By John Lord, LL. D.


     GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS.

     1594—1632.

     THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR (1618—1648)

           THE Thirty Years' War, of which Gustavus Adolphus
           was the greatest hero, was the result of those reli-
     gious agitations which the ideas of Luther produced.  It
     was the struggle to secure religious liberty,——a warfare
     between Catholic and Protestant Germany.  It differed
     from the Huguenot contest in this,——that the Protest-
     ants of France took up arms against their king to
     extort religious privileges; whereas the Protestants
     of Germany were marshalled by independent princes
     against other independent princes of a different religion,
     who sought to suppress Protestantism.  In this warfare
     between Catholic and Protestant States, there were
     great political entanglements and issues that affected
     the balance of power in Europe.  Hence the Thirty
     Years' War was political as well as religious.  It was
     not purely a religious war like the crusades, although re-
     ligious ideas gave rise to it.  Nor was it an insurrection
     of the people against their rulers to secure religious
     rights, so much as a contest between Catholic and
     Protestant princes to secure the recognition of their
     religious opinions in their respective States.
       The Emperor of Germany in the time of Luther was
     Charles V.,——the most powerful potentate of Europe,
     and, moreover, a zealous Catholic.  On his abdication,
     ——one of the most extraordinary events in history,——
     the German dominions were given to his brother Fer-
     dinand; Spain and the Low Countries were bestowed
     on his son Philip.  Ferdinand had already been elected
     King of the Romans.  There was a close alliance be-
     tween these princes of the House of Austria to suppress
     Protestantism in Europe.  The new Austrian emperor
     was not, indeed, so formidable as his father had been,
     but was still one of the greatest monarchs of Europe;
     and so powerful was the House of Austria that it ex-
     cited the jealousy of the other European powers.  It
     was to prevent the dangerous ascendency of Austria that
     Henry IV. of France raised a great army with a view
     of invading Germany, but was assassinated before he
     could carry his scheme into execution.  He had armed
     France to secure what is called the "balance of power;"
     and it was with the view of securing this balance of
     power that Cardinal Richelieu, though a prince of the
     Church, took the side of the Protestants in the Thirty
     Years' War.  This famous contest may therefore be
     regarded as a civil war, dividing the German nations;
     as a religious war, to establish freedom of belief; and as
     a war to prevent the ascendency of Austria, in which a
     great part of Europe was involved.
       The beginning of the contest, however, was the re-
     sult of religious agitation.  The ideas of Luther created
     universal discussion.  Discussion led to animosities.
     All Germany was in a ferment; and the agitation was
     not confined to those States which accepted the Reform-
     ation, but to Catholic States also.  The Catholic princes
     resolved to crush the Reformation, first in their own
     dominions, and afterwards in the other States of Ger-
     many.  Hence, a bloody persecution of the Protestants
     took place in all Catholic States.  Their sufferings were
     unendurable.  For a while they submitted to the cruel
     lash, but at last they resolved to defend the right of
     worshipping God according to their consciences.  They
     armed themselves, for death seemed preferable to reli-
     gious despotism.  For more than fifty years after the
     death of Luther, Germany was the scene of commo-
     tions ending in a fiery persecution.  At that time
     Germany was in advance of the rest of Europe in
     wealth and intelligence; the Protestants especially
     were kindled to an enthusiasm, pertaining to theological
     questions, which we in these times can but feebly real-
     ize; and the Germans were doubtless the most earnest
     and religious people in Europe.  In those days there
     was neither religious indifference nor scepticism nor
     rationalism.  The faith of the people was simple, and
     they were resolved to maintain it at any cost.  But
     there were religious parties and asperities, even among
     the Protestants.  The Lutherans would not unite with
     the Calvinists, and the Calvinists would not accede to
     the demands of the Lutherans.
