Roger Williams’ time in the Massachusetts colony during the first half of the 1630s was a troubled one, in which he was constantly at odds with his fellow colonists over Church matters, thus compelling his departure in 1635 for Rhode Island. But his fate was not as louring as that of the great Wallenstein, whose destiny in the same period, back in the tumultuous trials of Europe, was far grimmer.
The Spanish, in concert with Duke Maximilian’s Bavarian forces, had spent part of the early 1630s in planning and then attempting to reopen the Spanish Road between the north of Italy and the Spanish Netherlands. When they embarked on the military effort itself they met a section of the Swedish army under the command of the Swedish general Gustav Horn and Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, who pushed them back, and then followed them into Bavaria where they captured Regensburg.
This was a serious blow to the Emperor and Maximilian, a blow made worse by the fact that they had asked Wallenstein to come south in defence of the city, but Wallenstein had refused. Suspicion of Wallenstein’s motives and loyalties grew, and Ferdinand II regretted recalling him and agreeing to give him such plenary powers. Accordingly he sent a peremptory order to Wallenstein to take his army into Bavaria, to which Wallenstein responded by making all his officers swear an oath of allegiance to himself personally. On hearing this the Emperor required that the oath of loyalty to Wallenstein should be binding only while Wallenstein was in Imperial service. Wallenstein refused again.
The overmighty subject was heading fast for his fall: on 18 February 1634 Ferdinand gave orders for Wallenstein to be stripped of his command, and for that office to be transferred to Archduke Ferdinand, the Emperor’s son. Accordingly Wallenstein’s senior officers – notably the generals Gallas and Piccolomini – and practically all the soldiery deserted him. Wallenstein fled to Eger, now at last openly proposing to join the Swedes and Saxons. But on 25 February 1634 the garrison there turned on him and murdered him, along with the few loyal supporters who had accompanied him.
Saxony and Brandenburg were no longer in the mood to continue the war, and began direct negotiations with the Emperor. The Imperial forces were in need of a new commander; Ferdinand II appointed Ferdinand King of Hungary, who immediately laid plans for combining his forces with the Spanish army under Ferdinand Cardinal-Infante of Spain. The plan was to clear the Spanish Road and defeat the League of Heilbronn, consisting now mainly of the south-western Protestant princes. The joint Imperial–Spanish forces recaptured Regensburg in July 1634, then set off west along the Danube, capturing Donauwörth and laying siege to Nördlingen.
Fatally for the Swedish forces, its generals Horn and Saxe-Weimar had agreed a bizarre arrangement by which each took it in turns on alternate days to be supreme commander. This clumsy deal resulted in delays and muddle when the Swedes reached Nördlingen, where victory would have been theirs if they had attacked soon upon arriving. Instead they were too disorganised to do so, and by the time they were ready the Imperial and Spanish forces had been heavily reinforced. The result of the Battle of Nördlingen was destruction of the Swedish army; by nightfall on the day of the battle, 27 August 1634, it simply did not exist any more. Horn was a prisoner of the Emperor, and Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar a refugee, sending messages to his garrisons in various places to join him for a last stand on the Rhine.
The extinction of the Swedish army at Nördlingen meant the effective end of the Heilbronn League. Imperial and Spanish forces swept into Franconia, Swabia and Württemberg, meeting hardly any resistance. Heilbronn itself fell, and Stuttgart; the Spanish section of the force advanced rapidly towards the Rhine, taking Aschaffenburg and Schweinfurt. By the end of October 1634 the north German Protestant anti-Imperial resistance was geographically cut off from the south-western Protestant anti-Imperial resistance, and it was years before they were again in geographical connection.
The defeated Heilbronn League and their Swedish allies had only one resort in their emergency: France. In the strong negotiating position he now occupied, Richelieu was able to dictate the terms of the resulting Treaty of Paris, signed in November 1634. He offered further subsidies to the Swedes and Heilbronn League members for their military efforts, and undertook to supply an army of 12,000 for the German theatre of conflict, but this latter was only to act if France officially declared war on the Emperor. He said that the members of the Heilbronn League were to tolerate Catholicism wherever they encountered it, and were not to make war on anyone whom France regarded as a friend or ally. Finally Richelieu required recognition of France’s entitlement to keep troops in Alsace.
