IN THE YEARS that had elapsed since Richelieu’s rise to power, the affairs of Europe had taken no dramatic turn for the worse. The full horrors of the Thirty Years’ War were yet to come. For the moment, it seemed as though the devil were content to mark time. In 1625 Denmark entered the war against the Emperor. England had promised the Danes financial help; but the subsidies were never paid, for Parliament, after forcing James to break off his negotiations with Spain and encouraging Charles to support his Protestant brother-in-law, the Elector Palatine, refused to vote any supplies for the carrying on of the war. To disentangle himself from his financial difficulties, Charles had to adopt unconstitutional measures, and these unconstitutional measures resulted at last in the great rebellion. Evil is contagious; the Civil War, Charles’s execution and Cromwell’s tyranny were due, at least in part, to an infection brought over from war-fevered Germany. Meanwhile, the Danes, disappointed of their money, were unable to make much headway against the enemy. Christian IV collected a considerable army and was joined by Mansfeld and his marauding troops. To the Emperor Ferdinand, the situation seemed threatening – so threatening that, in order to meet it, he was induced to give Wallenstein authority to raise and command a great imperial army. In this way a new instrument of tyranny and oppression was forged, an instrument that was destined to inflict incalculable miseries upon the German people. With a greater air of legality than Mansfeld, but more efficiently and just as ruthlessly, Wallenstein stripped the various provinces through which he marched of all their reserves of coin, food, and any supplies that might be useful for his army. And the pillage went on, year after year, long after Wallenstein’s death, to the very end of the war.
In the campaigns of 1625 and 1626, Christian IV and Mansfeld were separated. Wallenstein followed the latter into Silesia, where he had joined forces with Bethlen Gabor, and forced him to accept a truce, shortly after which Mansfeld died. Desperately in need of food for the troops he had raised but (for lack of the English subsidies) could not pay, Christian IV advanced into Brunswick, pillaged the country for a little and was then defeated by Tilly, at Lutter. After that the war died down for a time into a succession of sieges of Danish fortresses. Returning from Silesia in 1627, Wallenstein devoted himself to two tasks; the subjugation of his new duchy of Mecklenburg, forfeited by its rightful owner for his share in the Danish war and presented by Ferdinand to his commander-in-chief; and the conquest, in the Emperor’s name, of the whole Baltic coast. Jealous of their liberties, the Hanse towns refused to open their gates to him and, at the beginning of 1628, Wallenstein sat down to the siege of one of them, the second-rate city of Stralsund. At this same moment, hundreds of miles to the south-west, Richelieu and his army were encamped outside the walls of La Rochelle. But whereas, thanks to Father Joseph, the siege of La Rochelle was continued to the bitter end, Wallenstein lost patience and, after six months, abandoned the attempt on Stralsund, cut his losses and marched away. The result, as time was to show, was that Richelieu’s position was greatly improved, while that of the Hapsburgs was correspondingly weakened. The victory at La Rochelle united France and closed a breach through which hostile powers might intervene in the country’s internal affairs; the defeat at Stralsund left the Baltic coast open to invasion from Scandinavia, but at the same time it had come near enough to victory to frighten the Northern Protestants into a more determined resistance to the centralizing policy of the Hapsburgs. In the following year, 1629, the Emperor did a thing which positively guaranteed the continuance and intensification of Protestant hostility; he issued the Edict of Restitution, which claimed for the Roman Church all lands which had been ecclesiastical property before 1552. The prospect of losing more than a hundred and fifty rich bishoprics united the Protestant princes of the North, while the prospect of being persecuted by the Jesuits united their peoples in a stand against what they regarded as naked religious and political aggression.
Meanwhile, trouble had broken out in Italy. At the end of 1627 Vincenzo II of Mantua died without issue, leaving a will by which he bequeathed his duchy to Father Joseph’s old friend, Charles Palaeologus Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers. The new sovereign hurried off to Italy and proceeded to install himself among the splendid and long-accumulated treasures of the Mantuan palaces. Many of these treasures – among them Mantegna’s ‘Triumph of Caesar’, now at Hampton Court – Nevers was forced soon afterwards to sell to Charles I of England; for he was in desperate need of money with which to buy the means for defending his inheritance. Even before Vincenzo’s death, the validity of his will had been disputed, and within a very short time of his accession the new duke found himself assailed on all sides by rival Gonzagas – the Duke of Guastalla, the Dowager Duchess of Lorraine and, more menacing than either, the Duke of Savoy, who demanded the Mantuan-owned duchy of Monferrato for his nephew’s wife, a daughter of Vincenzo II’s elder brother and predecessor on the ducal throne. Lying as it did on the road from Turin to Alessandria and Genoa, Monferrato, with its strong fortress of Casale, was a territory of much strategic importance. Charles Emanuel of Savoy had no wish to see a French prince, backed by French arms and money, installed so close to his capital. The prospect was even more distasteful to the Court of Madrid, for Monferrato lay across the line of communications between the Spanish province of Milan and the sea. Early in 1628 Charles Emanuel and Philip IV’s ambassador at Turin signed an agreement stipulating that the two powers should take joint military action against Monferrato, which was then to be partitioned between them. Troops were collected and equipped and, later in the year, Charles Emanuel overran that part of the duchy which lay on the left bank of the Po, while the Spanish governor of Milan addressed himself to the more difficult and laborious task of reducing the fortress of Casale.
So long as La Rochelle held out, it was impossible for Richelieu to do anything to relieve the French outpost which the accidents of heredity had now so conveniently established on the further side of the Alps. The surrender of the Huguenots left him free to act. He moved with as much dispatch as the winter weather, bad organization and court intrigues would permit. In the first days of March 1629, a French army of thirty-five thousand men, with the King and Cardinal at their head, crossed the Alps, defeated the troops of Savoy and captured the stronghold of Suss. A few days later Charles Emanuel signed a dictated peace and, on March 15th, the siege of Casale was raised and the Spanish army marched back to Milan. Richelieu provisioned the town against the renewed attack which he knew would come the moment French forces had been withdrawn, strengthened the fortifications and left a substantial garrison under Thoiras, the commander who had so valiantly resisted Buckingham on the island of Rhé. Meanwhile Father Joseph was in Mantua, telling the Duke exactly what was expected of him by the Cardinal and exactly what he might expect in the way of French support. Richelieu was a hard taskmaster, and the Duke complained of his severity; but fear of the Hapsburgs and the persuasive eloquence of his old friend and fellow-crusader brought him at last to the acceptance of all the Cardinal’s conditions – an acceptance which (though Mantua was sacked by the imperial troops in 1630) permitted him to keep his title and transmit it, at his death in 1637, to an infant grandchild. This grandchild grew up a profligate and left the duchy in due course to an almost imbecile son who finally lost it to the Austrians in 1708. It is a dismal and vaguely cautionary tale – cautionary, like all history, against the consequences of merely behaving like human beings, of existing unregenerately as natural men. We may wish sincerely to avoid the crimes and follies of past generations; but at the same time we wish to live that natural life which (along with its quota of goodness and beauty) produces the very crimes and follies we wish to avoid. That is why, to all but the saints, who anyhow have no need of them, the lessons of history are totally unavailing.
