History of Germany

Ernest Henderson

• Publisher: Endymion Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781531294410
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

GERMANY stands in the centre of Europe, and on her soil all the great international struggles have been fought, the Thirty Years' War, the early campaigns of the Spanish Succession War, the Seven Years' War, the gigantic wars against Napoleon. It is the custom for modern educators to recommend the study of the history of France as a guiding thread through the intricacies of general European history; but is this choice justifiable? The two great, omnipresent factors of the whole mediæval period are the Papacy and the Empire; the Empire was German from the ninth to the nineteenth century, from the days of Charlemagne until the days of Francis II., and the Empire interfered in the affairs of the Papacy and of Italy far more than did France. When we come to the period of the Reformation, surely Luther and his kind were more prominent than the. French reformers, and the Emperor Charles V. had more to do with the affairs of Europe than any of the French kings. In the Thirty Years' War, larger interests were at stake than in the Huguenot struggles, and the German Peace of Westphalia necessitated a recasting of the whole map of Europe. Louis XIV., it is true, gave the tone to the high society of his age, and French was almost universally spoken and written at the German courts; but this influence was neither very deep nor very beneficial. Nor can it be denied that the French Revolution produced great results for Europe. Yet its effects, as far as Germany was concerned, have been overrated; the liberation of the serfs would probably have been accomplished without it, while constitutional government, popular representation, and trial by jury had still to wait for half a century.

THE CAREER OF WALLENSTEIN, THE INTERVENTION OF FOREIGN POWERS, AND THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA

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THAT A WAR WHICH HAD originated in a private quarrel of the Bohemians should soon have spread to all parts of civilized Europe, was owing to two circumstances: first, that the dethroned Winter King so conducted himself as to justify Ferdinand II. in rigorously proceeding against him; second, that the emperor had made a promise to the Bavarian elector, which he could not fulfil without awakening violent opposition.

At a moment when his hold even on his own hereditary lands was growing precarious, Frederick of the Palatinate imagined that he would still be considered a dangerous pretender to the Bohemian throne. He offered to submit, but under what conditions! The Bohemians were to be amnestied, and also to be confirmed in their right of election and in the free exercise of their religion; the emperor was to make good the back pay of the soldiery that had just fought against him, to assume certain debts of Frederick, and to give him in addition a small gratuity or perhaps a yearly pension. The only answer to such representations was the hurling of the greater ban of the empire at this “rebel and traitor.” Spanish troops under Spinola had already quartered themselves in the Palatinate, and had taken several towns; they were now reënforced by a portion of the imperial army under Tilly, the victor of the White Hill. The rest of Ferdinand’s forces were kept busy in Hungary against Bethlen-Gabor. Frederick, indeed, was no longer so helpless as he had been in Bohemia. Mansfeld, who was far from Prague at the time of the great battle, had managed to escape with a considerable part of his troops. He would gladly have taken service with Ferdinand had the latter listened to his demands; but failing this, he devoted himself with real ardor to Frederick’s cause, marching to the Palatinate with some fourteen thousand men. A no less important ally was the cousin of Frederick’s wife, Christian of Brunswick, administrator of the secularized bishopric of Halberstadt. He was moved by a love of war which can only be described as blood- thirsty; by knightly devotion to the ex-queen, whose glove he wore on his helmet, and in whose honor his banner bore the device, “All for God and for her;” and, finally, by a well-grounded fear, that the reactionary policy of the emperor would eventually deprive him of his principality.

In one direction, indeed, from which he had a right to expect the most aid, Frederick was doomed to disappointment. The Protestant union, which had been founded in 1609 in view of just such an emergency as this, proved utterly unreliable and useless. Discord marked its deliberations, terror seized its individual members, and when, in the spring of 1621, an ultimatum was put to it by Spinola, its very existence came to an end. Out of its ruins, however, came succor for its former head, inasmuch as the Margrave of Baden-Durlach, commander of twenty thousand men, disapproving of the action of his colleagues, placed himself unreservedly at Frederick’s disposal. The latter’s forces had now swelled to some fifty thousand; a few victories would have drawn to his banner a number of wavering princes, and a respectable balance might have been maintained even against the combined forces of Austria, Bavaria, and Spain.

