The early seventeenth century reassured those battered by Christendom’s religious contentions, political divisions and international conflict. Henry IV’s statecraft measured up to the reality of religious division in France, his negotiators offering just enough concessions to the armed Protestant minority in the Edict of Nantes of April 1598 to win them over without losing the support of moderate Catholic royalists. Where previous edicts had come unstuck, this one survived. Then, following a papal initiative, peace was signed between Philip II and Henry IV at Vervins in May of the same year, bringing to an end three years of war and a decade of Spanish intervention in France. The ambitions of the independent-minded and expansionist Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy were cut down to size by a French military intervention, peace in the French Alps being secured at Lyon in January 1601. The Peace of London ended maritime warfare between Spain and England in August 1604. A settlement at Zsitvatorok closed the wearisome Austrian Habsburg war with the Ottomans in October 1606. Conflict in the Netherlands was brought to a standstill by the Twelve Years Truce, signed in Antwerp in April 1609. In the empire, there was an ongoing political impasse, but the peace had held since 1555 and no one openly challenged it. Austrian Habsburg lands were being pulled in different directions, their tensions focused in a succession crisis. Even there, however, in the decade before 1618 it appeared as though the problems could be solved by doing deals behind closed doors.
Jacques-Auguste de Thou, president of the Parlement of Paris and Henry IV’s librarian, read these events as offering a basis for the reunion of Christendom. It would not emerge from the papacy, the emperor, a Church council or theologians. It would be achieved by Christian states, intellectuals and diplomats. Off-stage, not courting public endorsement, they would work quietly, step by step, putting into practice the lesson of prudence taught by the study of history. Just as the negotiators of those treaties had done, they would build reconciliation around the points of Christian doctrine upon which everyone agreed. In December 1603, the Catholic de Thou wrote to congratulate the Protestant King James VI of Scotland on his ascent to the English throne. He presented the monarch with a copy of the first volume of his history of the French civil wars (the Historia sui temporis). Its preface (dedicated to Henry IV and a classic politique justification for state-engineered religious pluralism) offered the Edict of Nantes as a model for how statecraft ended civil wars. ‘Moderate conversation and . . . pacific conferences’ achieved more than ‘flames, exile and proscription’. James endorsed the sentiments in reply. He had never personally been ‘of a sectarian spirit nor resistant to the well-being of Christendom’. There was no ‘work so worthy and important’ as ‘the solace and universal peace of Christendom’.
De Thou’s library hosted a think-tank, uniting scholars convinced that confessional division, exacerbated by appeals to religious fanaticism, could be resolved by finer spirits. James devoted his time to reaching across denominational and national divisions. In 1603 the ‘blessed Union, or rather Reuniting of these two mightie, famous and ancient Kingdomes of England and Scotland, under one Imperial Crown’ served as one model. The Hampton Court Conference a year later, which tried but failed to persuade the English bishops to take seriously Puritan demands for reform, provided another. Both had their critics but the king pressed on. Internationally, his hopes were buoyed up by the controversy provoked by the papal Interdict of Venice (1606–10) and the criticism of Jesuit-led justifications for the pope’s indirect secular powers. Convinced Catholic Gallicans as well as moderate French and Dutch Protestants looked to the Church of England as a possible way forward: an inclusive state Church and episcopal government without oppressive authority. James elicited support in unlikely quarters. In Rakow, Jerome Moscorovius dedicated his translation of the Unitarian catechism to the English king, explaining that Unitarians had always seen Christian controversies as against the word of Scripture. Senior figures in the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate made contact with the English king, seeing in him an ally against Catholic missionaries and papal envoys in the Ottoman empire. The imperial astronomer Johannes Kepler dedicated his Harmony of the World (1619) to James, recalling ‘what attention the prince of Christendom gives to divine studies’. Scholars queued up to offer methods by which the Christian religion could be reduced to scripturally validated tenets to which both Protestants and Catholics might adhere.
Christendom had become a pipedream for irenicists – those who sought to reconcile Europe’s religious differences. It was a chimera because the basis for its aspirations lay in acts of state and diplomacy which shelved rather than solved the politico-religious tensions of the day. One by one these accords either came to bits or proved irrelevant. Jacobean diplomats were on hand to bring the parties to a contested succession in Jülich-Cleves to a negotiated peace (Xanten, 1614), but they did not eliminate the sources of the conflict. Denmark and Sweden, rivals for hegemony in the Baltic, were brought round the table by James’s diplomats to sign a peace accord at Knäred in 1613, but their enmities were not dissipated. The English envoy Sir Thomas Edmondes brokered reconciliation between the prince of Condé, Huguenot grandees and the Queen Mother, Marie de Médicis, in 1616 after tension and sporadic war in France threatened the Peace of Nantes. In 1617, she and Louis XIII began the re-Catholicizing of the principality of Béarn. The king’s triumphant entry there in October 1620 became the occasion for renewed hostilities with the Protestants which ended inconclusively at the Treaty of Montpellier (1622).
Meanwhile, the Peace of Zsitvatorok between the Ottomans and the Austrian Habsburgs was open to different interpretations from the moment it was signed, both sides accusing the other of bad faith and non-compliance. James’s ambassador to the empire in 1612–13, Sir Stephen Sieur, found his efforts to reconcile the different parties in the Reich blocked at every turn. In 1618, a panegyric to peace was published in London entitled The Peace-Maker and dedicated to King James. Throughout the British Isles (even Ireland, ‘that rebellious outlaw’) the king had brought an olive branch. Other disputes on the continent had been happily resolved. The Peace-Maker did not mention that Protestant and Catholic power-blocs had begun to dominate the international stage once more. That was evident in the repression of a Catholic rebellion that year in the Valtelline, the all-important route-way for the Spanish Habsburgs through the Alps, linking Lake Como and the Inn. Nor did the author of The Peace-Maker foresee the outcome of the Bohemian rebellion that same year which, with the non-renewal of the Twelve Years Truce following in 1621, was the undoing of James’s agenda.
Not only were the reconciliations of the early seventeenth century chimerical, they also fostered the illusion that a resolution to the problems posed by the outbreak of conflict on a large scale in central Europe (when it occurred in 1618) would be just around the corner; that the diplomatic and political measures which had worked once, would do so again; and that Christendom could be reconstructed by a dedicated peace-maker and the backing of a Christian state. What happened in the 1620s proved that nothing worked out as it was predicted. No one foresaw in 1618 that a king would be driven out of his kingdom (Bohemia) by military force and dispossessed of his lands (the Palatinate), his supporters executed and exiled. No one imagined that French Protestants would be militarily emasculated (the Peace of Alais, 1629), the terms of the Edict of Nantes confirmed but serving as the only legal safeguard the Huguenots had to their increasingly vulnerable privileges. No one predicted that Spain’s army in the southern Netherlands would gain the upper hand against the Dutch in the 1620s; or that the balances of forces in the Reich between the emperor and the princes would be totally reversed by military means; or that the Austrian Habsburg emperor would have the opportunity to behave like a sovereign prince in the empire (the Edict of Restitution, 1629) as well as in his ancestral lands. The most serious oppositional movements of the first half of the seventeenth century were different from the contentions of the later sixteenth century because they were reactions to what had taken people unawares, rearguard campaigns conducted by desperate people hanging on to the values of vanishing Christian commonwealths and defending themselves from what they regarded as assaults upon their religious integrity.
POLITICAL VIRTUES IN A DANGEROUS WORLD
The rationale for the Christian commonwealth was trumped by sovereignty and reason of state. Where did that leave those who believed that their birth, education, social role and religious experience entitled them to a vita civilis, a role in the state? They too had experienced the turmoil of post-Reformation politics. They had learned how difficult it was to square one’s private beliefs and conscience with what was required when one held office. They had been attacked in public for what they had said and done. They had supported political causes only to be disillusioned, let down by their leaders or by events turning out differently from the way they expected. They needed a new way of looking at the world.
Justus Lipsius offered just that. He was the most widely read and influential thinker of these decades. For a time he was a dominant figure and rector at the new Dutch university of Leiden, where he published his Two Books on Constancy (1584). That text took the form of a dialogue in a garden, a familiar locus for dignified retreat. In emphasizing constancy, Lipsius drew on Seneca to show his contemporaries how they could free themselves from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (publica mala) by being dispassionate (Stoic apatheia) towards them. Wars and disasters were sent by God as instruments of punishment and reward, to be accepted with Stoic realism. The man of virtue (vir virtutis) had the ‘immovable strength of a mind that is neither elated nor downcast by outward or fortuitous circumstances’. Obedient to the powers that be, he cultivated an inward life of reflection by which he remained true to himself.
Lipsius’s Six Books of Politics or Civil Doctrine (1589) demonstrated how to reflect on political life. It was a labyrinth of Tacitus quotations (‘this learned and laborious fabric’, said Montaigne). Its audience (he refused to publish it in anything other than Latin, his advice being aimed at élites) was invited to treat it as a commonplace repository, one whose organization left them with the task of excerpting those passages which spoke to them, thus developing their own ‘constancy’, or reflective distance from the powers that be. Attentive readers discovered that his advice was reason of state with a moral top-dressing. It was better to ‘bear up’ (ferre) with rather than ‘throw off’ (auferre) rulers. ‘Civil war is worse and more miserable than tyranny,’ he declared. It was not imprudent for a prince to be deceitful so long as it was done ‘moderately and for a good purpose’. In diplomacy, Lipsius advised: ‘The Prince may . . . sometimes have to deale with a foxe, play the foxe, especially if the good and publike profit . . . require it.’ Dissimulation was presented within a framework of political morality in which the end (stability and order) justified the means and the citizen was a bystander. Did prudence and virtue extend to a prince ‘tolerating’ a religion different from his own in his state? Experience indicated that religious dissent had torn Christendom to pieces. In a phrase he was later to regret, he wrote: ‘here is no place for clemencie; burne, sawe asunder, for it is better that one member be cast away, than that the whole body runne to ruyne’. At the same time he recognized that there came a point when political virtue dictated the opposite. Once dissidence threatened to overwhelm the state it was better to give it latitude so long as it did not disrupt its stability.
