The Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648

Of this antagonism between the minority of the princes backed by the majority of the nation, and the majority of the princes backed by an Emperor who was also a foreign sovereign, civil war was the natural result. In the end, the triumph of the Protestants was so far secured that they forced their opponents in 1552 to yield to the Convention of Passau, by which it was arranged that a Diet should be held as soon as possible for a general pacification.

1555

§ 5. The peace of Augsburg.

That Diet, which was assembled at Augsburg in 1555, met under remarkably favourable circumstances. Charles V., baffled and disappointed, had retired from the scene, and had left behind him, as his representative, his more conciliatory brother Ferdinand, who was already King of Hungary and Bohemia, and was his destined successor in the German possessions of the House of Austria. Both he and the leading men on either side were anxious for peace, and were jealous of the influence which Philip, the son of Charles V., and his successor in Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands, might gain from a continuance of the war.

§ 6. Its terms.

There was little difficulty in arranging that the Protestant princes, who, before the date of the Convention of Passau, had seized ecclesiastical property within their own territories, either for their own purposes or for the support of Protestant worship, should no longer be subject to the law or authority of the Catholic clergy. The real difficulty arose in providing for the future. With Protestantism as a growing religion, the princes might be inclined to proceed further with the secularizing of the Church property still left untouched within their own territories; and besides this, it was possible that even bishops or abbots themselves, being princes of the Empire, might be inclined to abandon their religion, and to adopt Protestantism.

§ 7. Might the princes seize more lands?

The first of these difficulties was left by the treaty in some obscurity; but, from the stress laid on the abandonment by the Catholics of the lands secularized before the Convention of Passau, it would seem that they might fairly urge that they had never abandoned their claims to lands which at that date had not been secularized.

§ 8. Might the ecclesiastics turn Protestants?

The second difficulty led to long discussions. The Protestants wished that any bishop or abbot who pleased might be allowed to turn Protestant, and might then establish Protestantism as the religion of his subjects. The Catholics insisted that any bishop or abbot who changed his religion should be compelled to vacate his post, and this view of the case prevailed, under the name of the Ecclesiastical Reservation. It was further agreed that the peace should apply to the Lutheran Church alone, no other confession having been as yet adopted by any of the princes.

§ 9. Dangers of the future.

Such a peace, acceptable as it was at the time, was pregnant with future evil. Owing its origin to a Diet in which everything was arranged by the princes and electors, it settled all questions as if nobody but princes and electors had any interest in the matter. And, besides this, there was a most unstatesmanlike want of provision for future change. The year 1552 was to give the line by which the religious institutions of Germany were to be measured for all time. There was nothing elastic about such legislation. It did not, on the one hand, adopt the religion of the vast majority as the established religion of the Empire. It did not, on the other hand, adopt the principle of religious liberty. In thinking of themselves and their rights, the princes had forgotten the German people.

§ 10. Fresh encroachments upon Church lands.

The barriers set up against Protestantism were so plainly artificial that they soon gave way. The princes claimed the right of continuing to secularize Church lands within their territories as inseparable from their general right of providing for the religion of their subjects. At all events they had might on their side. About a hundred monasteries are said to have fallen victims in the Palatinate alone, and an almost equal number, the gleanings of a richer harvest which had been reaped before the Convention of Passau, were taken possession of in Northern Germany.

§ 11. The Ecclesiastical Reservation.

The Ecclesiastical Reservation applied to a different class of property, namely, to the bishoprics and abbeys held immediately of the Empire. Here, too, the Protestants found an excuse for evading the Treaty of Augsburg. The object of the reservation, they argued, was not to keep the bishoprics in Catholic hands, but to prevent quarrels arising between the bishops and their chapters. If, therefore, a bishop elected as a Catholic chose to turn Protestant, he must resign his see in order to avoid giving offence to the Catholic chapter. But where a chapter, itself already Protestant, elected a Protestant bishop, he might take the see without hesitation, and hold it as long as he lived.

§ 12. The northern bishoprics Protestant.

In this way eight of the great northern bishoprics soon came under Protestant rule. Not that the Protestant occupant was in any real sense of the word a bishop. He was simply an elected prince, calling himself a bishop, or often more modestly an administrator, and looking after the temporal affairs of his dominions.

§ 13. Good and bad side of the arrangement.

In some respects the arrangement was a good one. The populations of these territories were mainly Protestant, and they had no cause to complain. Besides, if only a sufficient number of these bishoprics could be gained to Protestantism, the factitious majority in the Diet might be reversed, and an assembly obtained more truly representing the nation than that which was in existence. But it must be acknowledged that the whole thing had an ugly look; and it is no wonder that Catholics pronounced these administrators to be no bishops at all, and to have no right to hold the bishops' lands, or to take their seat as bishops in the Diet of the Empire.

