The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

The war had now lasted fourteen years. The Emperor could raise no more armies. His one able general, Wallenstein, was slain as a traitor. Germany was exhausted. Yet because no one power would consent to the others' proposed terms of peace, the war dragged on and on, in such feeble fashion as it could. Its misery fell almost wholly upon the unhappy peasantry. The armies of both sides lived upon the country; what they could not devour they destroyed, lest it be of use to the enemy. Germany became a desert, and its people starved amid their desolated homes. The troops, brutalized by long familiarity with suffering, tortured their captives to extort money or sometimes, it would seem, for the mere pleasure of the sport.

The Emperor Ferdinand died in the midst of the hideous ruin he had wrought. The Swedes, who had long abandoned the high principles of Gustavus, demanded territory as the price of peace. So did France. At last in 1648 the Peace of Westphalia was arranged. By it France became the foremost state of Europe; Sweden became one of the great powers; England, engrossed in her own civil war, could pull no chestnuts from the fire; but the German empire fell practically to pieces. Switzerland and Holland were formally declared outside of it. Each little prince got what increase of power he wanted, and the authority of the empire disappeared. The Hapsburgs still retained their title as its heads, but their real authority was confined entirely to their personal domains, Austria, Bohemia, and such part of Hungary as they could hold against the Turks.[9]

Historians tell us that in those terrible thirty years the population of Germany had dwindled from thirty million to only twelve million; nearly two-thirds of its common people had perished, mostly of starvation. The stored-up wealth of ages had been destroyed. The very character of the race had changed, broken from its old hardihood to temporary feebleness and fawning. The land had been set back an entire century, perhaps two, in its advance toward civilization. That is what war means. That is glory!

RULE OF RICHELIEU

Meanwhile France, profiting by the feebleness of her neighbors, had made great strides. At first the death of Henry IV had threatened her with the old anarchy. Louis XIII, Henry's son, was but a child; the Queen-mother, who became regent, was an Italian, Marie de' Medici, and devoted to the Spanish interests. The Huguenots feared renewed persecution. The nobles of the court grasped after renewed power.

In such turmoil was the land that it seemed necessary to summon the "States-General," the assembly of all the notables of France, the last one to be called until that eventful year of 1789. The States-General talked and dissolved, having done nothing but reveal that there was one capable man among its members, a young bishop who was to be a cardinal, Richelieu. His plans for reform and pacification were not adopted, but he drew the attention of the Queen Regent and became her chief adviser, later the chief adviser of the King.

Richelieu did four things for France. He broke the power of the Huguenots, who had become a political party, and a very troublesome one, a state within a state, independent and defiant, with their impenetrable capital at La Rochelle. After one of the most remarkable sieges of history Richelieu captured La Rochelle, crushed the resistance of the Huguenots by repeated defeats elsewhere, and then—granted them complete religious freedom![10]

It is one of the epochs of the world, the beginning of toleration not through force, but through free-will. A Catholic and a cardinal, having complete power to force these Protestants to his will, bids them worship as they choose, asking only that they become patriotic Frenchmen.

Next Richelieu humbled the great nobles of France, hanging them when they disobeyed his laws. Next by his part in the Thirty Years' War he won territory from both Germany and Spain. He was by no means the first Catholic ruler thus to seek Protestant allies; Francis I and Henry II had both done so in France; in Germany Charles V had sent a Lutheran army against the Pope. But it was Richelieu's successful adherence to this plan that positively and finally relegated religion to a minor place in statecraft, and made nationality, political supremacy, what some have called "vainglory," the foremost impulse.