at all, it was this. The arguments of the court were undoubtedly strong,
but a skilful lawyer could easily have found technicalities on the other
side, and the real evasion of the Royal Charter might have been urged as
a reason why the court had no right to press technical arguments too
closely. The danger was all the greater, as it was known that by the
renunciation of all intermediate heirs the hereditary right fell upon
Ferdinand of Styria, who had already stamped Protestantism out in his
own dominions. Yet, in spite of this, the Diet did as it was bidden,
and renounced the right of election by acknowledging Ferdinand as their
hereditary king (1617).
The new King was more of a devotee and less of a statesman than
Maximilian of Bavaria, his cousin on his mother's side. But their
judgments of events were formed on the same lines. Neither of them was a
mere ordinary bigot, keeping no faith with heretics. But they were both
likely to be guided in their interpretation of the law by that which
they conceived to be profitable to their church. Ferdinand was
personally brave; but except when his course was very clear before him,
he was apt to let difficulties settle themselves rather than come to a
decision.
He had at once to consider whether he would swear to the Royal Charter.
He consulted the Jesuits, and was told that, though it had been a sin to
grant it, it was no sin to accept it now that it was the law of the
land. As he walked in state to his coronation he turned to a nobleman
who was by his side. "I am glad," he said, "that I have attained the
Bohemian crown without any pangs of conscience." He took the oath
without further difficulty.
The Bohemians were not long in feeling the effects of the change.
Hitherto the hold of the house of Austria upon the country had been
limited to the life of one old man. It had now, by the admission of the
Diet itself, fixed itself forever upon Bohemia. The proceedings against
the Protestants on the royal domains assumed a sharper character. The
Braunau worshippers were rigorously excluded from their church. The
walls of the new church at Klostergrab were actually levelled with the
ground.
The Bohemians had thus to resist in 1618, under every disadvantage, the
attack which they had done nothing to meet in 1617. Certain persons
named "defensors" had, by law, the right of summoning an assembly of
representatives of the Protestant Estates. Such an assembly met on March
5th, and, having prepared a petition to Matthias, who was absent from
the kingdom, adjourned to May 21st.
Long before the time of meeting came, an answer was sent from Matthias
justifying all that had been done, and declaring the assembly illegal.
It was believed at the time, though incorrectly, that the answer was
prepared by Slavata and Martinitz, two members of the regency who had
been notorious for the vigor of their opposition to Protestantism.
In the Protestant assembly there was a knot of men, headed by Count
Henry of Thurn, which was bent on the dethronement of Ferdinand. They
resolved to take advantage of the popular feeling to effect the murder
of the two Regents, and so to place an impassable gulf between the
nation and the King.
Accordingly, on the morning of May 23d, the "beginning and cause," as a
contemporary calls it, "of all the coming evil," the first day, though
men as yet knew it not, of thirty years of war, Thurn sallied forth at
the head of a band of noblemen and their followers, all of them with
arms in their hands. Trooping into the room where the Regents were
seated, they charged the obnoxious two with being the authors of the
King's reply. After a bitter altercation both Martinitz and Slavata were
dragged to a window which overlooked the fosse below from a dizzy height
of some seventy feet. Martinitz, struggling against his enemies, pleaded
hard for a confessor. "Commend thy soul to God," was the stern answer.
"Shall we allow the Jesuit scoundrels to come here?" In an instant he
was hurled out, crying, "Jesus, Mary!" "Let us see," said someone
mockingly, "whether his Mary will help him." A moment later he added,
"By God, his Mary has helped him." Slavata followed, and then the
secretary Fabricius. By a wonderful preservation, in which pious
Catholics discerned the protecting hand of God, all three crawled away
from the spot without serious hurt.
There are moments when the character of a nation or party stands
revealed as by a lightning flash, and this was one of them. It is not in
such a way as this that successful revolutions are begun.
The first steps to constitute a new government were easy. Thirty
directors were appointed, and the Jesuits were expelled from Bohemia.
