The Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648

by Samuel Rawson Gardiner

His attention was not now called for the first time to the progress of the war. Like all the Lutheran princes, he had thoroughly disapproved of Frederick's Bohemian enterprise. But when Frederick was a fugitive he had seen that a strong force was needed to stop the Emperor from a retaliation which would be ruinous to the Protestants, and he had in the beginning of 1621 given a willing ear to James's proposal for a joint armament in defence of the Palatinate. Had the war been undertaken then, with the character of moderation which James and Christian would have been certain to impress upon it, the world might perhaps have been spared the spectacle of Mansfeld's plunderings, with their unhappy results. But James came too soon to the conclusion that it was unnecessary to arm till mediation had failed; and Christian, auguring no good from such a course, drew back and left the Palatinate to its fate. But the events which followed had increased his anxiety, and in 1624 his mind was distracted between his desire to check the growth of the imperial power and his hesitation to act with allies so vacillating and helpless as the Lower Saxon princes were proving themselves to be. In his own lands he had shown himself a good administrator and able ruler. Whether he was possessed of sufficient military capacity to cope with Tilly remained to be seen.

§ 4. Gustavus Adolphus.

Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, was a man of a higher stamp. His is the one of the few names which relieve the continental Protestantism of the seventeenth century from the charge of barrenness. Possessed of a high and brilliant imagination, and of a temperament restless and indefatigable, to which inaction was the sorest of trials, he was never happier than when he was infusing his own glowing spirit into the comrades of some perilous enterprise. Christian of Brunswick was not more ready than he to lead a charge or to conduct a storm. But he had, too, that of which no thought ever entered the mind of Christian for an instant—the power of seeing facts in their infinite variety as they really were, and the self-restraint with which he curbed in his struggling spirit and his passionate longing for action whenever a calm survey of the conditions around showed him that action was inexpedient. In all the pages of history there is probably no man who leaves such an impression of that energy under restraint, which is the truest mark of greatness in human character as it is the source of all that is sublime or lovely in nature or in art.

§ 5. His conflict with Poland and Russia.

Such a man was certain not to be a mere enthusiast embarking heedlessly in a Protestant crusade. Neither would he be careful for mere temporal or political power, regardless of the higher interests of his time. His first duty, and he never forgot it, was to his country. When he came to the throne, in 1611, Sweden was overrun by Danish armies, and in an almost desperate condition. In two years he had wrested a peace from the invaders, under conditions hard indeed, but which at least secured the independence of Sweden. His next effort, an effort which to the day of his death he never relaxed, was to bring into his own hands the dominion of the Baltic. He drove the Russians from its coasts. 'Now,' he said triumphantly in 1617, 'this enemy cannot, without our permission launch a single boat upon the Baltic.' He had another enemy more dangerous than Russia. Sigismund, King of Poland, was his cousin, the son of his father's elder brother, who had been driven from the throne of Sweden for his attachment to the Catholic belief. And so Gustavus was involved in the great question which was agitating Europe. The bare legal right which gave the whole of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands to Spain, which gave Bohemia to Ferdinand, and the Protestant bishoprics and the secularized lands to the Catholic clergy, gave also Sweden to Sigismund. Was it strange if Gustavus stood forth to combat this doctrine to the death, or if in his mind the growth of the two branches of the House of Austria, by whom this doctrine was maintained, became inextricably blended with the creed which that doctrine was to favour? Was it strange, too, if Protestantism and the national right of each separate country to go its own way untrammelled by such a doctrine appeared in his eyes, as in his days for the most part they really were, but two forms of the same spirit?

§ 6. His visit to Germany.

The peace concluded by Gustavus with Russia in 1617 was accompanied by a fresh outbreak of the war with Poland; and this renewal of the contest with the old rival of his house naturally drew the king's attention to affairs in Germany; for Ferdinand, now rising into power, was the brother-in-law of Sigismund, and likely to give him what aid he could in his Swedish enterprise. And Gustavus, too, was not quite a foreigner in Germany. Through his mother German blood ran in his veins, and when, in the summer of 1618, he visited Berlin in secret, he was won by the lovely face of the daughter of that energetic Elector of Brandenburg who after boxing the ears of the rival candidate for the dukedom of Cleves had adopted the Calvinist creed and had entered the Union. The death of the Elector delayed the marriage, and it was not till 1620 that, on a second visit, Gustavus wrung a consent from the new Elector, George William, whose weakness and vacillation were to be a sore trial to the Swedish king in after years. In strict incognito, Gustavus travelled as far as Heidelberg, at a time when the Elector was far away, in the midst of his short-lived splendour at Prague. Gustavus learned something from that visit which he never forgot. He saw the rich luxuriance of that fair Rhine valley, stretching away till the western hills are but dimly visible in the blue distance, and which, compared by Venetian travellers to the green Lombard plain, must have caused strange sensations of wonder in the wanderer from the cold and barren north. And he saw another sight, too, which he never forgot—the wealth and magnificence of the Rhenish prelates. 'If these priests were subjects to the king my master' (he spoke in the assumed character of a Swedish nobleman) 'he would long ago have taught them that modesty, humility, and obedience are the true characteristics of their profession.'

§ 7. His daring and prudence.

Plainly in this man there was something of Christian of Anhalt, something of the desire to overthrow existing institutions. But there was that in him which Christian of Anhalt was ignorant of—the long and calm preparation for the crisis, and the power of establishing a new order, if his life should be prolonged, to take the place of the old which was falling away.

§ 8. Renewed war with Poland.