NINETEEN
‘TALK FOR PEACE, PREPARE FOR WAR’
As Henry pushed ahead to enlarge his influence in the domestic sphere, on the Continent the Dutch and Spanish signed what appeared to be a significant truce. The Treaty of Antwerp of April 1609 proposed the unthinkable – universal peace in Europe. Yet less than twelve weeks later, James’s Privy Council observed: ‘it looks like there will be a dangerous war’.
The trouble arose over a messy inheritance in the Catholic German state of Jülich-Cleves in the Holy Roman Empire. The state lay on the empire’s main artery, the Rhine, and close to the border with France and the Netherlands. It connected outlying northern Catholic territories with the heart of the empire. It also separated German Protestant territories, such as the Palatinate, from both the Dutch Republic and from the centre of the empire. It could disrupt communications between the Protestant states, while it protected Spanish supply lines up the Rhine to the Spanish Netherlands. All the benefits to the Catholic states reversed if Jülich-Cleves ever went out of Catholic hands. The whole northern Rhineland area of the Holy Roman Empire was so successful economically, and so divided into these small, very rich independent territories, that it was always vulnerable to attack. It was one of the most fought over regions of Europe.
Duke John William of Cleves was Catholic, but he ruled a mixed religious population. Feeling himself going mad, the duke invited the Italian priest, Francesco Maria Guazzo, to treat him. An authority on witchcraft and demonic possession, Guazzo diagnosed ‘possession’ and administered the appropriate cures. The treatments failed. Guazzo said he got the initial diagnosis wrong and that the duke was in fact bewitched. In April, the duke died, more or less insane, without having named an heir. Seven claimants stepped forward: some Lutheran, some Calvinist and some Catholic. In July, the Holy Roman Emperor’s pugnacious brother, Archduke Leopold, rode in secret to the fortified city of Jülich and occupied it, insisting he only acted to guarantee stability until the inheritance dispute was settled.
European Protestant leaders were outraged, convinced this was a covert move by the Habsburgs and emperor to annex Jülich-Cleves, in the same way Maximilian of Bavaria had taken possession of Donauwörth eighteen months ago. It was thought doubly suspicious since the only claimants ‘whose pretensions were not absolutely ridiculous were Protestants’. The first of these was Duke John William’s nephew, and future elector, the Margrave of Brandenburg. Behind him in line stood the husband of the late duke’s younger sister, the Count Palatine of Pfalz-Neuburg.
As if to confirm Protestant suspicions, the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II, chose this moment to gift Donauwörth permanently to Maximilian of Bavaria, as a fief, to offset the expense to Maximilian of guaranteeing peace in Donauwörth. Encouraged, Maximilian formed the militant Catholic League to help prevent further unrest in the empire. A tremor of unease threatened the nascent peace. Neither Catholic nor Protestant leaders in Germany wanted the menace of foreign troops on their soil. Yet each side needed and sought diplomatic endorsement. The Catholic League looked to Spain, of course. The Evangelical Union courted France, Britain and Denmark.
The great shaping force of Henry’s European identity, as the likely leader of Protestant Christendom, affected the prince’s everyday life. ‘From all sides one hears about the great Virtu of the Prince, son to the King of England. But the world must wait a great while to reap benefit therefrom,’ the Venetian monk, Paolo Sarpi said. ‘For the King of England, however accomplished in the reformed religion, appears for the rest not to be worth much: he would like to do everything with words.’ That one of Henry’s favourite mottoes was Fas est aliorum quaerere regna (‘It is right to ask for the kingdoms of others’) illustrated his attitude not only to taking possession of the New World, but also perhaps to Europe. It inferred he might see it as morally ‘right’ to overrun Catholic territories for the greater good of Protestant Christendom. However, in any war for the soul of Europe, the prince’s power would depend on the strength of his position at home.
Henry waited impatiently for foreign intelligence to arrive from his travelling ‘right eye’, John Harington. ‘I find every week,’ observed Salisbury, ‘in the Prince’s hand, a letter from Sir John Harington, full of news of the place where he is, and the countries as he passes’ through. Salisbury hoped Henry would in turn pass them all on to him. Harington told the prince he was in Austria, from where he reported on an imperial conference ‘to settle the affairs’ of the Protestant Germans. The Protestants wanted to negotiate ‘greater liberty in religion’, he said, but the meetings had stalled. There would be no treaty change. The imperial edict held, suiting the most powerful members of the empire.
Harington sent news from Frankfurt on 29 September. He was ill, unable to get out and pick up intelligence. ‘The confused state of affairs here, affords but little subject and little leisure to write; except that the approaching war threatens both upper and lower Germany,’ is all he could tell Henry. His old tutor, Tovey, was also sick, said Harington. At St James’s they thought someone in papist Italy had administered ‘a slow-working poison to’ Harington and Tovey. ‘Seeing they had no hopes of corrupting their minds’ to idolatry, ‘they might destroy their bodies.’
Henry wrote to ‘My Good Fellow’, hoping to amuse the invalid. ‘I have sent certain matters of ancient sort,’ he said, ‘which I gained by search in a musty velum book in my father’s closet.’ It was a book on Harington’s ancestry. ‘It gave me some pains to read and some to write also but I have pleasure in over-reaching difficult matters,’ he joked, whether it was delving into the roots of the Haringtons of Northamptonshire, or translating Tacitus at his friend’s request. It gave Henry pleasure to read about Harington’s forebears and he copied out extracts to send him. ‘When I see you, and let that be shortly,’ Henry finished, ‘you will find me your better at tennis and pike. Good Fellow, I rest your Friend, Henry.’
