Chapter 24

THE GROWTH OF ABSOLUTISM IN FRANCE AND THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN BOURBONS AND HABSBURGS, 1589-1661

GROWTH OF ABSOLUTISM IN FRANCE: HENRY IV, RICHELIEU, AND MAZARIN

For the first time in many years France in 1598 was at peace. The Edict of Nantes, which in that year accorded qualified religious toleration to the Huguenots, removed the most serious danger to internal order, and the treaty of Vervins, concluded in the same year with the king of Spain, put an end to a long and exhausting foreign war. Henry IV was now free to undertake the internal reformation of his country.

Sorry, indeed, was the plight of France at the close of the sixteenth century. Protracted civil and foreign wars had produced their inevitable consequences. The state was nearly bankrupt. Country districts lay largely uncultivated. Towns were burned or abandoned. Roads were rough and neglected, and bridges in ruins. Many of the discharged soldiers turned highwaymen, pillaged farmhouses, and robbed travelers. Trade was at a standstill and the artisans of the cities were out of work. During the wars, moreover, great noblemen had taken many rights into their own hands and had acquired a habit of not obeying the king. The French crown seemed to be in danger of losing what power it had gained in the fifteenth century.

That the seventeenth century was to witness not a diminution but a pronounced increase of royal power, was due to the character of the French king at this critical juncture. Henry IV (1589-1610) was strong and vivacious. With his high forehead, sparkling eyes, smiling mouth, and his neatly pointed beard (_Henri quatre_), he was prepossessing in looks, while his affability, simplicity, and constant expression of interest in the welfare of his subjects earned him the appellation of "Good King Henry." His closest companions knew that he was selfish and avaricious, but that his quick decisions were likely to be good and certain to be put in force. Above all, Henry had soldierly qualities and would brook no disloyalty or disobedience.

[Sidenote: Sully]

Throughout his reign, Henry IV was well served by his chief minister, the duke of Sully, [Footnote: 1560-1641.] an able, loyal, upright Huguenot, though avaricious like the king and subject to furious fits of jealousy and temper. Appointed to the general oversight of financial affairs, Sully made a tour of inspection throughout the country and completely reformed the royal finances. He forbade provincial governors to raise money on their own authority, removed many abuses of tax- collecting, and by an honest, rigorous administration was able between 1600 and 1610 to save an average of a million livres a year. The king zealously upheld Sully's policy of retrenchment: he reduced the subsidies to artists and the grants to favorites, and retained only a small part of his army, sufficient to overawe rebellious nobles and to restore order and security throughout the realm. To promote and preserve universal peace, he even proposed the formation of a World Confederation--his so-called "Grand Design"--which, however, came to naught through the mutual jealousies and rival ambitions of the various European sovereigns. It proved to be much too early to talk convincingly of general pacifism and disarmament.

[Sidenote: Agricultural Development]

While domestic peace was being established and provision was being made for immediate financial contingencies, Henry IV and his great minister were both laboring to increase the resources of their country and thereby to promote the prosperity and contentment of the people. Sully believed that the true wealth of the nation lay in farming pursuits, and, therefore, agriculture should be encouraged even, if necessary, to the neglect of trade and industry. While the king allowed Sully to develop the farming interests, he himself encouraged the new commercial classes.

In order to promote agriculture, Sully urged the abolition of interior customs lines and the free circulation of grain, subsidized stock raising, forbade the destruction of the forests, drained swamps, rebuilt the roads and bridges, and planned a vast system of canals.

On his side, Henry IV was contributing to the wealth of the middle class. It was he who introduced silkworms and the mulberry trees, on which they feed, thereby giving an impetus to the industry which is now one of the most important in France. The beginnings of the industrial importance of Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles date from the reign of Henry IV.

The king likewise encouraged commerce. A French merchant marine was built up by means of royal bounties. A navy was started. Little by little the French began to compete for trade on the high seas at first with the Dutch, and subsequently with the English. French trading posts were established in India; and Champlain was dispatched to the New World to lay the foundations of a French empire in America. It was fortunate for France that she had two men like Henry IV and Sully, each supplementing the work of the other.

The assassination of Henry IV by a crazed fanatic in 1610 threatened for a time to nullify the effects of his labors, for supreme power passed to his widow, Marie de' Medici, an ambitious but incompetent woman, who dismissed Sully and undertook to act as regent for her nine- year-old son, Louis XIII. The queen-regent was surrounded by worthless favorites and was hated by the Huguenots, who feared her rigid Catholicism, and by the nobles, Catholic and Huguenot alike, who were determined to maintain their privileges and power.

The hard savings of Henry IV were quickly exhausted, and France once more faced a financial crisis. In this emergency the Estates-General was again convened (1614). Since the accession of Louis XI (1461), the French monarchs with their absolutist tendencies had endeavored to remove this ancient check upon their authority: they had convoked it only in times of public confusion or economic necessity. Had the Estates-General really been an effective body in 1614, it might have taken a position similar to that of the seventeenth-century Parliament in England and established constitutional government in France, but its organization and personnel militated against such heroic action. The three estates--clergy, nobles, and commoners (bourgeois)--sat separately in as many chambers; the clergy and nobles would neither tax themselves nor cooperate with the Third Estate; the commoners, many of whom were Huguenots, were disliked by the court, despised by the First and Second Estates, and quite out of sympathy with the peasants, the bulk of the French nation. It is not surprising, under the circumstances, that the session of 1614 lasted but three weeks and ended as a farce: the queen-regent locked up the halls and sent the representatives home--she needed the room for a dance, she said. It was not until the momentous year of 1789--after a lapse of 175 years--that the Estates-General again assembled.

