Wallenstein, Soldier Under Saturn: A Biography

By Francis Watson

Here is the only modern biography in English of Albrecht von Wallenstein, the great Habsburg general of the Thirty Years War.

Against the background of war and destruction, of tortuous intrigue, biographer Francis Watson has limned the enigmatic Wallenstein, tracing skillfully his furious, dramatic life from an indigent Protestant nobleman, through Catholic glory and prestige, to the day of his tragic assassination.

The thrilling climb to almost unexampled power of the unknown Bohemian soldier; the struggle with the cleverest diplomats in Europe; the reclaiming of war-wasted lands to industry and prosperity; the dogged conflict with Gustavus Adolphus that ended at Lützen; and at last the tragedy of a dishonored death; these are the main incidents in a story that Watson has traced with precision and imagination.

Nor does the biographer neglect Wallenstein's less dramatic activities: that the great Kepler cast his horoscope, that he planned a canal, built magnificent palaces, founded schools, hospitals, and monasteries, and took the cure at Carlsbad for the gout.

In preparation for this book, Watson travelled three thousand miles over sites and battlefields of the Thirty Years War, and studied original documents in Vienna, Prague, Dresden and elsewhere.

The result is an intensely interesting and lively piece of writing as well as an authoritative biography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Apr 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789121483

Francis Watson

 Francis Watson holds a research chair in biblical interpretation at Durham University, England. Well known for his work in both theological interpretation and Pauline studies, he is also the author of Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith.

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Text originally published in 1938 under the same title.

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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WALLENSTEIN

Soldier under Saturn

A Biography by

FRANCIS WATSON

Denn nur der grosze Gegenstand vermag

Den tiefen Grund der Menschheit aufzuregen;

Im engen Kreis verengert sich der Sinn,

Es wächst der Mensch mit seinen gröszern Zwecken.

Schiller

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

LIST OF PLATES 4

PREFACE 5

CHAPTER ONE 7

CHAPTER TWO 19

CHAPTER THREE 37

CHAPTER FOUR 52

CHAPTER FIVE 68

CHAPTER SIX 89

CHAPTER SEVEN 102

CHAPTER EIGHT 122

CHAPTER NINE 133

CHAPTER TEN 151

CHAPTER ELEVEN 173

CHAPTER TWELVE 194

CHAPTER THIRTEEN 213

CHAPTER FOURTEEN 233

EPILOGUE 257

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 262

BIBLIOGRAPHY 263

I. GENERAL HISTORIES AND CERTAIN MILITARY WORKS 263

II.—PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS AND CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTS 264

III. BIOGRAPHIES OF WALLENSTEIN 265

IV. SPECIAL STUDIES 266

V. MISCELLANEOUS BIOGRAPHICAL WORKS 268

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 270

LIST OF PLATES

ALBRECHT VON WALLENSTEIN, DUKE OF FRIEDLAND By VAN DYCK. Painting in the Bavarian Collections

MUSKETEER OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY He is represented blowing upon his match. Flintlocks were introduced towards the middle of the century, and at about the same time Gustavus Adolphus substituted cartridges and bandolier for the powder-horn seen on the man’s right side. From Jacob de Gheyn: Maniement d’Armes 1608

WALLENSTEIN IN ALTDORF, 1600 View over the town from the Students’ Prison

WALLENSTEIN IN ALTDORF, 1936 The procession from the triennial festival

THE DEFENESTRATION OF PRAGUE, 1618 From Matthäus Merian: Theatrum Europœum, Vol. I, 1662

THE COMET OF 1618 SEEN OVER HEIDELBERG From Matthäus Merian: Theatrum Europœum, Vol. I, 1662

Bethlen Gabor, Prince of Transylvania

Maximilian I of Bavaria, Later Elector

Frederick V, Palatine Elector, ‘Winter King’ of Bohemia

Emperor Ferdinand II

WALLENSTEIN, 1626 Painting by Christian Kaulfersch in the Castle of Friedland

THE TRIUMPH OF WALLENSTEIN Ceiling-fresco by BACCIO DEL BIANCO in the Palace at Prague

THE CASTLE OF FRIEDLAND, BOHEMIA WALLENSTEIN PALACE, PRAGUE Main entrance

THE SIEGE OF STRALSUND, 1628

STRALSUND FROM THE AIR

WALLENSTEIN’S COINAGE:

Above 1 Thaler (silver) 1629

Below 5 Ducats (gold) 1634

WALLENSTEIN’S ASTROLOGICAL COMPASS (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) Photo. Wolfman

