismal
list of losses and disgraces. The chief external danger was from
French influence, for a time supreme, always menacing. For though
Lewis the Fourteenth, on whom, in A.D. 1658, half the electoral
college wished to confer the imperial crown, was before the end of his
life an object of intense hatred, officially entitled 'Hereditary
enemy of the Holy Empire[380],' France had nevertheless a strong party
among the princes always at her beck. The Rhenish and Bavarian
electors were her favourite tools. The '_réunions_' begun in A.D.
1680, a pleasant euphemism for robbery in time of peace, added
Strasburg and other places in Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche Comté to
the monarchy of Lewis, and brought him nearer the heart of the Empire;
his ambition and cruelty were witnessed to by repeated wars, and by
the devastation of the Rhine countries; the ultimate though
short-lived triumph of his policy was attained when Marshal Belleisle
dictated the election of Charles VII in A.D. 1742. In the Turkish
wars, when the princes left Vienna to be saved by the Polish Sobieski,
the Empire's weakness appeared in a still more pitiable light. There
was, indeed, a complete loss of hope and interest in the old system.
The princes had been so long accustomed to consider themselves the
natural foes of a central government, that a request made by it was
sure to be disregarded; they aped in their petty courts the pomp and
etiquette of Vienna or Paris, grumbling that they should be required
to garrison the great frontier fortresses which alone protected them
from an encroaching neighbour. The Free Cities had never recovered the
famines and sieges of the Thirty Years' War: Hanseatic greatness had
waned, and the southern towns had sunk into languid oligarchies. All
the vigour of the people in a somewhat stagnant age either found its
sphere in rising states like the Prussia of Frederick the Great, or
turned away from politics altogether into other channels. The Diet had
become contemptible from the slowness with which it moved, and its
tedious squabbles on matters the most frivolous. Many sittings were
consumed in the discussion of a question regarding the time of keeping
Easter, more ridiculous than that which had distracted the Western
churches in the seventh century, the Protestants refusing to reckon by
the reformed calendar because it was the work of a Pope. Collective
action through the old organs was confessed impossible, when the
common object of defence against France was sought by forming a league
under the Emperor's presidency, and when at European congresses the
Empire was not represented at all[381]. No change could come from the
Emperor, whom the capitulation of A.D. 1658 deposed _ipso facto_ if he
violated its provisions. As Dohm[382] said, to keep him from doing
harm, he was kept from doing anything.
[Sidenote: Leopold I, 1658-1705.]
[Sidenote: Joseph I, 1705-1711.]
[Sidenote: Charles VI, 1711-1742.]
[Sidenote: The Hapsburg Emperors and their policy.]
[Sidenote: Causes of the long retention of the throne by Austria.]
[Sidenote: Charles VII, 1742-1745.]
[Sidenote: Francis I, 1745-1765.]
[Sidenote: Seven Years' War.]
[Sidenote: Joseph II, 1765-1790.]
[Sidenote: Leopold II, 1790-1792. Last phase of the Empire.]
[Sidenote: The Diet.]