The Diet met and ordered soldiers to be levied to form an army. But to
support this army money would be needed, and the existing taxes were
insufficient. A loan was accordingly thought of, and the nobles resolved
to request the towns to make up the sum, they themselves contributing
nothing. The project falling dead upon the resistance of the towns, new
taxes were voted, but no steps were taken to collect them, and the army
was left to depend in a great measure upon chance.
Would the princes of Germany come to the help of the directors? John
George of Saxony told them that he deeply sympathized with them, but
that rebellion was a serious matter. To one who asked him what he meant
to do he replied, "Help to put out the fire."
There was more help for them at Heidelberg than at Dresden. Frederick IV
had died in 1610, and his son, the young Frederick V, looked up to
Christian of Anhalt as the first statesman of his age. By his marriage
with Elizabeth, the daughter of James I of England, he had contracted an
alliance which gave him the appearance rather than the reality of
strength. He offered every encouragement to the Bohemians, but for the
time held back from giving them actual assistance.
CHARLES F. HORNE[32]
Ferdinand had crushed Protestantism in every estate he owned. In 1615 he
and Matthias began, or at least permitted, measures for its repression
in Bohemia. There were tumults, uprisings, and on May 23, 1618, a party
of angry citizens of Prague burst into the council hall, seized Slavata
and Martinitz, the two most obnoxious of the Catholic leaders, and
hurled them from the window. It was an ancient form of Bohemian
punishment, which had been used by Ziska and by others. The window this
time was over eighty feet from the ground, yet the fall did not prove
fatal. The men landed on a soft rubbish heap below, and one was unhurt;
the other, though much injured, survived. Their secretary was hurled
after them, and is said to have apologized to his masters, even as he
landed, for his unavoidable discourtesy in alighting upon them.
This semicomic tragedy opened the Thirty Years' War. At first the
struggle was confined to Bohemia and Austria. The other states, secure
in the fact that four-fifths of the populace of the empire was
Protestant, looked on with seeming indifference. The Bohemians drove the
scattered imperial troops from their country.
Meanwhile Matthias died, and Ferdinand was elected to the imperial
throne as Ferdinand II (1619-1637). The Bohemians besieged him in
Vienna. The Protestant Austrian nobles turned against him, and a
deputation forced its way into the presence of the helpless Emperor, and
insisted on his signing for them a grant of political and religious
liberty. Ferdinand resolutely refused; the deputation grew threatening.
One fierce noble seized the Emperor roughly by the coat front, crying,
with an offensive nickname for Ferdinand, "Sign it, Nandel!" A trumpet
from the castle yard interrupted them. It signalled the arrival of a
body of imperial troops, who had slipped through the lines of the
besiegers, and come to the Emperor's rescue.
The Austrian nobles withdrew. Spanish and Cossack troops were called by
Ferdinand into the country to crush all opposition. The Bohemians,
wasted by famine and plague, retreated into their own land, and the war
continued there. The people offered the Bohemian throne to Frederick,
the elector of the Rhenish Palatinate, and a son-in-law of the English
King, James I.
Frederick accepted, went to Bohemia in state, and tried to draw the
other Protestant princes to his help. But he was a Calvinist, so the
Lutherans refused to join him. His new subjects were mainly Lutherans
also, and his impolitic effort to enforce his religious views upon
Prague soon roused the citizens to a state of revolt against him.
The Catholic princes of the empire had long been united in a "League,"
with Bavaria at its head. Bavaria was, next to Austria, the most
powerful state of the empire, and it had become the stronghold of the
Roman faith in Germany. Now, the army of this League, under its chief,
Maximilian of Bavaria, offered its services to the Emperor against the
disunited and wavering Bohemians. A portion of the Bohemian army was
defeated at the battle of White Mountain, just outside of Prague.
Frederick, the newly elected Bohemian King, saw his troops come fleeing
back to the town, and their panic seems to have seized him also.
Abandoning the strong walled city, he swept such of his possessions
together as he could and fled in haste from Bohemia. "The Winter King"
his enemies called him in derision, because his kingship had lasted but
one short winter.
