The Winter King

Frederick V of the Palatinate and the Coming of the Thirty Years' War

Brennan C. Pursell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754634010
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351880428
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Elector Palatinate Frederick V - the Winter King - would be an insignificant figure in the history of Europe were it not for the tremendous conflagration that he helped to ignite. Frederick's conflict with Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II over the throne of Bohemia plunged Europe into thirty years of savage violence, fiery devastation, and terrible privation during the first half of the seventeenth century. More than simply a biographical study of Frederick, The Winter King provides a fresh and compelling study into the causes of the Thirty Years' War. Examining the early stages of the war through the locus of Frederick, it reconciles the forces of confession, conscience and constitutionalism that affected Frederick's decision making at critical junctures throughout the crisis. By placing constitutionalism rather than religion at the centre of events, it offers a subtle yet convincing new account of the conflict. Drawing on political and personal correspondence, backed up with a wealth of archival and secondary sources, Dr Pursell presents Frederick's choices and alternatives and interprets his words and responses to them. Considering the war from Frederick's perspective he argues convincingly that the war is best understood not simply as a struggle between Protestant and Catholic powers, but rather as an extended constitutional conflict, entwining religious and political factors, fought within the Holy Roman Empire.

Chapter 1
Signs of Impending Disaster?

Before beginning an analysis of Frederick V and his contribution to the Thirty Years’ War, it is necessary to present the main field of battle: the Holy Roman Empire and its constitution. It will be argued here that the structure of the Empire, despite the diversity of its constituent parts and the tensions between them, was not inviting an inevitable catastrophe to begin in 1618. At that time there were very few who could have predicted the dimensions of the crisis to come. In 1618 the Holy Roman Empire was one of the largest realms in Europe, encompassing all of Germany, the Kingdom of Bohemia and its incorporated lands (Moravia, Silesia, and Lusatia), the Austrian territories, the Netherlands, and parts of northern Italy. The Empire spanned from the North Sea and the Baltic over the Alpine lands to the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. Although the main language of the Imperial government, administration, and justice was High German, the Empire’s populace included speakers of most major European languages: Dutch, French, Italian, German, Polish, and Czech, not to mention the vast array of dialects and regional variations of each.

The Imperial Constitution

This sprawling, diverse polity was at once united in a single constitutional system and yet fissured with myriad rifts.¹ The Empire contained some 2500 separate ‘estates’.² An Imperial estate was ‘either a person or a community that occupied a land or territory, and, because of this, held a seat and vote in a general assembly’.³ There were hundreds of municipalities and secular and ecclesiastical principalities, each with its own local rights and privileges, possessing varying degrees of independence. Individual estates could take many different forms: abbeys, bishoprics, archbishoprics, free cities, villages, castellanies, principalities, counties, manors, duchies, archduchies, landgraviates, margraviates, electorates, and a kingdom. The 2000 odd Imperial knights were ‘estates’ in their own right. A few foreign potentates, such as the Kings of Spain and Denmark, held estates of the Empire by right of inheritance and were therefore considered Imperial princes. By 1618, a couple of regions, namely the Swiss Confederation and the United Provinces of the Netherlands, had developed polities that were wholly separated from the Imperial constitution except in name. The overwhelming majority of other estates, however, showed no inclination toward secession or a general dissolution.

