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THE GREAT DUEL OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

[Footnote: In this lecture free use has been made of recent writers--
Mitchell, Chapman, Vehse, Freytag and Ranke, as well as of the older
authorities. To Chapman's excellent Life of Gustavus Adolphus we are
under special obligations. In some passages it has been closely
followed. Colonel Mitchell has also supplied some remarks and touches,
such as are to be found only in a military writer.]

AN EPISODE OF THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR.

The Thirty Years' War is an old story, but its interest has been
recently revived. The conflict between Austria and German Independence
commenced in the struggle of the Protestant Princes against Charles V.,
and, continued on those battle-fields, was renewed and decided at
Sadowa. At Sadowa Germany was fighting for unity as well as for
independence. But in the Thirty Years' War it was Austria that with her
Croats, the Jesuits who inspired her councils, and her Spanish allies,
sought to impose a unity of death, against which Protestant Germany
struggled, preserving herself for a unity of life which, opened by the
victories of Frederick the Great, and, more nobly promoted by the great
uprising of the nation against the tyranny of Napoleon, was finally
accomplished at Sadowa, and ratified against French jealousy at Sedan.
Costly has been the achievement; lavish has been the expenditure of
German blood, severe the sufferings of the German people. It is the lot
of all who aspire high--no man or nation ever was dandled into
greatness.

The Thirty Years' War was a real world-contest. Austria and Spain drew
after them all the powers of reaction; all the powers of liberty and
progress were arrayed on the other side. The half-barbarous races that
lay between civilized Europe and Turkey mingled in the conflict: Turkey
herself was drawn diplomatically into the vortex. In the mines of Mexico
and Peru the Indian toiled to furnish both the Austrian and Spanish
hosts. The Treaty of Westphalia, which concluded the struggle, long
remained the Public Law of Europe.

Half religious, half political, in its character, this war stands midway
between the religious wars of the sixteenth century, and the political
wars of the eighteenth. France took the political view; and, while she
crushed her own Huguenots at home, supported the German Protestants
against the House of Austria. Even the Pope, Urban VIII., more
politician than churchman, more careful of Peter's patrimony than of
Peter's creed, went with France to the Protestant side. With the
princes, as usual, political motives were the strongest, with the people
religious motives. The politics were to a sad extent those of
Machiavelli and the Jesuit; but above the meaner characters who crowd
the scene rise at least two grand forms.

In a military point of view, the Thirty Years' War will bear no
comparison with that which has just run its marvellous course. The
armies were small, seldom exceeding thirty thousand. Tilly thought forty
thousand the largest number which a general could handle, while Von
Moltke has handled half a million. There was no regular commissariat,
there were no railroads, there were no good roads, there were no
accurate maps, there was no trained staff. The general had to be
everything and to do everything himself. The financial resources of the
powers were small: their regular revenues soon failed; and they had to
fly for loans to great banking houses, such as that of the Fuggers at
Augsburgh, so that the money power became the arbiter even of Imperial
elections. The country on which the armies lived was soon eaten up by
their rapine. Hence the feebleness of the operations, the absence of
anything which Von Moltke would call strategy: and hence again the cruel
length of the war, a whole generation of German agony.

But if the war was weak, not so were the warriors. On the Imperial side
especially, they were types of a class of men, the most terrible
perhaps, as well as the vilest, who ever plied the soldier's trade: of
those mercenary bands, _soldados_, in the literal and original
sense of the term, free companions, _condottieri_, lansquenets, who
came between the feudal militia and the standing armies of modern times.
In the wars of Italy and the Low Countries, under Alva and Parma and
Freundsberg, these men had opened new abysses of cruelty and lust in
human nature. They were the lineal representatives of the Great
Companies which ravaged France in the time of Edward III. They were near
of kin to the buccaneers, and Scott's Bertram Risingham is the portrait
of a lansquenet as well as of a rover of the Spanish Main. Many of them
were Croats, a race well known through all history in the ranks of
Austrian tyranny, and Walloons, a name synonymous with that of hired
butcher and marauder.