Lipsius’s ideas entered the mainstream, creating a political approach. His French emulators (they included members of de Thou’s circle) distanced themselves from the populism of the wars of religion and created a salon-world in which politics became a talking-shop for the initiated. ‘We are here among loyal friends; I think that what we say here will not pass beyond the threshold of the door,’ wrote Guillaume du Vair in his dialogue On Constancy (1594), a pastiche of Lipsius’s. Nicolas Faret’s The Honest Man (1630) manufactured the stereotype of how to be a citizen in an absolute monarchy. Subtitled ‘The Art of Pleasing at Court’, it showed how, following Lipsian precepts, one could navigate a world of false friendship and flattery while still remaining true to oneself. London play-goers were treated to Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Hamlet (1601), whose hero tests the Stoic outlook which he, along with his student friend Horatio, had imbibed in Wittenberg when they return to the corrupt Danish court. Notebook in hand, Prince Hamlet contrasts his own constancy with its absence in his mother. As the plot unfolds, Hamlet asks questions about the nobility of suicide, dissembles his own grief and uses dissimulation to uncover others’ guilt.
Behind this new politics was a discourse about secrecy. When Henry IV converted to Catholicism, his Catholic League critic Louis Dorléans complained that the king was like an oyster which ‘only opens up when and to whom it pleases him to do so’. Knowing when to speak and when to hold one’s tongue was one of the emerging political accomplishments. In 1612, Alessandro Anguissola, counsellor to Charles Emmanuel, duke of Savoy, presented his prince with a chapter from his book On princely good government. Entitled ‘On Dissimulation’ it justified why the essence of good government was for a prince to distance himself from those around him, how his conversation should expressly not reveal what he was thinking. The Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián y Morales warned that our ears are the back door of truth and the front door of deceit: ‘Truth is more often seen than heard. Seldom does it reach us unalloyed, even less so when it comes from afar.’ Dissimulation was like the ink a cuttlefish uses to defend itself, a way of self-preservation.
Systemic dissimulation made it harder for Europe’s diplomats to process the contradictory signals which they received. Those in authority were suspected of having mixed motives and therefore hidden agendas. They were no longer perceived as saying what they meant, or meaning what they said. That was how Thomas Middleton chose to present diplomacy in his play A Game at Chess (1624). The chess match turned out to be a game of bluff and counter-bluff representing contemporary diplomatic relations between London and Madrid. The characters included a traitorous king’s pawn, a turncoat bishop, and a black knight in the shape of the Spanish ambassador at the Court of St James, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count Gondomar. In Middleton’s satire, the heart of the issue was what constituted political virtue.
PAX HISPANICA
In c. 1616 the Dutch artist Adriaen Van De Venne painted a scene in which a large party including the Archduke Albert of the Netherlands and his former enemy Prince Mauritz of Nassau enjoyed a picnic, their hats off and musical instruments to hand. The fields were tilled since the military forces in the background were on standby. The picture is an allegory of the Twelve Years Truce, which was the apotheosis of twenty-three years from 1598 to 1621, known as the Pax Hispanica (las Pazes or the ‘Spanish Peace’), in which Spain sought a rapprochement with its enemies. The diplomacy which lay behind the various peace agreements of that period was tortuous, however, because, in each instance, they were acknowledgements of defeat. The Pax Hispanica was a lukewarm peace, a shallow intermission with continuing low-key hostilities.
The Spanish empire’s military corridor (the ‘Spanish Road’) to northern Europe became more indispensable as the Atlantic sea-lanes were still vulnerable to privateering. The Spanish control of the Balearics and Elba provided cover for the western Mediterranean sea-lane. Spanish troops occupied the coastal enclave of the Marquisate of Finale in 1570, purchasing it outright in 1602. Genoa was a pro-Spanish republic. The duchy of Milan was the administrative and military hub of the Spanish Road. Pedro Henriquez d’Azevedo y Alvarez de Toledo, Count Fuentes, tightened Spain’s military grip on the duchy and the lands around it (Mantua, Parma, Monferrato). From Milan, Fuentes threatened the duchy of Parma with military occupation, placed a garrison at Piacenza and concluded an alliance in 1600 with the Grisons (the Grey Leagues), the easterly canton of Switzerland whose name was derived from the local alliances which governed it. This allowed Spanish troops to traverse the Alps via the Valtelline. The significance of the latter as an imperial asset increased after the duchy of Savoy signed over to France the territories which enabled it to close at will the westerly Alpine corridors across the Little St Bernard or Mont Cenis to Annecy or Chambéry and then across the Rhône at the Pont de Grésin into Franche-Comté.
Spanish intentions were difficult to read because of their own hesitations about the wisdom of a strategy of peace. Philip II’s will dictated that his son Philip III (who succeeded him in 1598) continue the war in the Netherlands. Philip III had been initiated into government from the age of fifteen. Earnest, pious and no inspirer of others, he devolved routine business to a valido (‘most worthy’), someone who was privy (hence privado) to the king’s will – in the event, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, count (duke in 1599) of Lerma. The king did not attend councils of state and did not see all the diplomatic traffic. How long Lerma’s influence at court would last became a further uncertainty as doubts about the wisdom of the Pax Hispanica spread. Some argued that it might be prudent to accept peace on reasonable terms. On the other hand, said others, if it compromised the protection of Catholicism and failed to secure the integrity of Spain’s empire, then attack was the best form of defence. Many of those brought up in the service of Philip II believed that peace undermined Spain’s reputation. They noted the degrading of Spanish colonial and economic assets as the Dutch, English and French competed to secure a hostile presence on the coast of Brazil, while the Dutch and English undermined the Portuguese empire in the Far East.
Some thought that the solution to Spain’s dilemmas lay in a ‘project’ (arbitrio) – which they sometimes declared so important that it could be disclosed only in a private audience or circulated in manuscript. Proclaiming the virtues of their chosen remedy in print was part of the projectors’ strategy for winning themselves an audience. They capitalized on a sense of moral decline in the wake of Spain’s recent plagues. National ‘reformation’ accompanied international ‘reputation’ – and both conjoined to undermine Lerma’s peace. Don Baltasar de Zúñiga in Prague returned to sit on the Council of State in Madrid in July 1617, the leader of those who felt that the Pax Hispanica had given away too much. He steered Spain towards intervention in Bohemia and central Europe, and then towards renewing the war with the Dutch in the spring of 1621. That year, Philip III died, to be succeeded by his sixteen-year-old son, Philip IV. Zúñiga befriended the heir and ingratiated his nephew, Don Gaspar de Guzmán (Olivares) into his service. Philip IV instructed his secretaries that all papers requiring royal signature were to be passed to Olivares. The latter turned reputation and reformation into a programme to preserve Spanish Habsburg hegemony.
Adding to uncertainty, policy was made not only in Madrid. Four days after the Peace of Vervins, Philip II had bestowed his title to the Netherlands on his eldest daughter, Isabel Clara Eugenia, and her betrothed, his nephew, the (ex-cardinal) Archduke Albert of Austria. By a secret clause, they accepted the maintenance of a Spanish army in Flanders under a Spanish general, and their marriage contract enjoined them to recover the lost provinces of the Netherlands. They could have a court and influence, but Madrid held on to strategic and military matters. Yet things did not work out like that. The archduke was on the ground and took matters into his own hands. He masterminded the siege of Ostend (July 1601–September 1604: a ‘long carnival of death’, 35,000 men dying in its siege trenches) and opened direct talks with England and the Dutch. Delaying putting his signature to the truce until the last possible moment, Philip III was reported to remark: ‘deep down in my conscience remains the idea that once this truce is ended it will be suitable to make war’.
There were conflicting assessments of the Spanish empire’s financial strength and its will to mobilize resources. The English diplomat George Carew called it ‘an unsteady giant’. The evidence was ambiguous, even to those within the Spanish administration. Despite bankruptcy, Philip II mounted two further armadas against England in 1596 and 1597; 136 ships, 13,000 men and 300 horses were despatched in the latter – almost as large as that of 1588. Philip III launched a final, equally unsuccessful one in 1601. The Flanders military establishment cost in excess of 60 million florins in the four years from 1596 to 1600, yet because of the borrowing costs and the expenses of the new court in Brussels, only a proportion of the money ever made it to the forces on the ground. Unpaid, the troops mutinied. Contemporaries monitored the arrival of silver shipments from the New World – in 1600, the third silver fleet of the year landed with 8 million ducats, bringing the crown receipts that year to about 4 million ducats, enough (as one of the king’s advisers said) ‘to take care of things suitably’. Yet, at the same time, devastating plague decimated the population in parts of Castile. In June 1602, the Spanish government issued a new coinage for low-denomination transactions in copper (vellón) whose face value was in excess of its weight in metal. The French and Dutch minted counterfeit coins and smuggled them into the peninsula, exchanging them for silver at a profit. The results damaged still further the tax-raising capacity of Castile. By 1607, Spanish revenues were anticipated up to 1611 and another default occurred. Only an agreement with a syndicate of Genoese bankers in May 1608 kept the Flanders Army in the field. Contemporaries recognized that peace was because of exhaustion, but no one knew how long it would take for Spain to recover.
Uncertainties led to procrastination, a logical response to a confusing world. It was not merely Philip III whose habitual delays were interpreted as laziness. James I also exasperated those in his service for endlessly putting things off. Delays, however, created opportunities for others to manipulate uncertainty to their advantage. The Spanish Netherlands became a magnet for displaced Catholics from France, the northern Netherlands and the British Isles. The last of these reported over-optimistically on the possibilities for overthrowing James I, while confessors and Tridentine-inspired clerics and administrators in the ecclesiastical lands of the empire and the duchy of Bavaria inspired projects for German re-Catholicization.
In England, in the United Provinces and in the smaller German Calvinist courts, peace opened up different debates. International politics in western Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century moulded the outlook of policy-makers as well as military officers into a perception of two conflicting religious power-blocs. They saw the Spanish Habsburgs as a threat to the integrity of Protestantism, one which required unending vigilance and, in propitious circumstances, a pre-emptive strike. The ‘Protestant Cause’ grew out of educational, religious, military, diplomatic and family experience, reinforced by correspondence and reading. In England, Francis Walsingham, the earl of Leicester, Philip Sidney and the earl of Essex all found themselves of one mind with Philippe Duplessis-Mornay at the court of Henry of Navarre. Their brand of constancy was different from that advocated by Lipsius. It was tinged with the belief that the forces of ‘iniquity’ (as Duplessis-Mornay termed the Antichrist) stalked the world in Habsburg colours, and that only by armed intervention would they protect the ‘fortress of God’s sanctuary’. They expected to be in a minority around the council tables of Protestant princes. Calvinists especially cultivated the belief that they were among the righteous minority of those who would be proved correct. When they lost the argument (as manifestly they had with the coming of peace), they sought reinforcement among those who felt themselves excluded from influence in the state.
