The History of Protestantism |
Table of Contents
BOOK TWENTY-FIRST
THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR.
| Chapter 1 | . . . | GREAT PERIODS OF THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR. Dying Utterance of Charles IX of Sweden — Rearing of Gustavus Adolphus — Pacification of Augsburg — "Protestant Union" and "Catholic League:" their Objects — Third Phase of Protestantism in Germany — Beginning of the Thirty Years' War — Troubles at Prague — Insurrection — March of the Bohemians to Vienna — Their Retreat — War — Numbers of the Host — The Leaders on Both Sides — Oscillations of Victory — First Period of the War, from 1618 to 1630 — Second Period, from 1630 to 1634 — Third Period, from 1634 to 1648. |
| Chapter 2 | . . . | THE ARMY AND THE CAMP. The Battle-fields of the Seventeenth and of the Nineteenth Centuries – All Nationalities drawn into this War – Motley Host around the Banners of the League – Carnage – The Camping-ground – The General's Tent – Officers' Tents – Soldiers' Huts – Change in Method of Fortifying Camps – Sentinels and Outposts – All Languages heard in the Camp – A Flying Plague – Plundering of the Surrounding Country – Prayers and Divine Service – Gambling – Huts of the Sutlers – Camp Signals – Oscillation between Abundance and Famine – Scenes of Profusion – Picture of Famine in the Camp – Superstitions – Morals – Duels. |
| Chapter 3 | . . . | THE MARCH AND ITS DEVASTATIONS. Germany before the War – Its Husbandry – Its Villages – Its Cities – Dress, &c., of the Citizens – Schools – Its Protestantism – Memories of the Past – Foreign Soldiers Enter Thuringia – Their Oppressions of the Peasants – Exactions – Portents – Demoralization of Society – Villagers Driven into Hiding-places – Cruelties on Protestant Pastors – Michel Ludwig – George Faber – John Otto – Andrew Pochmann – The Pastor of Stelzen. |
| Chapter 4 | . . . | CONQUEST OF NORTH GERMANY BY FERDINAND II AND THE
"CATHOLIC LEAGUE." Ferdinand II's Aims – Extinction of Protestantism and the German Liberties – Ban of the Empire pronounced on Frederick V – Apathy of the Protestant Princes – They Withdraw from the Protestant Union – Count Mansfeld – Duke of Brunswick – The Number and Devastation of their Armies – Heidelberg Taken – The Palatinate Occupied – James I of England – Outwitted by Ferdinand and Philip II – Electorate of the Rhine Given to the Duke of Bavaria – Treaty between England, Holland, and Denmark – Christian IV of Denmark – Leads the Protestant Host – Ferdinand II Raises an Army – Wallenstein – His Character – Grandeur – Personal Appearance -His Method of Maintaining an Army – Movements of the Campaign of 1626 – Battle of Lutter – Victory of Tilly – Campaign of 1627 – North Germany Occupied by the League – Further Projects of Ferdinand |
| Chapter 5 | . . . | EDICT OF RESTITUTION. Edict of Restitution – Its Injustice – Amount of Property to be Restored – Imperial Commissaries – Commencement at Augsburg – Bulk of Property Seized by Ferdinand and the Jesuits – Greater Projects meditated – Denmark and Sweden marked for Conquest – Retribution – Ferdinand asked to Disarm – Combination against Ferdinand – Father Joseph – Outwits the Emperor – Ferdinand and the Jesuits Plot their own Undoing. |
| Chapter 6 | . . . | ARRIVAL OF GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS IN GERMANY. The Reaction – Its Limits – Preparatory Campaigns of Gustavus – All Ready – No Alternative left to Gustavus – His Motives – His Character – His Farewell to the Diet – His Parting Address – Embarkation – Lands in Germany – Contempt of Gustavus by the Court of Vienna – Marches on Stettin – Is Admitted into it – Takes Possession of Pomerania – Imperialists Driven out of Mecklenburg – Alliance with France – Edict of Restitution – John George, Elector of Saxony – His Project – The Convention at Leipsic – Its Failure. |
| Chapter 7 | . . . | FALL OF MAGDEBURG AND VICTORY OF LEIPSIC. Magdeburg – Its Wealth and Importance – Coveted by both Parties – It declares against the Imperialists – Its Administrator – Count von Tilly – His Career – Personal Appearance – Magdeburg Invested – Refuse a Swedish Garrison – Suburbs Burned – The Assault – The Defense – Council of War – The Cannonading Ceases – False Hopes – The City Stormed and Taken – Entry of Tilly – Horrors of the Sack – Total Destruction of the City – Gustavus Blamed for not Raising the Siege – His Defense – The Electors of Brandenburg and Saxony now Join him – Battle of Leipsic – Plan of Battle – Total Rout of the Imperialists – All is Changed. |
| Chapter 8 | . . . | CONQUEST OF THE RHINE AND BAVARIA — BATTLE OF
LUTZEN. Thanksgiving — Two Roads — Gustavus Marches to the Rhine — Submission of Erfurt, Wurzburg, Frankfort — Capture of Mainz — Gustavus' Court -Future Arrangements for Germany — The King's Plans — Stipulations for Peace — Terms Rejected — Gustavus Enters Bavaria — Defeat and Death of Tilly — Wallenstein Recalled — His Terms — The Saxons in Bohemia -Gustavus at Augsburg — At Ingolstadt — His Encampment at Nuremberg — Camp of Wallenstein — Famine and Death — Wallenstein Invades Saxony — Gustavus Follows him — The Two Armies Meet at Lutzen — Morning of the Battle — The King's Address to his Troops — The Battle — Capture and Recapture of Trenches and Cannon — Murderous Conflicts — The King Wounded — He Falls. |
| Chapter 9 | . . . | DEATH OF GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS. Battle Renewed — The Cry, "The King is Dead!" — The Duke of Saxe-Weimar takes the Command — Fury of the Swedes — Rout of the Imperialists — Arrival of Pappenheim on the Field — Renewal of Battle a Third Time — Death of Pappenheim — Final Rout of Wallenstein — Wallenstein on the Field of Battle — Retires to Leipsic — Escapes from Germany — Swedes remain Masters of the Field — Cost of the Victory — The King's Body Discovered — Embalmed and Conveyed to Sweden — Grief of the Swedes — Sorrow of Christendom — Character of Gustavus Adolphus — Accomplishes his Mission — Germany not Able to Receive the Emancipation he Achieved for her. |
| Chapter 10 | . . . | THE PACIFICATION OF WESTPHALIA. Gustavus' Mission no Failure — Oxenstierna comes to the Helm — Diet of Heilbronn — Wallenstein's Advice to Ferdinand — Success of the Swedes — Inactivity of Wallenstein — His Offer to Join the Swedes — His Supposed Conspiracy against Ferdinand — He is Assassinated — Defeat of the Swedes — Battle of Nordlingen — Defection of the Elector of Saxony — Peace of Prague — Rejected by the Swedes — Treaty with France — Great Victory of the Swedes — Progress of the War — Isolation of Ferdinand — Cry for Peace — Negotiations at Munster — The Peace of Westphalia. |
| Chapter 11 | . . . | THE FATHERLAND AFTER THE WAR. Peace Proclaimed — Banquet at Nuremberg — Varied Feelings awakened by the Peace — Celebration of the Peace in Dolstadt — Symbolical Figures and Procession — The Fatherland after the War — Its Recovery Slow — Invaded by Wandering and Lawless Troops — Poverty of the Inhabitants — Instances of Desolation of the Land — Unexampled Extent of the Calamity — Luther's Warnings Verified. |
BOOK TWENTY-FIRST
THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR.
CHAPTER 1 Back to Top
GREAT PERIODS OF THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR.
Dying Utterance of Charles IX of Sweden — Rearing of Gustavus Adolphus —
Pacification of Augsburg — "Protestant Union" and "Catholic
League:" their Objects — Third Phase of Protestantism in Germany —
Beginning of the Thirty Years' War — Troubles at Prague — Insurrection —
March of the Bohemians to Vienna — Their Retreat — War — Numbers of the
Host — The Leaders on Both Sides — Oscillations of Victory — First Period
of the War, from 1618 to 1630 — Second Period, from 1630 to 1634 — Third Period,
from 1634 to 1648.
STANDING by the death-bed of Charles IX of Sweden (161l), we
saw the monarch, as he ruminated on the conflicts which he but too truly divined the
future would bring with it to Protestantism, stretch out his hand, and laying it on the
golden locks of his boy, who was watching his father's last moments, utter the prophetic
words, "He will do it."[1] It
was the grandson of the famous Gustavus Vasa, the yet more renowned Gustavus Adolphus, of
whom these words were spoken. They fitly foreshadowed, in their incisive terseness, and
vague sublimity, the career of the future hero. We are arrived at one of the most terrible
struggles that ever desolated the world — the Thirty Years' War.
In the education of the young Gustavus, who, as a man, was to play so conspicuous a part
in the drama about to open, there was nothing lacking which could give him hardiness of
body, bravery of spirit, vigor of intellect, and largeness of soul. Though his cradle was
placed in a palace, it was surrounded with little of the splendor and nothing of the
effeminacy which commonly attend the early lot of those who are royally born. The father
was struggling for his crown when the son first saw the light.
Around him, from the first, were commotions and storms. These could admit of no life but a
plain and frugal one, verging it may be on roughness, but which brought with it an ample
recompense for the inconveniences it imposed, in the health, the buoyancy, and the
cheerfulness which it engendered. He grew hale and strong in the pure cold air to which he
was continually exposed. "Amid the starry nights and dark forests of his fatherland,
he nursed the seriousness which was a part of his nature."[2]
Meanwhile the mind of the future monarch was developing under influences as healthy
and stirring as those by which his body was being braced. His father took him with him
both to the senate and the camp. In the one he learned to think as the statesman, in the
other he imbibed the spirit of the soldier. Yet greater care was taken to develop and
strengthen his higher powers. Masters were appointed him in the various languages, ancient
and modern; and at the age of twelve he could speak Latin, French, German, and Italian
with fluency, and understood Spanish and English tolerably.[3] We hear of his reading Greek with ease, but this is more doubtful.
He had studied Grotius. This was a range of accomplishment which no monarch in Northern
Europe of his time could boast. Of the prudence and success with which, when he ascended
the throne, he set about correcting the abuses and confusions of half a century in his
hereditary dominions, and the rigor with which he prosecuted his first wars, we are not
here called to speak. The career of Gustavus Adolphus comes into our view at the point
where it first specially touches Protestantism. The Thirty Years' War had been going on
some years before he appeared on that bloody stage, and mingled in its awful strife.
The first grand settlement between the Romanists and the Protestants was the Pacification
of Augsburg, in 1555. This Pacification gathered up in one great edict all the advantages
which Protestantism had acquired during its previous existence of nearly forty years, and
it expressed them all in one single word — Toleration. The same word which summed up
the gains of Protestantism also summed up the losses of the empire; for the empire had
beam by pronouncing its ban upon Luther and his followers, and now at the end of forty
years, and after all the great wars of Charles V undertaken against the Protestants, the
empire was compelled to say, "I tolerate you."
So far had Protestantism molded the law of Christendom, reared a barrier around itself,
and set limits to the intolerant and despotic forces that assailed it from without. But
this Toleration was neither Perfect in itself, nor was it faithfully observed. It was
limited to Protestantism in its Lutheran form, for Calvinists were excluded from it, and,
not to speak of the many points which it left open to opposite interpretations, and which
were continually giving rise to quarrels, perpetual infringements were taking place on the
rights guaranteed under it. The Protestants had long complained of these breaches of the
Pacification, but could obtain no redress; and in the view of the general policy of the
Popish Powers, which was to sweep away the Pacification of Augsburg altogether as soon as
they were strong enough, a number of Protestant princes joined together for mutual
defense. On the 4th of May, 1608, was formed the "Protestant Union." At the head
of this Union was Frederick IV, the Elector of the Palatinate.
The answer to this was the counter-institution, in the following year, of the
"Catholic League." It was formed on July 10th , 1609,
and its chief was Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria. Maximilian was a fanatical disciple of the
Jesuits, and in the League now formed, and the terrible war to which it led, we see the
work of the Society of Jesus. The Duke of Bavaria was joined by Duke Leopold of Austria,
and the Prince-bishops of Wurzburg, Ratisbon, Augsburg, Constance, Strasburg, Passau, and
by several abbots.
The leading object of the League was the restoration of the Popish faith over Germany, and
the extirpation of Protestantism. This was to be accomplished by force of arms. Any moment
might bring the outbreak; and Maximilian had all army of Bavarians, zealots like himself,
waiting the summons, which, as matters then stood, could not be long deferred. We behold
Protestantism entering on its third grand phase in Germany.
The first was the Illumination. From the open Bible, unlocked by the recovered Hebrew and
Greek tongues, and from the closets and pulpits of great theologians and scholars, came
forth the light, and the darkness which had shrouded the world for a thousand years began
to be dispersed. This was the beginning of that world-overturning yet world-restoring
movement. The second phase was that of Confession and Martyrdom. During that period
societies and States were founding themselves upon the fundamental principle of
Protestantism — namely, submission to the Word of God — and were covering
Christendom with a new and higher life, individual and national. Protestantism opens its
second century with its third grand phase, which is War. The Old now begins clearly to
perceive that the New can establish itself only upon its ruins, and accordingly it girds
on the sword to fight. The battle-field is all Germany: into that vast arena descend men
of all nations, not only of Europe, but even from parts of Asia: the length of the day of
battle is thirty years.
Some have preferred this as an indictment against Protestantism; see, it has been said,
what convulsions it has brought on. It is true that if Protestantism had never existed
this unprecedented conflict would never have taken place, for had the Old been left in
unchallenged possession it would have been at peace. It is also true that neither
literature nor philosophy ever shook the world with storms like these. But this only
proves that conscience alone, quickened by the Word of God, was able to render the service
which the world needed; for the Old had to be displaced at whatever cost of tumult and
disturbance, that the New, which cannot be shaken, might be set up.
Let us trace the first risings of this great commotion. The "Catholic League"
having been formed, and Maximilian of Bavaria placed at the head of it, the Jesuits began
to intrigue in order to find work for the army which the duke held in readiness strike. It
needed but a spark to kindle a flame.
The spark fell. The "Majestats-Brief," or Royal Letter, granted by Rudolph II,
and which was the charter of the Bohemian Protestants, began to be encroached upon. The
privileges which that charter conceded to the Protestants, of not only retaining the old
churches but of building new ones where they were needed, were denied to those who lived
upon the Ecclesiastical States. The Jesuits openly said that this edict of toleration was
of no value, seeing the king had been terrified into granting it, and that the time was
near when it would be swept away altogether. This sort of talk gave great uneasiness and
alarm; alarm was speedily converted into indignation by the disposition now openly evinced
by the court to overturn the Majestats-Brief, and confiscate all the rights of the
Protestants. Count Thurn, Burgrave of Carlstein, a popular functionary, was dismissed, and
his vacant office was filled by two nobles who were specially obnoxious to the
Protestants, as prominent enemies of their faith and noted persecutors of their brethren.
They were accused of hunting their Protestant tenantry with dogs to mass, of forbidding
them the rights of baptism, of marriage, and of burial, and so compelling them to return
to the Roman Church. The arm of injustice began to be put forth against the Protestants on
the Ecclesiastical States, whose rights were more loosely defined. Their church in the
town of Klostergrab was demolished; that at Braunau was forcibly shut up, and the citizens
who had opposed these violent proceedings were thrown into prison. Count Thurn, who had
been elected by his fellow-Protestants to the office of Defender of the Church's civil
rights, thought himself called upon to organize measures of defense.
Deputies were summoned to Prague from every, circle of the kingdom for deliberation. They
petitioned the emperor to set free those whom he had cast into prison; but the imperial
reply, so far from opening the doors of the gaol, justified the demolition of the
churches, branded the opposers of that act as rebels, and dropped some significant threats
against all who should oppose the royal will. Bohemia was in a flame. The deputies armed
themselves, and believing that this harsh policy had been dictated by the two new members
of the vice-regal Council of Prate, they proceeded to the palace, and forcing their way
into the hall where the Council was sitting, they laid hold — as we have already
narrated — on the two obnoxious members, Martinitz and Slavata, and, "according
to a good old Bohemian custom," as one of the deputies termed it, they threw them out
at the window. They sustained no harm from their fall, but starting to their feet, made
off from their enemies. This was on the 23rd of May, 1618: the Thirty Years' War had
begun.
Thirty directors were appointed as a provisional government. Taking possession of all the
offices of state and the national revenues, the directors summoned Bohemia to arms. Count
Thurn was placed at the head of the army, and the entire kingdom joined the insurrection,
three towns excepted — Budweis, Krummau, and Pilsen — in which the majority of
the inhabitants were Romanists. The Emperor Matthias was terrified by this display of
union and courage on the part of the Bohemians. Innumerable perils at that hour environed
his throne. His hereditary States of Austria were nearly as disaffected as Bohemia itself
— a spark might kindle them also into revolt: the Protestants were numerous even in
them, and, united by a strong bond of sympathy, were not unlikely to make common cause
with their brethren. The emperor, dreading a universal conflagration, which might consume
his dynasty, made haste to pacify the Bohemian insurgents before they should arrive under
the walls of Vienna, and urge their demands for redress in his own palace. Negotiations
were in progress, with the best hopes of a pacific issue; but just at that moment the
Emperor Matthias died, and was succeeded by the fanatical and stem Ferdinand II.
There followed with starting rapidity a succession of significant events, all adverse to
Bohemia and to the cause of Protestantism. These occurrences form the prologue, as it
were, of that great drama of horrors which we are about to narrate. Some of them have
already come before us in connection with the history of Protestantism in Bohemia. First
of all came the accession of Silesia and Moravia to the insurrection; the deposition of
Ferdinand II as King of Bohemia, and the election of Frederick, Elector of the Palatinate,
in his room. This was followed by the victorious march of Count Thurn and his army to
Vienna. The appearance of the Bohemian army under the walls of the capital raised the
Protestant nobles in Vienna, who, while the Bohemian balls were falling on the royal
palace, forced their way into Ferdinand's presence, and insisted that he should make peace
with Count Thurn by guaranteeing toleration to the Protestants of his empire. One of the
Austrian magnates was so urgent that he seized the monarch by the button, and exclaimed,
"Ferdinand, wilt thou sign it?" But Ferdinand was immovable. In spite of the
extremity in which he stood, he would neither flee from his capital nor make concessions
to the Protestants. Suddenly, and while the altercation was still going on, a
trumpet-blast was heard in the court of the palace. Five hundred cuirassiers had arrived
at that critical moment, under General Dampierre, to defend the monarch. This turned the
tide. Vienna was preserved to the Papacy, and with Vienna the Austrian dominions and the
imperial throne. There followed the retreat of the Bohemian host from under the walls of
the capital; the election of Ferdinand, at the Diet of Frankfort, to the dignity of
emperor; the equipment of an army to crush the insurrection in Bohemia; and, in fine, the
battle of the Weissenburg under the walls of Prague, which by a single stroke brought the
"winter kingdom" of Frederick to an end, laid the provinces of Bohemia, Silesia,
and Moravia at the feet of Ferdinand, and enabled him to inaugurate an iron era of
persecution by setting up the scaffold at Prague, on which the flower of the country's
rank and genius and virtue were offered up in the holocaust we have already described.
Such was the series of minor acts which led up to the greater tragedies. Though
sufficiently serious in themselves, they are dwarfed into comparative insignificance by
the stupendous horrors that tower up behind them.
Before entering on details, we must first of all sketch the general features of this
terrible affair. It had long been felt that the antagonism between the old and the new
faiths — which every day partook more of passion and less of devotion, and with which
so many dynastic and national interests had come to be bound up — would, in the
issue, bring on a bloody catastrophe. That catastrophe came at last; but it needed the
space of a generation to exhaust its vengeance and consummate its woes. The war was
prolonged beyond all previous precedent, mainly from this cause, that no one of the
parties engaged in it so far overtopped the others as to be able to end the strife by
striking a great and decisive blow. The conflict dragged slowly on from year to year,
bearing down before it leaders, soldiers, cities, and provinces, as the lava-flood, slowly
descending the mountain-side, buries vineyard and pine-forest, smiling village and
populous city, under all ocean of molten rocks.
The armies by which this long-continued and fearfully destructive war was waged were not
of overwhelming numbers, according to our modern ideas. The host on either side rarely
exceeded 40,000; it oftener fell below than rose above this number; and almost all the
great battles of the war were fought with even fewer men. It was then held to be more than
doubtful whether a general could efficiently command a greater army than 40,000, or could
advantageously employ a more numerous host on one theater.
Once, it is true, Wallenstein assembled round his standard nearly 100,000; but this vast
multitude, in point of strategical disposition and obedience to command, hardly deserved
the name of an army. It was rather a congeries of fighting and marauding bands, scattered
over great part of Germany — a scourge to the unhappy provinces, and a terror to
those who had called it into existence. Even when the army-roll exhibited 100,000 names,
it was difficult to bring into action the half of that number of fighting men, the
absentees were always so numerous, from sickness, from desertion, from the necessity of
collecting provisions, and from the greed of plunder. The Bohemian army of 1620 was
speedily reduced in the field to one-half of its original numbers; the other half was
famished, frozen, or forced to desert by lack of pay, not less than four millions and a
half of guldens being owing to it at the close of the campaign. No military chest of those
days — not even that of the emperor, and much less that of any of the princes —
was rich enough to pay an army of 40,000; and few bankers could be persuaded to lend to
monarchs whose ordinary revenues were so disproportionate to their enormous war
expenditure. The army was left to feed itself. When one province was eaten up, the army
changed to another, which was devoured in its turn. The verdant earth was changed to
sackcloth. Citizens and peasants fled in terror-stricken crowds. In the van of the army
rose the wail of despair and anguish: in its rear, famine came stalking on in a pavilion
of cloud and fire and vapor of smoke.
The masses that swarm and welter in the abyss Germany now became we cannot particularize.
But out of the dust, the smoke, and the flame there emerge, towering above the others, a
few gigantic forms, which let us name. Ernest of Mansfeld, the fantastic Brunswicker and
Bernhard of Weimar form one group. Arrayed against these are Maximilian of Bavaria, and
the generals of the League — Tilly and Pappenheim, leaders of the imperial host; the
stern, inscrutable Wallenstein, Altringer, and the great Frenchmen, Conde and Turenne;
among the Swedes, Horn, Bauer, Torstenson, Wrangel, and over all, lifting himself grandly
above the others, is the warrior-prince Gustavus Adolphus. What a prodigious combination
of military genius, raised in each case to its highest degree of intensity, by the
greatness of the occasion and the wish to cope with a renowned antagonist or rival! The
war is one of brilliant battles, of terrible sieges, but of quick alternations of fortune,
the conqueror of today becoming often the vanquished of tomorrow. The evolution of
political results, however, is slow, and they are often as quickly lost as they had been
tediously and laboriously won.
This great war divides itself into three grand periods, the first being from 1618 to 1630.
That was the epoch of the imperial victories. Almost defeated at the outset, Ferdinand II
brought back success to his standards by the aid of Wallensiein and his immense hordes;
and in proportion as the imperial host triumphed, Ferdinand's claims on Germany rose
higher and higher: his object being to make his will as absolute and arbitrary over the
whole Fatherland as it was in his paternal estates of Austria. In short, the emperor had
revived the project which his ancestor Charles V had so nearly realized in his war with
the princes of the Schmalkald League — namely, that of making himself the one sole
master of Germany.
At the end of the first period we find that the Popish Power has spread itself like a
mighty flood over the whole of Germany to the North Sea. But now, with the commencement of
the second period — which extends from 1630 to 1634 — the opposing tide of
Protestantism begins to set in, and continues to flow, with irresistible force, from north
to south, till it has overspread two-thirds of the Fatherland. Nor does the death of its
great champion arrest it. Even after the fall of Gustavus Adolphus the Swedish warriors
continued for some time to win victories, and still farther to extend the territorial area
of Protestantism. The third and closing period of the war extends from 1634 to 1648, and
during this time victory and defeat perpetually oscillated from side to side, and shifted
from one part of the field to another. The Swedes came down in a mighty wave, which rolled
on unchecked till it reached the middle of Germany, the good fortune which attended them
receding at times, and then again returning. The French, greedy of booty, spread
themselves along the Rhine, hunger and pestilence traversing in their wake the wasted
land. In the Swedish army one general after another perished in battle, yet with singular
daring and obstinacy the army kept the field, and whether victorious or vanquished in
particular battles, always insisted on the former claim of civil and religious liberty to
Protestants. In opposition to the Swedes, and quite as immovable, is seen the Prince of
the League, Maximilian of Bavaria, and the campaigns which he now fought are amongst the
most brilliant which his dynasty have ever achieved. The fanatical Ferdinand II had by
this time gone to his grave; the soberer and more tolerant Ferdinand III had succeeded,
but he could not disengage himself from the terrible struggle, and it went on for some
time longer; but at last peace began to be talked about. Nature itself seemed to cry for a
cessation of the awful conflict; cities, towns, and villages were in flames; the land was
empty of men; the high-roads were without passengers, and briars and weeds were covering
the once richly cultivated fields. Several States had now withdrawn from the conflict: the
theater of war was being gradually narrowed, and the House of Hapsburg was eventually so
hedged in that it was compelled to come to terms. The countries which had been the seat of
the struggle were all but utterly ruined. Germany had lost three-fourths of its
population.[4] "Over
the brawling of parties a terrible Destiny moved its wings; it lifts up leaders and again
casts them down into the bloody mire; the greatest human power is helpless in its hand; at
last, satisfied with murder and corpses, it turns its face slowly from the land that is
become only a great field of the dead."[5]
CHAPTER 2 Back to Top
THE ARMY AND THE CAMP.