The citizens, disheartened by his flight, terrified by the overwhelming
forces arrayed against them, surrendered to Ferdinand. Executions,
proscriptions, banishments, followed without number. Every person of the
land was compelled to accept Catholicism. Many burned their homes with
their own hands, and fled to other countries. Seldom has liberty been so
utterly trampled under foot; seldom has a land been so completely
subjugated. The Bohemians, who had been one of the most intellectual,
energetic peoples of Europe, here practically disappear from history as
a separate nation.
We turn now to the second period of this deplorable war. Its scene
shifts to the domain of the unhappy Frederick upon the Rhine. He himself
fled to Holland, but his land was considered as forfeited, and was
deliberately desolated by Spanish troops in the service of the Emperor.
The Bohemians had employed a well-known leader of mercenary troops,
Count Mansfeld. When their cause was lost, Mansfeld, with most of his
army, amused the Catholic forces by negotiations, till he saw his
opportunity, when he slipped away from them, and led his army to the
Rhine. There he continued the war in Frederick's name, though really for
his own sake. His troops supported themselves by pillaging the country,
and the wretched inhabitants of Frederick's Palatinate were treated
almost as mercilessly by their pretended friends as by their open foes.
The peasants of Upper Austria also rebelled against Ferdinand's efforts
to force his religion upon them. For a time it seemed they would be as
successful as the Swiss mountaineers had been. Under a peasant named
Fadinger they gained several impressive victories; but he was killed,
and their cause collapsed into ruin. In its last stages their struggle
was taken up by an unknown leader, who was called simply "the Student."
But it was too late. Remarkable and romantic as was the Student's
career, his exploits and victories could not save the cause, and he
perished at the head of his followers.
Meanwhile, the war along the Rhine assumed more and more the savage
character that made it so destructive to the land. Mansfeld, driven from
the Palatinate, supported his ferocious troops almost entirely by
plundering. Tilly, the chief general of the Catholic League, followed
similar tactics, and, wherever they passed, the land lay ruined behind
them. Some of the lesser Protestant princes joined Mansfeld, but Tilly
proved a great military leader, and his opponents were slowly crowded
back into Northern Germany. The Emperor forced his religion upon the
Rhine districts, as he had upon Bohemia and Austria. The Protestant
world at last began to take alarm. Both England and Holland lent
Mansfeld support. The King of Denmark, drawing as many of the Protestant
German princes as possible to his side, joined vigorously in the
contest.
This Danish struggle may be considered the third period of the war. It
lasted from about 1625 to 1629, and introduces one of the two most
remarkable men of the period.
Albert of Waldstein, or Wallenstein, as he is generally called, was a
native of Bohemia, who joined the Catholics, and won military fame and
experience fighting on the imperial side in the Bohemian war. He
acquired vast wealth through marriage and the purchase of the
confiscated Protestant estates. Proving a remarkably capable financial
manager, he was soon the richest subject in the empire, and was created
Duke of Friedland, a district of Bohemia.
All of these successes were to Wallenstein mere preliminary steps to an
even more boundless ambition. He studied the political outlook, and his
keen eye saw the possibility of vastly expanding Mansfeld's barbaric
system of supporting his soldiers by plunder. The Emperor Ferdinand had
but few troops of his own, and they were needed for quelling rebellion
within his personal domains. For carrying on the war along the Rhine, he
was entirely dependent upon the princes of the Catholic League and their
army under Tilly.
Wallenstein now came forward and offered to supply the Emperor with a
powerful imperial army which should not cost him a penny. This offer,
coming from a mere private gentleman, sounded absurd; and for a time
Wallenstein was put aside with contemptuous laughter. At last the
Emperor told him, if he thought he could raise as many as ten thousand
men, to go ahead. "If I have only ten thousand," said Wallenstein, "we
must accept what people choose to give us. If I have thirty thousand, we
can take what we like."
The answer makes plain his whole system. His troops supported and paid
themselves at the expense of the neighborhood where they were quartered.
If it was a district which upheld the Emperor they took "contributions
to the necessity of the empire." If the land opposed him, no polite
words were needed to justify its pillage. Within three months
Wallenstein had nearly fifty thousand men under his standard, drawn to
him by the tempting offers of plunder that his agents held out. If the
war had been terrible before, imagine the awful phase it now assumed,
and the blighting curse that fell upon unhappy Germany!
