Grey Eminence by Aldous Huxley

Author:Aldous Huxley [Aldous Huxley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407065618
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

La Rochelle

RICHELIEU HAD SET himself two great tasks: to unify France under an omnipotent monarchy; to break the power of the Hapsburgs and to exalt the Bourbons in their place. The possibility of defeating Spain and Austria depended, obviously, on the previous accomplishment of the first task. Divided, France was weak. Hampered by his chronically rebellious nobles and by the Protestants, who formed a state within the state, the king was powerless to act against his ‘hereditary enemies’ abroad. The glory of the dynasty and even the safety of the realm (for the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs seemed to be aiming at nothing less than the hegemony of Europe) demanded the immediate suppression of feudal privilege and Huguenot power. Only when this had been done would the king be in a position to conduct a foreign war. In the meantime the Hapsburgs would have to be attacked mainly by diplomatic means – by bluff, by endless negotiation, by juggling the balance of power, by subsidizing governments already at war with Spain or Austria.

On matters of domestic policy, Father Joseph had always been in accord with the Cardinal; and by 1624 he was coming reluctantly to accept his foreign policy as well. He saw that, if that great crusade was ever to be undertaken, Spain and Austria must be humbled into submission to French leadership. Within a short time the political conversion was complete; Father Joseph had become as determinedly an enemy of the Hapsburgs as Richelieu himself.

In 1624 the Thirty Years’ War was just six years old and had already been the cause of enormous miseries. Bohemia, where the trouble started, was the first to suffer. Then, in 1619, Bethlen Gabor, the Protestant Prince of Transylvania, broke into the imperial domains and pillaged Austria. In 1620 Tilly’s Catholics ravaged Bohemia once more and committed many atrocities against the civil population. To such humanitarian protests as were made, Tilly merely replied ‘that his men were not nuns’. In 1621 the Protestants re-entered Bohemia under Mansfeld, and the country suffered as atrociously under its defenders as it had suffered in the previous year under its enemies.

When the Protestant army had devoured everything there was to eat in Bohemia, Mansfeld led his men into the Palatinate. Being without money or supplies, he was compelled to subordinate his policy and strategy to the demands of his soldiers’ stomachs. Where there was food there his army must go, regardless of every other consideration. In the Palatinate, Mansfeld was joined by Christian of Brunswick, and between them they succeeded in reducing the people to ruin and despair. Defeated by the imperialists, they were forced to retire into Alsace, and when Alsace had been gnawed to the bone they occupied Lorraine. From Lorraine, the army was invited in 1623 into Holland. Battles were fought on the way in the Spanish Netherlands, and the forces besieging Berg-op-Zoom were defeated. After which, in 1624, Mansfeld marched his men into East Friesland, which suffered the same fate as Bohemia, the Palatinate, Alsace and Lorraine.

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