The Battle-fields of the Seventeenth and of the Nineteenth Centuries – All
Nationalities drawn into this War – Motley Host around the Banners of the League
– Carnage – The Camping-ground – The General's Tent – Officers' Tents
– Soldiers' Huts – Change in Method of Fortifying Camps – Sentinels and
Outposts – All Languages heard in the Camp – A Flying Plague – Plundering
of the Surrounding Country – Prayers and Divine Service – Gambling – Huts
of the Sutlers – Camp Signals – Oscillation between Abundance and Famine –
Scenes of Profusion – Picture of Famine in the Camp – Superstitions –
Morals – Duels.
BEFORE narrating the successive stages of this most
extraordinary war, and summing up its gains to the cause of Protestantism, and the general
progress of the world, let us briefly sketch its more prominent characteristics. The
picture is not like anything with which we are now acquainted. The battles of our own day
are on a vaster scale, and the carnage of a modern field is far greater than was that of
the battle-fields of 200 years ago; but the miseries attending a campaign now are much
less, and the destruction inflicted by war on the country which becomes its seat is not
nearly so terrible as it was in the times of which we write. Altogether, the balance of
humanity is in favor of war as carried on in modern times, though it is still, and ever
must be, one of the most terrible scourges with which the earth is liable to be visited.
The Thirty Years' War was not so much German as (ecumenical. Not only did individual
foreign nationalities respond to the recruiting-drum, as crows flock to a battle-field,
lured thither by the effluvia of corpses, but all the peoples of Christian Europe were
drawn into its all-embracing vortex. From the west and from the east, from the north and
from the south, came men to fight on the German plains, and mingle their blood with the
waters of the Rhine, the Danube, and the Elbe. Englishmen and Scotchmen crossed the sea
and hastened to place themselves under one or other of the opposing standards. Danes,
Swedes, Finns, crowding to the theater of action, and mingling with the Netherlanders,
contended with them in the bloody fray in behalf of the Protestant liberties. The
Laplander, hearing amid his snows the bruit of this great conflict, yoked his reindeer,
and hurried in his sledge across the ice, brining with him furs for the clothing of the
Swedish troops. The imperial army was even more varied in respect of nationality, of
speech, of costume, and of manners. A motley host of Romish Walloons, of Irish
adventurers, of Spaniards and Italians were assembled under the banners of the League.
Almost every Slav race broke into the land in this day of confusion. The light horseman of
the Cossacks was the object of special terror. His movements were rapid, and he passed
along plundering and slaughtering without much distinction of friend or foe. There came a
mingling of Mohammedans in the corps raised in the provinces which abutted on the Turkish
frontier. But most hated of all were the Croats, because they were of all others the most
barbarous and the most cruel. So multiform was the host that now covered the Fatherland!
We know not where in history another such assemblage of ruffians, plunderers, and
murderers is to be beheld as is now seen settling down in Germany. Had the slaughter been
confined to the battle-field, the carnage would have been comparatively trifling; but all
the land was a battle-field, and every day of the thirty years was a day of battle, for
not a day but blood was shed. The times of the Goths furnish us with no such dark picture.
When these nations descended from the North to overthrow the Roman Empire, they pressed
forward and did not return on their course. The cities, the cultivation, and the men who
were trampled down in their march rose up again when they had passed. But the destroying
host which we now see collecting from the ends of the earth, and assembling in Germany,
does not depart from the land it has invaded. It abides for the space of a generation. It
comes to make the land a tomb, and to bury itself in the same vast sepulcher to which it
consigned the Germans; for only the merest remnant of that multitudinous host ever
returned home. It drew destruction upon itself in the destruction which it inflicted upon
the land.
When the field-master received orders to look out for new camping-ground, he chose a spot
if possible near a flowing stream, and one capable of being fortified. His first care was
to measure off a certain space, in the center of the ground. There was pitched the
general's tent. That tent rose in the midst of the host, distinguished from the others by
its superior size and greater grandeur. Over it floated the imperial standard, and there
the general abode as in the heart of a fortress. Around this central tent was an open
space, on which other tent must not be pitched, and which was walled in by spikes stuck in
the ground, and sometimes by a more substantial rampart. Immediately outside the space
appropriated to the general and his staff were the tents of the officers. They were made
of canvas, and conical in form. Outside these, running in parallel rows or streets, were
the huts of the common soldiers. They were composed of boards and straw, and the soldiers
were huddled together in them, two and four, with their wives, daughters, boys, and dogs.
The whole formed a great square or circle, regiment lying alongside regiment, the
encampment being strongly fortified; and out beyond its defense there stretched away a
wide cleared space, to admit of the enemy being espied a long while before he could make
his near approach.
In former times it had been customary to utilize the baggage wagons in fortifying an
encampment. The wagons were ranged all round the tents, sometimes in double, sometimes in
treble line; they were fastened the one to the other by iron chains, forming a rampart not
easily to be breached by an enemy. Such, as we have already seen, were the fortifications
within which the Hussites were wont to encamp. But by the time of which we write this
method of defense had been abandoned. Armies in the field now sought to protect themselves
by ditches, walls, and other field fortifications. At the outlets or portals of the camp
were posted sentinels, who stood grasping in the one hand the musket, its butt-end resting
on the ground, and in the other holding the burning torch. At a greater distance were
troops of horsemen and pickets of sharp-shooters, to detain the enemy should he appear,
and give time to those within the entrenchments to get under arms.
The camp was a city. It was a reproduction of the ancient Babel, for in it were to be
heard all the tongues of Europe and some of those of Asia. The German language
predominated, but it was almost lost within the encampment by adulteration from so many
foreign sources, and especially by the ample addition of oaths and terms of blasphemy.
Into the encampment were gathered all the peculiarities, prejudices, and hates of the
various nationalities of Europe. These burned all the more fiercely by reason of the
narrow space in which they were cooped up, and it was no easy matter to maintain the peace
between the several regiments, or even in the same regiment, and prevent the outbreak of
war within the camp itself. Other cities cannot change their site, they are tied with
their wickedness to the spot on which they stand; but this city was a movable plague, it
flitted from province to province, throwing a stream of moral Poison into the air. Even in
a friendly country the camp was an insufferable nuisance. Within its walls was, of course,
neither seed-time nor harvest, and the provinces, cities, and villages around had to feed
it. Hardly had the ground been selected, or the first tent set up, when orders were sent
out to all the inhabitants of the surrounding country to bring wood, straw, meat, and
provender to the army. On all the roads rolled trams of wagons, laden with provisions, for
the camp. Droves of cattle might be seen moving toward the same point. The villages for
miles around speedily vanished from sight, the thatch was torn off their roofs, and their
woodwork carried away by the soldiers for the building of their own huts, and only the
crumbling clay walls were left, to be swept away by the first tempest. Their former
inhabitants found refuge in the woods, or with their acquaintances in some remoter
village. Besides this general sack a great deal of private plundering and stealing went
on; soldiers were continually prowling about in all directions, and Sutlers were
constantly driving to and from the camp with what articles they had been able to collect,
and which they meant to retail to the soldiers. While the men lounged about in the rows
and avenues of the encampment, drinking, gambling, or settling points of national or
individual honor with their side-arms, the women cooked, washed, mended clothes, or
quarreled with one another, their vituperation often happily unintelligible to the object
of it, because uttered in a tongue the other did not understand.
Every morning the drum beat, and an accompanying herald called the soldiers to prayers.
This practice was observed even in the imperial camp. On Sunday only did the preacher of
the regiment conduct public worship, the soldiers with their families being assembled
before him, and seated orderly upon the ground. They were forbidden, during the time of
Divine service, to lie about in their huts, or to visit the tents of the Sutlers; and the
latter were not to sell drink or food to any one during these hours. In the camp of
Gustavus Adolphus prayers were read twice a day. The military discipline enforced by that
great leader was much more strict, and the moral decorum of his army far higher, as the
comparatively untouched aspect of the fields and villages around bore witness.
In the open space within the enclosure of the camp, near the guard-house, stood the
gambling-tables, the ground around being strewed over with mantles, for the convenience of
the players. Instead of the slow shuffling of the cards, the speedier throw of the dice
was often had recourse to, to decide the stakes; and when the dice were forbidden, the
players hid themselves behind hedges and there pursued their game, staking their food,
their weapons, their horses, and their booty, when booty they happened to possess. Behind
the tent of the upper officer, separated by a broad street, stood the stalls and huts of
the Sutlers, butchers, and master of the cook-shops; the price of all foods and drinks
being fixed by a certain officer. The luxury and profusion that prevailed in the officers'
tents, where the most expensive wines were drunk, and only viands prepared by a French
cook were eaten, offered an indifferent example of economy and carefulness to the common
soldier. The military signals of the camp were the beat of a large drum for the
foot-soldier, and the peal of a trumpet for the cavalry. When any important operation was
to be undertaken on the morrow, a herald, attired in a bright silk robe, embroidered
before and behind with the arms of his prince, rode through the host on the previous
evening, attended by the trumpeter, and announced the order for the coming day. This was
fatal to discipline, inasmuch as it gave warning to the lounger and the plunderer to set
out during the night in search of booty.
The camp oscillated between overflowing abundance and stark famine. When the army had won
a battle, and victory gave them the plunder of a city as the recompense of their bravery,
there came a good time to the soldiers. Food and drink were then plentiful, and of course
cheap. In the last year of the war a cow might be bought in the Bavarian host for almost
literally the smallest coin. Then, too, came good times to the merchants in the camp, for
then they could command any amount of sale, and obtain any price for their wares. The
soldiers tricked themselves out with expensive feathers, scarlet hose, with gold lacings,
and rich sables, and they purchased showy dresses and mules for the females of their
establishments. Grooms rode out dressed from head to heel in velvet. The Croats in the
winter of 1630-31 were so amply supplied with the precious metals that not only were their
girdles filled and distended with the number of their gold coins, but they wore golden
plates as breast-plates. Paul Stockman, Pastor of Lutzen, a small town in Saxony, relates
that before the battle of Lutzen one soldier rode a horse adorned with gold and silver
stars, and another had his steed ornamented with 300 silver moons.[1]
The camp-women, and sometimes the horsemen, arrayed themselves in altar-cloths,
mass-robes, and priests' coats. The topers pledged one another in the most expensive
wines, which they drank out of the altar-cups; and from their stolen gold they fabricated
long chains, from which they were accustomed to wrench off a link when they had a
reckoning to discharge or a debt to pay.
The longer the war continued, the less frequent and less joyous became these halcyon days.
Want then began to be more frequent in the camp than superfluity. "The spoiling of
the provinces avenged itself frightfully on the spoilers themselves. The pale specter of
hunger, the forerunner of plague, crept through the lanes of the camp, and raised its bony
hand before the door of every straw hut. Then the supplies from the neighborhood stopped;
neither fatted ox nor laden cart was now seen moving towards the camp. The price of living
became at these times exorbitant; for example, in 1640 a loaf of bread could not be
purchased by the Swedish army in the neighborhood of Gotha for a less sum than a ducat.
The sojourn in the camp became, even for the most inured soldier, unendurable. Everywhere
were hollow-eyed parchment faces; in every row of huts were sick and dying; the
neighborhood of the camp was infected by the putrid bodies of dead horses and mules; all
around was a desert of untilled fields, and blackened ruins of villages, and the camp
itself became a dismal city of the dead. The accompaniments of the host, the women and
children namely, speedily vanished in the burial-trenches; only the most wretched dogs
kept themselves alive on the most disgusting food; the others were killed and eaten.[2] At such a time the army melted
quickly, away, and no skill of the ablest leader could avert its ruin."[3]
There arose a mingled and luxuriant crop of Norse, German, and Roman superstitions
in the camp. The soldiers had unbounded faith in charms and incantations, and sought by
their use to render their weapons powerful and themselves invulnerable. They had prayers
and forms of words by which they hoped to obtain the mastery in the fight, and they wore
amulets to protect them from the deadly bullet and the fatal thrust of dagger. The camp
was visited by gypsies and soothsayers, who sold secret talismans to the soldiers as
infallible protections in the hour of danger. Blessings, conjurations, witchcrafts, in all
their various forms abounded in the imperial army as much as did guns and swords and
pikes. The soldiers fell all the same in the deadly breach, in the shock of battle, and in
the day of pale famine, The morals of the camp were without shame, speaking generally.
Almost every virtue perished but that of soldierly honor and fidelity to one's flag, so
long as one served under it; for the mercenary often changed his master, and with him the
cause for which he fought. The mood of mind prevalent in the camp is well hit off by
Schiller's Norseman's song – "A sharp sword is my field, plunder is my plough,
the earth is my bed, the sky is my covering, my cloak is my house, and wine is my eternal
life." Duels were of daily occurrence, and when at last they were forbidden, the
soldiers sought secret places beyond the lines, where they settled their quarrels.
Gustavus Adolphus punished dueling with death, even in the case of his highest officers,
but no law could suppress the practice.
CHAPTER 3 Back to Top
THE MARCH AND ITS DEVASTATIONS.
Germany before the War – Its Husbandry – Its Villages – Its Cities –
Dress, &c., of the Citizens – Schools – Its Protestantism – Memories of
the Past – Foreign Soldiers Enter Thuringia – Their Oppressions of the Peasants
– Exactions – Portents – Demoralization of Society – Villagers Driven
into Hiding-places – Cruelties on Protestant Pastors – Michel Ludwig –
George Faber – John Otto – Andrew Pochmann – The Pastor of Stelzen.
To know the desolation to which Germany was reduced by the
long war, it is necessary to recall the picture of what it was before it became the
theater of that unspeakable tragedy. In 1618, the opening year of a dismal era, Germany
was accounted a rich country. Under the influence of a long peace its towns had enlarged
in size, its villages had increased in number, and its smiling fields testified to the
excellence of its husbandry. The early dew of the Reformation was not yet exhaled. The
sweet breath of that morning gave it a healthy moral vigor, quickened its art and
industry, and filled the land with all good things. Wealth abounded in the cities, and
even the country people lived in circumstances of comfort and ease.
In Thuringia and Franconia the villages were numerous. They were not left open and without
defense. Some of them were surrounded with a broad trench or ditch; others were defended
with stone walls, in which were openings or gateways opposite all the principal streets,
with heavy doors to shut them in at night. Nor was the churchyard left unprotected; walls
enclosed the resting-places of the dead; and these, oftener than once, formed the last
refuge of the living. As a further security against surprise or molestation, village and
meadow were patrolled night and day by watchmen. The houses were built of wood or clay;
they stood close to each other, ranged in narrow streets, and though their exteriors were
mean, within they were not deficient in furnishings and comfort.
The fruit-trees stood round the village, perfuming the air with their spring blossoms, and
delighting the eye with their autumn fruits. At the village gates, or under the boughs of
one of its embowering trees, a fountain would gush out, and pour its crystal waters into a
stone trough. Here weary traveler might halt, and here ox or horse, toiling under the
load, might drink. The quiet courtyards were filled with domestic fowls; squadrons of
white geese sallied across the stubble-fields, or, like fleet at anchor, basked in the
sun; teams of horses were ranged in the stalls, and among them might be some great
hard-boned descendant of the old charger.
But the special pride of the husbandman were the flocks of sheep and oxen that roamed in
the meadow, or grazed on the hill-side. Besides the ordinary cereals, crops of flax and
hops covered his fields. It is believed that the cultivation of Germany in 1618 was not
inferior to its cultivation in 1818.
The cities were strongly fortified: their walls were not infrequently double, flanked by
towers, and defended by broad and deep moats. It was observed that stone walls crumbled
under the stroke of cannon-balls, and this led to the adoption of external defenses,
formed of earthen mounds, as in the case of the Antwerp citadel. Colleges, gymnasia, and
printing-presses flourished in the towns, as did trade and commerce. The great road
passing by Nuremberg, that ancient entrepot of the commerce of the West, diffused over
Germany the merchandise which still continued to flow, in part at least, in its old
channel. The Sunday was not honored as it ought to have been within their gates. When
Divine service was over, the citizens were wont to assemble on the exchange, where
amusement or business would profane the sacred hours. They were much given to feasting:
their attire was richer than at the present day: the burghers wore velvets, silks, and
laces, and adorned themselves with feathers, gold and silver clasps, and finely mounted
side-arms. The table of the citizen was regulated by a sumptuary law: the rich were not to
exceed the number of courses prescribed to them; and the ordinary citizen was not to dine
in plainer style than was appointed his rank. Dancing parties were forbidden after sunset.
Those who went out at night had to carry lanterns or torches: ultimately torches were
interdicted, and a metal basket fixed at the street-corners, filled with blazing tar-wood,
would dispel the darkness.
Since the Reformation, a school had existed in every town and village in which there was a
church. In the decline of the Lutheran Reformation, the incumbent discharged, in many
cases, the duties of both pastor and schoolmaster. He instructed the youth on the
week-days, and preached to their parents on the Sunday. Sometimes there was also a
schoolmistress. A small fee was exacted from the scholars. The capacity of reading and
writing was pretty generally diffused amongst the people. Catechisms, Psalters, and Bibles
were common in the houses of the Protestants. The hymns of Luther were sung in their
sanctuaries and dwellings, and might often be heard resounding from garden and rural lane.
The existing generation of Germans were the grandchildren of the men who had been the
contemporaries of Luther. They loved to recall the wonders of the olden time, when more
eyes were turned upon Wittemberg than upon Rome, and the Reformer filled a larger space in
the world's gaze than either the emperor or the Pope. As they sat under the shade of their
linden-trees, the father would tell the son how Tetzel came with his great red cross; how
a monk left his cell to cry aloud that "God only can forgive sin," and how the
pardon-monger fled at the sound of his voice; how the Pope next took up the quarrel, and
launched his bull, which Luther burned; how the emperor unsheathed his great sword, but
instead of extinguishing, only spread the conflagration wider. He would speak of the great
day of Worms, of the ever-memorable victory at Spires; and how the princes and knights of
old were wont to ride to the Diet, or march to battle, singing Luther's hymns, and having
verses of Holy Scripture blazoned on their banners. He would tell how in those days the
tents of Protestantism spread themselves out till they filled the land, and how the hosts
of Rome retreated and pitched their encampment afar off. But when he compared the present
with the past, he would heave a sigh. "Alas!" we hear the aged narrator say,
"the glory is departed." The fire is now cold on the national hearth; no longer
do eloquent doctors and chivalrous princes arise to do battle for the Protestantism of the
Fatherland. Alas! the roll of victories is closed, and the territory over which the
Reformation stretched its scepter grows narrower every year. Deep shadows gather on the
horizon, and through its darkness may be seen the shapes of mustering hosts, while
dreadful sounds as of battle strike upon the ear. It is a night of storms that is
descending on the grandchildren of the Reformers.
At last came the gathering of foreign troops, and their converging march on the scene of
operations. Startling forms began to show themselves on the frontiers of Thuringia, and
its vast expanse of glade and forest, of village and town, became the scene of
oft-repeated alarms and of frightful sufferings. Foreign soldiers, with the savage looks
of battle, and raiment besmeared with blood, marched into its villages, and entering its
thresholds, took possession of house and bed, and terrifying the owner and family,
peremptorily demanded provisions and contributions. Not content with what was supplied
them for their present necessities, they destroyed and plundered whatever their eyes
lighted upon. After 1626, these scenes continued year by year, growing only the worse each
successive year. Band followed band, and more than one army seated itself in the villages
of Thuringia for the winter. The demands of the soldiery were endless, and compliance was
enforced by blows and cruel torturings.
The peasant most probably had hidden his treasures in the earth on the approach of the
host; but he saw with terror the foreign man-at-arms exercising a power, which to him
seemed magical, of discovering the place where his hoards were concealed. If it happened
that the soldier was baffled in the search, the fate of the poor man was even worse, for
then he himself was seized, and by torments which it would be painful to describe, was
compelled to discover where his money and goods lay buried. On the fate of his wife and
his daughters we shall be silent. The greatest imaginable horrors were so customary that
their non-perpetration was a matter of surprise. Of all was the unhappy husbandman
plundered. His bondman was carried off to serve in the war; his team was unyoked from the
plough to drag the baggage or the cannon; his flocks and herds were driven off from the
meadow to be slaughtered and eaten by the army; and the man who had risen in affluence in
the morning, was stripped of all and left penniless before night.
It was not till after the death of Gustavus Adolphus that the sufferings of the country
people reached their maximum. The stricter discipline maintained by that great leader had
its effect not only in emboldening the peasants, and giving them some little sense of
security in these awful times, but also in restraining the other military corps, and
rendering their license less capricious and reckless than it otherwise would have been.
There was some system in the levying of supplies and the recruiting of soldiers during the
life of Gustavus; but after the fall of the Swedish king these bonds were relaxed, and the
greatest sufferings of the past appeared tolerable in comparison with the evils that now
afflicted the Germans. In addition to their other endurances, they were oppressed by
superstitious terrors and forebodings. Their minds, full of superstition, became the prey
of credulous fancies. They interpreted everything, if removed in the least from the
ordinary course, into a portent of calamity. They saw terrible sights in the sky, they
heard strange and menacing voices speaking out of heaven and specters gliding past on the
earth. In the Dukedom of Hildburghausen, white crosses lighted up the firmament when the
enemy approached. When the soldiers entered the office of the town clerk, they were met by
a spirit clothed in white, who waved them back. After their departure, there was heard
during eight days, in the choir of the burned church, a loud snorting and sighing. At
Gumpershausen was a girl whose visions and revelations spread excitement over the whole
district. She had been visited, she said, by a little angel, who appeared first in a red
and then in a blue mantle, and who, sitting in her sight upon the bed, cried,
"Woe!" to the inhabitants, and admonished them against blasphemy and cursing,
and foretold the most frightful shedding of blood if they did not leave off their
wickedness.[1] After
the terror came defiance and despair. An utter demoralization of society followed. Wives
deserted their husbands, and children their parents. The army passed on, but the vices and
diseases which they had brought with them continued to linger in the devastated and half-
peopled villages behind them. To other vices, drunkenness was added. Excess in ardent
spirits had deformed the German peasantry since the period of the Peasant-war, and now it
became a prevalent habit, and regard for the rights and property of one's neighbor soon
ceased. At the beginning of the war, village aided village, and mutually lightened each
other's calamities so far as was in their power. When a village was robbed of its cattle,
and sold to the adjoining one by the marauding host, that other village returned the oxen
to their original owners on repayment of the price which they had paid to the soldiers.
Even in Franconia these mutual services were frequently exchanged between Popish and
Protestant communities. But gradually, their oppression and their demoralization advancing
step by step, the country people began to steal and plunder like the soldiers. Armed bands
would cross the boundaries of their commune, and carry off from their neighbors whatsoever
they coveted. Brigandage was now added to robbery. They lurked in the woods and the
mountain passes, lying in wait for the stragglers of the army, and often took a red
revenge. How sad the change! The woodman, who had once on a time awakened all the echoes
of the forest glades with his artless songs, now terrified them with the shrieks of his
victim. A bunting hatred arose between the soldiers and the peasantry, which lasted till
the very end of the war, and the frightful traces of which long survived the conflict.
So long as their money lasted, the villagers bought themselves off from the obligation of
having the soldiers billeted upon them; but when their money was spent they were without
defense. Watchmen were stationed on the steeples and high places in the neighborhood, who
gave warning the moment they descried on the far-off horizon the approach of the host. The
villagers would then bring out their furniture and valuables, and convey them to
hiding-places selected weeks before, and themselves live the while in these places a most
miserable life. They dived into the darkest parts of the forests; they burrowed in the
bleakest moors; they lurked in old clay pits and in masses of fallen masonry; and to this
day the people of those parts show with much interest the retreats where their wretched
forefathers sought refuge from the fury of the soldiery. The peasant always came back to
his village – too commonly to find it only a ruin; but his attachment to the spot set
him eagerly to work to rebuild his overturned habitation, and sow the little seed he had
saved in the down-trodden soil. He had been robbed of his horse, it may be, but he would
harness himself to the plough, and obeying the force of habit, would continue the
processes of tilling and sowing, though he had but small hopes of reaping. The little left
him he was careful to conceal, and strove to look even poorer than he was. He taught
himself to live amid dirt and squalor and apparent poverty, and he even extinguished, the
fire on his hearth, lest its light, shining through the casement, should attract to his
dwelling any straggler who might be on the outlook for a comfortable lodging for the
night. "His scanty food he concealed in places from which even the ruthless enemy
turned away in horror, such as graves, coffins, and amongst skulls."[2]
The clergy were the chief consolers of the people in these miserable scenes, and at
the same time the chief sufferers in them. The flint brunt of the imperial troops fell on
the village pastor; his church was first spoiled, then burned down, and his flock
scattered. He would then assemble his congregation, or such as remained of them, for
worship in a granary or similar place, or on the open common, or in a wood. Not
infrequently were himself and his family singled out by the imperial soldiers as the
special objects of rudeness and violence. His house was commonly the first to be robbed,
his family the first to suffer outrage; but generally the pastors took patiently the
spoiling of their goods and the buffetings of their persons, and by their heroic behavior
did much to support the hearts of the people in those awful times.
We give a few instances extracted from the brief registers of those times. Michel Ludwig
was pastor in Sonnenfeld since 1633. When the times of suffering came he preached in the
wood, under the open heaven, to his flock. He summoned his congregation with the drum, for
bell he had none, and armed men were on the outlook while he preached. He continued these
ministrations during eight years, till his congregation had entirely disappeared. A
Swedish colonel invited the brave man to be preacher to the regiment, and he became at a
later date president of the field consistory near Torstenson, and superintendent at
Weimar.
Instances occur of studious habits pursued through these unsettled times. George Faber, at
Gellershausen, preached to a little flock of some three or four at the constant peril of
life. He rose every morning at three, studied and carefully committed to memory his
sermon, besides writing learned commentaries on several books of the Bible.
John Otto, Rector of Eisfeld in 1635, just married, in addition to the. duties of his
office had to teach the public school during eight years, and supported himself by
threshing oats, cutting wood, and similar occupations. The record of these vicissitudes is
contained in jottings by himself in his Euclid. Forty-two years he held his office in
honor. His successor, John Schmidt, was a famous Latin scholar, and owed his appointment
to the fact of his being found reading a Greek poem in the guard-house, to which he had
been taken by the soldiers.