Modern justice can find little to choose thereafter between the methods
of the opposing armies. We speak, therefore, only of the martial genius
which Wallenstein displayed. He completely outmanoeuvred Mansfeld,
defeated him, and drove him to flight and death. Then Wallenstein and
Tilly proceeded to destroy the high military reputation of the Danish
King. He was overcome in battle after battle, and his land so completely
devastated that he prayed for peace on any terms.
Peace seemed indeed at hand. The remaining Lutheran states of Saxony and
Brandenburg, which had been neutral and were as yet almost unharmed,
dared not interfere. The Emperor Ferdinand might have arranged
everything as he chose had he used his power with moderation. But his
hopes had grown with his fortunes, and he seems to have planned the
establishment of such an absolute power over Germany as had been the aim
of his ancestor, Charles V. Ferdinand passed laws and gave decrees,
without any pretence of calling a council or seeking the approval of the
princes. His general, Wallenstein, was given one of the conquered states
as his dukedom; and Wallenstein declared openly that his master had no
further need of councils; the time had come for Germany to be governed
as were France and Spain.
The Catholic princes, with Maximilian of Bavaria at their head, became
frightened by the giant they themselves had created, and began to take
measures for their own preservation. They demanded that Wallenstein be
removed from his command. The Emperor, perhaps himself afraid of his too
powerful general, finally consented.
There still remained, however, the serious question whether Wallenstein
would accept his dismissal. His huge and ever-growing army was
absolutely under his control. His influence over the troops was
extraordinary. A firm believer in astrology, he asserted that the stars
promised him certain success, and his followers believed him. Tall and
thin, dark and solemn, silent and grim, wearing a scarlet cloak and a
long, blood-red feather in his hat, he was declared by popular
superstition to be in league with the devil, invulnerable and
unconquerable. No evil act of his soldiery did he ever rebuke. Only two
things he demanded of them--absolute obedience and unshaken daring. The
man who flinched or disobeyed was executed on the instant. Otherwise the
marauders might desecrate God's earth with whatsoever hideous crimes
they would. His troops laughed at the idea of being Catholics or
Protestants, Germans or Bohemians; they were "Wallensteiners" and
nothing else.
Even Ferdinand would scarcely have dared oppose his overgrown servant
had not Wallenstein failed in an attempt to capture Stralsund. This
little Baltic seaport held out against the assaults of his entire army.
Wallenstein vowed that he would capture it "though it were fastened by
chains to heaven." But each mad attack of his wild troopers was beaten
back from the walls by the desperate townsfolk; and at last, with twelve
thousand of his men dead, he retreated from before the stubborn port. A
superstitious load was lifted from the minds even of those who pretended
to be his friends. Wallenstein was not unconquerable.
He accepted the Emperor's notice of removal with haughty disdain. He
said he had already seen it in the stars that evil men had sowed
dissension between him and his sovereign, but the end was not yet. He
retired to his vast estates in Bohemia, and lived at Prague with a
magnificence exceeding that of any court in Germany. His table was
always set for a hundred guests. He had sixty pages of the noblest
families to wait on him. For chamberlains and other household officials,
he had men who came from similar places under the Emperor.
Meanwhile a new defender had sprung up for exhausted Protestantism.
Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, invaded Germany in 1630 and called on
the Protestants to help him in the fight to save their faith. All Europe
had grown afraid of the tremendous and increasing power of the Hapsburg
Emperor. Not only was Protestant England in league with the Swedes, but
Catholic France, under its shrewd minister, Richelieu, also upheld them.
Still the burden of actual fighting fell upon Gustavus Adolphus, who
proved himself the greatest military leader of the age, and, in the eyes
of Protestant Europe, the noblest and sublimest man since Luther.
It is not our province to analyze the motives of the Swedish King, the
"Lion of the North," as he is called. How much he was actuated by
ambition, how much by religion, perhaps he himself might have found it
hard to say. His coming marks the turning-point of the contest; his
brilliant achievements constitute the fourth period of the war.