But with Croats and Walloons were mingled Germans, Spaniards, Italians,
Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, outcasts of every land, bearing the
devil's stamp on faces of every complexion, blaspheming in all European
and some non-European tongues. Their only country was the camp; their
cause booty; their king the bandit general who contracted for their
blood. Of attachment to religious principle they had usually just enough
to make them prefer murdering and plundering in the name of the Virgin
to murdering and plundering in the name of the Gospel, but outcasts of
all nominal creeds were found together in their camps. Even the dignity
of hatred was wanting to their conflicts, for they changed sides without
scruple, and the comrade of yesterday was the foeman of to-day, and
again the comrade of the morrow. The only moral salt which kept the
carcass of their villainy from rotting was a military code of honour,
embodying the freemasonry of the soldier's trade and having as one of
its articles the duel with all the forms--an improvement at any rate
upon assassination. A stronger contrast there cannot be than that
between these men and the citizen soldiers whom Germany the other day
sent forth to defend their country and their hearths. The soldier had a
language of his own, polyglot as the elements of the band, and garnished
with unearthly oaths: and the void left by religion in his soul was
filled with wild superstitions, bullet charming and spells against
bullets, the natural reflection in dark hearts of the blind chance which
since the introduction of firearms seemed to decide the soldier's fate.
Having no home but the camp, he carried with him his family, a she wolf
and her cubs, cruel and marauding as himself; and the numbers and
unwieldiness of every army were doubled by a train of waggons full of
women and children sitting on heaps of booty. It was not, we may guess,
as ministering angels that these women went among the wounded after a
battle. The chiefs made vast fortunes. Common soldiers sometimes drew a
great prize; left the standard for a time and lived like princes; but
the fiend's gold soon found its way back to the giver through the Jews
who prowled in the wake of war, or at the gambling table which was the
central object in every camp. When fortune smiled, when pay was good,
when a rich city had been stormed, the soldier's life was in its way a
merry one; his camp was full of roystering revelry; he, his lady and his
charger glittered with not over-tasteful finery, the lady sometimes with
finery stripped from the altars. Then, glass in hand he might joyously
cry, "The sharp sword is my farm and plundering is my plough; earth is
my bed, the sky my covering, this cloak is my house, this wine my
paradise;" or chant the doggerel stave which said that "when a soldier
was born three boors were given him, one to find him food, another to
find him a comely lass, a third to go to perdition in his stead." But
when the country had been eaten up, when the burghers held the city
stoutly, when the money-kings refused to advance the war kings any more
gold, the soldier shared the miseries which he inflicted, and, unless he
was of iron, sank under his hardships, unpitied by his stronger
comrades; for the rule of that world was woe to the weak. Terrible then
were the mutinies. Fearful was the position of the commander. We cannot
altogether resist the romance which attaches to the life of these men,
many a one among whom could have told a tale as wild as that with which
Othello, the hero of their tribe, won his Desdemona, in whose love he
finds the countercharm of his wandering life. But what sort of war such
a soldiery made, may be easily imagined. Its treatment of the people and
the country wherever it marched, as minutely described by trustworthy
witnesses, was literally fiendish. Germany did not recover the effects
for two hundred years.

A century had passed since the first preaching of Luther. Jesuitism,
working from its great seminary at Ingoldstadt, and backed by Austria,
had won back many, especially among the princes and nobility, to the
Church of Rome; but in the main the Germans, like the other Teutons,
were still Protestant even in the hereditary domains of the House of
Austria. The rival religions stood facing each other within the nominal
unity of the Empire, in a state of uneasy truce and compromise,
questions about ecclesiastical domains and religious privileges still
open; formularies styled of concord proving formularies of discord; no
mediating authority being able to make church authority and liberty of
private judgment, Reaction and Progress, the Spirit of the Past and the
Spirit of the Future lie down in real peace together. The Protestants
had formed an Evangelical Union, their opponents a Catholic League, of
which Maximilian, Elector of Bavaria, a pupil of the Jesuits, was chief.
The Protestants were ill prepared for the struggle. There was fatal
division between the Lutherans and the Calvinists, Luther himself having
said in his haste that he hated a Calvinist more than a Papist. The
great Protestant princes were lukewarm and weak-kneed: like the Tudor
nobility of England, they clung much more firmly to the lands which they
had taken from the Catholics than to the faith in the name of which the
lands were taken; and as powers of order, naturally alarmed by the
disorders which attended the great religious revolution, they were
politically inclined to the Imperial side. The lesser nobility and
gentry, staunch Protestants for the most part, had shown no capacity for
vigorous and united action since their premature attempt under Arnold
Von Sickingen. On the peasantry, also staunch Protestants, still weighed
the reaction produced by the Peasants' war and the excesses of the
Anabaptists. In the free cities there was a strong burgher element ready
to fight for Protestantism and liberty; but even in the free cities
wealth was Conservative, and to the Rothschilds of the day the cause
which offered high interest and good security was the cause of Heaven.