The story of Andrew Pochmann, afterwards superintendent, illustrates the life led in those
times, so full of deadly dangers, narrow escapes, and marvelous interpositions, which
strengthened the belief of the men who experienced them in a watchful Providence which
protected them, while millions were perishing around them. Pochmann was an orphan, who had
been carried off with two brothers by the Croats. Escaping with his brothers during the
night, he found means of entering a Latin school. Being a second time taken by the
soldiers, he was made quarter-master gunner. In the garrison he continued his studies, and
finding among his comrades scholars from Paris and London, he practiced with them the
speaking of Latin. Once, when sick, he lay down by the watch-fire with his powder-flask,
containing a pound and a half of powder, under his sleeve. As he lay, the fire reached his
sleeve and burned a large portion of it, but without exploding his powder-flask. He awoke
to find himself alone in the deserted camp, and without a farthing in his pocket. Among
the ashes of the now extinct watch-fire he found two thalers, and with these he set out
for Gotha. On the way he halted at Langensalza, and turned into a small and lonely house
on the wall. He was received by an old woman, who, commiserating his wretched plight, as
shown in his haggard looks and emaciated frame, laid him upon a bed to rest. His hostess
chanced to be a plague nurse, and the couch on which he was laid had but recently been
occupied by a plague patient. The disease was raging in the town; nevertheless, the poor
wanderer remained unattacked, and went on his way, to close his life amid happier scenes
than those that had marked its opening.
The village and Pastor of Stelzen will also interest us. The spring of the Itz was a holy
place in even pagan times. It rises at the foot of the mountains, where they sink down in
terraces to the banks of the Maine, and gushes out from the corner of a cave, which is
overshadowed by ancient beeches and linden-trees. Near this well stood, before the era of
the Reformation, a chapel to the Virgin; and at times hundreds of nobles, with an endless
retinue of servants, and troops of pilgrims would assemble on the spot. In 1632 the
village in the neighborhood of the well was burned down, and only the church,
school-house, and a shepherd's hut remained standing. The pastor, Nicolas Schubert, was
reduced to extreme misery. In the ensuing winter we find him inditing the following
heart-rending letter to the magistrate: – "I have nothing more, except my eight
small naked children; I live in a very old and dangerously dilapidated school-house,
without floors or chimneys, in which I find it impossible to study, or to do anything to
help myself. I am in want of food, clothes – in short, of everything. – Given at
the place of my misery – Stelzen. – Your respectful, poor, and burned-up
pastor."
Pastor Schubert was removed, whether to a richer living we know not – a poorer it
could not be. His successor was also plundered, and received in addition a blow from a
dagger by a soldier. A second successor was unable to keep himself alive. After that, for
fourteen years the parish had no pastor. Every third Sunday the neighboring clergyman
visited and conducted Divine service in the destroyed village. At last, in 1647, the
church itself was burned to the bare walls. Such was the temporal and spiritual
destitution that now overwhelmed that land which, half a century before, had been so full
of "the bread that perisheth," and also of that "which endures to eternal
life."[3]
CHAPTER 4 Back to Top
CONQUEST OF NORTH GERMANY BY FERDINAND II AND THE "CATHOLIC LEAGUE."
Ferdinand II's Aims – Extinction of Protestantism and the German Liberties – Ban
of the Empire pronounced on Frederick V – Apathy of the Protestant Princes –
They Withdraw from the Protestant Union – Count Mansfeld – Duke of Brunswick
– The Number and Devastation of their Armies – Heidelberg Taken – The
Palatinate Occupied – James I of England – Outwitted by Ferdinand and Philip II
– Electorate of the Rhine Given to the Duke of Bavaria – Treaty between England,
Holland, and Denmark – Christian IV of Denmark – Leads the Protestant Host
– Ferdinand II Raises an Army – Wallenstein – His Character – Grandeur
– Personal Appearance -His Method of Maintaining an Army – Movements of the
Campaign of 1626 – Battle of Lutter – Victory of Tilly – Campaign of 1627
– North Germany Occupied by the League – Further Projects of Ferdinand
FROM this general picture of the war, which shows us
fanaticism and ruffianism holding saturnalia inside the camp, and terror and devastation
extending their gloomy area from day to day outside of it, we turn to follow the progress
of its campaigns and battles, and the slow and gradual evolution of its moral results,
till they issue in the Peace of Westphalia, which gave a larger measure of toleration to
the Protestants than they had ever hitherto enjoyed.
The iron hand of military violence, moved by the Jesuits, was at this hour crushing out
Protestantism in Bohemia, in Hungary, in Transylvania, in Styria, and in Carinthia.
Dragonnades, confiscations, and executions were there the order of the day. The nobles
were dying on the scaffold, the ministers were shut up in prison or chained to the
galleys, churches and school-houses were lying in ruins, and the people, driven into exile
or slaughtered by soldiers, had disappeared from the land, and such as remained had found
refuge within the pale of the Church of Rome. But the extermination of the Protestant
faith in his own dominions could not satisfy the vast zeal of Ferdinand II. He aimed at
nothing less than its overthrow throughout all Germany. When there would not be one
Protestant church or a single Lutheran throughout that whole extent of territory lying
between the German Sea and the Carpathian chain, then, and only then, would Ferdinand have
accomplished the work for which the Jesuits had trained him, and fulfilled the vow he made
when he lay prostrate before the Virgin of Loretto. But ambition was combined with his
fanaticism. He aimed also at sweeping away all the charters and constitutions which
conferred independent rights on the German States, and subjecting both princes and people
to his own will. Henceforward, Germany should know only two masters: the Church of Rome
was to reign supreme and uncontrolled in things spiritual, and he himself should exercise
an equally absolute sway in things political and civil. It was a two-fold tide of
despotism that was about to overflow the countries of the Lutheran Reformation.
Having inaugurated a reaction on the east of Germany, Ferdinand now set on foot a
"Catholic restoration" on the west of it. He launched this part of his scheme by
fulminating against Frederick V, Palatine of the Rhine, the ban of the empire. Frederick
had offended by assuming the crown of Bohemia. After reigning during only one winter lie
was chased from Prague, as we have seen, by the arms of the Catholic Leslie. But the
matter did not end there: the occasion offered a fair pretext for advancing the scheme of
restoring the Church of Rome once more to supreme and universal dominancy in Germany.
Ferdinand accordingly passed sentence on Frederick, depriving him of his dominions and
dignities, as a traitor to the emperor and a disturber of the public peace. He empowered
Maximilian of Bavaria, as head of the League, to execute the ban – that is, to take
military possession of the Palatinate. Now was the time for the princes of the Protestant
Union to unsheathe the sword, and by wielding it in defense of the Palatine, their
confederate, who had risked more in the common cause than any one of them all, to prove
their zeal and sincerity in the great object for which they were associated. They would,
at t]he same time, shut the door at which the triumphant tide of armed Romanism was sure
to flow in and overwhelm their own dominions. But, unhappily for themselves and their
cause, instead of acting in the spirit of their Confederacy, they displayed an
extraordinary degree of pusillanimity and coldness. The terror of Ferdinand and the
Catholic Leslie had fallen upon them, and they left their chief to his fate,
congratulating themselves that their superior prudence had saved them from the disasters
by which Frederick was overtaken. The free cities of the Confederacy forsook him; and, as
if to mark still more their indifference to the cause to which they had so lately given
their most solemn pledge, they withdrew from the Union, and the example of cowardly
defection thus set by them was soon followed by the princes. How sure a sign of the
approach of evil days! We behold zeal on the Popish side, and only faint-heartedness and
indifference on that of the Protestants.
The troops of the League, under Duke Maximilian's famous general, Tilly, were now on their
march to the Palatinate; but the Protestant princes and free cities sat still, content to
see the fall of that powerful Protestant province, without lifting a finger on its behalf.
At that moment a soldier of fortune, whose wealth lay in his sword, assembled an army of
20,000, and came forward to fill the vacant place of the cities and princes. Ernest, Count
Mansfeld, offered battle to the troops of Spain and Bavaria, on behalf of the Elector
Frederick. Mansfeld was soon joined by the Margrave of Baden, with a splendid troop.
Christian, Duke of Brunswick, who had conceived a romantic passion for Elizabeth of
Bohemia, the Electress-Palatine, whose glove he always wore in his hat, also joined Count
Mansfeld, with an army of some 20,000, which he had raised in Lower Saxony, and which lie
maintained without pay, a secret he had learnt from Mansfeld.
These combined hosts, which the hope of plunder, quite as much as the desire of replacing
Frederick V on his throne, had drawn together, could not be much if at all below 50,000.
They were terrible scourges to the country which became the scene of their marches and of
their battles. They alighted like a flock of vultures on the rich chapters and bishoprics
of the Rhine. During the summers of 1621 and 1622, they marched backwards and forwards, as
the fortune of battle impelled them, in that rich valley, robbing the peasantry, levying
contributions upon the towns, slaughtering their opponents, and being themselves
slaughtered in turn. When hard pressed they would cross the river into France, and
continue, in that new and unexhausted field, their devastations and plunderings. But
ultimately the arms of Tilly prevailed. After murderous conflicts, in which both sides
sustained terrible loss, the bands of Mansfeld retreated northward, leaving the cities and
lands of the Palatinate to be occupied by the troops of the League. On the 17th of
September, 1622, Heidelberg was taken, after a terrible storm; its magnificent palace was
partially burned, its university was closed, and the treasures of its world-renowned
library were carried away in fifty wagon-loads to Rome. The rich city of Mannheim was
taken by the soldiers of the League in the November following Thus the gates of the
Palatinate were opened to the invading hosts, and they entered and gleaned where the
troops of Mansfeld and Brunswick had reaped the first rich harvest.
The man whom we have seen first driven from the throne of Bohemia, and next despoiled of
his hereditary dominions was, as our readers know, the son-in-law of the King of England.
It is with some astonishment that we see James I standing by a quiet spectator of the ruin
of his daughter's husband. Elizabeth, and the great statesmen who gave such glory to her
throne, would have seen in the swelling wave, crested with victory, that was setting in
upon Germany, peril to England; and, even though the happiness of no relation had been at
stake, would, for the safety of her throne and the welfare of her realm, have found means
of moderating, if not arresting, the reaction, before it had overwhelmed those princes and
lands where she must ever look for her trustiest allies. But James I and his minister
Buckingham had neither the capacity to devise, nor the spirit to pursue, so large a policy
as this. They allowed themselves to be befooled by the two leading Popish Powers.
Ferdinand of Austria buoyed up the English monarch with hopes that he would yet restore
his son-in-law to his Electorate, although he had already decided that Frederick should
see his dominions no more; and Philip II took care to amuse the English king with the
proposal of a Spanish marriage for his son, and James was mean-spirited enough to be
willing to wed the heir of his crown to the daughter of the man who, had he been able to
compass his designs, would have left him neither throne nor kingdom. The dupe of both
Austria and Spain, James I. sat still till the ruin of the Elector Frederick was almost
completed. When he saw what had happened he was willing to give both money and troops, but
it was too late. The occupation of Frederick's dominions by the army of the League made
the proffered assistance not only useless it gave it even an air of irony. The Electorate
of the Rhine was bestowed upon the Duke of Bavaria, as a recompense for his services.[1]
The territory was added to the area of Romanism, the Protestant ministers were
driven out, and Jesuits and priests crowded in flocks to take possession of the newly
subjugated domains. The former sovereign of these domains found asylum in a corner of
Holland. It was a bitter cup to Elizabeth, the wife of Frederick, and the daughter of the
King of England, who is reported to have said that she would rather live on bread and
water as a queen than, occupying a lower station, inhabit the most magnificent mansion,
and sit down at the most luxurious table.[2]
Other princes, besides the King of England, now opened their eyes. The Elector of
Saxony, the descendant of that Maurice who had chased Charles V. across the Alps of the
Tyrol, and wrested from him by force of arms the Treaty of Passau, which gave toleration
to the Lutherans, was not only indifferent to the misfortunes of the Elector Frederick,
but saw without concern the cruel suppression of Protestantism in Bohemia. Content to be
left in peace in his own dominions, and not ill-pleased, it may be, to see his rivals the
Calvinists humbled, he refused to act the part which his descent and his political power
made incumbent upon him. The Elector of Brandenburg, the next in rank to Saxony, showed
himself at this crisis equally unpatriotic and shortsighted. But now they saw – what
they might have foreseen long before, but for the blindness that selfishness ever inflicts
that the policy of Ferdinand had placed them in a new and most critical position.[3] East and west the Catholic
reaction had hemmed them in; Protestantism had disappeared in the kingdoms beyond the
Danube, and now the Rhine Electorate had undergone a forced conversion. On all sides the
wave of a triumphant reaction was rolling onward, and how soon it might sweep over their
own territories, now left almost like islands in the midst of a raging sea, they could not
tell. The tremendous blunder they had committed was plain enough, but how to remedy it was
more than their wisdom could say.
At this moment the situation of affairs in England changed, and a prospect began to open
up of a European coalition against the Powers of Spain and Austria. The "Spanish
sleeping-cup," as the English nation termed it, had been rudely dashed from the lip
of James I, and the monarch saw that he had been practiced upon by Philip II. The marriage
with the Infanta of Spain was broken off at the last moment; there followed a rapture with
that Power, and the English king, smarting from the insult, applied to Parliament
(February, 1624) for the means of reinstating Frederick in the Palatinate by force of
arms.[4] The Parliament, who had felt the
nation lowered, and the Protestant cause brought into peril, by the truckling of the king,
heartily responded to the royal request, and voted a liberal subsidy. Mansfeld and
Brunswick came over to London, where they met with a splendid reception. A new army was
provided for them, and they sailed to begin operations on the Rhine; but the expedition
did not prosper. Before they had struck a single blow the plague broke out in the camp of
Mansfeld, and swept away half his army, amid revolting horrors. Brunswick had no better
fortune than his companion. He was over-taken by Tilly on the Dutch frontier, and
experienced a tremendous defeat. During the winter that followed, the two generals
wandered about with the remains of their army, and a few new recruits, whom they had
persuaded to join their banners, but they accomplished nothing save the terror they
inspired in the districts which they visited, and the money given them by the inhabitants,
on the condition of their departure with their banditti.
Charles I having now succeeded his father on the throne of England, the war was resumed on
a larger scale, and with a more persistent energy. On the 9th of December, 1625, a treaty
was concluded at the Hague between England, Holland, and Denmark, for opposing by joint
arms the power of Hapsburg, and reinstating the Elector Frederick.[5] It was a grave question who
should head the expedition as leader of its armies. Proposals had been made to Gustavus
Adolphus of Sweden, but at that moment he had on his hands a war with Poland, and could
not embark in another and more onerous campaign. England was not in a condition for
carrying on hostilities in Germany on her own account. Holland had not yet ended its great
struggle with Spain, and dared not expend on other countries the strength so much needed
within itself. Of the three contracting Powers, Denmark was the one which was most at
liberty to charge itself with the main burden of the enterprise. It was ultimately
arranged that the Danish king should conduct the campaign, and the support of the joint
enterprise was distributed among the parties as follows: – Denmark was to raise an
army of 30,000, or thereabouts; England was to furnish L 30,000, and Holland L 5,000,
month by month, as subsidy. The latter engaged, moreover, should the imperial army press
upon the King of Denmark, to make a diversion next summer by placing a fair army in the
field, and by contributing a number of ships to strengthen the English fleet on the coast.[6]
Christian IV of Denmark, who was now placed at the head of the Protestant armies in
this great war, was one of the most courageous, enlightened, and patriotic monarchs of his
time. He hid under a rough exterior and bluff manners a mind of great shrewdness, and a
generous and noble disposition. He labored with equal wisdom and success to elevate the
condition of the middle class of his subjects. He lightened their burdens, he improved
their finance, and he incited them to engage in the pursuits of commerce and trade. These
measures, which laid the foundations of that material prosperity which Denmark long
enjoyed, made him beloved at home, and greatly raised his influence abroad. His kingdom,
he knew, had risen by the Reformation, and its standing, political and social, was fatally
menaced by the Popish reaction now in progress.
As Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, he was a prince of the German Empire, and might therefore,
without wounding the self-love of others, take a prominent position in checking a movement
which threatened the liberties of all Germany, as well as the independence of his own
dominions. The appearance of Christian IV at the head of the army of the Protestant
Confederacy makes it necessary that we should introduce ourselves to another – a
different, but a very powerful figure – that now stood up on the other side. The
combinations on the one side rendered it advisable that Ferdinand should make a new
disposition of the forces on his. Hitherto he had carried on the war with the arms of the
Catholic League. Maximilian of Bavaria and his general, Tilly, occupied the foreground,
and were the most prominent actors in the business. Ferdinand now resolved to come to the
front in person, by raising an army of his own, and appointing a general to lead it. But a
formidable obstacle met him on the threshold of his new project – his military chest
was empty. He had gathered many millions front his confiscations in Bohemia, but these had
been swallowed up by the Jesuits, or spent on the wars in Hungary, and nothing remained
wherewith to fight the battles of the "Restoration." In his difficulty, he
applied to one of his generals, who had served with distinction against the Turks and
Venetians, and had borne arms nearer home in Bohemia and Hungary. This soldier was
Albrecht von Wallenstein, a man of undeniable abilities, but questionable designs. It was
this gloomy personage who gave Ferdinand an army.
The same war-like race which had sent forth Zisca to fight the battles of the Hussite
Reformers, gave Wallenstein to Rome. He was born on the 15th of September, 1583, of
Protestant parents, who had, indeed, been Calixtines through several generations. Being
early left an orphan, he was adopted by an uncle, who sent him to the Jesuit college at
Olmutz. The Fathers could have no difficulty in discerning the genius of the boy, and they
would spare no pains to adapt that genius to the purposes in which they might afterwards
have occasion to employ it. The Jesuits had already fashioned a class of men for the war,
of whom they had every reason to be proud, and who will remain to all time monuments of
their skill and of the power of their maxims in making human souls pliant and terrible
instruments of their will. Ferdinand of Austria, Maximilian of Bavaria, and his general,
Tilly, were their handiwork. To these they were about to add a fourth. With a dark soul, a
resolute will, and a heart which ambition had rendered hard as the nether mill-stone, the
Jesuits beheld in Wallenstein a war-machine of their own creating, in the presence of
which they themselves at times trembled. The same hands which had fashioned these terrible
instruments put them forth, and moved them to and fro over the vast stage which we see
swimming in blood.
Wallenstein was now in the prime of life. He had acquired in former campaigns great
experience in the raising and disciplining of troops. To his fame as a soldier he now
added the prestige of an enormous fortune. An exceedingly rich old widow had fallen in
love with him, and overcome by the philter she gave him, and not, it is to be presumed, by
the love of her gold, he married her. Next came the confiscations of estates in Bohemia,
and Wallenstein bought at absurdly low prices not fewer than sixty-seven estates.[7] Ferdinand gave him in addition
the Duchy of Friedland, containing nine towns, fifty-seven castles, and villages. After
the king, he was the richest landed proprietor in Bohemia Not content with these hoards,
he sought to increase his goods by trading with the bankers, by lending to the court, and
by imposing taxes on both friend and foe.
But if his revenues were immense, amounting to many millions of florins annually, his
expenditure was great. He lived surrounded by the pomp of an Eastern monarch. His table
was sumptuous, and some hundred guests sat down at it daily. Six gates gave entrance to
his palace, which still stands on the right bank of the Moldau, on the slope of the
Hradschin at Prague. The pile is immense, and similar chateaux were erected on his
numerous estates elsewhere. His chamberlains were twenty-four, and were selected from the
noblest families in Bohemia. Sixty pages, in blue velvet dresses bordered with gold,
waited on him. Fifty men-at-arms kept guard, day and night, in his antechamber. A thousand
persons formed the usual complement of his household. Upwards of a thousand homes filled
the stalls of his stables, and fed from marble mangers. When he journeyed, ten trumpeters
with silver bugles preceded the march; there followed a hundred carriages, laden with his
servants and baggage; sixty carriages and fifty led homes conveyed his suite; and last of
all, suitably escorted, came the chariot of the man who formed the center of all this
splendor.
Wallenstein, although the champion of Rome, neither believed her creed nor loved her
clergy. He would, admit no priest into his camp, wishing, doubtless, to be master there
himself. He issued his orders in few but peremptory words, and exacted instant and blind
obedience. The slightest infraction of discipline brought down swift and severe
chastisement upon the person guilty of it. But though rigid in all matters of discipline,
he winked at the grossest excesses of his troops outside the camp, and shut his ear to the
oft-repeated complaints of the pillagings and murders which they committed upon the
peasantry. The most unbounded license was tolerated in his camp, and only one thing was
needful – implicit submission to his authority. He had a quick eye for talent, and
never hesitated to draw from the crowd, and reward with promotion, those whom he thought
fitted to serve him in a higher rank. He was a diligent student of the stars, and never
undertook anything of moment without first trying to discover, with the help of an Italian
astrologer whom he kept under his roof, whether the constellations promised success, or
threatened disaster, to the project he was meditating. Like all who have been believers in
the occult sciences, he was reserved, haughty, inscrutable, and whether in the saloons of
his palace, or in his tent, there was a halo of mystery around him. No one shared his
secrets, no one could read his thoughts: on his face there never came smile; nor did mirth
ever brighten the countenances of those who stood around him. In his palace no heavy
footfall, no loud voices, might be heard: all noises must be hushed; silence and awe must
wait continually in that grand but gloomy chamber, where Wallenstein sat apart from his
fellows, while the stars, as they traced their path in the firmament, were slowly working
out the brilliant destinies which an eternal Fate had decreed for him. The master-passions
of his soul were pride and ambition; and if he served Rome it was because he judged that
this was his road to those immense dignities and powers which he had been born to possess.
He followed his star.
We must add the picture of his personal appearance as Michiels has drawn it. "His
tall, thin figure; his haughty attitude; the stern expression of his pale face; his wide
forehead, that seemed formed to command; his black hair, close shorn and harsh; his little
dark eyes, in which the flame of authority shone; his haughty and suspicious look; his
thick moustaches and tufted beard, produced, at the first glance, a startling sensation.
His usual dress consisted of a justaucorps of elk-skin, covered by a white doublet and
cloak; round his neck he wore a Spanish ruff, in his hat fluttered a large and red plume,
while scarlet pantaloons and boots of Cordovan leather, carefully padded on account of the
gout, completed his ordinary attire."[8]
Such was the man to whom Ferdinand of Austria applied for assistance in raising an
army.
Wallenstein's grandeur had not as yet developed to so colossal a pitch as to overshadow
his sovereign, but his ambition was already fully grown, and in the necessities of
Ferdinand he saw another stage opening in his own advancement. He undertook at once to
raise an army for the emperor. "How many does your Majesty require?" he asked.
"Twenty thousand," replied Ferdinand. "Twenty thousand ?" responded
Wallenstein, with an air of surprise. "That is not enough; say forty thousand or
fifty thousand."[9] The
monarch hinted that there might be a difficulty in provisioning so many. "Fifty
thousand," promptly responded Wallenstein, "will have abundance where twenty
thousand would starve."
The calculation by which he arrived at this conclusion was sure, but atrocious. A force of
only twenty thousand might find their entrance barred into a rich province, whereas an
army of fifty thousand was strong enough to force admission anywhere, and to remain so
long as there was anything to eat or to waste. The general meant that the army should
subsist by plunder; and fifty thousand would cost the emperor no more than twenty
thousand, for neither would cost him anything. The royal permission was given, and an army
which speed fly attained this number was soon in the field. It was a mighty assemblage of
various nationalities, daring characters and diverse faiths; and, however formidable to
the cities and provinces amid which it was encamped, it adored and obeyed the iron man
around whom it was gathered.
In the autumn of 1625 six armies were in the field, prepared to resume the bloody strife,
and devastate the land they professed to liberate. The winter of 1625 passed without any
event of moment. With the spring of 1626 the campaign was opened in earnest. The King of
Denmark, with 30,000 troops, had passed the winter in the neighborhood of Bremen, and now,
putting his army in motion, he acted along the right bank of the Weser.
Tilly, with the army of the League, descended along the left bank of the same river, in
the hope of meeting the Danish force and joining battle with it. Wallenstein, who did not
care to share his victories and divide his laurels with Tilly, had encamped on the Elbe,
and strongly fortified himself at the bridge of Dessau. It would be easy for him to march
across the country to the Weser, and fall upon the rear of the King of Denmark, should the
latter come to an engagement with Tilly. Christian IV saw the danger, and arranged with
Count Mansfeld, who had under him a finely equipped force, to make a diversion in his
favor, by marching through Germany to Hungary, joining Gabriel Bethlen, and attacking
Vienna. This maneuver would draw off Wallenstein, and leave him to cope with only the
troops under Tilly. Duke Christian of Brunswick had orders to enter Westphalia, and thence
extend his operations into the Palatinate; and Duke John Ernest of Saxe-Weimar, who was
also in the field, was to act in Saxony, and assist Mansfeld in executing the diversion by
which Wallenstein was to be drawn off from the theater of war between the Weser and the
Elbe, and allow the campaign to be decided by a trial of strength between Christian IV and
the general of the League.
Count Mansfeld set about executing his part of the plan. He marched against Wallenstein,
attacked him in his strong position on the Elbe, but he was routed with great loss. He
retreated through Silesia, pursued by his terrible antagonist, and arrived in Hungary, but
only to find a cold reception from Prince Bethlen. Worn out by toil and defeat, he set out
to return to England by way of Venice; it was his last journey, for falling sick, he died
by the way. He was soon followed to the grave by his two companions in arms, the Duke of
Brunswick and Ernest of Saxe-Weimar.
