7

From Rudolf to Matthias 1582–1612

RELIGION AND THE GERMAN PRINCES

The problems inherent in the Religious Peace of Augsburg became more apparent from 1582, six years into Emperor Rudolf’s reign, and grew pronounced as the seventeenth century commenced, leaving a difficult legacy for Matthias on his imperial accession in 1612. While tensions mounted in the Empire, there was no inexorable slide towards war, however. The problems were certainly serious, but not insurmountable, particularly if the emperor was prepared to act more forcefully and consistently to provide the impartial guidance most princes desired. As the following will show, there were formidable barriers to polarization along confessional lines. Two hostile alliances did coalesce after 1608, but both remained expressions of disparate and partially contradictory princely interests. These interests need to be teased out and examined in some detail, because they reveal why some were prepared to take up arms against the emperor in 1618, while others backed him and the majority sought peace.

Potential Catholic Leaders

The Empire’s hierarchical structure encouraged disaffected princes to expect leadership from above. The emperor was the Catholics’ natural choice of leader, but he was extremely reluctant to favour them openly. By brokering the Augsburg settlement, the Austrian Habsburgs associated their imperial role with cross-confessional politics. There were good reasons for them to continue this when many of their subjects were Lutherans and broad support was required to maintain defence against the Ottomans. Emperor Ferdinand I founded the Landsberg Alliance in 1556 that was expressly dedicated to upholding the Augsburg settlement and renounced religion as a ground for violence. Bavaria, Salzburg and other leading Catholics joined, as did important Protestant territories, such as the imperial cities of Nuremberg and Augsburg. The duke of Alba’s application to join was rejected by Maximilian II in order to preserve the alliance’s bi-partisan character.¹

The Habsburgs’ stance deterred other Catholics from stepping out of their shadow to form a separate confessional party. The elector of Mainz was the next potential leader, as senior Catholic prince and arch-chancellor of the Empire, but he followed the emperor in favouring dialogue with moderate Lutherans in the interests of the public peace. Like the other two ecclesiastical electorates, he lacked the resources for an independent role and witnessed with dismay the sectarian violence just across the frontier in France and the Netherlands. The lack of hereditary rule within the imperial church lands also focused attention on more immediate concerns of nepotism or promoting internal Catholic renewal. Personal ambitions intersected with competing visions of Catholicism to create further rifts within and between the numerous bishoprics, priories and other foundations. What has been taken by some historians as evidence of a united Counter-Reformation front crumbles upon closer inspection into a series of local struggles for influence that inhibited any coherent common action against Protestantism.

A good example is the ambitious Bishop Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn, who was elected to Würzburg by a small majority in 1573. At first sight, he appears an archetypal Counter-Reformer who reversed the spread of Protestantism into the Franconian church lands. He swiftly secured financial independence from his cathedral chapter by blurring the distinction between local and imperial taxes, extracting more from his subjects than the territory actually owed as assistance against the Turks. This enabled him to undercut the influence of the Franconian imperial knights, who dominated the chapter and were defecting to Lutheranism, and to finance measures to revive Catholic life. He founded a new hospital and a university in 1582, and reorganized the bishopric into 24 parishes, each staffed by a more qualified priest.² Six hundred Lutherans were expelled from the diocese in 1586, followed by the formal promulgation of the Tridentine decrees in the bishopric three years later.

With his own diocese secure, Echter turned his attention to his neighbours, starting with Fulda where he engineered the removal of Abbot Dernbach in 1576. Though Dernbach had been raised a Protestant, he had converted and had begun his own programme of Catholic reform in 1571. Echter’s intervention led to cases in the imperial courts that restored Dernbach in 1602. By then, most of the local nobles had secured legal immunities for their Lutheran faith, eventually escaping the abbot’s jurisdiction altogether as imperial knights in 1652. Reform was delayed, because Dernbach now concentrated on seeking episcopal status to preserve Fulda’s autonomy. Similar problems followed in Bamberg where Echter tried to get himself elected bishop, even though the current incumbent was promoting his own reforms. The presence of Echter’s supporters split the Tridentine vote when a vacancy occurred in 1599, giving the election to Johann Philipp von Gebsattel, a representative of more traditional Renaissance Catholicism who tolerated a resurgence of Lutheranism. In return for large loans to Bavaria, Echter won political backing for his protégé Aschhausen who eventually became bishop in 1609 and belatedly began a reform programme. Elsewhere, ecclesiastical princes squabbled over precedence in imperial institutions, or jurisdiction over individual foundations. None was able to offer clear leadership and the idea of a coordinated, coherent Counter-Reformation was a figment of Protestant paranoia.

Though there were far more Catholic than Protestant princes, the majority were ecclesiastics, because few secular rulers remained loyal to Rome. The duke of Lorraine was too heavily involved in French politics to serve as a Catholic leader in Germany, leaving Bavaria as the only possible alternative to the Habsburgs.³ Bavaria had already consolidated political authority on the basis of Catholic conformity before the Habsburg archdukes attempted this in their own lands. Admittedly, Bavarian Protestantism had been far weaker, allowing the duke to outmanoeuvre the few senior nobles who dabbled with Lutheranism and forge an alliance with the lesser nobility who remained overwhelmingly Catholic. By 1600 Bavaria was the best-governed German territory, with a relatively comprehensive administrative network reaching into local communities to extract regular taxes. Certain factors did suggest that Bavarian militancy might translate into political activism. The long-standing rivalry with their Palatinate relations deepened as these embraced Calvinism in the 1560s, and the duke was heir to a proud heritage that included his ancestor Ludwig IV, who had been emperor between 1314 and 1347.

However, a more prominent role for the duchy would inevitably strain relations with the Habsburgs, who had been happy to help Bavaria provided the duke remembered his place as junior partner. Duke Albrecht IV had married Kunigunde, sister of Emperor Maximilian I who backed Bavaria in its violent inheritance dispute with the Palatinate in 1503–5. Albrecht V, who became duke in 1550, and his grandson Maximilian I, who ruled from 1598, both married Habsburg princesses, while Albrecht’s daughter Maria married an archduke and Maximilian’s sister, Maria Anna, married the future emperor Ferdinand II. However, Austrian territory enclosed Bavaria to the south and east and the Habsburgs had helped themselves to Kuefstein and other areas on the Tirolean border in 1505. Austria contested Bavarian influence in the large but sparsely populated archbishopric of Salzburg that lay between them, and both were rivals in the salt trade that constituted their principal export.

Bavaria needed to tread carefully, generally supporting the Habsburgs, but expecting rewards intended to lift the duke into the princely premier league. Promotion was eventually to be secured through the transfer of the Palatine electoral title in 1623, mirroring the elevation of the Albertine Saxons at the Ernestines’ expense in 1547, after the Schmalkaldic War. However, there was no opportunity to press such a demand before the seventeenth century, and none of the dukes showed any inclination to do so prior to the accession of Maximilian I. Albrecht V solidly backed Habsburg cross-confessionalism, even vetoing the application of the bishop of Augsburg to join the Landsberg Alliance because he was too militant. His successor from 1579, Wilhelm V, showed more interest in extending Bavarian influence within the imperial church, but otherwise restricted his activity to his own lands by embarking on a major building programme in Munich.

Perhaps the most significant barrier to a Catholic alliance was Catholicism itself. To most Catholics, the empire was still a single respublica Christiana within a unitary Christendom. Since their own faith represented the only ‘true’ religion, they had no need to separate themselves from existing institutions as a distinct confessional block. To do so would suggest the established order was somehow defective and imply that the Protestants were justified in criticizing it.

Potential Protestant Leaders

Protestant princes displayed even less cohesion than the Catholics, because they disagreed over doctrine, as well as all the usual conflicts about status and dynastic interest. Two distinct groups emerged gradually as the issues became more sharply defined. Most backed a moderate, Lutheran group led by Saxony which favoured working within the constitution to preserve the gains of 1555. A more radical, Calvinist group led by the Palatinate sought constitutional change through confrontation, and won only modest support from minor counts and territorial nobles. The division was neither clear nor final. Calvinist Brandenburg and Hessen-Kassel oscillated between the two factions, while important Lutheran princes like Württemberg and Ansbach sided with the Palatinate for considerable periods. Moreover, while the divisions came to be expressed confessionally, the differences over tactics pre-dated the emergence of Calvinism as a political force within the Empire.

As the birthplace of the Reformation, Saxony was the obvious choice as Protestant leader. Historians have generally shown little sympathy for Saxony, the least understood of all the protagonists during the Thirty Years War. Given that most have thought the war inevitable and the Empire in terminal decline, Saxon attempts to sustain the Augsburg settlement naturally appear naïve and doomed to failure.⁴ Yet the 1555 peace largely satisfied Saxon objectives by stabilizing a religious and political balance within the Empire. Since it adhered strictly to Lutheran orthodoxy, it had nothing to gain from the radicals’ campaign to include Calvinism within the peace. Though it did not assume formal control of the bishoprics of Zeitz-Naumburg, Meissen and Merseburg until 1561-81, it claimed these had already been secularized in 1542 and so were covered by the terms agreed in Augsburg. The elector was interested in placing relations as administrators in neighbouring Magdeburg and Halberstadt, but the main obstacle here was competition from rival Protestants, not Catholic resistance. Above all, the elector never forgot that he owed his title to Habsburg favour in 1547. Duke Moritz’s leadership of the princes’ revolt in 1551–2 had been an aberration in otherwise continued Albertine-Habsburg cooperation dating from 1487, and he reverted to backing the imperial dynasty immediately after Ferdinand agreed terms at Passau. His brother and successor, August, continued this during his reign, from 1553 to 1586, because this seemed the best guarantee for Saxony’s new status. It also inclined August to remain aloof from his Ernestine relations and other established princely families, preferring instead the company of his fellow electors within their exclusive college at the Reichstag. Saxony’s determination to preserve the status quo did not mean its policy was inflexible. On the contrary, August developed a standard tactic that his successors continued into the war after 1618. Each new problem was to be isolated diplomatically to prevent it from disturbing the constitutional balance, and then shifted to imperial institutions where it could be resolved through peaceful compromise.

The Palatinate’s development prompted its rulers to reject such tactics in favour of constitutional change. The Palatinate had been very powerful in the later Middle Ages, especially when Elector Ruprecht I had ruled as German king between 1400 and 1410. In addition to territory, its electors had acquired the quasi-sovereign rights associated with the Palatine title, including powers to ennoble and feudal jurisdiction over numerous weaker territories on the middle Rhine. The end of the powerful Luxembourg dynasty, the kings of Bohemia, in 1437 left the Palatine Wittelsbachs as the Habsburg’s principal rivals in the Empire, a factor behind Emperor Maximilian’s alliance with Bavaria that led to the Palatinate’s defeat in 1505. The consolidation of Habsburg imperial rule under Charles V shifted political gravity eastwards away from the middle Rhine where it had rested throughout the later Middle Ages. The adoption of the Reformation in the 1540s further distanced the Palatinate from the ecclesiastical electors and its other former allies within the imperial church.