Section III. —Reaction against Protestantism

§ 1. Theological disputes among Protestants.

In course of time Protestantism, in its turn, exposed itself to attack. Each petty court soon had its own school of theologians, whose minds were dwarfed to the limits of the circle which they influenced with their logic and their eloquence. The healthful feeling which springs from action on a large stage was wanting to them. Bitterly wrangling with one another, they were eager to call in the secular arm against their opponents. Seizing the opportunity, the newly-constituted order of Jesuits stepped forward to bid silence in the name of the renovated Papal Church, alone, as they urged, able to give peace instead of strife, certainty instead of disputation. The Protestants were taken at a disadvantage. The enthusiasm of a national life, which repelled the Jesuits in the England of the sixteenth century, and the enthusiasm of scientific knowledge which repels them in the Germany of the nineteenth century, were alike wanting to a Germany in which national life was a dream of the past, and science a dream of the future. Luther had long ago passed away from the world. Melanchthon's last days were spent in hopeless protest against the evil around him. 'For two reasons,' he said, as he lay upon his death-bed, 'I desire to leave this life: First, that I may enjoy the sight, which I long for, of the Son of God and of the Church in Heaven. Next, that I may be set free from the monstrous and implacable hatreds of the theologians.'

§ 2. The Catholics make progress.

In the face of a divided people, or self-seeking princes, and of conflicting theories, the Jesuits made their way. Step by step the Catholic reaction gained ground, not without compulsion, but also not without that moral force which makes compulsion possible. The bishops and abbots gave their subjects the choice between conversion and exile. An attempt made by the Archbishop of Cologne to marry and turn Protestant was too plainly in contradiction to the Ecclesiastical Reservation to prosper, and when the Protestant majority of the Chapter of Strasburg elected a Protestant bishop they were soon overpowered. A Protestant Archbishop of Magdeburg offering to take his place amongst the princes of the Empire at the Diet was refused admission, and though nothing was done to dispossess him and the other northern administrators of their sees, yet a slur had been cast upon their title which they were anxious to efface. A few years later a legal decision was obtained in the cases of four monasteries secularized after the Convention of Passau, and that decision was adverse to the claim of the Protestants.

§ 3. The disputes which led finally to war.

Out of these two disputes – the dispute about the Protestant administrators and the dispute about the secularized lands – the Thirty Years' War arose. The Catholic party stood upon the strict letter of the law, according, at least, to their own interpretation, and asked that everything might be replaced in the condition in which it was in 1552, the date of the Convention of Passau. The Protestant view, that consideration should be taken for changes, many of which at the end of the sixteenth century were at least a generation old, may or may not have been in accordance with the law, but it was certainly in accordance with the desires of the greater part of the population affected by them.

§ 4. No popular representation.

There is every reason to believe that if Germany had possessed anything like a popular representation its voice would have spoken in favour of some kind of compromise. There is no trace of any mutual hostility between the populations of the Catholic and Protestant districts apart from their rulers.

Section IV. —Three Parties and Three Leaders

§ 1. The leaders of parties.

Two men stood forward to personify the elements of strife – Maximilian, the Catholic Duke of Bavaria, and the Calvinist Prince Christian of Anhalt, whilst the warmest advocate of peace was John George, the Lutheran Elector of Saxony.

§ 2. Maximilian of Bavaria.

Maximilian of Bavaria was the only lay prince of any importance on the side of the Catholics. He had long been known as a wise administrator of his own dominions. No other ruler was provided with so well-filled a treasury, or so disciplined an army. No other ruler was so capable of forming designs which were likely to win the approbation of others, or so patient in waiting till the proper time arrived for their execution. 'What the Duke of Bavaria does,' said one of his most discerning opponents, 'has hands and feet.' His plans, when once they were launched into the world, seemed to march forwards of themselves to success.

§ 3. His love of legality.

Such a man was not likely to take up the wild theories which were here and there springing up, of the duty of uprooting Protestantism at all times and all places, or to declare, as some were declaring, that the Peace of Augsburg was invalid because it had never been confirmed by the Pope. To him the Peace of Augsburg was the legal settlement by which all questions were to be tried. What he read there was hostile to the Protestant administrators and the secularizing princes. Yet he did not propose to carry his views into instant action. He would await his opportunity. But he would do his best to be strong, in order that he might not be found wanting when the opportunity arrived, and, in spite of his enthusiasm for legal rights, it was by no means unlikely that, if a difficult point arose, he might be inclined to strain the law in his own favour.

§ 4. Danger of the Protestants.