JOHANN TSERCLAES, COUNT VON TILLY, 1631 Assault of Magdeburg in the background

WALLENSTEIN’S EXPRESS MESSAGE TO PAPPENHEIM, NOVEMBER 15th, 1632 War Archives, Vienna

Title-piece of pamphlet, 1632. Gustavus Adolphus (I.) and the Elector of Saxony

Title-piece of pamphlet, 1632. Wallenstein

THE MURDER OF WALLENSTEIN AND HIS OFFICERS AT EGER, FEBRUARY 24TH, 1634 Contemporary Print

PREFACE

IN the year before the birth of Wallenstein the promulgation of the Gregorian Calendar, with the threat of excommunication for those who should refuse to conform to it, provided a happy opportunity of self-assertion in regions of an anti-Roman temper. England held grimly to the Julian method of reckoning for another hundred and seventy years, and in Russia it survived down to the Soviet Revolution, while in the Orthodox Balkans firemen are still occasionally summoned to play their hoses upon calendar-rioters. Throughout the period with which this book deals, Protestants dated their letters and affairs of business or politics according to the Old Style, Catholics according to the New. For the present purpose all dates are given in the New Style. A reduction of ten days in each case will bring them into line with those obtaining at the time in England and certain other Protestant States.

Proper names are necessarily written in no style at all, English usage having never committed itself to any single system. To write Köln would please none but the pedant, but I prefer Trier to Trèves, and Mainz to either Mayence or Mentz. Frankfurt, so written, indicates Frankfurt-on-the-Main. The sister-city is regularly referred to as Frankfurt-on-the-Oder. In cases where even the most arbitrary might hesitate, the German form of a German name is commonly given preference (Aldringen for Altringer), but the Swedish Kling is not allowed to become Gustav Adolf. Since the pronunciation of Slavonic names may offer difficulties to the English reader, I have risked the displeasure of many Czech friends by rendering these in the German version, with the Czech name added between brackets at the first mention.

Thus it was not at Mnichovo Hradiště (euphoniously as those syllables fall from native lips) but at Münchengratz that the caretaker unlocked the Capuchin Oratory one green and golden afternoon of July, to give his dog and myself the run of the tomb of Wallenstein. For the last three years—only for the last three years—the resting-place of the wonder and terror of his time has been marked in marble, with a handsome inscription. But few find their way to it. Sometimes a scholar from Prague or Vienna, said the caretaker, and now and then, on their free Sunday, a party of soldiers.

It is something that the soldiers remember him. For the scholar the hardest thing of all is to imagine him dead. Even Hermann Hallwich, though he documented with great labour the problems of Wallenstein’s last years, brought his Fünf Bücher Geschichte Wallensteins no further than to 1630, when his hero still bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus. By those familiar with Hallwich’s monumental work—they have not, by the way, between them yet applied the paperknife to the copy in the British Museum Library, nor to the only other copy which I have come across in London—my debt to him will be easily detected. It is acknowledged in the proper place at the end of this book, where also the name of Dr. Josef Bergl will be found. But Dr. Bergl must have a more personal notice for his great kindness to me in Prague, the assistance which he lent to my researches and the readiness with which, both then and since, he has placed at my disposal the results of his own far more expert studies. I am grateful also to Dr. Dostál, his fellow-archivist at the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior; to Dr. Papoušek of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs; and to Dr. Jan Opočenský, now Consul-General in Paris, who in a room of the Czernin Palace overlooking the Hradčany and the domes and towers of Prague, discussed those relations between Wallenstein and Richelieu which he has made his special concern. I should have had none of these advantages had it not been for Dr. Hyka, who gave me much office-time, much hospitality, much of his genial company, and several of the illustrations used in this book. Nor should I have met Dr. Hyka without the good offices of Dr. J. Kraus, of the Czechoslovak Legation in London. The facilities generously accorded by the Czechoslovak State Railways were also greatly appreciated.

Through the kindness of Counsellor Blaas, of the Austrian Legation, the way to the rich archives of Vienna was smoothed. Generalstaatsarchivar Professor Dr. Ludwig Bittner made me free of the Haus-Hof-und Staatsarchiv; and Herr Maior Schnagl, of the War Archives, went to considerable trouble to place the whole collection of Wallenstein’s dispatches and other relevant documents under my hands, and later to photograph for me the letter to Pappenheim from the battlefield of Lützen.