But, save the one victory over Tilly at Wiesloch, where the imperial commander lost two thousand men, there came nothing but crushing disasters. The Margrave of Baden had tried to storm Tilly’s camp upon the heights above Wimpfen, and for his own defence had drawn up his wagons after the manner of an old Hussite fortress. A fierce charge of the Spaniards under Cordova, and the accidental explosion of the margrave’s own powder magazines, turned the well-fought day into a signal defeat. A similar fate met Christian of Brunswick at Höchst. This did not yet mean that all was lost, for the armies had retired from both fields in some kind of order; but Frederick now fell a victim to the well-meant interference of King James of England, who had endeavored of his own accord to mediate with the emperor. The emperor’s preliminary demand had been that Frederick should lay down his arms and dismiss both Christian and Mansfeld, and this James now persuaded his son-in-law to do. The generals took service with the Dutch, whose long truce with Spain had run out in this same year, and met Cordova in the indecisive battle of Fleurus. Christian lost his arm, which had to be amputated; but he sent word to the Spanish commander-in- chief, Spinola, to note well that the other was still uninjured; Altera restat was the motto he engraved on one of his coins.

As for Ferdinand, far from concluding peace as James of England had expected, he allowed Tilly to proceed without interruption to the subjugation of the whole Palatinate. Heidelberg was taken and cruelly plundered. Maximilian of Bavaria, as head of the Catholic league, took possession of its magnificent library, and sent it off to Rome to become a part of the Vatican collection. This ambitious prince, who, after years of careful management, had brought order and system into the Bavarian administration, was now casting lusting eyes, not only on the electoral dignity, but also on the newly conquered lands. He had a bill of costs to present to the emperor; it proved so enormous that Ferdinand was under the necessity of either forfeiting the Austrian lands that he had pledged, or of acceding to the new demands. The bestowal of a Protestant electorate on a Catholic prince: that was a feat that had never yet been successfully accomplished! Maximilian, however, insisted on his claims and was ably seconded by Pope Gregory XV., who was full of proud plans for increasing the power of the holy Catholic church. Spain, on the other hand, objected; she knew better than any power in Europe what war meant, she saw that to utterly crush the count palatine meant to prolong the struggle indefinitely, and that the English friendship must be forfeited should Philip IV. help to rob the son-in- law of James I.

Even Ferdinand II. hesitated to settle the matter by simple imperial rescript. From the beginning of the previous century custom had sanctioned the occasional calling together of a supplementary or deputy diet. Such a delegation now met at Ratisbon in December, 1622, to listen to the emperor’s proposals; but the fierce opposition that arose, even on the part of some of the Catholics, caused him seriously to modify his intended measure. He no longer dared now, openly and unconditionally, and for all time, to give the electorate to Maximilian; the Bavarian duke was merely to hold it pending negotiations with Frederick; and he was to resign without a murmur should the former elector “show due humility, ask for pardon, and cease altogether from his machinations.” The matter was to come up again for deliberation at a later date; the emperor, in the meanwhile, was to discuss with the electors the question of the rights of the count palatine’s children. Even the Protestant Landgrave of Hesse was willing to agree to an arrangement like this, and the investiture of Maximilian took place’ with all form and ceremony.

But not in vain had Ferdinand been the pupil of the Jesuits. Though assuming for the benefit of the Protestants a yielding attitude, on the very day after the investiture he bound himself to Maximilian by a written agreement, to the effect that the latter should hold the electoral dignity for life; and that he, the emperor, no matter what the electors might determine concerning Frederick’s children, would not consider himself bound by their decision.

At the first news of the deposition of Frederick, and the sequestration of his lands in favor of so orthodox a prince, all Catholic Europe was jubilant, and the Pope wrote to Ferdinand that the latter had “filled his breast with delight as with a stream of heavenly manna.” But soon to the blindest eye it was evident that a storm was brewing that might shake the power of the Hapsburgs, and thus of the church, to the very foundations. Mansfeld and Christian of Brunswick appeared in North Germany, supplied with gold from England and Holland. The Lower Saxon Circle, one of those organizations for mutual defence of which ten had been formed in 1500, mustered its own army and determined to oppose the emperor, should he interfere with the North German bishoprics. Scattered here and there, their little principalities afforded to the party that held them obvious coigns of vantage.

