If these went over to Rome, he calculated (not quite correctly, as the event was to prove) the common people would follow. To obtain these key conversions, he employed the usual spiritual weapons, exhortation, argument, and the edifying example of a devoted life; but when occasion demanded, he supplemented these with the other, more mundane forms of persuasion-the offer of gifts from the royal exchequer, pensions, honours, positions in the administration. Astute Protestant noblemen saw their chance and drove shrewd bargains. No gentleman, they protested, no man of conscience could be expected to change his religious convictions for a paltry six thousand livres a year. But if the Reverend Father would make it ten, well, perhaps … A compromise would be reached at eight, and, with all the traditional pomps and ceremonies, Mother Church would open her arms to yet another erring sheep.
LA ROCHELLE
CHAPTER VIII The Diet of Ratisbon
In the years that had elapsed since Richelieu’s rise to power, the affairs of Europe had taken no dramatic turn for the worse. The full horrors of the Thirty Years’ War were yet to come. For the moment, it seemed as though the devil were content to mark time. In 1625 Denmark entered the war against the Emperor. England had promised the Danes financial help; but the subsidies were never paid, for Parliament, after forcing James to break off his negotiations with Spain and encouraging Charles to support his Protestant brotherin-law, the Elector Palatine, refused to vote any supplies for the carrying on of the war. To disentangle himself from his financial difficulties, Charles had to adopt unconstitutional measures, and these unconstitutional measures resulted at last in the great rebellion. Evil is contagious; the Civil War, Charles’s execution and Cromwell’s tyranny were due, at least in part, to an infection brought over from war-fevered Germany. Meanwhile, the Danes, disappointed of their money, were unable to make much headway against the enemy.
Christian IV collected a considerable army and was joined by Mansfeld and his marauding troops. To the Emperor Ferdinand, the situation seemed threatening -so threatening that, in order to meet it, he was induced to give Wallenstein authority to raise and command a great imperial army. In this way a new instrument of tyranny and oppression was forged, an instrument that was destined to inflict incalculable miseries upon the German people. With a greater air of legality than Mansfeld, but more efficiently and just as ruthlessly, Wallenstein stripped the various provinces through which he marched of all their reserves of coin, food, and any supplies that might be useful for his army. And the pillage went on, year after year, long after Wallenstein’s death, to the very end of the war.
In the campaigns of 1625 and 1626, Christian IV and Mansfeld were separated. Wallenstein followed the latter into Silesia, where he had joined forces with Bethlen Gabor, and forced him to accept a truce, shortly after which Mansfeld died. Desperately in need of food for the troops he had raised but (for lack of the English subsidies) could not pay, Christian IV advanced into Brunswick, pillaged the country for a little and was then defeated by Tilly, at Lutter. After that the war died down for a time into a succession of sieges of Danish fortresses. Returning from Silesia in 1611, Wallenstein devoted himself to two tasks; the subjugation of his new duchy of Mecklenburg, forfeited by its rightful owner for his share in the Danish war and presented by Ferdinand to his commander-in-chief; and the conquest, in the Emperor’s name, of the whole Baltic coast. Jealous of their liberties, the Hanse towns refused tn open their gates to him and, at the beginning of 1628, Wallenstein sat down to the siege of one of them, the second-rate city of Stralsund.
At this same moment, hundreds of miles to the south-west, Richelieu and his army were encamped outside the walls of La Rochelle. But whereas, thanks to Father Joseph, the siege of La Rochelle was continued to the bitter end, Wallenstein lost patience and, after six months, abandoned the attempt on Stralsund, cut his losses and marched away. The result, as time was to show, was that Richelieu’s position was greatly improved, while that of the Hapsburgs was correspondingly weakened. The victory at La Rochelle united France and closed a breach through which hostile powers might intervene in the country’s internal affairs; the defeat at Stralsund left the Baltic coast open to invasion from Scandinavia, but at the same time it had come near enough to victory to frighten the Northern Protestants into a more determined resistance to the centralizing policy of the Hapsburgs.
In the following year, 1629, the Emperor did a thing which positively guaranteed the continuance and intensification of Protestant hostility; he issued the Edict of Restitution, which claimed for the Roman Church all lands which had been ecclesiastical property before 1552. The prospect of losing more than a hundred and fifty rich bishoprics united the Protestant princes of the North, while the prospect of being persecuted by the Jesuits united their peoples in a stand against what they regarded as naked religious and political aggression. Meanwhile, trouble had broken out in Italy. At the end of 1627 Vincenzo II of Mantua died without issue, leaving a will by which he bequeathed his duchy to Father Joseph’s old friend, Charles Palaeologus Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers.
The new sovereign hurried off to Italy and proceeded to instal himself among the splendid and long-accumulated treasures of the Mantuan palaces. Many of these treasures-among them Mantegna’s ‘Triumph of Caesar,’ now at Hampton Court, Nevers was faced soon afterwards to sell to Charles I of England; for he was in desperate need of money with which to buy the means for defending his inheritance. Even before Vincenzo’s death, the validity of his will had been disputed, and within a very short time of his accession the new duke found himself assailed on all sides by rival Gonzagas -the Duke of Guastalla, the Dowager Duchess of Lorraine and, more menacing than either, the Duke of Savoy, who demanded the Mantuan-owned duchy of Monferrato for his nephew’s wife, a daughter of Vincenzo II’s elder brother and predecessor on the ducal throne. Lying as it did on the road from Turin to Alessandria and Genoa, Monferrato, with its strong fortress of Casale, was a territory of much strategic importance.
Charles Emanuel of Savoy had no wish to see a French prince, backed by French arms and money, installed so close to his capital. The prospect was even more distasteful to the Court of Madrid, for Monferrato lay across the line of communications between the Spanish province of Milan and the sea. Early in 1628 Charles Emanuel and Philip IV’s ambassador at Turin signed an agreement stipulating that the two powers should take joint military action against Monferrato, which was then to be partitioned between them. Troops were collected and equipped and, later in the year, Charles Emanuel overran that part of the duchy which lay on the left bank of the Po, while the Spanish governor of Milan addressed himself to the more difficult and laborious task of reducing the fortress of Casale.
So long as La Rochelle held out, it was impossible for Richelieu to do anything to relieve the French outpost which the accidents of heredity had now so conveniently established on the further side of the Alps. The surrender of the Huguenots left him free to act. He moved with as much dispatch as the winter weather, bad organization and court intrigues would permit. In the first days of March 1629, a French army of thirty-five thousand men, with the King and Cardinal at their head, crossed the Alps, defeated the troops of Savoy and captured the stronghold of Suss. A few days later Charles Emanuel signed a dictated peace and, on March 15th, the siege of Casale was raised and the Spanish army marched back to Milan. Richelieu provisioned the town against the renewed attack which he knew would come the moment French forces had been withdrawn, strengthened the fortifications and left a substantial garrison under Thoiras, the commander who had so valiantly resisted Buckingham on the island of Rhé. Meanwhile Father Joseph was in Mantua, telling the Duke exactly what was expected of him by the Cardinal and exactly what he might expect in the way of French support.
Richelieu was a hard taskmaster, and the Duke complained of his severity; but fear of the Hapsburgs and the persuasive eloquence of his old friend and fellow crusader brought him at last to the acceptance of all the Cardinal’s conditions-an acceptance which (though: Mantua was sacked by the imperial troops in 1630) permitted him to keep his title and transmit it, at his death in 1637, to an infant grandchild. This grandchild grew up a profligate and left the duchy in due course to an almost imbecile son who finally lost it to the Austrians in 1708. It is a dismal and vaguely cautionary,