In England, the peace with Spain opened the door to foreign affairs being a subject for debate and controversy in the Parliaments of James I. In the 1620s it was both the objectives and conduct of Stuart foreign affairs which served as a way for a minority of politicized Puritan voices to mobilize and to pressurize the king. English Puritan-minded congregations held fast-days along with their Calvinist co-religionists in France and the Netherlands at moments of international tension. They collected money for the relief of places and persons. In the universities and the London Inns of Court, like-minded students sought new heroes (King James’s children – Prince Henry; then, after his death in November 1612, Princess Elizabeth, the bride of Frederick V of the Palatinate in the following year) on which to pin their hopes.
The decentralized government of the young Dutch Republic afforded scope for those who opposed the Twelve Years Truce. Its political classes (the ‘Regents’, or members of the oligarchies in towns providing delegates to the provincial Estates and the Estates General) had differing views. It required time and patience to come to a common mind. Johan van Oldenbarnevelt deployed his skills in negotiation, first as stipendiary town clerk (‘pensionary’) to the city of Rotterdam and then as Advocate of the Provincial States of Holland, which paid the lion’s share of the Dutch military budget. He was, as the States of Holland declared when he was executed on 13 May 1619, ‘a man of great business, activity, memory and wisdom’. Oldenbarnevelt used those skills to negotiate the 1609 truce to safeguard Holland’s commercial interests, arguing that it did not compromise the republic’s integrity. Mauritz of Nassau, later prince of Orange, was unconvinced. Spain would refortify. The landward provinces (where he was Stadholder) would be vulnerable. A generation’s military experience would be lost when regiments (where his support partly lay) were disbanded.
As it happened, the argument over the truce was fought out on other grounds. Oldenbarnevelt and a majority of Regents from Holland and Zeeland made no secret of their sympathy, cautiously expressed in the theological language of the day, for the views of the Amsterdam pastor Jacob Hermanszoon (Arminius). The issues went to the heart of what the Dutch Calvinist Church stood for during the revolt: Calvinist predestination, and behind that the godly nation, as well as the right of the Church to excommunicate those who did not uphold doctrinal purity. Arminius died the year the truce was signed. The year after, his supporters presented a petition in five articles (the Remonstrance) to the States of Holland and Friesland. They upheld Arminius’s right to cast doubts on the strict Calvinist interpretation of predestination in a polity where the Church of the state was not a state Church. In sermons, debates, placards, handbills and around Sunday lunch-tables, the views of Remonstrants (the supporters of Arminius) and Anti-Remonstrants grafted themselves into literate, well-informed, but insecure Dutch society. Churches were ransacked, ministers heckled and Oldenbarnevelt (a Remonstrant) eventually arrested by order of the States General on 23 August 1618, along with several of his supporters (including the jurist Hugo Grotius). Eight months later, Oldenbarnevelt was beheaded after a commission of the States General declared him guilty of crimes against the ‘generality’, that being their interpretation of what they now saw as the dangers of the truce which he had negotiated in 1609. These events were followed intently in London, Paris and Madrid. Olivares took the lesson from them that there could not be a better moment to renew the war against a divided republic than when the truce expired in 1621.
Others in Protestant Europe – beyond the politicians, courtiers and soldiers – also believed that Spain was not to be trusted, and that its empire should be attacked while it was weak. They offered their services in espionage and know-how, resulting in security alerts and plots. Some of the latter were real and dangerous, others the phantoms of overexcited imaginations. The Gunpowder Plot (5 November 1605) was a terrorist attempt to decapitate the English government with the intention of replacing King James by his daughter Elizabeth, who would be then married into the Spanish royal family and converted to Catholicism. Guy Fawkes had spent a decade in the Army of Flanders and knew what gunpowder could achieve. More speculative was the conspiracy that implicated Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, Henry Wotton and others in the wake of the Venetian Interdict controversy. The plan was to use émigrés and discontents in Venice to engineer a revolution. In January 1617, Thomas Edmondes was among those who plotted with Walter Raleigh to attack Genoa under cover of an expedition to seek for gold in Guiana. That plot was no hoax, and it came centre-stage in Raleigh’s trial and execution in 1618 when he incriminated his co-conspirators. Who knows, however, what was behind the report, accorded credibility by Brussels in 1621, of a plot afoot to fill a ship in Holland with barrels of gunpowder and bring the cargo to ’s-Hertogenbosch and blow up the main gates of the city? In October 1623, an accident occurred in Blackfriars, London, when a gallery serving as a chapel adjoining the French ambassador’s lodging collapsed, killing Catholics assembled below to hear a Jesuit preach. Prince Charles had just returned to London from Madrid empty-handed after his quixotic quest to win the hand of the Spanish infanta Maria. The coroner declared it a tragic accident but London pamphlets and ballads told another story. It was a providential act of God: ‘No Plot, No Powder’ ran one headline. Real or false, accidents or contrivances, such reports exaggerated the sense of a world on the brink.
GALLIC HERCULES
Spanish diplomats understood that suspicions could be turned into a hatred of Habsburg hegemony. They responded with offices, promises of pensions, tempting possibilities of marriage, lucrative benefices. In the case of James I, they played on his conviction that the confessional divide could be bridged through the wisdom and majesty of a Solomon prince (himself). Their efforts created pro-Spanish cliques in the courts and politics of their rivals – whose adherents became accused in turn by their opponents of being proxies for the Catholic designs of a foreign power. Such resentments were held in check so long as there was no realistic alternative to Spanish ascendancy. The revival of French authority under Henry IV changed that, as registered in the Italian peninsula. Venice was the first Catholic state officially to recognize Bourbon rule. The papacy (under Pope Clement VIII) distanced itself from Spanish dependency and recognized Henry’s absolution, then accepted the annulment of his first marriage (to Marguerite de Valois), thus opening the door to a second – to the daughter of the grand duke of Tuscany and an archduchess of Austria, Marie de Médicis, in October 1600. That year, rumours circulated in Rome and Venice that the French king wanted to be elected king of the Romans. In October that same year, Henry led a military campaign into the duchy of Savoy. Months later, ‘Fire-head’ (testa d’feu) Duke Charles Emmanuel was brought to the negotiating table in Lyon. The treaty allowed the duke of Savoy to retain the fortress of Saluzzo, while France acquired Bresse and Bugey, its most significant strategic gains since the siege of Calais in 1558. With these gains France threatened the westerly route of the Spanish Road.
About that time Toussaint Dubreuil completed his painting of Henry as Hercules slaying the many-headed Hydra, probably for the newly renovated Fontainebleau. The ‘Gallic Hercules’ became a commonplace among the king’s image-makers – armed with a club and belabouring the Cerberus of the Catholic League (1592), triumphing over a falling centaur (1600 – the duke of Savoy), cleansing the Augean stables (c. 1604 – the reform of the kingdom) and carrying the world on his shoulders (a reflection of his European conception of his authority). The French ‘royal Hercules’ had usually been depicted with chains coming out of his mouth – a representation of how the French monarchy persuaded people into virtue and obedience by eloquence. That was characteristically abandoned by Henry IV, for whom the emphasis was on action, not words. He reminded notables, magistrates and clergy that it was words (sermons, speeches, rabble-rousing) which had caused France’s civil wars. His role was to cut the Gordian Knot of dissension. Argument was futile since the king’s actions were unquestionable. It was authoritarianism with kid-gloves.
France’s reconstruction was coaxed into reality by Henry IV’s charisma, a recovery of monarchical authority on old foundations. The pacification at Nantes in 1598 was an ambitious and successful attempt to use law to define and implement religious pluralism. The expansionist dynamic of French Protestantism had evaporated during the civil wars. By 1600, Protestants were perhaps no more than 5–6 per cent of the kingdom, the majority of their 700 or so worshipping communities concentrated especially in the south. But its political organization matured. The general assembly of the Huguenot party met in six different places in five years from 1593 to 1598, and in almost continuous session from April 1596 to June 1598 while the negotiations leading up to Nantes were in progress. The party’s military strength was underwritten in the Nantes agreements with royal undertakings to pay for fifty garrisoned strongholds (places de sûreté). But the French Protestants were divided among themselves and lacked a ‘protector’ whom they could trust. In addition the terms of the edict stipulated that, in future, their general assemblies could be held only with royal permission. The peace defined where and how they could worship and offered the prospect that they would not be excluded from the state. Royal commissioners took on the burden of settling local issues that a general edict could not resolve, and legal tribunals (chambres de l’édit) with bi-confessional membership settled lawsuits between Protestants and Catholics. If religious pluralism became a fact of life in some parts of France it was on the basis of local agreements to live and let live, meaning that the frontiers between the faiths were not legally determined and rigid but fluid and evolving.
Henry IV also unilaterally wrote off some of the crown’s debts while the Protestant superintendant of finance, Maximilien de Béthune, duke (in 1606) of Sully, patched the leaky pipe of royal income and became unpopular by controlling royal expenditure. Partly under Sully’s impetus, Henrician reconstruction had its showcase mercantilist projects. In Paris, these resulted in the completion of the Pont Neuf over the Seine and an associated new square (the place Dauphine), an esplanade along the river between the (reconstructed) Louvre and the Arsenal, as well as the place Royale (now the place des Vosges), an Italianate piazza in an up-and-coming part of town (the Marais).
The smack of firm rule from the first Bourbon was most keenly felt by France’s grandees. Their role in the civil wars had been considerable. They were between and among Europe’s sovereign princes, intermarrying with them and participating in their competitive dynasticism. Some of them were persuaded to see the world through the confessionalized lens of international power-blocs. France’s aristocracy was open to outsiders because cadets from foreign lineages were made dukes and peers. Their aspirations, mingling with those of the Bourbon princes of the blood, constituted an important dynamic and instability in the first generation of Bourbon rule. The nobility ‘complain more about the peace than about their pensions’, wrote François d’Aerssen, the Dutch envoy, in 1602, ‘and willingly lend an ear to all novelty and stirring’. At that moment, Charles de Gontaut, duke of Biron, a marshal of France who fought alongside Henry IV in the League, went on trial before the Parlement of Paris for high treason – for accepting a Spanish pension, concluding a treaty, perhaps conspiring to kill the king. Henry IV released incriminating evidence and Biron’s execution at the Bastille (31 July 1602) was a reminder that kings were not just aristocrats with crowns. They were demi-gods – Hercules – and they could cut off the heads of the greatest in the land.