In Germany every door was opened with the magic key furnished by Ministerialrat Dr. Schlösser, of the Ministry of Propaganda, but thanks are due individually to Staatsarchivrat Dr. Krause and Baurath Fischer, of Magdeburg; to Dr. Carl Niessen, of Cologne; to Dr. Schubert, of the Dresden Print-Room; to Dr. Thoma of the Residenzmuseum in Munich, and Dr. Holzinger of the Alte Pinakothek; to Herr Baumann, of Altdorf; and to the secretary and staff of the Deutsch-Englische Gesellschaft in Berlin.

Officials at the British Museum have given their customary courteous service, and for various suggestions I am grateful to Messrs. W. F. Reddaway, M.A., of King’s; W. Cartwright, M.A., of Bradfield; E. R. Thompson, Hans Baedeker, H. A. Piehler and Dr. Gerhard Neumann.

F. W.

Hammersmith

August 1937

CHAPTER ONE

GERMANY has indeed been great, but never again will she be what she was in the past....Blind is the confidence and insensate the assurance of dying Germany.

Already in 1542 Martin Luther saw it, and he had four more years of life in which to contemplate that spectacle which again and again has brought disillusion to honest advocates of change: the Saturnine spectacle of Revolution devouring her children.

The monk of Wittenberg was no anarchist. He was even appalled to discover that he was a revolutionary. He was a German of magnificent simplicity, fond of his beer, familiar with his God, proud of the music of his native language, thriftily content to patch his own trousers, and consumed with indignation that bright German money and pious German prayers should be offered for the maintenance of an Italian court of unimaginable luxury. For that was the way of these Saxons. The Rome of the Legions had never conquered them, and the Rome of the Popes was still a foreign city. Luther threw his inkpot at the Devil and took up his broom. Puffing at his work, he did not at first notice the seven other devils approaching the newly garnished chamber. Revolt flamed up from one end of Germany to the other. The peasants poured out after Communist Messiahs, plundering, murdering, burning, wiping out the sufferings of generations in a riot of destruction. Luther recoiled. Satan is in these boors! he cried. Up, crush them! Cut their throats! Spit them on pikes! To kill a rebel is to destroy a mad dog! The feudal landowners needed no second summons, and the familiar sequence was established: revolution, reaction, intervention, European war.

Luther did not analyse it thus, but before he died he saw what it must mean to Germany, leaderless, helpless in disunion in the midst of rising nations. Social symptoms impressed him. He noted a fall in longevity, an increase in the national vice of drunkenness; greed and misery reflecting the disturbed state of economic life, and religion twisted (by his rivals, he convinced himself) into dialectical theology. It was the end. God’s judgement was at hand. The final dissolution of the earth, declared Luther, might be expected in 1560.

But the world went obstinately on. No merciful cataclysm anticipated the stern sentence of causality. Luther had been seventy years dead when a political grievance precipitated the great conflict that a bad treaty of peace had prepared. The horrors of that Thirty Years War have passed into popular tradition and into political thought. A hundred and fifty years afterwards Germany was still a prostrate country, with scarcely strength to quiver under the heel of Napoleon.

It is with the first and decisive half of the Thirty Years War that we are here concerned, and with one man whose rise and fall marked the turning-points of the struggle. What the demagogue Luther began, Albrecht von Wallenstein, the Catholic leader of Imperial armies, might have completed. Both aimed at a national policy for Germany. The significance of neither was recognised by the Hapsburg Emperors of their time. Luther by his intolerance helped to widen the cracks that already ran through the national fabric. Wallenstein by his tolerance lost his hold upon the direction of a religious war and involved himself and his great schemes in catastrophe. Beneath such paradoxes lies an historical truth that is of some importance for the modern enquirer.

The reluctance of seventeenth-century Europe to cut across all racial and political boundaries in order to confine itself in two religious camps may give pause to the theorist who would draw a no less arbitrary line across the Europe of today. It may induce him to examine his labels more carefully before applying them, remembering that labels may prejudice the future as they have obscured the past. Because the German Revolution of the sixteenth century first found its voice in the clamour for ecclesiastical reform, it has been made to bear through all its phases the title of Reformation. We omit to contrast its tremendous effects with the bloodless course of the Franciscan movement. We forget, perhaps, that Germany alone had seen at least eleven rebellions against the temporal authority of the Church before Luther loosed his familiar thunderbolts. Some of us even speak vaguely of Papal infallibility, a doctrine that was not promulgated until 1870. And the Thirty Years War, condensed in a chapter, inevitably appears as a struggle between one confession and another. It is a religious war, the classically bitter religious war, and not all of its historians have yet been demobilised. We have learned to recognise, and to judge as our conditioned sympathies may direct us, the symbolic champions of either front: Loyola about his ecstatic exercises, or Gustavus Adolphus borne on a northern tempest to rescue the Bible for Germany and the world, rather than the Baltic ports for Sweden.

