The smouldering fire burst into a flame in Bohemia, a kingdom of the House of Austria, and a member of the Empire, but peopled by hot, impulsive Sclavs, jealous of their nationality, as well as of their Protestant faith—Bohemia, whither the spark of Wycliffism had passed along the electric chain of common universities by which mediaeval Christendom was bound, and where it had kindled first the martyr fire of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, then the fiercer conflagration of the Hussite war. In that romantic city by the Moldau, with its strange, half Oriental beauty, where Jesuitism now reigns supreme, and St. John Nepemuch is the popular divinity, Protestantism and Jesuitism then lay in jealous neighbourhood, Protestantism supported by the native nobility, from anarchical propensity as well as from religious conviction; Jesuitism patronized and furtively aided by the intrusive Austrian power. From the Emperor Rudolph II., the Protestants had obtained a charter of religious liberties. But Rudolph's successor, Ferdinand II., was the Philip II. of Germany in bigotry, though not in cruelty. In his youth, after a pilgrimage to Loretto, he had vowed at the feet of the Pope to restore Catholicism at the hazard of his life. He was a pupil of the Jesuits, almost worshipped priests, was passionately devoted to the ceremonies of his religion, delighting even in the functions of an acolyte, and, as he said, preferred a desert to an empire full of heretics. He had, moreover, before his accession to the throne, come into collision with Protestantism where it was triumphant, and had found in its violence too good an excuse for his bigotry. It was inevitable that as King of Bohemia he should attempt to narrow the Protestant liberties. The hot Czech blood took fire, the fierceness of political turbulence mingled with that of religious zeal, and at a council held at Prague, in the old palace of the Bohemian kings, Martiniz and Slavata, the most hated of Ferdinand's creatures, were thrown out of a window in what was called good Bohemian fashion, and only by a marvellous accident escaped with their lives. The first blow was struck, the signal was given for thirty years of havoc. Insurrection flamed up in Bohemia. At the head of the insurgents, Count Thurn rushed on Vienna. The Emperor was saved only by a miracle, as Jesuitism averred,—as Rationalism says, by the arrival of Dampierre's Imperial horse. He suffered a fright which must have made him more than ever prefer a desert to an empire full of heretics. By a vote of the States of Bohemia the crown was taken from Ferdinand and offered to Frederic, Elector Palatine. Frederic was married to the bright and fascinating Princess Elizabeth of England, the darling of Protestant hearts; other qualifications for that crown of peril he had none. But in an evil hour he accepted the offer. Soon his unfitness appeared. A foreigner, he could not rein the restive and hard mouthed Czech nobility, a Calvinist and a pupil of the Huguenots, he unwisely let loose Calvinist iconoclasm among a people who clung to their ancient images though they had renounced their ancient faith. Supinely he allowed Austria and the Catholic League to raise their Croats and Walloons with the ready aid, so valuable in that age of unready finance, of Spanish gold. Supinely he saw the storm gather and roll towards him. Supinely he lingered in his palace, while on the White Hill, a name fatal in Protestant annals, his army, filled with his own discouragement, was broken by the combined forces of the Empire, under Bucquoi, and of the Catholic League, under Count Tilly. Still there was hope in resistance, yet Frederic fled. He was in great danger, say his apologists. It was to face a great danger, and show others how to face it, that he had come there. Let a man, before he takes the crown of Bohemia, look well into his own heart. Then followed a scaffold scene like that of Egmont and Horn, but on a larger scale. Ferdinand, it seems, hesitated to shed blood, but his confessor quelled his scruples. Before the City Hall of Prague, and near the Thein Church, bearing the Hussite emblems of the chalice and sword, amidst stern military pomp, the Emperor presiding in the person of his High Commissioner, twenty- four victims of high rank were led forth to death. Just as the executions commenced a bright rainbow spanned the sky. To the victims it seemed an assurance of Heaven's mercy. To the more far-reaching eye of history it may seem to have been an assurance that, dark as the sky then was, the flood of Reaction should no more cover the earth. But dark the sky was: the counter-reformation rode on the wings of victory, and with ruthless cruelty, through Bohemia, through Moravia, through Austria Proper, which had shown sympathy with the Bohemian revolt. The lands of the Protestant nobility were confiscated, the nobility itself crushed; in its place was erected a new nobility of courtiers, foreigners, military adventurers devoted to the Empire and to Catholicism, the seed of the Metternichs.