Of the four generals on the Protestant side, only one now survived, Christian IV of
Denmark. The deaths of these leaders, and the dispersion of their corps, decided the fate
of the campaign. Tilly, his army reinforced by detachments which Wallenstein had sent to
his aid, now bore down on the Danish host, which was retreating northwards. He overtook it
at Lutter, in Bernburg, and compelled it to accept battle. The Danish monarch three times
rallied his soldiers, and led them against the enemy, but in vain did Christian IV contend
against greatly superior numbers. The Danes were completely routed; 4,000 lay dead on the
field; the killed included many officers. Artillery, ammunition, and standards became the
booty of the imperialists, and the Danish king, escaping through a narrow defile with a
remnant of his cavalry, presented himself, on the evening of the day of battle, at the
gates of Wolfenbuttel.
Pursuing his victory, and driving the Danes before him, Tilly made himself master of the
Weser and the territories of Brunswick. Still advancing, he entered Hanover, crossed the
Elbe, and spread the troops of the League over the territories of Brandenburg. The year
closed with the King of Denmark in Holstein, and the League master of great part of North
Germany.
In the spring of next year (1627), Wallenstein returned from Hungary, tracing a second
time the march of his troops through Silesia and Germany in a black line of desolation. On
joining Tilly, the combined army amounted to 80,000. The two generals, having now no enemy
in their path capable of opposing them, resumed their victorious advance. Rapidly
overrunning the Dukedoms of Mecklenburg, and putting garrisons in all the fortresses, they
soon made themselves masters of the whole of Germany to the North Sea. Wallenstein next
poured his troops into Schleswig-Holstein, and attacked Christian IV in his own
territories, and soon the Danish king saw his dominions and sovereignty all but wrested
from him.
So disastrous for the Protestant interests was the issue of the campaign, illustrating how
questionable in such a controversy is the interference of the sword, and how uncertain the
results which it works out. Not only had the Protestants not recovered the Palatinate of
the Rhine, but the tide of Popish and imperialist victory had rolled on, along the course
of the Weser and the Elbe, stopping only on the shores of the Baltic. The Elector of
Brandenburg saw the imperial troops at the gate of Berlin, and had to send in his
submission to Ferdinand. The Dukes of Mecklenburg had been placed under the ban of the
empire, and expelled from their territories. The Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel had been
compelled to abandon the Danish alliance. The King of Denmark had lost all his fortresses
in Germany; his army had. been dispersed; and Schleswig-Holstein was trembling in the
balance. Wallenstein was master of most of the German towns on the shores of the Baltic
and the North Sea, but these successes only instigated to greater. The duke was at that
moment revolving mighty projects, which would vastly extend both his own and the emperor's
power. He dropped hints from which it was plain that he meditated putting down all the
German princes, with their "German liberty," and installing one emperor and one
law in the Fatherland. He would dethrone the King of Denmark, and proclaim Ferdinand in
his room. The whole of Germany, Denmark included, was to be governed from Vienna. There
was to be one exception: the Dukedoms of Mecklenburg had become his own special
principality, and as this was but a narrow land territory, lie proposed to add thereto the
dominion of the seas. By way of carrying out this dream of a vast maritime empire, he Bad
already assumed the title of "Admiral of the North and Baltic Seas." He had east
his eyes on two points of the Baltic shore, the towns of Rugen and Stralsund, as specially
adapted for being the site of his arsenals and dockyards, where he might fit out his
fleets, to be sent forth on the errands of peaceful commerce, or more probably on the
hostile expeditions of conquest.
Such was the wretched condition of Germany when the year 1627 closed upon it. Everywhere
the League had been triumphant, and all was gloom – nay, darkness. The land lay
beaten down and trampled upon by its two masters, a fanatical emperor and a dark,
inscrutable, and insatiably ambitious soldier. Its princes had been humiliated, its towns
garrisoned with foreign troops, and an army of banditti, now swollen to 100,000, were
marching hither and thither in it, and in the exercise of a boundless license were
converting its fair fields into a wilderness. As if the calamities of the present were not
enough, its masters were revolving new schemes of confiscation and oppression, which would
complete the ruin they had commenced, and plunge the Fatherland into an abyss of misery.
CHAPTER 5 Back to Top
EDICT OF RESTITUTION.
Edict of Restitution – Its Injustice – Amount of Property to be Restored –
Imperial Commissaries – Commencement at Augsburg – Bulk of Property Seized by
Ferdinand and the Jesuits – Greater Projects meditated – Denmark and Sweden
marked for Conquest – Retribution – Ferdinand asked to Disarm – Combination
against Ferdinand – Father Joseph – Outwits the Emperor – Ferdinand and the
Jesuits Plot their own Undoing.
THE party of the League were now masters of Germany. Front
the foot of the Tyrol and the banks of the Danube all northwards to the shores of the
Baltic, and the coast of Denmark, the Jesuit might survey the land and proudly say,
"I am lord of it all." Like the persecutor of early times, he might rear his
pillar, and write upon it that once Lutheranism existed here, but now it was extinct, and
henceforth Rome resumed her sway. Such were the hopes confidently entertained by the
Fathers, and accordingly the year 1629 was signalized by an edict which surpassed in its
sweeping injustice all that had gone before it. Protestantism had been slain by the sword
of Wallenstein, and the decree that was now launched was meant to consign it to its grave.
On the 6th of March, 1629, was issued the famous "Edict of Restitution." This
commanded that all the archbishoprics, bishoprics, abbacies, and monasteries, in short all
the property and goods which had belonged to the Romish Church, and which since the
Religious Peace of Passau had been taken possession of by the Protestants, should be
restored. This was a revolution the extent of which it was not easy to calculate, seeing
it overturned a state of things which had existed for now nearly a century, and implied
the transference of an amount of property so vast as to affect almost every interest and
person in Germany. "It was a coup-d'etat as furious," says Michiels, "as if
the French were now to be asked to restore the clerical property seized during the
Revolution."[1]
Part of that property went to the payment of the Protestant ministers: good part of it was
held by the princes; in some cases it formed the entire source of their revenue; its
restitution would beggar some of them, and irritate all of them. The princes might plead
that the settlement which this edict proposed to overturn had lasted now seventy-five
years; that it had been acquiesced in by the silence of four preceding emperors, and that
these secularizations had received a legal ratification at the Pacification of Augsburg in
1555, when a proposed clause enjoining restitution had been rejected. They might farther
plead that they were entitled to an equal share in those foundations which had been
contributed by their common ancestors, and that the edict would disturb the balance of the
constitution of Germany, by creating an overwhelming majority of Popish votes in the Diet.
The hardships of the edict were still farther intensified by the addition of a clause
which touched the conscience. Popish landed proprietors were empowered to compel their
vassals to adopt their religion, or leave the country. When it was objected that this was
contrary to the spirit of the Religious Peace, it was coolly replied that "Catholic
proprietors of estates were no farther bound than to allow their Protestant subjects full
liberty to emigrate."[2]
Commissaries were appointed for carrying out the edict; and all unlawful possessors
of church benefices, and all the Protestant States without exception, were ordered, under
pain of the ban of the empire, to make immediate restitution of their usurped possessions.
Behind the imperial Commissaries stood two powerful armies, ready with their swords to
enforce the orders of the Commissaries touching the execution of the edict.
The decree fell upon Germany like a thunderbolt. The bishoprics alone were extensive
enough to form a kingdom; the abbacies were numberless; lands and houses scattered
throughout all Northern Germany would have to be reft from their proprietors, powerful
princes would be left without a penny, and thousands would have to exile themselves; in
short, endless confusion would ensue. The Elector of Saxony and the Duke of Brandenburg,
whose equanimity had not been disturbed so long as religion only was in question, were now
alarmed in earnest. They could no longer hide from themselves that the destruction of the
Protestant religion, and the ruin of the German liberties, had been resolved on by the
emperor and the Catholic League.
A commencement was made of the edict in Augsburg. This was eminently a city of Protestant
memories, for there the Augustan Confession had been read, and the Religious Peace
concluded, and that doubtless made this city a delicious conquest to the Jesuits. Augsburg
was again placed under the government of its bishop, and all the Lutheran churches were
shut up. In all the free cities the Romish worship was restored by the soldiers. As
regards the richer bishoprics, the emperor, having regard to the maxim that all
well-regulated charity begins at home, got the chapters to elect his sons to them. His
second son, Leopold William, a lad of fifteen already nominated Bishop of Strasburg,
Passau, Breslau, and Olmutz, obtained as his share of the spoil gathered under the edict,
the Bishopric of Halberstadt, and the Archiepiscopates of Magdeburg and Bremen. When the
ancient heritages of the Benedictines, Augustines, and other orders came to be distributed
anew, by whom should they be claimed but by the Jesuits, an order which had no existence
when these foundations were first created! To benefice a youth of fifteen, and endow the
new order of Loyola, with this wealth, Ferdinand called "making restitution to the
original owners." "If its confiscation was called plunder, it could not be made
good by fresh robbery."[3]
Meanwhile the camarilla at Vienna, whose counsels had given birth to this Edict of
Restitution, with all the mischiefs with which it was pregnant to its authors, but which
it had not yet disclosed, were indulging in dreams of yet greater conquest. The tide of
success which had flowed upon them so suddenly had turned their heads, and nothing was too
impracticable or chimerical for them to attempt. East and west they beheld the trophies of
their victories. The once powerful Protestant Churches of Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary
were in ruins; the Palatinate of the Rhine, including that second fountain of Calvinism,
Heidelberg, had been added to their dominions; their victorious arms had been carried
along the Weser, the Elbe, and the Oder, and had stopped only on the shores of the Baltic.
But there was no reason why the Baltic should be the boundary of their triumphs. They
would make a new departure. They would carry their victories into the North Sea, and
recover for Rome the Kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden. When they had reached this furthest
limit on the north, they would return and would essay with their adventurous arms France
and England. in both of these countries Protestantism seemed on the ebb, and the thrones
so lately occupied by all Elizabeth and a Henry IV, were now filled by pedantic or senile
sovereigns, and a second period of juvenescence seemed there to be awaiting their Church.
This was the moment when the "Catholic Restoration" had reached its height, when
the House of Hapsburg was in its glory, and when the scheme of gigantic dominion at which
Loyola aimed when he founded his order, had approached more nearly than ever before or
since its full and perfect consummation.
The dreams of aggression which were now inflaming the imaginations of the Jesuits were
shared in by Ferdinand; although, as was natural, he contemplated these anticipated
achievements more from the point of his own and his house's aggrandizement, and less from
that of the exaltation of the Vatican, and the propagation over Europe of that teaching
which it styles Christianity. The emperor viewed the contemplated conquests as sound in
principle, and he could not see why they should not be found as easily practicable as they
were undoubtedly right. He had a general of consummate ability, and an army of 100,000
strong, that cost him nothing: might he not with a force so overwhelming walk to and fro
over Europe, as he had done over Germany, and prescribe to its peoples what law they were
to obey, and what creed they were to believe? This he meant assuredly to do in that vast
territory which stretches from the Balkan and the Carpathians to the German Sea, and the
northern coast of Sweden. The next conquest of his arms he fully intended should be the
two Kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden; and then changing the German Confederacy into an
absolute monarchy, sweeping away the charters and rights of its several States, which he
regarded but as so much rubbish, shutting up all its heretical churches, and permitting
only the Roman religion to be professed, the whole to the extreme north of Sweden would be
brought under what he accounted "the best political constitution – namely, one
king,, one law, one God."[4]
But to the emperor, and the Jesuits, his counselors, giddy with the achievements of
the past, and yet more so with the dreams of the future, defeat was treading upon the
heels of success. Retribution came sooner than Ferdinand had foreseen, and in a way he
could not calculate, inasmuch as it grew out of those very schemes, the success of which
seemed to guard him against any such reverse as that which was now approaching. The man
who had lifted him up to his dizzy height was to be, indirectly, the occasion of his
downfall. The first turn in the tide was visible in the jealousy which at this stage
sprang up between Ferdinand and the Catholic League. The emperor had become suddenly too
powerful to be safe for Catholic interests, and the Jesuits of the League resolved to
humble or to break him. So long as Ferdinand was content to owe his victories to
Maximilian of Bavaria as head of the League, and conquer only by the sword of Tilly, the
Jesuits were willing to permit him to go on. He was their servant while he leaned upon the
League, and they could use him or throw him aside as they found it expedient. The moment
they saw him disposed to use his power for personal or dynastic ends in opposition to the
interests of the order, they could check him, or even strip him of that power altogether.
But it was wholly different when Ferdinand separated his military operations from those of
the League, called Wallenstein to his service, raised an army of overwhelming numbers, and
was winning victories which, although they brought with them the spread of the Roman
faith, brought with them still more power to the House of Hapsburg, and glory to its
general, Wallenstein. Ferdinand was now dangerous, and they must take measures for
curtailing a power that was becoming formidable to themselves. Maximilian of Bavaria
summoned a meeting of the League at Heidelberg, and after discussing the matter, a demand
was sent to the emperor that he should disarm – that is, dismiss Wallenstein, and
dissolve his army.[5] Remove
the pedestal, thought the meeting, and the figure will fall.
Other parties came forward to urge the same demand on Ferdinand. These were the princes of
Germany, to whom the army of Wallenstein had become a terror, a scourge, and a
destruction. We can imagine, or rather we cannot imagine, the state of that land with an
assemblage of banditti, now swollen to somewhere about 100,000, [6] roaming over it, reaping the harvest of its fields, gathering the
spoil of its cities, torturing the inhabitants to compel them to disclose their treasures,
causing whole villages on the line of their march, or in the neighborhood of their
encampment, to disappear, and leaving their occupants to find a home in the woods. The
position of the princes was no longer endurable. It did not matter much whether they were
with or against Ferdinand. The ruffians assembled under Wallenstein selected as the scene
of their encampment not the most heterodox, but the most fertile province, and carried
away the cattle, the gold, and the goods which it contained, without stopping to inquire
whether the owner was a Romanist or a Protestant. "Brandenburg estimated its losses
at 20,000,000, Pomerania at 10,000,000, Hesse-Cassel at 7,000,000 of dollars, and the rest
in proportion. The cry for redress was loud, urgent, and universal; on this point
Catholics and Protestants were agreed."[7]
Ferdinand for some time obstinately shut his ear to the complaints and accusations
which reached him on all sides against his general and his army. At last he deemed it
prudent to make some concession to the general outcry. He dismissed 18,000 of his
soldiers. Under the standard of Wallenstein there remained more marauders than had been
sent away; but, over and above, the master-grievance still existed – Wallenstein was
still in command, and neither the League nor the princes would be at rest till he too had
quitted the emperor's service.
A council of the princes was held at Ratisbon (June, 1630), and the demand was renewed,
and again pressed upon Ferdinand. Host painful it was to dismiss the man to whom he owed
his greatness; but with a singular unanimity the demand was joined in by the whole
Electoral College, by the princes of the League, the Protestant princes, and by the
ambassadors of France and of Spain. Along with the ambassadors of France had come a
Capuchin friar, Father Joseph, whom Richelieu had sent as an admirable instrument for
working on the emperor. This monk has received the credit, of giving the last touch that
turned the scale in this delicate affair. "The voice of a monk," says Schiller,
"was to Ferdinand the voice of God." Ferdinand was then negotiating for the
election of his son as King of the Romans, with the view of his succeeding him in the
empire.
"It will be necessary," softly whispered the Capuchin, "to gratify the
electors on this occasion, and thereby facilitate your son's election to the Roman crown.
When this object has been gained, Wallenstein will always be ready to resume his former
station."[8] The
argument of Father Joseph prevailed; Wallenstein's dismissal was determined on; and when
it was intimated to him the general submitted, only saying to the messenger who brought
the unwelcome tidings, that he had learned his errand from the stars before his arrival.
Ferdinand faded to carry his son's election as King of the Romans; and when he found how
he had been outwitted, he vented his rage, exclaiming, "A rascally Capuchin has
disarmed me with his rosary, and crammed into his cowl six electoral bonnets."[9]
All parties in this transaction appear as if smitten with blindness and
infatuation. We behold each in turn laying the train for its own overthrow. The cause of
Protestantism seemed eternally ruined in the land of Luther, and lo, the emperor and the
Jesuits combine to lift it up! Ferdinand prepares the means for his own discomfiture and
humiliation when in the first place he quarrels with the League, and in the second when he
issues the Edict of Restitution. He drives both Jesuits and Protestants from him in turn.
Next it is the Jesuits who plot their own undoing. They compel the emperor to reduce his
army, and not only so, but they also make him dismiss a general who is more to him than an
army. And what is yet more strange, the time they select for making these great changes is
the moment when a hero, who had bound victory to his standards by his surpassing bravery
and skill, was stepping upon the shore of Northern Germany to do battle for a faith which
they had trodden into the dust, and the name of which would soon, they hoped, perish from
the Fatherland.
CHAPTER 6 Back to Top
ARRIVAL OF GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS IN GERMANY.
The Reaction – Its Limits – Preparatory Campaigns of Gustavus – All Ready
– No Alternative left to Gustavus – His Motives – His Character – His
Farewell to the Diet – His Parting Address – Embarkation – Lands in Germany
– Contempt of Gustavus by the Court of Vienna – Marches on Stettin – Is
Admitted into it – Takes Possession of Pomerania – Imperialists Driven out of
Mecklenburg – Alliance with France – Edict of Restitution – John George,
Elector of Saxony – His Project – The Convention at Leipsic – Its Failure.
THE Catholic reaction, borne onwards by the force of the
imperial arms, had rolled up to the borders of Sweden, chasing before it Christian of
Denmark, and every one who had striven to stem its advancing torrent. But a mightier
Potentate than Ferdinand or any earthly emperor had fixed the limits of the reaction, and
decreed that beyond the line it had now reached it should not pass. From the remote
regions of the North Sea a deliverer came forth, summoned by a Divine voice, and guided by
a Divine hand, empowered to roll back its swelling wave, and bid the nations it had
overwhelmed stand up and again assume, the rights of free men. The champion who now arose
to confront Rome was Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden.
A sincere Protestant, as well as valorous soldier, Gustavus Adolphus had seen with pain
and alarm the troops of the League and of the emperor overrun the States of Germany, drive
away the ministers of the Reformed faith, and set up the overturned altars of Rome. The
cry of the oppressed peoples had reached him once and again, but circumstances did not
permit of his interfering in the great quarrel. On ascending the throne, he had the
disorders of half a century in his own dominions to rectify. This was a laborious task,
but it was executed with an intelligence that replaced stagnation with life and
prosperity. The external relations of his kingdom next claimed his attention. These called
him to engage, first, in a war with Denmark; and, secondly, in a war with Russia. A third
war he was compelled to wage with Poland. His title to the throne of Sweden had been
brought into question by the Polish sovereign, who maintained that the rightful heirs were
to be found in the other line of Gustavus Vasa. The Romanists sided with the King of
Poland, in the hope of being able to wrest the sovereignty from the hands of a Protestant,
and of bringing back the kingdom to the See of Rome; and thus Gustavus Adolphus found that
he had to do battle at the same time for the possession of his crown and the Protestantism
of his realm. This contest, which was completely successful, was terminated in 1629, and
it left Sweden mistress of a large and important section of the Baltic coast. These
campaigns formed the preparation for the fourth and greatest war in which the monarch and
people of Sweden were destined to embark. The reforms set on foot within the country had
vastly augmented its resources. The power which Gustavus had acquired over the Baltic, and
the towns which he held on its coast, kept open to him the gate of entrance into Germany;
and the generals and warriors whom he had trained in these wars were such as had not been
seen in Europe since the decline of the Spanish school. All these requisites, unsuspected
by himself, had been slowly preparing, and now they were completed: he could command the
sinews of war; he had an open road to the great battle-field, and he had warriors worthy
of being his companions in arms, and able to act their part in the conflict to which he
was about to lead them.
If Gustavus Adolphus was now, what he had never been before, ready to engage in the
worldwide strife, it is not less true that that strife had reached a stage which left him
no alternative but to take part in it, if ever he would do so with the chance of success.
Victory had carried the Popish arms to the waters of the Baltic: the possessions he held
on the coast of that sea were in danger of being wrested from him; but his foes would not
stop there; they would cross the ocean; they would assail him on his own soil, and
extinguish his sovereignty and the Protestantism of his realm together. Wallenstein had
suggested such a scheme of conquest to his master, and Ferdinand would not be at rest till
he had extended his sway to the extreme north of Sweden.[1]
Such was the situation in which the Swedish monarch now found himself placed. He rightly
interpreted that situation. He knew that he could not avoid war by sitting still; that if
he did not go to meet his enemies on the plains of Germany, they would seek him out in his
own sea-girt kingdom, where he should fight at greater disadvantage. Therefore he chose
the bolder and safer course.
But these reasons, wise though they were, were not the only, nor indeed the strongest
motives that influenced Gustavus Adolphus in adopting this course. He was a devout
Christian and an enlightened Protestant, as well as a brave warrior, and he took into
consideration the seat crisis which had arrived in the affairs of Europe and of
Protestantism, and the part that fell to himself in this emergency. He saw the religion
and the liberty of Christendom on the point of being trodden out by the armed hordes of an
emperor whose councilors were Jesuits, and whose generals were content to sink the soldier
in the ruthless banditti-leader; and to whom could the oppressed nations look if not to
himself? England was indifferent, France was unwilling, Holland was unable, and, unless
Protestantism was to be saved by miracle, he must gird on the sword and essay the
Herculean task. He knew the slender means and the small army with which he must confront
an enemy who had inexhaustible resources at his command, and innumerable soldiers, with
the prestige of invincibility, under his banner; but if the difficulty of the enterprise
was immense, and might well inspire caution or even fear, it was of a nature surpassingly
grand, and might well kindle enthusiasm, and beget a sublime faith that He whose cause it
was, and who, by the very perils with which He was surrounding him, seemed to be forcing
him out into the field of battle, would bear him safely through all the dangers of the
great venture, and by his hand deliver his people. It was in this faith that Gustavus
Adolphus became the champion of Protestantism.
"In one respect," says Hausser, "Gustavus Adolphus was a unique personage
in this century: he was animated by the fresh, unbroken, youthful spirit of the early days
of the Reformation, like that which characterized such men as Frederick of Saxony and
Philip of Hesse. If it can be said of any ruler in the first half of the sixteenth
century, that he was filled with Protestant zeal and sincere enthusiasm for the greatness
of his cause, it may be said of him and of him alone. To a world full of mean artifices,
miserable intrigues, and narrow-minded men, he exhibited once more the characteristics and
qualities of a true hero. This explains why he called forth enthusiasm where it had been
for many decades unknown – why he succeeded in kindling men's minds for ideas which
had been engulfed in the miseries of the times. Sacred things were no idle sport with
him."[2]
Having resolved to present himself on the great arena, in the faith of uplifting a
cause which already appeared almost utterly ruined, Gustavus Adolphus, "like a dying
man," says Gfrorer, "set his house in order," by making arrangements for
the defense and government of his kingdom in his absence. On the 20th of May, 1630, he
assembled the Diet at Stockholm, to bid the States a solemn farewell."[3] Taking in his arms his infant
daughter Christina, then only five years old,[4] he presented her to the assembled nobles and deputies, who swore
fidelity to her as their sovereign, in the event of her royal father failing on the
battle-field. The touching spectacle melted all present into tears, and the emotion of the
king was so great that it was some time before he was able to proceed in his farewell
address to the States.
When at length he found words, the brave and devoted prince assured his people that it was
no light cause which had led him to embark in this new war. God was his witness that he
had not sought this contest. That contest exposed himself to great dangers, and it laid
heavy burdens on them; but, however full of risks and sacrifices, he dared not decline an
enterprise to which he was summoned by the cry of his perishing brethren. Even should he
and his subjects prefer their own ease to the deliverance of the oppressed, it would not
be long till they should have abundant cause to repent their selfishness. The same armed
bigotry which had wrought such desolation in Germany, was at that hour meditating the
overthrow of their own throne, and the destruction of their own religion and independence.
They must not think to escape by abiding within their own seas and shutting themselves out
from others. Who could tell whether Sweden had not attained her present place among the
nations for such a time as this? Turning to his councilors of state, he bade them seek to
be filled with wisdom, that they might govern with equity. Addressing his nobles, he
exhorted them to emulate the bravery of "those Gothic heroes who humbled in the dust
the pride of ancient Rome." The pastors he earnestly recommended to cultivate unity,
and to exemplify in their own lives the virtues they preached to others. For all classes
of his subjects he offered his earnest prayers, that order might bless their cities,
fertility clothe their fields, and plenty cheer their homes; and then, with the tenderness
of a father taking leave of his children – for the mind of the hero-prince was
oppressed by the presentiment that he should see them no more – he said, "I bid
you all an affectionate – it may be an eternal farewell."[5]
A few days after this solemn parting, the king embarked his army of 15,000 at
Elfsnabhen. It was a small host to essay so great an enterprise; but it was led by a great
general, and the heroism and devotion of the chief burned in the breasts of the soldiers.
Up to the water's edge the shore was black with the crowds which had assembled to witness
the embarkation, and to take, it might be, their last look of their beloved sovereign.
Contrary winds detained the fleet a few days, but at last the breeze veered round, and
bore away the magnanimous prince, with his chivalrous host, from a shore to which he but
too truly presaged he should return no more. In a few days the opposite coast of the
Baltic rose out of the waves, and the fleet cast anchor before the Isle of Rugen, on the
coast of Pomerania. On the 24th of June, 1630 – exactly 100 years after the
presentation of the Augsburg Confession to Charles V – Gustavus Adolphus landed on
the shore of Germany. The king was the first to step on land, and advancing a few paces
before the soldiers, he kneeled down in presence of the army, and gave thanks to God for
conveying the host in safety across the deep, and prayed that success might crown their
endeavors.