The Imperial constitution is almost impossible to classify. Early modern theorists found little agreement, arguing variously in favor of pure aristocracy, monarchy with indivisible sovereignty, a mixed constitution, and a federal state. Some praised its uniqueness, and others declared it monstrous and degenerate.⁴ At the head of the Imperial constitution was as an elective monarchy that was meant to balance the authority of the emperor with that of seven electors and the other estates. The core of this constitution was the Golden Bull of 1356, which had established the procedure for the election of the emperor and the constitution of the Electoral College.⁵ The emperor-elect had to be an orthodox Christian and supposedly the man best suited for the position. At the time of his election, each emperor-elect had to consent to a set of electoral concessions, or Wahlcapitulation, a kind of contract that guaranteed the electors’ independence from the emperor and their pre-eminence in the Empire. The concessions invariably included promises not to try to change the Empire into a heritable monarchy and to let the right of free election stay with the electors forever, and other articles guaranteed various rights and privileges of other estates of the Empire. Furthermore, the emperor was dependent on the electors’ support for his power, because ‘their consent was necessary to all public acts of consequence’.⁶ He had to consult with the electors and other Imperial estates on questions of war and peace, foreign policy, alliances, domestic peace, and taxation. Without the electors’ consent, the emperor could not call an Imperial diet, make use of an escheated fief, or apply the Imperial ban to an estate of the Empire.⁷

The Imperial ban was the one of the most powerful weapons that the highest jurisdiction of the Empire had at its disposal, and it figures prominently in the story of Frederick V. It was used against those who violated the public peace, committed the crimes of lèse-majesté, organized counterfeit, and so on. Those subjected to the ban lost all protection under the law for their persons and their property. All legal contracts were dissolved, and all fiefs held reverted to the liege lord. All assistance for this person or community was forbidden. Traditionally the right to declare the Imperial ban belonged to the emperor alone, but the electors, using the electoral concessions, limited this power by making it contingent on the consent of a majority of the electoral college.⁸ Despite this restriction, the emperor’s prestige and legal authority were separate and superior.

In the seventeenth century the emperor maintained his medieval prestige as the protector of Christendom – although he lacked the resources to act as such – and as the Reichslehnsherr, or feudal overlord of the Empire. He had the power to bestow the status of Imperial prince, count, knight, and free lord, to give out an array of legal privileges and dispensations, to declare children to be in their legal majority, and to grant legitimacy to bastard offspring. He could also name notaries, judges, and members of the Reichskammergericht, the Imperial Supreme Court. This court was the central legal authority that functioned according to Roman law, based on Justinian’s Corpus Iuris, and bolstered the emperor’s prerogative, effectively elevating him, it has been argued, above the law.⁹In addition the emperor dominated the Reichshofrat, the Aulic Council, which served as a central institution of governmental and judicial authority, and was considered the second highest legal authority in the Empire.¹⁰ With thirty members at most, the Aulic Council was located at the emperor’s court in Vienna and served to defend his interests against those of the estates of the Empire.

The seven electors were members of the Electoral College, the highest order of the Empire under the emperor. The Golden Bull named them – the Archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier, the Count Palatine on the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, the Margrave of Brandenburg, and the King of Bohemia – and elevated them above other princes and estates of the Empire. They were, according to the Golden Bull, the ‘foundations and fixed pillars of the Empire’; their duty was to protect its constitution and insure its peace and stability.¹¹ The Golden Bull stipulated that they should convene periodically to guarantee their rights and regulate their relationship.¹² They exercised full sovereignty over their estates, which were not to be subdivided. They enjoyed regalian rights to tax, mine, and issue coinage in their own lands. Their subjects were wholly under their legal jurisdiction; cases could be tried and appealed only in the elector’s law courts, unless justice had been blatantly denied, in which case, it was possible to appeal to the emperor. The electors’ persons were declared inviolable, and they commanded much of the prestige, popularity, and power that would have belonged to the emperor, had the Empire been more a monarchy and less a federation.¹³