From Italy, Father Joseph followed the royal armies back to France, where they spent the spring and summer of 1629 crushing out the political power of the Huguenots of Provence and Languedoc. It was a savage campaign, with much slaughtering of the inhabitants of captured cities, much hanging of rebels, much condemning of men to slavery in the galleys. Father Joseph did his best to mitigate these horrors; but the King and, above all, Condé, who was in command of part of the forces, were ruthless. By the end of July the royal arms were completely victorious, and the Cardinal was able to ride from city to Protestant city, making triumphal entries, receiving the submission of the magistrates, appointing royal intendants to govern in the King’s name, supervising the demolition of walls and towers. Returning to Paris to cope with the ever more menacing intrigues of Marie de Medicis, he left Father Joseph in southern France, with the difficult task of initiating the reconversion of the people to Catholicism. Of the methods he sometimes used to accomplish this end I have already spoken. They were a bit shady, to say the least of it; but then it was a matter of performing God’s exterior will as rapidly and efficiently as possible . . .
Early in 1630, trouble broke out again in Italy. Disregarding the terms of the peace treaty he had signed the year before, Charles Emanuel once more threw in his lot with the Spaniards. Spanish power was a menace to all the princes of Italy; but for the present at least, Madrid had an interest in preserving Savoy as a buffer state between France and its own possessions in Lombardy. The French attitude towards Savoy was uncertain and equivocal. Better a known than an unknown evil. Besides, Charles Emanuel wanted his slice of Monferrato.
Once more a Spanish army sat down to the siege of Casale. It was commanded by Ambrose Spinola, the Genoese soldier who survives for us in Velasquez’s ‘Surrender of Breda’ – a great master of siege-craft, who had served the Spanish crown not only in the field, but also by the sacrifice (in order to keep his unpaid troops from mutiny) of his entire personal fortune, only to be treated in the last years of his life with the most shameless ingratitude. The injuries and insults heaped upon him by Olivares during this campaign so preyed upon his mind that in September of 1630 he fell sick and died at his post before the walls of Casale.
To relieve Casale was as necessary in 1630 as it had been in 1629; but this time Richelieu found himself paralysed by opposition within the royal family and the ranks of his own cabinet. Mainly because of her personal grudge against the Cardinal, but also because she believed in a specifically Catholic foreign policy, a policy of collaboration with the Hapsburgs in the extermination of heresy, Marie de Medicis was firmly set against the Italian campaign. The young Queen, Anne of Austria, had been a Spanish Infanta and, on this point at least, was in accord with her mother-in-law. Their strongest supporter in the Council of State was Marillac, the Keeper of the Great Seal. Another supporter had been Cardinal Bérulle, who, until his death in 1629, had used all the authority conferred upon him by his position and the extraordinary sanctity of his life to back up the Queen Mother in her opposition to Richelieu. His talk was of the seamless robe of Christ, of a western world purged of heresy and reunited under the three great Catholic powers, France, Spain and Austria. One wonders if he ever used his fancy to trace out in pictorial terms the implications of his metaphor. His aim was to transform a seamy robe into a seamless one. To achieve this end, he proposed that Bourbons and Hapsburgs should unite their forces for the purpose of gashing and cauterizing the body within the robe. At some point in the proceedings the seams were automatically to disappear, and all Christendom would find itself united. For Bérulle’s own sake, one can only be thankful that he died when he did. Had he lived on, had his policy been adopted, he would have become, like his old schoolfellow, Father Joseph, more and more deeply involved in large-scale iniquity, would have known the bitterness of seeing the disastrous consequences of his good intentions, would at last have realized that between his policy and Richelieu’s there was little or nothing to choose; for both had proposed the employment of means, whose consequences could never be the improvement of the existing state of things.
Between his mother and the Cardinal, Louis XIII vacillated in an agony of uncertainty. He disliked Richelieu and felt himself humiliated by the man’s superiority; but at the same time he recognized his ability, he was grateful to him for all he had done for the glory of the monarchy, he knew that there was nobody who could take his place. Over against Richelieu stood Marie de Medicis, florid and fairly bulging with female energy, vulgar, loud-voiced, rancorous and obstinately stupid. Ever since his unhappy childhood, the King hated and feared her, but always with a guilty sense that he ought to love her and listen to what she said. What she said now was that the war must be stopped at once and the Cardinal dismissed. And though he felt sure that Richelieu was right, that he would go on doing great things for the house of Bourbon, Louis listened to his mother’s words, and was half persuaded. The spring and summer of 1630 were wasted, from a military point of view, because the King was unable to make up his mind whether to prosecute the war or to make peace, whether to accompany his armies into Italy, or to stay at home. Always sickly and delicate, he had several sharp attacks of illness, which the treatment prescribed by his physicians – daily purgings and weekly bleedings – threatened to make chronic. Away from the court, a soldier among his soldiers, he always felt stronger for a time; but sooner or later his mother’s letters would bring back the old neurasthenia, and he would insist on taking the Cardinal back from the frontier to where the two queens were quartered, at Lyons. There, in the council chamber, Richelieu had to set forth, yet once more, his reasons for going on with the war in Italy. The council gave him a vote of confidence, and Louis was reassured. Three times this proceeding was repeated; and meanwhile time was passing, plague had broken out in the army and thousands of soldiers were deserting. At Casale, however, Thoiras still held out.