The elector assumed the mantle of Protestant militancy that had been discreetly dropped by Saxony after 1547. This began at the Reichstag of 1556–7, the first session after the Augsburg settlement, where the Palatinate presented a series of demands that became the political programme it carried into the war after 1618. It sought to overcome the in-built Catholic majority by splitting the Reichstag along confessional lines, at least when religious issues were discussed. Catholics and Protestants would debate the matter separately, regardless of princely or electoral status, and then confer to reach a common agreement. This mechanism became known as itio in partes and was enshrined in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, but had no previous foundation in imperial law and was bitterly opposed by Saxony and others who feared it would undermine the Empire’s hierarchical constitution. The second demand was for the Protestant grievances (Gravamina) to be settled by accepting their interpretation of the disputed points in the Augsburg settlement. While Saxony broadly supported the abolition of the ecclesiastical reservation and other specific points, it vehemently opposed Palatine tactics to achieve these goals. The Palatinate proposed withholding imperial taxes against the Turks and blocking the election of a king of the Romans. This would effectively engineer an interregnum and so allow the Palatinate and Saxony, as imperial vicars, to exercise imperial authority at least long enough to effect the proposed changes. Saxony had advocated these tactics itself in the 1530s, but had no interest in such confrontational methods now.

The Palatine programme pinpointed the central problem with the Augsburg settlement that Saxony chose to ignore. The 1555 Peace tried to defuse tension by taking doctrine out of politics, but had done nothing to integrate the confessional groups into the Reichstag or other imperial institutions. As long as the Protestants regarded themselves as a party with specific interests, they would feel threatened by the in-built Catholic majority. The Palatine programme addressed this by attempting to reconfigure politics along confessional lines. The Catholics were not prepared to make such sweeping concessions, leaving the Palatinate little choice but to go outside the constitution and seek a separate confessional alliance, as Saxony had done in the 1530s.

It took over thirty years for the disagreement over tactics to produce two distinct Protestant parties. Neither Saxony nor the Palatinate wanted to allow their differences to be exploited by the Catholics. Saxony restrained Württemberg which had called for the Palatinate’s isolation after Elector Friedrich III converted to Calvinism in 1560. The next elector, Ludwig VI, reversed course after 1576 and re-embraced Lutheranism, largely removing the confessional rift until his death in 1583. Political interests also hindered confessional polarization. Both electors worked with their Catholic colleagues to consolidate their collective pre-eminence over the princes, notably in brokering the transition to Ferdinand I after Charles V’s abdication. In return, they were permitted to maintain a permanent ‘electoral alliance’ (Kurverein), entitling them to meet and discuss imperial affairs.

Protestant Disunity

More fundamentally, the Protestant princely dynasties were divided among themselves by a range of conflicting interests that inhibited any stable grouping based exclusively on confession. Though they controlled all the larger principalities other than Austria and Bavaria, the Protestant princes weakened their potential power through frequent dynastic partition. The Reformation stopped the general trend towards accepting primogeniture, prompting Protestant princes to retain or even reintroduce partible inheritance in order to provide equally for their children.⁵ Unfortunately this coincided with changes in imperial law that fixed political rights in existing imperial fiefs by 1583. Rulers were no longer able to create additional votes in imperial institutions by partitioning their territories, but now had to decide either to share princely rights among their heirs, or give juniors appanages created from the main territory.

The latter route reduced the chances of making an equitable marriage since the junior princes no longer held land associated with constitutional rights. In some respects this contributed to Protestant activism. Younger sons sought alternative careers, raising mercenaries for the Dutch and Huguenots, or seeking posts as Protestant administrators in the imperial church. The Ernestine Wettins provide a good example. Dynastic partitions created four branches in Altenburg, Coburg, Eisenach and Weimar after 1572. Weakness encouraged reconciliation with electoral Saxony, which also wanted better relations. However, none of the branches could sustain further partitions. Johann Ernst was faced with seven brothers to provide for after he became duke of Weimar in 1615, and it is little surprise that he and his relations were among the most active of the lesser princes in the Protestant armies of the Thirty Years War.

More generally, partitions emasculated Protestant territories by dissipating their resources or creating debilitating inheritance disputes. The first of these problems was experienced by Brandenburg, contributing to its position as the weakest electorate and condemning its rulers to a minor role in imperial affairs. The main electorate had been split by partition in 1535, and though reunited under Johann Georg after 1571, further problems were created by the adoption of primogeniture on his death in 1598. The new elector, Joachim Friedrich, was 52 and preoccupied with his Lutheran duty to provide for his relations who could now no longer inherit the electorate. The incorporation of the secularized bishoprics of Havelberg, Brandenburg and Lebus into the electorate in 1598 removed them as alternative accommodation. Joachim Friedrich had been administrator of Magdeburg since 1566 and managed to pass this to his youngest son, Christian Wilhelm, on his accession, but only at the cost of friction with Saxony. Rather than keeping Ansbach and Bayreuth, which belonged to his Franconian relations, when he inherited them in 1603, the elector handed them to his half-brothers and his second son.⁶

Other territories suffered serious inheritance disputes, of which the most important affected Hessen, the territory that had, along with Saxony, been Protestant leader during the Reformation. Four lines were created in 1567, of which those in Marburg, Kassel and Darmstadt survived after 1583.⁷ The original partition stipulated a common Lutheran church, but when the Hessians were asked to endorse the Book of Concord in 1576, Wilhelm of Hessen-Kassel refused. His lands became the target of Calvinist evangelizing, leading to the formal conversion of his successor, Landgrave Moritz, in 1603. Confessional differences sharpened the inheritance dispute that developed with the extinction of the Marburg line in October 1604. Not only did Landgrave Ludwig V in Darmstadt remain Lutheran, but he was no longer content with representing a junior branch and wanted to grab all of Marburg, the cultural centre and the seat of the common Hessian consistory. Moritz compromised his own claim by introducing Calvinism into the northern part of Marburg in 1605. Ludwig used this as a pretext to open a case at the Reichshofrat, beginning a process that placed Darmstadt in the imperial camp throughout the Thirty Years War.

The Hessen case illustrates a second general factor undermining Protestant unity. It was not only princes who disagreed over doctrine, but also their subjects who sometimes embraced a different variety of Protestantism from their rulers. Landgrave Moritz encountered serious difficulties when he began his ‘second Reformation’ in Kassel and Marburg. His neighbour, Count Simon VI of Lippe, faced an open revolt when he attempted the same in 1607, forcing him to relocate his capital from Detmold to Lemgo. Serious unrest also broke out in Brandenburg following Elector Johann Sigismund’s public commitment to Calvinism at Christmas in 1613. The elector found little support outside the court and the university of Frankfurt on the Oder. Even his wife, Anna of Prussia, openly criticized him and rallied Lutheran opposition.⁸

The Protestant states were also divided by two further forms of rivalry. Large territories often tried to assert jurisdiction over their weaker neighbours, often using religion to supplement older feudal claims. For example, the Palatinate expected the smaller counts and imperial knights in its vicinity to follow its lead in embracing Calvinism, while Landgrave Moritz wanted Lutheran Waldeck to copy his second Reformation.⁹ Protestants also clashed over competing claims to Catholic lands that often pre-dated the Reformation. Darmstadt and Kassel disputed possession of the large imperial abbey of Hersfeld that had been a Hessian protectorate since 1432. Hessen-Kassel, Cleves and the Guelph dukes all claimed rights over Paderborn and had factions in its cathedral chapter. Kassel’s influence caused many Paderborn nobles to become Calvinists, adding a further confessional dimension to the dispute. As a result, Protestant influence cancelled itself out there, ending eight years of Lutheran administration by permitting the election of Dietrich von Fürstenberg as Catholic bishop in 1585 – the Protestant Hessian canons even voted for him to prevent the Guelph candidate obtaining a majority! Similar Guelph-Hessian rivalry permitted a resurgence of Catholic influence in the strategic abbey of Corvey.¹⁰

Political interests could take precedence over confessional solidarity. Darmstadt’s hopes for a favourable verdict in its inheritance dispute led it to back the emperor. Württemberg hesitated to antagonize the Habsburgs who had sequestrated the duchy when its duke broke the public peace in 1517. Though the emperor restored it in 1534, he delayed confirmation of Württemberg’s status as an imperial fief until 1599 and then inserted its revision to the Habsburgs if the ducal family died out. The powerful Guelph family also had good reasons to abstain from radical Protestant politics. Like the Wittelsbachs, they had a long and proud history, having once ruled all of Saxony before being defeated by Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa in 1180. The long process of rebuilding their regional power was threatened by the absence of primogeniture, which they only adopted in 1592 when there were two main branches of the dynasty. The weaker Lüneburg line governed part of Brunswick from Celle, while the senior Dannenberg branch held Wolfenbüttel, Calenberg, Grubenhagen and Göttingen. Both branches claimed a protectorate over the city of Brunswick with its 20,000 inhabitants and role as a major economic centre. The adoption of Lutheranism by the citizens and both the dukes failed to produce harmony as the city sought to emancipate itself through membership of the Hanseatic League. Heinrich Julius of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel was one of the ablest and most learned princes of his day, sharing much in common with Rudolf II in terms of artistic and intellectual interests. He went to Prague in 1602 to press his case against the city, but was opposed by his Lüneburg relations despite their common interest in asserting dynastic authority over the Brunswickers. Having twice failed to take the city by force, Heinrich Julius bowed to a Reichskammergericht injunction to halt operations in 1606. He remained in Prague where his presence in the emperor’s privy council encouraged many moderate Lutherans to remain loyal to the Habsburgs. Meanwhile, his attacks on Brunswick alienated the Protestant imperial cities who remained suspicious of any princely alliance, fearing it would be used against them rather than to defend religion. Competition over the church lands even encouraged Heinrich Julius to raise three of his sons as Catholics, giving them the tonsure in 1578 so that they might stand for election in the neighbouring bishoprics.¹¹

CONFESSION AND IMPERIAL POLITICS TO 1608

The Cologne Dispute 1583–90

The Guelphs had already been thwarted in their earlier attempts to secure the entire bishopric of Hildesheim, having acquired 21 of its 24 districts in 1523, reducing the bishop to the remaining three districts around the town itself. The town converted to Lutheranism in 1542 and accepted a Guelph protectorate. Facing complete extinction, the remaining Catholic canons elected Ernst of Bavaria bishop in 1573.¹² The new bishop was the seventh son of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria. Unlike the Protestants, the Catholic rulers still enjoyed access to the imperial church to offset the problems of primogeniture. Ernst himself was far removed from Cardinal Borromeo’s model of a post-Tridentine bishop, but the papacy had been impressed by Bavarian dedication to Catholic renewal, and considered its ruling dynasty better sons of the church than the Austrian Habsburgs who had accepted the Augsburg settlement. The pope and Spain swung behind Ernst as their man to secure German bishoprics in danger of falling under Protestant administration. Hildesheim was Ernst’s second see; he had already become bishop of Freising at the age of twelve in 1566. It was followed by election to Liège in 1581, but the main target was Cologne, where a disputed election led to the first significant sectarian violence in the Empire since the Schmalkaldic War.