The smouldering fire burst into a flame in Bohemia, a kingdom of the
House of Austria, and a member of the Empire, but peopled by hot,
impulsive Sclavs, jealous of their nationality, as well as of their
Protestant faith--Bohemia, whither the spark of Wycliffism had passed
along the electric chain of common universities by which mediaeval
Christendom was bound, and where it had kindled first the martyr fire of
John Huss and Jerome of Prague, then the fiercer conflagration of the
Hussite war. In that romantic city by the Moldau, with its strange, half
Oriental beauty, where Jesuitism now reigns supreme, and St. John
Nepemuch is the popular divinity, Protestantism and Jesuitism then lay
in jealous neighbourhood, Protestantism supported by the native
nobility, from anarchical propensity as well as from religious
conviction; Jesuitism patronized and furtively aided by the intrusive
Austrian power. From the Emperor Rudolph II., the Protestants had
obtained a charter of religious liberties. But Rudolph's successor,
Ferdinand II., was the Philip II. of Germany in bigotry, though not in
cruelty. In his youth, after a pilgrimage to Loretto, he had vowed at
the feet of the Pope to restore Catholicism at the hazard of his life.
He was a pupil of the Jesuits, almost worshipped priests, was
passionately devoted to the ceremonies of his religion, delighting even
in the functions of an acolyte, and, as he said, preferred a desert to
an empire full of heretics. He had, moreover, before his accession to
the throne, come into collision with Protestantism where it was
triumphant, and had found in its violence too good an excuse for his
bigotry. It was inevitable that as King of Bohemia he should attempt to
narrow the Protestant liberties. The hot Czech blood took fire, the
fierceness of political turbulence mingled with that of religious zeal,
and at a council held at Prague, in the old palace of the Bohemian
kings, Martiniz and Slavata, the most hated of Ferdinand's creatures,
were thrown out of a window in what was called good Bohemian fashion,
and only by a marvellous accident escaped with their lives. The first
blow was struck, the signal was given for thirty years of havoc.
Insurrection flamed up in Bohemia. At the head of the insurgents, Count
Thurn rushed on Vienna. The Emperor was saved only by a miracle, as
Jesuitism averred,--as Rationalism says, by the arrival of Dampierre's
Imperial horse. He suffered a fright which must have made him more than
ever prefer a desert to an empire full of heretics. By a vote of the
States of Bohemia the crown was taken from Ferdinand and offered to
Frederic, Elector Palatine. Frederic was married to the bright and
fascinating Princess Elizabeth of England, the darling of Protestant
hearts; other qualifications for that crown of peril he had none. But in
an evil hour he accepted the offer. Soon his unfitness appeared. A
foreigner, he could not rein the restive and hard mouthed Czech
nobility, a Calvinist and a pupil of the Huguenots, he unwisely let
loose Calvinist iconoclasm among a people who clung to their ancient
images though they had renounced their ancient faith. Supinely he
allowed Austria and the Catholic League to raise their Croats and
Walloons with the ready aid, so valuable in that age of unready finance,
of Spanish gold. Supinely he saw the storm gather and roll towards him.
Supinely he lingered in his palace, while on the White Hill, a name
fatal in Protestant annals, his army, filled with his own
discouragement, was broken by the combined forces of the Empire, under
Bucquoi, and of the Catholic League, under Count Tilly. Still there was
hope in resistance, yet Frederic fled. He was in great danger, say his
apologists. It was to face a great danger, and show others how to face
it, that he had come there. Let a man, before he takes the crown of
Bohemia, look well into his own heart. Then followed a scaffold scene
like that of Egmont and Horn, but on a larger scale. Ferdinand, it
seems, hesitated to shed blood, but his confessor quelled his scruples.
Before the City Hall of Prague, and near the Thein Church, bearing the
Hussite emblems of the chalice and sword, amidst stern military pomp,
the Emperor presiding in the person of his High Commissioner, twenty-
four victims of high rank were led forth to death. Just as the
executions commenced a bright rainbow spanned the sky. To the victims it
seemed an assurance of Heaven's mercy. To the more far-reaching eye of
history it may seem to have been an assurance that, dark as the sky then
was, the flood of Reaction should no more cover the earth. But dark the
sky was: the counter-reformation rode on the wings of victory, and with
ruthless cruelty, through Bohemia, through Moravia, through Austria
Proper, which had shown sympathy with the Bohemian revolt. The lands of
the Protestant nobility were confiscated, the nobility itself crushed;
in its place was erected a new nobility of courtiers, foreigners,
military adventurers devoted to the Empire and to Catholicism, the seed
of the Metternichs.