Yet little was lost by his inactivity, for what could have been hoped
from his action? From the election of Albert the Second, A.D. 1437, to
the death of Charles the Sixth, A.D. 1742, the sceptre had remained in
the hands of one family. So far from being fit subjects for
undistinguishing invective, the Hapsburg Emperors may be contrasted
favourably with the contemporary dynasties of France, Spain, or
England. Their policy, viewed as a whole from the days of Rudolf
downwards, had been neither conspicuously tyrannical, nor faltering,
nor dishonest. But it had been always selfish. Entrusted with an
office which might, if there be any power in those memories of the
past to which the champions of hereditary monarchy so constantly
appeal, have stirred their sluggish souls with some enthusiasm for the
heroes on whose throne they sat, some wish to advance the glory and
the happiness of Germany, they had cared for nothing, sought nothing,
used the Empire as an instrument for nothing but the attainment of
their own personal or dynastic ends. Placed on the eastern verge of
Germany, the Hapsburgs had added to their ancient lands in Austria
proper and Tyrol, non-German territories far more extensive, and had
thus become the chiefs of a separate and independent state. They
endeavoured to reconcile its interests with the interests of the
Empire, so long as it seemed possible to recover part of the old
imperial prerogative. But when such hopes were dashed by the defeats
of the Thirty Years' War, they hesitated no longer between an elective
crown and the rule of their hereditary states, and comported
themselves thenceforth in European politics not as the representatives
of Germany, but as heads of the great Austrian monarchy. There would
have been nothing culpable in this had they not at the same time
continued to entangle Germany in wars with which she had no concern:
to waste her strength in tedious combats with the Turks, or plunge her
into a new struggle with France, not to defend her frontiers or
recover the lands she had lost, but that some scion of the house of
Hapsburg might reign in Spain or Italy. Watching the whole course of
their foreign policy, marking how in A.D. 1736 they had bartered away
Lorraine for Tuscany, a German for a non-German territory, and seeing
how at home they opposed every scheme of reform which could in the
least degree trench upon their own prerogative, how they strove to
obstruct the imperial chamber lest it should interfere with their own
Aulic council, men were driven to separate the body of the Empire from
the imperial office and its possessors[383], and when plans for
reinvigorating the one failed, to leave the others to their fate.
Still the old line clung to the crown with that Hapsburg gripe which
has almost passed into a proverb. Odious as Austria was, no one could
despise her, or fancy it easy to shake her commanding position in
Europe. Her alliances were fortunate: her designs were steadily
pursued: her dismembered territories always returned to her. Though
the throne continued strictly elective, it was impossible not to be
influenced by long prescription. Projects were repeatedly formed to
set the Hapsburgs aside by electing a prince of some other line[384],
or by passing a law that there should never be more than two, or four,
successive Emperors of the same house. France[385] ever and anon
renewed her warnings to the electors, that their freedom was passing
from them, and the sceptre becoming hereditary in one haughty family.
But it was felt that a change would be difficult and disagreeable, and
that the heavy expense and scanty revenues of the Empire required to
be supported by larger patrimonial domains than most German princes
possessed. The heads of states like Prussia and Hanover, states whose
size and wealth would have made them suitable candidates, were
Protestants, and so excluded both by the connexion of the imperial
office with the Church, and by the majority of Roman Catholics in the
electoral college[386], who, however jealous they might be of Austria,
were led both by habit and sympathy to rally round her in moments of
peril. The one occasion on which these considerations were disregarded
shewed their force. On the extinction of the male line of Hapsburg in
the person of Charles the Sixth, the intrigues of the French envoy,
Marshal Belleisle, procured the election of Charles Albert of Bavaria,
who stood first among the Catholic princes. His reign was a succession
of misfortunes and ignominies. Driven from Munich by the Austrians,
the head of the Holy Empire lived in Frankfort on the bounty of
France, cursed by the country on which his ambition had brought the
miseries of a protracted war[387]. The choice in 1745 of Duke Francis
of Lorraine, husband of the archduchess of Austria and queen of
Hungary, Maria Theresa, was meant to restore the crown to the only
power capable of wearing it with dignity: in Joseph the Second, her
son, it again rested on the brow of a Hapsburg[388]. In the war of the
Austrian succession, which followed on the death of Charles the Sixth,
the Empire as a body took no part; in the Seven Years' War its whole
might broke in vain against one resolute member. Under Frederick the
Great Prussia approved herself at least a match for France and Austria
leagued against her, and the semblance of unity which the predominance
of a single power had hitherto given to the Empire was replaced by the
avowed rivalry of two military monarchies. The Emperor Joseph the
Second, a sort of philosopher-king, than whom few have more narrowly
missed greatness, made a desperate effort to set things right,
striving to restore the disordered finances, to purge and vivify the
Imperial Chamber. Nay, he renounced the intolerant policy of his
ancestors, quarrelled with the Pope[389], and presumed to visit Rome,
whose streets heard once more the shout that had been silent for three
centuries, 'Evviva il nostro imperatore! Siete a casa vostra: siete il
padrone[390].' But his indiscreet haste was met by a sullen
resistance, and he died disappointed in plans for which the time was
not yet ripe, leaving no result save the league of princes which
Frederick the Great had formed to oppose his designs on Bavaria. His
successor, Leopold the Second, abandoned the projected reforms, and a
calm, the calm before the hurricane, settled down again upon Germany.