For ten years the tide ran steadily against Protestantism and German Independence. The Protestants were without cohesion, without powerful chiefs. Count Mansfeldt was a brilliant soldier, with a strong dash of the robber. Christian of Brunswick was a brave knight errant, fighting, as his motto had it, for God and for Elizabeth of Bohemia. But neither of them had any great or stable force at his back, and if a ray of victory shone for a moment on their standards, it was soon lost in gloom. In Frederick, ex-king of Bohemia, was no help; and his charming queen could only win for him hearts like that of Christian of Brunswick. The great Protestant Princes of the North, Saxony and Brandenburgh, twin pillars of the cause that should have been, were not only lukewarm, timorous, superstitiously afraid of taking part against the Emperor, but they were sybarites, or rather sots, to whose gross hearts no noble thought could find its way. Their inaction was almost justified by the conduct of the Protestant chiefs, whose councils were full of folly and selfishness, whose policy seemed mere anarchy, and who too often made war like buccaneers. The Evangelical Union, in which Lutheranism and political quietism prevailed, refused its aid to the Calvinist and usurping King of Bohemia. Among foreign powers, England was divided in will, the nation being enthusiastically for Protestantism and Elizabeth of Bohemia, while the Court leant to the side of order and hankered after the Spanish marriage. France was not divided in will: her single will was that of Richelieu, who, to weaken Austria, fanned the flame of civil war in Germany, as he did in England, but lent no decisive aid. Bethlem Gabor, the Evangelical Prince of Transylvania, led semi- barbarous hosts, useful as auxiliaries, but incapable of bearing the main brunt of the struggle; and he was trammelled by his allegiance to his suzerain, the Sultan. The Catholic League was served by a first-rate general in the person of Tilly; the Empire by a first-rate general and first-rate statesman in the person of Wallenstein. The Palatinate was conquered, and the Electorate was transferred by Imperial fiat to Maximilian of Bavaria, the head of the Catholic League, whereby a majority was given to the Catholics in the hitherto equally-divided College of Electors. An Imperial Edict of Restitution went forth, restoring to Catholicism all that it had lost by conversion within the last seventy years. Over all Germany, Jesuits and Capuchins swarmed with the mandates of reaction in their hands. The King of Denmark tardily took up arms only to be overthrown by Tilly at Lutter, and again at Wolgast by Wallenstein. The Catholic and Imperial armies were on the northern seas. Wallenstein, made Admiral of the Empire, was preparing a basis of maritime operations against the Protestant kingdoms of Scandinavia, against the last asylum of Protestantism and Liberty in Holland. Germany, with all its intellect and all its hopes, was on the point of becoming a second Spain. Teutonism was all but enslaved to the Croat. The double star of the House of Austria seemed with baleful aspect to dominate in the sky, and to threaten with extinction European liberty and progress. One bright spot alone remained amidst the gloom. By the side of the brave burghers who beat back the Prince of Parma from the cities of Holland, a place must be made in history for the brave burghers who beat back Wallenstein from Stralsund, after he had sworn, in his grand, impious way, that he would take it though it were bound by a chain to Heaven. The eyes of all Protestants were turned, says Richelieu, like those of sailors, towards the North. And from the North a deliverer came. On Midsummer day, 1630, a bright day in the annals of Protestantism, of Germany, and, as Protestants and Germans must believe, of human liberty and progress, Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, landed at Penemunde, on the Pomeranian coast, and knelt down on the shore to give thanks to God for his safe passage; then showed at once his knowledge of the art of war and of the soldier's heart, by himself taking spade in hand, and commencing the entrenchment of his camp. Gustavus was the grandson of that Gustavus Vasa who had broken at once the bonds of Denmark and of Rome, and had made Sweden independent and Lutheran. He was the son of that Charles Vasa who had defeated the counter-reformation. Devoted from his childhood to the Protestant cause, hardily trained in a country where even the palace was the abode of thrift and self-denial, his mind enlarged by a liberal education, in regard for which, amidst her poverty, as in general character and habits of her people, his Sweden greatly resembled Scotland; his imagination stimulated by the wild scenery, the dark forests, the starry nights of Scandinavia; gifted by nature both in mind and body; the young king had already shown himself a hero. He had waged grim war with the powers of the icy north; he bore several scars, proofs of a valour only too great for the vast interests which depended on his life; he had been a successful innovator in tactics, or rather a successful restorer of the military science of the Romans. But the best of his military innovations were discipline and religion. His discipline redeemed the war from savagery, and made it again, so far as war, and war in that iron age could be, a school of humanity and self-control. In religion he was himself not an ascetic saint, there is one light passage at least in his early life: and at Augsburg they show a ruff plucked from his neck by a fair Augsburger at the crisis of a very brisk flirtation. But he was devout, and he inspired his army with his devotion. The traveller is still struck with the prayer and hymn which open and close the march of the soldiers of Gustavus. Schools for the soldiers' children were held in his camp. It is true that the besetting sin of the Swedes, and of all dwellers in cold countries, is disclosed by the article in his military code directed against the drunkenness of army chaplains.