For ten years the tide ran steadily against Protestantism and German
Independence. The Protestants were without cohesion, without powerful
chiefs. Count Mansfeldt was a brilliant soldier, with a strong dash of
the robber. Christian of Brunswick was a brave knight errant, fighting,
as his motto had it, for God and for Elizabeth of Bohemia. But neither
of them had any great or stable force at his back, and if a ray of
victory shone for a moment on their standards, it was soon lost in
gloom. In Frederick, ex-king of Bohemia, was no help; and his charming
queen could only win for him hearts like that of Christian of Brunswick.
The great Protestant Princes of the North, Saxony and Brandenburgh, twin
pillars of the cause that should have been, were not only lukewarm,
timorous, superstitiously afraid of taking part against the Emperor, but
they were sybarites, or rather sots, to whose gross hearts no noble
thought could find its way. Their inaction was almost justified by the
conduct of the Protestant chiefs, whose councils were full of folly and
selfishness, whose policy seemed mere anarchy, and who too often made
war like buccaneers. The Evangelical Union, in which Lutheranism and
political quietism prevailed, refused its aid to the Calvinist and
usurping King of Bohemia. Among foreign powers, England was divided in
will, the nation being enthusiastically for Protestantism and Elizabeth
of Bohemia, while the Court leant to the side of order and hankered
after the Spanish marriage. France was not divided in will: her single
will was that of Richelieu, who, to weaken Austria, fanned the flame of
civil war in Germany, as he did in England, but lent no decisive aid.
Bethlem Gabor, the Evangelical Prince of Transylvania, led semi-
barbarous hosts, useful as auxiliaries, but incapable of bearing the
main brunt of the struggle; and he was trammelled by his allegiance to
his suzerain, the Sultan. The Catholic League was served by a first-rate
general in the person of Tilly; the Empire by a first-rate general and
first-rate statesman in the person of Wallenstein. The Palatinate was
conquered, and the Electorate was transferred by Imperial fiat to
Maximilian of Bavaria, the head of the Catholic League, whereby a
majority was given to the Catholics in the hitherto equally-divided
College of Electors. An Imperial Edict of Restitution went forth,
restoring to Catholicism all that it had lost by conversion within the
last seventy years. Over all Germany, Jesuits and Capuchins swarmed with
the mandates of reaction in their hands. The King of Denmark tardily
took up arms only to be overthrown by Tilly at Lutter, and again at
Wolgast by Wallenstein. The Catholic and Imperial armies were on the
northern seas. Wallenstein, made Admiral of the Empire, was preparing a
basis of maritime operations against the Protestant kingdoms of
Scandinavia, against the last asylum of Protestantism and Liberty in
Holland. Germany, with all its intellect and all its hopes, was on the
point of becoming a second Spain. Teutonism was all but enslaved to the
Croat. The double star of the House of Austria seemed with baleful
aspect to dominate in the sky, and to threaten with extinction European
liberty and progress. One bright spot alone remained amidst the gloom.
By the side of the brave burghers who beat back the Prince of Parma from
the cities of Holland, a place must be made in history for the brave
burghers who beat back Wallenstein from Stralsund, after he had sworn,
in his grand, impious way, that he would take it though it were bound by
a chain to Heaven. The eyes of all Protestants were turned, says
Richelieu, like those of sailors, towards the North. And from the North
a deliverer came. On Midsummer day, 1630, a bright day in the annals of
Protestantism, of Germany, and, as Protestants and Germans must believe,
of human liberty and progress, Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, landed
at Penemunde, on the Pomeranian coast, and knelt down on the shore to
give thanks to God for his safe passage; then showed at once his
knowledge of the art of war and of the soldier's heart, by himself
taking spade in hand, and commencing the entrenchment of his camp.
Gustavus was the grandson of that Gustavus Vasa who had broken at once
the bonds of Denmark and of Rome, and had made Sweden independent and
Lutheran. He was the son of that Charles Vasa who had defeated the
counter-reformation. Devoted from his childhood to the Protestant cause,
hardily trained in a country where even the palace was the abode of
thrift and self-denial, his mind enlarged by a liberal education, in
regard for which, amidst her poverty, as in general character and habits
of her people, his Sweden greatly resembled Scotland; his imagination
stimulated by the wild scenery, the dark forests, the starry nights of
Scandinavia; gifted by nature both in mind and body; the young king had
already shown himself a hero. He had waged grim war with the powers of
the icy north; he bore several scars, proofs of a valour only too great
for the vast interests which depended on his life; he had been a
successful innovator in tactics, or rather a successful restorer of the
military science of the Romans. But the best of his military innovations
were discipline and religion. His discipline redeemed the war from
savagery, and made it again, so far as war, and war in that iron age
could be, a school of humanity and self-control. In religion he was
himself not an ascetic saint, there is one light passage at least in his
early life: and at Augsburg they show a ruff plucked from his neck by a
fair Augsburger at the crisis of a very brisk flirtation. But he was
devout, and he inspired his army with his devotion. The traveller is
still struck with the prayer and hymn which open and close the march of
the soldiers of Gustavus. Schools for the soldiers' children were held
in his camp. It is true that the besetting sin of the Swedes, and of all
dwellers in cold countries, is disclosed by the article in his military
code directed against the drunkenness of army chaplains.