The existence of the Empire was almost forgotten by its subjects:
there was nothing to remind them of it but a feudal investiture now
and then at Vienna (real feudal rights were obsolete[391]); a
concourse of solemn old lawyers at Wetzlar puzzling over interminable
suits[392]; and some thirty diplomatists at Regensburg[393], the
relics of that Imperial Diet where once a hero-king, a Frederick or a
Henry, enthroned amid mitred prelates and steel-clad barons, had
issued laws for every tribe from the Mediterranean to the Baltic[394].
The solemn triflings of this so-called 'Diet of Deputation' have
probably never been equalled elsewhere[395]. Questions of precedence
and title, questions whether the envoys of princes should have chairs
of red cloth like those of the electors, or only of the less
honourable green, whether they should be served on gold or on silver,
how many hawthorn boughs should be hung up before the door of each on
May-day; these, and such as these, it was their chief employment not
to settle but to discuss. The pedantic formalism of old Germany passed
that of Spaniards or Turks; it had now crushed under a mountain of
rubbish whatever meaning or force its old institutions had contained.
It is the penalty of greatness that its form should outlive its
substance: that gilding and trappings should remain when that which
they were meant to deck and clothe has departed. So our sloth or our
timidity, not seeing that whatever is false must be also bad,
maintains in being what once was good long after it has become
helpless and hopeless: so now at the close of the eighteenth century,
strings of sounding titles were all that was left of the Empire which
Charles had founded, and Frederick adorned, and Dante sung.
[Sidenote: Feelings of the German people.]
The German mind, just beginning to put forth the blossoms of its
wondrous literature, turned away in disgust from the spectacle of
ceremonious imbecility more than Byzantine. National feeling seemed
gone from princes and people alike. Lessing, who did more than any one
else to create the German literary spirit, says, 'Of the love of
country I have no conception: it appears to me at best a heroic
weakness which I am right glad to be without[396].' The Emperor Joseph
II writes to his brother of France: 'You must know that the
annihilation of German nationality is a necessary leading principle of
my policy[397].' There were nevertheless persons who saw how fatal
such a system was, lying like a nightmare on the people's soul.
Speaking of the union of princes formed by Frederick of Prussia to
preserve the existing condition of things, Johannes von Müller
writes[398]: 'If the German Union serves for nothing better than to
maintain the _status quo_, it is against the eternal order of God, by
which neither the physical nor the moral world remains for a moment in
the _status quo_, but all is life and motion and progress. To exist
without law or justice, without security from arbitrary imposts,
doubtful whether we can preserve from day to day our honours, our
liberties, our rights, our lives, helpless before superior force,
without a beneficial connexion between our states, without a national
spirit at all, this is the _status quo_ of our nation. And it was this
that the Union was meant to confirm. If it be this and nothing more,
then bethink you how when Israel saw that Rehoboam would not hearken,
the people gave answer to the king and spake, "What portion have we in
David, or what inheritance in the son of Jesse? to your tents, O
Israel: David, see to thine own house." See then to your own houses,
ye princes.'
Nevertheless, though the Empire stood like a corpse brought forth from
some Egyptian sepulchre, ready to crumble at a touch, there seemed no
reason why it should not stand so for centuries more. Fate was kind,
and slew it in the light.
FOOTNOTES:
[376] _De Ratione Status in Imperio nostro Romano-Germanico_.
[377] Even then the Roman pontiffs had lapsed into that scolding,
anile tone (so unlike the fiery brevity of Hildebrand, or the stern
precision of Innocent III) which is now seldom absent from their
public utterances. Pope Innocent the Tenth pronounces the provisions
of the treaty, 'ipso iure nulla, irrita, invalida, iniqua, iniusta,
damnata, reprobata, inania, viribusque et effectu vacua, omnino
fuisse, esse, et perpetuo fore.' In spite of which they were observed.