The same kind of rivalry between Catholics that delayed reform in Franconia had facilitated Protestant penetration of the electorate of Cologne. Ernst’s candidacy there in 1577 had been opposed by Johann von Manderscheid who was already bishop of Strasbourg, allowing Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg to win by a narrow margin. Spain was not overly concerned, because Truchsess appeared a good Catholic with close links to the Jesuits, whereas Ernst had not even been ordained. However, the new archbishop fell in love with a nun, Agnes von Mansfeld, and married her in February 1582, dividing the local population. Renaissance Catholicism tolerated concubinage, but this was more than it could stomach. The controversy radicalized Truchsess who raised troops, seized the capital at Bonn and then announced his conversion to Calvinism on 19 December. He declared that he would not pass the territory on to his heirs, clearly expecting the emperor to accept him as another Protestant administrator, but Cologne’s prominence as an electorate, and the decision to embrace Calvinism rather than Lutheranism forced the issue. Germans were compelled to confront the ambiguities of the Augsburg settlement, but rather than representing a step towards inevitable war, the Cologne dispute revealed how the complexity of the issues prevented polarization into two clear sides.

The pope’s deposition of Truchsess on 1 April 1583 immediately alarmed the remaining Catholic electors, who joined their Protestant colleagues in doubting whether anyone had the power to remove one of the highest princes of the Empire.¹³ Meanwhile, Truchsess’s choice of Calvinism alienated the Lutherans who rightly feared that it would render the emperor’s tacit toleration of Protestant administrators untenable. They rejected the Palatine interpretation of the situation in confessional terms, even though Truchsess’s conversion gave them a majority in the electoral college. The elector Palatine raised 7,000 troops, sending 1,000 to reinforce Truchsess in Bonn, while the Calvinist Wetterau counts and the Dutch also promised support. However, Saxon and Brandenburg opposition deterred others like Hessen-Kassel from joining in, and even most Palatine officers refused to cross into Cologne territory, because of an imperial order to disband.

Bavaria seized its opportunity, demanding not only Truchsess’s removal, but his replacement with Ernst. Spain realized its mistake and now feared for the security of the Spanish Road running close to Cologne. It despatched 3,000 infantry (including Tilly as a young ensign), while the cathedral chapter convened to elect a new archbishop. Such enthusiasm was far from universal among Catholics. Most bishops and abbots were slow to respond to Ernst’s calls for contributions to his war chest, while Emperor Rudolf opposed both Spanish intervention and Bavaria’s blatant dynasticism. However, the Habsburg candidate stood no chance,¹⁴ forcing the reluctant emperor to endorse Ernst who was elected on 23 May 1583. Having collected his forces, Ernst struck in December, taking Bonn with the help of local Catholic nobles the following month and forcing Truchsess to flee to Holland. The Palatinate had been paralysed at this critical juncture by the death of Elector Ludwig in November 1583, leaving government to his seven-year-old son. The other electors fell into line and acknowledged Ernst by January 1585, and he secured his fifth diocese by being elected to Münster with Spanish and papal support in May 1585.

Nuremberg and the Tirol resigned from the bi-partisan Landsberg Alliance in protest in 1584. Though it remained formally in being until 1598, the organization effectively collapsed, indicating the erosion of the moderate middle ground in the Empire. However, its demise was more a product of disillusionment with Rudolf’s handling of the affair than confessional polarization. Matters had been settled by force of arms, casting doubt on the ability of imperial institutions to solve complex problems. Spanish intervention widened the foreign involvement in imperial politics. Spain left troops in the electorate, because Truchsess’s supporters and Dutch auxiliaries held out in a few towns. Ernst’s acquisition of Münster deepened Spanish involvement, because he now controlled a large block of territory straddling the Lower Rhine around the Republic’s eastern flank. The Dutch considered Ernst a Spanish ally and treated his lands as enemy territory. Spain felt obliged to protect him, while the Spanish soldiers, who had not been paid properly for years, saw a chance to seize supplies in the rich ecclesiastical lands. Fighting was limited to minor cross-border raids until December 1587, when 600 Protestants captured Bonn where the Spanish had left only 140 men. The duke of Parma despatched a large force that retook the city the following September after a six-month siege. He then moved north to capture Rheinberg in February 1590, a Cologne enclave that provided access across the Rhine and facilitated the subsequent campaigns to outflank the Dutch Republic from the east. The Empire’s territorial integrity had been compromised, but only at its north-western corner. The damage was limited, because neither Spain nor the Dutch wanted to become embroiled in German politics. Spain even bowed to Protestant protests and refrained from turning Bonn into a major fortified base.¹⁵

The Strasbourg Bishops’ War 1592–1604

The problems in Cologne were followed by similar difficulties in the bishopric of Strasbourg that inflicted more damage to Rudolf’s prestige. Strasbourg lay further up the Rhine and surrounded the Protestant imperial city of that name that contained the most northerly permanent bridge over the river. Like Cologne, its location beside the Spanish Road attracted international interest, but, as so often with imperial politics, the actual dispute began with personal animosities far removed from the concerns of great powers.

Truchsess was deacon of the Strasbourg cathedral chapter and three of the canons who backed him in Cologne were also members, along with eleven other Protestants and seven Catholics. Matters came to a head with the death of Bishop Manderscheid in 1592. The Protestant majority were concerned at the presence of Duke Charles of Lorraine, who had been accepted as a canon by the Catholic minority and so was entitled to stand for election. As a cardinal and bishop of Metz, Charles was already a powerful figure with wide connections (he was a grandson of Catherine de Medici, and was related by marriage to Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria). The Protestants feared they would fall victims to a Spanish-Lorraine-Bavarian plot, and be driven from their benefices like their colleagues in Cologne. They collected a few supporters and stormed the episcopal offices that were inside the city of Strasbourg. Safe behind the city’s defences, they elected Johann Georg, a fifteen-year-old student at the local Protestant college, as the new bishop. As grandson of the current Brandenburg elector, the choice was intended to rally Lutheran support within the Empire. They also counted on help from Württemberg, which held small enclaves in Alsace and bitterly opposed Lorraine after the French Catholic League’s devastation of Mömpelgard in 1587–8. Dynastic interests lurked behind a thin skin of Protestant solidarity. Duke Friedrich I of Württemberg exploited the young bishop’s precarious position by loaning him 330,000 fl. in return for a controlling stake in the bishopric. Württemberg was given the district of Oberkirch that established a land bridge between it and its Alsatian enclaves, while Friedrich’s six-year-old son was made a canon and named as Johann Georg’s successor.¹⁶ Meanwhile, the Catholic canons fled to the strong episcopal town of Saverne and duly elected Duke Charles as rival bishop.

Rather than a straightforward contest between Protestants and Catholics, the ensuing dispute saw a three-cornered struggle between Lorraine, Johann Georg and Württemberg, while outsiders sought a peaceful settlement. Christian of Anhalt took command of the few troops Johann Georg had recruited locally and managed to stop Lorraine from overrunning the entire bishopric in 1592. With Rudolf incapable of mediating, Henri IV of France brokered a temporary partition the following year, giving Saverne and six other districts to Lorraine, and leaving the remaining six, including Oberkirch, to Johann Georg. Württemberg then used its financial muscle to revise this arrangement through further negotiations, leading to two agreements in 1604. Johann Georg surrendered his entire position to Württemberg in return for an annual pension and payment of his debts. Württemberg then handed the bishopric over to Lorraine, which let it keep Oberkirch for thirty years.

The so-called ‘Bishops’ War’ saw even less fighting than the Cologne dispute. All parties remained willing to negotiate and let material and dynastic interests dictate the final outcome. Nonetheless, the public peace had been breached a second time and further damage done to Rudolf’s standing in the Empire. Worse, coming after the ‘Spanish Winter’ of 1598–9, the Catholic victory in Strasbourg raised the spectre of a concerted Counter-Reformation against German Protestants.

Dreams of a Protestant Alliance

The Spanish intervention along the Rhine after 1583 suggested that the French and Dutch wars were spreading to Germany. Denmark and England viewed events with alarm. Fears of Spanish or Jesuit activity in their own countries naturally inclined the Danish and English leaderships to see Catholic plots extending to Germany as well. England forged its alliance with the Dutch rebels in 1585 and supplied money and volunteers to the French Huguenots. Denmark channelled money for the Huguenots through the Palatinate, and both countries desired closer ties to German princes who assumed a significance in Protestant calculations far in excess of what they might actually contribute to any alliance.¹⁷ A central tenet of the militant outlook was the belief that the pope intended to strike at Germany first as the birthplace of the Reformation. The German princes also enjoyed a higher international standing at this point than they would do after 1648. Though clearly inferior to sovereign monarchs, they remained part of the international community of rulers and regularly travelled abroad. Their territories were centrally located with access to Scandinavia, the Netherlands and France, making them an ideal base for operations against perceived Catholic threats, while their military reputation was sustained by the presence of German volunteers and mercenaries in all Protestant armies.

In reality, the prospect of an international Protestant alliance was an illusion. The different national trajectories of the Danish and Anglican churches and the diverging political ambitions of their monarchs prevented any firm agreement between the two potential foreign backers. As one grew more militant, the other’s ardour waned, inhibiting synchronization of interests. The controversy surrounding the conservative Lutheran Book of Concord added a further stumbling block that assumed greater proportions after 1582, despite the apparent urgency of the Cologne and Strasbourg disputes. The viability of any alliance among German Protestants depended on attracting external sponsorship, but neither England nor Denmark would bankroll a group unless both Saxony and the Palatinate were included. Yet the rift between the two leading German Protestant princes grew following Palatine resentment at Saxony’s failure to back it over Cologne. Matters worsened as Palatine government passed into the hands of Johann Casimir, from the junior branch of Pfalz-Lautern, who acted as regent between 1583 and 1592. He surrounded himself with exiles and veterans from the western religious wars, rather than the men who had run the Palatinate until then. Viewing the world from the militant perspective, he had no time for the traditional consensual politics of the Empire and vigorously reversed the reintroduction of Lutheranism under the previous elector, even provoking a revolt in the Upper Palatinate in 1592. This lurch towards extremism pulled the Palatinate further away from potential allies in the Empire and was also fuelled by personal disappointments. The marriages of the Saxon elector’s niece and daughter to Calvinists William of Orange and Johann Casimir had both failed by 1583.

