The Thirty Years' War by Parker Geoffrey

Author:Parker, Geoffrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

ii 1635–1642: The deadlock broken

At the time of the peace of Prague, Ferdinand II was already fifty-seven years old. He had faced opposition from many quarters since he first exercised power in 1596, but he had, by and large, overcome it. In the course of his term as emperor he had deposed an Elector and a number of dukes, margraves and counts. He had restored Imperial power to a level unequalled since the reign of Charles V. But he had failed to persuade the Electors to recognize his son Ferdinand, the victor of Nördlingen, as emperor-designate. Now, the chances seemed better: Ferdinand himself was Elector of Bohemia; Saxony and Brandenburg, newly reconciled to the emperor by the peace of Prague, were anxious to please; the anti-Habsburg Elector of Trier, Philip von Sötern, languished in prison (where he was to remain until 1645) for openly placing himself under French protection. This left only the Wittelsbach brothers, Electors of Bavaria and Cologne, and the refugee Elector of Mainz, Anselm Casimir von Wambold, who had been in exile at Cologne since 1631. Ferdinand felt confident that he could secure recognition of his son's title to succeed from these men, and a meeting of the Electoral College was summoned to Regensburg for September 1636.

The power of the Electors, however, was formidable. In the absence of Diets, they were able (in the caustic phrase of David Chytraeus, a Protestant constitutional lawyer) to 'deck themselves with an eagle's plumage' and usurp certain functions of both the Diet and the emperor. Although, in 1636, young Ferdinand was effectively the only serious candidate - French efforts to run first Wladislaw of Poland and then Maximilian of Bavaria came to nothing - the Electors managed to postpone acknowledging him until December while they attempted to force the emperor into making peace with his enemies. There was some success on the internal front: Ferdinand reluctantly agreed that he would pardon any prince who was prepared to submit to him. He also promised to hold an international peace conference to settle the claims of the foreign powers involved in the war, but further progress on this score was prevented by the extreme demands of the Electors themselves. Maximilian of Bavaria required that France should evacuate Lorraine and restore his dispossessed cousin, Duke Charles IV; George William of Brandenburg, still obsessed by the Pomeranian question, insisted that Sweden 'should not retain one foot of territory on Imperial soil, still less any town or fortress'.1 In the end, the Electors had to be content with Imperial promises that negotiations would soon begin. But on 15 February 1637, Ferdinand died. No serious talks with foreign powers took place.

The war therefore continued. While the French tried unsuccessfully to overrun the South Netherlands and the Rhineland (pages 134-6 above), the Swedish main army under Johan Baner prepared to meet the forces of the emperor, uneasily combined since the peace of Prague with those of Bavaria, Saxony and Brandenburg. In the autumn of 1635, Baner fought a

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