The powerful Popish monarch who had put his foot upon the neck of Germany, heard with easy
and haughty unconcern of the landing of Gustavus Adolphus. The significance of that
landing was but little understood on either the Romish or the Protestant side. Ferdinand
could not see that the mighty fabric of his power could be shaken, or the triumphant tide
of his arms rolled back, by the little host that had just crossed the Baltic. When the
courtiers of Vienna heard of the corning of Gustavus "they looked in the State
Almanack to see where the country of the little Gothic king was situated."[6] The princes of Germany, trodden
into the dust, were nearly as unable to understand that deliverance had dawned for them in
the advent of the northern hero. Front the powerful thrones of England and France they
might have looked for help; but what succor could a petty kingdom like Sweden bring them?
They could not recognize their deliverer coming in a guise so humble. Gustavus Adolphus
was a foreigner. They almost wished that he had not interfered in their matters; and
greatly as they longed to be lifted out of the mire, they were content well-nigh to be as
they were, rather than owe their emancipation to a stranger. These degenerate princes were
to be taught the power of that Protestantism from which they had so greatly declined. At
what altar had Gustavus and his followers kindled that heroism which enabled them to
command victory, if not at that of the Reformed faith? This it was that made them the
deliverers of those who had lost their liberty by losing their Protestantism.
Eager to invest his arms with the prestige of a first success, the Swedish king set out
for Stettin, and arrived under its walls before the imperial troops had time to occupy it.
Stettin was the capital of Pomerania; but its importance lay in its commanding the mouths
of the Oder, and leaving open in the rear of Gustavus a passage to Sweden, should fortune
compel him to retreat. He demanded that; the town should receive a Swedish garrison. The
citizens, but too familiar with the horrors of a foreign occupation, and not knowing as
yet the difference between the orderly and disciplined soldiers of Gustavus and the
marauders who served under Tilly and Wallenstein, were unwilling to open their gates.
Still more unwilling was their Duke Bogislaus, who added the timidity of age to that of
constitution. This prince longed to be freed from the terrors and the oppressions of
Ferdinand, but he trembled at the coming of Gustavus, fearing that the emperor would visit
with a double vengeance his compliance with the Swedish monarch's wishes. Bogislaus begged
to be permitted to remain neutral. But Gustavus told him that he must choose between
himself and Ferdinand, and that he must decide at once.
Influenced by the present rather than by the remote danger, Bogislaus opened the gates of
Stettin, and the Swedish troops entered. Instead of plundering their houses the soldiers
went with the citizens to church, and soon established a reputation which proved second
only to their valor in its influence on their future success. The occupation of this town
was a masterly stroke. It gave the king a basis of operations on the mainland, it covered
his rear, and it secured his communication with Sweden.
Step by step Gustavus Adolphus advanced into North Germany. His host swelled and
multiplied the farther his banners were borne. The soldiers who had formed the armies of
Count Mansfeld and the Duke of Brunswick, and the corps disbanded by Wallenstein, flocked
in crowds to his standard, and exchanged their plundering habits for the order and bravery
of well-disciplined troops. The capture of town after town added every day new pledges of
final success. The inequality of his force in point of numbers was more than balanced by
his great superiority in tactics. Combining the most determined resolution with the most
consummate prudence, he went on driving the imperialists before him, and by the end of
autumn almost the whole of Pomerania was in his possession. It was on these first efforts
that the final issue must depend, and not one false step had he made in them.
"Napoleon considered him to be the first general of all times, chiefly because during
a dangerous and tedious campaign, from June, 1630, to the autumn of 1631, he advanced
slowly, but surely, towards the center of Germany without suffering any repulse worth
mentioning."[7]
When winter approached, the imperial generals, wearied with their defeats, sent
plenipotentiaries to the camp of the Swedes to sue for a cessation of hostilities, but
they found they had to do with an enemy who, clad in sheep's-skin, felt no winter in the
climate of Germany. The reply of Gustavus to the proposal that both sides should go into
winter quarters was, "The Swedes are soldiers in winter as well as in summer."[8] The imperialist soldiers were
farther harassed by the peasantry, who now avenged upon them the pillagings and murders
they had been guilty of in their advance. Desertion was thinning and disorganization
weakening their ranks, and the imperial commander in Pomerania, Torquato Conte, took the
opportunity of resigning a command which, while adding nothing to his wealth, was every
day lessening his reputation.
Flying before the victorious arms of Gustavus Adolphus, and abandoning in their retreat
wagons and standards,[9] to
be gathered up by the Swedes, the imperial troops took refuge in Brandenburg, where they
prepared for themselves future calamities by oppressing and plundering the inhabitants,
although the subjects of a ruler who was the ally of their emperor. The king would have
followed the enemy into the Duchy of Brandenburg, had not the gates of Kustrin, opened to
admit the imperialists, been closed upon himself. He now turned his victorious arms
towards Mecklenburg, whose dukes the Emperor Ferdinand had stripped of their territory and
driven into exile. The capture of Demmin gave him entrance into this territory, where
success continued to attend his arms. By the end of February, 1631, the king had taken
fully eighty cities, strongholds, and redoubts in Pomerania and Mecklenburg.[10]
At this stage there came a little help to the Protestant hero from a somewhat
suspicious quarter, France. Cardinal Richelieu, who was now supreme in that kingdom, had
revived the foreign policy of Henry IV, which was directed to the end of humbling the
House of Austria, and his quick eye saw in the Swedish warrior a fit instrument, as he
thought, for achieving his purpose. It was a delicate matter for a "prince of the
Church" to enter into an alliance with a heretical king, but Richelieu trusted that
in return for the subsidy he offered to Gustavus he would be allowed the regulation and
control of the war. He found, however, in Adolphus his master. The Treaty of Balwarde
(January, 1631) secured to Gustavus a subsidy of 400,000 dollars, for the attainment of
interests common to France and Sweden, but left to the latter Power the political and
military direction. This was a diplomatic victory of no small importance to the Swedish
monarch. The capture of two important places, Colberg and Frankfort-on-the-Oder, which
followed soon after, shed fresh luster on the Swedish arms, and made the expedition of
Gustavus Adolphus appear still more prominent in the eyes of Europe.
Even the Protestant princes of Germany began to show a little heart. They had basely
truckled to the Emperor Ferdinand; not a finger had they lifted to stem the torrent of the
Catholic reaction; but now, conscious that a mighty power had arrived in the midst of
them, they began to talk of reasserting their rights. They were yet too proud to accept of
help from the stranger, but his presence among them, and the success that was crowning his
efforts in a war which ought to have been undertaken by themselves, helped to rouse them
from that shameful and criminal apathy into which they had fallen, and which indisposed
them for the least effort to recover the much of which they had been stripped, or to
retain the little that had been left to them. At this moment Ferdinand of Austria did his
best, though all unintentionally, to stimulate their feeble efforts, and to make them join
their arms with those of the Swedish monarch in fighting the battle of a common
Protestantism. The emperor issued orders to his officers to put in execution the Edict of
Restitution. The enforcement of this edict would sweep into the Treasury of the emperor
and of the Roman Church a vast amount of Protestant property in the two most powerful
Protestant electorates in Germany, those of Saxony and Brandenburg, and would specially
irritate the two most important allies whom the emperor had among the Protestant princes.
The hour was certainly ill-chosen for such a proceeding, when Wallenstein had been
dismissed, when defeat after defeat was scattering the imperial armies, and when the
advancing tide of Swedish success was threatening to sweep away all the fruits of
Ferdinand's former victories even more rapidly than he had achieved them. But, the Court
of Vienna believing that its hold on Germany was firm ever to be loosened, and despising
this assault from the little Sweden, Ferdinand, acting doubtless by the advice of the
Jesuits, gave orders to proceed with the plunder of his Protestant allies.
It was only now that the veil was fully lifted from the eyes of John George, Elector of
Saxony. This prince exhibits little save contrast to the pious, magnanimous, and
public-spirited Electors of Saxony of a former day. His private and personal manners were
coarse; he dressed slovenly, and fed gluttonously. His public policy was utterly selfish.
He had long been the dupe of the emperor, his sottish understanding and groveling aims
preventing him from seeing the gulf into which he was sinking. But now, finding himself
threatened with annihilation, he resolved to adopt a decisive policy. As Elector of Saxony
he was the leader of the Protestant princes, and he now purposed to place himself at their
head, and form a third party in Germany, which would oppose the emperor on the one side,
and the King of Sweden on the other. The Elector of Saxony would not lower himself by
joining with Gustavus Adolphus He did not need the hand of the northern stranger to pull
him out of the mire; he would extricate himself.
Proceeding in the execution of his plans, destined, he believed, to restore the German
liberties, the Elector of Saxony summoned a convention of the Protestant States, to meet
at Leipsic in February, 1631. The assemblage was brilliant, but can hardly be said to have
been powerful. The princes and deputies who composed it would never have had the courage
to meet, had they not known that they assembled under the shadow of the Swedish arms,
which they affected to despise. Their convention lasted three months, and their time was
divided between feasting and attempts to frame a program of united action. The Jesuits
jeered. "The poor little Lutheran princes," said they, "are holding a
little convention at Leipsic.
Who is there?" they asked. "A princeling and a half. What are they going to do?
Make a little war." The princes did not make a war either little or great: they
contented themselves with petitioning the emperor to remove the grievances of which they
complained. They begged him especially to revoke the Edict of Restitution, and to withdraw
his troops from their cities and fortresses. To this petition not the least heed was ever
paid. The princes did not even form a league among themselves; they thought they had done
enough when they fixed the number of soldiers that each was to furnish, in the event of
their forming a league some other time.[11] This was a truly pitiable spectacle. The princes saw their country
devastated, their cities occupied by foreign troops, their religion and their liberties
proscribed – in short, all that gave glory and renown to Germany smitten down by the
hand of tyranny, yet the power and the spirit alike were wanting for the vindication of
their rights, and amid the ruin of every virtue their pride alone survived; for we see
them turning away with disdain from the strong arm that is extended towards them for the
purpose of pulling them out of the gulf. Plain it was that the hour of their deliverance
was yet distant.
CHAPTER 7 Back to Top
FALL OF MAGDEBURG AND VICTORY OF LEIPSIC.
Magdeburg – Its Wealth and Importance – Coveted by both Parties – It
declares against the Imperialists – Its Administrator – Count von Tilly –
His Career – Personal Appearance – Magdeburg Invested – Refuse a Swedish
Garrison – Suburbs Burned – The Assault – The Defense – Council of War
– The Cannonading Ceases – False Hopes – The City Stormed and Taken –
Entry of Tilly – Horrors of the Sack – Total Destruction of the City –
Gustavus Blamed for not Raising the Siege – His Defense – The Electors of
Brandenburg and Saxony now Join him – Battle of Leipsic – Plan of Battle –
Total Rout of the Imperialists – All is Changed.
WHILE the convention of Leipsic was making boastful speeches,
and the Jesuits were firing off derisive pasquils, and Ferdinand of Austria was
maintaining a haughty and apparently an unconcerned attitude in presence of the invading
Swedes, Gustavus Adolphus was adding victory to victory, and every day marching farther
into the heart of Germany. His advance at last caused alarm to the imperial generals, and
it was resolved to trifle no longer with the matter, but to adopt the most energetic
measures to oppose the progress of the northern arms. This brings us to one of the most
thrilling incidents of the war – the siege and capture of Magdeburg.
This ancient and wealthy city stood on the left bank of the Elbe. It was strongly
fortified, being enclosed on its land sides by lofty walls and broad ditches. The commerce
on its river had greatly enriched the citizens, and the republican form of their
government had nourished in their breasts a spirit of independence and bravery. In those
days, when neither trade nor liberty was widely diffused, Magdeburg had fewer rivals to
contend with than now, and it surpassed in riches and freedom most of the cities in
Germany. This made it a prize earnestly coveted by both sides. If it should fall into the
hands of the Swedes, its situation and strength would make it an admirable storehouse and
arsenal for the army; and, on the other hand, should the imperialists gain possession of
it, it would give them a basis of operations from which to threaten Gustavus Adolphus in
his rear, and would put it into their power to close against him one of his main exits
from Germany, should defeat compel him to retreat towards the Baltic. Its government was
somewhat anomalous at this moment. It was the capital of a rich bishopric, which had for
some time been in possession of the Protestant princes of the House of Brandenburg.
Its present administrator, Christian William, had made himself obnoxious to Ferdinand, by
taking part with the King of Denmark in his invasion of the empire; and the chapter,
dreading the effects of the emperor's anger, deposed Christian William, and elected the
second son of the Elector of Saxony in his room. The emperor, however, disallowed this
election, and appointed his own son Leopold to the dignity; but Christian William of
Brandenburg, having made friends with the magistrates and the citizens, resumed his
government of the city, and having roused the inhabitants by pointing to the devastations
which the imperial troops had committed on their territory, and having held out to them
hopes of succor from the Swedes, whose victorious leader was approaching nearer every day,
he induced them to declare war against the emperor. They joined battle with small bodies
of imperialists, and succeeded in defeating them, and they had even surprised the town of
Halle, when the advance of the main army under Tilly compelled them to fall back and shut
themselves up in Magdeburg.
Before entering on the sad story of Magdeburg's heroic defense and tragic fall, let us
look at the man who was destined to be the chief actor in the scenes of carnage about to
ensue. .Count von Tilly was born in Liege, of a noble family. He received his military
education in the Netherlands, then the most famous school for generals. By nature cold, of
gloomy disposition, and cherishing an austere but sincere bigotry, he had served with
equal zeal and ability in almost all the wars of the period against Protestantism. His
sword had been drawn on the bloody fields of the Low Countries; he had combated against
the Protestant armies in Hungary and Bohemia, and when the wars came to an end in these
countries, because there were no more Protestants to slay, he had been appointed to lead
the armies of the League. When Wallenstein was dismissed he was made generalissimo of the
Emperor Ferdinand, and it is in this capacity that we now find him before the walls of
Magdeburg. Schiller has drawn his personal appearance with the power of a master.
"His strange and terrific aspect," says he, "was in unison with his
character. Of low stature, thin, with hollow cheeks, a long nose, a broad and wrinkled
forehead, large whiskers, and a pointed chin; he was generally attired in a Spanish
doublet of green silk, with slashed sleeves, with a small and peaked hat upon his head,
surmounted by a red feather, which hung down his back. His whole aspect recalled to
recollection the Duke of Alva, the scourge of the Flemings, and his actions were by no
means calculated to remove the impression."[1]
Tilly knew too well the art of war to despise his great opponent. "This is a
player," said he of Gustavus Adolphus, "from whom we gain much if we merely lose
nothing."
Magdeburg was first invested by Count Pappenheim, an ardent supporter of the House of
Austria, and accounted the first cavalry general of his age. He was soon joined by Tilly
at the head of his army, and the city was more closely invested than ever. The line of
walls to be defended was extensive, the garrison was small, and the citizens, when they
saw the imperialist banners on all sides of them, began to repent having declined the
offer of Gustavus Adolphus to aid in the defense with a regiment of his soldiers. Faction,
unhappily, divided the citizens, and they refused to admit the Swedish garrison within
their walls; nor, wealthy though they were, would they even advance money enough to levy
troops sufficient for their defense. The Swedish monarch was pained at the course they
chose to adopt, but the city was now shut in, and all he could do was to send Count
Falkenberg, a brave and experienced officer, to direct the military operations, and aid
with his counsel the Administrator Christian William.
All during the winter of 1630-31, Magdeburg continued to be invested; but the siege made
slow progress owing to the circumstance that the two generals, Tilly and Pappenheim, were
compelled to withdraw, to withstand the advance of Gustavus Adolphus, leaving inferior men
to command in their absence. But in March, 1631, the two great leaders returned, and the
operations of the siege were resumed with rigor. After the first few days the outposts and
suburbs were abandoned, and, being set fire to by the imperialists, were reduced to ashes.
The battle now advanced to the walls and gates. During all the month of April the storm of
assault and resistance raged fiercely round the fortifications. The citizens armed
themselves to supplement the smallness of the garrison, and day and night fought on the
walls. Daily battle thinned their numbers, want began to impair their strength, but their
frequent sallies told the besiegers that their spirit and bravery remained unabated. Their
detestation of the tyranny of Ferdinand, their determination to retain their Protestant
faith, and their hopes of relief from Gustavus Adolphus, who they knew was in their
neighborhood, made them unanimous in their resolution to defend the place to the last.
The approach of the Swedish hero was as greatly dreaded in the camp of Tilly, as it was
longed for in the city of Magdeburg. A march of three days, it was known., would bring him
before the walls, and then the imperialists would be between two fires; they would have
the Swedes, flushed with victory, in their rear, and the besieged, armed with despair, in
their front. Tilly often directed anxious eyes into the distance, fearing to discover the
Swedish banners on the horizon. He assembled a council of war, to debate whether he should
raise the siege, or attempt carrying Magdeburg by storm. It was resolved to storm the city
before Gustavus should arrive. No breach had yet been made in the walls, and the besiegers
must add stratagem to force, would they take the place. It was resolved to follow the
precedent of the siege of Maestricht, where a sudden cessation of the cannonading had done
more to open the gates than all the fire of the artillery. On the 9th of May, at noon, the
cannon of Tilly ceased firing, and the besiegers removed a few of the guns.
"Ah!" said the citizens of Magdeburg, joyfully, "we are saved; the Swedish
hero is approaching, and the hosts of Tilly are about to flee." All that night the
cannon of the besiegers remained silent. This confirmed the impression of the citizens
that the siege was about to be raised. The danger which had so long hung above them and
inflicted so fearful a strain on their energies being gone, as they believed, the
weariness and exhaustion that now overpowered them were in proportion to the former
tension. The stillness seemed deep after the nights of fire and tempest through which they
had passed. The silver of morning appeared in the east; still all was calm. The sun of a
May day beamed forth, and showed the imperial encampment apparently reposing.
One-half of the garrison, by order of Falkenberg, had been withdrawn from the walls, the
wearied citizens were drowned in sleep, and the few who were awake were about to repair to
the churches to offer thanks for their deliverance, when, at seven of the morning, sudden
as the awakening of a quiescent volcano, a terrific storm broke over the city.
The roar of cannon, the ringing of the tocsin, the shouts of assailants, blending in one
frightful thunder-burst, awoke the citizens. Stunned and terrified, they seized their arms
and rushed into the street, only to find the enemy pouring into the town over the ramparts
and through two of the gates, of which they had already gained possession. Falkenberg, as
he was hurrying from post to post, was cut down at the commencement of the assault. His
fall was fatal to the defense, for the attack not having been foreseen, no plan of
resistance had been arranged; and though the citizens, knowing the horrors that were
entering with the soldiers, fought with a desperate bravery, they were unable –
without a leader, and without a plan – to stem the torrent of armed men who were
every minute pouring into their city. It was easy scaling the walls, when defended by only
a handful of men; it was equally easy forcing the gates, when the guards had been
withdrawn to fight on the ramparts. Every moment the odds against the citizens were
becoming more overwhelming, and by twelve o'clock all resistance was at an end, and
Magdeburg was in the hands of the enemy.
Tilly now entered with the army. He took possession of the principal streets with his
troops, and pointing his shotted cannon upon the masses of the citizens, compelled them to
retire into their houses, there to await their fate. Regiment after regiment poured into
Magdeburg. There entered, besides the German troops, the pitiless Walloons, followed by
the yet more terrible Croats. What a horde of ruffianism! Although an army of wolves or
tigers had been collected into Magdeburg, the danger would not have been half .so terrible
as that which now hung over the city from this assemblage of men, inflamed by every brutal
passion, who stood wailing the signal to spring upon their prey.
Silence was signal enough: even Tilly dared not have withstood these men in their dreadful
purpose. "And now began a scene of carnage," says Schiller, "which history
has no language, poetry no pencil, to portray. Neither the innocence of childhood nor the
helplessness of old age, neither youth, sex, rank, nor beauty could disarm the fury of the
conquerors. Wives were dishonored in the arms of their husbands, and daughters at the feet
of their parents." Infants were murdered at the breast, or tossed from pike to pike
of the Croats, and then flung into the fire. Fifty-three women were found in a single
church, their hands tied and their throats cut. Some ladies of wealth and beauty were tied
to the stirrups of the soldiers' horses, and led away captive. It were a wickedness even
to write all the shameful and horrible things that were done: how much greater a
wickedness was it to do them! Some of the officers of the League, shocked at the awful
sights, ventured to approach Tilly, and beg him to put a stop to the carnage. "Come
back in an hour," was his answer, "and I shall see what can be done. The soldier
must have some recompense for his danger and toils." The tempest of shrieks, and
wailings, and shoutings, of murder and rapine, the rattling of musketry and the clashing
of swords, continued to rage, while the general stood by, a calm spectator of the woes and
crimes that were passing around him.
The city had been set fire to in several places, and a strong wind springing up, the
conflagration raged with a fury which no one sought to control. The roar of the flames was
now added to the other sounds of terror that rose from the doomed spot. The fire ran along
the city with great rapidity, and swept houses, churches, and whole streets before it; but
amid the smoke, the falling buildings, and the streets flowing with blood, the plunderer
continued to prowl, and the murderer to pursue his victim, till the glowing and almost
burning air drove the miscreants back to their camp. Magdeburg had ceased to exist; this
fair, populous, and wealthy city, one of the finest in Germany, was now a field of
blackened ruins.
Every edifice had fallen a prey to the flames, with the exception of a church and a
convent, which the soldiers assisted the monks to save, and 150 fishermen's huts which
stood on the banks of the Elbe. "The thing is so horrible," says a contemporary
writer, "that I am afraid to mention it further. According to the general belief
here, above 40,000 of all conditions have ended their days in the streets and houses by
fire and sword."[2]
The same German party who had declined, with an air of offended dignity, the help
of Gustavus Adolphus, now blamed him for not having extended his assistance to Magdeburg.
This made it necessary for the Swedish monarch to explain publicly why he had not raised
the siege. He showed conclusively that he could not have done so without risking the whole
success of his expedition, and this he did not feel justified in doing for the sake of a
single city. He had resolved, he said, the moment he heard of the danger of Magdeburg, to
march to its relief: but first the Elector of Saxony refused a passage for his troops
through his dominions; and, secondly, the Elector of Brandenburg was equally unwilling to
guarantee an open retreat for his army through his territory in case of defeat. The fate
of Magdeburg was thus mainly owing to the vacillating and cowardly policy of these two
Electors, who had, up to that moment, not made it plain to Gustavus whether they were his
friends or his enemies, and whether they were to abide with the League or join their arms
with his in defense of Protestantism.
But the fall of Magdeburg was helpful to the Protestant cause. It sent a thrill of horror
through Germany, and it alarmed the wavering Electors of Brandenburg and Saxony, who began
to see that the end of that neutrality which they thought so dexterous would be that they
would be the last to be devoured by the imperial arms. Accordingly, first the Landgrave of
Hesse made a firm compact with Gustavus Adolphus, and ever after continued his staunchest
friend. A raid which Tilly made into his territories after leaving Magdeburg helped
powerfully to this alliance with the Swedish king. The next to become the ally of Gustavus
was the Elector of Brandenburg – not, however, till the Swedes had marched to Berlin,
and Gustavus, pointing his cannon at the palace, demanded of the Elector that he should
say whether he was for him or against him. Last of all, the Elector of Saxony, who had
endured such distress and irresolution of mind, and who now received a visit from Tilly
and his marauders – their track marked, as usual, by frightful devastation –
came at length to a decision, and joined his arms with those of Gustavus. This opened the
way for the crowning victory of the campaign, which established the fortunes of Gustavus,
and broke in pieces the army of the emperor.
Strengthened by these alliances, Gustavus crossed the Elbe. The next day his forces were
joined by the Saxon army, 35,000 strong. At a council of war which was held here, it was
debated whether the confederated host was strong enough to risk a battle, or whether the
war should be protracted. "If we decide upon a battle," said Gustavus, "a
crown and two electorates are at stake." The die was cast in favor of fighting.
Gustavus put his army in motion to meet Tilly, who lay encamped in a strong and
advantageous position near Leipsic. On the evening of the 6th September, 1631, Gustavus
learned that he was within half a dozen miles of the imperialists. That night he dreamed
that he had caught Tilly by the hair of his head, but that all his exertions could not
secure his prisoner before he had succeeded in biting him on the left arm.[3] Next morning the two hostile
armies were in sight of each other. Gustavus had seen the dawn of this day with deep
anxiety. For the first time he was in presence of the whole imperial host, under its
hitherto unconquered leader, and the issue of this day's battle would decide whether the
object for which he had crossed the Baltic was to be attained, and Germany set free from
her chains, or whether defeat lowered over himself, and political and religious bondage
over the Fatherland. Christendom waited with anxiety the issue of the event.
The army of Tilly was drawn up in a single far-extending line on a rising ground on the
plain of Breitenfeld, within a mile of Leipsic. The cannon were planted on the heights
which rose behind the army, so as to sweep the plain, but making it impossible for the
imperial troops to advance without coming within the range of their own fire. The infantry
was placed in the center, where Tilly himself commanded; the cavalry formed the wings,
with Furstenberg on the right, and Pappenheim on the left. The Swedish army was arranged
into center and. wings, each two columns in depth. Teuffel commanded in the center, Horn
led the left wing, and the king himself the right, fronting Pappenheim. The Saxon troops,
under the Elector, were stationed a little in the rear, on the left, at some distance from
the Swedish main body, the king deeming it prudent to separate Saxon from Swedish valor;
and the event justified his forethought. The battle was joined at noon. It began with a
cannonading, which lasted two hours. At two o'clock Pappenheim began the attack by
throwing his cavalry upon the right wing of the Swedes, which was commanded by the king.
The wind was blowing from the west, and the dust from the new-ploughed hind was driven in
clouds in the face of the Swedes. To avoid the annoyance the king wheeled rapidly to the
north, and the troops of Pappenheim, rushing in at the void which the king's movement had
left between the right wing and the center, were met in front by the second column of the
wing, and assailed in the rear by the first column, led by the king, and after a desperate
and prolonged conflict they were nearly all cut in pieces. Pappenheim was driven from the
field, with the loss of his ordnance. While this struggle was proceeding between the two
confronting wings, Tilly descended from the heights, and attacked the left wing of the
Swedish army. To avoid the severe fire with which the Swedes received him, lie turned off
to attack the Saxons, who, mostly raw recruits, gave way and fled, carrying the Elector
with them, who stopped only when he had reached Eilenburg.[4] Only one division under Arnim remained on the field, and saved the
Saxon honor.