This bull may be found in vol. xvii. of the _Bullarium_. It bears date
Nov. 20th, A.D. 1648.
[378] The Imperial Chamber (Kammergericht) continued, with frequent
and long interruptions, to sit while the Empire lasted. But its
slowness and formality passed that of any other legal body the world
has yet seen, and it had no power to enforce its sentences. The Aulic
council was little more efficient, and was generally disliked as the
tool of imperial intrigue.
[379] The 'matricula' specifying the quota of each state to the
imperial army could not be any longer employed.
[380] _Erbfeind des heiligen Reichs._
[381] Only the envoys of the several states were present at Utrecht in
1713.
[382] Quoted by Ludwig Haüsser, _Deutsche Geschichte_.
[383] The distinction is well expressed by the German 'Reich' and
'Kaiserthum,' to which we have unfortunately no terms to correspond.
[384] So the Elector of Saxony proposed in 1532 that Albert II,
Frederick III, and Maximilian having been all of one house, Charles
V's successor should be chosen from some other.--Moser, _Römische
Kayser_. See the various attempts of France in Moser. The coronation
engagements (Wahlcapitulation) of every Emperor bound him not to
attempt to make the throne hereditary in his family.
[385] In 1658 France offered to subsidize the Elector of Bavaria if he
would become Emperor.
[386] Whether an Evangelical was eligible for the office of Emperor
was a question often debated, but never actually raised by the
candidature of any but a Roman Catholic prince. The 'exacta æqualitas'
conceded by the Peace of Westphalia might appear to include so
important a privilege. But when we consider that the peculiar relation
in which the Emperor stood to the Holy Roman Church was one which no
heretic could hold, and that the coronation oaths could not have been
taken by, nor the coronation ceremonies (among which was a sort of
ordination) performed upon a Protestant, the conclusion must be
unfavourable to the claims of any but a Catholic.
[387]
'The bold Bavarian, in a luckless hour,
Tries the dread summits of Cæsarian power.
With unexpected legions bursts away,
And sees defenceless realms receive his sway....
The baffled prince in honour's flattering bloom
Of hasty greatness finds the fatal doom;
His foes' derision and his subjects' blame,
And steals to death from anguish and from shame.'
JOHNSON, _Vanity of Human Wishes_.
[388] The following nine reasons for the long continuance of the
Empire in the House of Hapsburg are given by Pfeffinger (_Vitriarius
Illustratus_), writing early in the eighteenth century:--
1. The great power of Austria.
2. Her wealth, now that the Empire was so poor.
3. The majority of Catholics among the electors.
4. Her fortunate matrimonial alliances.
5. Her moderation.
6. The memory of benefits conferred by her.
7. The example of evils that had followed a departure from
the blood of former Cæsars.
8. The fear of the confusion that would ensue if she were
deprived of the crown.
9. Her own eagerness to have it.
[389] The Pope undertook a journey to Vienna to mollify Joseph, and
met with a sufficiently cold reception. When he saw the famous
minister Kaunitz and gave him his hand to kiss, Kaunitz took it and
shook it.
[390] 'You are in your own house: be the master.'
[391] Joseph II was foiled in his attempt to assert them.
[392] Goethe spent some time in studying law at Wetzlar among those
who practised in the Kammergericht.
[393] Cf. Pütter, _Historical Developement of the Political
Constitution of the German Empire_, vol. iii.
[394] Frederick the Great said of the Diet, 'Es ist ein Schattenbild,
eine Versammlung aus Publizisten die mehr mit Formalien als mit Sachen
sich beschäftigen, und, wie Hofhunde, den Mond anbellen.'
[395] Cf. Haüsser, _Deutsche Geschichte_; Introduction.
[396] Quoted by Haüsser.
[397] Rotteck and Welcker, _Staats Lexikon_, s. v. 'Deutsches Reich.'
[398] _Deutschlands Erwartungen vom Fürstenbunde_, quoted in the
_Staats Lexikon_.