There was such a war. There were pilgrimages to Loreto, there were psalms before battle. God fought on every front and for each cause. There must have been thousands who died bravely in the belief that they were defending their most intimate convictions. But behind this struggle was the more significant conflict of nations, and within it were all the plots and intrigues employed by political rivalries, personal animosities, and the battle of vested interests which the transfer of Church property had created. It was in Germany that these issues were fought out, and we must understand why.

***

Each noon, above the portal of the Marienkirche in Nuremberg, the Holy Roman Empire mimes its lost splendour for the delectation of the upturned faces in the Adolf-Hitler-Platz. The copper heralds of Sebastian Lindenast raise their slender trumpets, the little doors jerk open. One after another seven figures appear, slide stiffly through the half of a circle, and vanish again; but not without a momentary pause in midcourse, where each turns inwards and bows towards the throned simulacrum of Imperial majesty. Adjusting their watches, the onlookers move across the square to take their sausages and sauerkraut in that ancient penthouse where Hans Sachs and Albrecht Dürer may be supposed to have sat.

The occupant of the highest temporal throne who is specifically commemorated in this product of Nuremberg craftsmanship is the fourteenth-century Emperor Charles IV. The seven who pay him the perfunctory homage of clockwork are the Electors whose status and privileges, with the transmission of their rights through primogeniture, he defined in the Golden Bull. Four of them were lay: the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine or Palsgrave of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony and the Margrave of Brandenburg; three ecclesiastical: the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne. Their dimensions in this mechanical charade are discreetly inferior to that of the Emperor, the lay head of Christendom, whose shadowy authority looked back to Otto and Charlemagne and even Constantine for its precedents. In practice they were not only supreme within their own dominions, but by concerted action could wreck any Imperial project that displeased them.

For a thousand years after Charlemagne’s death the dream persisted. Yet already in 1356, when the Golden Bull was drawn up, the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation was little more than a picturesque fiction. The Hohenstaufens had lost their long duel with the Papacy, and the power of the Hapsburg Emperors was built up outside Germany. By diplomatic marriages and the armed support of hereditary claims the family enlarged its territories to such an extent that Germany could never be the sole interest of a Hapsburg Emperor, and seldom even the first. The master-stroke of the dynasts, momentous for the history of Europe, was the marriage of an Austrian Archduke to a Spanish Princess. As for the Electors, where fear or jealousy failed to move them money was persuasive, and the Hapsburgs had the Augsburg banking-house of Fugger behind them.

The Empire of Charles V, who was thus elected in 1519, blurred all the old boundaries into confusion. Spain was his, with the Spanish possessions in the Netherlands, in Italy, and the fabulous new wealth of America. Burgundy, the Tyrol and Austria were his by inheritance. Bohemia and as much of Hungary as could be saved from the Turks shortly fell to him in like manner. In the midst was Germany, owing him allegiance above the heads of two hundred and fifty lesser authorities, her national configurations lost under the contours of an inchoate world-power.

Such power raised enemies. It was the disturbance of balance under this one hand that gave impetus to the new and vigorous nationalism of France, of England, of the United Provinces of Holland. Nevertheless, Charles V might have kept the dominion of Europe, and even extended it, but for three factors: the Lutherans, the Turks and the gout.

That is not the man who can make me a heretic! exclaimed the Emperor when he first caught sight of Luther. The tragedy of it was that Luther could not make him a German. Born a Fleming, by necessity a Spaniard, Charles was reputed to speak German only to his horse. As a Catholic, he could not compromise with the demands of the German Reformers. As a foreigner, he could not grasp their significance.

And so he had to fight. The French, ready for any lever to use against the Hapsburg power, had previously allied themselves with the infidel Turk. Now they supported the Lutheran Princes, and received as their reward the strategic bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun, which in time became the pivot of their pressure on the Rhine.

The German difficulty broke Charles. There came a summer night, in the thirty-third year of his reign, when Maurice of Saxony chased him out of Innsbruck and over the Brenner Pass. It happened that the English scholar Roger Ascham, who was at that time in the Imperial service, was one of the little company that left the city by one gate as the enemy entered by another. And it is worth noticing the opinion of Master Ascham on the origin of all these battles by sea and land, these forced marches and bloody raids and swift escapes from one walled town to another. Not to the demand for a pure religion, not to the glorious bid for liberty of conscience, nor yet to the revolt of semi-Pagan Saxons does he attribute ye sturres in Italie and Germanie; but simply and directly to unkyndnes between Charles V and Francis I of France, between the Most Catholic King and the Most Christian King. Not dogma, but nationalism explains the intricate politics of the age.