Unable to work with Saxony in the electoral college, the Palatinate resumed its policy of building a distinct Protestant party (corpus evangelicorum) outside the formal constitutional framework of the Empire. Protestants now had a clear choice to advance confessional goals. They could follow Saxony and work through imperial institutions to safeguard the status quo, or they could join the Palatinate’s new group, based entirely on common faith, which held its congresses separately from the Reichstag and Kreis assemblies. As the 1580s progressed, it became increasingly obvious that most princes preferred the Saxon model above the confrontational Palatine option. Saxony renewed its old alliance with Hessen-Kassel in 1587, thus bringing the other leader of the defunct Schmalkaldic group into its party. Württemberg, Pomerania, Mecklenburg and the Ernestines all backed Saxony, which extended its alliance to include Brandenburg in 1614.

Much now depended on the attitude of the Saxon elector and there were signs of a possible rapprochement with the Palatinate with the accession of Christian I in 1586. The new elector rejected his father’s orthodoxy in favour of the Philippist variety of Lutheranism, but since he never openly declared a conversion to Calvinism, his ultimate intentions remain unclear. Already an alcoholic and gambling addict prior to his accession, he was unable to master the personal rivalries at his court, allowing other figures to exert greater influence. His chancellor, Nikolaus Crell, also favoured Philippism, and introduced a new Bible against mounting popular opposition from 1589. The internal reorientation was accompanied by a change of direction in imperial politics as Saxony opened negotiations with the Palatinate in February 1590, leading to the Union of Torgau the following January. The move has been interpreted as a radical departure, presaging a powerful, united Protestant front.¹⁸ Christian was more prepared to cooperate with the Palatinate than his father, but rather than representing a conversion to Palatine radicalism, his agreement at Torgau was intended to steer his new partner towards a more moderate course. Though the allies sent a military expedition to France, this was no longer such a radical step now that Henri IV was king. Moreover, their cooperation in the Empire was restricted to sending a joint protest to Rudolf seeking redress for Protestant grievances through constitutional means. Of the other Protestant rulers, only Hessen-Kassel backed the Union, which collapsed with Christian’s death in September 1591.

The Union’s fragility was revealed when Christian’s unexpected death immediately sparked rumours that he had been poisoned by the Saxon Lutheran establishment to forestall a Calvinist second Reformation. Had he lived longer, it is unlikely that the Union would have presented a serious challenge to imperial authority, because the outbreak of the Turkish War in 1593 rallied broad support behind Rudolf. Christian died leaving three sons, of whom the eldest, Christian II, was only eight. A regency was established under Friedrich Wilhelm of Weimar and the boy’s maternal grandfather, Elector Johann Georg of Brandenburg. His mother, Sophie of Brandenburg, orchestrated a purge of Philippists and crypto-Calvinists in 1591–3, imprisoning Crell. All pastors were obliged to swear allegiance to the Book of Concord and the measures found broad popular approval in anti-Calvinist riots. Saxony not only returned to its previous stance in imperial politics, but also drifted into political passivity, since the regents were reluctant to take any risks. Christian II continued the family tradition of alcoholism and was even less able to assert himself than his father, allowing his mother to maintain Saxon support for Rudolf. As a Saxon privy councillor noted in 1610, ‘politically we’re papists’.¹⁹ The only tangible reward was the Reichshofrat’s confirmation of a death sentence for Crell, despite the lack of any evidence for a conspiracy and in defiance of pleas for mercy from Elizabeth I of England and Henri IV. Convinced that Crell had corrupted her husband, Sophie took the seat of honour at his public execution in Dresden’s main square on 9 October 1601. This piece of personal revenge was widely interpreted as Saxony’s determination to oppose Calvinism.

The Saxon preoccupation with settling scores left the political stage open for the Palatinate to resume its efforts to recruit its alternative confessional alliance. Protestant politics diverged again as Saxon conservatism contrasted with growing Palatine militancy. The new elector Palatine, Friedrich IV, was not an obvious radical. Raised a Lutheran, he converted to Calvinism under the influence of Johann Casimir whose regency only ended in 1592. However, he never embraced the Calvinist work ethic, and was moody and often ill, especially from 1602. Friedrich’s love of pomp led to serious overspending on the court, creating debts of 1.8 million fl. by 1613.²⁰ The expansion of the court also allowed the aristocratic element, already present during the regency, to gain the upper hand, significantly changing the character of Palatine politics. Previously, government was in the hands of a privy, or ‘upper’, council (Oberrat), created in 1557 and staffed largely by commoners who had been educated at humanist universities. Their collegiate decision-making induced caution, whereas Friedrich IV’s growing reliance on aristocratic courtiers and military men increased scope for individual influence. The situation was exacerbated by the elector’s declining health which reawakened his religious fervour and inclined him to see matters more in confessional terms.

One man particularly attracted his attention and favour: Christian of Anhalt, one of the most important figures in the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Usually dismissed as a reckless schemer, there can be no doubt he would have been considered a far-sighted strategist had the Bohemian adventure been crowned with success. His presence in the Palatinate is a further example of the problems facing the numerous Protestant princely families. Though he served the elector, he was himself a prince from the Askanier family which claimed a 1,000-year-long ancestry and had once been one of the most powerful dynasties in the Empire. By the late sixteenth century it was reduced to ruling Anhalt, a principality sandwiched between Brandenburg and Saxony. Lack of primogeniture fragmented even this small holding, splitting it five ways between Christian and his brothers after 1586. Christian’s share at Bernburg was too cramped for a man of his ambition, and he sought a more prestigious court that would give him a wider role.

He went first to Saxony in 1586 where he converted to Calvinism, embracing his new faith with particular fervour and immersing himself in its eclectic belief in a magical system of universal knowledge. Like many ardent Calvinists, he was convinced it was possible to discern divine will by correctly interpreting events according to the Bible. He was given command of the joint Saxon-Palatine force sent to assist Henri IV in 1591. Like the previous German expeditions, none of the backers came through with the money and Anhalt was left to pay the 1.3 million talers expenses himself – a debt his descendants were still claiming from France in 1818.²¹ Still, the eleven-month campaign brought him into contact with the key players of the Calvinist international, notably Count Johann of Nassau-Siegen. Having commanded the Protestant forces in the brief Strasbourg Bishops’ War, he was ready to accept an offer from Rudolf to take command against the Turks in 1593. Count Johann persuaded him this would be contrary to the Protestant cause, and facilitated an alternative appointment as governor of the Upper Palatinate in 1595.

The post enabled Christian to display his many undoubted talents. The Upper Palatinate lay considerably to the east of the electorate that acquired it in 1329. It was administered separately by its own government in Amberg, whereas the Lower, or electoral, Palatinate was ruled from Heidelberg. Its religious traditions were also distinct, and while Lutheranism had been a court phenomenon on the Rhine, it was genuinely popular among the Upper Palatines who resisted the re-imposition of Calvinism by Johann Casimir. Anhalt regained their loyalty by a mixture of tact and cunning and was so successful that the local Estates gave strong support to the later Bohemian adventure.²² His success as governor raised Anhalt’s profile at the Heidelberg court, where his influence grew with the appointment of his protégés and other figures associated with international Calvinism.

The Four Monasteries Dispute 1598–1601

By the late 1590s Anhalt was in a position to revive Johann Casimir’s activist policy and take it to its logical conclusion by forming a Palatine-led Protestant alliance. To persuade the other princes to abandon Saxon constitutionalism, Anhalt sought to demonstrate that existing institutions no longer safeguarded Protestant interests. He deliberately chose imperial justice as his battleground, because the Augsburg settlement rested on the Empire’s ability to resolve disputes through peaceful arbitration in the courts. It is quite likely that he, or at least others in the Palatine administration, genuinely believed that the existing institutions were not only inherently biased against Protestants, but had been captured by the Jesuits as agencies of Counter-Reformation. Nonetheless, by politicizing imperial justice, Anhalt greatly escalated the tensions within the Empire.

The impact of the Palatine programme can be seen by comparing the situation after 1598 with the preceding forty years. The Augsburg settlement entrusted the Reichskammergericht with resolving cases involving religious issues. The court was largely staffed by Catholics, because it was up to the territories of each Kreis to propose new judges to fill vacancies. As territories chose their co-religionists, only a third of the judges were Protestants in the three decades prior to the Thirty Years War, roughly reflecting the Protestant proportion among the princes. Despite this, Protestant territories continued to pay their regular contributions to maintain the court. Moreover, they did not protest as a succession of Catholics were chosen as presiding judges between 1559 and 1570. It was not until 1576 that the Palatinate had seriously suggested introducing religious parity, by demanding that the presidency alternate between Catholics and Protestants.²³ The emperor rejected this not only as an attack on his prerogative, but also as unnecessary, because religiously sensitive cases were already judged by a senate, or review panel of three Protestant and three Catholic judges. If one senate failed to agree a verdict, they had to refer the matter to another panel, also composed of equal numbers from both confessions. This procedure had worked so successfully that there were only seven formal complaints against court verdicts between 1559 and 1589.

None of the cases in the so-called ‘four monasteries dispute’ (Vierklösterstreit) that the Palatinate singled out in 1598 differed substantially from those that had been successfully resolved in the past. The first, from January 1597, involved a verdict in favour of the Carthusian order against the count of Öttingen, ordering him to return their monastery, which he had secularized in 1556, thus falling after the normative year specified at Augsburg. The court made a similar judgment in a second case against the Hirschhorn imperial knights who had appropriated a Carmelite convent in 1568. The third verdict instructed the city of Strasbourg to refrain from meddling in the internal affairs of the Maria Magdalena nunnery within its walls. Finally, the court required the margrave of Baden and count of Eberstein to release the abbess of Frauenalb whom they had arrested for having allegedly led a disorderly life. All the decisions had been reached by majority vote in bi-confessional review panels, indicating that some Protestant judges had sided with their Catholic colleagues.