The court of England by this time had changed its policy and was filled with hatred of Spain. The young Prince of Wales, the future Charles I., had gone to Madrid incognito to look at his intended bride. Her religious intolerance, and the general stiffness and pride of the court, were such that the match came to nothing, and the young suitor returned home with disgust in his heart for the whole connection. The efforts of the English minister, Buckingham, brought about instead a marriage with Henrietta Maria, the sister of Louis XIII. of France. In this latter country Richelieu had just come into power, and he, although persecuting the Huguenots at home, was willing enough to encourage Protestants abroad to fight against the Hapsburgs. The Spaniards, by interfering in a local quarrel, had taken the Swiss Valtelline, as well as the province of Bormio; by which conquests the house of Austria had opened up direct communication between its German and Italian possessions. This Colossus of a house of Hapsburg was overshadowing Europe, and Richelieu, though not yet prepared for open war, was glad to furnish subsidies and diplomatic support to those who were anxious to begin the struggle.

During this the last year of his life, the English king made up in some degree for his former lukewarmness in the cause of continental Protestantism. He bestirred himself right busily to form a coalition, that should wage war for the direct purpose of restoring to the count palatine his hereditary domains. The Dutch were easily won over; they had always sympathized with Frederick, had offered him an asylum, had paid him subsidies, and had only been prevented from doing more by reason of their own isolation.

Two other powers in Europe, Denmark and Sweden, were friendly to the cause, but England was placed in an awkward predicament of having to choose between them. Not only were Christian IV. and Gustavus Adolphus personal rivals, but in this very matter of the continental war the policy of the one differed materially from that of the other. Christian both as Duke of Holstein, and thus member of the Lower Saxon Circle, and as uncle of the palatine electress, had his own interest in the struggle; he was, however, in every way, a pygmy compared to the Swedish king. Gustavus Adolphus, whose splendid talents had carried Sweden through glorious years of war and peace, insisted that should the struggle be begun, it should be with a large army and with ample funds; his demands, both on England and on Protestant Germany, were very high, though not higher than to a far-seeing eye the exigencies of the case demanded. But James I., and, on his death, his young successor, preferred the more modest plan of campaign of the Danish king. With him in December, 1625, Charles I. concluded the treaty of the Hague, and Gustavus Adolphus devoted all his energies to his own Polish war, and refrained from interference in Germany.

In spite of errors of judgment and of sins of omission on the part of his opponents, the emperor Ferdinand was at this moment in an extremely difficult and dangerous position. The sums extorted from the Bohemians had been squandered on churches and on Jesuits; the treasury was empty; to oppose the various forces that were springing up in all directions there was only the army of Tilly. Spain was occupied elsewhere for the moment, while Bethlen Gabor was making ready to help the Protestants.

It was natural that in such an emergency Ferdinand should seek assistance wherever it was most easy to obtain. Then it was that the man came to the fore who was to occupy the thoughts of his fellow-men, and to dominate his age to a rare degree – a mysterious, elusive genius, not thoroughly good but certainly not thoroughly bad. The character of Wallenstein is the more difficult to judge because of his own inveterate caution and reticence; it was his rule never to commit to paper anything that might compromise himself. Everything that we know about his motives is at second-hand, and verdicts vary according to the standpoint.

Born in Bohemia of Protestant parents, and subjected to various religious influences, Wallenstein finally counted himself a Roman Catholic, but was never fanatical or intolerant, unless it served some special turn. Superstitious we may call him, for dreams and portents largely influenced his actions, and the popular study of astrology occupied much of his time. Kepler once took his horoscope and told him that he was destined for great things; no less a person, he declared, than Queen Elizabeth of England had been born under the same constellation. With the stars in their courses in his favor, possessed of an ambition that recoiled before no step toward his own advancement, Wallenstein progressed rapidly in his military and civil career. His first wife, Lucretia Neckish, brought him a considerable fortune; after her death he looked for a connection that would afford him influence and high social position, and found it in the house of Harrach. With a sword that was always at the service of the Hapsburgs, he had risen by the year 1622 to be the highest commanding officer in Bohemia.