After the fiasco of 1614, affairs went from bad to worse. Nobles and Huguenots contended between themselves, and both against the court favorites. As many as five distinct uprisings occurred. Marie de' Medici was forced to relinquish the government, but Louis XIII, on reaching maturity, gave evidence of little executive ability. The king was far more interested in music and hunting than in business of state. No improvement appeared until Cardinal Richelieu assumed the guidance of affairs of state in 1624. Henceforth, the royal power was exercised not so much by Louis XIII as by his great minister.

[Sidenote: Cardinal Richelieu]

Born of a noble family of Poitou, Armand de Richelieu (1585-1642), at the age of twenty-one had been appointed bishop of the small diocese of Luçon. His eloquence and ability as spokesman for the clergy in the fatuous Estates-General of 1614 attracted the notice of Marie de' Medici, who invited him to court, gave him a seat in the royal council, and secured his nomination as a cardinal of the Roman Church. From 1624 until his death in 1642, Richelieu was the most important man in France.

With undoubted loyalty and imperious will, with the most delicate diplomacy and all the blandishments of subtle court intrigue, sometimes with sternest and most merciless cruelty, Richelieu maintained his influence over the king and proceeded to destroy the enemies of the French crown.

[Sidenote: Richelieu's Policies]

Richelieu's policies were quite simple: (1) To make the royal power supreme in France; (2) to make France predominant in Europe. The first involved the removal of checks upon royal authority and the triumph of absolutism; the second meant a vigorous foreign policy, leading to the humiliation of the rival Habsburgs. In both these policies Richelieu was following the general traditions of the preceding century, essentially those of Henry IV, but to an exaggerated extent and with unparalleled success. Postponing consideration of general European affairs, let us first see what the great cardinal accomplished in France.

[Sidenote: Disappearance of Representative Government]

First of all, Richelieu disregarded the Estates-General. He was convinced of its futility and unhesitatingly declined to consult it. Gradually the idea became current that the Estates-General was an out- worn, medieval institution, totally unfit for modern purposes, and that official business could best--and therefore properly--be conducted, not by the representatives of the chief social classes in the nation, but by personal appointees of the king. Thus the royal council became the supreme lawmaking and administrative body in the country.

Local estates, or parliaments, continued to exist in certain of the most recently acquired provinces of France, such as Brittany, Provence, Burgundy, and Languedoc, but they had little influence except in apportioning taxes: Richelieu tampered with their privileges and vetoed many of their acts.

[Sidenote: The Royal Army]

The royal prerogative extended not only to matters of taxation and legislation, including the right to levy taxes and to make expenditures for any purpose without public accounting, but it was preserved and enforced by means of a large standing army, which received its pay and its orders exclusively from the crown. To the royal might, as well as to its right, Richelieu contributed. He energetically aided Louis XIII in organizing and equipping what proved to be the best army in Europe.

Two factions in the state aroused the cardinal's ire--one the Huguenots, and the other the nobles--for both threatened the autocracy which he was bent upon erecting. Both factions suffered defeat and humiliation at his hands.

Richelieu, though a cardinal of the Roman Church, was more politician and statesman than ecclesiastic; though living in an age of religious fanaticism, he was by no means a bigot. As we shall presently see, this Catholic cardinal actually gave military support to Protestants in Germany--for political purposes; it was similarly for political purposes that he attacked the Protestants in France.

As has already been pointed out, French Protestantism meant an influential political party as well as a religion. Since Henry IV had issued the Edict of Nantes, the Huguenots had had their own assemblies, officers, judges, and even certain fortified towns, all of which interfered with the sovereign authority and impaired that uniformity which thoughtful royalists believed to be the very cornerstone of absolutism. Richelieu had no desire to deprive the Huguenots of religious freedom, but he was resolved that in political matters they should obey the king. Consequently, when they revolted in 1625, he determined to crush them. In spite of the considerable aid which England endeavored to give them, the Huguenots were entirely subdued. Richelieu's long siege of La Rochelle, lasting nearly fifteen months, showed his forceful resolution. When the whole country had submitted, the Edict of Alais was published (1629), leaving to the Protestants freedom of conscience and of worship but depriving them of their fortifications and forbidding them to hold assemblies. Public office was still open to them and their representatives kept their judicial posts. "The honest Huguenot retained all that he would have been willing to protect with his life, while the factious and turbulent Huguenot was deprived of the means of embarrassing the government."

The repression of the nobles was a similar statesmanlike achievement, and one made in the face of redoubtable opposition. It had long been customary to name noblemen as governors of the various provinces, but the governors had gradually become masters instead of administrators: they commanded detachments of the army; they claimed allegiance of the garrisons in their towns; they repeatedly and openly defied the royal will. The country, moreover, was sprinkled with noblemen's castles or _châteaux_, protected by fortifications and armed retainers, standing menaces to the prompt execution of the king's orders. Finally, the noblemen at court, jealous of the cardinal's advancement and spurred on by the intrigues of the disaffected Marie de' Medici or of the king's own brother, hampered the minister at every turn. Of such intolerable conditions, Richelieu determined to be quit.

Into the ranks of noble courtiers, Richelieu struck terror. By means of spies and trickery, he ferreted out conspiracies and arbitrarily put their leaders to death. Every attempt at rebellion was mercilessly punished, no matter how exalted in rank the rebel might be. Richelieu was never moved by entreaties or threats--he was as inexorable as fate itself.

[Sidenote: Demolition of Private Fortifications ]

The cardinal did not confine his attention to noblemen at court. As early as 1626 he published an edict ordering the immediate demolition of all fortified castles not needed for defense against foreign invasion. In carrying this edict into force, Richelieu found warm supporters in peasantry and townsfolk who had long suffered from the exactions and depredations of their noble but warlike neighbors. The ruins of many a _chateau_ throughout modern France bear eloquent witness to the cardinal's activity.