The Gallic Hercules’s view of his place in the world did not accord with that perceived in Madrid. Their differences emerged most starkly at the end of Henry’s reign. Less than a month before the signing of the truce in Antwerp, on 25 March 1609, John William, duke of Cleves, Jülich and Berg, died without direct heirs. His duchies sat astride the Rhine, controlling the approaches to the Netherlands. The area was confessionally mixed, and exiles from the Spanish Netherlands had established Calvinist churches in the lower Rhine duchies, a confession not included in the Peace of Augsburg but gaining ground. They enveloped the Archbishopric-Electorate of Cologne, the most important ecclesiastical principality of the lower Rhineland. Its Catholicism was guaranteed by the imperial mandate (‘Ecclesiastical Reservation’) which Protestant princes understood differently from Catholics. But during the Cologne War (1582–3) the Archbishop-Elector converted to Protestantism and attempted to impose a Protestant Reformation upon his Electorate with ramifications that Counter-Reformed Catholics were anxious to undo. Both Madrid and Brussels wanted to strengthen their military position in the lower Rhineland for any future offensive at the end of the truce. Jülich was the most heavily fortified town on the left bank of the lower Rhine. If it fell into Protestant hands, it would compromise the Habsburg frontier in that region.
The principal pretenders to the duchies were both Protestants. The emperor tried to parachute in an interim imperial administrator (Archduke Leopold) to keep the peace. Leopold arrived with a token military force, no support in the mainly Protestant towns and a majority of the nobles against him. His appearance on the scene was a threat to the Dutch, who responded with military preparations in the spring of 1610. Henry IV sensed that the moment had come for a show of force. As in Savoy a decade previously, he envisaged a short, sharp intervention to assert French influence in a crucial theatre. His diplomats interpreted the Brussels archdukes’ refusal to surrender the young bride (Charlotte de Montmorency) of Henry’s cousin (Henri de Bourbon-Condé) to the king as a sign of bad faith. Both Condé and his fiancée had fled to Brussels late in 1609 following Henry IV’s infatuation with her and his cousin’s refusal to play the part of cuckold. In the early summer of 1610, an army of 32,000 infantry, 5,000 cavalry and artillery assembled in Champagne. The king commissioned a painting of himself as Hercules fleeing Venus (love) in favour of the goddesses of hope and virtue. In contemporary aristocratic culture, Hercules was often represented as an all-too-mortal god, caught between his base desires and his more noble virtues. Lipsius would have approved of the message of a painting that encouraged the king to sublimate the former for the latter. Henry IV was on his way by coach from the Louvre to the Arsenal to discuss final military plans when he was assassinated on 14 May 1610.
The truth behind the assassination will never be known, though the events can be reconstructed and the assassin, Jean-François Ravaillac, was cross-questioned in detail. Ravaillac was a downwardly mobile younger son from a broken marriage. He was poor, suffered from nightmares, heard voices, wrote delirious verses and insisted that it was ‘the judgment of God’ which led him on. He was interrogated and tortured, but his story remained the same: he had acted on his own. If he had been influenced by Jesuit-inspired writings about tyrannicide, it was by osmosis. Other evidence for the involvement of disgruntled grandees in the assassination comes from tainted sources. And yet the timing of the event was so consummate that it is difficult to exclude the possibility of a plot from abroad. Diplomats had credible advance warning of an assassination attempt emanating from Brussels. The receiver-general of Archduke Albert dispensed a large sum that year for undisclosed activities by agents in France. There was perhaps more than one murder plot in May 1610, Ravaillac being the assassin who got there first. Whatever the truth of the matter, France was plunged into a minority government with Marie de Médicis at its head. Only a token force was despatched to Jülich, a compromise was reached and Spain expanded its garrisons in the area. In Paris, prudence dictated cooperation with Spain, cemented by a double marriage between the two ruling houses. If France retreated from a wider role in Europe for a while, it was not altogether abandoned.
THE AUSTRIAN HABSBURGS DISCONCERTED
In July 1609, Henry IV told Archduke Albert’s ambassador that Emperor Rudolf was no longer master in his own realms, and not even in Prague. That assessment of the emperor’s failure to direct affairs in the lands which made up the Austrian Habsburg ancestral patrimony was commonplace. Two years later, Rudolf was forced to abdicate from the Bohemian crown by his own brother, Archduke Matthias. Eight months later, Rudolf himself died with nothing more than the title of emperor to his name. Matthias had succeeded to the Bohemian and then the imperial throne in a dynastic crisis which reflected the broader tensions within the Habsburg ancestral domains. Matthias’s ambition to succeed his childless brother led him to make promises which, in the circumstances of the succession, he was then unable to fulfil. As he was childless himself, the succession problem was merely postponed, while Emperor Matthias had to contend with the suspicions which he had raised among his opponents. Everyone expected that the Habsburgs would negotiate their way through their various difficulties, but the Bohemian Revolt of 1618 detonated a crisis in the Habsburg lands which was resolved by force, spilling out into the German empire.
The origins of the dynastic crisis lay in Emperor Ferdinand I’s partition of the ancestral lands between his sons in 1564. The division created a separate archduchy for Ferdinand’s second son (also Ferdinand) in the Tyrol and Further Austria and another for Karl in Inner Austria (Styria, Carinthia and Carniola). The archduchies responded differently to the common and mounting fiscal and administrative pressures upon the Habsburg patrimony around the turn of the century from the Long Turkish War. Emperor Rudolf failed to make common cause with those committed to keeping the empire working. Meanwhile, deepening divisions in the Reich precluded its members from contributing more to the military campaigns in Hungary. The emperor was thrown back on what he could negotiate from his ancestral lands through their Diets, dominated by local nobles and notables, where Protestantism had gained a firm foothold. Each meeting of the Diets in the various lands advertised their bewilderment with the emperor’s erratic behaviour and emphasized his enfeeblement. Meanwhile, the archdukes handled local governing groups in ways that seemed to them best.
One group of lands in the 1564 partition lay in the Tyrol. There, Archduke Ferdinand had the fewest difficulties. Lutheranism had not made much headway and local secular and ecclesiastical élites were easily rallied behind a Counter-Reformation drawing on neighbouring Bavaria, which served as a shop-window for how to consolidate authority around revived Catholicism led from the top.
Archduke Karl faced different problems in Inner Austria, a second parcel of ancestral domains. Here Lutheranism had a secure footing among the local élites. In his negotiations with the Estates he was obliged to concede a general religious freedom, confirmed in the Pacification of Bruck (1578). In 1595, however, Archduke Ferdinand II (‘Ferdinand of Styria’), Karl’s eldest son, took over the reins in Graz, capital of Inner Austria. Following his father’s wishes as well as the injunctions of his Bavarian mother, Archduchess Maria, and the Jesuits, Ferdinand turned the Counter-Reformation into a political programme of confessional absolutism. Its hallmarks were a twin allergy towards Protestantism and notions of mutual obligation between ruler and ruled. Its objective was to demonstrate how, with determined leadership, a prince could galvanize conforming élites into imposing the Counter-Reformation decisively and quickly.
Protestant nobles initially hoped to get Ferdinand’s written agreement to continue the concessions made at Bruck as a quid pro quo for the Diet formally recognizing him as their ruler. When he refused, contending that he was a princeps absolutus and not a princeps modificatus, they accepted him anyway. He later claimed that the Diet had no right of appeal over his head to the emperor, that the privileges which the Protestants claimed had no basis in the ‘consent of all the people’ (consensus totius populi), and that his father had not bound his successors. His decisions were based, he told a delegation from the Diet, on an ‘inspiration from God the Holy Spirit’.
In September 1598, he decreed the expulsion of all Protestant preachers from Styria. A year later an ecclesiastical commission began work. Led by a bishop and accompanied by state officials and militia, it worked its way round towns and villages. Books were publicly burned and Protestant graveyards desecrated. Commissioners expelled the Protestant preacher if one still remained, and then called the local community together. In exhortations which mingled the evils of Lutheranism with the benefits of conversion, the Ottoman threat and obedience to the prince, they then installed a Catholic priest, commissioned repairs to the church, and ordered Sunday and Catholic feast-day observance. Remaining Protestants were given notice to leave. Around 11,000 townspeople and 1,000 nobles chose exile but the popular revolt which some of Ferdinand’s counsellors had predicted did not erupt. The achievement of Ferdinand’s programme took place in the peculiar circumstances of the Turkish War, the growing political paralysis of the empire and the coming to maturity of a first generation of Jesuit-trained members of the local élite. Styria’s success became the blueprint for confessional absolutism elsewhere in the Austrian Habsburg domains, and then in the Reich. The origins of the Thirty Years War are not to be sought in the Hradschin Palace in Prague (which is where the 1618 rebellion began) but on the Stadtkrone in Graz. That was where Ferdinand turned the Hofburg into his governing headquarters, next door to the Jesuit church and college (endowed with new buildings by Ferdinand in 1609), and where, appropriately, his imperial mausoleum would later be built.
A final group of ancestral lands, inherited by Ferdinand I’s son and heir, Maximilian, came in three different parts: Upper and Lower Austria, Bohemia and Hungary. In Austria, the local nobility had a secure position in the Diets. In Bohemia and Hungary, the elective powers of the Diets made them stronger, the balance of powers and obligations as between prince and Diet being open to contesting interpretations by both sides, starting with the electoral principle itself in Bohemia. Although Ferdinand I had affirmed the principle of primogeniture after the 1547 rebellion, the Diet did not regard itself as bound by that decision.