The Palatinate politicized these cases by raising confessional, rather than legal objections. The court had judged each case according to property rights and jurisdictions, yet all involved fundamental disagreements over the purpose and use of church property. Moreover, the verdicts lacked solidity, because the appeals procedure had collapsed. Known as the Visitation, this had been established in 1532 and confirmed by the Peace of Augsburg, and involved an annual review of the Reichskammergericht cases by a special committee with rotating membership drawn from all imperial Estates. In the wake of the Cologne dispute, Rudolf had blocked the Lutheran administrator of Magdeburg from taking his seat when his turn came in 1588, stalling the review process. The Catholics wanted a functioning court as much as the Protestants and used the 1594 Reichstag to propose entrusting the Visitation to the imperial Deputation. This was another committee formed by members drawn from all Estates and charged with dealing with special matters when the Reichstag was not in session. Given that Protestants currently had even fewer members on the Deputation than the Visitation panel, they rejected this as another Catholic plot against them.

However, the problem was not simply confessional; it also revealed a serious deficiency in the imperial constitution. The Reichskammergericht was not a modern constitutional supreme court empowered to deal with legal loopholes or new problems by offering its own interpretation of the law. Instead, it was charged with implementing existing legislation passed by the Reichstag, leaving final judgment as the emperor’s prerogative. Since the melancholic Rudolf refused to become involved, the matter passed back to the Reichstag, opening relatively minor cases to heated political debate. The Protestant litigants in the four cases simply requested that parity be introduced into the Deputation to ensure a fair appeal, but their pleas were ignored by the Palatinate which rallied Brandenburg and Brunswick to dispute even this body’s authority to review cases. The move paralysed the Deputation by 1601, allowing the Palatinate to take the matter to the next Reichstag that met between March and July 1603.

The Palatine leadership hoped the four monasteries dispute would finally convince the doubters to abandon Saxony and join a distinct Protestant party. Since the 1594 Reichstag, the Palatinate had chaired six Protestant congresses to debate tactics to be employed in the formal imperial institutions. While delegates obediently affirmed the Palatine policy of withholding assistance against the Turks, Saxony’s boycott of these congresses rendered their decision largely meaningless. Spanish encroachment in the Lower Rhine did prompt Ansbach and Hessen-Kassel to open talks in 1596 for a new Protestant union, but again, without Saxon participation neither Denmark nor England would back the project. The militants’ lack of support was exposed once the 1603 Reichstag opened. James VI of Scotland, who had just become king of England, politely declined Anhalt’s invitation to lead a new union. France rejected similar offers, because Anhalt had sheltered the duc de Bouillon, a Huguenot grandee with his own sovereign duchy at Sedan on the Meuse, who had led a conspiracy against Henri IV. Fearing they would be left exposed, Ansbach and Hessen-Kassel backtracked at the last minute and refused to join the Palatinate in opposing renewed assistance against the Turks. The atmosphere became so poisoned that when someone shot at Elector Christian II while he was out riding in April 1603, the Saxons immediately accused Anhalt of planning an assassination.²⁴ Saxony was assisted by the numerous moderate Catholics who had been alarmed by the collapse of the Deputation and avoided giving the Palatine representative an excuse to orchestrate a walkout.

Bavaria

Though the Reichstag closed with its customary imperial Recess listing its decisions endorsed by all participants, there were clear signs that the old consensual political culture was under great strain. Palatine behaviour fuelled Catholic suspicions that all Protestants were inherently unreasonable, contributing to a growing reluctance to tolerate perceived infringements of the Augsburg settlement. Catholic intransigence grew as Wilhelm V brought his 24-year-old son Maximilian into the Bavarian government in 1594, and then handed over completely four years later in order to retreat into a life of pious contemplation.²⁵ Unlike other principal figures around the turn of the century, Duke Maximilian saw out the entire Thirty Years War and was the most influential and dynamic German Catholic prince. There is some debate on his character. While all agree he was determined and ambitious, his principal biographer, Dieter Albrecht, rather overstresses his natural caution and circumspection.

A convinced Catholic like his brother-in-law Ferdinand of Styria, Maximilian put himself through a punishing routine of personal devotion, spending hours daily in prayer or at mass. He developed a particular attachment to the Virgin, proclaiming her patron of Bavaria in 1616 and dedicating himself to her in a vow written in his own blood and deposited in a silver tabernacle at the Altötting shrine in 1645. Her intercession was sought before key decisions with, for example, the intervention in Donauwörth (1607) and the invasion of the Upper Palatinate (1621) timed to coincide with important dates in her calendar. However, like Ferdinand, Maximilian’s personal piety did not preclude dialogue with those not sharing his faith. In 1601 he restaged the famous disputation between Luther and Catholic theologians by inviting leading thinkers from both faiths to Regensburg to seek common ground. Albrecht is certainly correct in presenting Maximilian as sharing Ferdinand’s legalistic outlook on political action, inclining him to a deference towards the emperor that was both psychological and practical. Like his Saxon contemporaries, Maximilian still thought of the Empire as a divinely ordained hierarchy and naturally looked to the emperor to provide guidance. He was reluctant to act without prior imperial approval, seeking explicit sanction from the emperor before taking action, as well as negotiating safeguards in case of failure.

Such attitudes conditioned Bavaria to remain discreetly in the background, and it is unlikely that its dukes harboured long-standing plans to create a separate Catholic party. But is clear that, like the Saxon and Palatine electors, Maximilian was convinced that his own confessional and dynastic goals were in the broader interests of his church, and of the Empire as a whole. The duke felt that Catholics had given too much ground already since 1555 and that it was high time for them to take a firm stand to prevent the Empire sliding into chaos. The stance was influenced by a book, Autonomia, published in Munich in 1586 by Andreas Erstenberger, a secretary at the Reichshofrat, who criticized the toleration extended by the Catholic politique faction in France in an attempt to pacify the Huguenots. For Erstenberger, there could be no ‘autonomy’, since freedom of conscience was simply a licence to serve the devil. Bavaria led the other Catholics at the 1593–4 Reichstag in threatening to walk out if the Magdeburg administrator was allowed to take up his seat. The action implied a concerted rejection of all administrators as a precursor to bringing their bishoprics back into Catholic hands. Maximilian continued this line at the next Reichstag in 1597–8 when he insisted on the validity of majority voting to contest Palatine calls for parity along the lines of itio in partes.

Donauwörth

The Catholic position was stiffened by a string of imperial verdicts between 1604 and 1608 that attempted to restore the Catholic interpretation of the Augsburg settlement in the imperial cities. While the Protestants argued the terms permitted freedom of conscience, Catholics pointed to other clauses suggesting the cities’ religion had to remain as it had been in 1555. Lutheranism had always been attractive to urban burghers who had been among its first adherents. It spread after 1555 into Aalen, Colmar, Essen, Hagenau and elsewhere, eroding their formal Catholic character. For example, there were only 30 Catholics left in Dortmund by 1602, while 80 Catholics faced 700 Protestants in Kaufbeuren and a mere 16 households remained true to Rome of the 4,000 people living in Donauwörth. While each case had its local colour, all involved similar problems. The Catholic minority faced growing intimidation from armed gangs, particularly during council elections, so that civic government passed into Protestant hands, for example in Aachen in 1581. Once in power, the new councillors enacted legislation in favour of their faith, for example blocking the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, or denying citizenship to new Catholics, as in Donauwörth despite its being formally bi-confessional. The dwindling Catholic population left their institutions vulnerable, allowing Protestants to take control of hospitals, schools, churches and other valuable real estate. Such actions had wider repercussions through the overlapping web of jurisdictions in the Empire. For example, the sole remaining Catholic church in Donauwörth by 1605 belonged to the Benedictine monastery of the Holy Cross which claimed exemption from the city’s jurisdiction and enjoyed the protection of the bishop of Augsburg.

The paralysis of the Reichskammergericht left the Reichshofrat as the only fully functioning imperial court. Based in Vienna, this was staffed entirely by Habsburg appointees who acted as both judges and the emperor’s political advisers. It was not only faster than the Reichskammergericht, but its decisions enjoyed the emperor’s direct backing. For this reason, its case load rose from 250 a year prior to the mid-1580s to twice that by 1590, before levelling off slightly; within this the number of politically sensitive cases rose from around 25 before 1585 to 60 a year by the early seventeenth century. Though they accepted its competence in feudal law, the Protestants did not trust the Reichshofrat completely and always referred religious cases to the Reichskammergericht as it enjoyed greater judicial independence.²⁶ However, the cities were directly subject to Rudolf’s authority as overlord, and previous emperors had intervened to rewrite civic constitutions and restore order. Thus, Rudolf was widely believed to be acting within his powers when the Reichshofrat issued a series of mandates against the Protestant councils in Aachen, Dortmund, Esslingen, Hamburg and Kaufbeuren after 1604.

Like the four monasteries dispute, the individual cases were not particularly serious, but became so because they were politicized by the Palatinate to mobilize support for its plans for a confessional alliance. The Donauwörth case proved so controversial because it came after Catholic restorations in a number of other cities, and because Rudolf’s mishandling of the affair opened him to charges of arbitrary justice. The incident was sparked by a religious procession that, like those in Austria, symbolized a struggle to control the community. Bishop Knöringen of Augsburg and the Jesuits at his university in Dillingen encouraged the abbot of the Holy Cross monastery to reintroduce the St Mark’s Day procession. The city council ruled in May 1605 that the monks could only march with their banners furled. Backed by Augsburg, the abbot appealed to the Reichshofrat, which invited the council to present its case while ordering it not to disrupt the procession in the meantime. The local Catholics took this for tacit approval of their position and marched in April 1606 with their flags unfurled. The ensuing ‘battle of the flags’ saw Protestant burghers rip up the banners and chase the monks back to the abbey. The Reichshofrat ruled on 3 September that their actions constituted a clear breach of the peace, rejecting the council’s argument that it had been powerless to restrain the mob.

Rudolf’s intervention at this point transformed an unexceptional local case into a high political drama. Maximilian of Bavaria had already executed the mandate against Kaufbeuren in 1604 and on 17 March 1607 the emperor empowered him to do the same in Donauwörth. Maximilian appeared a loyal Catholic and Rudolf wanted to win Bavarian favour given the Brothers’ Quarrel. However, his choice breached the custom of entrusting such imperial commissions to the leading princes of the Kreis where the verdict was to be enforced. Since the city was in Swabia, not Bavaria, Duke Friedrich of Württemberg took it as a deliberate slight and tried to mobilize the south German Protestants to complain. Rudolf hesitated, losing face in the process, while Maximilian would not move without an explicit order. Meanwhile, Donauwörth militants, angry at their council’s apparent timidity, instigated a riot in April 1607 and expelled some Bavarian representatives who had been sent to investigate the previous disturbance. Maximilian now had the excuse he needed, but still waited until Rudolf reluctantly placed the city under the imperial ban and then finally ordered Bavaria to act on 1 December. Maximilian now had to move quickly, because the Reichstag had been summoned and he feared the matter would be referred there instead. Within a week of Rudolf’s decision, 6,500 Bavarian troops were on the march. The agitators fled at their approach and they entered the city unopposed on 17 December.