But religious questions demanded settlement. In 1555, with a gesture almost of indifference, Charles summoned the Diet of the Empire to Augsburg, but left his brother Ferdinand to preside over it while he took himself with his world-weariness to Flanders. At the previous Diet, five years earlier, it had been noticed that at fifty Charles seemed to have lost the savour of life. In the glittering Fugger banqueting-hall he ate sparingly and without ceremony, a bent little man in sombre clothing, short of breath and wincing with gout. And now, already turning over in his mind the renunciation and division of his Empire and his own retirement to a Spanish monastery with his elaborate clocks and his quietist meditations, he begged that his infirmities might excuse him from attendance at yet another exchange of claims. Advising his brother to be guided by his conscience, he left the German Parliament to resolve as best it might the problems which he had no strength or desire to face.

Divided into three Colleges—of the Electors (all but the King of Bohemia), the Princes spiritual and temporal, and the Imperial Free Cities—the Diets of the Empire were to that extent representative, and no further. Nor was this Diet of Augsburg well attended even by those whom it could properly summon. Not one of the six eligible Electors appeared in person. Of the ecclesiastical Princes two only were present, of the lay Princes four. And after the death of Pope Julius III on March 24th, the two Roman Cardinals attending the Diet left Augsburg to assist in the election of his successor.

It was not to be expected that Ferdinand, though anxious for a settlement, would allow Catholic authority to suffer any prejudice that he could avoid. But though the Papal party was numerically superior in the Diet, the Protestants were in a strong position. Their recent military successes had won for them the favourable Convention of Passau, and they expected the main clauses of that convention to be ratified. Moreover, they were holding at the same time, at Naumburg in Saxony, a rival assembly attended by more German Princes than the Diet itself. They were not to be easily satisfied, and nearly seven months of deliberation were required before a settlement was hammered out. During that time a number of events occurred which introduced fresh factors into the debate, and a number of others which did not. Bishops Latimer and Ridley suffered at Oxford under the Marian reaction; Marcellus II was elected to the Papacy, lived twenty-two days, and was succeeded by the aged Paul IV, a Neapolitan and an anti-imperialist; Michael Nostradamus, the most celebrated astrologer of his day, published at Lyons his prophetic Centuries which, woeful enough where they were understood, had a quite extraordinary success;{1} and the octogenarian Michelangelo, having symbolised the terrors of his time with his Last Judgement, fell to composing those valedictory sonnets which mirror the meeting of an age of free endeavour with one of bigotry. Europe was awaiting catastrophe, as so often before and since, with an impotent anxiety expressed in wrangling and superstition, while at Augsburg the old and the new order were joined in debate—feudalism thrusting the support of capitalism beneath its insecure throne, and Prince-Bishops dining with bankers off the gold plate of the Fugger Palace.

The agreement which was reached in September is flattered in the history-books with the title of the Pacification of Augsburg. Its governing principle was expressed in the phrase cuius regio eius religio, originated by Carlstadt and promulgated by Luther. Each region, that is to say, must decide its own religion. It sounds admirably fair, and not unlike the system of political self-determination followed in post-war plebiscites. In reality it had the simple effect of leaving in the control of the territorial Princes the religious expression of their subjects. Only in the Free Cities was there a possibility of an approximate self-determination, and the tendency of the coming age was towards a loss of civic power. The movement for religious liberty, that is to say, had resulted merely in the subdivision of religious authority, with all that that promised of strife to come. The population of Germany at this time was in the neighbourhood of seventeen million. The individuals to whom the Pacification of Augsburg secured liberty of religion numbered about twenty thousand.

And even this liberty was restricted to the choice between two confessions, between the dogmas of Rome and Wittenberg. Calvinism and its ally Zwinglianism, well founded and militant creeds, had both been barred from debate. The assembly, indeed, had concerned itself far more with property than with belief. For the secularisation of Church lands had been proceeding in Germany for twenty years, sometimes with the honest object of providing a preponderantly Lutheran population with the means of worship, but more often at the thinly disguised promptings of greed. A date-line had to be found, and the Convention of Passau of 1552 was established as the boundary. Property secularised before that date was abandoned by the Catholics, who maintained their right to resist any further sequestration. Their demand that a Catholic prelate who changed his faith should vacate his see was likewise, after much argument, upheld.