In all these lands, Protestantism was an established presence, with rights of worship guaranteed through the Diets, and especially to the nobility. In 1568, Maximilian granted freedom of worship to nobles in Upper and Lower Austria. By the end of his rule, they were overwhelmingly Protestant and, through their influence, so were over half the parishes. In Bohemia, Lutherans collaborated with Utraquists and the Bohemian Brethren and, in 1575, the Diet presented the Confessio Bohemica (based on the Augsburg Confession) for Maximilian’s assent (he gave it only orally). In neighbouring Moravia, a Calvinist minority was vociferous, while in Silesia all the nobility and most of the towns had been Lutheran for a generation. Although the major offices of state remained nominees of the emperor and in Catholic hands, the Protestants in the Diet developed parallel institutions to safeguard their privileges. Finally, in that enclave of northern and western Hungary which the Habsburgs counted their own, Protestantism was also in a majority. With the Turkish threat on their doorstep, neither Maximilian nor Rudolf could afford to ignore the political reality in Hungary, which was that its Diet was in contact with the other Diets in Habsburg lands and elsewhere, and that any opposition to Habsburg rule was guaranteed sustenance from Transylvania (or/and) the Ottomans.
The Austrian Habsburg succession was further complicated when Emperor Maximilian II left that last set of domains, his share of the inheritance, uniquely to his son Rudolf II. That broke with the precedent set by Ferdinand and, in 1582, Rudolf’s four surviving brothers demanded compensation for their exclusion. They were offered posts within the Habsburg portfolio, but Matthias, Rudolf’s third brother, refused to sign away his inheritance. Three years in the Netherlands as Stadholder (1578–81) did not cover him in glory. He spent the 1580s sulking in Linz. In 1593, he was put in charge of the Habsburg forces in the war against the Turks, and two years later became next in line to his brother Rudolf after the death of Archduke Ernst. By then, however, his frustration with the emperor’s failure to support the war against the Turks was coupled with a desire (fostered by family rivalry) to emulate Archduke Ferdinand’s Styrian experiment in Upper and Lower Austria. In 1599, Matthias appointed Bishop Melchior Khlesl as his chancellor there. It was on Khlesl’s initiative that the archdukes met to draft an ultimatum to place before Rudolf, that he should appoint a successor.
Rudolf was jolted into actions that made an already delicate situation worse. He refused to discuss the succession. Instead, buoyed up by military successes in the Turkish War, he tried to show that he could emulate the Styrian programme and keep the archdukes in their place. The Hungarian Diet was told in 1604 that issues of religion were no longer up for discussion, while the royal towns of Silesia were informed that their Protestant institutions and worship had no legal basis. At the end of 1604, already discontented Hungarian Protestants made plans to join the Transylvanian István Bocskai in rebellion, while the Bohemian Diet looked on anxiously at what was happening in Silesia.
Exploiting the emperor’s increasing weakness and isolation, Matthias manoeuvred himself into becoming the imperial governor in Hungary. There, faced with the reality of revolt, he made peace with the Hungarian rebels (June 1606), István Bocskai and the Ottomans. At the meeting of the Hungarian Diet in Bratislava in February 1608, Matthias struck a deal with the Hungarians and the Upper and Lower Austrian Diets, to which the Moravian Diet became a party at a later stage. István Illésházy, Protestant leader in the Hungarian Diet, was made a Palatine baron. Under his influence, and that of Georg Erasmus von Tschernembl, the Calvinist leader of the Lower Austrian Diet, the Estates offered homage to Archduke Matthias (thereby implicitly renouncing the emperor), so long as they were guaranteed their religious and political privileges, including the right to have only indigenous people appointed to the offices of state in their localities. In April 1608, Archduke Matthias had an army to hand and his cheer-leaders (Illésházy and Tschernembl) on side, ready to march on Prague and force the emperor’s hand.
Spanish diplomats and the papal representative brokered a way out of the impasse. The emperor reluctantly accepted the treaty with the Turks. He ceded to Matthias all his rights over Hungary, Austria and Moravia, and promised him the succession in Bohemia. Sensing their time had come, the Bohemian, Silesian and Lusatian Diets, which had stood aside from the 1608 agreement at Bratislava, entered into a solemn alliance in June 1609, vowing in biblical terms to defend their religious freedoms ‘to the last drop of blood’. They acknowledged their loyalty to the king of Bohemia but not to the Catholic officials in Prague who claimed to act in his name. Faced with a group of Protestant delegates who had forced their way into his apartments in the Hradschin Palace in Prague, Rudolf responded by offering in a personal guarantee (Letter of Majesty, 9 July 1609) what they wanted by way of religious and political privileges. Bohemian nobles, knights and towns with imperial charters could follow whatever religion those chose, and each group could elect ten ‘Defensores’ from the Estates, in reality an alternative government.
Rudolf’s desperate efforts thereafter to recover his hopelessly weak position made things catastrophic. He asked his nephew Archduke Leopold to return with troops which had been deployed in the Jülich-Cleves dispute and liberate him from both Archduke Matthias and the Bohemian Estates. On their way down the Danube, some of them mutinied, while others looted parts of Austria and Bohemia. When they arrived in Prague in February 1611, the Diet simply removed all authority from imperial officers and put the Defensores in their place. In April, they summarily deposed Rudolf from his Bohemian crown and then used the Letter of Majesty as the basis for a confirmation of all their rights and privileges before electing Matthias in his place in May 1611. The contours of the crisis in Habsburg lands which broke out seven years later were already largely sketched out.
A CENTRAL EUROPEAN STORM
Matthias’s election as emperor in 1612 did not diminish the Austrian Habsburg crisis either in the empire or in the ancestral lands. He presented himself to the imperial electors as a conciliator. Only intermittently involved in the affairs of the wider empire himself, he let Bishop (after 1615, Cardinal) Khlesl take the initiative. But the latter was mistrusted by the Reich’s senior figures as a scheming newcomer. The fact that he was prepared to negotiate with Protestants seemed, at least to Archdukes Maximilian and Ferdinand, to prove them right, so they orchestrated his downfall in 1618. Khlesl’s earliest initiative was to summon a Diet to Regensburg in August 1613. But he was held in suspicion by Protestant delegates when he proposed reforms to the imperial court to break the deadlock in its proceedings. Equally, his proposals for the empire to assist Matthias with his inherited debt of over 5 million guilders and the ongoing costs of maintaining the Hungarian frontier fortresses met with few supporters. Prorogued to the following year, and then abandoned, this was the last Diet to be held in the Reich for forty years, its paralysis the cause of its dissolution.
Khlesl’s way forward in the empire then consisted of independently brokered bilateral compromises by which he could create a coalition of imperial loyalists which would gradually subsume Catholic and Protestant separatism. That separatism had become entrenched in the formation of confessional defensive leagues in the empire. The Protestants, led by Christian of Anhalt (Palatine in the Upper Palatinate, who had come to see politics in terms of opposing confessional blocs) and Philipp Ludwig of Pfalz-Neuburg, buried their Calvinist-Lutheran divisions and signed up to a confessionally delineated defensive Protestant Union at Auhausen (May 1608). Duke Maximilian of Bavaria responded with an association of German Catholic states (July 1609). Khlesl’s efforts to weaken these leagues were helped by events. Although Christian of Anhalt’s diplomatic initiatives included treaties with England (1612) and the Dutch (1613), the Protestant Union lost the backing which it had from France and Brandenburg, and never enjoyed any from Saxony. With an enfeebled membership and divisions, the Protestant Union was hardly a going concern in 1618, and collapsed in 1621. Maximilian’s Catholic League fell apart even sooner, undermined by rivalries which the Habsburgs fomented. The more the confessionally based leagues weakened, the more Matthias was held in mistrust within the empire.
Meanwhile, in the ancestral lands Archduke Matthias’s election as emperor did nothing to reduce the potential for confrontation. In Hungary, the threat to Habsburg survival was real and imminent. In Styria, Archduke Ferdinand demonstrated what a determined Catholic solution to all these problems would be. In Bohemia, a group of Protestant nobles won concessions in writing which acknowledged the Defensores as their independent guarantors, out of imperial hands. Matthias even agreed that the next Bohemian Diet would consider proposals to extend their powers, making them responsible for Bohemian military defence and foreign policy and allowing them to form a common front with other Diets in the ancestral lands.
Matthias’s transfer of the imperial court to Vienna made him closer at hand for Hungarian problems. But it put him correspondingly further away from Prague and the influence which the imperial court could bring to bear there. At two general Diets of the Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian lands in 1614 and 1615 Matthias played for time, exploiting the disunity among the opposition and counting on compliant Moravian and Bohemian nobles with whom he could work. The latter included the Bohemian chancellor and one of the Defensores, Zdenek von Lobkowitz, and, in Moravia, Karl Žerotín. The failure of the Diets disillusioned some and radicalized others, but seemed to strengthen Emperor Matthias’s position.
With the emperor childless, there was a further succession issue looming. Faced with the crisis in their midst, however, the Habsburg brothers renounced their claims in favour of Ferdinand of Styria, the only archduke with offspring. Philip III, as a grandson of Maximilian II, technically had precedence, but the Spanish ambassador in Vienna, Íñigo Vélez de Guevara, count of Oñate, concluded a secret treaty with Matthias and Ferdinand in March 1617 whereby the latter would cede Habsburg possessions in Alsace and on the right bank of the Rhine to Spain in return for its support for his unopposed election to the Bohemian and imperial thrones. With that deal in the pocket, Matthias summoned the Bohemian Diet, which reluctantly elected Ferdinand king of Bohemia on 5 June 1617, crowning him three weeks later. Only two nobles openly opposed the election. Ferdinand then engineered his election by the Hungarian Diet to the crown of St Stephen, the coronation taking place in Bratislava on 1 July 1618. It was there that he received the news that his representatives in Prague (the Regents) had been summarily despatched from a window.
The Defenestration of Prague (23 May 1618) was an orchestrated act of rebellion from a minority of desperate nobles. The archbishop of Prague, Johann Lohelius, had already begun to anticipate the prospect of Ferdinand’s accession by replacing Protestant pastors with Catholic priests on crown lands whose administration Matthias had entrusted to him. Protestants insisted that the Letter of Majesty extended freedom of worship to crown lands, but the emperor claimed that these were now in the hands of the Church and that its stipulations did not apply. When they petitioned Emperor Matthias in March against this sleight of hand, they were threatened with arrest. Aware that the support for rebellion was not wholehearted, a minority of Protestant notables met once more on 22 May in Prague, where one of their number (Heinrich Matthias, Count Thurn – a recently sacked imperial privy councillor) declared that it was time to throw the emperor’s representatives ‘out of the window, as is customary’, a reference to the defenestration which had begun the Hussite revolt. The following day, singing hymns to keep up their spirits, they marched up the stairs to the room in the Hradschin where the Regents held court and despatched three (two Regents and a secretary) through a window.