Health recovered, Harington resumed his homeward journey, crossing into France in the autumn of 1609. There he found Henri IV and Maurice of Nassau mobilising troops to go to the aid of the Protestants in Jülich-Cleves – a show of strength to warn the Habsburgs that any attempt to increase their power and influence in central Europe would meet resistance.
In October, with international pressure building, James stated gloomily to his Privy Council that England would have to send troops to join the French and Dutch. Yet, military activity was ‘like to draw no less after it than a general War in Christendom’, he concluded.
A cold war situation developed as Europe’s key players lined up behind the two sides. Spain agreed to send troops to aid Leopold, on condition they would take command of the combined Spanish and imperial Habsburg forces. In December, having refused direct involvement with the Evangelical Union until now, Henri IV formalised a military pact with the Protestant princes.
Protestant Christendom now fixed on Prince Henry in England. ‘Your Grace’s name begins already to be spread through the whole world. I hope in God you shall follow the footsteps of … King Edward the third’s son,’ Edward, Prince of Wales, the Black Prince, wrote Sir Clement Edmondes, a Scots officer serving under Maurice of Nassau. Henry, the ‘hope of the Christian world’, would lead an English force to combine with the armies of Maurice and Henri IV. All the theory Henry had read and heard and debated in his military salon; all the exercises he practised with such vigour, would soon submit themselves to trial by sword.
From his pulpit in the Inns of Court, where he regularly invoked king and prince, William Crashaw urged: ‘God hath appointed and anointed our Gracious Sovereign, and his royal issue, to hold up his religion in these declining days, and to give the Whore of Babylon that foil and fall,’ from which she shall never rise. ‘Hate the Whore,’ he shrieked, ‘and make her desolate, and eat her flesh and burn her with fire.’ Puritan clerics beseeched Henry to ‘undertake [all that shall] be profitable to all Christendom … to tame these damnable Monsters of wicked factions and pernicious sects’.
‘[I] heard [Prince Henry],’ said the godly MP Sir John Holles, ‘confidently assever that there were now as many men and able, worthy spirits in England as were then [in Elizabeth’s reign], who wanted but good occasions to put them to work to make them thereby as glorious as their forefathers.’ This was the military salon of St James’s courtly college in full voice. ‘Neither closed he his eyes from what concerned us abroad, but entertained by his purse in sundry places as good intelligence as any we had, a rare vigilancy’ in such a young man to be a spymaster.
Henry’s friends were covering events in central Europe, but the prince needed an informant in Spain. In April, as the Spanish and Dutch concluded their truce, England’s ambassador in Madrid, Sir Charles Cornwallis, wrote to Henry, full of news. Henri IV’s forces had conducted a raid into the Spanish Netherlands and taken a few thousand cattle: ‘Although it waked us a little out of sleep, yet it has not raised us out of our beds of rest.’ Rather the opposite. Cornwallis stated that since signing the treaty, the Spanish were ‘inclined rather to stand at mark and observe into what figures and forms … other Princes and estates will cast themselves’. Spain wanted to keep the peace, said Cornwallis. Yet their involvement in the Catholic League was intensifying the crisis in Jülich-Cleves.
In the face of James’s refusal to commission a regiment to march with Henri IV and Maurice, Henry received an anonymous tract, titled ‘Propositions for War’, outlining the virtues of military preparedness. ‘By arms was laid the foundation of this state,’ it reminded him. The politics and well-being of the country ‘are best preserved from the same grounds they were first founded on’. Henry must consider entering just wars for the following reasons:
James always disapproved of such calls to arm. But he particularly disliked this one, coming at a delicate time in European relations. He asked the scholarly Sir Robert Cotton to rebuff it on behalf of the Crown. Cotton’s argument against war was ten times as long as the propositions tract, crammed full of quotations drawn from the MP’s extensive antiquarian researches. It was an anti-war jeremiad. A densely argued piece of overkill, Cotton’s response was unlikely to shift Henry off course.
Henry’s military salon at St James’s saw that they, not Whitehall, formed a virtuous defensive front line, linking Prince Henry to Henri IV and Maurice of Nassau. Henry asked Ralegh to answer the anonymous pamphlet, to counter the king and Cotton. The result was An Answer made by Command of Prince Henry to Certain Propositions of Warre and Peace, Delivered to his Highness by some military servants. Unsurprisingly Ralegh seconded the ‘Propositions for War’, stating that Henry, if called, must never duck a war against the old enemy, Spain. Ralegh said that foreign war ‘tended to remove the seat of blood from our own doors, and prove the cheapest school to train up in arms and better dispositions, [those] whose military skill may after serve to defend the state’.
In 1609 the playwright George Chapman, ‘sewer-in-ordinary’ in the prince’s household, dedicated to Henry his translation of the twelve books of the Iliad – the epic tale of how Achilles saved the Greeks in their hour of need against an entrenched Troy. Although the king and Privy Council dominated government, Henry now focused a political counter culture and alternative policy.