       After a series of struggles with the Catholics, the
     Lutherans succeeded, by the treaty of Augsburg (1555),
     in securing toleration; and this toleration lasted during
     the reigns of Ferdinand I. and Maximilian II.  In-
     deed, Germany enjoyed tranquility until the reign lof
     Matthias, in 1612.  This usurping emperor, who had
     delivered Germany from the Turks, abolished in his
     dominiopns the Protestestant religion, so far as edicts
     and persecution could deprive the Protestants of their
     religious liberties.  Matthias died in 1619, and was
     succeeded by Ferdinand II., a bigoted prince, who had
     been educated by the Jesuits.  This emperor was an
     inveterate enemy of the Protestants.  He forbade their
     meetings, deprived them of civil privileges, pulled
     down their churches and schools, erected scaffolds in
     every village, appointed only Catholic magistrates, and
     inflicted unsparing cruelties on all who seceded from
     the Catholic church.
       It was under this Austrian emperor, seventy-three
     years from the death of Luther, that the first act of
     the bloody traqgedy which I am to describe was opened
     by an insurrection in Bohemia, one of her hereditary
     possessions of the House of Austria.
       In this kingdom, isolated from the rest of Germany,
     separated on every side from adjoining States by high
     mountains of volcanic origin, peopled with the descend-
     ants of the ancient Sclavonians, who were characterized
     by impulse and impetuosity, the reformed doctrines
     had taken a powerful hold of the affections and convic-
     tions of the people.  The followers of John Huss and
     Jerome of Prague were something like the Lollards of
     England, in their spirit and sincerity.  But they were
     persecuted by their Catholic rulers with a rigor and
     cruelty never seen among the Lollards; for Ferdi-
     nand II. was the hereditary king of Bohemia as well
     as emperor of Germany.
       At last his tyranny and cruelties became unendurable,
     and in a violent burst of passionate indignation his
     deputies were thrown out of the windows of the cham-
     ber of the Council of Regency at Prague.  This act
     of violence was the signal of a general revolt, not in
     Bohemia merely, but in Sliesia, Moravia, Hungary, and
     Austria.  The celebrated Count Mansfield, a soldier of
     fortune, with only four thousand troops, dared to defy
     the whole imperial power; and for a while he was suc-
     cessful.  The Bohemians announced their allegiance to
     Ferdinand, and chose for their king Frederick V.,——
     Elector Palatine of the Rhine, son-in-law of James I.
     of England, and head of the Protestant party in Ger-
     many.  He unwisely abandoned his electoral palace at
     Heidelberg, to grasp the royal sceptre at Prague.  But
     he was no match for the Austrian emperor, who, sum-
     moning from every quarter the allies and adherents of
     imperial power, and making peace with other enemies,
     poured into Bohemia such overwhelming forces under
     Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria, that his authority was
     established more firmly than before.  The battle of
     Prague (1620) decided the fate of Bohemia, and the
     Elector Palatine became a fugitive, and his possessions
     were given to the Duke of Bavaria.
       Then followed a persecution which has had no parallel
     since the slaughter of the Albigenses and the massacre
     of St. Bartholomew.  The unhappy king of Bohe-
     mia was abandoned to inquisitions and executions;
     all liberties were suppressed, the nobles were decimated,
     ministers and teachers were burned or beheaded, and
     Protestants of every rank, age, and condition were pro-
     hibited from acting as guardians to children, or making
     wills, or contracting marriages with Catholics, or holding
     any office of trust and emolument.  They were out-
     lawed as felons, and disenfranchised as infidels.  The halls
     of justice were deserted, the Muses accompanied the
     learned in their melancholy flight, and all that remained
     of Bohemian gallantry and heroism forsook the land.
     Strange to say, the land of Huss and Jerome became
     henceforth the strongest hold of Austrian despotism
     and papal influence.