[Sidenote: Centralization of Administration] [Sidenote: The Intendants]

Another enduring monument to Richelieu was the centralization of French administration. The great minister was tired of the proud, independent bearing of the noble governors. Without getting rid of them altogether, he checked these proud officials by transferring most of their powers to a new kind of royal officer, the intendant. Appointed by the crown usually from among the intelligent, loyal middle class, each intendant had charge of a certain district, supervising therein the assessment and collection of royal taxes, the organization of local police or militia, the enforcement of order, and the conduct of courts. These intendants, with their wide powers of taxation, police, and justice, were later dubbed, from their approximate number, the "thirty tyrants" of France. But they owed their positions solely to the favor of the crown; they were drawn from a class whose economic interests were long and well served by the royal power; and their loyalty to the king, therefore, could be depended upon. The intendants constantly made reports to, and received orders from, the central government at Paris. They were so many eyes, all over the kingdom, for an ever-watchful Richelieu. And in measure as the power of the _bourgeois_ intendants increased, that of the noble governors diminished, until, by the eighteenth century, the offices of the latter had become largely honorary though still richly remunerative. To keep the nobles amused and in money, and thereby out of mischief and politics, became, from Richelieu's time, a maxim of the royal policy in France.

[Side Note: Richelieu's Significance]

Such, in brief, was the work of this grim figure that moved across the stage at a critical period in French history. Richelieu, more than any other man, was responsible for the assurance of absolutism in his country at the very time when England, by means of revolution and bloodshed, was establishing parliamentary government; and, as we shall soon see, his foreign policy covered France with European glory and prestige.

In person, Richelieu was frail and sickly, yet when clothed in his cardinal's red robes he appeared distinguished and commanding. His pale, drawn face displayed a firm determination and an inflexible will. Unscrupulous, exacting, and without pity, he preserved to the end a proud faith in his moral strength and in his loyalty to country and to king.

Richelieu died in 1642, and the very next year the monarch whom he had served so gloriously followed him to the grave, leaving the crown to a boy of five years--Louis XIV.

[Side Note: Minority of Louis XIV] [Sidenote: Cardinal Mazarin]

The minority of Louis XIV might have been disastrous to France and to the royal power, had not the strong policies of Richelieu been exemplified and enforced by another remarkable minister and cardinal, Mazarin. Mazarin (1602-1661) was an Italian, born near Naples, educated for an ecclesiastical career at Rome and in Spain. In the discharge of several delicate diplomatic missions for the pope, he had acted as nuncio at Paris, where he so ingratiated himself in Richelieu's favor that he was invited to enter the service of the king of France, and in 1639 he became a naturalized Frenchman.

Despite his foreign birth and the fact that he never spoke French without a bad accent, he rose rapidly in public service. He was named cardinal and was recognized as Richelieu's disciple and imitator. From the death of the greater cardinal in 1642 to his own death in 1661, Mazarin actually governed France.

[Sidenote: Unrest of the Nobles]

Against the Habsburgs, Mazarin continued the great war which Richelieu had begun and brought it to a successful conclusion. In domestic affairs, he encountered greater troubles. The nobles had naturally taken umbrage at the vigorous policies of Richelieu, from which Mazarin seemed to have no thought of departing. They were strengthened, moreover, by a good deal of popular dislike of Mazarin's foreign birth, his avarice, his unscrupulous plundering of the revenues of the realm for the benefit of his own family, and his tricky double-dealing ways.

[Sidenote: The Fronde]

The result was the Fronde, [Footnote: Probably so called from the name of a street game played by Parisian children and often stopped by policemen.] the last attempt prior to the French Revolution to cast off royal absolutism in France. It was a vague popular protest coupled with a selfish reaction on the part of the influential nobles: the pretext was Mazarin's interference with the parlement of Paris.

[Sidenote: The Parlements]

The parlements were judicial bodies [Footnote: There were thirteen in the seventeenth century.] which tried important cases and heard appeals from lower courts. That of Paris, being the most eminent, had, in course of time, secured to itself the right of registering royal decrees--that is, of receiving the king's edicts in formal fashion and entering them upon the statute books so that the law of the land might be known generally. From making such a claim, it was only a step for the parlement of Paris to refuse to register certain new edicts on the ground that the king was not well informed or that they were in conflict with older and more binding enactments. If these claims were substantiated, the royal will would be subjected to revision by the parlement of Paris. To prevent their substantiation, both Louis XIII and Louis XIV held "beds of justice"--that is, appeared in person before the parlement, and from their seat of cushions and pillows declared their will regarding the new edict and directed that it be promulgated. There were amusing scenes when the boy-king, at the direction of Mazarin, gave orders in his shrill treble to the learned lawyers and grave old judges.

Egged on by seeming popular sympathy and no doubt by the contemporaneous political revolution in England, the parlement of Paris at length defied the prime minister. It proclaimed its immunity from royal control; declared the illegality of any public tax which it had not freely and expressly authorized; ordered the abolition of the office of intendant; and protested against arbitrary arrest or imprisonment. To these demands, the people of Paris gave support-- barricades were erected in the streets, and Mazarin, whose loyal army was still fighting in the Germanies, was obliged temporarily to recognize the new order. Within six months, however, sufficient troops had been collected to enable him to overawe Paris and to annul his concessions.