In this predicament Richelieu did his best to compensate for his enforced inactivity in the field by redoubling his efforts on the diplomatic front. His first system of Protestant alliances had failed him. It was in vain that Louis XIII had given his sister in marriage to Charles I; instead of collaborating with France, England had gone to war on behalf of the Huguenots. Meanwhile Denmark had been decisively defeated by the imperialists. Holland was too weak to do anything effective on land. There remained only Sweden. In the autumn of 1629 Richelieu had sent an agent to Gustavus Adolphus, offering French mediation between the king and his cousin, Sigismund of Poland, with whom he had for years been at war. Peace was quickly restored between the two sovereigns, who agreed to a six-years’ truce. Having thus secured his flank, Gustavus was now free to invade Germany – a plan which he had long been meditating, partly for religious reasons (for he was an ardent Protestant who regarded the Hapsburgs’ Counter-Reformation as diabolic), and partly because he was ambitious to transform the Baltic into a Swedish lake. But Sweden was a poor country and, though Gustavus had the best army in Europe, he lacked the sinews of war. Richelieu now offered him a subsidy of six hundred thousand livres – less than one-eighth of his own income – on condition that Gustavus should invade Germany, beat the imperialists, but respect the rights of the Catholic princes. Gustavus, who had no wish to respect Catholics, rejected the offer; and in the summer of 1630 boldly invaded Pomerania, without a subsidy. Richelieu bided his time and continued to dangle the golden bait, knowing very well that the Swedish King would sooner or later be forced by mere poverty to accept his terms.
Meanwhile, at the other end of Germany, Ferdinand had summoned an imperial Diet to meet at Ratisbon. His intention was to persuade the seven Electors of the Empire to appoint his son King of the Romans, a title which would officially consecrate him as his father’s successor to the imperial throne. For this favour he expected to have to pay – in what way and precisely how much would be settled by a long-drawn process of haggling at the Diet.
The summoning of the Diet gave Richelieu an excuse for sending a special embassy to Ratisbon – nominally to discuss the question of the Mantuan succession, but in fact to make trouble between the Emperor and the Electors. A professional diplomat, Brulart de Leon, was officially the King’s ambassador; but the real representative of France, as everyone knew, was the humble Capuchin who accompanied him on his mission. Father Joseph had no offical position, and his credentials to the Emperor attributed to him no powers; he was just an observer, nothing more. As a mere observer, he was able to act and speak with a freedom that would have been impossible in an ambassador; as the right-hand man of Cardinal Richelieu, he was listened to with an attention and a deference which a mere civil servant, like Brulart, could not command.
From the General of the Capuchins Father Joseph had received an ‘obedience’ which permitted him so far to infringe the rules of his order as to ride in a carriage and handle money. Armed with this and his letters of credence, he rejoined Brulart in Switzerland, where the latter had been acting as French ambassador, and together, in the month of July 1630, they set out with all the pomp befitting a King’s representative, for Ratisbon.
There was not much active fighting going on at the moment and, as there was still something to eat in southern Germany, Wallenstein had established his headquarters at Memmingen, about half-way between Augsburg and the Swiss frontier. Hearing of the approach of the French envoy and his interesting companion, the commander of the imperial army drove out of the town to meet them, accompanied by ‘eighteen coaches, filled with princes, dukes and palatines of Hungary and Bohemia’. One can imagine the scene on that hot July afternoon: trains of coaches halted in the dusty road; the coming and going, between ambassador and generalissimo, of emissaries to discuss the delicate and, for seventeenth-century noblemen, infinitely important question of precedence; the happy solution of the problem by a decision that both parties should alight simultaneously and greet one another at a point exactly half-way between the two foremost carriages; then the solemn approach and beautifully stylized salutation – the low bow, with the right foot advanced and pointed slightly outwards in the first position of the dance, the elaborate flourish of the plumed hat, followed by the handshake, the few well-chosen words, the enormous compliments. And when the two protagonists have gone through their ritual, there is a similar baroque exchange of courtesies between Brulart’s suite and the eighteen carriage-loads of princes, dukes and palatines. In the background, meanwhile, conspicuously grey and tattered in the midst of so much crimson velvet, so much lace and jewellery, stands the Capuchin, his bare horny feet sunk in the dust. To those who salute him, he inclines his head and raises his right hand in benediction. When Wallenstein invites him to join the ambassador and himself in his huge gilded coach, Father Joseph protests that the honour is too great; but the general insists, and in the end he climbs in after the others, and away they roll towards Memmingen and an official banquet, of which it will be impossible for him to partake as he is in the midst of one of his four annual Lents.
Next day, during a lull in the festivities, Wallenstein invited the friar to his quarters for a long confidential talk, the gist of which was communicated to the Cardinal in Father Joseph’s next dispatch. It was an interesting conversation and one which any casual eavesdropper would have found extremely odd. For what the two men chiefly discussed was Byzantium and the Holy Places, Turkish power and joint expeditions from the West. Not since those happy days with the Duke of Nevers and Paul V had Father Joseph had the joy of talking crusades with so ardent an enthusiast. Wallenstein was as keen to smash the infidels as St Louis had been, albeit, as Father Joseph came little by little to discover, not for quite the same reasons. For one who had been sent to school, first with the Moravians, then with the Jesuits, who had exchanged Lutheranism for Romanism out of personal interest, and who believed with conviction only in astrology, the triumph of the Church Militant was not of the smallest interest. Crusading, for Wallenstein, was merely an excuse for the Drang nach Osten. That he talked of his vast projects in terms of the Cross and Crescent was merely a historical accident and a matter of convenience. If steam engines had existed in the seventeenth century, he would have talked just as enthusiastically about the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. His ambition was to create a great federated empire, stretching from the Baltic to the Bosphorus and beyond, into Asia Minor and Syria. Such an empire could be ruled either by the Hapsburgs, with himself, Albrecht von Wallenstein, as their generalissimo and mayor of the palace, or else (and at this point that dark and horribly sinister face of his, the face of a bloated Mephistopheles, the face of a devil who is not a gentleman, lit up with inward exultation as he leaned confidentially towards the friar) or else – why not? – by Albrecht von Wallenstein himself, ruling in his own name, by virtue of an irresistible military force. Coming as they did from the Emperor’s commander-in-chief, and addressed as they were to the man who was travelling to Ratisbon, among other reasons, for the express purpose of undermining Wallenstein’s position with the Emperor, these remarks were, to say the least of it, surprising. But along with his cunning and caution, Wallenstein had the recklessness of one who knows that all things are predestined, that fate is written in the stars and cannot be changed. Let them all know what he planned – Emperor, Cardinal, Pope, King of Spain, the whole lot of them! What did it matter, so long as, from their heavenly houses, the planets looked down on him with favour?
