Protestants were without cohesion, without powerful chiefs. Count Mansfeldt was a brilliant soldier, with a strong dash of the robber. Christian of Brunswick was a brave knight errant, fighting, as his motto had it, for God and for Elizabeth of Bohemia. But neither of them had any great or stable force at his back, and if a ray of victory shone for a moment on their standards, it was soon lost in gloom. In Frederick, ex-king of Bohemia, was no help; and his charming queen could only win for him hearts like that of Christian of Brunswick. The great Protestant Princes of the North, Saxony and Brandenburgh, twin pillars of the cause that should have been, were not only lukewarm, timorous, superstitiously afraid of taking part against the Emperor, but they were sybarites, or rather sots, to whose gross hearts no noble thought could find its way. Their inaction was almost justified by the conduct of the Protestant chiefs, whose councils were full of folly and selfishness, whose policy seemed mere anarchy, and who too often made war like buccaneers. The Evangelical Union, in which Lutheranism and political quietism prevailed, refused its aid to the Calvinist and usurping King of Bohemia. Among foreign powers, England was divided in will, the nation being enthusiastically for Protestantism and Elizabeth of Bohemia, while the Court leant to the side of order and hankered after the Spanish marriage. France was not divided in will: her single will was that of Richelieu, who, to weaken Austria, fanned the flame of civil war in Germany, as he did in England, but lent no decisive aid. Bethlem Gabor, the Evangelical Prince of Transylvania, led semi- barbarous hosts, useful as auxiliaries, but incapable of bearing the main brunt of the struggle; and he was trammelled by his allegiance to his suzerain, the Sultan. The Catholic League was served by a first-rate general in the person of Tilly; the Empire by a first-rate general and first-rate statesman in the person of Wallenstein. The Palatinate was conquered, and the Electorate was transferred by Imperial fiat to Maximilian of Bavaria, the head of the Catholic League, whereby a majority was given to the Catholics in the hitherto equally-divided College of Electors. An Imperial Edict of Restitution went forth, restoring to Catholicism all that it had lost by conversion within the last seventy years. Over all Germany, Jesuits and Capuchins swarmed with the mandates of reaction in their hands. The King of Denmark tardily took up arms only to be overthrown by Tilly at Lutter, and again at Wolgast by Wallenstein. The Catholic and Imperial armies were on the northern seas. Wallenstein, made Admiral of the Empire, was preparing a basis of maritime operations against the Protestant kingdoms of Scandinavia, against the last asylum of Protestantism and Liberty in Holland. Germany, with all its intellect and all its hopes, was on the point of becoming a second Spain. Teutonism was all but enslaved to the Croat. The double star of the House of Austria seemed with baleful aspect to dominate in the sky, and to threaten with extinction European liberty and progress. One bright spot alone remained amidst the gloom. By the side of the brave burghers who beat back the Prince of Parma from the cities of Holland, a place must be made in history for the brave burghers who beat back Wallenstein from Stralsund, after he had sworn, in his grand, impious way, that he would take it though it were bound by a chain to Heaven. The eyes of all Protestants were turned, says Richelieu, like those of sailors, towards the North. And from the North a deliverer came. On Midsummer day, 1630, a bright day in the annals of Protestantism, of Germany, and, as Protestants and Germans must believe, of human liberty and progress, Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, landed at Penemunde, on the Pomeranian coast, and knelt down on the shore to give thanks to God for his safe passage; then showed at once his knowledge of the art of war and of the soldier's heart, by himself taking spade in hand, and commencing the entrenchment of his camp. Gustavus was the grandson of that Gustavus Vasa who had broken at once the bonds of Denmark and of Rome, and had made Sweden independent and Lutheran. He was the son of that Charles Vasa who had defeated the counter-reformation. Devoted from his childhood to the Protestant cause, hardily trained in a country where even the palace was the abode of thrift and self-denial, his mind enlarged by a liberal education, in regard for which, amidst her poverty, as in general character and habits of her people, his Sweden greatly resembled Scotland; his imagination stimulated by the wild scenery, the dark forests, the starry nights of Scandinavia; gifted by nature both in mind and body; the young king had already shown himself a hero. He had waged grim war with the powers of the icy north; he bore several scars, proofs of a valour only too great for the vast interests which depended on his life; he had been a successful innovator in tactics, or rather a successful restorer of the military science of the Romans. But the best of his military innovations were discipline and religion. His discipline redeemed the war from savagery, and made it again, so far as war, and war in that iron age could be, a school of humanity and self-control. In religion he was himself not an ascetic saint, there is one light passage at least in his early life: and at Augsburg they show a ruff plucked from his neck by a fair Augsburger at the crisis of a very brisk flirtation. But he was devout, and he inspired his army with his devotion. The traveller is still struck with the prayer and hymn which open and close the march of the soldiers of Gustavus. Schools for the soldiers' children were held in his camp. It is true that the besetting sin of the Swedes, and of all dwellers in cold countries, is disclosed by the article in his military code directed against the drunkenness of army chaplains.