[Sidenote: Suppression of the Fronde] [Sidenote: Triumph of Absolutism in France]

Subsequent uprisings, engineered by prominent noblemen, were often more humorous than harmful. To be sure, no less a commander than the great Condé, one of the chief heroes of the Thirty Years' War, took arms against the Cardinalists, as Mazarin's party was called, but so slight was the aid which he received from the French people that he was speedily driven from his country and joined the Spanish army. The upshot of the Fronde was (1) the nobility were more discredited than ever; (2) the parlement was forbidden to devote attention to political or financial affairs; (3) Paris was disarmed and lost the right of electing its own municipal officers; (4) the royal authority was even stronger than under Richelieu because an unsuccessful attempt had been made to weaken it. Henry IV, Richelieu, and Mazarin had made straight the way for the despotism of Louis XIV.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN BOURBONS AND HABSBURGS THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR

[Sidenote: Dynastic Character of Wars in the Seventeenth Century.]

Every European country, except England, was marked in the seventeenth century by a continued growth of monarchical power. The kings were busily engaged in strengthening their hold upon their respective states and in reaching out for additional lands and wealth. International wars, therefore, assumed the character of struggles for dynastic aggrandizement. How might this or that royal family obtain wider territories and richer towns? There was certainly sufficient national life in western Europe to make the common people proud of their nationality; hence the kings could normally count upon popular support. But wars were undertaken upon the continent of Europe in the seventeenth century not primarily for national or patriotic motives, but for the exaltation of a particular royal family. Citizens of border provinces were treated like so many cattle or so much soil that might be conveniently bartered among the kings of France, Spain, or Sweden.

[Sidenote: Habsburg Dominions in 1600.]

This idea had been quite evident in the increase of the Habsburg power during the sixteenth century. In an earlier chapter we have noticed how that family had acquired one district after another until their property included: (1) Under the Spanish branch--Spain, the Two Sicilies, Milan, Franche Comte, the Belgian Netherlands, Portugal, and a huge colonial empire; (2) Under the Austrian branch--Austria and its dependencies, Hungary, Bohemia, and the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Despite the herculean labors of Philip II, France remained outside Habsburg influence, a big gap in what would otherwise have been a series of connected territories.

[Sidenote: Ambition of the Bourbons.]

In measure as the French kings--the Bourbons--strengthened their position in their own country, they looked abroad not merely to ward off foreign attacks but to add land at their neighbors' expense. Richelieu understood that his two policies went hand in glove--to make the Bourbons predominant in Europe was but a corollary to making the royal power supreme in France.

[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War.]

The chief warfare of the seventeenth century centers, therefore, in the long, terrible conflict between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons. Of this struggle, the so-called Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) may be treated as the first stage. Let us endeavor to obtain a clear idea of the interests involved.

When Richelieu became the chief minister of Louis XIII (1624), he found the Habsburgs in serious trouble and he resolved to take advantage of the situation to enhance the prestige of the Bourbons. The Austrian Habsburgs were facing a vast civil and religious war in the Germanies, and the Spanish Habsburgs were dispatching aid to their hard-pressed kinsmen.

The war, which proved momentous both to the Habsburgs and to their enemies, resulted from a variety of reasons--religious, economic, and political.

[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War: Ecclesiastical Causes]

The peace of Augsburg (1555) had been expected to settle the religious question in the Germanies. But in practice it had failed to fix two important matters. In the first place, the provision forbidding further secularization of church property ("Ecclesiastical Reservation") was not carried out, nor could it be while human nature and human temptation remained. Every Catholic ecclesiastic who became Protestant would naturally endeavor to take his church lands with him. Then, in the second place, the peace had recognized only Catholics and Lutherans: meanwhile the Calvinists had increased their numbers, especially in southern and central Germany and in Bohemia, and demanded equal rights. In order to extort concessions from the emperor, a union of Protestant princes was formed, containing among its members the zealous young Calvinist prince of the Palatinate, Frederick, commonly called the Elector Palatine of the Rhine. The Catholics were in an equally belligerent frame of mind. Not only were they determined to prevent further secularization of church property, but, emboldened by the progress of the Catholic Reformation in the Germanies during the second half of the sixteenth century, they were now anxious to revise the earlier religious settlement in their own interest and to regain, if possible, the lands that had been lost by the Church to the Protestants. The Catholics relied for political and military support upon the Catholic Habsburg emperor and upon Maximilian, duke of Bavaria and head of the Catholic League of Princes. Religiously, the enemies of the Habsburgs were the German Protestants.

[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War: Political Causes]

But a hardly less important cause of the Thirty Years' War lay in the politics of the Holy Roman Empire. The German princes had greatly increased their territories and their wealth during the Protestant Revolution. They aspired, each and all, to complete sovereignty. They would rid themselves of the outworn bonds of a medieval empire and assume their proper place among the independent and autocratic rulers of Europe. On his side, the emperor was insistent upon strengthening his position and securing a united powerful Germany under his personal control. Politically, the enemies of the Habsburgs were the German princes.

With the princes was almost invariably allied any European monarch who had anything to gain from dividing Germany or weakening Habsburg influence. In case of a civil war, the Habsburgs might reasonably expect to find enemies in Denmark, Sweden, and France.

[Sidenote: Four Periods in the Thirty Years' War]

The war naturally divides itself into four periods: (1) The Bohemian Revolt; (2) The Danish Period; (3) The Swedish Period; (4) The French or International Period.

[Sidenote: 1. The Bohemian Revolt]

The signal for the outbreak of hostilities in the Germanics was given by a rebellion in Bohemia against the Habsburgs. Following the death of Rudolph II (1576-1612), a narrow-minded, art-loving, and unbalanced recluse, his childless brother Matthias (1612-1619) had desired to secure the succession of a cousin, Ferdinand II (1619-1637), who, although a man of blameless life and resolute character, was known to be devoted to the cause of absolutism and fanatically loyal to the Catholic Church. Little opposition to this settlement was encountered in the various Habsburg Bohemian dominions, except in Bohemia. In that country, however, the nobles, many of whom were Calvinists, dreaded the prospective accession of Ferdinand, who would be likely to deprive them of their special privileges and to impede, if not to forbid, the exercise of the Protestant religion in their territories. Already there had been encroachments on their religious liberty.

