Indifferent what their banner,
whether it was The Double Eagle, Lily or the Lion,
indifferent to everything save the prospect of pay, plunder, women and the chance of serving under a competent and hitherto supremely fortunate commander. The fourteen years of war, and before them the long period of rearmament, had created all over Europe a class of military adventurers, landless, homeless, without family, without any of the natural pieties, without religion or scruple, without knowledge of any trade but war and incapable of anything but destruction. To these men the Thirty Years’ War seemed deplorably brief. They had worked up a vested interest in it, and to any hint of peace they reacted with all the dismay and fury of bishops threatened by disestablishment, or of mill-owners at the prospect of a law to regulate child labour. In 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia was finally signed, many of the armies mutinied, and it was with the greatest difficulty that their commanders were able to induce them to accept the fait accompli. Demobilization was gradual and had to be drawn out over a period of years; but even so there was much trouble, and many of the mercenaries were never reabsorbed into the body politic, but retained, as bandits and pimps and professional assassins, the parasitic character they had acquired during the long years of warfare.
With this motley army Wallenstein drove the Saxons out of Bohemia, then moved against Gustavus. For weeks they faced one another in the neighbourhood of Nuremberg. Then, starved out in a completely devastated country, the Swedes marched off in search of food. Wallenstein thereupon entered Saxony and proceeded to lay waste to the land with a quite extraordinary thoroughness. Gustavus doubled back and, in November, forced him to give battle at Lutzen. The imperialist army was defeated; but Gustavus was killed in the action.
To Richelieu and Father Joseph the news of Gustavus’s death came as an immense relief. As a faithful son of the Church Militant, Father Joseph had accepted the Swedish pact with a reluctance, which had been overcome only by the conviction that there was no other way of securing the victory of what he regarded as true Catholic principles. Of Protestant alliances in general he remarked that ‘ one should make use of these things as of a drug, of which a small dose acts as an antidote and a large one kills outright.’ The trouble with Gustavus was that, being a military genius of the first order, he had been able to force his French allies to swallow doses of Protestantism far longer than were good for a Catholic stomach. Or, to revert to an earlier metaphor, the picador had turned espada and, when Lutzen happily put an end to him, was on the point of administering the final death-blow to Austrian power. But, as we have seen, Richelieu did not desire the death of the Hapsburg monarchy.
All he wanted was, in the words of a French historian, ‘to break the ring of Catholic states united around the House of Austria and to draw them under the patronage and protection of France.’ His sympathies were not with the Evangelical League, but with ‘the German Catholic party, and their leader, Maximilian of Bavaria.’ If he made use of Protestant England, Protestant Holland, Protestant Denmark and, finally, Protestant Sweden, it was because the only persuasions to which the German Catholic princes would listen were those brought to them by Anglican, Lutheran and Calvinist armies. Gustavus had made the grievous mistake of leading these armies all too well, and so becoming, within a few months, the master of almost the whole of Germany. His death redressed the balance between Catholics and Protestants, restored the equilibrium of mutually destructive forces. To those who understood the foreign policy of France, the event seemed providential-so very providential, indeed, that there were many who refused to regard it as an accident. It was whispered that Gustavus had been killed, not by Wallenstein’s soldiers, but by assassins in the ranks of his own army. And who had hired the assassins?
Who had given them their instructions and found them a place near Gustavus’s person? Why, naturally, the head of Richelieu’s secret service, the ubiquitously sinister Father Joseph. Such was the friar’s reputation that people now connected his name with every strange and questionable occurrence of the time. Thus, not only had he planned the killing of Gustavus Adolphus; he was also deeply implicated in that cause celebre which for long months was the favourite topic of conversation at court, among the burgesses of Paris and all the provincial towns, in every .monastery, convent and vicarage throughout the country the case of Father Urbain Grandier of Loudun and the nuns he was said to have bewitched. Bogus demoniac possession, artfully faked by a whole convent of hysterical Ursulines, under the coaching of their spiritual directors; monks plotting with lawyers to bear false witness against a hated professional and sexual rival; a fornicating priest, enmeshed in the toils of his own lust and vanity and at last judicially murdered on a false charge and with every refinement of cruelty -it is a story that takes a high place in the annals of human beastliness in general and religious beastliness in particular.
