Samuel Gardiner - The Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648

If the present work should appear to be written for more advanced students than those for whom most if not all the other books of the series are designed, the nature of the subject must be pleaded in excuse. The mere fact that it relates exclusively to Continental history makes it unlikely that junior pupils would approach it in any shape, and it is probably impossible to make the very complicated relations between the German states and other European nations interesting to those who are for the first time, or almost the first time, attempting to acquire historical knowledge. Every history, to be a history, must have a unity of its own, and here we have no unity of national life such as that which is reflected in the institutions of England and France, not even the unity of a great race of sovereigns handing down the traditions of government from one generation to another. The unity of the subject which I have chosen must be sought in the growth of the principle of religious toleration as it is adopted or repelled by the institutions under which Germany and France, the two principal nations with which we are concerned, are living. Thus the history of the period may be compared to a gigantic dissolving view. As we enter upon it our minds are filled with German men and things. But Germany fails to find the solution of the problem before it. Gradually France comes with increasing distinctness before us. It succeeds where Germany had failed, and occupies us more and more till it fills the whole field of action.

But though, as I have said, the present work is not intended for young children, neither is it intended for those who require the results of original research. The data for a final judgment on the story are scattered in so many repositories that the Germans themselves have now discovered that a complete investigation into one or other of the sections into which the war naturally falls, is sufficient work for any man. There must surely, however, be many, as well in the upper classes of schools as in more advanced life, who would be glad to know at second hand what is the result of recent inquiry in Germany into the causes of the failure of the last attempt, before our own day, to constitute a united German nation. The writer who undertakes such a task encounters, with his eyes open, all the hazards to which a second-hand narrative is liable. His impressions are less sharp, and are exposed to greater risk of error than those of one who goes direct to the fountain head. He must be content to be the retailer rather than the manufacturer of history, knowing that each kind of work has its use.

Not that the present book is a mere collection of other men's words. If I have often adopted without much change the narrative or opinions of German writers, I have never said any thing which I have not made my own, by passing it through my own mind. To reproduce with mere paste and scissors passages from the writings of men so opposed to one another as Ranke, Gindely, Ritter, Opel, Hurter, Droysen, Gfrörer, Klopp, Förster, Villermont, Uetterodt, Koch, and others, would be to bewilder, not to instruct. And in forming my own opinions I have had the advantage not merely of being in the habit of writing from original documents, but of having studied at least some of the letters and State papers of the time. I have thus, for example, been able, from my knowledge of the despatches of Sir Robert Anstruther, to neglect Droysen's elaborate argument that Christian IV. took part in the war through jealousy of Gustavus Adolphus; and to speak, in opposition to Onno Klopp, of the persistence of the Dukes of Mecklenburg in the support which they gave to the King of Denmark.

More valuable than the little additional knowledge thus obtained is the insight into the feelings and thoughts of the Catholic princes gained by a very slight acquaintance with their own correspondence. To start by trying to understand what a man appears to himself, and only when that has been done, to try him by the standard of the judgment of others, is in my opinion the first canon of historical portraiture; and it is one which till very recent times has been more neglected by writers on the Thirty Years' War than by students of any other portion of history.

My teachers in Germany from whom I have borrowed so freely, and according to the rules of the series, without acknowledgment in foot-notes, will, I hope, accept this little book, not as an attempt to do that which they are so much better qualified to execute, but as an expression of the sympathy which an Englishman cannot but feel for the misfortunes as well as the achievements of his kindred on the Continent, and as an effort to tell something of the by-gone fortunes of their race to those amongst his own countrymen to whom, from youth or from circumstances of education, German literature is a sealed book.

I have only to add that the dates are according to the New Style. Ten days must be deducted to bring them in accordance with those used at the time in England.

§ 1. Want of national institutions in Germany.

It was the misfortune of Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that, with most of the conditions requisite for the formation of national unity, she had no really national institutions. There was an emperor, who looked something like an English king, and a Diet, or General Assembly, which looked something like an English Parliament, but the resemblance was far greater in appearance than in reality.

§ 2. The Emperor.

The Emperor was chosen by three ecclesiastical electors, the Archbishops of Mentz, Treves and Cologne, and four lay electors, the Elector Palatine, the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, and the King of Bohemia. In theory he was the successor of the Roman Emperors Julius and Constantine, the ruler of the world, or of so much of it at least as he could bring under his sway. More particularly, he was the successor of Charles the Great and Otto the Great, the lay head of Western Christendom. The Emperor Sigismund, on his death-bed, had directed that his body should lie in state for some days, that men might see 'that the lord of all the world was dead.' 'We have chosen your grace,' said the electors to Frederick III., 'as head, protector, and governor of all Christendom.' Yet it would be hard to find a single fragment of reality corresponding to the magnificence of the claim.

§ 3. The German kingship.

As far, however, as the period now under review is concerned, though the name of Emperor was retained, it is unnecessary to trouble ourselves with the rights, real or imaginary, connected with the imperial dignity. Charles the Great, before the imperial crown was conferred on him, ruled as king, by national assent or by conquest, over a great part of Western Europe. When his dominions were divided amongst his successors, the rule of those successors in Germany or elsewhere had no necessary connexion with the imperial crown. Henry the Fowler, one of the greatest of the Kings of the Germans, was never an emperor at all, and though, after the reign of his son Otto the Great, the German kings claimed from the Pope the imperial crown as their right, they never failed also to receive a special German crown at Aachen ( Aix-la-Chapelle ) or at Frankfort as the symbol of their headship over German lands and German men.

§ 4. Its connexion with the Empire.

When, therefore, the writers of the 16th or 17th centuries speak of the rights of the Emperor in Germany, they really mean to speak of the rights of the Emperor in his capacity of German king, just as, when they speak of the Empire, they mean what we call Germany, together with certain surrounding districts, such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Lorraine, and Eastern Burgundy or Franche Comté, which are not now, if Alsace and the newly-conquered part of Lorraine be excepted, included under that name. In the same way the mere fragments of feudal supremacy, and the payment of feudal dues which the emperors claimed in Italy, belonged to them, not as emperors, but simply as Italian kings, and as wearers of the iron crown of Lombardy, which, as the legends told, was formed of nails taken from the Saviour's cross.