The incident compromised the Reichshofrat’s reputation, enabling the Palatinate to widen its charge of corrupt institutions. Though Rudolf had genuinely wanted a peaceful settlement, he had seriously mishandled the affair. He refused to follow Saxon advice and issue a statement denying his judgment was sectarian. His inflated sense of majesty prevented him from seeing the need to explain his actions. It fell to Bavaria to do this, undermining the emperor’s credibility and raising the spectre of arbitrary rule.

Though the incident is widely taken as leading directly to the formation of confessional alliances,²⁷ Swabian Protestants showed little enthusiasm for Württemberg’s protest and convened with their Catholic colleagues in the Kreis assembly again in 1609. Maximilian also tried to avoid inflaming the situation. He restored parish churches to Catholic control in Donauwörth, but refrained from suppressing Lutheranism until 1609 and only then in relation to his wider goal of annexing the city. Rudolf placed Donauwörth under Bavarian administration until it paid Maximilian’s expenses. The arrangement was integral to imperial justice as it relied on territories recouping the cost of serving the courts from the guilty party. However, Maximilian’s deliberately excessive punitive expedition cost over 300,000 fl., which the city, with an annual revenue of 15,000 fl., stood no chance of repaying. The duke was there to stay and had already removed the city’s imperial title from all official documents after 1609. As he now regarded the citizens as his own subjects, he felt no compunction to respect their faith.

The 1608 Reichstag

Even now, Anhalt found it hard to drum up support for a confessional alliance. An agreement with Brandenburg and the Dutch from 1605 was still-born, because the Brandenburgers placed their dynastic interests above the Protestant international and paid the money earmarked for the Dutch to Poland instead to guarantee their succession to ducal Prussia. Württemberg and Baden-Durlach preferred a local arrangement with Pfalz-Neuburg, leaving the Palatinate to conclude a pact with Ansbach, Bayreuth and Nuremberg in 1607, restricted to the defence of the Upper Palatinate against possible Bavarian attack.

Nonetheless, the coincidence of the Donauwörth incident with the Brothers’ Quarrel convinced Saxony that something had to be done to safeguard Protestant interests. Rudolf’s choice of Archduke Ferdinand of Styria to represent him at the planned Reichstag suggested little could be expected from the imperial proposals. Saxony now accepted the Palatinate’s argument that majority voting should not apply to issues where religion was at stake. As with the Torgau Union, this was not a clear shift towards militancy, because Saxon prestige meant it was now the spokesman for the Palatine programme, and of course expressed it in more moderate language. The Palatinate fell into line and even held talks with the ecclesiastical elector of Mainz to smooth over controversial issues.

The Reichstag opened in February 1608 with Archduke Ferdinand’s response to the Protestant demand for formal confirmation of the Peace of Augsburg. Ferdinand offered to confirm it, provided the Protestants restored all Catholic church property taken since 1552. The proposal represented a significant hardening of the Catholic position, suggesting restitution should come from a definitive interpretation of the 1555 peace, rather than by individual case through the imperial courts. It has been rightly identified as the origins of the Restitution Edict, issued by Ferdinand as emperor in 1629 at the height of his political and military power.²⁸ Saxon moderation was rendered untenable in the face of this proposal, passing the initiative back to the Palatinate that countered with a series of demands, including that Rudolf should extend toleration to Hungarian Protestants, even though this lay well outside the Reichstag’s jurisdiction. Saxon and Mainz efforts to preserve sanity were drowned out amid rising passions, culminating in a Palatine walkout, followed by Hessen-Kassel, Baden-Durlach and others. Many moderate Catholics were exasperated and now backed Bavaria and militants like the bishop of Augsburg.

UNION AND LIGA 1608–9

The Protestant Union

The 1608 Reichstag was the first to end without the customary final Recess. Its collapse, coming after the failure of the Reichskammergericht Visitation and the Deputation, suggested constitutional paralysis and the futility of the elector of Saxony’s faith that established institutions provided adequate safeguards. Anhalt moved quickly, skilfully using the emotive occasion of Friedrich of Württemberg’s funeral in February 1608 to make his proposals directly to the Protestant princes. A group reconvened in the symbolic setting of Auhausen, a monastery that had been secularized by Ansbach, and agreed a new Protestant Union on 14 May, just eleven days after the unsatisfactory conclusion of the Reichstag.²⁹

The Union essentially merged the existing Palatine defence group from 1607 with the south-west German alliance of Pfalz-Neuburg, Baden-Durlach and Württemberg from 1605. Only four other princes had joined by the spring of 1609, but the Jülich-Cleves crisis (see below) added Brandenburg, Hessen-Kassel, Zweibrücken, Anhalt’s brothers and the count of Öttingen, as well as sixteen imperial cities, including Nuremberg, Ulm and Strasbourg. Once these had joined by January 1610, the Union still only encompassed around half the Protestant territories. Hessen-Kassel’s membership ensured Darmstadt’s abstention, while the Guelph dukes refrained because they hoped for Rudolf’s support in their dispute with Brunswick. Suspicion of princely intentions also deterred many important imperial cities, including Augsburg, but the most obvious empty seat belonged to the Saxon elector, whose refusal to join kept all the north-eastern dukes and counts away.

With its membership only half full, the Union remained a south German regional alliance based on the Palatinate’s existing dynastic and political network. The cities joined primarily because the Union made Donauwörth’s full restoration one of its main demands. Though they outnumbered the princes, revisions to the Union’s charter in 1610 reduced the cities to second-class members by ensuring that the princes always had two more votes. The initial charter was for ten years, under Palatine directorship for the first three, but the entire organization remained provisional, because it was envisaged that a second, north German directorate would be created when Saxony joined. All members forswore violence among themselves, and agreed to coordinate their participation in imperial institutions. The Union held 25 plenary congresses throughout its 13-year existence, but failed to develop its own institutions. Though conceived as a vehicle for the radical Palatine programme, the Union was compelled through its own weakness to rely heavily on the existing imperial constitution for its fiscal and military arrangements. Members used the quotas assigned them by the imperial tax register to determine how much they paid the Union if it decided to mobilize an army. Reliance on the imperial constitution was also a political expedient, since the Union had to present itself as an adjunct of the formal public peace framework to avoid condemnation as an illegal organization. Consequently, it failed to institute its own judiciary or mechanisms that would have allowed ordinary members to hold the director to account. All correspondence was routed through Heidelberg, because the Palatinate was the only territory with sufficient bureaucratic development capable of handling the business.

The Catholic Liga

Catholic rulers formed a rival organization fourteen months later. This has entered history as the Catholic League, or Liga, thanks to Protestant propaganda that sought to brand the group as the German equivalent of the notorious French Catholic Ligue. Like the Union, the new organization emerged from a combination of two earlier groups. The three ecclesiastical electors had been disappointed by the outcome of the 1603 Reichstag and had already considered forming a confessional alliance dedicated to defending the Catholic interpretation of the Augsburg settlement. However, the new elector of Mainz from 1604, Johann Schweikhard von Kronberg, preferred to continue negotiations with Saxony for an amicable compromise. Rudolf’s passivity also deterred the electors of Trier and Cologne, because they felt the emperor had to be included for any alliance to be legitimate. It was also hard to conceive of a group without Bavaria, but at this point Maximilian opposed any confessional alliance, particularly one that included the Habsburgs, for fear of being sucked into the Austrian Brothers’ Quarrel. The political fallout from the Donauwörth incident forced Maximilian to change his mind and he now worked to form an alliance to enhance Bavarian security. He was careful to remain discreetly in the background, though, using Bishop Knöringen of Augsburg as a front man to recruit the Swabian, Franconian and Bavarian bishops.

The core of the future Liga came together at a personal meeting with Maximilian in July 1609 that concluded an alliance between Bavaria and the bishops of Augsburg, Konstanz, Kempten, Passau, Regensburg, Ellwangen and Würzburg. They agreed a mutual defence pact for nine years dedicated in vague terms to defending Catholicism. The organizational details were left sketchy, because no agreement had been reached with the three ecclesiastical electors. Maximilian then used Augsburg and Konstanz to recruit additional south German members, while encouraging his uncle Ernst of Cologne to promote a Rhenish group. The Jülich-Cleves crisis prompted Schweikhard of Mainz to drop his objections to a confessional alliance, and both parties came together at a secret convention in Würzburg in February 1610 that represented the Liga’s real foundation. Bavaria was to lead a southern directory which included the original 8 members from 1609, together with Bamberg and 19 Swabian prelates who had been recruited. These 28 territories were grouped into 3 subdivisions based on their membership of the Bavarian, Swabian and Franconian Kreise. A second, Rhenish directory was led by Mainz and included Cologne, Trier and the bishops of Speyer and Worms.³⁰

The Liga shared many of the Union’s defects. It likewise presented itself as an auxiliary of the imperial constitution, intended only to become active should existing institutions fail to resolve problems or provide security. The Liga’s more detailed and explicit structure embraced the imperial constitution more readily than the Union had done, because Bavarian aims were more conservative. Like in the Union, Liga members were to use their imperial quotas if summoned to provide men or money. There was a clearer, more centralized command structure, but also more accountability to plenary congresses that were necessary to ratify the directors’ decisions.

Common Problems

Both Bavaria and the Palatinate were determined that their new alliances were to support their own dynastic and confessional goals. By associating themselves with other territories, they hoped to increase their respective influence within imperial institutions. The alliances also served as platforms to attract external sponsors who could provide money and security, especially if tensions in the Empire led to open violence. Though intended for security, the alliances made adventurous policies more likely, because both Bavaria and the Palatinate could spread the costs among their allies. Other territories joined for similarly selfish motives, notably the Protestant princes who hoped the Union would assist their dynastic objectives as well. The overriding concern, however, was for security with all members regarding their participation as insurance should the imperial institutions fail them.