The other estates of the Empire, the princes, prelates, free cities, et al., could participate in the Imperial polity through three representative institutions of the Imperial constitution: the Imperial circles, the Imperial Supreme Court, and the Imperial diet. The Empire was subdivided, more or less according to geographic region, into ten Imperial circles, each with their own officials and representative assembly elected by the estates within them.¹⁴ The purpose of the circles was to help maintain the peace on a local level and provide for a speedy defense of their region of the Empire in case of foreign invasion. The Imperial Supreme Court had been established in 1495 to help enforce the proclamation of a permanent, domestic peace within the Empire as an effort to repress endemic feuding. The Court normally met in Speyer, far from the emperor’s main residences in Vienna and Prague, and the emperors, despite their efforts, exercised less control over it than did the Imperial estates.¹⁵ The estates paid a tax to cover their expenses, and, with the Imperial circles, selected the majority of the court’s membership, a mix of lawyers and nobles of lesser and greater status. The Court made an indispensable contribution to the process of legal standardization in the areas of trial and civil law in the Empire.¹⁶ Unlike the circles and the Court, the Imperial diet was a temporary institution, an assembly that met seldom and, in times of need, somewhat more often.¹⁷ It included the emperor and the three colleges: those of the electors, the princes and prelates, and the Imperial Free Cities.¹⁸ The diet presented an opportunity to make provisions for various issues affecting the Empire as a whole, such as the maintenance of domestic peace, inter-confessional strife, declaration of war, general taxation, and the administration of justice.¹⁹ Although the diet was meant to build consensus between the emperor and the estates, in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century agreement among the emperor, the colleges, and their individual members had been a rare phenomenon. The Diets of 1608 and 1613 had failed to make any resolutions at all because of intensive inter-confessional bickering.

The exercise of religion in the Empire lay under the jurisdiction of Imperial constitutional law, which applied to both church and state. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 had resolved the Schmalkaldic War between Catholics and Protestants by enshrining the principle of cuius regio eius religio in Imperial law. This principle guaranteed that it was the right of the ruler of an Imperial estate to determine which Christian confession, either Roman Catholic or Lutheran, the populace would practice. Official toleration of Lutheranism, therefore, became a part of the Imperial constitution. The Peace, however, also had an ‘ecclesiastical reservation’ that dictated that Catholic prelates who converted to Protestantism had to relinquish control of their lands and titles, a provision meant to limit the spread of the new confession. The Peace was an ad hoc compromise and, unfortunately, rife with inherent contradictions and impracticalities.²⁰ For example, although Calvinism and sectarian confessions were not named in the Peace, the principle of cuius regio, euis religio appeared to allow Calvinist rulers to institute official toleration of Calvinism in their principalities, if they did not expressly reject the tenets of the Augsburg Confession of 1530, which served as a litmus test for legitimate Protestantism in the Peace. There is no reason why Calvinism should have been incorporated in the Peace; in 1555 Calvinism was a regional sect particular to some of the Swiss Cantons. No major princes of the Empire had converted, and Calvin had only just begun his campaign to evangelize in France. But by 1618 Calvinism had become a prominent component of the Empire’s religious diversity. Generally speaking there tended to be a fundamental disagreement on how to interpret and execute the Peace.²¹ Catholics were ready to rely on the judgments of Imperial institutions and on the will of the majority in the electoral and Imperial diets, where the benefit of greater numbers usually guaranteed results favorable to their interests. Protestants, however, preferred an unstructured approach that favored voluntary action, persuasion, and consensus over the will of the majority.²² They wanted representational parity in the organs of the Imperial government, but the Catholic majority consistently confounded their efforts, not least because unity among Protestant confessions was seldom to be had.

These tensions produced no small amount of mutual antagonism, but it did not lead inevitably to the relentless bloodshed f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Frederick V and the Thirty Years’ War
• 1. Signs of Impending Disaster?
• 2. Rebellion in Bohemia: a Local Crisis
• 3. The Elections of 1619: an Imperial Crisis
• 4. The New King, 1619–1620
• 5. The Palatine Crisis, 1620–1621
• 6. Frederick at War, 1622
• 7. Undermining the Anglo-Spanish Peace, 1623
• 8. The Rise and Fall of The Hague Alliance, 1624–1626
• 9. Tragedy and Deliverance, 1627–1632
• 10. Closure
• Bibliography
• Index