The nuts ripened in the Augsburg copses and the delegates dispersed to their own dominions: the Catholics to defend the rights that they had won and to extend them where possible, the Protestants to defeat, by a vigorous interpretation of the general powers assigned to them, the effect of every concession to which they had subscribed. For since they were authorised to determine which religion should be practised within their territories, they might be justified in converting to their own use the remaining Catholic lands under their control. And this, notably in the Palatinate and the North, they zealously performed.

There were local disturbances, but for the next fifty years Germany at large enjoyed an ominous peace; and it is notable that, apart from the periodical differences between the Princes, Catholics and Protestants contrived to live side by side without any outburst of popular fury such as had embittered the first half of the century. The settlement, in short, was followed by just those transitional evidences of success which bad settlements habitually furnish. A good treaty involves the signatories in immediate constructive efforts which for a time obscure its permanent value. A bad one stultifies all the processes of recovery with a drug that grants instant but deceptive relief.

During the last weeks of the Augsburg Diet the Emperor who had summoned it was already in residence at Brussels, in the park-lodge near the Louvain Gate, preparing the elaborate step of abdication. He could still walk without a stick, and he rode frequently in the park on a she-mule, while throughout his dominions the heavens were watched for phenomena that should reveal the fate of the Empire. Its fate was division. Charles withdrew to Spain to die, leaving to his son Philip all the Spanish possessions in Europe and America, discovered or undiscovered, and to his brother Ferdinand the Hapsburg inheritance in Austria together with the succession to the Holy Roman Empire. For the latter title the formality of election was required. Like the puppets on the Nuremberg clock, the Electors made their due obeisance. Their private reservations did not interfere with the ceremony.

The Empire of Charles V had proved too unwieldy to be managed by one man. But it was still managed by one family. France made peace with Spain, but antagonism to Hapsburg hegemony remained the mainspring of her foreign policy. The distribution of power was still dangerous, and the defence of an unnatural system was to cost Spain, in men and money, sufficient to ruin her. The Hapsburgs had not learned, indeed they never learned, the unreality of dynastic politics. And a brief view of their attempt to dominate Europe by this means is essential for the understanding of the period in which the life of Wallenstein was set. Serving another Hapsburg Emperor, he achieved for himself a power that astonished Europe. The enlightened central policy to which he turned this power, had it succeeded, might have given a new and more orderly direction to continental history. But the scales were weighted against him by religious irredentism and family tradition. He failed, and the attempt cost him both his life and his reputation.

Wallenstein’s fall offers no less to the student of human endeavour than his military campaigns, his great economic undertakings, and all the schemes that he carried with him to the grave. Insofar as it was the result of character it has provided the theme of a great piece of dramatic literature, and of the less convincing reconstructions of novelists. But it was also the result of circumstance, and that circumstance is the stuff of history. To the most remarkable and least familiar career in an age of brutal opportunity, few of the well-used keys will suffice. Wallenstein was neither a religious nor a political fanatic. If he had patriotism, it was of a kind which his fellow-Bohemians could not be expected to appreciate. Living between two periods in which feminine influence secured its greatest triumphs, he was in no way uxorious. He believed in one thing above all else—in himself. According to contemporary custom, but with a more than usual fervour, he supported and satisfied that belief with the practice of astrology.

If that practice seems at times, in Wallenstein’s case, to take on some of the aspects of a personal religion, we must ask ourselves: for what was it a substitute? For Wallenstein was furthermore a convert to Catholicism. How can the two be reconciled? First, by understanding the religious position that gave rise to the Counter-Reformation. Secondly, by examining the relation of astrology to the science of the time. We have seen how inelastic a pacification was produced at Augsburg. What the princes and the preachers could not determine, the soldiers must eventually take in hand. The lessons of Machiavellian expedience learned by Papal example and from the wars of the sixteenth century, prepared the way for the bleak and brilliant individualism of the seventeenth, the individualism of a Cromwell, a Gustavus, a Wallenstein. The fate of Catholicism itself was gathered into the protection of an Order founded by a Spanish soldier.