The tension between dynastic ambition and security concerns quickly became obvious as opinions diverged between directors and members over three key issues. The Palatinate and other Union radicals saw the Habsburgs as irredeemably compromised as impartial leaders through their suppression of Protestant liberties in their own lands and through Rudolf’s apparently arbitrary justice. The others simply hoped the emperor would see sense and resume an active, but impartial role. Bavaria was also wary of the imperial dynasty and resisted pressure from Mainz, Spain and the papacy to admit the Austrian archdukes. Habsburg membership would force Bavaria to surrender control of the Liga, which would then lose its utility as a vehicle for Maximilian’s dynastic goals. Since he could not refuse a formal application from them, he devised other strategies to keep the Habsburgs out. He won the confidence of the Spanish ambassador, Balthasar de Zúñiga, securing Spanish and papal support for the Liga in August 1610 in return for acknowledging King Philip III and Archduke Ferdinand as its ‘protectors’. Spain failed to pay anything, and the pope delivered only a fraction of the subsidy he promised, but political recognition of Bavarian leadership was far more valuable. Spain accepted that Austria’s low standing in the Empire meant it had to cooperate with Bavaria. Maximilian’s insistence on the Liga’s confessional character added a further barrier to Austrian membership, because even Rudolf recognized he could not join an openly Catholic alliance. Maximilian also blocked Schweikhard’s calls to admit Saxony, Hessen-Darmstadt and other moderate Lutherans, since their membership would remove the stigma of sectarianism and thus allow Rudolf to join.

Both organizations were also divided about their primary purpose. The Palatinate and Union radicals believed religious war was inevitable and urged preparations, to be ready to strike at the best moment. The others simply saw the Union as a device to pressure the Catholics into becoming more reasonable in the ongoing negotiations. Maximilian was less belligerent than his Palatinate counterpart, but nonetheless regarded the Liga as a framework for spreading the cost of Bavarian defence among his neighbours and allies, whereas they saw it as an insurance policy and hoped its mere existence would be sufficient to deter the Protestants from doing anything foolish.

External relations provided a third area of disagreement. Anhalt and other Palatine leaders were convinced Catholics throughout Europe were conspiring to extirpate the true Protestant faith, and argued for a similarly broad war on the Catholic threat. The refusal of the others to countenance such action forced them to become increasingly secretive and pursue their own foreign policy in the Union’s name without consulting the membership. The roles were reversed in the Liga where the director opposed calls to include Spain formally, fearing it would lead to Rudolf’s joining and the organization becoming drawn into the Habsburg struggle against the Dutch.

THE JÜLICH-CLEVES CRISIS 1609–10

These tensions strained both alliances as they faced their first test with the contested Jülich-Cleves inheritance. The crisis represented the third outbreak of violence on the Rhine following the Cologne and Strasbourg disputes. It is generally fitted into the narrative of mounting confessional tension in the Empire, because fighting between rival Catholic and Protestant claimants threatened to draw in foreign powers. Some have even seen 1609 as the true start of the Thirty Years War, or argued that a general conflict was only postponed because it was not then in the interests of Spain and the Dutch.³¹ However, the inhabitants of the Empire were perfectly capable of fighting each other when they wanted to, and did not need to wait for the approval or assistance of other powers, as 1618 was to prove. The lack of major conflict in 1609–10 stemmed from widespread opposition to violence and a general desire to negotiate a peaceful solution.

The Jülich-Cleves Inheritance

Serious issues were at stake. The disputed territories were substantial, totalling around 14,000km², and strategically situated at the end of the Spanish Road and across the south-eastern approaches to the Dutch Republic. The duchy of Cleves straddled both sides of the Rhine as it entered the Netherlands, thus separating the electorate of Cologne from Dutch territory. The duchies of Berg and Jülich lay further south, either side of Cologne, with Jülich controlling the routes between the Rhine and Meuse. The large county of Mark lay separately to the east of Berg, with the smaller county of Ravensberg around Bielefeld further north-east. The relatively insignificant county of Ravenstein was an enclave in Dutch territory. All were indisputably part of the Empire, belonging to the Westphalian Kreis, but they were at its exposed north-western corner where it met Spanish, Dutch and French territory. They were also important economically. Jülich alone had 180,000 inhabitants, making it one of the most densely populated parts of the Empire. Commerce and industry had been stimulated by exiles from both the northern and southern Netherlands, contributing to the growth of cloth-dying in Jülich, mining and metallurgy in the more forested Berg and Mark, and agriculture in Cleves.

The inhabitants shared many of the political traditions of the Netherlanders, with whom they had close confessional, cultural and economic ties. Each territory had its own Estates that together formed a union in 1496, before the lands passed into the hands of a common dynasty in 1521. Other local customs forged bonds between Jülich and Berg, as well as between Cleves and Mark, while the uneven spread of Protestantism created further ties cutting across territorial boundaries. Berg and Ravensberg were mainly Protestant by 1609, but Catholics formed half the population of Cleves and Mark and most of that in Jülich. Calvinism spread with refugees from the Netherlands in the 1570s, especially in the town of Wesel in Cleves where they almost doubled the local population of around 7,000.³²

Duke Johann Wilhelm was already mentally ill before he succeeded his father in 1592 and, with no children to succeed him, his relations waited eagerly for his death.³³ The Habsburgs had claims stemming from intermarriage and Charles V’s attempts in the 1540s to incorporate Cleves into the Netherlands. Rudolf, however, could not afford to press his case openly without compromising his standing as impartial judge, and instead sought the succession of a friendly dynasty, with imperial sequestration only to be considered should that not be possible. Saxony also had rights, and there were at least seven other parties, although only Brandenburg and Pfalz-Neuburg had credible claims through recent marriages to Johann Wilhelm’s aunts. Typically, Rudolf could not make up his mind, and tried to postpone a decision so as not to alienate any of the claimants and their potential foreign sponsors. Indecision created a vacuum in Jülich-Cleves where different parties manoeuvred to secure their position should Johann Wilhelm die. As in Cologne and Strasbourg, the factions did not divide clearly along confessional lines. Duchess Jakobe von Baden-Hochberg, a devout Catholic, collaborated with the predominantly Protestant Estates to escape the influence of her husband’s Catholic advisers who curried favour with Rudolf in the hope of guaranteeing their positions. The councillors persuaded Rudolf to arrest the duchess shortly before her death in 1597 on charges of imprisoning her husband, corruption and adultery. Meanwhile, the government steered a middle course between Spain and the Dutch in the hope of preserving neutrality. All the major claimants were Lutherans who grew alarmed, not at Jülich’s irenicist culture, but because Rudolf’s interference suggested the emperor was planning to pre-empt them by sequestrating the territories.

The conflicting dynastic, confessional and strategic interests inhibited polarization and the prospects of a peaceful settlement remained good when Johann Wilhelm died on 25 March 1609. Though the Protestant Union was then ten months old, the Liga had not yet formed and Spain and the Dutch were on the verge of concluding their Twelve Years Truce (9 April 1609). France was also not overly interested, provided neither Spain nor Austria acquired the duchies, and all the other claimants favoured an amicable settlement. Unfortunately, Rudolf was embroiled in his quarrel with Archduke Matthias and looked for a way to delay a decision without compromising his authority. A regency was established on 2 April consisting of the duke’s second wife, Antoinette of Lorraine, the privy councillors and an imperial commissioner. Rudolf then announced on 24 May that the Reichshofrat would pronounce a definitive verdict within four weeks. Both Pfalz-Neuburg and Brandenburg interpreted these steps as intended to cut them out of their inheritance. They closed ranks in the Treaty of Dortmund (10 June), agreeing to reject all other claimants and establish a provisional government in collaboration with the local Estates. They also agreed to settle their conflicting claims within twelve months, or pass the matter to a commission of impartial princes. The implicit rejection of both Rudolf and the Reichshofrat reflected their disillusionment with imperial justice in the wake of the Donauwörth incident. Elector Johann Sigismund of Brandenburg sent his brother, Margrave Ernst, as his representative to the duchies, while Philipp Ludwig of Pfalz-Neuburg appointed his son and heir, Wolfgang Wilhelm, to safeguard his interests. Accompanied by a few troops, the two established themselves as the ‘Possessors’ (Possidierenden), in defiance of both the regency government in Jülich and Emperor Rudolf.

It is unlikely that the emperor would have done much about it if his cousin Archduke Leopold had not intervened. Though only 23 and not yet a cleric, Leopold had been elected as bishop of Passau and Strasbourg as part of a Habsburg strategy to counter Bavarian influence in the imperial church. Leopold was overconfident and believed that firm action in Jülich would restore imperial prestige generally and raise his own profile in the Brothers’ Quarrel. Having been convinced by Leopold, Rudolf annulled the Treaty of Dortmund on his own authority and, without consulting the Reichshofrat, made the young archduke imperial commissioner on 14 July. Leopold dashed to Jülich, but once in the town he was quickly surrounded by the Possessors who raised three times as many troops as he had.³⁴ Jülich had been strongly fortified in 1547–9, but Leopold lacked the men to venture beyond the walls. Having repelled a raid to Aachen and captured Düren, the Possessors tightened the noose, and his position looked increasingly hopeless.

Coinciding with unrest in the Habsburg lands and the formation of the confessional alliances, the Jülich-Cleves crisis was profoundly unsettling. The majority of princes favoured mediation and Rudolf was obliged to accept a meeting that convened in Prague on 1 May 1610 to broker a general settlement. Archdukes Ferdinand and Maximilian attended in person, while Archduke Albert sent an envoy. German moderate opinion was represented by the electors of Mainz, Cologne and Saxony, as well as Duke Heinrich Julius of Brunswick and Landgrave Ludwig of Hessen-Darmstadt. The princes pushed Rudolf to replace Leopold with a more impartial imperial commissioner, as a preliminary step to an amicable settlement. Fearing for his prestige, Rudolf made one of his snap, arbitrary decisions and enfeoffed Saxony with the entire Jülich-Cleves inheritance on 7 July. Though not unwelcome for Saxony, there was little chance of it benefiting, given that Brandenburg and Pfalz-Neuburg had now overrun all the territories, apart from the city of Jülich where Leopold still held out. The princes maintained their pressure, forcing Rudolf to reverse course and convene another peace conference that opened in Cologne in August.