Sir Thomas Roe, the most sagacious of the English diplomatists of that age, wrote of Gustavus to James I.—"The king hath solemnly protested that he will not depose arms till he hath spoken one word for your majesty in Germany (that was his own phrase), and glory will contend with policy in his resolution; for he hath unlimited thoughts, and is the likeliest instrument for God to work by in Europe. We have often observed great alterations to follow great spirits, as if they were fitted for the times. Certainly, ambit fortunam Caesaris: he thinks the ship cannot sink that carries him, and doth thus oblige prosperity."
Gustavus justified his landing in Germany by a manifesto setting forth hostile acts of the Emperor against him in Poland. No doubt there was a technical casus belli. But, morally, the landing of Gustavus was a glorious breach of the principle of non-intervention. He came to save the world. He was not the less a fit instrument for God to work by because it was likely that he would rule the world when he had saved it.
"A snow king!" tittered the courtiers of Vienna, "he will soon melt away." He soon began to prove to them, both in war and diplomacy, that his melting would be slow. Richelieu at last ventured on a treaty of alliance. Charles I., now on the throne of England, and angry at having been jilted by Spain, also entered into a treaty, and sent British auxiliaries, who, though soon reduced in numbers by sickness, always formed a substantial part of the armies of Gustavus, and in battle and storm earned their full share of the honour of his campaigns. Many British volunteers had already joined the standard of Mansfeldt and other Protestant chiefs; and if some of these men were mere soldiers of the Dugald Dalghetty type, some were the Garibaldians of their day, and brought back at once enthusiasm and military skill from German battlefields to Marston and Naseby. Diplomacy, aided by a little gentle pressure, drew Saxony and Brandenburgh to the better cause, now that the better cause was so strong. But while they dallied and haggled one more great disaster was added to the sum of Protestant calamity. Magdeburgh, the queen of Protestant cities, the citadel of North German liberty, fell—fell with Gustavus and rescue near—and nameless atrocities were perpetrated by the ferocious bands of the Empire on innocents of all ages and both sexes, whose cry goes up against bloodthirsty fanaticism for ever. A shriek of horror rang through the Protestant world, not without reproaches against Gustavus, who cleared himself by words, and was soon to clear himself better by deeds.
Count Tilly was now in sole command on the Catholic and Imperial side. Wallenstein had been dismissed. A military Richelieu, an absolutist in politics, an indifferentist in religion, caring at least for the religious quarrel only as it affected the political question, he aimed at crushing the independence of all the princes, Catholic as well as Protestant, and making the Emperor, or rather Wallenstein in the name of the Imperial devotee, as much master of Germany as the Spanish king was of Spain. But the disclosure of this policy, and the towering pride of its author had alarmed the Catholic princes, and produced a reaction similar to that caused by the absolutist encroachments of Charles V. Aided by the Jesuits, who marked in Wallenstein a statesman whose policy was independent of theirs, and who, if not a traitor to the faith, was at least a bad persecutor, Maximilian and his confederates forced the Emperor to remove Wallenstein from command. The great man received the bearers of the mandate with stately courtesy, with princely hospitality, showed them that he had read in the stars the predominance of Maximilian over Ferdinand, slightly glanced at the Emperor's weakness, then withdrew to that palace at Prague, so like its mysterious lord, so regal and so fantastic in its splendour, yet so gloomy, so jealously guarded, so full of the spirit of dark ambition, so haunted by the shadow of the dagger. There he lay, watching the storm that gathered in the North, scanning the stars and waiting for his hour.
When the Swedes and Saxons, under Gustavus and the Elector of Saxony, drew near to the Imperial army under Tilly, in the neighbourhood of Leipsic, there was a crisis, a thrill of worldwide expectation, as when the Armada approached the shores of England; as when the allies met the forces of Louis XIV. at Blenheim, as when, on those same plains of Leipsic, the uprisen nations advanced to battle against Napoleon. Count Tilly's military genius fell short only of the highest. His figure was one which showed that war had become a science, and that the days of the Paladins were past. He was a little old man, with a broad wrinkled forehead, hollow cheeks, a long nose and projecting chin, grotesquely attired in a slashed doublet of green satin, with a peaked hat and a long red feather hanging down behind. His charger was a grey pony, his only weapon a pistol, which it was his delight to say he had never fired in the thirty pitched fields which he had fought and won. He was a Walloon by birth, a pupil of the Jesuits, a sincere devotee, and could boast that he had never yielded to the allurements of wine or women, as well as that he had never lost a battle. His name was now one of horror, for he was the captor of Magdeburg, and if he had not commanded the massacre, or, as it was said, jested at it, he could not be acquitted of cruel connivance. That it was the death of his honour to survive the butchery which he ought to have died, if necessary, in resisting sword in hand, is a soldier's judgment on his case. At his side was Pappenheim, another pupil of the Jesuits, the Dundee of the thirty years' war, with all the devotion, all the loyalty, all the ferocity of the Cavalier, the most fiery and brilliant of cavalry officers, the leader of the storming column at Magdeburg.