At the time of the great sale of lands confiscated from the Protestants, Wallenstein had been far and away the largest purchaser; the domains of the “Prince of Friedland,” as he was now called, covered the whole of north- eastern Bohemia. One can judge of his wealth from the homely fact that in one year alone the beer monopoly within his boundaries brought him a revenue of sixteen thousand guldens. And excellently and economically did. he manage his estates; even when busy with his army in field, he is known to have sent directions about the proper food for swine, calves, and foals, and to have recommended a particular treatment for sick hens. Not altogether unimportant details these, when we remember that, later, his chief occupation was not fighting battles, but providing food and clothing for immense armies, many of his supplies coming from his own lands.

The arrangement was unprecedented, which Ferdinand, in his hour of need, made with Wallenstein. The latter was to raise and equip an army of twenty-one thousand men at his own expense. Once fairly in the field, the emperor was to undertake the pay of the soldiers; but they were largely to subsist by levying contributions on the lands through which they passed. The commander-in-chief, besides his regular yearly compensation, was to have as his perquisite the ransoms of all ordinary prisoners and a share of the booty, and in addition to this, he was endowed with political, almost sovereign, rights. He might make treaties with territorial lords, and even, if need be, grant concessions with regard to their religion.

Ferdinand little knew as yet the man with whom he had to deal, else how could he have ordered him to consult on all important matters with Tilly, the general of the league forces? The two were as opposed to each other as fire and water. Wallenstein, as he soon showed, meant to raise the ordinary prose both of war and politics to a higher plane. Protestants were as welcome in his army as Catholics, Walloons and Croats as Germans, desperadoes as honest men. His original twenty-one thousand men were growing into many times that number, and he quartered them on the lands of friends and foes alike. In Tilly’s head, on the other hand, were no great political plans; he was a brave, plain soldier and a devout Roman Catholic of the intolerant and proselytizing kind. As the faithful henchman of Maximilian of Bavaria, his one object was to fight battles and reduce Protestants to submission. To him fell the good fortune of routing the king of Denmark in the fierce battle of Lutter, whereas Wallenstein could only point to a skirmish with Mansfeld at Dessau on the Elbe, and a long pursuit of the Savoy condottiere into Bohemia, where Mansfeld had hoped to unite his forces with those of Bethlen Gabor.

It was Mansfeld’s last campaign; Bethlen, induced by the laxness of the coalition in sending him promised subsidies, made his own peace with the emperor; Mansfeld withdrew, but fell sick on the way. Whatever his faults, he was accustomed to face his enemies; and now, confronted with death, he armed himself to the teeth, girded his sword at his side, and insisted on being held in a standing position until the breath had left his body. The cause that he had espoused seemed again likely to fail, for England and France had fallen out with each other, and the Danish king, chased to the utmost limits of northwestern Europe, had little hope but in submission, and finally, in 1629, concluded the Peace of Lübeck.

Wallenstein’s whole method of procedure had by this time raised up for him many and violent opponents, chiefly among the members of the Catholic league. What was his purpose in levying this enormous army? What was the need of it now that practically no enemy at all remained in Germany? Ferdinand himself in the days preceding Mansfeld’s death had been puzzled and annoyed at the conduct of his general; he desired more activity and less recruiting, and he sent his chief minister Eggenberg to confer with Wallenstein at Bruck on the Leitha. The revelations made in this interview had fairly taken away the breath of the minister, who returned in haste – as Wallenstein’s warmest adherent – to acquaint his master with the real trend of the new policy.

The imperial authority, it seems, was to be established not only over a few rebellious estates like the former elector of the Palatinate or the city of Magdeburg, which refused to accept a garrison, but over all princes and subjects alike. As Wallenstein later expressed himself, the emperor was no longer to be a mere image, an ornament in the general structure. For this it was necessary that he should have a large and well-trained army, one indeed that should be the terror of all Europe. These forces were not to be wasted in petty undertakings, nor was it wise by employing sectarian measures to make the task more difficult. One reason for employing Protestants in the army and for giving them some of the best offices had been to emphasize the superior and impartial position of the nation’s head.