Sir Thomas Roe, the most sagacious of the English diplomatists of that
age, wrote of Gustavus to James I.--"The king hath solemnly protested
that he will not depose arms till he hath spoken one word for your
majesty in Germany (that was his own phrase), and glory will contend
with policy in his resolution; for he hath unlimited thoughts, and is
the likeliest instrument for God to work by in Europe. We have often
observed great alterations to follow great spirits, as if they were
fitted for the times. Certainly, _ambit fortunam Caesaris_: he
thinks the ship cannot sink that carries him, and doth thus oblige
prosperity."

Gustavus justified his landing in Germany by a manifesto setting forth
hostile acts of the Emperor against him in Poland. No doubt there was a
technical _casus belli_. But, morally, the landing of Gustavus was
a glorious breach of the principle of non-intervention. He came to save
the world. He was not the less a fit instrument for God to work by
because it was likely that he would rule the world when he had saved it.

"A snow king!" tittered the courtiers of Vienna, "he will soon melt
away." He soon began to prove to them, both in war and diplomacy, that
his melting would be slow. Richelieu at last ventured on a treaty of
alliance. Charles I., now on the throne of England, and angry at having
been jilted by Spain, also entered into a treaty, and sent British
auxiliaries, who, though soon reduced in numbers by sickness, always
formed a substantial part of the armies of Gustavus, and in battle and
storm earned their full share of the honour of his campaigns. Many
British volunteers had already joined the standard of Mansfeldt and
other Protestant chiefs; and if some of these men were mere soldiers of
the Dugald Dalghetty type, some were the Garibaldians of their day, and
brought back at once enthusiasm and military skill from German
battlefields to Marston and Naseby. Diplomacy, aided by a little gentle
pressure, drew Saxony and Brandenburgh to the better cause, now that the
better cause was so strong. But while they dallied and haggled one more
great disaster was added to the sum of Protestant calamity. Magdeburgh,
the queen of Protestant cities, the citadel of North German liberty,
fell--fell with Gustavus and rescue near--and nameless atrocities were
perpetrated by the ferocious bands of the Empire on innocents of all
ages and both sexes, whose cry goes up against bloodthirsty fanaticism
for ever. A shriek of horror rang through the Protestant world, not
without reproaches against Gustavus, who cleared himself by words, and
was soon to clear himself better by deeds.

Count Tilly was now in sole command on the Catholic and Imperial side.
Wallenstein had been dismissed. A military Richelieu, an absolutist in
politics, an indifferentist in religion, caring at least for the
religious quarrel only as it affected the political question, he aimed
at crushing the independence of all the princes, Catholic as well as
Protestant, and making the Emperor, or rather Wallenstein in the name of
the Imperial devotee, as much master of Germany as the Spanish king was
of Spain. But the disclosure of this policy, and the towering pride of
its author had alarmed the Catholic princes, and produced a reaction
similar to that caused by the absolutist encroachments of Charles V.
Aided by the Jesuits, who marked in Wallenstein a statesman whose policy
was independent of theirs, and who, if not a traitor to the faith, was
at least a bad persecutor, Maximilian and his confederates forced the
Emperor to remove Wallenstein from command. The great man received the
bearers of the mandate with stately courtesy, with princely hospitality,
showed them that he had read in the stars the predominance of Maximilian
over Ferdinand, slightly glanced at the Emperor's weakness, then
withdrew to that palace at Prague, so like its mysterious lord, so regal
and so fantastic in its splendour, yet so gloomy, so jealously guarded,
so full of the spirit of dark ambition, so haunted by the shadow of the
dagger. There he lay, watching the storm that gathered in the North,
scanning the stars and waiting for his hour.

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