Deeming the victory won, the imperialists raised the cry of pursuit. Some 8,000 or 9,000
left the field on the track of the flying Saxons, numbers of whom were overtaken and
slaughtered. Gustavus seized the moment to fall upon the flank of the imperial center, and
soon effectually routed it, with the exception of two regiments concealed by the smoke and
dust. The center of the imperialists had been broken, and their left wing driven from the
field, when the troops under Furstenberg, who had returned from chasing the Saxons,
assailed with desperate fury the left wing of the Swedes. The conflict had almost ceased
on the other parts of the field, and the last and most terrible burst of the tempest was
here to discharge itself, and the fate of the day to be decided. Foot and horse,
cuirassier, pikeman, and musketeer were drawn hither, and mingled in fearful and bloody
conflict. The sun was now sinking in the west, and his slanting beam fell on the quiet
dead, scattered over the field, but still that heaving mass in the center kept surging and
boiling; cuirass and helmet, pike-head and uplifted sword, darting back the rays of the
sun, which was descending lower and lower in the horizon. The mass was growing perceptibly
smaller, as soldier and horse fell beneath saber or bullet, and were trampled into the
bloody mire. Tills and his imperialists were fighting for the renown of a hundred battles,
which was fast vanishing. The most obstinate valor could not long hold out against the
overwhelming odds of the Swedish warriors; and a remnant of the imperialists, favored by
the dusk of evening, and the cloud and dust that veiled the battle-field, escaped from the
conflict – the remnant of those terrible battalions which had inflicted such
devastation on Germany.[5]
When Gustavus Adolphus rode out of the field, all was changed. He was no longer "the
little Gothic king;" he was now the powerful conqueror, the terror of the Popish and
the hope of the Protestant princes of Germany. The butchers of Magdeburg had been trampled
into the bloody dust of Breitenfeld. The imperialist army had been annihilated; their
leader, whom some called the first captain of the age, had left his glory on the field
from which he was fleeing; the road into the center of Germany was open to the conqueror;
the mighty projects of the Jesuits were menaced with overthrow; and the throne of the
emperor was beginning to totter.
CHAPTER 8 Back to Top
CONQUEST OF THE RHINE AND BAVARIA —
BATTLE OF LUTZEN.
Thanksgiving — Two Roads — Gustavus Marches to the Rhine — Submission of
Erfurt, Wurzburg, Frankfort — Capture of Mainz — Gustavus' Court -Future
Arrangements for Germany — The King's Plans — Stipulations for Peace —
Terms Rejected — Gustavus Enters Bavaria — Defeat and Death of Tilly —
Wallenstein Recalled — His Terms — The Saxons in Bohemia -Gustavus at Augsburg
— At Ingolstadt — His Encampment at Nuremberg — Camp of Wallenstein —
Famine and Death — Wallenstein Invades Saxony — Gustavus Follows him — The
Two Armies Meet at Lutzen — Morning of the Battle — The King's Address to his
Troops — The Battle — Capture and Recapture of Trenches and Cannon —
Murderous Conflicts — The King Wounded — He Falls.
WHEN he saw how the day had gone, the first act of Gustavus
Adolphus was to fall on his knees on the blood-besprinkled plain, and to give thanks for
the victory which had crowned his arms.[1] On this field the God of battles had "cast down the
mighty," and "exalted them of low degree."
There was now an end to the jeers of the Jesuits, and the supercilious insolences of
Ferdinand. Having offered his prayer, Gustavus rose up to prosecute, in the mightier
strength with which victory had clothed him, the great enterprise which had brought him
across the sea. He encamped for the night between the city of Leipsic and the field of
battle. On that field 7,000 imperialists lay dead, and in addition 5,000 had been wounded
or taken prisoners. The loss of the Swedes did not exceed 700; that of the Saxons amounted
to 2,000, who had fallen on the field, or been cut down in the pursuit. In a few days the
Elector of Saxony, who had accompanied his soldiers in their flight, believing all to be
lost, returned to the camp of the king, finding him still victorious, and a council of war
was held to decide on the measures to be adopted for the further prosecution of the war.
Two roads were open to Gustavus — one to Vienna, and the other to the Rhine; which of
the two shall he choose? If the king had marched on Vienna, taking Prague on his way, it
is probable that he would have been able to dictate a peace on his own terms at the gates
of the Austrian capital. His renowned chancellor, Oxenstierna, was of opinion that this
was the course which Gustavus ought to have followed.[2] But the king did not then fully know the importance of the victory
of Breitenfeld, and the blow it had inflicted on the imperial cause; nor could he expect
any material succors in Bohemia, where Protestantism was almost entirely trampled out; so,
sending the Elector of Saxony southwards, where every operation against the Popish States
would help to confirm his own Protestant loyalty, still doubtful, the Swedish monarch
directed his own march to the West, where the free cities, and the Protestant princes,
waited his coming to shake off the yoke of Ferdinand, and rally round the standard of the
Protestant Liberator.
His progress was a triumphal march. The fugitive Tilly had collected a few new regiments
to oppose his advance, but he had marshaled them only to be routed by the victorious
Swedes. The strongly fortified city of Erfurt fell to the arms of Gustavus; Gotha and
Weimar also opened their gates to him. He exacted an oath of allegiance from their
inhabitants, as he did of every town of any importance, of which he took possession,
leaving a garrison on his departure, to secure its loyalty. The army now entered the
Thuringian Forest, cresset lights hung upon the trees enabling it to thread its densest
thickets in perfect safety. On the 30th September, 1631, the king crossed the frontier of
Franconia. The cities opened their gates to him, most of them willingly, and a few after a
faint show of resistance. To all of them the conqueror extended protection of their civil
rights, and liberty of worship.
The Bishops of Wurzburg and Bamberg trembled when they saw the Swedes pouring like a
torrent into their territories. These two ecclesiastics were among the most zealous
members of the League, and the most virulent enemies of the Protestants, and they and the
towns of their principalities anticipated the same treatment at the hands of the
conquerors which they in similar circumstances had inflicted on others. Their fortresses,
cities, and territories were speedily in possession of Gustavus, but to their glad
surprise, instead of the desecration of their churches, or the persecution of their
persons, they beheld only a brilliant example of toleration. The Protestant worship was
set up in their cities, but the Roman service was permitted to be practiced as before. The
Bishop of Wurzburg, however, had not remained to be witness of this act of moderation. He
had fled to Paris at the approach of Gustavus. In the fortress of Marienburg, which the
Swedish king carried by storm, he found the valuable library of the Jesuits, which he
caused to be transported to Upsala. This formed some compensation for the more valuable
library of Heidelberg which had been transferred to Rome. On the 17th of November he
entered Frankfort-on-the-Maine, and marched his army in a magnificent procession through
it. "He appeared in the midst of his troops, clad in cloth of scarlet and gold,
riding a handsome Spanish jennet, bare-headed, with a bright and handsome countenance, and
returning with graceful courtesy the cheers and salutations of the spectators."[3] From the furthest shore of
Pomerania, to the point where he had now arrived, the banks of the Maine, the king had
held his victorious way without being once compelled to recede, and without encountering a
single defeat. "Here, in the heart of Germany, he received the Protestant States like
a German emperor of the olden time."[4]
Traversing the Ecclesiastical States that stretch from the Maine to the Rhine,
"the Priest's Row," the milk and honey of which regaled his soldiers after the
sterile districts through which they had passed, Gustavus crossed the Rhine, and laid
siege (11th December) to the wealthy city of Mainz. In two days it capitulated, and the
king entered it in state, attended by the Landgrave of Hesse. After this he returned to
Frankfort, where he fixed his abode for a short while.[5]
If the summer had been passed in deeds of arms, the winter was not less busily
occupied in securing the fruits of these dangers and toils. Gustavus' queen, to whom he
was tenderly attached, joined him at Mainz, to which he again repaired; so too did his
chancellor, the famous Oxenstierna, on whose wisdom he so confidingly and justly relied.
The city of Mainz and the banks of the Rhine resounded with the din and shone with the
splendor of the old imperial times. Couriers were hourly arriving and departing;
ambassadors from foreign States were daily receiving audience; the Protestant princes, and
the deputies from the imperial towns, were crowding to pay their homage to, or solicit the
protection of, the victorious chief; uniforms and royal equipages crowded the street; and
while the bugle's note and the drum's roll were heard without, inside the palace
negotiations were going on, treaties were being framed, the future condition and relations
of Germany were being discussed and decided upon, and efforts were being made to frame a
basis of peace, such as might adjust the balance between Popish and Protestant ,Germany,
and restore rest to the weary land, and security to its trembling inhabitants.
When the king set out from Sweden to begin this gigantic enterprise, his one paramount
object was the restoration of Protestantism, whose overthrow was owing quite as much to
the pusillanimity of the princes, as to the power of the imperial arms. He felt "a
divine impulse" impelling him onwards, and he obeyed, without settling, even with
himself, what recompense he should have for all his risks and toils, or what material
guarantees it might be necessary to exact, not only for the security of a re-established
Protestantism, but also for the defense of his own kingdom of Sweden, which the success of
his expedition would make an object of hostility to the Popish princes. The Elector of
Brandenburg had sounded him on this point before he entered his dominions, and Gustavus
had frankly replied that if the exiles were restored, religious liberty granted in the
States, and himself secured against attack from the Hapsburgs in his own country, he would
be satisfied. But now, in the midst of Germany, and taking a near view of matters as
success on the battle-field had shaped them, and especially considering the too obvious
lukewarmness and imbecility of the Protestant princes, it is probable that the guarantees
that would have satisfied him at an earlier stage, he no longer deemed sufficient.
It is even possible that he would not have declined a controlling power over the princes,
somewhat like that which the emperor wielded. We do not necessarily impute ambitious views
to Gustavus Adolphus, when we admit the Possibility of some such arrangement as this
having shaped itself before his mind; for it might seem to him that otherwise the
existence of a Protestant Germany was not possible. He would have been guilty of something
like folly, if he had not taken the best means in his power to perpetuate what he
accounted of so great value, and to save which from destruction he had undertaken so long
a march, and fought so many battles; and when he looked round on the princes he might well
ask himself, "Is there one of them to whom I can with perfect confidence commit this
great trust?" We do not say that he had formed this plan; but if the fruits of his
victories were not to be dissipated, some such plan he would ultimately have been
compelled to have recourse to; and amidst a crowd of insincere, pusillanimous, and
incompetent princes, where could a head to such a confederacy have been found if not in
the one only man of zeal, and spirit, and capacity that the cause had at its service?
The restorations that the Swedish king at this hour contemplated, and the aspect which the
future Germany would have worn, had he lived to put the crown upon his enterprise, may be
gathered from the stipulations which he demanded when the Roman Catholic party made
overtures of peace to him. These were the following:
We have two lists of these conditions — one by
Khevenhiller,[7] and
another by Richelieu.[8] In
the latter list the 10th article, which stipulates that Gustavus should be made King of
the Romans, is wanting. To be King of Rome was to hold in reversion the empire; but this
article is far from being authenticated.
Such were the terms on which the conqueror was willing to sheathe his sword and make peace
with the emperor. Substantially, they implied the return of Germany to its condition
before the war (status quo ante bellum); and they were not only just and equitable, but,
though Richelieu thought otherwise, extremely moderate, when we think that they were
presented by a king, in the heart of Germany, at the head of a victorious host, to another
sovereign whose army was all but annihilated, and the road to whose capital stood open to
the conqueror. The stipulations, in brief, were the free profession of religion to both
Romanists and Lutherans throughout the empire.[9] The terms were rejected, and the war was resumed.
In the middle of February, 1532, the king put his army in motion, advancing southward into
Bavaria, that he might attack the League in the chief seat of its power. The fallen Tilly
made a last effort to retrieve his fame by the overthrow of his great antagonist. Having
collected the wreck of his routed host, with the addition of some new levies:, he waited
on the banks of the river Lech for the approach of Gustavus. The defeat of the general of
the League was complete: both the army and its leader were utterly lost; the former being
dispersed, and Tilly dying of his wounds a few days after the battle. It delights us to be
able to pay a tribute to the memory of the warrior whom we now see expiring at the age of
seventy-three. He was inflamed with bigotry, but he was sincere and open, and had not
stained himself with the low vices and shameless hypocrisy of the Jesuits, nor with the
dark arts which Wallenstein studied. He was chaste and temperate — virtues beyond
price in every age, but especially in an age like that in which Tilly lived. The cloud on
his glory is the sack of Magdeburg, but retribution soon followed in the eclipse of
Leipsic. After that the sun-light of his face never returned. He complained that the world
spoke in of him, and that those whom he had faithfully served had left him desolate in his
age. He died grasping the crucifix, and expended his parting breath in repeating a verse
from the Psalms — "In thee, O Lord, have I put my trust."[10]
The overthrow of Tilly, and the utter rout of his army, had left the frontiers of
Austria without defense; and the emperor saw with alarm that the road to his capital was
open to the victorious Swede if he chose to pursue it. The whole of Germany between the
Rhine and the Danube was in possession of Gustavus, and a new army must be found if
Ferdinand would prevent the conqueror seating himself in Vienna. Even granting that an
army were raised, who was to command it? All his generals had fallen by the sword; one
only survived, but how could Ferdinand approach him, seeing he had requited his great
services by dismissal? But the desperate straits to which he was reduced left the emperor
no alternative, and he made overtures to Wallenstein. That consummately able, but
vaultingly ambitious man, listened to the royal proposals, but deigned them no reply.
Living in a style of magnificence that threw Ferdinand and all the sovereigns of the day
into the shade, Wallenstein professed to have no desire to return to the toils of a
military life. The emperor in distress sent again and again to the duke. At last
Wallenstein was moved. He would succor the empire at its need; he would organize an army,
but he would not command it. He set to work; the spell of his name was still omnipotent.
In three months he had raised 50,000 men, and he sent to the emperor to tell him that the
army was ready, and that he waited only till he should name the man who was to command it,
when he would hand it over to his Majesty. Every one knew that the troops would soon
disperse if the man who had raised them was not at their head.
Again the imperial ambassadors kneeled before Wallenstein. They begged him to undertake
the command of the army which he had equipped. The duke was inexorable. Other ambassadors
were sent, but they entreated in vain. At last came the prince of Eggenberg, and now
Wallenstein was won, but on terms that would be incredible were they not amply
authenticated. The treaty concluded in April, 1632, provided that the Duke of Friedland
should be generalissimo not only of the army, but of the emperor, of the arch-dukes, and
of the Austrian crown. The emperor must never be present in the army, much less command
it. As ordinary reward an Austrian hereditary territory was to be bestowed on Wallenstein;
as extraordinary he was to have sovereign jurisdiction over all the conquered territories,
and nearly all Germany was to be conquered. He was to possess, moreover, the sole power of
confiscating estates; he only could pardon; and the emperor's forgiveness was to be valid
only when ratified by the duke.[11] These
conditions constituted Wallenstein the real master of the empire. To Ferdinand there
remained only the title of king and the shadow of power. Thus, the man who had hid the
rankling wound inflicted by dismissal beneath, apparently, the most placid of submissions,
exacted a terrible revenge; but in so using the advantage which the calamities of his
friends put in his power, he over-reached himself, as the sequel proved.
Again we behold the duke at the head of the imperial armies. His first efforts were
followed by success. He entered Bohemia, which had been occupied by the Saxon troops after
the battle of Leipsic. The Saxons had taken down the martyrs' heads on the Bridge-tower of
Prague, as we have already narrated, and they had re-established for a brief period, the
Protestant worship in the city of Huss; but they retreated before the soldiers of
Wallenstein, together with their spiritless Elector, who was but too glad of an excuse for
returning to his palace and his table. Bohemia was again subjugated to the scepter of
Ferdinand, and Wallenstein turned westward to measure swords with a very different
antagonist — Gustavus Adolphus.
We parted from the King of Sweden at the passage of the Lech, where Tilly received his
mortal wound. From this point Gustavus marched on towards Augsburg, where he arrived on
the 8th of April, 1632. The Augsburg of that day was renowned for the multitude of its
merchants and the opulence of its bankers. It was the city of the Fuggers and the
Baumgartens, at whose door monarchs knocked when they would place an army in the field.
These men lived in stately mansions, surrounded by gardens which outvied the royal park at
Blots. It was in one of their parterres that the tulip first unfolded its gorgeous petals
beneath the sun of Europe.
But Augsburg wore in Protestant eyes a yet greater attraction, from the circumstance that
its name was linked with the immortal Confession in which the young Protestant Church
expressed her belief at t]he foot of the throne of Charles V. Here, too, had been framed
the Pacification, which Ferdinand had flagrantly violated, and which the hero now at her
gates had taken up arms to restore. Will Augsburg welcome the Protestant champion?
Incredible as it may seem, she closes her gates against him. Gustavus began to prepare for
a siege by digging trenches; the guns of the city ramparts fired upon his soldiers while
so engaged; but he did not reply, for he was loth to deface a single stone of a place so
sacred. Before opening his cannonade he made trial if haply he might re-kindle the old
fire that once burned so brightly in this venerable town. tits appeal was successful, and
on the 10th of April, Augsburg capitulated. On the 14th the king made his public entry,
going straight to St. Ann's Church, where the Lutheran Litany was sung, after the silence
of many years, and Fabricius, the king's chaplain, preached, taking Psalm 12:5 as his
text. After sermon the king repaired to the market-place, where the citizens took an oath
of fealty to himself and to the crown of Sweden.[12]
The king left Augsburg next day, and proceeded to Ingolstadt. He thought to take
this city and dislodge the nest of Jesuits within it, but being strongly fortified, its
siege would have occupied more time than its importance justified; and so, leaving
Ingolstadt, Gustavus directed his course to Munich. The capital of Bavaria was thus added
to the towns that had submitted to his arms, and now the whole country of the League,
Ingolstadt excepted, was his. He had carried his arms from the shores of the Baltic to the
foot of the Tyrol, from the banks of the Oder to those of the Rhine. The monarchs of
Denmark and France, jealous of his advances, and not knowing where they would end, here
met him with offers of mediating between him and the emperor and establishing peace.
Gustavus frankly told them that he had drawn the sword for the vindication of the rights
of the Protestants of the empire, and that he would not sheathe it so long as the object
for which he had begun the war remained unaccomplished.
The king now moved toward Nuremberg, where he established his camp, which he fortified
with a ditch eight feet deep and twelve wide,[13] within which rose redoubts and bastions mounted with 300 cannon.
Wallenstein, advancing from Bohemia, and joined by the army under the Elector of Bavaria,
pitched his camp of 60,000 men on the other side of the town. Europe watched with
breathless anxiety, expecting every day the decisive trial of strength between these two
armies. Gustavus strove by every expedient to draw his great antagonist into battle, but
Wallenstein had adopted a strategy of famine. The plan succeeded. The land was not able to
bear two such mighty hosts, and the scene of the encampment became a field of horrors. The
horses died in thousands for want of forage; the steaming putridity of the unburied
carcasses poisoned the air, and the effluvia, joined to the famine, proved more fatal to
the soldiers of both camps than would the bloodiest battle. In the city of Nuremberg
10,000 inhabitants died. Gustavus Adolphus had lost 20,000 of his soldiers; the
imperialists had lost, it is to be presumed, an equal number; the villages around
Nuremberg were in ashes; the plundered peasantry were expiring on the highway: the most
ghastly spectacles met the eye on every side, for the country for leagues had become a
graveyard. In the middle of September, Gustavus Adolphus raised his camp and returned to
Bavaria, to complete its conquest by the reduction of Ingolstadt. Wallenstein also broke
up his encampment, and marched northwards to Saxony. A second time the road had been left
open to Vienna, for there was now no army between Gustavus and that capital. While he was
revolving a march southward, and the ending of the campaign by the dethronement of the
emperor, he received a letter from his chancellor, Oxenstierna, informing him that a
treachery was preparing in his rear. The Elector of Saxony was negotiating with
Wallenstein, with a view to withdrawing from the Swedish alliance, and joining in affinity
with the imperialists. If the powerful principality of Saxony should become hostile, lying
as it did between Gustavus and the Baltic, a march on Vienna was impossible. Thus again
were the house and throne of the Hapsburgs saved.
Intent on preventing the defection of the Elector of Saxony, all example likely to be
followed by other princes, Gustavus Adolphus returned northward by forced marches.
Traversing the Bavarian plains, he entered Thuringia, where he was welcomed with the
acclamations of the inhabitants of the towns and villages through which he passed. At
Erfurt he took a tender leave of his queen, and hastened forward in the direction of
Leipsic to meet Wallenstein. On his march he was informed that the enemy was stationed in
the villages around Lutzen, a small town not far from the spot where he had gained his
great victory of a year ago.
Gustavus darted forward on his prey, but before he could reach Lutzen the night had
fallen, and the battle could not be joined. Wallenstein, who had been unaware of the
approach of the Swedes, profited by the night's delay to dig trenches on the battle-field,
which he filled with musketeers. He also recalled Pappenheim, who had been sent off with a
detachment to Cologne. The king passed the night in his carriage, arranging with his
generals the order of battle, and waiting the breaking of the day. The morning rose in
fog; the king had prayers read by his chaplain, Fabricius; then the army, accompanied by
martial music, sang Luther's hymn; after which Gustavus himself led in a second hymn, in
which the battalions around him joined in full chorus. The mist still hung over the
landscape, concealing the one army from the other; but at ten o'clock it cleared off,
revealing to the eyes of the Swedes the long confronting line of the imperialists, and the
town of Lutzen in flames, Wallenstein having ordered it to be fired lest, under cover of
it, the Swedes should outflank him.[14]
The king, without having broken his fast, mounted his horse. He did not put on his
armor before entering the battle: he had forborne its use for some time owing to his
corpulence. He wore only a plain buff coat or leather jerkin; replying, it is said, to one
who tried to dissuade him from thus exposing his life, that "God was his
harness."[15] He
addressed in brief but energetic terms first the Swedes, then the Germans, reminding them
of the vast issues depending on the battle about to be joined; that on this day their
bravery would vindicate, or their cowardice would crush, the religion and liberty of
Germany. He exhorted them not to be sparing of their blood in so great a cause, and
assured them that posterity would not forget what it owed to the men who had died on the
field of Lutzen that they might be free. Having so spoken, Gustavus rode forward, the
first of all his army, to meet the enemy.
At the moment when the battle began, it is probable that the number of the opposing hosts
was about equal; but on the arrival of Pappenheim the preponderance was thrown on the side
of the imperialists. The calculations of the best authorities make Wallenstein's army
amount to about 27,000, and the force under Gustavus Adolphus to from 18,000 to 20,000.
The Swedish infantry advanced against the trenches, but were received with a tremendous
fire of musketry and artillery. Bearing down with immense impetuosity, they crossed the
trenches, captured the battery, and turned the guns against the enemy. The first of the
five imperial brigades was routed; the second was in disorder; the third was wavering,
Wallenstein, with three regiments of horse, galloped to the spot, shouting with a voice of
thunder, and cleaving in his rage some of the fugitives with his own hand. The flight of
his soldiers was arrested. The brigades formed anew, and faced the Swedes. A murderous
conflict ensued.
The combatants, locked in a hand-to-hand struggle, could make no use of their firearms.
They fought with their swords, pikes, and the butt-end of their muskets; the clash of
steel, blending with the groans of those who were being trampled down, resounded over the
field. The Swedes, at last overpowered by numbers, were compelled to abandon the cannon
they had captured; and when they retreated, a thousand dead and dying covered the spot
where the conflict had raged.
Gustavus Adolphus, at the head of his Finland cuirassiers, attacked the left wing of the
enemy. The light-mounted Poles and Croats were broken by the shock, and fleeing in
disorder, they spread terror and confusion among the rest of the imperial cavalry. At this
moment the king was told that his infantry was recrossing the trenches, and that his left
wing was wavering. Committing the pursuit of the vanquished Croats to General Horn, he
flew on his white steed across the field, followed by the regiment of Steinbock; he leaped
the trenches, and spurred to the spot where his soldiers were most closely pressed. Only
the Duke of Lauenburg and a few horsemen were able to keep pace with the king; the
squadrons he led had not yet come up, not being able to clear the trenches so easily as
the king had done. Gustavus, shortsighted, and eager to discover an opening in the enemy's
ranks at which to pour in a charge, approached too close to their line; a musketeer took
aim at him, and his shot shattered the king's left arm. By this time his squadrons had
come up, and the king attempted to lead them, but overcome by pain, and on the point of
fainting, he requested the Duke of Lauenburg to lead him secretly out of the tumult.
As he was retiring he received a second shot through the back. Feeling the wound to be
mortal, he said to Lauenburg, "I am gone; look to your own life." A page
assisted him to dismount, and while in the act of doing so other cuirassiers gathered
around the wounded monarch, and demanded who he was. The page refused to tell, but
Gustavus himself made known his name and rank, whereupon the cuirassiers completed the
work of death by the discharge of more shots, and the king sunk in the midst of the
imperial horsemen. Such were the accounts of the page, who himself was wounded, and died
soon after. The king's steed, now set free, galloped with flowing rein and empty saddle
over the field, communicating to the Swedish ranks the impression that some disaster had
befallen, of which they knew not as yet the full and terrible extent.
CHAPTER 9 Back to Top
DEATH OF GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS.