From crusades the conversation shifted, by way of the Palaeologi, to Mantua; and with the same astonishing frankness Wallenstein declared himself entirely opposed to the Hapsburg policy in Italy. He knew Nevers and liked him; besides, as the last of the Palaeologi, the man might come in useful one day. And anyhow, it was senseless for the Emperor to add to his troubles by going to war with France over a piddling little duchy that mattered to nobody except the Spaniards. In these sentiments Father Joseph most heartily concurred and went on to express the hope that His Highness would do all he could to bring His Imperial Majesty to the same opinion. Not that Wallenstein would have much time or opportunity to influence the Emperor, he reflected inwardly; for he felt pretty certain of being able to persuade the Electors to force the general’s resignation. Which was a pity in some ways; for Wallenstein would be a most useful ally in the Mantuan affair. But meanwhile Gustavus Adolphus was already on German soil, and it was essential that before the campaign started, the imperial armies should be weakened by the loss of their commander. Later on, perhaps, when the King of Sweden had done his work, Wallenstein might be called back to power, might be encouraged in his wild ambitions for personal rule – encouraged just sufficiently to make him a paralysing embarrassment to the Emperor, but not enough, of course, to permit him to become the military dictator of all the Germanies.
Refreshed and considerably enlightened by his stay at Memmingen, Father Joseph drove on with Brulart and their following to Ratisbon, where the Diet was already in session. The Emperor and the five Catholic Electors were present in person; the two Protestant Electors had sent only their representatives. To his surprise – for he persisted in regarding himself as what in fact he was in private life, a humble Capuchin friar – Father Joseph found himself the man most talked about, most in view, most generally notorious in all Ratisbon. Six years of close association with Richelieu had given him already an international reputation. Every well-informed person in Europe had heard of the bare-footed friar who had left his convent to become the collaborator of the most astute and, so far as Hapsburg sympathizers were concerned, the most dangerous politician of his century. Universally known, Father Joseph was almost universally reprobated. This follower of St Francis who had betrayed the Lady Poverty to live among princes, this dedicated servant of the Church who had conspired with the heretics to thwart the Counter-Reformation – what was he but a renegade, an enemy of God and man? At Ratisbon, Father Joseph discovered for the first time what his contemporaries thought of him.
The first revelation came to him one day, early in the proceedings, when he had gone to pay his respects on Tilly, the old general to whom, in the Turciad, he had devoted two graceful lines of praise:
Tilli, etenim te nostra canet testudo, nec unquam
Egregium nomen gelidi teget umbra sepulcri.20
The compliment had been penned at a time when Father Joseph was still an ardent imperialist; now that he had become convinced that Hapsburg power must be destroyed, if true religion, under Bourbon leadership, was to flourish, he would have written rather differently. But whatever his present opinions of Tilly, etiquette demanded that he should call on him. When the interview was over, Tilly accompanied his guest to the door of the reception room, and from there the friar was escorted by a group of the general’s aides to the foot of the steps leading into the street. On the way out, one of the gentlemen called de Flamel turned to the friar, asked him if he was really Father Joseph and, on receiving an affirmative answer, continued: ‘Then you are a Capuchin; that is to say you are obliged by your profession to do what you can to foster peace in Christendom. And yet you are the man who starts a bloody war between the Catholic sovereigns – between the Emperor, the King of Spain and the King of France. You ought to blush with shame.’
Reacting, not to the offence against his personal honour, but to the insult offered a representative of His Most Christian Majesty, Father Joseph demanded an apology. Tilly tendered excuses and had the offender clapped in irons; but in spite of all this, Father Joseph had reason to believe that the affront was premeditated and that the whole incident on the steps had been carefully staged by Tilly himself. Well, calumny was what the servants of Christ had been taught to expect – yes, and even rejoice in; for to be tried by calumny was a sign, if one were following the way of perfection, that God considered one ripe for the hardest lessons. To suffer slander without resentment or bitterness was possible only to souls that had lost themselves in God. At Ratisbon, Father Joseph redoubled his exercises of passive and active annihilation.
He had need to do so; for what happened at Tilly’s headquarters was only the first of a long series of similar trials to his patience. Pamphlets were hawked about the streets of Ratisbon, in which he and his master, the Cardinal, were denounced with that savage intemperance of language characteristic of all controversial writing in the seventeenth century. The pamphlets were in Latin and unsigned. Rumour had it that they were composed by two Spanish ecclesiastics; but the fact that the authors were Father Joseph’s political enemies did not prevent them from saying some very just and sensible things about him, things that were being said by men of ordinary intelligence and decent feeling in every part of Europe. People everywhere were wondering, like Flamel, how a Capuchin could reconcile his profession with the framing and execution of policies that resulted, as anyone with eyes in his head could see, in the increase of misery and crime. To them it seemed as though he were deliberately using the reputation of his order to whiten the sepulchre of Richelieu’s iniquities. In the epigrammatic Latin of the pamphleteers, ‘huic ille tegendo sceleri cucullum praebet’. (He, Joseph, offers him, Richelieu, a friar’s hood to hide his crimes in.) Richelieu himself knew very well how important it was for a politician to cover his actions with the prestige of religion and high morality. In his dealings with foreign countries, he always took enormous pains never to seem the aggressor, always to have the appearance of legality and right on his side. Nor was this all; for, in the words of an Italian diplomat of the period, ‘it is said that when Cardinal Richelieu wishes to play some clever trick, not to say some piece of knavery, he always makes use of men of piety.’ Bad men could never do the harm they actually accomplish, unless they were able to induce good men to become, first their dupes, and then their more or less willing, more or less conscious accomplices. ‘Huic ille tegendo sceleri cucullum praebet.’
What happens when good men go into power politics in the hope of forcibly shoving humanity into the kingdom of God? Echoing the wisdom of common men, the pamphleteers of Ratisbon had their neatly pointed answer in the best Senecan manner. ‘Sacrilega sunt arma quae sacra tractantur manu . . . Miles mitrae imperat cum mitra militibus imperat.’ (Sacrilegious are the arms wielded by a sacred hand. When the mitre commands the soldier, it is the soldier who commands the mitre.) The whole political history of the Church is summed up in those phrases. Again and again ecclesiastics and pious laymen have become statesmen in the hope of raising politics to their own high moral level, and again and again politics have dragged them down to the low moral level upon which statesmen, in their political capacity, are compelled to live. That the Ratisbon pamphleteers should have chosen to wrap up a great moral and political truth in a tissue of lies and scurrility was unfortunate; for by so doing they made it absolutely certain that Father Joseph would pay no attention to what they had to say.