One day in 1618, a group of Bohemian noblemen broke into the room where the imperial envoys were stopping and hurled them out of a window into a castle moat some sixty feet below. This so-called "defenestration" of Ferdinand's representatives was followed by the proclamation of the dethronement of the Habsburgs in Bohemia and the election to the kingship of Frederick, the Calvinistic Elector Palatine. Frederick was crowned at Prague and prepared to defend his new lands. Ferdinand II, raising a large army in his other possessions, and receiving assistance from Maximilian of Bavaria and the Catholic League as well as from Tuscany and the Spanish Habsburgs, intrusted the allied forces to an able veteran general, Count Tilly (1559-1632). King Frederick had expected support from his father-in-law, James I of England, and from the Lutheran princes of northern Germany, but in both respects he was disappointed. What with parliamentary quarrels at home and a curiously mistaken foreign policy of a Spanish alliance, James confined his assistance to pompous advice and long words. Then, too, most of the Lutheran princes, led by the tactful John George, elector of Saxony, hoped by remaining neutral to obtain special concessions from the emperor.

Within a very brief period, Tilly subdued Bohemia, drove out Frederick, and reestablished the Habsburg power. Many rebellious nobles lost their property and lives, and the practice of the Protestant religion was again forbidden in Bohemia. Nor was that all. The victorious imperialists drove the fugitive Frederick, now derisively dubbed the "winter king," out of his original wealthy possessions on the Rhine, into miserable exile, an outcast without land or money. The conquered Palatinate was turned over to Maximilian of Bavaria, who was further rewarded for his services by being recognized as an elector of the Holy Roman Empire in place of the deposed Frederick.

The first period of the war was thus favorable to the Habsburg and Catholic causes. Between 1618 and 1620, revolt had been suppressed in Bohemia and an influential Rhenish electorate had been transferred from Calvinist to Catholic hands.

Now, however, the northern Protestant princes took alarm. If they had viewed with composure the failure of Frederick's foolhardy efforts in Bohemia, they beheld with downright dismay the expansion of Bavaria and the destruction of a balance of power long maintained between Catholic and Protestant Germany. And so long as the ill-disciplined remnants of Frederick's armies were behaving like highwaymen, pillaging and burning throughout the Germanics, the emperor declined to consider the grant of any concessions.

[Sidenote: 2. Danish Intervention. Christian IV]

At this critical juncture, while the Protestant princes were wavering between obedience and rebellion, Christian IV of Denmark intervened and precipitated the second period of the war. Christian IV (1588-1648) was impulsive and ambitious: as duke of Holstein he was a member of the Holy Roman Empire and opposed to Habsburg domination; as king of Denmark and Norway he was anxious to extend his influence over the North Sea ports; and as a Lutheran, he sought to champion the rights of his German co-religionists and to help them retain the rich lands which they had appropriated from the Catholic Church. In 1625, therefore, Christian invaded Germany, supported by liberal grants of money from England and by the troops of many of the German princes, both Calvinist and Lutheran.

[Sidenote: Wallenstein]

Against the Danish invasion, Tilly unaided might have had difficulty to stand, but fortune seemed to have raised up a codefender of the imperialist cause in the person of an extraordinary adventurer, Wallenstein. This man had enriched himself enormously out of the recently confiscated estates of rebellious Bohemians, and now, in order to benefit himself still further, he secured permission from the Emperor Ferdinand II to raise an independent army of his own to restore order in the empire and to expel the Danes. By liberal promises of pay and plunder, the soldier of fortune soon recruited an army of some 50,000 men, and what a motley collection it was! Italian, Swiss, Spaniard, German, Pole, Englishman, and Scot,--Protestant was welcomed as heartily as Catholic,--any one who loved adventure or hoped for gain, all united by the single tie of loyalty and devotion to Wallenstein. The force was whipped into shape by the undoubted genius of its commander and at once became an effective machine of war. Yet the perpetual plundering of the land, on which it lived, was a constant source of reproach to the army of Wallenstein.

The campaigning of the second period of the war took place in North Germany. At Lutter, King Christian IV was defeated overwhelmingly by the combined forces of Tilly and Wallenstein, and the Lutheran states were left at the mercy of the Catholic League. Brandenburg openly espoused the imperialist cause and aided Ferdinand's generals in expelling the Danish king from German soil. Only the lack of naval control of the Baltic and North seas prevented the victors from seizing Denmark. The desperation of Christian and the growingly suspicious activity of Sweden resulted in the peace of Lubeck (1629), by which the king of Denmark was left in possession of Jutland, Schleswig, and Holstein, but deprived of the German bishoprics which various members of his family had taken from the Catholic Church.

Following up its successes, the Catholic League prevailed upon the Emperor Ferdinand II in the same year (1629) to sign the Edict of Restitution, restoring to the Church all the property that had been secularized in violation of the peace of Augsburg of 1555. The edict was to be executed by imperial commissioners, all of whom were Catholics, and so well did they do their work that, within three years of the promulgation of the edict, Roman Catholicism in the Germanies had recovered five bishoprics, thirty Hanse towns, and nearly a hundred monasteries, to say nothing of parish churches of which the number can hardly be estimated.