Such an opponent, so moderate and yet so resolute, was a far more dangerous enemy to the Protestants than the most blatant declaimer against their doctrines. Naturally, the Protestants regarded his views as entirely inadmissible. They implied nothing less than the forcible conversion of the thousands of Protestants who were inhabitants of the administrators' dominions, and the occupation by the Catholic clergy of points of vantage which would serve them in their operations upon the surrounding districts. It is true that the change, if effected would simply replace matters in the position which had been found endurable in 1552. But that which could be borne when the Catholics were weak and despondent might be an intolerable menace when they were confident and aggressive.

§ 5. Danger of the Protestants.

Resistance, therefore, became a duty, a duty to which the princes were all the more likely to pay attention because it coincided with their private interest. In the bishoprics and chapters they found provision for their younger sons, from which they would be cut off if Protestants were hereafter to be excluded.

§ 6. Protestants of the north and south.

The only question was in what spirit the resistance should be offered. The tie which bound the Empire together was so loose, and resistance to law, or what was thought to be law, was so likely to lead to resistance to law in general, that it was the more incumbent on the Protestants to choose their ground well. And in Germany, at least, there was not likely to be any hasty provocation to give Maximilian an excuse for reclaiming the bishoprics. Far removed from the danger, these northern Lutherans found it difficult to conceive that there was any real danger at all. The states of the south, lying like a wedge driven into the heart of European Catholicism, were forced by their geographical position to be ever on the alert. They knew that they were the advanced guard of Protestantism. On the one flank was the Catholic duchy of Bavaria, and the bishoprics of Würzburg and Bamberg. On the other flank were the ecclesiastical electorates on the Rhine and the Moselle, the bishoprics of Worms, Spires, and Strasburg, the Austrian lands in Swabia and Alsace, and the long line of the Spanish frontier in Franche Comté and the Netherlands garrisoned by the troops of the first military monarchy in Europe. What wonder if men so endangered were in haste to cut the knot which threatened to strangle them, and to meet the enemy by flying in his face rather than by awaiting the onslaught which they believed to be inevitable.

§ 7. Spread of Calvinism.

Under the influence of this feeling the princes of these southern regions for the most part adopted a religion very different from the courtly Lutheranism of the north. If Würtemberg continued Lutheran under the influence of the University of Tübingen, the rulers of the Palatinate, of Hesse Cassel, of Baden-Durlach, of Zwei-Brücken, sought for strength in the iron discipline of Calvinism, a form of religion which always came into favour when there was an immediate prospect of a death-struggle with Rome.

§ 8. Courtly character of Calvinism in Germany.

Unhappily, German Calvinism differed from that of Scotland and the Netherlands. Owing to its adoption by the princes rather than by the people, it failed in gaining that hardy growth which made it invincible on its native soil. It had less of the discipline of an army about it, less resolute defiance, less strength altogether. And whilst it was weaker it was more provocative. Excluded from the benefits of the Peace of Augsburg, which knew of no Protestant body except the Lutheran, the Calvinists were apt to talk about the institutions of the Empire in a manner so disparaging as to give offence to Lutherans and Catholics alike.

§ 9. Frederick IV., Elector Palatine.

Of this Calvinist feeling Christian of Anhalt became the impersonation. The leadership of the Calvinist states in the beginning of the seventeenth century would naturally have devolved on Frederick IV., Elector Palatine. But Frederick was an incapable drunkard, and his councillors, with Christian at their head, were left to act in his name.

§ 10. Christian of Anhalt.

Christian of Anhalt possessed a brain of inexhaustible fertility. As soon as one plan which he had framed appeared impracticable, he was ready with another. He was a born diplomatist, and all the chief politicians of Europe were intimately known to him by report, whilst with many of them he carried on a close personal intercourse. His leading idea was that the maintenance of peace was hopeless, and that either Protestantism must get rid of the House of Austria, or the House of Austria would get rid of Protestantism. Whether this were true or false, it is certain that he committed the terrible fault of underestimating his enemy. Whilst Maximilian was drilling soldiers and saving money, Christian was trusting to mere diplomatic finesse. He had no idea of the tenacity with which men will cling to institutions, however rotten, till they feel sure that some other institutions will be substituted for them, or of the strength which Maximilian derived from the appearance of conservatism in which his revolutionary designs were shrouded even from his own observation. In order to give to Protestantism that development which in Christian's eyes was necessary to its safety, it would be needful to overthrow the authority of the Emperor and of the Diet. And if the Emperor and the Diet were overthrown, what had Christian to offer to save Germany from anarchy? If his plan included, as there is little doubt that it did, the seizure of the lands of the neighbouring bishops, and a fresh secularization of ecclesiastical property, even Protestant towns might begin to ask whether their turn would not come next. A return to the old days of private war and the law of the strongest would be welcome to very few.