On the 24th, the Protestants formed a provisional government (the ‘Directors’) and raised an army. The stakes were extremely high. The rebel leaders had no international backing and risked execution and reprisals, while for the Habsburgs the imperial crown lay in the balance. The comparison with the first act of the Dutch Revolt just over fifty years previously came to people’s minds. But there was a difference in the desperation of the rebels and the determination of their opponents. The Directors cast around for allies elsewhere in the ancestral lands but the response was noncommittal. The Moravians refused to join in. Christian of Anhalt and the remnant of the Protestant (Evangelical) Union of princes in the empire were unwilling to support a rebellion against the emperor. But, holding out the prospect of being elected to the Bohemian crown, Christian persuaded the maverick duke of Savoy to finance a contract army under Count Ernst von Mansfeld, whose military experience had been won in the Turkish War but who had never been paid for his services. Playing for time and relying on the secret treaty with Spain, the imperialists began mustering their forces. Emperor Matthias died on 20 March 1619 and events moved to their climax.
Bohemian forces under Count Thurn invaded Moravia to force its Diet to join the rebellion, and then turned towards Vienna, arriving in its suburbs and hoping for a rebellion from within which never materialized. The Silesians, Lusatians and Lower and Upper Austrian Estates concluded a confederation with the Bohemians, its articles offering a vague blueprint for a mixed monarchy in which Protestantism had a defined place and where power lay in the hands of the nobles. But Mansfeld’s forces were trapped by a contingent of Habsburg cavalry and decimated. On 19 August, the Bohemians deposed Ferdinand on the grounds of manifest tyranny. A week later, they elected Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate as their new king. Frederick’s acceptance of the offer reflected the world view which prevailed around his council table in Heidelberg. Ludwig Camerarius, his leading privy councillor, was a Calvinist with a correspondence network which put him in touch with most of those in northern Europe who had been brought up as activists in the Protestant cause, and who argued for a pre-emptive strike against the imperialists.
In reality, Frederick was recognized as king in Bohemia only by Denmark, Sweden, Venice and the Dutch Republic, and only the last offered any resources to keep him on his throne. Frederick V could hardly let his co-religionists down and was influenced by his inheritance and connections. Through his bride, Elizabeth Stuart, King James I was his father-in-law, and she led him to believe that there would be support from that quarter. There had been a Palatine prince on the imperial throne two centuries previously (Ruprecht III), so why not another? When Elizabeth arrived in Prague she gave birth to their fourth child and he was named Ruprecht (‘Rupert of the Rhine’). Frederick thought he could count, too, on collaboration from Bethlen Gábor’s forces from Transylvania for a joint assault on Vienna before the end of the year.
Ferdinand consolidated his position as well. He was unanimously elected emperor at Frankfurt on 28 August 1619 and mustered his forces. The military defeat of the Bohemians, when it came, was swift and total. Saxony and Brandenburg supported the emperor, and so did Maximilian, duke of Bavaria, in the name of the Catholic League (Treaty of Munich, October 1619). The League had an army under a seasoned general, Johann Tserclaes, Count Tilly. At the battle of the White Mountain (8 November 1620), a chalk escarpment near Prague, 30,000 Bohemians were routed in about an hour by the conjoined imperial and Bavarian army. The Confederates might have regrouped to hold on to Prague but Tilly’s cavalry so scattered the remnants that they put up no resistance. Frederick, now the derided ‘Winter King’, fled east to Silesia and then back to the Palatinate. It was how Emperor Ferdinand chose to exploit that victory which turned the Austrian Habsburg crisis into the Thirty Years War.
CONVERGING CATHOLIC INTERESTS OF STATE
Ferdinand’s success made confessional absolutism conceivable more broadly within the Habsburg ancestral lands, starting in Bohemia. On 21 June 1621, twenty-seven Bohemian rebel leaders were executed in the town hall square in Prague. The victims’ speeches were drowned out by drums in case they proclaimed their martyrdom to a cause. Jan Jessenius, the brains behind the rebellion, was secured to a chair before his tongue was cut out prior to his being decapitated. The heads of the victims were displayed on spikes on top of the Charles Bridge – the six facing east towards the castle were those of the nobles who had revolted against their prince, and the six facing west towards the Old Town were those of burghers. Over 1,500 nobles were tried before a court and more than 600 of them were deprived of their estates (along with a further 250 Moravian nobles). Some received partial monetary compensation but it was in a currency that was deliberately debased and the Bohemian economy was by this point shattered. Ferdinand used the expropriations to reward those who had been loyal to the imperial cause, to strengthen the power of the Habsburg state and to re-Catholicize the region. Calvinist and Lutheran ministers were expelled along with all Anabaptists, and religious freedom was abolished. Urban privileges were curtailed. Then in 1627 the nobility was confronted with the choice between converting to Catholicism and taking up exile. That same year a ‘Renewed Constitution’ (Verneuerte Landesordnung) was proclaimed in both Bohemia and Moravia which declared the Bohemian crown hereditarily Habsburg and Catholicism the sole religion. The country ceased to be a constituent element in the Habsburg kingdom and instead became an imperial crown land, its Diet a consultative body in which the upper clergy was restored to its place. Over 150,000 Bohemians chose exile.
Aware of the ramifications of confessional absolutism, Emperor Ferdinand tailored it to local environments to minimize the backlash. In Silesia, the repression was less harsh. In Lower Austria, the opposition was divided between a minority of nobles who swore an oath of allegiance to Ferdinand in 1620 – and were then guaranteed personal religious freedom – and the rest, who were not. Then, once those who had openly resisted his rule had been dealt with, he modified the 1620 undertakings to a simple guarantee of freedom of conscience, prohibiting remaining Protestant nobles from having churches and schools in their castles, on the pretext that they caused sedition. Upper Austria, by contrast, was treated to a similar fate to that of Bohemia. In 1624, Protestant preachers and schoolmasters were given a month to leave the country. All other Protestants except nobles were told to convert or leave by Easter 1626. A resulting uprising was suppressed with the help of Bavaria and, by 1630, 100,000 Austrians had joined the exiled Bohemians. In Hungary, Ferdinand’s rule still hung in the balance. Bethlen Gábor periodically assaulted it from Transylvania until his death in 1629. Thereafter his successor, György I Rákóczi, continued the struggle, making ineffectual common cause with Sweden and France until Emperor Ferdinand III made a peace with him in 1647 (the Treaty of Linz), opening the door to Hungary’s confessional absolutism later in the century.
The emperor’s jurists argued (with reason on their side) that they were merely putting into practice cuius regio eius religio in Habsburg lands, granting a right of exile (ius emigrandi) in each case as required by the Peace of Augsburg. What happened in the empire after the Bohemian defeat called into question, however, the basic fabric of the Reich. Frederick’s defeat in Prague foreshadowed his deposition from the Palatinate. Rejecting an offer of leniency if he acknowledged the emperor’s authority, he was unilaterally outlawed by the emperor in 1621 (imperial lawyers advising that no trial was needed because his crime was ‘notorious’). His survival depended on mercenary forces under Count Mansfeld, the Lutheran Margrave of Baden-Durlach, Duke Christian of Brunswick-Lüneburg and a token force of 2,000 from James I. Spanish troops advanced on the left bank of the Rhine into the Lower Palatinate under General Ambrogio Spínola, while Count Tilly’s League forces occupied the right bank, taking Heidelberg on 19 September. Frederick fled into exile in the Netherlands. There then followed a confiscation of the Elector’s assets. Adding the left-bank lands of the Lower Palatinate to what it had been promised under the 1617 treaty, Spain increased its stake in the Rhineland.
Emperor Ferdinand had built up big debts to Duke Maximilian of Bavaria during the Bohemian campaign, and initially offered Upper Austria as their guarantee. He could now recompense him with the Upper Palatinate and, in a secret deal in September 1621, Maximilian was also given the Electoral title. The balance of forces among the Electors was changed for good, and without any consultation of those Electors. When the Palatine councillor Ludwig Camerarius published the secret letters, making it impossible to deny what had been agreed, it was the papacy which demanded that the arrangement be publicly ratified. It also asked for the uniquely rich Heidelberg library to be transferred to Rome in recompense for its support. Following a limited assembly of Catholic princes which stopped short of being a Diet, at Regensburg (February 1623), the emperor reluctantly agreed to the transfer of the library, Maximilian ensuring that a Bavarian ex libris was inscribed in each book before it was transhipped to Rome. The formal annexation of the Upper Palatinate to Duke Maximilian was confirmed in 1628. Wittelsbach Bavaria was no longer a rival of the Austrian Habsburgs but a military and strategic partner whose alliance with the Spanish Habsburgs was based on congruent Catholic interests.
The re-Catholicization of the Upper Palatinate followed immediately thereafter. Protestant schools and churches were closed and transferred to Catholic authorities. The Jesuits organized mass burnings of Protestant books. Confession certificates were introduced as tests of compliance, especially among the nobility. Those failing to attend Mass, or who ate meat on Fridays, were liable to a fine and the threat of expulsion. By 1630, ninety noble families in the Upper Palatinate had converted and more than that number took up exile. As in Bohemia and Upper Austria, the changes offered the opportunity to refashion the élite around those who either had been, or would be, loyal to the Bavarian duke.
The prospects for a peaceful resolution, launched by Duke Wilhelm IV of Saxony-Weimar around the notion of a German Peace League in 1623, were non-existent. The propositions that the Elector Palatine should be allowed back into his territories, that exiles should return and that a peace accord could be built around a reconstructed Peace of Augsburg were unrealistic. Besides, Count Tilly’s Catholic League army now moved from the Palatine into Westphalia in pursuit of Christian of Brunswick’s forces in the summer of 1623, blocking their escape into the Netherlands and routing them at Stadtlohn on 6 August. The theatre of conflict moved northwards into the heartland of the Protestant princes and territories.