So far, the religious and economic grievances against the Habsburgs had been confined mainly to Calvinists, but now the Lutheran princes were alarmed. The enforcement of the Edict of Restitution against all Protestants alike was the signal for an emphatic protest from Lutherans as well as from Calvinists. A favorable opportunity for intervention seemed to present itself to the foremost Lutheran power--Sweden. Not only were many Protestant princes in Germany in a mood to welcome foreign assistance against the Catholics, but the emperor was less able to resist invasion, since in 1630, yielding to the urgent entreaties of the Catholic League, he dismissed the plundering and ambitious Wallenstein from his service.

The king of Sweden at this time was Gustavus Adolphus (1611-1632), the grandson of that Gustavus Vasa who had established both the independence and the Lutheranism of his country. Gustavus Adolphus was one of the most attractive figures of his age--in the prime of life, tall, fair, and blue-eyed, well educated and versed in seven languages, fond of music and poetry, skilled and daring in war, impetuous, well balanced, and versatile. A rare combination of the idealist and the practical man of affairs, Gustavus Adolphus had dreamed of making Protestant Sweden the leading power in northern Europe and had vigorously set to work to achieve his ends. His determination to encircle the whole Baltic with his own territories--making it literally a Swedish lake--brought him first into conflict with Muscovy, or, as we call it today, Russia. Finland and Esthonia were occupied, and Russia agreed in 1617 to exclusion from the Baltic sea coast. Next a stubborn conflict with Poland (1621-1629) secured for Sweden the province of Livonia and the mouth of the Vistula River. Gustavus then turned his longing eyes to the Baltic coast of northern Germany, at the very time when the Edict of Restitution promised him aggrieved allies in that quarter.

[Sidenote: 3. Swedish Intervention: Gustavus Adolphus]

It was likewise at the very time when Cardinal Richelieu had crushed out all insurrection, whether Huguenot or noble, in France and was seeking some effective means of prolonging the war in the Germanies to the end that the rival Habsburgs might be irretrievably weakened and humiliated. He entered into definite alliance with Gustavus Adolphus and provided him arms and money, for the time asking only that the Protestant champion accord the liberty of Catholic worship in conquered districts.

[Sidenote: French Aid]

Gustavus Adolphus landed in Pomerania in 1630 and proceeded to occupy the chief northern fortresses and to treat for alliances with the influential Protestant electors of Brandenburg and Saxony. While Gustavus tarried at Potsdam, in protracted negotiation with the elector of Brandenburg, Tilly and the imperialists succeeded, after a long siege, in capturing the Lutheran stronghold of Magdeburg (May, 1631). The fall of the city was attended by a mad massacre of the garrison, and of armed and unarmed citizens, in streets, houses, and churches; at least 20,000 perished; wholesale plundering and a general conflagration completed the havoc. The sack of Magdeburg evoked the greatest indignation from the Lutherans. Gustavus Adolphus, now joined by the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony and by many other Protestant princes of northern Germany, advanced into Saxony, where, in September, 1631, he avenged the destruction of Magdeburg by defeating decisively the smaller army of Tilly on the Breitenfeld, near Leipzig. Then Gustavus turned southwestward, making for the Rhine valley, with the idea of forming a union with the Calvinist princes. Only the prompt protest of his powerful ally, Richelieu, prevented the rich archbishoprics of Cologne, Trier, and Mainz from passing immediately under Swedish control. Next Gustavus Adolphus turned east and invaded Bavaria. Tilly, who had reassembled his forces, failed to check the invasion and lost his life in a battle on the Lech (April, 1632). The victorious Swedish king now made ready to carry the war into the hereditary dominions of the Austrian Habsburgs. As a last resort to check the invader, the emperor recalled Wallenstein with full power over his freelance army. About the same time the emperor concluded a close alliance with his kinsman, the ambitious Philip IV of Spain.

The memorable contest between the two great generals--Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein--was brought to a tragic close in the late autumn of the same year on the fateful field of Lützen. Wallenstein was defeated, but Gustavus was killed. Although the Swedes continued the struggle, they were comparatively few in numbers and possessed no such general as their fallen king. On the other side, Wallenstein's loyalty could not be depended upon; rumors reached the ear of the emperor that his foremost general was negotiating with the Protestants to make peace on his own terms; and Wallenstein was assassinated in his camp by fanatical imperialists (February, 1634). The tragic removal of both Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus, the economic exhaustion of the whole empire, and the national desire on the part of many Protestant princes, as well as on the part of the Catholic emperor, to rid the Germanies of foreign soldiers and foreign influence--all these developments seemed to point to the possibility of concluding the third, or Swedish, period of the war, not perhaps as advantageously for the imperialist cause as had ended the Bohemian revolt or the Danish intervention, but at any rate in a spirit of reasonable compromise. In fact, in May, 1635, a treaty was signed at Prague between the emperor and such princes as were then willing to lay down their arms, whereby all the military forces in the empire were henceforth to be under the direct control of the emperor (with the exception of a contingent under the special command of the Lutheran elector of Saxony); all princely leagues within the empire were to be dissolved; mutual restoration of captured territory was to be made; and, as to the fundamental question of the ownership of ecclesiastical lands, it was settled that any such lands actually held in the year 1627, whether acquired before or after the religious peace of Augsburg of 1555, should continue so to be held for forty years or until in each case an amicable arrangement could be reached.

What wrecked the peace of Prague was not so much the disinclination of the Protestant princes of Germany to accept its terms as the policy of Cardinal Richelieu of France. Richelieu was convinced more than ever that French greatness depended upon Habsburg defeat; he would not suffer the princes to make peace with the emperor until the latter was soundly trounced and all Germany devastated; instead of supplying the Swedes and the German Protestants with assistance from behind the scenes, he now would come boldly upon the stage and engage the emperor in open combat.