Sir Thomas Roe, the most sagacious of the English diplomatists of that age, wrote of Gustavus to James I.—"The king hath solemnly protested that he will not depose arms till he hath spoken one word for your majesty in Germany (that was his own phrase), and glory will contend with policy in his resolution; for he hath unlimited thoughts, and is the likeliest instrument for God to work by in Europe. We have often observed great alterations to follow great spirits, as if they were fitted for the times. Certainly, ambit fortunam Caesaris: he thinks the ship cannot sink that carries him, and doth thus oblige prosperity."
Gustavus justified his landing in Germany by a manifesto setting forth hostile acts of the Emperor against him in Poland. No doubt there was a technical casus belli. But, morally, the landing of Gustavus was a glorious breach of the principle of non-intervention. He came to save the world. He was not the less a fit instrument for God to work by because it was likely that he would rule the world when he had saved it.
"A snow king!" tittered the courtiers of Vienna, "he will soon melt away." He soon began to prove to them, both in war and diplomacy, that his melting would be slow. Richelieu at last ventured on a treaty of alliance. Charles I., now on the throne of England, and angry at having been jilted by Spain, also entered into a treaty, and sent British auxiliaries, who, though soon reduced in numbers by sickness, always formed a substantial part of the armies of Gustavus, and in battle and storm earned their full share of the honour of his campaigns. Many British volunteers had already joined the standard of Mansfeldt and other Protestant chiefs; and if some of these men were mere soldiers of the Dugald Dalghetty type, some were the Garibaldians of their day, and brought back at once enthusiasm and military skill from German battlefields to Marston and Naseby. Diplomacy, aided by a little gentle pressure, drew Saxony and Brandenburgh to the better cause, now that the better cause was so strong. But while they dallied and haggled one more great disaster was added to the sum of Protestant calamity. Magdeburgh, the queen of Protestant cities, the citadel of North German liberty, fell—fell with Gustavus and rescue near—and nameless atrocities were perpetrated by the ferocious bands of the Empire on innocents of all ages and both sexes, whose cry goes up against bloodthirsty fanaticism for ever. A shriek of horror rang through the Protestant world, not without reproaches against Gustavus, who cleared himself by words, and was soon to clear himself better by deeds.
Count Tilly was now in sole command on the Catholic and Imperial side. Wallenstein had been dismissed. A military Richelieu, an absolutist in politics, an indifferentist in religion, caring at least for the religious quarrel only as it affected the political question, he aimed at crushing the independence of all the princes, Catholic as well as Protestant, and making the Emperor, or rather Wallenstein in the name of the Imperial devotee, as much master of Germany as the Spanish king was of Spain. But the disclosure of this policy, and the towering pride of its author had alarmed the Catholic princes, and produced a reaction similar to that caused by the absolutist encroachments of Charles V. Aided by the Jesuits, who marked in Wallenstein a statesman whose policy was independent of theirs, and who, if not a traitor to the faith, was at least a bad persecutor, Maximilian and his confederates forced the Emperor to remove Wallenstein from command. The great man received the bearers of the mandate with stately courtesy, with princely hospitality, showed them that he had read in the stars the predominance of Maximilian over Ferdinand, slightly glanced