The League members agreed, but Oxenstierna did not. He continued to negotiate, seeking better terms for Sweden. The result was the Treaty of Compiègne, signed in April 1635, in which Oxenstierna gained recognition of Swedish control of Mainz and Worms, and toleration for Protestantism.
Treaties are not the same thing as soldiers and firepower. French and League troops did not have much success against their Spanish–Imperial foes, who were able to pin them to the left bank of the Rhine and to keep them there for years. Part of the reason was France’s distraction over the question of Triers, whose Archbishop-Elector was under its protection. At the end of March 1635 the city was attacked and both it and its Elector were captured by the Spanish. France declared war on Spain; the two countries remained at war until 1659, a drain on both and a distraction from the main event.
Four months earlier, in November 1634, Johann-Georg of Saxony had reached an accommodation with Ferdinand II known as the ‘Preliminaries of Pirna’. It was immediately followed by an armistice between the Saxon and Imperial armies. The chief sticking point for Johann-Georg as for all Protestants was the Edict of Restitution. Ferdinand’s attachment to it, fostered as we saw by the influence of his confessor Lamormaini, was beginning to weaken now that peace with Saxony hinged on it, so he began to consult more widely. His wife’s confessor Don Diego de Quiroga was not so sure that Ferdinand’s immortal soul hung in the balance over the Edict. Ferdinand consulted twenty theologians and his fellow Catholic electors, and was persuaded by their collective opinions to temporise: in the Peace of Prague which resulted, signed on 30 May 1635, the Edict was suspended for forty years; there were to be no more restitutions of church property for that time. This was kicking the ball out of play as an expedient – leaving it to a later generation to have its own wars, perhaps, over the matter.
The Peace of Prague was good for Johann-Georg. It was peace, he was ceded Lusatia, the Edict was suspended, some lands which had been returned to Catholic control now returned to Protestant control again. For Ferdinand II the gain was that the treaty’s signatories undertook not to form leagues against him, were not to sign treaties with foreign powers, and were to place their militaries at Imperial disposal. The treaty was open to any prince who cared to sign, in return for amnesty and restoration of titles. The only exceptions to the latter were the heirs of Frederick V of the Palatinate and those of his first ally, the Duke of Baden-Durlach. All but one of the princes signed the treaty; the one hold-out was Wilhelm of Hesse-Cassel, who declared neutrality. The Peace of Prague effectively ended the civil war aspect of the Thirty Years War, though certain of the Imperial estates at times allied themselves to the foreign powers – France and Sweden – who were now the Empire’s principal enemies.1
Another brief glance away from the war is merited by mention of the year in which the Peace of Prague was signed. If 1635 was good from the point of view of ending the civil war aspect of the Thirty Years War, it was good for education and learning too. It saw the establishment of the famous Latin School of Boston, the first public school in America and today the United States’ oldest existing such school. It also saw the founding in Paris by Cardinal Richelieu of the Académie Française. The Académie grew out of a salon of savants and literary folk who had been meeting at the Hôtel de Rambouillet for more than a decade, and who had attracted the patronage of Richelieu. The Académie’s 1635 letters of royal patent specified its task, which was to purify the French language, specify its rules and make it fit for literary and scientific purposes. Richelieu was inspired by the model of the Accademia della Crusca in Florence, which had existed since the 1580s and which had the same object in regard to language, thereby establishing Tuscany’s dialect as the standard form of Italian.2
The Holy Roman Emperor had much trouble persuading some of his Catholic allies to accede to the Peace of Prague. He had to resort to bribery to get them to do it. Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, always independent-minded despite being a supporter, did not like the requirement that his armed forces were to be subsumed into the Imperial army. He had to be seduced into signing the treaty by the offer of marriage to the Emperor’s daughter, Archduchess Maria Anna, by the granting of the Bishopric of Hildesheim to his brother the Elector of Cologne, and by a promise that the Bavarian forces in the Imperial army would have a degree of autonomy.