[Sidenote: 4. French Intervention. Richelieu's Policy in the Germanies]

The final, or French, period of the Thirty Years' War lasted from 1635 to 1648--almost as long as the other three periods put together. Richelieu entered the war not only to humble the Austrian Habsburgs and, if possible, to wrest the valuable Rhenish province of Alsace from the Holy Roman Empire, but also to strike telling blows at the Continental supremacy of the Spanish Habsburgs, who, since 1632, had been actively helping their German kinsmen. The Spanish king, it will be remembered, still held the Belgian Netherlands, on the northern frontier of France, and Franche Comté on the east, while oft-contested Milan in northern Italy was a Spanish dependency. France was almost surrounded by Spanish possessions, and Richelieu naturally declared war against Spain as against the emperor. The wily French cardinal could count upon the Swedes and many of the German Protestants to keep the Austrian Habsburgs busily engaged and upon the assistance of the Dutch in humbling the Spaniard, for Spain had not yet formally recognized the independence of the Dutch Netherlands. Inasmuch as England was chiefly concerned with troublesome internal affairs, the enemies of France could hardly expect aid from across the Channel.

[Sidenote: Condé and Turenne]

At first, the French suffered a series of military reverses, due in large part to unpreparedness, incompetent commanders, and ill- disciplined troops. At one time it looked as if the Spaniards might capture Paris. But with unflagging zeal and patriotic devotion, Richelieu pressed on the war. He raised armies, drilled them, and dispatched them into the Netherlands, into Alsace, into Franche Comté, into northern Italy, and into Roussillon. He stirred up the Portuguese to revolt and recover their independence (1640). And Mazarin, who succeeded him in 1642, preserved his foreign policy intact. Young and brilliant generals now appeared at the head of the French forces, among whom were the dashing Prince of Condé (1621-1686), and the master strategist Turenne (1611-1675), the greatest soldier of his day. The former's victory of Rocroi (1643) dated the commencement of the supremacy of France in war, a supremacy which was retained for a century.

[Sidenote: Peace of Westphalia (1648)]

Finally, Turenne's masterly maneuvering against the Spaniards and his forcible detachment of Maximilian of Bavaria from the imperial alliance broke down effective opposition and ended the Thirty Years' War in the Germanies. The various treaties which were signed in 1648 constituted the peace of Westphalia.

The political clauses of the peace of Westphalia provided: (1) Each German state was free to make peace or war without consulting the emperor--each prince was invested with sovereign authority; (2) France received Alsace, except the free city of Strassburg, and was confirmed in the possession of the bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun; (3) Sweden was given territory in Pomerania controlling the mouth of the Oder, and the secularized bishopric of Bremen, surrounding the city of that name and dominating the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser; (4) France and Sweden received votes in the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire, with implied rights to exercise an oversight of German affairs; (5) Brandenburg secured eastern Pomerania and several bishoprics, including Magdeburg; (6) The Palatinate was divided between Maximilian of Bavaria and the son of the deposed Frederick--each bearing the title of elector; (7) Switzerland and the United Provinces (Holland) were formally recognized as independent of the empire and of Spain respectively.

The religious difficulties were settled as follows: (1) Calvinists were to share all the privileges of their Lutheran fellow-Protestants; (2) All church property was to be secured in the possession of those, whether Catholics or Protestants, who held it on 1 January, 1624; (3) An equal number of Catholic and Protestant judges were to sit in the imperial courts. Inasmuch as after 1648 there was little relative change of religion in Germany, this religious settlement was practically permanent.

[Sidenote: Evil Effects of the Thirty Years' War on Germany]

One of the most striking results of the peace of Westphalia was the completion of a long process of political disruption in the Germanies. Only the form of the Holy Roman Empire survived. The already shadowy imperial power became a mere phantom, nor was a change destined to come until, centuries later, the Prussian Hohenzollerns should replace the Austrian Habsburgs. Meanwhile the weakness of Germany enabled France to extend her northern boundaries toward the Rhine.

Far more serious than her political losses were the economic results to Germany. The Thirty Years' War left Germany almost a desert. "About two-thirds of the total population had disappeared; the misery of those that survived was piteous in the extreme. Five-sixths of the villages in the empire had been destroyed. We read of one in the Palatinate that in two years had been plundered twenty-eight times. In Saxony, packs of wolves roamed about, for in the north quite one-third of the land had gone out of cultivation, and trade had drifted into the hands of the French or Dutch. Education had almost disappeared; and the moral decline of the people was seen in the coarsening of manners and the growth of superstition, as witnessed by frequent burning of witches."

[Sidenote: Continuation of War between French Bourbons and Spanish Hapsburgs. Peace of the Pyrenees 1659]

The peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War in the Germanies, but it did not stop the bitter contest between France and Spain. Mazarin was determined to secure even greater territorial gains for his country, and, although Condé deserted to Spain, Turenne was more than a match for any commander whom the Spaniards could put in the field. Mazarin, moreover, by ceding the fortress of Dunkirk to the English, obtained aid from the veteran troops of Cromwell. It was not until 1659 that, in the celebrated treaty of the Pyrenees, peace was concluded between France and Spain. This provided: (1) France added the province of Roussillon on her southern frontier and that of Artois on the north; (2) France was recognized as protector of the duchy of Lorraine; (3) Condé was pardoned and reinstated in French service; (4) Maria Theresa, eldest daughter of the Spanish Habsburg king, Philip IV, was to marry the young French Bourbon king, Louis XIV, and, in consideration of the payment of a large dowry, was to renounce all claims to the Spanish dominions.