In those armies the heavy cavalry was the principal arm. The musket was an unwieldy matchlock fired from a rest, and without a bayonet, so that in the infantry regiments it was necessary to combine pikemen with the musketeers. Cannon there were of all calibres and with a whole vocabulary of fantastic names, but none capable of advancing and manoeuvring with troops in battle. The Imperial troops were formed in heavy masses. Gustavus, taking his lesson from the Roman legion, had introduced a more open order—he had lightened the musket, dispensed with the rest, given the musketeer a cartridge box instead of the flapping bandoleer. He had trained his cavalry, instead of firing their carbines and wheeling, to charge home with the sword. He had created a real field artillery of imperfect structure, but which told on the Imperial masses.
The harvest had been reaped, and a strong wind blew clouds of dust over the bare autumn fields, when Count Tilly formed the victorious veterans of the Empire, in what was called Spanish order—infantry in the centre, cavalry on the flanks—upon a rising ground overlooking the broad plain of Breitenfeldt. On him marched the allies in two columns—Gustavus with the Swedes upon the right, the Elector with his Saxons on the left. As they passed a brook in front of the Imperial position, Pappenheim dashed upon them with his cavalry, but was driven back, and the two columns deployed upon the plain. The night before the battle Gustavus had dreamt that he was wrestling with Tilly, and that Tilly bit him in the left arm, but that he overpowered Tilly with his right arm. That dream came through the Gate of Horn, for the Saxons who formed the left wing were raw troops, but victory was sure to the Swede. Soldiers of the old school proudly compare the shock of charging armies at Leipsic with modern battles, which they call battles of skirmishers with armies in reserve. However this may be, all that day the plain of Breitenfeldt was filled with the fierce eddies of a hand-to-hand struggle between mail- clad masses, their cuirasses and helmets gleaming fitfully amidst the clouds of smoke and dust, the mortal shock of the charge and the deadly ring of steel striking the ear with a distinctness impossible in modern battle. Tilly with his right soon shattered the Saxons, but his centre and left were shattered by the unconquerable Swede. The day was won by the genius of the Swedish king, by the steadiness with which his troops manoeuvred, and the promptness with which they formed a new front when the defeat of the Saxons exposed their left, by the rapidity of their fire and by the vigour with which their cavalry charged. The victory was complete. At sunset four veteran Walloon regiments made a last stand for the honour of the Empire, and with difficulty bore off their redoubtable commander from his first lost field. Through all Protestant Europe flew the tidings of a great deliverance and the name of a great deliverer.
On to Vienna cried hope and daring then. On to Vienna; history still regretfully repeats the cry. Gustavus judged otherwise—and whatever his reason was we may be sure it was not weak. Not to the Danube therefore but to the Main and Rhine the tide of conquest rolled. The Thuringian forest gleams with fires that guide the night march of the Swede. Frankfort the city of empire opens her gates to him who will soon come as the hearts of all men divine not as a conqueror in the iron garb of war but as the elect of Germany to put on the imperial crown. In the cellars of the Prince Bishop of Bamberg and Wurtzburg the rich wine is broached for heretic lips. Protestantism everywhere uplifts its head, the Archbishop of Mainz, chief of the Catholic persecutors becomes a fugitive in his turn. Jesuit and Capuchin must cower or fly. All fortresses are opened by the arms of Gustavus, all hearts are opened by his gracious manner, his winning words, his sunny smile. To the people accustomed to a war of massacre and persecution he came as from a better world a spirit of humanity and toleration. His toleration was politic no doubt but it was also sincere. So novel was it that a monk finding himself not butchered or tortured thought the king's faith must be weak and attempted his conversion. His zeal was repaid with a gracious smile. Once more on the Lech Tilly crossed the path of the thunderbolt. Dishonoured at Magdeburg, defeated at Leipsic, the old man seems to have been weary of life, his leg shattered by a cannon hall he was borne dying from the field and left the Imperial cause headless as well as beaten. Gustavus is in Augsburgh, the queen of German commerce, the city of the Fuggers with their splendid and romantic money kingdom, the city of the Confession. He is in Munich, the capital of Maximilian and the Catholic League. His allies the Saxons are in Prague. A few marches more and he will dictate peace at Vienna with all Germany at his back. A few marches more the Germans will be a Protestant nation under a Protestant chief and many a dark page will be torn from the book of fate.