To the Protestant elector Georg-Wilhelm of Brandenburg a different and mistaken promise had to be made: Ferdinand had to say that when the Swedes were defeated, Pomerania would be given to Georg-Wilhelm. Because the Swedes so avidly wished to retain Pomerania, this clause was a guarantee that the war would continue.
It will be remembered that in 1629 Richelieu had succeeded in bringing Sweden into the war by arranging a truce between Gustavus and his cousin the King of Poland, thus releasing the Swedes to pursue bigger fish. Now in 1635 Richelieu had to get the truce renewed to ensure that Sweden would not be distracted into revived hostilities in the east of Europe. He sent ambassadors to Sweden and Poland to arrange an extension of the truce, and succeeded; it was renewed for twenty-six years.
The terms were not so advantageous for Sweden as they had originally been, for the Poles now understood that they had a bargaining position. Before the ink was dry the Swedish garrison in Poland under Field Marshal Lennart Torstensson gathered themselves and hastened towards Germany, where the need for them was sore, for in October 1635 Saxony declared war on Sweden, threatening to realise the Swedes’ worst fear, which – rather like that of the ancient Greeks – was to be cut off from the sea. In the event Torstensson beat back the Saxon threat, and the Swedish hold on Mecklenburg and Pomerania was secure.
Matters were not progressing so well on the western and southern fronts of the war, where France had launched major offensives against the Spaniards in the Low Countries and Spain itself, and in Italy. All three offensives failed. Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, in need of French support and waiting for the French Rhine army which, thus distracted, could not go to his aid, was in an exposed position in Spiers. He had to retreat, leaving Kaiserslautern, Heidelberg and Mainz to fall to the Imperial army.
Richelieu was much shaken by the defeats suffered by the French armies, and realised that the only reliable force available for defence of the Rhine was the experienced army under Bernhard. The latter at the same time realised that because the Swedes were weakened, and the Protestant princes who had joined the Peace of Prague were lost to the anti-Imperial cause, he had to establish a new alliance. Accordingly he and Richelieu held talks, and agreed that the French would pay him a million livres annually to maintain his forces, that he would be Margrave of Alsace, and that he could wield sovereignty over any territories he conquered. The deal was signed on 19 November 1635. By entering this agreement Bernhard was reneging on his obligations to Sweden, and the Swedes were naturally angered that France had – as they saw it – stolen him away. But in the state of affairs obtaining at the close of that year – a difficult year for the anti-Imperial cause – no one was in a position to do otherwise.
The war was now, in 1636, in a state of what might paradoxically be called bloody and vigorous stagnation, much to the harm of the lands and people over which the contending forces trampled back and forth. France and Bernhard made progress in Alsace, Spain’s Cardinal-Infante invaded northern France from the Spanish Netherlands and was driven back with difficulty, the Swedes regathered themselves and went on the offensive down the Elbe.
That was the pattern all year. The combined armies of the Emperor and Saxony met the Swedes at Wittstock in Brandenburg on 4 October, and a fierce battle ensued. It was fought over marshy ground, which made manoeuvring difficult. Casualties were great on both sides. It was decisively won by the Swedes, who were quick to exploit their success; they occupied the rest of Brandenburg and pushed forward as far as Eisenach. The effort to reattach Georg-Wilhelm of Brandenburg failed because the Elector chose to observe the terms of the Peace of Prague. The Swedes ventured into Saxony and laid siege to Leipzig, unsuccessfully; in January 1637 they therefore retreated to Torgau until the next campaigning season.
In February 1637 Ferdinand II died, to be succeeded by his son Archduke Ferdinand.3 This Ferdinand had been titular head of the Imperial armies since the fall of Wallenstein. His father had at last succeeded in having him elected King of the Romans in December 1636, so he now became Holy Roman Emperor, as Ferdinand III.