The treaty of the Pyrenees was the last important achievement of Cardinal Mazarin. But before he died in 1661 he had the satisfaction of seeing the triumph of those policies which he had adopted from Richelieu: the royal power firmly established within France; the Habsburgs, whether Austrian or Spanish, defeated and humiliated; the Bourbon king of France respected and feared throughout Europe.

[Sidenote: Development of International Law] [Sidenote: In Italy]

Not least among the results of the conflict between Habsburgs and Bourbons was the stimulus given to the acceptance of fixed principles of international law and of definite usages for international diplomacy. In ancient times the existence of the all-embracing Roman Empire had militated against the development of international relations as we know them to-day. In the early middle ages feudal society had left little room for diplomacy. Of course, both in ancient times and in the middle ages, there had been embassies and negotiations and treaties; but the embassies had been no more than temporary missions directed to a particular end, and there had been neither permanent diplomatic agents nor a professional diplomatic class. To the development of such a class the Italy of the fifteenth century had given the first impetus. Northern and central Italy was then filled, as we have discovered, with a large number of city-states, all struggling for political and economic mastery, all dependent for the maintenance of a "balance of power" upon alliances and counter alliances, all employing diplomacy quite as much as war in the game of peninsular politics. It was in Italy that there grew up the institution of passports, the distinction between armed forces and civilians, international comity, and in fact the very notion that states have an interest in the observance of law and order among themselves. Of special importance, in this connection, was Venice, which gradually evolved a regular system of permanent diplomats, and incidentally obliged her ambassadors to present detailed reports on foreign affairs; and, because of their commercial preeminence in the Mediterranean, the Venetians contributed a good deal to the development of rules of the sea first in time of peace, and subsequently in time of war.

[Sidenote: In Europe in Sixteenth Century]

During the sixteenth century the Italian ideas of statecraft and inter- state relations, ably championed by Machiavelli, were communicated to the nations of western Europe. Permanent embassies were established in foreign countries by the kings of Spain, Portugal, France, and England. Customs of international intercourse grew up. Diplomacy became a recognized occupation of distinguished statesmen.

[Sidenote: Thirty Years' War and International Law]

Two institutions might have thwarted or retarded the development of international law: one was the Catholic Church with its international organization and its claim to universal spiritual supremacy; the other was the Holy Roman Empire, with its claim to temporal predominance and with its insistence upon the essential inequality between itself and all other states. But the Protestant Revolt in the sixteenth century dealt a severe blow to the claim and power of the Catholic Church. And the long struggle between Bourbons and Habsburgs, culminating in the Thirty Years' War, reduced the Holy Roman Empire to a position, in theory as well as in fact, certainly no higher than that of the national monarchies of France, England, and Spain, or that of the Dutch Republic.

From the treaties of Westphalia emerged a real state-system in Europe, based on the theory of the essential equality of independent sovereign states, though admitting of the fact that there were Great Powers. Henceforth the public law of Europe was to be made by diplomats and by congresses of ambassadors. Westphalia pointed the new path.

Another aspect of international relations was emphasized in the first half of the seventeenth century. It was the Thirty Years' War, with its revolting cruelty, which brought out the contrast between the more humane practice of war as an art in Italy and the savagery which disgraced the Germanies. The brutality of the struggle turned thinkers' attention to the need of formulating rules for the protection of non- combatants in time of war, the treatment of the sick and wounded, the prohibition of wanton pillage and other horrors which shocked the awakening conscience of seventeenth-century Europe. It was the starting-point of the publication of treatises on international law.

[Sidenote: Grotius]

The first effective work, the one which was destined long to influence sovereigns and diplomats, was Grotius's _On the Law of War and Peace_. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) [Footnote: Known in his native country as Huig van Groot. The last years of his life he spent as ambassador of Sweden at the French court.] was a learned Dutch humanist, whose active participation in politics against the stadholder of the Netherlands and whose strong protests for religious toleration against the dominant orthodox Calvinists of his country combined to bring upon himself a sentence of life imprisonment. Immured in a Dutch fortress in 1619, he managed to escape and fled to Paris, where he prepared and in 1625 published his immortal work. _On the Law of War and Peace_ is an exhaustive and masterly text-book--the first and one of the best of the systematic treatises on the fundamental principles of international law.

ADDITIONAL READING

HENRY IV, RICHELIEU, AND MAZARIN. Brief general accounts: H. O. Wakeman, _The Ascendancy of France, 1598-1715_ (1894), ch. i-vii; Mary A. Hollings, _Renaissance and Reformation, 1453-1660_ (1910), ch. xi, xii; J. H. Sacret, _Bourbon and Vasa, 1610-1715_ (1914), ch. i-vii; A. J. Grant, _The French Monarchy, 1483-1789_, Vol. I (1900), ch. vi-ix; G. W. Kitchin, _A History of France_, 3d and 4th editions (1894-1899), Vol. II, Book IV, ch. i-iii, Vol. III, Book IV, ch. iv-viii; H. T. Dyer, _A History of Modern Europe from the Fall of Constantinople_, 3d ed. rev. by Arthur Hassall (1901), ch. xxix-xxxv; Victor Duruy, _History of Modern Times_, trans. and rev. by E. A. Grosvenor (1894), ch. xvii, xviii, xx; _Cambridge Modern History_, Vol. II, ch. xx (by Stanley Leathes, on Henry IV), Vol. IV, ch. iv (on Richelieu), xxi (on Mazarin); _Histoire générale_, Vol. V, ch. vi-viii, Vol. VI, ch. i. More detailed works: _Histoire de France_, ed. by Ernest Lavisse, Vol. VI, Part I (1904), Livre IV (on Henry IV), Vol. VI, Part II (1905), Livres I-III (on Henry IV and Richelieu, by J. H. Mariéjol), Vol. VII,