Father Joseph’s performance at Ratisbon was a miracle of diplomatic virtuosity. His first task was to allay the suspicions of the Emperor, who had been repeatedly warned by Richelieu’s enemies in France – Marillac, the Queen-Mother, the great nobles, the extreme Catholic partisans of collaboration with Spain – that the Cardinal was plotting nothing less than the overthrow of Hapsburg power. This happened, of course, to be true; all the more reason, therefore, for persuading Ferdinand that it was false. This Father Joseph accomplished more or less successfully by discrediting the people from whom the Emperor had received these warnings. They were people, he explained, whose personal ambitions had been thwarted by the Cardinal’s rise to power, or who objected to the Cardinal’s efforts to achieve what His Imperial Majesty was so wisely and benevolently trying to achieve in Germany: the union of a divided country under a single centralized authority. It was true that France had been forced to protect itself against Spanish aggression; but to pretend that the Cardinal or his master had any designs against Austria was a malicious falsehood . . .
From his interviews with the Emperor, Father Joseph padded away on his bare feet to Maximilian of Bavaria and his fellow Electors. To these he spoke of His Most Christian Majesty’s extreme concern for the liberties of his cousins, the German princes. He was shocked to observe the way in which these liberties were now being menaced; his heart bled for the unhappy victims of the Emperor’s tyranny. The imperial army, under that arrogant upstart, Wallenstein, had been raised to fight the heretics; but it was being used even more effectively to subjugate the Catholic Electors. With Wallenstein quartered at Memmingen, this solemn Diet was nothing but a farce. Under the threat of overwhelming force the Electors were no longer free agents; it was the end of that grand old German Constitution, to which His Most Christian Majesty and the Cardinal were so deeply and unshakably attached. Their only hope lay in acting at once, while the Emperor had need of them to nominate his son King of the Romans. Let them refuse even to discuss the question so long as Wallenstein remained in power. If there should be any trouble, Their Highnesses could rely on the Cardinal to come to their aid.
The Electors listened and took heart to do what the Emperor’s military successes and his high-handed Edict of Restitution had secretly made them wish to do for some time past. They demanded the dismissal of Wallenstein and a reduction in the size of the imperial army.
Ferdinand had no great love for Wallenstein, whose loyalty he suspected and of whose vast personal ambitions he had been fully informed. At the same time he was loath at this particular juncture to get rid of him. After all, Gustavus was busy up there in the North, consolidating his position and preparing for attack. Father Joseph hastened to reassure him. Gustavus, he cried contemptuously, who was Gustavus? A twopenny-halfpenny little princeling at the head of a troop of starving barbarians. No, Gustavus simply didn’t count; pitted against the imperial army, he would be swept off the face of the earth. And, of course, if by some unlucky chance he should happen to give trouble, the Emperor could always call Wallenstein back to his command and recruit a few more regiments. Meanwhile with regard to the election, His Imperial Majesty need have no fears. Once Wallenstein was out of the way, the grateful princes would do what they were asked, and the fact that they had voted freely would redound enormously to the glory of the Emperor and enhance his moral authority through the Germanies.
All this was sound enough and, feeling that Wallenstein was a moderate price to pay for his son’s election, Ferdinand consented to dismiss his general. In September emissaries were sent to Memmingen ordering Wallenstein to resign. Father Joseph, meanwhile, had sent a letter to the general, reminding him of their delightful conversation about the infidels and advising him to submit without demur to the Emperor’s bidding. After all, he pointed out, Gustavus Adolphus was in Pomerania. With his magnificent army he was bound to win some victories, and the moment that happened the Emperor would be forced to come hat in hand to the only soldier in Europe capable of dealing with so formidable an enemy. His Highness would then be able to demand practically anything he liked; to allow himself to be dismissed now would be a stroke of the most consummate policy. Wallenstein accepted the advice, which was in accord with what his horoscopists (Johann Kepler at their head) had discovered in the stars. Obediently and without protest, he resigned his command, and with him were dismissed eighteen thousand cavalry and not less than twice that number of foot soldiers. Merely by talking, Father Joseph had won the equivalent of a major military victory.
Now that Wallenstein had been dismissed and his army cut in half, the Emperor turned to the Electors for his reward. But Tenebroso-Cavernoso had slipped up the back stairs and into their private council chambers before him. Their Highnesses, he whispered, had scored a signal victory; but the fruits of that victory would be wasted unless it were followed up by a second. Now that they had weakened the Emperor, they ought quickly to strike again – strike at the most vulnerable chink in the Hapsburg’s armour: the imperial succession. By refusing to nominate Ferdinand’s son as his successor, by merely hinting at the possibility that they might elect an Emperor from some other royal house, they could put the fear of God into those tyrants of Vienna and Madrid. And if the tyrants should bluster and threaten, the Electors had only to appeal to His Most Christian Majesty; all the resources of France would be at their disposal. This was the moment for Their Highnesses to assert themselves, to remind these Hapsburgs that they were Emperors, not by hereditary right, but only by the grace of the Electors and the grand old German Constitution.
When the Emperor formally asked for the title of King of the Romans for his son, the Electors voted him down, Wallenstein and the army had been sacrificed for nothing. Looking back over the causes of his defeat, Ferdinand perceived, at every turn of the tortuous diplomatic road, a grey-cowled figure, hurrying in silence through the shadows. To his ministers, the Emperor ruefully admitted that ‘a poor Capuchin had beaten them with his rosary, and that, narrow as was the friar’s hood, he had contrived to stuff into it six electoral bonnets’.