***

It is clear that whatever of positive value the Reformation might eventually achieve was not yet to be looked for. In material matters all that had been gained was a refurbishing of feudal weapons in the hands of the Princes. The great days of German Renaissance culture were already waning, and literature and philosophy were enslaved to the petty ends of innumerable courtly schools of theologians. The trials for witchcraft, both in Protestant and Catholic territories, which are so characteristic a feature of the social history of the next hundred years, are of wider significance than as evidence of intolerance. In estimating the wave of witch-hunting we must not lose sight of the wave of witchcraft which undoubtedly called it forth. It is well, nevertheless, to bear in mind, when the statistics of military destruction are laid before us, that in 1627 and the following year, when Wallenstein was fighting in northern Germany, nine hundred people were burned for witchcraft farther south, in the diocese of Würzburg.

A puritan element had been manifest in the closing of a majority of the public brothels, but in the Catholic South it was left to the Jesuits to press for moral reforms. Had Calvinism been permitted at this time to become a political force in Germany, the Society of Jesus would have found its work of reclaiming the Empire for the Church considerably harder. Clear and logical in its appeal, Calvinism was well organised and energetic, and associated itself easily with the beginnings of democratic nationalism. In no country where it had obtained a firm hold did the disciples of Loyola penetrate with any success. But in the Empire and in Poland, with their mixed populations and divided loyalties, the Jesuits found a field for their resolve. Strengthened by the Council of Trent, the Papacy thereafter produced for a period representatives whose reforming zeal and inflexible purpose were in sharp contrast to the selfish and vacillating policies of many of their predecessors. There was evidence of jealousy in Rome, but the immense possibilities of the new Order were recognised, and its work facilitated wherever the Papal writ still ran.

Two years after the Pacification of Augsburg, the Venetian Ambassador stated in a dispatch that the Catholics in Germany numbered at most one-tenth of the population. By 1574 the extinction of the older cause seemed imminent. At the outbreak of war in 1618, Catholicism had so far recovered as to represent, on a contemporary estimate, one quarter of the German people. It was owing to the work of the Jesuits, with their perfect discipline and their intelligent attention to education, that the ground had been regained.

It had been at the suggestion of Ferdinand I, while still Archduke of Austria, that in 1551 a nucleus of thirteen Jesuits was established in Vienna, in the hereditary Hapsburg possessions; and four years later, while the Diet was sitting at Augsburg, he wrote to the city council of Cologne recommending the appointment of Jesuits as preachers and school-masters for the benefit of Christian doctrine, discipline and unity. By 1558 the twenty fathers in Cologne had nearly five hundred pupils, and when the Archbishop, having formed a desire to marry, proposed to turn Protestant while retaining his see, the Catholics were successful in upholding the Augsburg provision on the subject. In 1559 the celebrated Peter Canisius began to preach in the cathedral at Augsburg to a congregation that quickly increased from the fifty who first heard him. He occupied in turn the pulpits of Vienna, Prague (where, as he wrote to his general Loyola, I was greeted by a huge stone flung through the window), Regensburg, Worms, Cologne, Strasbourg, Osnabrück and Würzburg. But he gave most of his attention to Austria and Bavaria, on whose fidelity everything depends. That Austria is today under a Catholic Government and that Bavaria and Cologne remain the strongholds of the faith in Germany, affords some notion of how firmly the Jesuits built.

In the Duchy of Bavaria, which was to play so important a part in the coming conflict, the movement found especial favour. Four years before the Pacification of Augsburg, Canisius temporarily accepted—without remuneration, according to his vows—the vice-Chancellorship of Munich University offered to him by Duke Albrecht. Five years later the Duke built a Jesuit College at Ingolstadt, where the Order had occupied the chairs of theology and philosophy since as early as 1549. Indeed, this Danubian University, which stoutly resisted the Reformation, had by Johann Eck, Luther’s opponent, been made for southern Catholicism what Wittenberg was for Protestantism. Give me the first six years of a child’s life and you can have the rest. Loyola’s well-known principle, that education is the key to the minds of nations, was amply justified at Ingolstadt, whence so many crusaders for the Counter-Reformation went out into the world. With two in particular who spent their early years together here we shall presently be concerned. One was Maximilian of Bavaria, who employed Tilly as his general in the attempt to reconquer the Empire for Catholicism. The other was Ferdinand of Gratz, who as the Emperor Ferdinand II was the Catholic champion in the war; who summoned Wallenstein to raise his first great army and at length, when the man became too big for his job, connived at his assassination.