The logic for that shift of emphasis lay in the briefly coinciding interests of Munich, Vienna and Madrid. Although their diplomats and advisers shared a common Catholic outlook on politics and the world, Protestant contemporaries wrongly interpreted that as a Catholic conspiracy or a resurgent myth of Habsburg world monarchy. In reality it depended on a realization that for the moment they had more to gain from standing together than apart. There was solidarity for Spain when it used military force to intervene in the Grisons to secure the Valtelline in 1620, a heavy-handed repression of a largely Protestant population. Support from Munich and Vienna became clearer during the renewed Spanish conflict with the Dutch in the Low Countries in the 1620s. With the expiry of the truce in 1621, Spínola’s re-equipped Flanders Army of 70,000 men launched an assault on Bergen-op-Zoom in 1622. Two years later, Spínola invested the nearby fortress town of Breda. The siege lasted nine months and resulted in the deaths of 13,000 inhabitants and defending soldiers before the city surrendered in June 1625. That success was because so many Dutch troops were pinned down by Count Tilly’s forces in garrisons along the Rhine, Ems and Lippe.
A more ambitious joint strategy against the Dutch (one not requiring such a large army stationed in the Netherlands) involved crippling the enemy’s economic infrastructure. Spain commissioned the construction of twenty purpose-built corsairs at Dunkirk and requisitioned sixty or so other ships for war purposes. The Dunkirkers menaced Dutch and English shipping in the Channel in the 1620s. Whereas over 1,000 Dutch vessels were recorded going to and fro up the Channel in the years 1614–20, only fifty-two risked that passage in the years from 1621 to 1627. The English lost 390 ships (a fifth of its merchant marine) between 1624 and 1628. The economic disruption had a significant impact in both the Netherlands and England. The Anglo-Dutch counter-attack of 1625 was limited to a failed raid on Cádiz and a disastrous expedition to help French Protestants. In the same year a Franco-Savoyard attack on Genoa was successfully repulsed, and the Dutch were expelled from Bahia in Brazil.
In the light of that success, Spain began establishing agents, responsible to a court in Seville, known as the ‘Admiralty of the North’, or Almirantazgo de los Países Septentrionales. The task of the court was to certify the place of origin of goods imported into Spain from northern lands. The objective was to stamp out Dutch goods being smuggled in as French or German. A further measure initiated in 1625 involved constructing a canal linking the Rhine south of Wesel with the Maas at Venlo (the Fossa Eugeniana) to deflect commerce away from the republic. Then discussions began between Madrid and Vienna on developing a Habsburg anti-Dutch maritime capacity in the North Sea and the Baltic. Madrid’s aim was to complete its economic blockade of the Netherlands; Vienna’s aims were to develop the ports in East Frisia and on the Elbe, generate a permanent revenue for the imperial treasury and impose an imperial-led Catholic solution upon the ecclesiastical territories in the Reich and the future of its institutions.
With the spoils from Bohemia and the prospect of permanent revenues from the empire, Ferdinand decided to sponsor a further army. Albrecht von Wallenstein was appointed its commander and ordered to raise 24,000 men in Lower Saxony in April 1625. Wallenstein was a minor Bohemian noble who had risen through service to Emperor Matthias, converted to Catholicism and acquired military experience. Profiting from imperial expropriations and currency debasement in Bohemia, he became the largest landowner in the region and was one of the richest men in the empire. He raised regiments on his own credit. The Flemish Calvinist Hans de Witte was a partner in the consortium which profited from the Bohemian debasement, and his confidence in Wallenstein’s assets in Bohemia and elsewhere was at the basis of his willingness to mobilize credit lines with other Calvinist financiers, as well as manage the armaments, munitions and food supply contracts essential to Wallenstein’s military effort. With de Witte, Wallenstein advanced sums to the emperor. In return, his estates in Friedland were elevated to a dukedom, thereby making him an imperial prince. Wallenstein’s army was, like those of his contemporaries only on a grander scale, a speculative operation.
DENMARK AND THE DESTINY OF THE EMPIRE
The impact of this congruence of Catholic state interests in the empire was profound. In Protestant courts, exiled nobles recounted stories of religious oppression, presenting themselves as the precursors of what would happen elsewhere. Those who stood aside from the conflict (such as Brandenburg and Saxony), having received guarantees from the emperor, began to wonder what would become of the Reich. Even Catholic Electors shared their nervousness, complaining about Spanish troops on their estates and concerned about being dragged into the Hispano-Dutch conflict. Duke Maximilian of Bavaria was outraged to learn of a secret agreement between Emperor Ferdinand and General Wallenstein at Bruck (November 1626) giving Wallenstein permission to occupy lands in the Reich and exact contributions from them to support his forces. The convergence of Catholic state interests faded as imperial intentions became more menacing.
The developments in the empire particularly affected Denmark. The Danish Oldenburg dynasty had emerged in 1536 from an interregnum and civil war to take advantage of the Reformation, consolidate its authority over Denmark, Norway and Iceland and become a significant regional power. Collaboration with its aristocracy was one of the secrets of its success; another was its strategic dominance of the entrance to the Baltic. As the latter’s maritime commerce grew so Danish temptations to turn it into a closed sea (mare clausum) became greater. It first exercised its right to do so in 1565 and then levied tolls (2 per cent of the value of the cargo from 1567) on vessels passing through the Skagerrak. Ships were compelled to put into Elsinore, the royal castle at Kronborg, rebuilt in 1585 and a symbol of the power of the Danish monarchy into whose coffers toll-receipts directly went.
Christian IV, crowned king in Denmark in 1596, was the heir to a healthy treasury. Educated to rule, he entered into the task with hyperactive enthusiasm. He launched ambitious projects – creating new towns, founding new industries and sponsoring exploration to Greenland and the Far East. The Danish navy became a serious force in the Baltic, but its dominance was not uncontested. Since the 1560s Sweden, Russia and Poland vied for the eastern Baltic littoral. The relationship between Sweden and Poland became hostile. And Denmark’s relationship with Sweden was fraught because Christian IV refused to surrender his dynastic claims to the Swedish crown, and because Danish territories circled Sweden’s frontiers to the south and west. Danish-Swedish antagonisms also involved contested claims to Norwegian lands in the Arctic Circle, where both monarchs claimed to be king of the Lapps, rivals to control shipping through the Barents Sea to Archangel. In the Kalmar War (1611–13) Denmark took Älvsborg after a siege of only eighteen days, Sweden’s only North Sea port. At the Peace of Knäred (January 1613) Danish pre-eminence in the Baltic and northern Norway was reinforced. Sweden recovered Älvsborg with a ransom of a million riksdalers or the equivalent of ten barrels of gold. Free of concerns about his Baltic neighbour, Christian IV could concentrate upon problems in the empire.
The Danish king was a Reich prince (through being duke of Holstein). He had dynastic involvements in the bishoprics of Bremen, Verden and Osnabrück which would be threatened by any change of status imposed by the emperor in secularized ecclesiastical territories. Bremen and Verden controlled the Weser and Elbe estuaries, where Christian IV had mercantilist ambitions. When the imperial court ruled in 1618 that Hamburg was a ‘free city’, Christian decided to construct a new town (Glückstadt) to constrict Hamburg’s maritime traffic. The Habsburg programme of a North Sea-Baltic economic campaign against Dutch commerce directly affected Denmark.
Christian IV’s alarm at the emperor’s growing military presence in northern Germany was not shared by his Council of State, which regarded involvement in German affairs as a diversion that Sweden would exploit. So when he declared war on the emperor in 1625 it was not as a Danish invasion but as duke of Holstein lending support to the local defence alliance of the Lower Saxon Circle. Things did not begin well for Christian. He and his horse fell from the city wall at Hameln in July 1625. He was unconscious for a couple of days, with rumours of his death giving Tilly hopes of overcoming the opposition quickly. Christian recovered to lead the Lower Saxon campaign the following year against the combined armies of Tilly and Wallenstein, but his allies abroad (the Dutch and England) let him down and his campaign faltered. A counter-offensive failed and, in full retreat, he made a stand at Lutter am Barenberge in the foothills of the Harz Mountains, where he was routed. Half his army was killed, captured or wounded, his senior officers died, and the king himself only narrowly escaped capture. The collapse of the Lower Saxon opposition followed. Wallenstein’s and Tilly’s forces invaded Holstein in September 1627 and then moved into Denmark itself. Wallenstein became duke of Mecklenburg, a principality with which he could underwrite his debts and support his now mammoth army, numbering (on paper) 130,000 men.
The emperor’s pre-eminence in the Reich became a realistic prospect. The plans for a Habsburg North Sea and Baltic anti-Dutch commercial tourniquet were now feasible. Wallenstein was given the titles ‘Generalissimo’ and ‘General of the Ocean and Baltic Seas’. He started work on a canal across the neck of the Jutland peninsula so that ships could bypass the tolls on shipping exacted by Denmark at the Sound. The Mecklenburg port of Wismar was chosen as his naval base, and work began to build a fleet. Before it was ready, the small Pomeranian Baltic sea-port of Stralsund refused to accept a garrison of Wallenstein’s troops, and he ordered its bombardment in May 1628. He perhaps had not appreciated its strategically excellent defensive position and, four months later, Wallenstein’s forces withdrew as Swedish and Danish reinforcements came to the town’s rescue. Emboldened by that reversal and with the Danish fleet intact, Christian mounted a naval counter-offensive. Hoping to make use of those ships in the imperial cause in due course, imperial strategists made an honourable peace with the Danish king at Lübeck, restoring all his patrimony except the secularized bishoprics without a penny in costs.
The secularized ecclesiastical territories in the empire were the subject of Ferdinand’s Edict of Restitution (March 1629). His Jesuit confessor, Wilhelm Lamormaini, assured him that it was a solution which carried divine blessing: ‘God promises us the victory shortly. His cause drives us on.’ The imperial vice-chancellor, Peter Heinrich von Stralendorf, drafted the text. Superficially, it was nothing more than an interpretation of the Peace of Augsburg. In reality, it was a legislative act without precedence, pronounced as law in the empire without being endorsed by any imperial Diet. It enforced a Catholic interpretation of the Ecclesiastical Reservation – the requirement that ecclesiastical princes in the empire should forfeit Church lands if they converted to Lutheranism after 1552. Such secularizations had occurred on a large scale but they had become sanctioned by time and legalized in princely successions and land transfers. However, the military successes of the 1620s favoured the restitution of such lands in the Rhineland, and secular Catholic rulers had already begun to take advantage of that fact. The edict offered a way for the emperor to bridle a process already in motion and, by emphasizing his own role as arbiter, to reassert imperial authority.