Meanwhile, however, the war of negotiation had been going badly for Father Joseph on some of the other diplomatic fronts, where events in France had placed him in an inextricably difficult and precarious situation. Vacillating between his mother and the Cardinal, Louis XIII had sunk through neurasthenia into physical sickness. On September 22nd, at Lyons, he fell ill of a fever so violent that, a week later, his condition was despaired of and the last rites of the Church were administered. Then, on the first of October, the physicians reported that an abscess in the King’s body had burst; the fever dropped; it seemed possible that Louis would recover. Richelieu’s situation during these last days of September was like that of a man suspended over a precipice by a rope whose fibres, one by one, are snapping under his weight. If the King died, he was infallibly lost. Gaston, who would succeed his childless brother as King, detested the Cardinal; so did the Queen-Mother; so did the great magnates whose power he had sought to curb; so did the common people, who knew him only as the ruthless tax-gatherer, the instigator of this gratuitous and incomprehensible war, which might at any moment spread from Italy to every corner of Europe and even into France itself. As soon as the King’s condition became serious, a group of nobles secretly met and decided, if he died, to deal with Richelieu as Concini had been dealt with, thirteen years before. Remembering that eviscerated carcass hanging by the heels from the gibbet of the Pont Neuf, the Cardinal made plans to flee for safety to the papal city of Avignon. It would be a race between the murderers and their victim. Then, at the very moment when the race was timed to start, the King began to recover. For Richelieu it was a respite from his mortal apprehensions – but only a respite, not yet definitive and enduring liberation. The King was out of immediate danger, but he was still a sick man, and at his bedside sat the Queen-Mother and Anne of Austria. As Louis emerged again into convalescence, the two women prolonged and intensified their persuasions. They were all devotion, all sweetness, all love and forgiveness; but they were determined to badger the unhappy man into doing what they and their political friends desired. Day and night, relaying one another, like a pair of examining magistrates putting a recalcitrant prisoner through the third degree, they pressed the young King to make the decisive move – dismiss his minister, stop the war, reverse his policy. Louis had no strength to argue with them; but he was able at last to summon up enough will power to say, quite definitely, that he would make no decision till he was well again and back in Paris. The Cardinal’s respite had been prolonged for a few more weeks.
Receiving word of what was happening at Lyons, Father Joseph found himself in a most painful predicament. His secret mission, which was to drive a wedge between the Emperor and the Electors, had been accomplished; but there was also an ostensible mission, which was to come to terms over the question of Mantua. The Emperor, as had been foreseen, was pressing for a general settlement of all outstanding differences between France and Austria; but as Richelieu’s campaign against the Hapsburgs had only just begun, such a general settlement would be premature and must therefore be avoided. Hitherto Father Joseph had succeeded in parrying all the Emperor’s attempts to link up Mantua with the European situation as a whole. It was a policy of delay and evasion, deliberately framed to prolong the struggle between the Hapsburgs and France and her allies. Such a policy could be pursued only on condition that Richelieu remained sufficiently powerful at home to override popular and aristocratic opposition to the war. But now Richelieu was in danger of dismissal, even of death; the prime condition of France’s anti-Hapsburg policy – the Cardinal’s absolute power – was ceasing to exist. To Father Joseph, at Ratisbon, it seemed clear that the only hope for Richelieu lay in regaining popularity and conciliating the great nobles. But there was only one way for the Cardinal to regain popularity and conciliate the great nobles, and that was through an immediate reversal of his foreign policy. To take such a step was a very serious matter, and, before doing so, he had written urgently for precise instructions. Owing partly to the Cardinal’s procrastination, partly to bad weather which had held up the courier, no answering dispatch had been received; and, on October 13th, acting on his own responsibility, he instructed Brulart to sign a document which provided for a general settlement of Franco-Austrian differences. As a mere observer, he declined at first to append his own signature to the treaty; but the Emperor insisted on it, and in the end he had to give way. As he looked on at the ceremony, Ferdinand gleefully reflected that he had succeeded in pulling out of that grey Franciscan hood political advantages which far outweighed the six electoral bonnets which the friar had so recently stuffed into it. But the Emperor’s triumph was short-lived. News that an agreement had been signed was brought to Richelieu on October 19th, as he and the convalescent King were returning to Paris. Meanwhile, the full text of the treaty had been sent to the Court at Lyons, where it obtained the approval of all who read it.
The news that the war was over and that there would be no more foreign adventures spread like wild-fire across the country, causing, as Father Joseph had foreseen, universal rejoicing. Next day a copy of the treaty was brought to Richelieu at Roanne. He read it; then angrily tore it up. The ambassadors had exceeded their instructions, he said; the treaty would not be ratified. It was an act on his part of quite extraordinary courage. By repudiating the treaty, Richelieu invited the hatred of the masses and made more implacable the hostility of the Queen-Mother and the nobles. He had been given a chance to save his neck, and he had refused it. If the King were to fail him now – and, at court, the betting was ten to one in favour of the Queen-Mother – he was infallibly done for.
Events were to justify Richelieu in taking the risks he did. Three weeks after his refusal to ratify Father Joseph’s treaty, there took place that decisive interview between Louis and his mother – the interview from which Marie de Medicis confidently expected to emerge victorious over the Cardinal. Stealing through an unbolted back door, Richelieu broke in upon this interview, and at the sight of him the Queen-Mother lost her self-control and began to scream at him, like a fishwife. Her vulgarity was her undoing. The seventeenth-century absolute monarch was a sacred person, in whose presence all, even his closest intimates, were expected to behave with the restraint of a stoic philosopher, a positively Confucian decorum. His mother’s proletarian outburst was an insult to the royal dignity. Outraged and revolted, Louis extricated himself from the distasteful situation as quickly as he could, and retired to Versailles. Marie was left in the exultant illusion that she had triumphed. That evening, Louis sent for the Cardinal and confirmed him in his position. Marillac was arrested and, at the news, Gaston of Orléans, who had been closeted with his mother, hastened to Versailles to assure the King of his loyalty and the Cardinal of his henceforth unwavering affection. For Marie, this ‘Day of Dupes’ marked a decisive defeat. After giving trouble for a few months more, she was skilfully manoeuvred by the Cardinal into making an irretrievable mistake; she fled the country. From this voluntary exile Louis never allowed her to return, and the Queen-Mother spent the last twelve years of her life wandering from court to court, an ever less welcome guest, chronically short of money, and dependent upon the humiliating charity of the man who had once been her obsequious protégé and was now the master of France and the arbiter of all Europe.
Returning to Paris shortly after the ‘Day of Dupes’, Father Joseph was welcomed by his chief with the utmost cordiality. Richelieu bore him no grudge for having exceeded his instructions. Promptly repudiated, the treaty had done no harm. For the rest, Father Joseph’s expedition had been entirely successful. Wallenstein had been dismissed and his army weakened; the Electors had asserted their independence of the Emperor and were showing signs of turning towards France, and (hardly less important) time had been gained – time for Gustavus to prepare his next year’s campaign, time for the Cardinal himself to overthrow his domestic enemies and consolidate his position. Time in the present juncture was on the side of the Bourbons and against the Hapsburgs, who could only suffer from the prolongation of the German chaos, whereas their rivals to the west of the Rhine stood only to gain by the progressive exhaustion of the imperial resources.