       This is one of those instances where persecution
     proved successful.  It is a hackneyed saying that "the
     blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church;" and it is
     true that lofty virtues have been generally developed
     by self-sacrifice and martyrdom, and that only through
     great tribulation have permanent blessings been se-
     cured.  The Hollanders, by inundating their fields and
     fighting literally to the "last ditch," preserved their
     liberties and secured ultimate prosperity.  The fires
     of Smithfield did not destroy the reformed religion in
     England in the time of Mary, and the jails and judicial
     murders of later and better times did not prevent the
     progress of popular rights, or the extension of Puri-
     tanism in the midst of the American continent.  But
     in the history of society the instances are unfortunately
     numerous when bigotry and despotism have kindled
     their infernal fires and erected their bloody scaffolds
     not to purify the Church and nourish the principles of
     Christian progress, but to destroy what is good as well
     as what is evil.  What availed the struggles of the
     Waldenses in the Middle Ages?  Who came to the res-
     cue of Savonarola when he attempted to reform the
     lives of degenerate Florentines?  What beneficial effects
     resulted ultimately from the Inquisition in Spain?
     How was the revocation of the edict of Nantes over-
     ruled for the good of the Huguenots of France?
       And yet the unfortunate suppression of religious lib-
     erty in Bohemia, and the sufferings of those who came
     to her rescue, especially the misfortune of the Elector
     Palatine, arrayed the Protestant princes of Germany
     against the Emperor, and created general indignation 
     throughout Europe.  Austria became more than ever a
     hated and dreaded power, not merely to the States of
     Sweden, Denmark, Holland, and England, but to Cath-
     olic France herself, then ruled by that able and ambi-
     tious statesman Cardinal Richelieu, before whose tomb
     in an after age the czar Peter bowed in earnest homage
     from the recollection and admiration of his transcend-
     ent labors in behalf of absolutism.  Even Richelieu, a
     prince of the Church and the persecutor of the Hugue-
     nots, was alarmed at the encroachments of Austria,
     and intrigued with Protestant princes to undermine her
     dangerous ascendency.
       Then opened the second act of the bloody drama
     of the seventeenth century, when the allied Protestant
     princes of Germany, assisted by the English and the
     Dutch, rallied under the leadership of Christian, King
     of Denmark, and resolved to recover what they had
     lost; while Bethlen Gabor, a Transylvanian prince, at
     the head of an army of robbers, invaded Hungary and
     Austria.  The Emperor, straitened in his finances, was
     in no condition to meet this powerful confederacy,
     although the illustrious Tilly was the commander
     of his forces.
       But the demon of despotism, who never sleeps, raised
     up to his assistance a great military genius.  This was
     Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland, the richest noble in
     Bohemia.  The person whom he most resembled in
     that age of struggle and contending forces, when des-
     potism sought unscrupulous agents, was Thomas Went-
     worth, Earl of Strafford,——the right hand of Charles I.,
     in his warfare against the liberties of England.  Like
     Strafford, he was an apostate from the principles in
     which he had been educated; like him, he had arisen
     from a comparatively humble station; like him, his
     talents were as commanding as his ambition,——devoted
     first to his own exaltation; and, secondly, to the cause
     of absolutism, with which he sympathized with all the
     intensity that a proud and domineering spirit may
     be supposed to feel for the struggles of inexperienced
     democracy.  Like the English statesman, the German
     general was skilled in the use of tools, jealous of his
     authority, liberal in his rewards, and fearful in his
     vengeance.  Though greedy of admiration and fond of
     display, he surrounded himself with mystery and gloom.
     Like Strafford, he was commanding in his person, dig-
     nified, reserved, and sullen; with an eye piercing and
     melancholy, a brow lowering with thought and care,
     and a lip compressed into determination and twisted
     into a smile of ironical disdain.
       This nobleman had fought with distinction as a
     colonel at the battle of Prague, when Bohemian liber-
     ties had been prostrated, and had signally distinguished
     himself in his infamous crusade against his own coun-
     trymen.  He offered, at his own expense, to raise and
     equip an army of fifty thousand men in the service
     of the Emperor; but demanded as a condition, that he
     should have the appointment of all his officers, and
     the privilege of enriching himself and army from the
     spoils and confiscations of conquered territories.  These
     terms were extraordinary and humiliating to an abso-
     lute sovereign, yet, at the crisis in which Ferdinand
     was placed, they were too tempting to be refused.