The sixty-odd years that elapsed between the abdication of Charles V and the election of Ferdinand II cover, in England, the creative expansion of the Elizabethan age; in Holland, the heroic struggle against the Spaniards; in Spain the great period of native art and literature. In Europe as a continent there is the Jesuit crusade to stamp it as an age of endeavour, a crusade which burned no heretics and left the Inquisition to the Dominicans. But such sturdy pragmatism serves only to throw into deeper shadow the general despair of this schismatic age, the aftermath of a Renaissance of joyous discovery. Europe went a-whoring after many gods, and found none to satisfy her. There are times when the forces of barbarity seem mobilised in every country at the same moment. In France the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, applauded in Rome, shows the savage lengths to which religious dissension can be brought by political intrigue. In England the life of the Queen (and with it, as is thought, the cause of European Protestantism) seems hourly threatened. In the revolting Netherlands Alba makes his reply. In the Empire both Catholics and Protestants are sharpening their swords. At about this time the armoury of the Elector of Saxony at Dresden contained munitions for 70,000 men.

Small wonder that men turned for counsel to the night sky and to those who professed to read it.

A few months after St. Bartholomew, one to whom such powers were attributed, had chanced to cast his eyes towards the heavens. Returning home from his laboratory at Augsburg on the evening of November 11th, 1572, the astronomer Tycho Brahe tilted his valuable nose{2} upwards and was astonished to perceive in the constellation of Cassiopeia, near the zenith, a very bright star which he was certain had not previously been there. Not only had the birth of a new star found no record since the Star of Bethlehem, but such a phenomenon had been considered by theology (since God had perfected his work on the sixth day) to be virtually impossible. Tycho was sceptical. His eyesight, keen as it was, might more easily be fallible than the wisdom of the ages. Forgetful of his waiting supper, he stopped and made his servants count the stars in the quarter that he indicated. They all confirmed him, and so did a number of peasants who were stopped as they drove home from the fields.

There could be no doubt about it. During all that winter the astronomer took observations of the star with his new quadrant. Towards the spring of 1573 it gradually declined in brilliance, and at length disappeared altogether. Later in the same year Brahe published his findings, among which the least important were the astrological. There were other observers also, less scientific in their approach. Some thought the star must be an old and faint one, hitherto unnoticed. Others, in the face of notable discoveries by Appianus, declared it a comet. Christ’s Second Coming and the Last Judgement were expected in many quarters to follow the appearance, as His birth had followed that of the Bethlehem star. Catholic writers foresaw the victory of their cause, and a certain Georg Busch of Erfurt, in two pamphlets, described the star as a comet formed by the gaseous ascent of the sins of men, which, ignited by Divine displeasure, give off a venomous exhalation which falls again upon the earth with a precipitation of various mischiefs from bad weather to Frenchmen.

The Renaissance brought to the advance of astronomy two direct impulses. In the first place the revival of Greek studies made the work of ancient astronomers—studied during the Middle Ages in Latin versions of Arabic texts—available in the purity of the original. In the second place the new voyages of discovery set up a demand for more precise observations of the apparent motions of stars and planets for the guidance of navigators, while the reports from southern latitudes of the navigators themselves extended the range of the work at home. The earliest observatory in Europe was established at Nuremberg by Regiomontanus and the wealthy Bernhard Walther, who began their observations with the comet of 1472. The development of printing, Germany’s greatest contribution to the Renaissance, enabled them to publish their researches; and these became known, through the Nuremberg geographer Behaim, to Columbus and Vasco da Gama. Through the scientists of Nuremberg, and a little later through the bankers of Augsburg, two inland cities of an almost land-locked country played a decisive and (as it turned out) a suicidal part in the extension of the horizons of the Old World.

But the extreme veneration with which the Renaissance scholars regarded the freshly discovered classics set limits to free enquiry, and the earliest of the new astronomers were content to substantiate the theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy. From what is now Prussia, in 1543, came the first suggestion of an alternative to the Ptolemaic system that had satisfied man and his gods for fourteen hundred years. In that year, the last of his life, Copernicus put forward the notion that the sun rather than the earth dominated the planetary system. What was now needed was more perfect instruments of measure, and the Dane Tycho Brahe made it his study to supply them. His successor Kepler, Wallenstein’s official astrologer, categorically declared that the restoration of astronomy by that Phoenix of Astronomers, Tycho Brahe, was first conceived and determined upon in the year 1564.

None of these pioneers was so exclusively attached to the measurement of angles as to neglect the interpretation of his findings to a public that demanded prophecy. But on the whole it may be said that, for such a man as Brahe, his astrology stood towards his nightly observations with the cross-staff in much the same relation as the modern investigator’s popular articles on Science from an Armchair stand towards his daily work in the laboratory. Astrology, Kepler wrote again, is the foolish daughter of a wise mother, and this wise mother could not have survived the last hundred years without the aid of her foolish daughter.

It is easy