Ferdinand, for a time at least, was completely won over to these ideas. Even the tolerance towards the Protestants seems to have met with his approval. Never before or since has there been in Germany such a military despotism as was now established. The army reached the enormous total of one hundred and thirty thousand – an incredible number if we consider that each man was more highly paid than are the soldiers of modern times, and that, according to the peculiar custom during these thirty years of war, thousands of women and children were allowed to follow the camps and to add their maintenance to the general expense. The requisitions were burdensome in the extreme; Wallenstein himself, who tried to spare the country as much as possible, and did everything in his power to see that the harvests were properly sown and reaped, wrote to Ferdinand with regard to some of the northern provinces that they were thoroughly ruined, that the inhabitants had taken to eating cats and dogs, and that suicides were frequent.

Yet while the dream lasted Ferdinand could not do enough for his loyal champion and defender. Privileges without end were heaped upon his head. He had formed a plan for winning the Hanseatic towns and gaining for them a monopoly of the trade with Spain. Ferdinand accordingly appointed him “general of the whole imperial armada and of the Baltic and the North Sea.” His principality of Friedland was raised to a dukedom, and permission given him to issue coins bearing his own image. He might appoint not only the lower officers of the army, but the colonels and captains as well. His pay was increased threefold, a measure which was to have retroactive force for the past three years. And all this was nothing to the final concession which even Ferdinand hesitated long before deciding to grant. The emperor by this time was millions in his great subject’s debt. Wallenstein, supported by Ferdinand’s Jesuit councillors, to whom he offered free play in his coveted new domains, proposed the expulsion of the Protestant dukes of Mecklenburg, and the handing over of their lands to himself in lieu of all other claims. It would be a good thing, it was argued, to make a severe example of a few rebellious princes. “I only wish,” wrote Wallenstein to his field marshal Arnim, “that the Duke of Pomerania would also prove disloyal.”

The “Duke of Friedland” was now an independent sovereign in all but name, with lands stretching far along the Baltic coast. The magnificence of his mode of living beggars all description. In his suite were two hundred and twenty-five chamberlains and stewards, pages, lackeys, and Jesuits; one thousand horses were needed for their use. For his further ambitious schemes it was necessary that he should have more towns upon the seacoast, and he summoned the citizens of Stralsund to receive an imperial garrison within their walls. When the inhabitants refused the request, preferring to withstand a siege, he is said to have remarked that he would have the city, even though it were fastened by chains to the vault of heaven. Here finally, however, he met with the first check in his military career, and was obliged to raise the siege on account of the aid which Danish and Swedish ships brought to the garrison.

It may well be imagined that not only the members of the league, but all the electors as well, had now become thoroughly alarmed at Wallenstein’s doings. Already in 1627 a conven...

Table of contents

• THE EARLY GERMANS
• THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CAROLINGIANS
• THE RELATIONS BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE UNDER THE SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMPERORS
• THE POPES AND THE HOHENSTAUFENS
• THE AGE OF CHIVALRY
• THE KINGS FROM DIFFERENT HOUSES
• THE RULERS OF THE HOUSE OF LUXEMBURG
• THE TEUTONIC ORDER AND THE HANSEATIC LEAGUE
• THE ERA OF THE CHURCH COUNCILS
• GERMAN LIFE ON THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION
• MARTIN LUTHER AND THE EMPEROR CHARLES V
• FRIENDS AND ALLIES OF THE REFORMATION
• ANABAPTISM AND CIVIL WAR
• THE EMPERORS WARS AND THE PROTESTANT PARTY IN GERMANY
• CHARLES V AT WAR WITH THE PROTESTANT PRINCES
• THE ROMAN CATHOLIC REACTION
• THE BEGINNING OF THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR
• THE CAREER OF WALLENSTEIN, THE INTERVENTION OF FOREIGN POWERS, AND THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA