Part 97

The Elector of Saxony, and other Protestant princes, then made peace with the Emperor, and the war was only prolonged by the intrigues of Richelieu and for the aggrandizement of France. In this final stage of it, when the original elements of contention, and most of the original contestants, had disappeared, it lasted for yet fourteen years. Ferdinand II. died in 1637, and was succeeded by his son Ferdinand III. Duke Bernhard died in 1639. In the later years of the war, Piccolomini on the Imperial side, Baner, Torstenson and Wrangel at the head of the Swedes, and Turenne and Condé in command of the French, were the soldiers who made great names.

Destructiveness of the War.

In 1648, the long suffering of Germany was eased by the Peace of Westphalia. Years of quiet, and of order fairly restored, would be needed to heal the bleeding wounds of the country and revive its strength. From end to end, it had been trampled upon for a generation by armies which plundered and destroyed as they passed. There is nothing more sickening in the annals of war than the descriptions which eye-witnesses have left of the misery, the horror, the desolation of that frightful period in German history. "Especially in the south and west, Germany was a wilderness of ruins; places that were formerly the seats of prosperity were the haunts of wolves and robbers for many a long year. It is estimated that the population was diminished by twenty, by some even by fifty, per cent. The population of Augsburg was reduced from 80,000 to 18,000; of Frankenthal, from 18,000 to 324 inhabitants. In Würtemberg, in 1641, of 400,000 inhabitants, 48,000 remained; in the Palatinate, in 1636, there were 201 peasant farmers; and in 1648, but a fiftieth part of the population remained" (Häusser).

The Peace of Westphalia.

By the treaties of Westphalia, the religious question was settled with finality. Catholics, Lutherans, and the Reformed (Calvinists), were put on an equal footing of religious liberty. Politically, the effects of the Peace were radical and lasting in their injury to the German people. The few bonds of Germanic unity which had survived the reign of feudalism were dissolved. The last vestige of authority in the Empire was destroyed. "From this time Germany long remained a mere lax confederation of petty despotisms and oligarchies with hardly any national feeling. Its boundaries too were cut short in various ways. The independence of the two free Confederations at the two ends of the Empire, those of Switzerland and the United Provinces, which had long been practically cut off from the Empire, was now formally acknowledged. And, what was far more important, the two foreign kingdoms which had had the chief share in the war, France and Sweden, obtained possessions within the Empire, and moreover, as guarantors or sureties of the peace, they obtained a general right of meddling in its affairs." "The right of France to the 'Three Lotharingian Bishoprics,' which had been seized nearly a hundred years before, was now formally acknowledged, and, besides this, the possessions and rights of the House of Austria in Elsass, the German land between the Rhine and the Vosges, called in France Alsace, were given to France. The free city of Strasburg and other places in Elsass still remained independent, but the whole of South Germany now lay open to France. This was the greatest advance that France had yet made at the expense of the Empire. Within Germany itself the Elector of Brandenburg also received a large increase of territory" (Freeman).

Among the treaties which made up the Peace of Westphalia was one signed by Spain, acknowledging the independence of the United Provinces, and renouncing all claims to them.

France under Richelieu.

The great gains of France from the Thirty Years War were part of the fruit of bold and cunning statesmanship which Richelieu had ripened and plucked for that now rising nation. For a time after the death of Henry IV., chaos had seemed likely to return again in France. His son, Louis XIII., was but nine years old. The mother, Marie de' Medici, who secured the regency, was a foolish woman, ruled by Italian favorites, who made themselves odious to the French people. As soon as the young king approached manhood, he put himself in opposition to his mother and her favorites, under the influence of a set of rivals no more worthy, and France was carried to the verge of civil war by their puerile hostilities. Happily there was something in the weak character of Louis XIII. which bent him under the influence of a really great mind when circumstances had brought him within its reach. Richelieu entered the King's council in 1624. The king was soon an instrument in his hands, and he ruled France, as though the scepter was his own, for eighteen years. He was as pitiless a despot as ever set heel on a nation's neck; but the power which he grasped with what seemed to be a miserly and commonplace greed, was all gathered for the aggrandizement of the monarchy that he served. He believed that the nation needed to have one master, sole and unquestioned in his sovereignty. That he enjoyed being that one master, in reality, while he lived, is hardly doubtful; but his whole ambition is not so explained. He wrought according to his belief for France, and the king, in his eyes, was the embodiment of France. He erected the pedestal on which "the grand monarch" of the next generation posed with theatrical effect.

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Three things Richelieu did;

1. He enforced the royal authority, with inexorable rigor, against the great families and personages, who had not learned, even under Henry IV., that they were subjects in the absolute sense.

2. He struck the Huguenots, not as a religious sect, but as a political party, and peremptorily stopped their growth of strength in that character, which had clearly become threatening to the state.

3. He organized hostility in Europe to the overbearing and dangerous Austro-Spanish power, put France at the head of it, and took for her the lion's share of the conquests by which the Hapsburgs were reduced.

Mazarin and the Fronde.

The great Cardinal died near the close of the year 1642; and Louis XIII. followed him to the grave in the succeeding May, leaving a son, Louis XIV., not yet five years of age, under the regency of his mother, Anne of Austria. The minister, Cardinal Mazarin, who enjoyed the confidence of the queen-regent, and who was supposed to enjoy her affections as well, had been Richelieu's disciple, and took the helm of government on Richelieu's recommendation. He was an adroit politician, with some statesmanlike sagacity, but he lacked the potent spirit by which his master had awed and ruled every circle into which he came, great or small. Mazarin had the Thirty Years War to bring to a close, and he managed the difficult business with success, wasting nothing of the effect of the brilliant victories of Condé and Turenne. But the war had been very costly. Mazarin was no better financier than Richelieu had been before him, and the burdens of taxation were greater than wise management would have made them. There was inevitable discontent, and Mazarin, as a foreigner, was inevitably unpopular. With public feeling in this state, the Court involved itself in a foolish conflict with the Parliament of Paris, and presently there was a Paris revolution and a civil war afoot (1649). It was a strange affair of froth and empty rages--this war of "The Fronde," as it was called--having no depth of earnestness in it and no honesty of purpose anywhere visible in its complications. The men and women who sprang to a lead in it--the women more actively and rancorously than the men--were mere actors of parts in a great play of court intrigue, for the performance of which unhappy France had lent its grand stage. There seems to have been never, in any other civil conflict which history describes, so extraordinary a mixture of treason and libertinism, of political and amorous intrigue, of heartlessness and frivolity, of hot passion and cool selfishness. The people who fought most and suffered most hardly appear as noticeable factors in the contest. The court performers amused themselves with the stratagems and bloody doings of the war as they might have done with the tricks of a masquerade.

It was in keeping with the character of the Frondeurs that they went into alliance, at last, with Spain, and that, even after peace within the nation had been restored, "the Great Condé" remained in the Spanish service and fought against his own countrymen. Mazarin regained control of affairs, and managed them on the whole ably and well. He brought about an alliance with England, under Cromwell, and humbled Spain to the acceptance of a treaty which considerably raised the position of France among the European Powers. By this Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), the northwestern frontier of the kingdom was both strengthened and advanced; Lorraine was shorn of some of its territory and prepared for the absorption which followed after no long time; there were gains made on the side of the Pyrenees; and, finally, Louis XIV. was wedded to the infanta of Spain, with solemn renunciations on her part, for herself and her descendants, of all claims upon the Spanish crown, or upon Flanders, or Burgundy, or Charolais. Not a claim was extinguished by these solemn renunciations, and the Treaty of the Pyrenees is made remarkable by the number of serious wars and important events to which it gave rise.

Cardinal Mazarin died in 1661 and the government was assumed personally by Louis XIV., then twenty-three years old.

England Under the Stuarts.

While Germany and France had, each in turn, been disordered by extremely unlike civil wars, one to the unmitigated devastation and prostration of the land, the other to the plain putting in proof of the nothingness of the nation at large, as against its monarchy and court, the domestic peace of England had been ruffled in a very different way, and with very different effects.

The death of Queen Elizabeth united the crown of England with that of Scotland, on the head of James, son of the unhappy Mary Stuart. In England he was James I., in Scotland James VI. His character combined shrewdness in some directions with the most foolish simplicity in others. He was not vicious, he was not in any particular a bad man; but he was exasperating in his opinionated self-conceit, and in his gaucheries of mind and body. The Englishmen of those days did not love the Scots; and, all things considered, we may wonder, perhaps, that James got on so well as he did with his English subjects. He had high notions of kingship, and a superlative opinion of his own king-craft, as he termed the art of government. He scarcely deviated from the arbitrary lines which Elizabeth had laid down, though he had nothing of Elizabeth's popularity. He offended the nation by truckling to its old enemy, the King of Spain, and pressing almost shamefully for a marriage of his elder son to the Spanish infanta. The favorites he enriched and lavished honors upon were insolent upstarts. His treatment of the growing Puritanism in English religious feeling was contemptuous. There was scarcely a point on which any considerable number of his subjects could feel in agreement with him, or entertain towards him a cordial sentiment of loyalty or respect. Yet his reign of twenty-two years was disturbed by nothing more serious than the fatuous "gunpowder plot" (1605) of a few discontented Catholics. But his son had to suffer the retarded consequences of a loyalty growing weak, on one side, while royalty strained its prerogatives on the other.

The reign of James I. witnessed the effective beginnings of English colonization in America,--the planting of a durable settlement in Virginia and the migration of the Pilgrim Fathers to New England. The latter movement (1620) was one of voluntary exile, produced by the hard treatment inflicted on those "Separatists" or "Independents" who could not reconcile themselves to a state-established Church. Ten years later, the Pilgrim movement, of Independents, was followed by the greater migration of Puritans--quite different in class, in character and in spirit.

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Charles. I.

James died in 1625, and the troubled reign of his son, Charles I., began. Charles took over from his father a full measure of popular discontent, along with numerous active springs in operation for increasing it. The most productive of these was the favorite, Buckingham, who continued to be the sole counselor and minister of the young king, as he had been of the older one, and who was utterly hateful to England, for good reasons of incapacity and general worthlessness. In the king himself, though he had virtues, there was a coldness and a falsity of nature which were sure to widen the breach between him and his people.

Failing the Spanish marriage, Charles had wedded (1624) a French princess, Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII. The previous subserviency to Spain had then been followed by a war with that country, which came to Charles among his inheritances, and which Buckingham mismanaged, to the shame of England. In 1627 another war began, but this time with France, on account of the Huguenots besieged at La Rochelle. Again the meddlesome hand of Buckingham wrought disaster and national disgrace, and public indignation was greatly stirred. When Parliament endeavored to call the incapable minister to account, and to obtain some security for a better management of affairs, the king dissolved it. Twice was this done, and Charles and his favorite employed every arbitrary and questionable device that could be contrived for them, to raise money without need of the representatives of the people. At length, in 1628, they were driven to face a third Parliament, in order to obtain supplies. By this time the Commons of England were wrought up to a high and determined assertion of their rights, as against the Crown, and the Puritans had gained a majority in the popular representation. In the lower House of Parliament, therefore, the demands of the king for money were met by a counter-demand for guarantees to protect the people from royal encroachments on their liberties. The Commons were resolute, and Charles gave way to them, signing with much reluctance the famous instrument known as the "Petition of Right," which pledged the Crown to abstain in future from forced loans, from taxes imposed without Parliamentary grant, from arbitrary imprisonments, without cause shown, and from other despotic proceedings. In return for his signature to the Petition of Right, Charles received a grant of money; but the Commons refused to authorize his collection of certain customs duties, called Tonnage and Poundage, beyond a single year, and it began attacks on Buckingham,--whereupon the king prorogued it. Shortly afterwards Buckingham was assassinated; a second expedition to relieve Rochelle failed miserably; and early in 1629 Parliament was assembled again. This time the Puritan temper of the House began to show itself in measures to put a stop to some revivals of ancient ceremony which had appeared in certain churches. At the same time officers of the king, who had seized goods belonging to a member of the House, for non-payment of Tonnage and Poundage, were summoned to the bar to answer for it. The king protected them, and a direct conflict of authority arose. On the 2d of March, the king sent an order to the Speaker of the House of Commons for adjournment; but the Speaker was forcibly held in his chair, and not permitted to announce the adjournment, until three resolutions had been read and adopted, denouncing as an enemy to the kingdom every person who brought in innovations in religion, or who advised the levying of Tonnage and Poundage without parliamentary grant, or who voluntarily paid such duties, so levied. This done, the members dispersed; the king dissolved Parliament immediately, and his resolution was taken to govern England thenceforth on his own authority, with no assembly of the representatives of the people to question or criticise him. He held to that determination for eleven years, during which long time no Parliament sat in England, and the Constitution was practically obliterated.

The leaders of the Commons in their recent proceedings were arrested and imprisoned. Sir John Eliot, the foremost of them, died in harsh confinement within the Tower, and others were held in long custody, refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of the king's judges over things done in Parliament.

Wentworth and Laud.

One man, of great ability, who had stood at the beginning with Sir John Eliot, and acted with the party which opposed the king, now went over to the side of the latter and rose high in royal favor, until he came in the end to be held chiefly responsible for the extreme absolutism to which the government of Charles was pushed. This was Sir Thomas Wentworth, made Earl of Strafford at a later day, in the tardy rewarding of his services. But William Laud, Bishop of London, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, was the evil counselor of the king, much more than Wentworth, in the earlier years of the decade of tyranny. It was Laud's part to organize the system of despotic monarchy on its ecclesiastical side; to uproot Puritanism and all dissent, and to cast religion for England and for Scotland in one mould, as rigid as that of Rome.

For some years, the English nation seemed terrorized or stupefied by the audacity of the complete overthrow of its Constitution. The king and his servants might easily imagine that the day of troublesome Parliaments and of inconvenient laws was passed. At least in those early years of their success, it can scarcely have occurred to their minds that a time of accounting for broken laws, and for the violated pledges of the Petition of Right, might come at the end. At all events they went their way with seeming satisfaction, and tested, year by year, the patient endurance of a people which has always been slow to move. Their courts of Star Chamber and of High Commission, finding a paramount law in the will and pleasure of the king, imprisoned, fined, pilloried, flogged and mutilated in quite the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition, though they did not burn. {1076} They collected Tonnage and Poundage without parliamentary consent, and servile judges enforced the payment. They invented a claim for "ship-money" (in commutation of an ancient demand for ships to serve in the King's navy) from inland towns and counties, as well as from the commercial ports; and when John Hampden, a squire in Buckinghamshire, refused payment of the unlawful tax, their obedient judges gave judgment against him. And still the people endured; but they were laying up in memory many things, and gathering a store of reasons for the action that would by and by begin.

Rebellion in Scotland.

At last, it was Scotland, not England, that moved to rebel. Laud and the king had determined to break down Presbyterianism in the northern kingdom and to force a Prayer Book on the Scottish Church. There was a consequent riot at St. Giles, in Edinburgh (1637); Jenny Geddes threw her stool at the bishop, and Scotland presently was in revolt, signing a National Covenant and defying the king. Charles, attempting to frighten the resolute Scots with an army which he could not pay, was soon driven to a treaty with them (1639) which he had not honesty enough to keep. Wentworth, who had been Lord Deputy of Ireland since 1632, and who had framed a model of absolutism in that island, for the admiration of his colleagues in England, now returned to the king's side and became his chief adviser. He counselled the calling of a Parliament, as the only means by which English help could be got for the restoring of royal authority in Scotland. The Parliament was summoned and met in April, 1640. At once, it showed a temper which alarmed the king and he dissolved it in three weeks. Again Charles made the attempt to put down his Scottish subjects without help from an English Parliament, and again the attempt failed.

The Long Parliament.

Then the desperate king summoned another Parliament, which concentrated in itself, when it came together, the suppressed rebellion that had been in the heart of England for ten years, and which broke his flimsy fabric of absolutism, almost at a single blow. It was the famous Long Parliament of English history, which met in November, 1640, and which ruled England for a dozen years, until it gave way to the Cromwellian dictatorship. It sent Laud and Strafford to the Tower, impeached the latter and brought him to the block, within six months from the beginning of its session; and the king gave up his minister to the vengeance of the angry Commons with hardly one honest attempt to protect him. Laud waited in prison five years before he suffered the same fate. The Parliament declared itself to be indissoluble by any royal command; and the king assented. It abolished the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission; and the king approved. It swept ship-money, and forest claims, and all of Charles' lawless money-getting devices into the limbo; and he put his signature to its bills. But all the time he was intriguing with the Scots for armed help to overthrow his masterful English Parliament, and he was listening to Irish emissaries who offered an army for the same purpose, on condition that Ireland' should be surrendered to the Catholics.

Civil War.

Charles had arranged nothing on either of these treacherous plans, nor had he gained anything yet from the division between radicals and moderates that was beginning to show itself in the popular party, when he suddenly brought the strained situation to a crisis, in January, 1642, by his most foolish and arrogant act. He invaded the House of Commons in person, with a large body of armed men, for the purpose of arresting five members--Pym, Hampden, Holles, Hazlerigg and Strode--whom he accused of having negotiated treasonably with the Scots in 1640. The five members escaped; the House appealed to the citizens of London for protection; king and Parliament began immediately to raise troops; the nation divided and arrayed itself on the two sides,--most of the gentry, the Cavaliers, supporting the king, and most of the Puritan middle-class, wearing close-cut hair and receiving the name Roundheads, being ranged in the party of Parliament. They came to blows in October, when the first battle was fought, at Edgehill.