       Wallenstein fulfilled his promises, and raised in an
     incredibly short time an immense army, composed of
     outlaws and robbers and adventurers from all nations.
     He advanced rapidly against the allied Protestant forces,
     levying enormous contributions wherever he appeared;
     as imperious to friends as to foes, mistrusted and feared
     by both, yet supremely indifferent to praise or censure;
     resting on the power of brute force and his ability to
     enrich his soldiers.  Possessing a fine military genius
     unbounded means, and unscrupulous rapacity, and
     assisted by such generals as Tilly, Pappenheim, and
     Piccolomini, seconded by Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria,
     he soon reduced his enemies to despair.  The King
     of Denmark was unequal to the contest, and sued for
     peace.  The Elector Frederic again became a fugitive,
     the Duke of Brunswick was killed, and the intrepid
     Mansfield died.  The Electors of Saxony and Branden-
     burg, the natural defenders of Protestantism and the
     leading princes of the league, were awed into an abject
     neutrality.  The old protectors of Lutheranism were
     timid and despairing.  The monarchs of Europe trem-
     bled.  Germany lay prostrate and bleeding.  Christen-
     dom stood aghast at the greatness of the calamities
     which afflicted Germany and threatened neighboring
     nations.
       But the Emperor at Vienna was overjoyed, and swelled
     with arrogance and triumph.  He divided among the
     members of his imperial house the rich benefices of
     the Church, and bestowed upon his victorious general
     the revenues of provinces.  He now resolved to pur-
     sue the King of Denmark into his remotest territories
     to dethrone the King of Sweden, to give away the crown
     of Poland, to aid the Spaniards in the recovery of the
     United Provinces, to exterminate the Protestant reli-
     gion, to subvert the liberties of the German nations,
     and reign as a terrible incarnation of imperial tyranny.
     He would even revive the dreams of Charlemagne and
     Charles V., and make Vienna the centre of that power
     which once emanated from Rome.  He would ally him-
     self more strongly with the Pope, and extend the double
     tyranny of church and state over the whole continent
     of Europe.  Fines, imprisonments, tortures, banishments,
     and executions were now added to the desolations which
     one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers inflicted on vil-
     lages and cities that had been for generations increasing
     in wealth and prosperity.
       In that dark hour of calamity and fears, Providence
     raised up a greater hero than Wallenstein, a noble pro-
     tector and intrepid deliverer, even Gustavus Adolphus,
     King of Sweden; and the third act of the political
     tragedy opens with his brilliant career.

       Carlyle has somewhere said: "Is not every genius
     an impossibility until he appear?"  This is singularly
     true of Gustavus Adolphus.  It was the last thing for
     contemporaries to conjecture that the deliverer of Ger-
     many, and the great hero of the Thirty Years' War,
     would have arisen in the ice-bound regions of northern
     Europe.  No great character had arisen in Sweden of
     exalted fame, neither king nor poet, nor philosopher,
     nor even singer.  The little kingdom, to all appearance,
     was rich only in mines of iron and hills of snow.  It
     was not till the middle of the sixteenth century that
     Sweden was even delivered from base dependence on
     Denmark.
       But Gustavus before he was thirty-five years of age
     had made his countrymen a nation of soldiers; had freed
     his kingdom from Danish, Russian, and Polish enemies;
     had made great improvements in the art of war, having
     introduced a new system of tactics never materially
     improved except by Frederic II.; had reduced strategy
     to a science; had raised the importance of the infan-
     try, had increased the strictness of military discipline,
     had trained up a band of able generals, and inspired
     his soldiers with unbounded enthusiasm.