The change at the top of the Empire had no marked effect on the war, except perhaps to return it to the back-and-forth stagnation that every succeeding campaigning season seemed to involve. In the north the Swedes were pushed back by the Imperial forces, losing all their gains and more of the previous year, so that after a series of encounters they found themselves confined to a corner of Pomerania – the least territory they had held since Gustavus Adolphus first invaded. Meanwhile in the south-west Bernhard made gains along the Rhine, capturing the Forest Towns and by the beginning of 1638 getting himself in position to besiege the great fortress at Breisach, which was the lynchpin of Imperial power in the Vorosterreich, the Imperial lands of the Rhine.
After reinforcing his army and beating off attempts by Imperial forces to prevent him establishing the siege, Bernhard settled down to starve the Breisach garrison out of their otherwise impregnable position. Ferdinand III made a number of further attempts to relieve the fortress, all sporadic and each easily rebuffed. When at last the fortress surrendered Bernhard learned to his horror that some of his men who had been prisoners in the fortress had been obliged by starvation to eat their own dead comrades.
The loss of Breisach was a major blow to the Imperial cause. While the fortress was under siege Sweden’s Oxenstierna had been contemplating his choices: whether to make a separate peace with Ferdinand III, or persuade the French to give more financial support. In March 1638 the drawn-out negotiations over the latter possibility came to an end in the Treaty of Hamburg; the French were to pay a million livres annually to the Swedes in return for two things – a guarantee that the Swedes would not seek a separate peace with Ferdinand III, and continued military endeavours by them in the eastern Habsburg territories. Oxenstierna sent 14,000 freshly raised troops from Sweden to join the forces in Pomerania under the command of his general in the field, Johan Banér.
Given this new impetus Banér was able to regroup, and in the spring of 1639 he again advanced. He recaptured all of Pomerania and Mecklenburg, and pursued the Imperial forces into Silesia and Bohemia after inflicting a crushing defeat on them at the Battle of Chemnitz on 14 April, in which the Imperial troops were commanded by the Emperor’s brother, the Archduke Leopold-Wilhelm. Another equally crushing Swedish victory at Brandeis opened the way to Prague; by May Banér was under its walls, but because he was insufficiently prepared for a siege he chose to withdraw to the Elbe.
The gods on either side of this war seemed, like the Olympians at Troy, to be sporting with the opposing sides. As the Swedes made gains on the eastern side of the conflict, their allies on the western side fell into disarray. First, the son of the Winter King Frederick V, Karl-Ludwig, had at last raised an army paid for by money from Charles I of England, and led an invasion against the Empire down the Ems. It was stopped at Hochfeld by an Imperial force, and completely destroyed. Meanwhile Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar and the French had fallen out over which of them could lay claim to Breisach. Bernhard argued that it fell within his Margravate of Alsace, to say nothing of being his by right of conquest; the French disagreed, saying that Breisach was part of Breisgau and not Alsace, and that anyway the original agreement excepted the Alsatian fortresses from Bernhard’s control should he capture them. Any appearance of inconsistency here – that Breisach was not in Alsace, but as an Alsatian fortress it was exempt from the agreement – is to be attributed to the natural human desire to win an argument at any cost.
In anger Bernhard withdrew his forces to the Franche-Comté to overwinter. In the event, he stayed too long; he was still there with his army in June 1639 when plague broke out among his troops. He caught the disease too, and died on 11 July.
Command of the Saxe-Weimar forces fell to Bernhard’s second-in-command, Johann Ludwig von Erlach, who thought differently about matters from his erstwhile commander. He promptly entered into negotiations with all three of the French, Swedes and Ferdinand III to see who would pay most for his loyalty. All three were highly interested given the seasoned and experienced nature of the troops he commanded. In October 1639 he decided to stay with the French, and combined his forces with theirs. The enlarged army immediately enjoyed a number of successes along the Rhine, and crossed it at Bacharach, a significant blow for the Emperor.