Gossip incriminated both the Eminences, the scarlet and the grey. Richelieu was supposed to have engineered the burning of Grandier to revenge himself for a satire of which the latter was reputedly the author. Father Joseph was said to have egged on the protagonists of the iniquitous drama from motives of mere vanity. When exorcised, the Ursulines of Loudun had visions of St. Joseph, and these visitations from his divine namesake were supposed to be taken by the Capuchin as a graceful compliment to himsel Both accusations were unfounded. In the Loudun affair, neither Richelieu nor Father Joseph exhibited anything worse than weakness.
Thinking to win a little popularity by getting himself associated with a case that had aroused so much excitement and (in its earlier phases) fanatical enthusiasm, Richelieu gave money to the exorcists, who had been summoned in 1633 to work upon the nuns. It was a regrettable move, which seemed to lend a certain official sanction to the proceedings. As for Father Joseph’s intervention, this consisted in a visit paid to Loudun, a brief first-hand examination into what was happening there, and a hasty retreat to Paris. Loudun was a hornets’ nest; the case was suffered to take its horrible course. On the 18th of August 1634, Grandier was duly burned alive.
Meanwhile, in Germany, things were rapidly going from bad to worse. A new Franco-Protestant alliance, the League of Heilbronn, was formed in the spring of 1633, with armies commanded by Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, Hom and Baner. A royal adventurer in search of a country to rule, Bernard now set to work to steal himself a duchy. Reversing the Emperor’s policy of re-catholicizing the Protestants, he seized large areas of episcopal territory in the Rhineland, made himself their ruler and started to impose Protestantism on their Catholic population. Upon imperialists the effect of this action was the same as had been the effect upon the Protestants of the Edict of Restitution four years before; it revived their will to war. Bernard’s short-lived essay in forcible conversion threw the Emperor into the arms of the Spanish and extreme Catholic party.
Wallenstein, meanwhile, was working for the fulfillment of his old dream of a Germany united under a central authority controlled by himself. Making a private peace with the Elector of Saxony, whom he hoped to use as an ally, he advanced northwards, defeated the Swedes at Steinau, captured a number of towns in which Gustavus had left garrisons, and advancing almost to the Baltic, thoroughly devastated a part of the country which, for more than two years, had enjoyed some measure of freedom from military outrage. While Wallenstein was busy in the North, the Swedes and German Protestants were similarly occupied in Southern Germany.
Bernard’s capture of Ratisbon led to the recall of Wallenstein, who abandoned Mecklenburg and Pomerania without achieving any result beyond their devastation. Bad weather now paralysed both armies. The men were billeted out in winter quarters, to eat their way through the meagre stocks accumulated by the civil population. Wallenstein meanwhile pursued his plans for making peace and unifying Germany under his own sway. At the same time, with the help of Father Joseph’s agents and a number of Czech nobles, he was plotting to have himself crowned King of Bohemia. Alarmed, the Emperor dismissed him for a second time. Wallenstein appealed to his officers and openly sought Swedish support. The Swedes were shy, and most of the officers remained faithful to the Emperor. Wallenstein was outlawed, took flight and, on February 25th, 1634, was murdered at Eger by two Scots Presbyterians and an Irish papist, all three of them officers in his polyglot army. Wallenstein’s place was taken by Gallas, under the nominal command of Ferdinand’s son and heir, the King of Hungary.
Ratisbon was recaptured, and Augsburg, which had been taken in 1632 by Gustavus, was now besieged by the imperialists. It surrendered in the following year, having lost four-fifths of its population by hunger and disease.