In a memorandum on the affairs of Germany, which he wrote in January 1631, for the instruction of the King, Father Joseph insisted that French policy should be directed to the systematic exploitation of time as the deadliest of all weapons in the Bourbons’ armoury. To this end, the negotiations which he had begun at Ratisbon were to be continued, unremittingly. Through his agents the King was to go on offering French protection to the Electors, on condition that all, Protestant and Catholic alike, should band themselves together in a specifically German, anti-Spanish bloc, independent of the Emperor. Such a bloc would be strong enough to negotiate on equal terms with the Hapsburgs, and if the King of France were to act as mediator, the Electors could feel certain of reaching a final settlement favourable to themselves.
If such propositions were not made at once, and made, what was more, with every appearance of sincerity, the Electors would be driven back into the Emperor’s camp through fear of Gustavus. Should this happen, Father Joseph went on, the Emperor would find himself in a position to bring about an immediate settlement of all disputes. Which would be disastrous for the Bourbons; for it would leave the Hapsburgs free to turn all their military power against France. Every effort towards an early peace within the Empire and between the Emperor and his foreign enemies must therefore be uncovered and promptly scotched. But how? Father Joseph had his answer. His Most Christian Majesty could avert the catastrophe of an early peace by offering to become a peace-maker. ‘Assuming the office of mediator and arbitrator, and promising to help the Electors if they have need, the King can spin out matters indefinitely, counterbalance the authority of the Emperor, and retard the coming of peace in Germany until such time as we can be sure of the security of a general pacification’ – a general pacification, of course, favourable to Bourbon interests.
While the imperial Diet was in session, there had poured into Ratisbon, from every corner of Germany, an unending stream of supplicants, seeking redress from the assembled princes for the wrongs inflicted upon them during the campaigns of the preceding years. Nothing, of course, was ever done for them, and they either returned, embittered, to their devastated homes, or else, like Kepler, who had ridden all the way from Silesia to ask for the arrears of his salary as Imperial Mathematician, they quietly died and were stowed away in one of the churchyards of Ratisbon. Among these supplicants was a group of delegates from Pomerania. Humbly, but none the less insistently, they begged the Emperor and the Electors to consider the lamentable state of their province. In the preceding year, Wallenstein’s armies had stripped the country so effectively that the people had been starving ever since. Very many had died, and those who survived were eating grass and roots – yes, and young children and the sick and even the newly buried dead.
This seems to have been one of the first occasions, during the Thirty Years’ War, when public attention was called to the enforced cannibalism which was to become so horrifyingly common in Germany of those disastrous years. Emperor and Electors listened sympathetically to the Pomeranians, assured them of their deep concern and left the matter at that. Given the political system within which they lived and performed their functions, given the habits of thought and feeling then current in princely circles, that was all they could be expected to do. Besides, during the whole of the Thirty Years’ War, no German ruler ever went hungry. For dukes and prince-bishops there was always more than enough. The common people might be dying of hunger or living obscenely on human carrion; but in the imperial, electoral and episcopal banqueting halls, the grand old German custom of gorging and swilling was never abrogated. Full of beef and wine, the princes were able to bear their subjects’ afflictions with the utmost fortitude.
But what about Father Joseph? He had lived among the poor and like the poor. He knew their sufferings, and he was the member of a religious order, vowed, among other things, to their service. And yet here he was, pursuing, patiently and with consummate skill, a policy which could only increase the sufferings of the poor he had promised to serve. With full knowledge of what had already happened in Pomerania, he continued to advocate a course of action that must positively guarantee the spread of cannibalism to other provinces.
One wonders what went on in the friar’s mind during those daily periods of recollection when, examining his thoughts and actions, he prepared himself for what his master in mysticism called the ‘passive annihilation’ of mental prayer. First, no doubt, and all the time, he reminded himself that, in working for France, he was doing God’s external will. Gesta Dei per Francos was an axiom, from which it followed that France was divine, that those who worked for French greatness were God’s instruments, and that the means they employed could not but be in accord with God’s will. When he angled for Father Joseph’s soul, Satan baited his hook with the noblest temptations: patriotic duty and self-sacrifice. Father Joseph swallowed the hook, and gave himself to France with as much ardour as he had given himself to God. But a man cannot serve two masters, God is jealous and the consequences of idolatry are disastrous. Because he still persisted in identifying the French monarchy with the ultimate reality apprehended in contemplation, Father Joseph failed to connect the plight of the Pomeranian cannibals with his own and all the other European statesmen’s infringement of the first two Commandments.
Sometimes, during his self-examination, it certainly struck him that he had resorted, during his negotiations, to methods of a sometimes rather questionable nature. (It was Father Joseph’s contemporary, Sir Henry Wotton, who defined an ambassador as ‘an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’. In the seventeenth century an envoy was expected not merely to lie, but also to conduct espionage in the country to which he was accredited.) Father Joseph was able to justify his diplomatic activities in two ways: in the first place, it was his patriotic duty to do these things; and in the second, he always tried his hardest to practise ‘active annihilation’ in God, while he was doing them. Tilly and de Flamel and the anonymous Spanish pamphleteers might accuse him of criminal conduct; but what they did not and could not know was that all his actions were performed by one who strenuously cultivated the supreme, all-comprehending virtue which St François de Sales described as ‘holy indifference’.
The earliest literary reference to ‘holy indifference’ occurs in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna assures Arjuna that it is right for him to slaughter his enemies, provided always that he does so in a spirit of non-attachment. When the same doctrine was used by the Illuminés of Picardy to justify sexual promiscuity, all right-thinking men, including Father Joseph, were properly horrified. But for some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles; but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels! Father Joseph conducted a small crusade against the Illuminés, who asserted that they could go to bed with one another in a spirit of holy indifference; but there seemed to him nothing in the least improper in his own claim to be a non-attached intriguer, spy and maker of wars.
The truth is, of course, that non-attachment can be practised only in regard to actions intrinsically good or ethically neutral. In spite of anything that Krishna or anyone else may say, bad actions are unannihilatable. They are unannihilatable because, as a matter of brute psychological fact, they enhance the separate, personal ego of those who perform them. But ‘the more of the creature,’ as Tauler puts it, ‘the less of God’. Any act which enhances the separate, personal ego automatically diminishes the actor’s chance of establishing contact with reality. He may try very hard to annihilate himself in God, to practise God’s presence, even while he is acting. But the nature of what he is doing condemns his efforts to frustration. Father Joseph’s activities at Ratisbon and as Richelieu’s foreign minister were essentially incompatible with the unitive life to which, as a young man, he had dedicated himself and which he was now so desperately struggling to combine with power politics. He could excuse himself for his more questionable acts by the thought that he was doing his best to perform them in a condition of active annihilation in God. The fact that his best efforts were not very successful he attributed, not to the intrinsically unannihilatable nature of what he was doing, but to his own personal imperfections – imperfections for which the cure was more austerity, severer self-discipline.