The edict threatened the (Protestant) possessors of fifteen bishoprics in northern Germany as well as the occupants of 500 wealthy monasteries across northern and central Germany – large areas and populations, with substantial revenues. By the end of 1630, five bishoprics and 120 monasteries were restored by imperial commissioners, backed up by Wallenstein’s troops. In Magdeburg, where monastic restitution had begun under his authority in 1628, the city rebelled. Representatives from Lübeck and Hamburg, the most important independent Hanse cities, told Wallenstein that the measure compromised their mercantile cooperation with him: ‘The edict cannot be sustained . . . one cannot simply scrap the religious peace.’ Writing back to Rombaldo Collalto, president of the imperial War Council, in November 1629, Wallenstein bluntly told him that the edict had ‘turned all the non-Catholics against us’. Three months later, he added: ‘their embitterment is so great that they are all saying that if only the Swede [i.e. Gustav Adolf] would come they would gladly die for him’.
The implications of the edict for the empire were huge. The scope for Habsburg ecclesiastical patronage with which to cajole princes and territories to do the emperor’s bidding was immense. The power of that patronage was already evident. Saxony had been given Lusatia for its loyalty in the Bohemian rising. Brandenburg’s Calvinist Elector’s policy was in the hand of his favourite, Count Adam von Schwarzenberg. The latter exploited his contacts in Vienna to assure the duke’s succession in Pomerania and his security of tenure in Magdeburg and Cleves. Wallenstein maintained 12,000 troops in garrisons across northern Germany, while despatching 15,000 more into Poland to keep Gustav Adolf tied down in his Polish campaign. A further 17,000 were sent to the Netherlands to reinforce the Spanish, whose army threatened mutiny after the Dutch captured the Spanish silver fleet in 1628. Partly with that windfall, the Dutch began the siege of ’s-Hertogenbosch in April 1629, building a 40-mile dyke around its canals and sluices. The resulting polder was then drained, allowing the Dutch to advance and force the surrender of a key stronghold in Spain’s frontier fortresses.
With the imperial hold on northern Germany fragile and the continuing risk of a Hungarian attack from Bethlen Gábor, Wallenstein wanted no further commitments. Yet the emperor and the imperial War Council in Vienna demanded he find 14,000 troops for a proposed campaign in northern Italy. On Christmas Day 1627 Duke Vincenzo II Gonzaga of Mantua and Montferrat died. His territories were technically fiefs of the empire, and he was childless. Aware of his ill-health, he had willed his inheritance to his niece, Maria Gonzaga, whom he married to his cousin Charles de Gonzaga, duke of Nevers, to keep the possessions in the family. The marriage took place at Mantua, the day that he died. The duke of Nevers was a resident of the French court and his succession to Mantua and Montferrat threatened Spain’s position in northern Italy, especially in contiguous Milan.
The Spanish Habsburgs procured an alternative claimant, declared Nevers’s occupation illegal and despatched forces to seize the fortress of Casale in the spring of 1628. What was intended as a short campaign turned into a protracted siege lasting over a year. Braving Alpine snow, French regiments relieved the fortress in February 1629, but the Spanish renewed their attack on it in the summer, asking the emperor for assistance. Ferdinand assented and an imperial army left to besiege Casale in September, despite Wallenstein’s opposition, directed by Rombaldo, count of Collalto. Not until July of the following year did the imperial regiments enter Mantua and expel the duke of Nevers. By then, opposition to Wallenstein’s extraordinary power, as well as his regiments’ garrisons and their exactions in northern Germany, had been expressed by the Catholic Electors of the empire meeting at Regensburg in June 1630. They demanded Wallenstein’s dismissal and the reduction of his forces to under a third of their strength. Ferdinand II complied, dispensing with his commander-in-chief in August. Wallenstein’s own disillusionment with the direction of imperial affairs made him accept the turn of events with equanimity. Not so Hans de Witte, his banker, who committed suicide. Gustav Adolf had landed with a Swedish expeditionary force at Stralsund just over a month previously.
THE DEMISE OF THE FRENCH PROTESTANT PARTY
In the aftermath of Henry IV’s assassination, a Protestant delegation accompanied the pastor André Rivet to present their loyal address to Louis XIII and his mother Marie de Médicis. Among them was the soldier-poet Agrippa d’Aubigné, who recounts how he scandalized the queen and courtiers by refusing to go down on bended knee before his sovereign. His gesture so frightened Rivet that he could hardly deliver his speech for shaking with fear. D’Aubigné explained that he meant no disrespect to his king. Especially in the circumstances of the recent assassination, he owed his sovereign ‘reverence’. His point was that (Protestant) nobles owed ‘natural’ obedience to their ruler, unconstrained by (Catholic) fawning. The Huguenot ‘party’ fostered attitudes to power that were redolent of the Christian commonwealth. Now that peace had been secured, its general assemblies existed (according to Philippe Duplessis-Mornay) to advance the ‘common good’ of Protestant Churches. He saw no contradiction between that and the ‘common good’ of the realm as a whole. He argued that the assemblies were essential to the maintenance of the peace, the electing of deputies to represent their interests at the French court, and the integration of French Protestants into civil society. These were the grounds on which Regent Queen Mother Marie reluctantly assented to calling an assembly to Duplessis’s stronghold town of Saumur in 1611.
French politics were moving, however, in another direction. Two royal assassinations in succession created a unique public mood which royal publicists and Gallican magistrates exploited. Henry IV became a Bourbon hero who had sacrificed his life for his kingdom. At the Estates General of 1614–15, summoned to forestall a noble rebellion led by the prince of the blood (Henri, prince of Condé), the demands from the third estate opened with a ‘fundamental law’ that no authority on earth but that of the king of France existed in his realm. The rest of the cahier of demands went on to elaborate reforms which were politely put to one side when the queen mother dismissed the delegates to this, its last convocation before 1789. Marie de Médicis’s court excluded Protestant grandees who had enjoyed high favour in the previous regime, and they were inclined to side with other malcontent nobles. Louis XIII’s marriage to Anne of Austria, Philip III’s daughter (November 1615), convinced Protestants that France had joined the Spanish Habsburg orbit.
The Protestant party was divided between those who believed the best way of protecting it was through negotiation (dismissed as politiques) and those who thought that confrontation was the best defence (hard-liners – fermes, acharnés). Denied a formal protector, the party’s grandees (the duke of Bouillon in the northeast; the duke of Lesdiguières in Dauphiné; the duke of La Force in the southwest, and others) used their regional influence to rival one another to lead it. Some of them found royal pensions and a place at Louis XIII’s court more congenial, and in due course converted. In 1620, a royal expedition to integrate Béarn into the rest of the kingdom forced the issue. The Pyrenean viscountcy was part of Henry of Navarre’s ancestral lands. Its Reformation was an act of state, directed by his mother, Jeanne d’Albret, after a failed rebellion and invasion in 1569. A Protestant oligarchy ran its affairs through Estates, which preserved its language and traditions as a place where the Salic law did not apply and its princes could be held to account.
Integrating Béarn into France meant disavowing those traditions and reducing the privileged position of its Protestants. Louis XIII’s entry into its capital (Pau) in October 1620 was a Catholic victory parade. Béarn’s frightened Protestant oligarchs called on their French co-religionists to help. The latter interpreted what was happening as linked to events in Germany and the Rhineland. Aware of their own divisions and military unpreparedness but feeling desperate, they took up arms, led by the militarily resourceful Henri, duke of Rohan, and his less capable younger brother, Benjamin, duke of Soubise. It took five royal campaigns and a decade to crush the military strength of the Huguenots, but the essence of the task was achieved in the first two years during a campaign to the south of France in 1621–2, which removed many Protestant strongholds, leaving La Rochelle, Montauban and Montpellier as exposed relics of its former strength, internally divided and desperate. La Rochelle was the object of a remorseless siege, masterminded by Armand du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, in 1628. He ordered the construction of 7.5 miles of siege-works and twenty-nine fortifications. To prevent the city receiving aid from English or Dutch co-religionists, 4,000 workers built a 1,500-yard wall on sunken vessels, filled with rubble. After fourteen months and a failed Anglo-Dutch relief expedition, it surrendered in October 1628.
Montauban and Montpellier were handed over to Louis XIII by the duke of Rohan at the Peace of Alais in June 1629, sacrificing the Huguenot political and military party in return for a renewed guarantee of the religious privileges which the peace at Nantes had accorded them. The fall of La Rochelle was the focus for an orgy of celebrations in Paris, culminating in a victory procession through twelve triumphal arches on 23 December. The frontispiece to the official programme depicts the magistrates of Paris on their knees before the seated king, surrounded by the dukes of Orléans and Soissons. Through the windows in the background are depicted the smouldering relics of La Rochelle. Four of the magistrates look directly at the reader, reminding him that absolute obedience is his duty too.
The duke of Rohan escaped to exile in Venice, taking with him four crates of books. In his enforced leisure, he wrote about politics. His library included Machiavelli and Guicciardini as well as Cicero, Tacitus and the neo-Stoic classics. His lifestyle and outlook were not those of a strict Calvinist, and his loyalty to the Huguenot cause, while not in doubt, had not uniquely inspired his rebellion. He rationalized the latter as a visceral hatred for Spain, whose ‘interest is to persecute Protestants in order to aggrandize themselves on the spoils’, France’s ‘interest’ being to understand ‘the poison which results from that’. His military campaigns were ruthless, reflecting the desperate situation in which the divided French Protestant movement found itself, and about which he had no illusions. Criticized for appealing to King James for outside aid in 1620–21, he said that he would surely have been censured afterwards had he not done so. He understood that politics and war were spheres where Christian morality played no part, that he was living in a world of political and military ‘revolutions’ for which there were no ‘rules’. His heroes were rebels – Alcibiades, Caesar, even the Catholic duke of Guise – to be criticized only when they failed to follow the logic of their own actions. Rejecting the virtues of clemency, he wrote: ‘It is the vice of irresolution and a weakness of courage that holds us back, rather than true compassion for the sufferings of others . . . it is thus that we often try to cover our vices with the meanest virtue [pity].’ An iron century bred iron in the soul.