Battle Renewed — The Cry, "The King is Dead!" — The Duke of
Saxe-Weimar takes the Command — Fury of the Swedes — Rout of the Imperialists
— Arrival of Pappenheim on the Field — Renewal of Battle a Third Time —
Death of Pappenheim — Final Rout of Wallenstein — Wallenstein on the Field of
Battle — Retires to Leipsic — Escapes from Germany — Swedes remain Masters
of the Field — Cost of the Victory — The King's Body Discovered — Embalmed
and Conveyed to Sweden — Grief of the Swedes — Sorrow of Christendom —
Character of Gustavus Adolphus — Accomplishes his Mission — Germany not Able to
Receive the Emancipation he Achieved for her.
THE fall of Gustavus Adolphus, so far from ending the battle,
was in a sort only its beginning. The riderless horse, galloping wildly over the
battlefield, only half told its tale. It was possible that the king was only wounded. The
bravery of the Swedes was now changed into fury. Horse and foot rushed madly onward to the
spot where the king had been seen to enter the thick of the fight, with the intention of
rescuing him if alive, of avenging him if dead. The mournful fact was passed in a whisper
from one Swedish officer to another, that Gustavus Adolphus was no more. They rode up to
the Croats, who were stripping the body in their desire to possess some memorial of the
fallen hero, and a terrible conflict ensued over his corpse. No flash of firearm was seen,
only the glitter of pike, the clash of sword, and the heavy stroke of musket as it fell on
the steel helmet, came from that struggling mass in the center of the field, for again the
fight was a hand-to-hand one. The dead fell thick, and a mound of corpses, rising ever
higher, with the battle raging widely around it, termed meanwhile the mausoleum of the
great warrior.
From the officers the dreadful intelligence soon descended to the ranks. The cry ran from
brigade to brigade of the Swedes, "The king is dead!" As the terrible words fell
on the soldier's ear his knitted brow grew darker, and he seized his weapon with a yet
fiercer grasp. The most sacred life of all had been spilled, and of what value was now his
own? He feared not to die on the same field with the king, and a new energy animated the
soldier. The brave Bernard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, took the place of Gustavus, and his
squadrons advanced to the charge with a fire that showed that the spirit of the fallen
hero lived in the troops. They closed in dreadful conflict with the enemy. His left wing
was chased completely out of the field; this was followed by the rout of the right wing.
Like a whirlwind, the Swedes again passed the trenches, and the artillery, which had clone
such murderous execution upon them, was seized, and its thunders directed against the foe.
The heavy battalions of the imperial center were now attacked, and were giving way before
the overwhelming impetuosity of their antagonists. At that moment a terrible roar was
heard behind the imperial army. The ground shook, and the air was black with volumes of
smoke, and lurid with flashes of fire. Their powder wagons had exploded, and bombs and
grenades in thousands were shooting wildly into the sky. Wallenstein's army imagined that
they had been attacked in the rear; panic and flight were setting in among his troops;
another moment and the day would be won by the Swedes.
It was now that Pappenheim, whom Wallenstein's recall found at no great distance,
presented himself on the field at the head of fresh troops. All the advantages which the
Swedes had gained were suddenly lost, and the battle was begun anew. The newly-arrived
cuirassiers and dragoons fell upon the Swedes, who, their numbers thinned, and wearied
with their many hours' fighting, fell back; the trenches were again recrossed, and the
cannon once more abandoned. Pappenheim himself followed the retreating Swedes, and
plunging into the thickest of the fight, wandered over the field in quest of Gustavus,
whom he believed to be still living, and whom he burned to meet in single combat. He fell,
his breast pierced by two musket-balls, and was carried out of the field by his soldiers..
While he was being borne to the rear, some one whispered into his ear that the man he
sought lay slain upon the field. "His dying eye," says Schiller, "sparkled
with a gleam of joy." "Tell the Duke of Friedland," said he, "that I
am mortally wounded, but that I die happy, knowing that the implacable enemy of my faith
has fallen on the same day."[1]
The fall of their leader dispirited his troops, and the tide of battle again turned
against the imperialists. The Swedes, seeing the enemy's confusion, with great promptitude
filled up the gaps that death had made in their ranks, and forming into one line made a
last decisive charge. A third time the trenches were crossed, and the enemy's artillery
seized. The sun was setting as the two armies closed in that last desperate struggle. The
ardor of the combatants seemed to grow, and the battle to wax in fury, the nearer the
moment when it must end. Each seemed bent on seizing the victory before darkness should
descend on the scene and part the combatants. The night came; the rival armies could no
longer see the one the other; the trumpet sounded; the torn relics of those magnificent
squadrons which had formed in proud and terrible array in the morning now marched out of
the field. The victory was claimed by both sides.
Both armies left their artillery on the battlefield, and the victory would rightfully
belong to whichever of the two hosts should have the courage or the good fortune to
appropriate it.
Far and wide on that field lay the dead, in all places thickly strewn, in some piled in
heaps, with whole regiments lying in the exact order in which they had formed, attesting
in death the tenacity of that courage which had animated them in life. Wallenstein retired
for the night to Leipsic. He had striven to the utmost, during that dreadful day, to add
to his other laurels the field of Lutzen. He was to be seen on all parts of the field
careering through the smoke and fire, rallying his troops, encouraging the brave, and
threatening or punishing the coward. He feared not to go where the shower of bullets was
the thickest and deadliest. His cloak was pierced by balls in numerous places. The dead
were falling thick around him; but a shield which he saw not covered his head, and he
passed scatheless through all the horrors of the day, fate having decreed — though
the stars had hidden it from him — that he should die on a less glorious field than
that on which his immortal antagonist had breathed his last.
When the sun rose next morning, the dead and dying alone occupied the field of Lutzen.
There were the cannon, their thunders hushed, as if in reverence of those who were
breathing out their life in low and heavy moanings. The two armies stood off from the spot
where the day before they had wrestled in all the passionate energy of battle. Wallenstein
sent his Croats to take possession of the artillery, that he might have a pretext for
saying that he had vanquished on the field from the vicinity of which he was at that
moment preparing to flee; but when his messengers saw the Swedes drawn up in order of
battle at no great distance, they forbore the attempt to execute the orders of their
master. The same day Wallenstein was followed to Leipsic by the remnant of his army, but
in most miserable plight, without artillery, without standards, almost without arms,
covered with wounds; in short, looking the reverse of victors. The duke made a short stay
in Leipsic, and soon removed even beyond the bounds of Saxony; in such haste was he to
escape from the scene of his alleged triumph, for which the bells of the churches of
Austria were at that moment ringing peals of joy! The Duke of Saxe-Weimar, who had
succeeded the fallen king in the command of the Swedes, took possession of the
battle-field, with all on it; and soon thereafter established himself in Leipsic, thus
incontestably proving that the victory was his.[2]
When the terrible cry, "The king is dead!" rang along the Swedish ranks
on the day of battle, it struck as a knell of woe on every ear on which it fell. But the
soldier had only a moment to think on the extent of the calamity; the uppermost idea in
his mind was "to conquer." The field beneath him, with its burden of ghastly
horrors, and the enemy vanishing in the distance, was the proof That he had conquered; but
now he had time to reflect at what a cost victory had been won! Somewhere on that field on
which he was now gazing with an eye in which sadness had taken the place of fury, lay the
hero who had yesterday led them forth to battle. This changed victory's paean into a
funeral dirge. How much lay buried with that hero! The safety of Sweden, the hopes of the
Protestant princes, the restoration of the Protestant worship in Germany; for what so
likely, now that the strong arm which had rolled back the Catholic Restoration was broken,
as that the flood would return and again overflow those countries from which its
desolating waters had been dried up?
The first care of the Swedes was to search for the body of their king. The quest was for
some time ineffectual; but at last the royal corpse was discovered beneath a heap of
slain, stripped of all its ornaments, and most of its clothing, and covered with blood and
wounds. The king had fallen near to a great stone, which for a century had stood between
Lutzen and the canal, and which from that day has borne, in memory of the event, the name
of the "Stone of the Swede." The body of the king was carried to the neighboring
town of Weissenfels, and there embalmed and laid out in state. The queen embraced his
remains in an agony of grief; his generals stood round his bier in speechless sorrow,
gazing on the majestic countenance of him who would no more lead them forth to battle, and
striving to turn their thoughts away from the contemplation of a future which his death
had so suddenly darkened. His remains were conveyed to Stockholm, and interred in the
sepulchres of the Kings of Sweden in the Church of Ritterholm.[3]
"When the great king, lord of the half of Germany, sank in the dust of the
battle-field," says Freytag, "a cry of woe went through the whole Protestant
territories. In city and country there was a funeral service held; endless were the
elegies written upon him; even enemies concealed their joy behind a manly sympathy which
was seldom shown in that time to any opponent.
"His end was considered as a national misfortune; to the people the 'Liberator,' the
'Savior,' was lost. Also we, whether Protestants or Catholics, may look, not only with
cordial interest upon a pure heroic life, which in the years of its highest power was so
suddenly extinguished; we should also consider with thanks the influence which the king
had upon the German war. For he has in desperate times defended what Luther obtained for
the whole nation — the freedom of thought, and capacity for national development
against the frightful enemy of German existence, a soulless despotism in Church and
State."[4]
So ended, in the thirty-eighth year of his age, the great career of Gustavus
Adolphus. His sudden appearance on the scene, and his sudden departure from it, are
equally striking. "History," says Schiller, "so often engaged in the
ungrateful task of analyzing; the uniform course of human passions, is sometimes gratified
by the appearance of events which strike like a hand from heaven, into the calculated
machinery of human affairs, and recall to the contemplative mind the idea of a higher
order of things. Such appears to us the sudden vanishing of Gustavus Adolphus from the
scene."[5] It
does not pertain to our subject to dwell on his great military genius, and the original
tactics which he introduced into the art of war. He was the greatest general in an age of
great generals. Among the eight best commanders whom, in his opinion, the world had ever
seen, Napoleon gave a place to Gustavus Adolphus.[6]
Gustavus Adolphus falls below the great William of Orange, but he rises high above
all his contemporaries, and stands forth, beyond question, as the greatest man of his age.
In each of the three departments that constitute greatness he excelled — in the
largeness of his moral and intellectual nature; in the grandeur of his aims; and in the
all but perfect success that crowned what he undertook. The foundation of his character
was his piety. "He was a king," said Oxenstierna, "God-fearing in all his
works and actions even unto death." From his youth his soul had been visited with
impulses which he believed came from beyond the sphere of humanity. His grandfather's
dying words had consecrated him to a sublime but most arduous mission; that mission he
could scarcely misunderstand. The thoughts that began to stir within him as he grew to
manhood, and the aspects of Providence around him, gave depth and strength to his early
impressions, which so grew upon him from day to day that he had no rest.
He saw the labors of the Reformers on the point of being swept away, the world about to be
rolled back into darkness, add the religion and liberty of Christendom overwhelmed by a
flood of arms and Jesuitry. Among the princes of Germany he could discern no one who was
able or at all willing to cope with the crisis. If the terrible ruin was to be averted, he
himself must stand in the breach: he was the last hope of a perishing world. Thus it was
that he came across the sea with a feeling that he was the chosen instrument of Providence
to set limits to the ruinous reaction that was overwhelming Christendom. In the great
generals who had grown up around him; in the army, disciplined and hardened in many a
campaign, now gathered under his banners; in the union of great qualities in himself,
fitting him for his task; in his power of command; in his love of order and system; in his
intuitive faculty of quick and rapid combinations; in his genius for forming plans, and
the caution, united with daring courage, which never permitted him to take a single step
forward without having secured a line of safe retreat in the rear — in this
assemblage of great attributes, so fully possessed and so easily exercised by him, he read
the authentication of his great mission.
That mission was publicly and conclusively certified to both friend and foe on the field
of Leipsic. That marvelous victory proclaimed Gustavus Adolphus to be one of those saviors
whom the Great Ruler, at times, raises up in pity for a fallen race, and whom he employs
suddenly and beneficently to change the current of history. A greater consciousness of
this breathes henceforward in every word and act of Gustavus. He displays greater
elevation of soul, a nobler bearing and a higher faith in his mission; and from this hour
his conquests become more rapid and brilliant. He sees One moving before him, and giving
him victory; mighty armies and renowned captains are driven before him as chaff is driven
before the wind; the gates of proud cities are unlocked at his approach, and the keys of
strong fortresses are put into his hand; rivers are divided that he may pass over; and his
banners are borne triumphantly onwards till they are seen waving on the frontier of
Austria. Germany was liberated.
But Germany was not able to accept her liberation. The princes who were now delivered from
a yoke under which they had groaned, and who might now freely profess the Protestant
faith, and re-establish the exercise of the Protestant worship among their subjects, were
unable to prize the boon which had been put within their reach. They began to mistrust and
intrigue against their deliverer, and to quarrel with the arrangements necessary for
securing the fruits of what had been achieved with so much toil and danger.
These unworthy princes put away from them the proffered liberty; and then the deliverer
was withdrawn. The man who had passed unharmed over a hundred battle-fields fell by the
bullet of an imperial cuirassier. But Gustavus Adolphus had not borne toil and braved
danger in vain; nor did he leave his work unfinished, although it seemed so to his
contemporaries. Germany, after being chastened by yet other sixteen years of terrible
suffering, accepted the boon for which she was not prepared in the lifetime of her great
deliverer; for it was the victories of Gustavus Adolphus that made possible, and it was
his proposals that formed the basis ultimately of that great charter of toleration under
which Christendom finally sat down, and which is known in history as the Pacification of
Westphalia.
CHAPTER 10 Back to Top
THE PACIFICATION OF WESTPHALIA.
Gustavus' Mission no Failure — Oxenstierna comes to the Helm — Diet of Heilbronn
— Wallenstein's Advice to Ferdinand — Success of the Swedes — Inactivity of
Wallenstein — His Offer to Join the Swedes — His Supposed Conspiracy against
Ferdinand — He is Assassinated — Defeat of the Swedes — Battle of
Nordlingen — Defection of the Elector of Saxony — Peace of Prague —
Rejected by the Swedes — Treaty with France — Great Victory of the Swedes —
Progress of the War — Isolation of Ferdinand — Cry for Peace — Negotiations
at Munster — The Peace of Westphalia.
MOST historians, reviewing the career of Gustavus Adolphus,
have given it as their opinion that when he died he had reached the maturity of his glory,
but not of his designs. We are disposed to regard this judgment as a narrow and mistaken
one. That he had reached the summit of his fame we readily admit; but we also hold that at
the moment of his death he had reached the consummation of his plans, so far as their
accomplishment rested with himself. Had Gustavus Adolphus crossed the Baltic to found a
new kingdom, and reign as head of the German Empire, then indisputably he failed in the
object for which he had girded on the sword; and, in the words of Schiller, "the
proud edifice of his past greatness sunk into ruins when he died." But this was far
indeed from being what the hero of Sweden aimed at. He sought to roll back the Catholic
reaction, and to set free the princes and States of Germany from the treble despotism of
Ferdinand, of the League, of Rome: this he did. The battle of Leipsic scattered the army
of the emperor; the campaigns that followed carried the banners of Gustavus in triumph to
the Rhine on the west, and to the very frontier of Austria on the south, including
Bavaria, the seat of the League.
The crowning victory of Lutzen set the seal upon all his past achievements, by completing
the discomfiture of Ferdinand and of the League, and consummating the emancipation of
Germany. When he expired on the last and bloodiest of all his fields, the Fatherland was
freed. It does not at all diminish from the perfection of his work, that neither the
princes nor the people of Germany were prepared to profit by the boon which he put within
their reach. These craven sons of heroic sires were not worthy of freedom. They were
incapable of appreciating the character or sympathizing with the grand aims of their
liberator; and had Gustavus Adolphus lived, it is probable that these easy-going men, who
were so unbending in points of dignity but so pliant in matters of conscience, so zealous
for the enlargement of their estates but so lukewarm in the defense of their faith, would
have quarreled over the spoils of his victories, while they undervalued and neglected that
which was the greatest of them all — Protestant liberty. He was spared this
mortifying sight by his early removal. It does not follow that the fruits of his labors
perished. They were postponed, but not lost. They were gathered-in sixteen years after.
wards at the Peace of Westphalia.
The Protestant interest of the Thirty Years' War ends with the life of Gustavus. The two
parties continued the struggle, and the Fatherland was still deluged with blood; but the
moral end of the conflict was lost sight of, and the bearing as well as the aims of the
combatants rapidly and sadly degenerated. They fought, not for the vindication of
Protestant liberties, but for plunder, or for pay, or at best for victory. To record
battles and campaigns waged for these objects is not our purpose, and we shall
sufficiently discharge our duty to our subject if we trace rapidly the course of events to
their issue in the great European Settlement of 1648, which owed its existence mainly to
the man who had laid down his sword on the field of Lutzen.
When Gustavus Adolphus died, the great chancellor and statesman, Oxenstierna, sprang to
the helm. His were the ablest hands, after those of Gustavus, to guide the State.
Oxenstierna was the friend, as well as the minister, of the deceased monarch; he perfectly
knew and thoroughly sympathized with the policy of the king, and of all the survivors he
was the best fitted by his genius, his lofty patriotism, and his undoubted Protestantism,
to carry out the views of his late master. The Senate of Sweden was equally valorous and
prompt. It met at Stockholm on the 16th of March, 1633, and passed a resolution "to
prosecute the war against the Roman emperor and Popish League in Germany, until it should
please Almighty God to establish a happy peace for the good of his Church."[1] Nor were able generals wanting
to the Diet to carry out its resolution. If the deceased king had a not unworthy successor
in the State in Oxenstierna, he had also not unmeet representatives in the field in the
generals who had been trained under him. The tactics, the power of rapid combination of
masses, the intrepidity, and above all the lofty spirit of Gustavus, to a great degree
lived in Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, Bauer, Torstenson, and Wrangel. It was not on the leaders
only that Gustavus had stamped his image, he had infused his spirit into the common
soldiers, and thus all three — the Diet, the minister, and the army — continued
to pursue the career in which the late king had started them, just as a machine, to which
a mighty impulse has been communicated, continues to revolve after the strong hand from
which the impulse came is withdrawn.
The work which hitherto had been done by one was now divided among many. Gustavus Adolphus
had centered in himself the office of minister, of Diet, of diplomatist, of statesman, and
of general. The conception of his plans was his, and so too was the execution of them. The
comprehensiveness of his mind and the versatility of his genius made these various parts
easy and natural to him, and gave him a prodigious advantage over his opponents, by giving
a more perfect unity and a quicker dispatch to all his plans. This perfect accord and
harmony were henceforward wanting; but it was some time till its loss became apparent.
Oxenstierna did his best to maintain the tottering fabric of the German Confederacy, which
had shown signs of dissolution even before the fall of Gustavus. Everything depended upon
the Protestant princes remaining united, and continuing in alliance with Sweden; and the
chancellor succeeded in strengthening the bond of union among his allies, in spite of the
jealousies, the interests, and the many difficulties he had to overcome. At the Diet of
Heilbronn the Directorship Franconia, Suabia, and the Upper and Lower Rhine was conferred
upon him, "the princes of these circles entering into a league with the Crown of
Sweden, and with one another, against the emperor, until the civil and religious liberties
of Germany should be restored, and Sweden indemnified for the cost of the war."[2]
If Sweden and her German allies had resolved not to sheathe the sword till the
civil and religious liberties of Germany had been restored, not less were the emperor and
his allies — the Pope, the King of Spain, and Maximilian of Bavaria — resolved
that the war should go on. Wallenstein advised Ferdinand to meet the Protestant States
with an unqualified amnesty;[3] and
had the emperor done so he would very probably have broken their union, and brought back
the more pliant and wavering. But blinded by bigotry and the brilliant prospects of
triumph, which he imagined the fall of Gustavus Adolphus had opened to him, he rejected
the Duke of Friedland's counsel, and instead of holding out the olive-branch to the
Protestants, offered them battle by increasing the number of his army. Hostilities soon
again commenced.
Victory still followed the standards of the Swedes. During the campaign of 1633, they
overran the territory of Bamberg, swept along the Danube, and took the town of Ratisbon,
which gave them the command of Bavaria, the cradle of the League. Their arms were attended
with equal success in Suabia, and on the Upper and Lower Rhine. Lower Saxony and
Westphalia also became the scene of their triumphs. They crossed and re-crossed Germany,
scattering the imperial armies, capturing the enemy's fortresses, and wresting from him
the keys of all his important cities, besides other trophies of war. such as cannon,
baggage, and standards. One who did not know what had taken place on the field of Lutzen,
would have thought that Gustavus Adolphus was still at the head of the Swedish warriors.
Their banners, floating triumphant in every part of Germany, again proclaimed the fact
that nothing was wanting to the Protestant princes, save hearty zeal and firm concord, to
recover all the rights which the Catholic reaction had swept away, and to establish
Protestant liberty in Germany as it had existed a century before.
While the Swedish arms had come up to the Austrian frontier, and it seemed as if a few
marches and one or two battles would carry them to the gates of Vienna, the generalissimo
of Ferdinand was maintaining a most unaccountable inactivity. Wallenstein lay encamped in
Bohemia, with 40,000 soldiers under him, apparently an uninterested spectator of the
disasters befalling the empire. Ferdinand sent message after message, each more pressing
than that which had preceded it, commanding him to put his army in motion against the
invaders. Wallenstein answered, "I go;" but went not. At last he marched to
Munsterberg, where he formed an entrenched camp. The Swedes offered him battle, but he
declined it. The two armies remained nine days within musket-shot of each other, but
neither stirred from their entrenchments. At last the. mystery of Wallenstein's inactivity
was made plain. Count Terzky, attended by a trumpeter, appeared in the Swedish camp, with
proposals of peace from the imperial generalissimo. Wallenstein offered to join the
allies, and turn his arms against the emperor, on condition of being made King of Bohemia.
He further promised that, should the Bohemian crown be placed on his head, he would recall
the exiles, restore the confiscated estates, and establish toleration in that country.[4] So do contemporary historians relate.
Besides his own ambition, the stars had promised this dignity to Wallenstein. The Swedes
did not know what to make of this strange proposal; but at last, deeming it an artful trap
to seize their army and deliver it up to the emperor, they rejected it. The real
intentions of Wallenstein still remain a mystery; but we incline to the belief that he was
then meditating some deep revenge on the emperor, whom he had never forgiven for
dismissing him, and that he was not less desirous of striking a blow at the Jesuits, who
he knew cordially hated him, and were intriguing against him at the court of Vienna. It is
said that he was revolving even mightier projects. He harbored the daring purpose of
putting down all the lords, lay and ecclesiastical, of Germany, of combining its various
countries into one kingdom, and setting over it a single chief. Ferdinand II was to be
installed meanwhile as the nominal sovereign, but Wallenstein would govern through him, as
Richelieu did through Louis XIII. The Turks were to be driven out of Europe, and
Wallenstein, at the head of a gigantic army, was to make himself Dictator of Christendom.
Such was the colossal scheme with which he was credited, and which is said to have alarmed
the Pope, excited the jealousy of Richelieu, intensified the hatred of the Jesuits, and
made them combine to effect his destruction.[5]
His ruin soon followed. To have sent him his dismissal in the ordinary way would
have been to bring on the explosion of the terrible plot. He held the army in his hand,
and Ferdinand was not powerful enough to wrest that weapon from him. He could be
approached only with the dagger.
Wallenstein was residing at Eger, where he was busily engaged corresponding with his
accomplices, and studying the stars. They rolled night by night over his head, without
notifying that the hour had come for the execution of his great design. While he waited
for the celestial summons, dark preparations were forming round him on earth. On the
evening of the 25th of February, 1634, the officers of the garrison who remained loyal to
Ferdinand invited the four leading conspirators of Wallenstein to sup with them. The wine
was circulating freely after supper, when one of the company rose and gave as a toast,
"The House of Austria, Long live Ferdinand!" It was the preconcerted signal.
Thirty-six men-at-arms, who had been stationed in the ante-chamber, rushed in, overturned
the table, and threw themselves upon their victims. In a few minutes Wallenstein's
partisans lay sabered and dying on the floor of the apartment.
This was only a beginning. The great conspirator still lived; but, whatever the
prognostication of the stars, his last sands were running. The elements seemed in accord
with the violent deeds on foot, for a frightful tempest had burst over Eger, and the black
clouds, the howling winds, and the pelting rains favored the assassins. Devereux, followed
by twelve halberdiers, proceeded to Wallenstein's residence, and was at once admitted by
the guard, who were accustomed to see him visit the duke at all hours. Wallenstein had
retired to rest; but hearing a noise he had got out of bed, and going to the window he
opened it and challenged the sentinel.
He had just seated himself in a chair at a table in his night-dress, when Devereux burst
open the door and entered with the halberdiers. The man whom armies obeyed, and who was
the terror of kings, was before him. Rushing towards him, he shouted, "Thy hour is
come, villain!" The duke rose, and attempted to reach the window and summon the
guard, but the men-at-arms barred his way. Opening his arms, he received the stroke of
their halberds in his breast, and fell bathed in his blood, but without uttering a word.
His designs, whatever they were, he took with him to his grave. The wise man had said long
before, "As passeth the whirlwind, so the wicked."[6]
After the death of Wallenstein, Ferdinand's son, the King of Hungary, bore the
title of generalissimo, but Count Gallas discharged the duty by leading the army. The tide
of success now began to turn against the Swedes. They had already lost several important
towns, among others Ratisbon, and their misfortunes were crowned by a severe defeat which
they encountered under the walls of Nordlingen. Some 12,000 men lay dead on the field, 80
cannon, 4,000 wagons, and 300 standards fell into the hands of the imperialists. The
Swedes had lost their superiority in the field; consternation reigned among the members of
the Protestant Confederacy, and the free cities; and Oxenstierna, to save the cause from
ruin, ,was obliged, as he believed, to cast himself upon the protection of Richelieu,
giving to France, as the price of her help, the province of Alsace. This put the key of
Germany into her hands, and her armies poured along the Rhine, and, under pretext of
assisting the Swedes, plundered the cities and devastated the provinces.