Returning to his self-examination, he was able to discover a kind of cosmic and metaphysical justification for his schemes in the thought that what seemed bad from a merely human viewpoint might really and actually be good. ‘Il faut aimer Dieu vengeur,’ he told his nuns, ‘aussi bien que Dieu miséricordieux.’21 God, the avenger, might have his reasons for wishing to destroy large numbers of Central Europeans. Indeed, since history was assumed by Father Joseph to be an expression of the intentions of divine providence, and since, as a matter of historical fact, large numbers of Central Europeans were in process of being starved and slaughtered, it was manifest that God, the avenger, did desire their destruction. Therefore, the policy of prolonging the war was not wrong.
Here, his vicarious ambition for France made him forget what had been said in the Gospels to the effect that scandals will always arise, but woe unto those through whom they come. There is an observable correlation between certain undesirable modes of thought and courses of action on the one hand and, on the other, certain catastrophes, such as the Thirty Years’ War. But it most certainly does not follow that, because in this sense, a war may be described as the will of God, the individual who labours to prolong it is doing God’s will.
Threading the mazes of his own voluntary ignorance, it was thus, explicitly or by implication, that Father Joseph reasoned to himself, as he knelt each night and morning before his crucifix. From justificatory argument, his mind would slip into meditation on the Passion of the Saviour, whose tortured body hung there in image before his eyes. And sometimes, this meditation would give place in its turn to a timeless and ecstatic contemplation of divine suffering – contemplation profound to the verge of trance. Father Joseph had been rapt away to that place which had been, ever since he was a tiny boy, the home of his strange spirit; he was on Calvary, at the foot of the cross, with the beloved disciple and the holy women.
One would imagine, a priori, that those whose religious life is centred upon the sufferings of a divine Saviour would be peculiarly compassionate, scrupulous beyond all others in the avoidance of actions calculated to give or prolong pain. ‘But no a priori principles determine or limit the possibilities of experience. Experience is determined only by experience.’ As a matter of historical fact, those whose religious life is centred upon the sufferings of a divine Saviour have not been pre-eminently compassionate, have not been more careful than all others to avoid the infliction of pain. As a matter of historical fact, the record of Buddhism is, in this respect, a good deal better than that of Christianity. Let us examine some of the reasons for the positive cruelty on the one hand and, on the other, the negative indifference to suffering, which have too often characterized the actions of ardent Christians.
Considered merely as an account of the way in which a good man was trapped, tortured and unjustly put to death, the story of the Passion is already sufficiently moving; and, for those who accept them as true, its theological overtones enrich it with a much profounder significance. The good Christian’s emotional reactions to this story are always intense, but, unfortunately, not always desirable. Consider, first of all, that common type of reaction so vividly illustrated by the anecdote about Father Joseph’s older contemporary, Louis de Crillon, surnamed Le Brave. In his retirement at Avignon, the aged warrior was listening one day to a sermon. The theme was the Passion of Christ, the preacher, full of fire and eloquence. Suddenly, in the middle of a pathetic description of the crucifixion, the old man sprang to his feet, drew the sword he had used so heroically at Lepanto and against the Huguenots, and, brandishing it above his head, with the gesture of one springing to defence of persecuted innocence, shouted: ‘Où étais-tu, Crillon?’
Movingly told, the story of a cruel injustice has power to drive men forth to commit retaliatory injustices either against the original authors of the crime, or, if these should be dead or distant, upon the men and women who, by means of some fatally common abuse of language, are temporarily identified with the criminals. The motives actuating anti-Semites, crusaders, inquisitors and other Christian persecutors have been many and various; but among them there has almost invariably figured a desire to take vengeance, in some entirely symbolic and Pickwickian way, for the wrong committed on Calvary. Emotional Christianity is two-sided. On the obverse of the medal are stamped the cross and the types of compassionate adoration; all too often in the course of history, its reverse face had displayed the hideous emblems of war and cold-blooded cruelty.
The idea of vicarious suffering is closely associated with the story of the Passion, and in the minds of Christians has produced effects no less ambivalent. Gratitude to a God who assumed humanity and suffered that men might be saved from their merited doom carries with it, as a kind of illegitimate corollary, the thesis that suffering is good in itself and that, because voluntary self-sacrifice is meritorious and ennobling, there must be something splendid even about involuntary self-sacrifice imposed from without. The following lines are taken from a letter addressed to a West Country newspaper by a clergyman of the Church of England, and published in the spring of 1936. ‘The principle of vicarious suffering pervades history, some suffering and dying for the sake of others. The mother for her sick child, the doctor in his laboratory, the missionary among the heathen, the soldier on the battlefield – these suffer and sometimes die, that others may live and be happy and well. Is it not in accordance with this great principle that animals should play their part by sometimes suffering and dying to help in keeping Britons hardy, healthy and brave?’ From which it follows, of course, that fox-hunting is something entirely admirable and Christ-like.
That such lines could have been penned in all seriousness by a minister of religion may seem to many almost unbelievable. But the fact that they actually were penned is of the deepest significance; for it shows how dangerous the idea of vicarious suffering can become, what iniquities it can be made, in all good faith, to justify. God took upon himself the sins of humanity and died that men might be saved. Therefore (so runs the implied argument) we can make war, exploit the poor, enslave the coloured races, and all without the smallest qualm of conscience; for our victims are illustrating the great principle of vicarious suffering and, so far from wronging them, we are actually doing them a service by making it possible for them to ‘suffer and die, that others (by a happy coincidence, ourselves) may live and be happy and well’.
Another point: the sufferings of mere humans and, a fortiori, of animals are as nothing compared with the sufferings of a God who has assumed human form, taken upon himself the sins of the world and chosen to expiate them all in a single act of self-sacrifice. This being so, the sufferings of human beings and animals are not really of much account. A constant dwelling on the sufferings of Christ and of the martyrs may produce in the emotional Christian an altogether admirable indifference to his own pains; but unless he is very careful to cultivate a compassion commensurate with his courage, he may end by becoming indifferent to the pains of others. The child who had sobbed so bitterly because they had hurt and killed poor Jesus was father of the man who, fifty years later, did everything in his power to prolong a war which had already caused the death of hundreds of thousands of his fellow-creatures and was reducing the survivors to cannibalism.