Tilly opposed him with the army of the Catholic League--Tilly, the
victor of thirty desperate battles. The Emperor and his court laughed,
and, thinking of the Bohemian King and the Dane, said: "Another of these
snow kings has come against us. He, too, will melt in our southern sun."
The Protestant princes hesitated, fearing to join Gustavus; he was
hampered on every side. Tilly in his very face stormed the great
Protestant city of Magdeburg, and sacked it with such merciless
brutalities as raised a cry of horrified disgust, even in that age of
atrocities. "Never was such a victory," wrote Tilly to the Emperor,
"since the storming of Troy or of Jerusalem. I am sorry you and the
ladies of the court were not there to enjoy the spectacle." A heap of
blackened ruins, hiding a few hundred famished and broken outcasts, was
all that remained of a splendid and prosperous city of forty thousand
souls.
Tilly's object in this bloody deed seems to have been to terrify the
rest of Protestant Germany into submission. If so, he failed of his
purpose. Gustavus promptly abandoned gentle measures, and by a threat of
force compelled the Saxon elector to join him. He then met Tilly in a
fierce battle near Leipsic and utterly defeated him. Tilly fled, and his
army was almost annihilated, the fugitives who escaped the Swedes
falling victims to the vengeance of the enraged Protestant peasantry.
Few men who had taken part in the sack of Magdeburg lived long to boast
of their achievement.
Gustavus swept victoriously through all the Rhineland. One Catholic
prince or bishop after another was defeated. The advance soon became
little more than a triumphal procession, city after city opening its
gates to welcome him. The Saxon army conquered Bohemia; Gustavus reached
Bavaria.
There on the southern bank of the River Lech the Bavarian army under
Tilly and Prince Maximilian was drawn to oppose the passage of the
Protestant troops. It seemed impossible to cross the broad and deep
stream in the face of such a force and such a general. Gustavus kept up
a tremendous cannonade for three days. He burned great fires along the
shore, that the smoke might conceal his movements. Tilly was struck down
by a cannon-ball, the whole Bavarian army fell into confusion, and the
Swedes rushed across the river almost unopposed. Maximilian fled with
his army; and Bavaria, which as yet had escaped the horrors of the war,
was in its turn plundered by an enemy.
The stars in their courses seemed indeed to fight for Wallenstein. From
the moment that he was deprived of his command, the triumphant cause of
the Emperor had fallen, fallen until now it lay in utter ruin. The
Saxons held Bohemia; all Western Germany was in Gustavus' hands; nothing
interposed between the conquerors and defenceless Austria--nothing but
Wallenstein.
Messenger after messenger sped from the Emperor to his offended general,
entreating him to reaccept his command. Wallenstein dallied, and
postponed his consent, until he had wrung from his despairing sovereign
such terms as never general secured before or since. Practically
Wallenstein became as exalted in authority as the Emperor himself, and
wholly independent of his former master. He was to carry on the war or
to make peace entirely as he saw fit, without interference of any sort.
Certain provinces of Austria were given him to hold as a guarantee of
the Emperor's good faith.
The mere raising of the great general's standard drew around him another
army of "Wallensteiners," with whom he marched against Gustavus. Two of
the ablest military leaders in history were thus pitted against each
other. There were clever marches and countermarches, partial, indecisive
attacks, and at last a great culminating battle at Luetzen, in Saxony,
November 6, 1632.
Gustavus won; but he perished on the field. He was always exposing
himself in battle, and at Luetzen he galloped across in front of his
army from one wing to another. A shot struck him--a traitor shot, say
some, from his own German allies. He fell from his horse, and a band of
the opposing cavalry encircled and slew him, not knowing who he was. His
Swedes, who adored him, pressed furiously forward to save or avenge
their leader. The Wallensteiners, after a desperate struggle, broke and
fled before the resistless attack.
Wallenstein himself, his hat and cloak riddled with bullets, rushed in
vain among his men, taunting them furiously with their cowardice. It was
only the night and the death of Gustavus that prevented the Swedes from
reaping the full fruits of their victory. The imperial troops retreated
unpursued. Wallenstein held a savage court-martial, and executed all of
his men whom he could prove had been among the first in flight.