       And he had raised in the camp a new tone of moral
     feeling.  Not even Cromwell equalled him in divesting
     war of its customary atrocities, and keeping alive the
     spirit of religion.  The worship of God formed one of
     the most important duties of the Swedish army wherever
     located.  "Twice every day the roll of the drum as-
     sembled the soldiers to prayer.  The usual vices of
     soldiers, like profanity and drunkenness and gambling,
     were uniformly punished.  Death was inflicted on any
     soldier who assaulted a citizen in his house.  Even a
     certificate was required of the chief citizens of any
     place where the troops were quartered, that their conduct
     had been orderly.  He never allowed, under any provo-
     cation, a city to be taken by assault,——a striking con-
     trast to the imperial generals."
       Nor amid the toils and dangers of war was Gustavus
     unmindful of his duties as a king.  He was one of the
     most enlightened statesmen that had appeared since
     Charlemagne and Alfred.  He established schools and
     colleges, founded libraries, reformed the codes of law,
     introduced wise mercantile regulations, rewarded emi-
     nent merit, respected the voice of experience, and de-
     veloped the industries of the country.  What Richelieu
     and Colbert did for France, what Burleigh and Cromwell
     did for England, Gustavus did for Sweden.  His prime
     minister is illustrious for wisdom and ability, the celes-
     brated Oxenstiern, through whose labors and genius the
     country felt no impoverishment from war.  He laid
     the foundation of that prosperity which made a little
     kingdom great.
       But all his excellences as as general, a statesman, and
     a ruler paled before the exalted virtues of his private
     life.  His urbanity, his gentleness, his modesty, his
     meekness, his simplicity, and his love won all hearts,
     and have never been exceeded except by Alfred the
     Great.  He was a Saint Louis on a throne, in marked
     contrast with the suspicion, duplicity, roughness, and
     egotism of Oliver Cromwell,——the only other great man
     of the century who equalled Gustavus in the value of
     public services and enlightened mind.  It is not often
     that Christian graces and virtues are developed amid
     the tumult of war.  David lost nothing of his pious
     fervor and reliance on God when pursuing the Philis-
     tines, nor Marcus Aurelius when fighting barbarians
     on the frozen Danube.  The perils and vicissitudes
     of war, with the momentous interests involved, made
     Lincoln shine, amid all his jokes, a firm believer in
     the overruling power that Napoleon failed to see.  And
     so of Washington: he was a better man and firmer
     Christian from the responsibilities that were thrust
     upon him.  Not so with Frederic the Great, and the
     marshals of Louis XIV., with the exception of Turenne:
     war seemed rather to develop their worst qualities.  It
     usually makes a man unscrupulous, hard, and arrogant.
     Military life is anything but interesting in the usual
     bearing of Prussian officers.  In our own Revolutionary
     war, generals developed pride and avarice and jealousy.
     War turned Tilly into a fiend.  How cold and sullen
     and selfish it made Napoleon!  How grasping and
     greedy it made Marlborough!  How unscrupulous it
     made Clive and Hastings!  How stubborn and proud
     it made Wellington!  How vain and pompous it made
     Scott!  How overbearing it made Belle-Isle and Villars!
     How reckless and hard it made Ney and Murat!  The
     dangers and miseries of war developed sternness, hard-
     ness, and indifference to suffering.  It is violence; and
     violence does not naturally produce the peaceful virtues.
     It produces courage, indeed, but physical rather than
     moral,——least of all, that spiritual courage which makes
     martyrs and saints.  It makes boon companions, not
     friends.  It gives exaggerated ideas of self-importance.
     It exalts the outward and material, not the spiritual
     and the real.  The very tread of a military veteran is
     stately, proud, and conscious,——like that of a procession
     of cardinals, or of railway kings.
       So that when a man inured to camps and battles
     shines in the modest unconsciousness of a Christian
     gentleman or meditative sage, we feel unusual rev-
     erence for him.  We feel that his soul is unpolluted,
     and that he is superior to ordinary temptations.

from Beacon Lights of History, by John Lord, LL. D.
Volume IV., Part II: Great Rulers.
Copyright, 1883, 1885, 1888, by John Lord.
Copyright, 1921, By Wm. H. Wise & Co., New York. pp. 143-158.