And now a severer blow befell the Swedes than even the defeat at Nordlingen. John George,
the Elector of Saxony, deserting his confederates, entered into a treaty of peace with the
emperor. The weakness of the Protestant cause, all along, had lain, not in the strength of
the imperialists, but in the divisions of the German princes, and now this heavy and, for
the time, fatal blow was dealt it by the defection of the man who had so largely
contributed to. begin the war, by helping the League to take Prague, and suppress the
Protestantism of Bohemia. All the Protestant States were invited to enter this peace along
with the emperor and elector. It effected no real settlement of differences; it offered no
effectual redress of grievances; and, while it swept away nearly all that the Protestants
had gained in the war, it left undetermined innumerable points which were sure to become
the seeds of conflicts in the future.
Nevertheless, the peace was acceded to by the Elector of Brandenburg, Duke William of
Weimar, the Princes of Anhalt, the Dukes of Mecklenburg, the Dukes of Brunswick, Luneburg,
the Hanseatic towns, and most of the imperial cities.[7]
This peace, termed the Peace of Prague, from the town where the treaty was framed,
was scornfully rejected by the Swedes, and on just grounds. It offered them no
indemnification for the expenses they had incurred, and no compensation for the conquests
they were to leave behind them. They loudly protested against the princes who had made
their reconciliation with the emperor, as guilty of a shameful abandonment of themselves.
They had come into Germany at their invitation; they had vindicated the Protestant rights
and the German liberties with their blood, and "the sacred life of their king,"
and now they were to be expelled from the empire without reward, without even thanks, by
the very men for whom they had toiled and bled. Rather than be thus dishonored, and lose
into the bargain all for which they had fought, they resolved to continue the war.
Oxenstierna, in this extremity of Swedish affairs, turned to France, and Richelieu met him
with offers of assistance. The Swedes and French formed a compact body, and penetrated
into the heart of the empire. The Swedes fought with a more desperate bravery than ever.
The battles were bloodier. They fell on Saxony, and avenged, in the devastation and
slaughter they inflicted, the defection of the Elector. They defeated him in a great
battle at Wittsbach, in 1636, the Elector leaving 5,000 men on the field, with baggage,
cannon, standards, and silver plate, the booty being enhanced by the capture of some
thousands of prisoners. After this, victory oscillates from side to side; now it is the
imperialists who triumph on the red field; now it is the Swedes, grown as savage as the
imperialists, who remain masters; but though battle succeeds battle, the war makes no
progress, and the end for which it was commenced has been entirely lost sight of.
At length there appeared a new Swedish generalissimo, Bernard Torstenson, a pupil of
Gustavus Adolphus, and the leader who, of all who had been reared in the same school,
approached the most nearly to his great master. He transferred the seat of war from the
exhausted provinces to those which had not yet tasted the miseries of the campaigns, He
led the Swedish hosts into the Austrian territories which had hitherto been exempted by
their remoteness from the calamities tinder which the rest of Germany groaned. "He
hurled the torch of war," says Schiller, "even to the very footsteps of the
imperial throne." By his great victory at Jancowitz, where the emperor lost his best
general, Hatzfeld, and his last army, the whole territory of Austria was thrown open to
him. The victorious Swedes, pouring over the frontiers, spread themselves like an
inundation over Moravia and Austria. Ferdinand fled to Vienna to save his family and his
treasures. The Swedes followed hard on his fleeing steps, carried the entrenchments at the
Wolf's Bridge, and showed themselves before the walls of Vienna. Thus, after a long and
destructive circuit through every province of Germany, the terrible procession of battles
and sieges had returned to the spot whence it set out. The artillery of the Swedes that
now thundered around the Austrian capital must have recalled to the memory of the
inhabitants the balls shot into Vienna twenty-seven years ago by the Bohemians. Since that
day, whole armies had sunk into the German plains. All the great leaders had fallen in the
war. Wallenstein, Tilly, Count Mansfeld, and dozens of inferior generals had gone to the
grave. Monarchs, as well as men of lower degree — the great Gustavus and the bigoted
Ferdinand — had bowed to the stroke of fate. Richelieu too slept in the marble in
which France lays her great statesmen, and the "odor" in which Rome buries her
faithful servants. Still, above the graves of those who began it, this war was holding its
fearful course, as if it longed to gather beneath its scythe not the German people only,
but the nations of Christendom. Now awoke a loud and universal cry for peace.
Even Maximilian of Bavaria had grown weary of the war. The House of Austria was left alone
in this great field of blood and corpses, and negotiations for peace were opened at
Munster and Osnaburg. These negotiations proceeded slowly. The conflicting interests that
had to be reconciled, and the deep-seated jealousies, antipathies, and bigotrys that had
to be conquered, before the sword could be sheathed, were innumerable. The demands of the
negotiating parties rose and fell according to the position of their arms. But at last the
great victory — more glorious than any that had preceded it — was achieved. They
were exchanging the last shots on the very spot where the first had been fired, namely at
Prague, when a messenger brought the news that a peace had been concluded on the 24th of
October, 1648. First of all, the new treaty confirmed the old ones of Passau and Augsburg
(1552-5), and declared that the interpretation now put upon them was to remain valid in
spite of all protests, from any quarter whatsoever. But the new advanced a step beyond the
old treaties, and gave still more important results. Besides a number of territorial and
political concessions, such as giving Pomerania to Sweden, it extended Toleration to
Calvinists as well as Lutherans. This was the crowning blessing which rose out of these
red fields. And to this day the balance of power between Romanist and Protestant has
remained substantially as it was fixed by the Pacification of Westphalia.
CHAPTER 11 Back to Top
THE FATHERLAND AFTER THE WAR.
Peace Proclaimed — Banquet at Nuremberg — Varied Feelings awakened by the Peace
— Celebration of the Peace in Dolstadt — Symbolical Figures and Procession
— The Fatherland after the War — Its Recovery Slow — Invaded by Wandering
and Lawless Troops — Poverty of the Inhabitants — Instances of Desolation of the
Land — Unexampled Extent of the Calamity — Luther's Warnings Verified.
THE peace had been signed. The ambassadors had solemnly
shaken hands with one another in token of its. ratification, and on all the roads rode
trumpeters to carry to city and rural village the news of the happy event. The rude
tempests of war had spent themselves, and now mild-eyed Peace looked forth and smiled.
The peace was celebrated at Nuremberg by a great banquet, at which imperialists and Swedes
sat down together at the same table, and mingled their rejoicings under the same roof.
Brilliant lights illuminated the vaulted roof of the magnificent town-hall. Between the
blazing chandeliers were hung thirty kinds of fruits and a profusion of flowers, bound
together with gold wire. Four bands were appointed to discourse sweet music, and in six
different rooms were assembled the Six classes of invited guests. Two enormous allegorical
figures had been erected on the tables — the one an arch of victory, the other a
six-sided mountain, covered with mythological and allegorical figures from the Latin and
German mythologies. Dinner was served in four courses, each consisting of 150 dishes. Then
came the fruits, some of which were served in silver, and others on the boughs of the very
trees on which they had grown, and which had been transferred root and all into the
banqueting-room. Along the table at intervals burned fine incense, which filled the
spacious hall with a delightful perfume. There was also confectionery in great abundance,
made up in a variety of fanciful and fantastic forms. A herald now rose and announced the
toast of the day — "The health of his Imperial Majesty of Vienna, and his Royal
Majesty of Sweden." The toast of the newly-concluded peace followed, and was drunk
with rapturous cheers by the assembled ambassadors and generals, while a response was
thundered from the artillery of the castle. A somewhat perilous play at soldiers now
diversified the entertainment. Muskets and swords were brought into the room, and the
company, arming themselves and forming in file, marched :round the table, and fired off a
salvo. After this they marched out, and ascended the streets to the old Margrave's Castle
at the northern gate, and discharged several pieces of ordnance. On their return to the
town-hall they were jestingly thanked, and discharged from the service on the ground that
now War had sheathed his sword, and Peace began her reign. To regale the poor, two oxen
had been killed, and quantities of bread were distributed, and out of a lion's jaws there
ran for six hours white and red wine. Out of a still greater lion's jaws had run for
thirty years tears and blood. As did the ambassadors at Nuremberg, so in every town and
half-destroyed village this thrice-welcome peace was celebrated by the rejoicings of the
inhabitants.
From the banquet-hall of Nuremberg, let us turn to the homesteads of the people, and mark
the varied feelings awakened in their breasts by the cessation of this terrible war.
"To the old," says Gustavus Freytag, "peace appeared like a return of their
youth; they saw the rich harvests of their childhood brought back again; the
thickly-peopled villages; the merry Sundays under the now cut-down village lindens; the
pleasant hours which they had spent with their now dead or impoverished relations and
companions — in short, all the pictures that made up the memory of early days they
saw reviving again to gladden their age. They found themselves happier, manlier, and
better than they had become in almost thirty years filled with misery and degradation. The
young men, that hard, war-begotten, wild generation, felt the approach of a wonderful
time; it seemed to them like a fable out of a far-off land; they saw in vista a time when
on every field there would wave in the wind thick yellow ears of corn, when in every stall
the cows would low, when in every sty would bask a round little pig, when they themselves
should drive two horses to the merry crack of the whip, and no hostile soldier would dare
to lay rough hands upon their sisters and sweethearts; when they would no longer lie in
wait in the bushes with hay-forks and rusty muskets for stragglers; when they would no
longer sit as fugitives, in the eerie nights of the forest, on the graves of their
stricken comrades; when the roofs of the village houses would be without holes, the yards
without crumbling barns; when one would no longer hear the cry of the wolf at the
yard-gate; when the village church would again have glass windows and beautiful bells;
when in the befouled choir of the church there would stand a new altar, with a silk cover,
a silver crucifix, and a gilt cup; and when once again the young men would lead the brides
to the altar with the maiden-wreath in their hair. A passionate, pained joy throbbed in
every breast; and even war's wildest brood, the common soldiers, felt its convulsive
thrill. The callous governing powers even, the princes and their ambassadors, felt that
the great fact of peace was the saving of Germany from the last extremity of ruin.
Solemnly, and with all the fervor of which the people were capable, was the peace
celebrated throughout the land."[1]
As an example of the way in which the peace was welcomed in the smaller towns we
take Dolstadt, in the Dukedom of Gotha. The glimpse it gives us of the morals of the
Fatherland at this era is far from pleasant, and shows us how far the sons of the
Reformers had degenerated; and it paints in affecting colors the character of the men on
whom the great calamity of the Thirty Years' War fell. The Pastor of Dolstadt, vexed from
day to day with the impiety of his flock, denounced against them the judgment of Heaven
unless they turned from their wickedness. They only laughed at his warnings, and showed
him all manner of disrespect. They tore down his hops from the pole, they carried off the
corn from his field, and many other injuries, as he complained with tearful eyes in 1634,
did they inflict upon him. When he came to die he burst into tears, uttering the following
sorrowful exclamation — "Alas! poor Dolstadt, how ill it will go with thee after
my departure!" Directing a look towards the church, and surveying it with a heart
heavy with sorrow and eyes dim with death, he made his attendants raise him in bed, and
again exclaimed, "Ah! dear, dear church, how wilt thou fare after my death! thou
shalt be swept into a heap with the broom of judgment!" His prophecy came true. In
1636 the armed corps of Hatzfeld fell upon the place, ravaging and spoiling; the church
was plundered, and its wood-work torn down and burned, as Pastor Dekner had not obscurely
foretold. In the same year the village had to pay 5,500 guldens of war indemnity. From
1627 to 1637, 29,595 guldens had been exacted of it. The inhabitants dwindled away, and in
a short while the place became almost as deserted as the wilderness. In 1636 there were
only two married couples in the village. In 1641, first Bannier, and after him the French
were quartered there in winter; one half-acre was the whole extent of soil cultivated, and
the population amounted to just four persons.
After the Peace of Westphalia, under the fostering care of Duke Ernest, the pious
sovereign of Gotha, this as well as the other abandoned villages were quickly
re-populated, so that in 1650 there was held also in Dolstadt a festival in honor of the
peace. The morning of the 19th of August was ushered in by the singing of hymns. At six
o'clock the bells were set a-ringing, and the whole population of the place assembled
before the entrance of the village — the women grouped on one side of the path, and
the men on the other. Before the females stood an allegorical figure of Peace, dressed in
a robe of green silk, crowned with a green wreath, varied with yellow flowers, and holding
in its hand a branch of olive. In front of the men was a symbolical representation of
Justice, clothed in white, wearing a green wreath, and holding in one hand a naked sword,
and in the other a yellow rod. The young men stood at some distance, with a representation
of Mars before them, dressed as a soldier and carrying a cross-bow. In the middle of these
groups stood the scholars and villagers, with the pastor at their head, the director of
the day's proceedings, and afterwards their narrator. The pastor directed their glance
back on the awful tempests which had beat upon them, now happily ended. He told them how
often they had had to flee from their homes, fear in their hearts and tears in their eyes;
and how glad they were, the storm over, to return, though to enter naked and devastated
dwellings, and sit at hearths blackened and cold. "And now let us," he said,
"pass in with praise at these same gates, out of which we have often passed in
flight; and let us enter the sanctuary of the Eternal with a psalm of thanksgiving, and
lifting up our voices with one accord, sing to God on high." Thereupon the whole
assembly, wearing green wreaths, and carrying in their hands green branches, marched to
the church singing hymns. The villagers had been joined by the gentry and nobility of the
neighborhood, and the procession was a long and imposing one. In the church hymns were
again sung by voices which trembled with varied emotions; prayers breathed out with
touching pathos and solemnity ascended upward; and the pastor, mounting the pulpit,
preached a sermon suited to the joyful occasion. Thereafter the whole assemblage gathered
in the market-place, and the stripling and the patriarch, the village maiden and the
high-bona dame, mingling their voices in one mighty chorus, sang a closing hymn and then
dispersed.[2]
The condition of the Fatherland after the war was of the most serious and painful
character. Peace had been proclaimed, but many years were needed to staunch the wounds and
efface the deep scars which the war had made. When one has been brought to the grave's
brink and again recovers, slowly the pallor departs from the face, and slowly does the
dimmed eye brighten and the sickly frame wax strong. So with Germany: the work was both
laborious and tedious of re-building its cities, restoring the verdure of its fields and
the shade of its forests, and especially reviving its all but extinct population.
Unconscionable war taxes, ravaging camps waiting for disbandment, prolonged into the era
of peace the miseries that had darkened the period of war. To these were added annoyances
of another kind. The whole country swarmed with "masterless bands," made up of
runaway serfs and discharged soldiers, with women and camp followers.
After these came troops of beggars and hosts of robbers, who wandered from province to
province in quest of prey. "A stream of beggars," says Gustavus Freytag,
"of every kind wandered over the country — dismissed soldiers, cripples,
homeless people, old and sick people; among the rest, lepers, with certificates from the
hospitals; exiles from Bohemia and Hungaria, who had left their home for their religion;
expelled nobles from England, Ireland, and Poland; collectors who wished to set free their
relations from the Turkish prisons; travelers who had been plundered at wayside inns; a
blind pastor, with five children, from Denmark; and not one of this long troop was there
who had not a tale of suffering or adventure to recount, in order to procure money or
excite admiration."[3]
They forcibly quartered themselves in the villages where there still remained a few
inhabitants; and where the population had totally disappeared they took unchallenged
possession of the empty dwellings. But the infection of evil habits spreads fast; and the
inhabitants, discovering that it was easier to rob than to cultivate the fields, began to
make secret incursions into their neighbors' territories, and appropriated whatever they
coveted. The Romanists plundered the Protestant communities, and the Protestants repaid
the visit by plundering the Romanists. The gypsy tribes began to swarm and multiply; their
wandering hordes would gather in every village. Fantastically dressed, they would encamp
round the stone troughs in the market-places, with laden carts, stolen horses, and naked
children. Only where there existed a strong municipality could these wild wanderers be
kept away. In the Dukedom of Gotha sentinels were placed on the bridges and at the fords
of rivers, to sound the alarm when they saw any of these lawless troops approaching.
Gradually something like a police force was organized; a register of householders was
made, and an account taken of the hind each occupied, and the manner in which he
cultivated it, and the taxes fixed which he was to pay. By these means the inhabitants
were again broken into habits of industry. Those who had fled to the mountains, or had
sought refuge in the cities, or in foreign countries, returned, the villages arose,
marriages and baptisms were numerous, and something like its old face began again to be
seen on the Fatherland.
The poverty of the inhabitants was so great that they were not able to procure implements
to cultivate their fields, and large tracts of Germany long lay fallow, or covered with
brushwood. "There were parts of the country where a horseman could ride for many
hours without coming to a single inhabited dwelling. A messenger, who hastened from Saxony
to Berlin, traveled from morning till evening over uncultivated land, through thorns and
thistles, without finding one village in which to rest."[4] In Thuringia and Franconia, fair samples of the rest of Germany,
it is calculated that seventy-five per cent of the male population had perished.
They had lost eighty-five per cent. of horses, eighty-three of goats, and eighty-two of
cows; the remaining horses were lame and blind, and the sheep in all places were
completely annihilated. The population of Hesse had shrunk to a fourth of its former
number. Augsburg was reduced from 80,000 to 18,000; Frankenthal, from 18,000 to 324;
Wurtemberg, from 400,000 to 48,000. In the Palatinate but a fiftieth part of the
population remained. In Ummerstadt, near Coburg, which before the war had a population of
800, so great was the reduction that in two years not one child was born. It is a bloody
history which these facts record.[5]
In olden time, when nations were migrating from one country to another, it would happen
that particular territories were even more completely bereft of inhabitants, or when
plague smote a city there might be even a more terrible destruction of its people. These
depopulations were local, and were easily repaired from the abundant population around the
stricken spot; but here was an ancient nation, possessing hundreds of walled towns,
numerous villages, with meadow-lands and fields, cultivated for thirty generations,
overtaken by a stroke beneath which their cities fell into ruins, their villages sank into
heaps, their morals and religion were lost, and the soil, refusing longer to be the
servant of man, sent forth only weeds, and offered only a lair to the wild beast.
The prophetic eye of Luther saw the approach of terrible evils to Germany, should the
Gospel he had preached not be held fast by her sons. His warnings had been despised, and a
night, blacker even than any he had foreseen, descended on the Fatherland.
FOOTNOTES
VOLUME THIRD
BOOK TWENTY-FIRST
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-FIRST- CHAPTER 1
[1] See ante, vol. 2.
[2] Hallenberg, 1., p. 22. History of Gustavus Adolphus, by B. Chapman, M. A.; p. 47; Lond., 1856.
[3] Geijer, 3., p. 5 — apud Chapman, Hist. Gust. Adolph., p. 45.
[4] Frederick Schiller, The Thirty Years' War, vol. 1., bk. 1.; Edin., 1828. Ludwig Hausser, The Period of the Reformation, vol. 2., part 7., chap. 31; Lond., 1873. B. Chapman, The History of Gustavus Adolphus, and the Thirty Years' War, chap. 5; Lond., 1856.
[5] Von Gustav Freytag, Aus dom Jahrhundert grossen Krieges, chap. 1, p. 22; Leipsic, 1867.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-FIRST- CHAPTER 2
[1] Gustav. Freytag, Jahrhundert dem grossen Krieges, chap. 2, p. 72.
[2] From the parish registers of Seebergen, near Gotha — apud Gustav. Freytag.
[3] Gustav. Freytag, pp. 72, 73.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-FIRST- CHAPTER 3
[1] Gustav. Freytag, chap. 3, p. 111.
[2] Gustav. Freytag, p. 116.
[3] Gustav. Freytag, pp. 119-122.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-FIRST- CHAPTER 4
[1] Chapman, Hist. of Gustavus Adolphus, p. 151.
[2] Schiller, The Thirty Years' War, bk. 2., pp. 161-173. Chapman, Hist. of Gustavus Adolphus, chap. 5, pp. 142-150. Ludwig Hausser, The Period of the Reformation, vol. 2., pp. 108,109.
[3] Schiller, The Thirty Years' War, vol. 1., pp. 145, 146, 163. Ludwig Hausser, The Period of the Reformation, vol. 2., pp. 110, 111.
[4] Schiller, The Thirty Years' War, vol. 1., p. 165. Ludwig Hausser, The Period of the Reformation, vol. 2., p. 112.
[5] Ludwig Hausser, vol. 2., p. 112. Schiller, vol. 1., pp. 172, 173.
[6] Chapman, pp. 159, 160.
[7] Alfred Michiels, p. 60. Ludwig Hausser, vol. 2., p. 116.
[8] Alfred Michiels, p. 63.
[9] Ibid., p. 59. Schiller, vol. 1., pp. 178, 179.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-FIRST- CHAPTER 5
[1] Secret History of the Austrian Government, p. 71.
[2] Schiller, vol. 1., p. 198.
[3] Ludwig Hausser, vol. 2., p. 126.
[4] Chapman, p. 184.
[5] Ludwig Hausser, vol. 2., p. 127.
[6] Schiller, vol. 1., p. 205.
[7] Schiller, vol. 1., p. 200.
[8] Schiller, vol. 1., p. 204.
[9] Ibid., p. 205.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-FIRST- CHAPTER 6
[1] Chapman, p. 196.
[2] Ludwig Hausser, vol. 2., pp. 150, 151.
[3] Schiller, vol. 1., p. 219.
[4] Chapman, p. 205.
[5] Schiller, vol. 1., p. 220.
[6] Ludwig Hausser, vol. 2., p. 148.
[7] Ludwig Hausser, vol. 2., p. 157.
[8] Schiller, vol. 1., p. 226.
[9] Chapman, p. 219.
[10] Ibid., p. 234.
[11] Schiller, vol. 1., pp. 234, 235. Ludwig Hausser, vol. 2., pp. 160-162.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-FIRST- CHAPTER 7
[1] Schiller, vol. 1., p. 230.
[2] Sir Robert Anstruther. German Correspondence, May, 1631. Lotichius, vol. 1., p. 876. Chemnitz, vol. 1., p. 132. Chapman, pp. 240-243. Schiller, vol. 1., pp. 240-250.
[3] Khevenhiller, vol. 11., p. 1875 — apud Chapman, p. 257.
[4] The king's letter to Oxenstierna, apud Geijer, vol 3., p. 217. Chapman, p. 261.
[5] Chemnitz, vol. 1., p. 175. Khevenhiller, vol. 11., p. 1874. Chapman, pp. 257-265. Schiller, vol. 1., pp. 266-269.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-FIRST- CHAPTER 8
[1] Schiller, vol. 1., p. 269.
[2] Puffendorf p. 53. Chapman, p. 267.
[3] Chemnitz, vol. 1., p. 199 — apud Chapman, p. 285.
[4] Ludwig Hausser, vol. 2., p. 168.
[5] Schiller, vol. 2., p. 30.
[6] Ludwig Hausser, vol. 2., pp. 170, 171.
[7] Khevenhiller, vol 7., p. 87.
[8] Richelieu, Memoirs, vol. 7., p. 45.
[9] Chapman, pp. 296, 297.
[10] Aldzreitter, vol. 3., p. 265 — apud Chapman, p. 313.
[11] Khevenhiller, vol. 12., p. 13 — apud Chapman, p. 323. Ludwig Hausser, vol. 2., pp. 175, 176.
[12] Swed. Intell., vol. 2., pp. 152-158 — apud Chapman, p. 326.
[13] Schiller, vol. 2., p. 98.
[14] Schiller, vol 2., p. 122.
[15] Swed. Intell., vol. 3., p. 128 — apud Chapman, p. 369.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-FIRST- CHAPTER 9
[1] Schiller, vol. 2., p. 128.
[2] We have followed the standard authorities for our description of this celebrated battle; still, it is impossible to give very minute or, it may be, perfectly accurate details of it. It was variously reported at the time. The king's death, for instance, has been set down as the act of an assassin, and the Swedes generally believed that the perpetrator of the base act was Francis, Duke of Lauenburg. The antecedents of this man, and his subsequent history, gave some grounds for the suspicion. But it needs not assassination to account for the death of one who, with incomparable but unjustifiable bravery, was fighting, almost alone and without armor, in the midst of hundreds of enemies.
[3] The traveler Cox says: "A few years ago, Prince Henry of Prussia, being at Stockholm, descended into the vault, and opened the coffin which contains the remains of Gustavus. A Swedish nobleman who accompanied the prince into the vault assured me that the body was in a state of complete preservation" (about 150 years after burial), "that the countenance still retained the most perfect resemblance to the pictures and coins, and particularly that the whiskers and short pointed beard, which he wore according to the fashion of the times in which he lived, were distinctly visible." (Cox, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, vol. 3., p. 102; Dublin, 1784.)
[4] Gustav Freytag, p. 180.
[5] Schiller, vol. 2., p. 135.
[6] Alexander, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Prince Eugene, Frederick II of Prussia, Napoleon. (Gfrorer, p. 1015.)
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-FIRST- CHAPTER 10
[1] Swed. Intell., vol. 3., p. 200 — apud Chapman, p. 390.
[2] Diet of Heilbronn — Swed. Intell., vol. 3., p. 312.
[3] Schiller, vol. 2., p. 148.
[4] Schiller, vol. 2., p. 170. Khevenhiller, vol. 12., p. 591. Forster, Wallenstein's Briefe, vol. 3., p. 30 — apud Chapman, p. 391.
[5] Michiels, Secret History of the Austrian Government, pp. 78, 79.
[6] Forster, Wallenstein's Briefe, vol. 3., p. 199. Chemnitz, vol. 2., p. 332. Khevenhiller, vol. 12., p. 1163. Schiller, vol. 2., pp. 197-201. Michiels, Secret History, pp. 87-91. Chapman, pp. 396-398.
[7] Schiller, vol. 2., p. 221.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-FIRST- CHAPTER 11
[1] Gustav. Freytag, pp. 221-223.
[2] From the Church-Book of Pastor Trumper of Dolstadt, apud Gustav. Freytag, pp. 223-227.
[3] Freytag, p. 229.
[4] Freytag, pp. 230, 231.
[5] Chapman, p. 400. Freytag, p. 235. Ludwig Hausser, vol. 2., p. 277.