French Intervention

Each delay increased the likelihood of unwelcome foreign intervention. France had already opened parallel negotiations with the Protestant Union and Savoy, leading to a marriage alliance with the latter in December 1609 and a draft military pact with the former in January 1610. The move suggested a two-pronged assault on either end of the Spanish Road, something that appeared to get under way when Savoy expelled the Spanish regiment that had been guarding the Grésin bridge since 1602. Meanwhile, Henri IV more than doubled the size of his army and assembled 22,000 men under Field Marshal de la Châtre in north-east France.³⁵ Nineteenth-century writers read these events through the lens of the French Revolution and Napoleon III’s support of the House of Savoy against Austria in 1859, presenting Henri IV as having a Grand Design to help nations struggling to free themselves from the Spanish yoke. French preparations in fact were mere sabre-rattling intended to intimidate Spain and assert Henri’s role as arbiter and peace-bringer. Having carefully fostered the king’s image as guaranteeing domestic tranquillity after the Wars of Religion, the French monarchy sought now to project this on an international stage. It was an implicit challenge to Rudolf, as Henri was attempting to appropriate the positive elements of the traditional imperial role and leave the emperor with its negative associations of Habsburg oppression. France had little intention of coming to blows, particularly now that Spain had agreed its truce with the Dutch. Henri was already frustrated at the Possessors’ inability to agree a division of the inheritance, and he remained suspicious of the Union because of Anhalt’s attitude over the renegade duc de Bouillon. The massive military preparations were intended to overawe all other parties and render actual fighting unnecessary.

Rumours of impending intervention caused anxiety among French Catholics, who feared their king might fight Spain and the emperor. To bolster his regime and provide an excuse to delay joining the army, Henri attended the coronation of his wife, Marie de Medici, on 13 May 1610. He went to Paris the next day to prepare for her formal entry into the city, scheduled two days later. His coach was stuck in the morning traffic in the rue de la Ferronerie when Francois Ravaillac reached in and stabbed him. He had survived 23 previous assassination attempts, but this one proved fatal. Though the king’s sudden death means we can never know his ultimate intentions, it is significant that French military preparations continued without interruption. Fearing they would be tarred as the assassin’s accomplices, the Catholic zealots dropped their criticism of royal policy and joined the regency under his widow in a chorus of praise for the dead king’s virtues as a peace-maker. All agreed that French foreign policy should be directed at recovering the country’s former influence and accepted the crown’s presentation of the military preparations as intended to induce all parties in the Jülich-Cleves dispute to reach an amicable agreement.

The inheritance dispute assumed long-term significance in this respect, because subsequent French intervention in Germany was related to this earlier episode and Henri’s hallowed memory. Later, both Richelieu and Mazarin had to deal with the inherent contradictions of Henri’s policy. French prestige rested on its claims to be seeking European peace, yet its arbiter role required military strength. Intervention to preserve the European balance of power necessarily involved contesting Spain and the Habsburgs as Europe’s predominant powers, yet this threatened to put Catholic France on the side of heretics like the Dutch and German Protestants.

Actual intervention, when it finally came, was relatively restricted and further underlines the fact that France was not actively seeking war. Only 9,000 men were sent in August 1610 and each had signed up for only four months. They advanced slowly from Metz down the Meuse through the middle of the bishopric of Liège, having previously been granted free passage by Archduke Albert on 13 May. The situation looked tense, because other powers also mobilized. Prince Maurice of Nassau concentrated 14,000 Dutch infantry and 8,000 cavalry at Schenkenschans close to Cleves in mid July, but the statesman Oldenbarnevelt had no desire to provoke a rupture with Spain and the presence was intended mainly to demonstrate republican strength.³⁶ Philip III authorized Albert to support Leopold, but only if France and the Dutch actually joined the siege of Jülich. Albert did reinforce his garrisons along the frontier, but simultaneously sent a representative to the Prague congress to seek a negotiated settlement. Spain, like the Dutch, was mainly concerned with saving face. The duke of Lerma’s prime preoccupation was Italy, not the Rhine, and he had no intention of letting the situation get out of hand. Albert was in constant touch with Maurice and allowed him to advance up the Rhine from Schenkenschans and to cross the river at Rheinberg.

German Intervention

The troop movements heightened anxiety in the Empire where there was little firm information about what the foreign powers actually intended. The Palatine leadership initially regarded the dispute as a private matter for Brandenburg and Pfalz-Neuburg and refused assistance. Anhalt was also reluctant to become involved until a firm alliance could be concluded with a friendly power, while the other members opposed seeking an ally precisely because they feared this would suck them into a war. Anhalt was forced to conduct his negotiations with France, England and the Dutch in secret, not revealing them until the congress that convened in Schwäbisch-Hall in January–February 1610. The Union now agreed to mobilize 5,000 men, provided the Possessors would foot the bill.

Leopold naturally appealed to the Liga for assistance, but while Mainz was prepared to offer subsidies, Maximilian of Bavaria kept the issue firmly off the agenda, because he wanted to avoid all entanglements with the Habsburgs. Leopold faced considerable difficulties collecting an army to relieve Jülich. He could not use Passau, because any men raised there would have to run the gauntlet of the Franconian and Swabian Protestants to reach the Rhine. Archduke Maximilian of the Tirol refused permission to recruit in his lands, blaming Rudolf for creating the crisis. This left only the bishopric of Strasbourg where Leopold’s officers collected 1,000 cavalry and 3,000 infantry, dispersing them in the villages to conceal them from the Palatine forces nearby.

The Liga members also began collecting troops, but only for their own protection. News of these preparations alongside rumours of Leopold’s activities heightened anxiety among the Protestants. The elector Palatine met the duke of Württemberg and margrave of Baden-Durlach in Heidelberg on 13 March 1610 and agreed a counterstroke without consulting the rest of the Union. Count Otto von Solms-Braunfels led 2,000 men, mainly from the territorial militia, into Strasbourg territory.³⁷ Leopold’s commander simply repeated the Catholic tactics during the Strasbourg Bishops’ War and retreated into Saverne and the other walled towns. The invaders ran out of money and their ill-disciplined troops went home after a few weeks, exposing the Union’s weakness.

Nonetheless, the operation prevented Leopold’s forces moving north to relieve Jülich where the situation was increasingly desperate, particularly after Maurice intercepted other men who had been raised in Liège in May. The three Protestant princes rallied the Union for a second attempt, assembling 7,300 infantry and 2,500 cavalry in their territories and billeting some on Würzburg and Bamberg, partly to intimidate the Catholics but also simply to save money. Meanwhile, the margraves of Ansbach and Baden-Durlach led a second army across the Strasbourg bridge to attack Leopold’s men.³⁸ These retreated into the towns again, but this time the Unionists had brought artillery with them, and soon captured Dachstein, Molsheim and Mutzig. However, Leopold’s cavalry still remained at large in the countryside, while the remaining infantry held out in Saverne. Though larger and better equipped than the first invasion force, the Union army was also more expensive. The Strasbourg burghers resented the princes’ conspiratorial politics and stopped supplying food to the troops, whose operations ground to a halt. A local truce was agreed on 10 August to allow time for the duke of Lorraine and the Alsatian nobles to broker a mutual withdrawal.

By then, Jülich’s fate was sealed. Leopold had managed to escape in May, leaving the 1,500-strong garrison inside. The arrival of Union reinforcements brought the Possessors’ blockading force up to 2,200 horse and 8,000 foot by 28 July, at last large enough for a proper siege. The arrival of Maurice and Châtre added a further 23,000 troops, and the garrison surrendered on 1 September after four weeks in return for free passage to join the rest of Leopold’s men in Upper Alsace.

The French and Dutch presence was a matter of saving face, because the siege had progressed beyond the point where they could remain on the sidelines. Had Leopold’s garrison been less diligent and surrendered sooner, neither Maurice nor Châtre would have intervened. As it was, the latter’s painfully slow progress down the Meuse raised suspicions among the Protestants of French betrayal. Châtre did not arrive until 19 August after the city’s outworks had already fallen, and could scarcely wait to leave once the garrison marched out. The Dutch were gone a week later, leaving only a small detachment in Jülich under Captain Pithan. They were joined the following year by another garrison in Wesel, the strategic crossing-point over the Rhine in Cleves. Dutch influence there matched that in Emden, with similar intentions and effects. The town formally converted to Calvinism in 1612, while its garrison threatened Spanish communications with the places taken by Spinola east of the Ijssel in 1605–6. Other than this, all parties moved swiftly to disengage. The Union and Liga agreed mutual withdrawals on 24 October 1610 and had disbanded their forces by the new year, while Leopold retreated across Swabia to Passau in December.

Consequences

This first ‘Jülich War’ was not a dress rehearsal for the Thirty Years War, but it offered some military lessons that the later belligerents failed to learn. Operations had been relatively brief and were largely restricted to Alsace and parts of the Lower Rhine. Leopold probably never mustered more than 7,000 men at any one time, while his opponents fielded 30,000 at the climax in August 1610, plus 23,000 French and Dutch auxiliaries. The Liga mobilized up to 19,000 men by September, but had not been engaged. This effort completely exhausted all parties. Two of the remaining three Pfalz-Neuburg companies in Jülich had to be disbanded in 1611 after mutinying over their pay arrears, while Brandenburg retained just 100 men there and another 400 in Aachen. Leopold claimed his involvement cost him 2.6 million fl., while the damage in the Austrian part of Alsace alone was estimated at 1.14 million. Leopold had only managed to travel to Jülich in the first place because the Spanish ambassador had loaned him the money. Spanish passivity was imposed partly through fear that the Army of Flanders would demand its back pay if ordered to the front. French involvement cost 5.38 million fl., or one-third of the war chest Henri had built up since 1598. Even neutral territories suffered, like the Tirol, which was forced to raise its wine tax in January 1612, triggering peasant unrest that lasted until September 1614.³⁹

The financial consequences deepened the political damage to both confessional alliances where arguments over policy were now complicated by disputes over who would foot the bill. The crisis broke before either group was fully formed, and both experienced an influx of new members seeking security but who were swiftly disillusioned by what they found. Leopold was frustrated by Bavaria’s refusal to see the dispute as a Liga matter. Though the Liga congress agreed defensive mobilization in August 1610, most members regretted this because of the expense and the fact that recruitment made them targets for Unionist billeting. They resented Bavaria’s continued opposition to Habsburg membership, fearing they would not be safe until the Austrian archdukes could join. They vented their feelings by failing to pay their contributions in full, leaving Bavaria to make good the shortfall.

The impact was deeper still on the Union because this had been directly involved. Neither of the Possessors paid for the assistance they received, while the Palatinate was unable to find the 300,000 fl. it needed for the 1610 campaign. Though the Union relied heavily on militiamen, its operations went way over budget, with the expenses swollen by the hordes of camp followers accompanying the army. The margrave of Ansbach marched the 18,000 men, women and children with their 4,000 wagons out of Alsace in October 1610 to Ulm to demand payment. With the troops on their doorstep, the Swabian and Franconian members had no choice but to dig deep into their pockets. The shambles dispelled any rejoicing at Jülich’s capture, and deepened the suspicions surrounding Anhalt’s conspiratorial leadership, especially as the original inheritance dispute remained unresolved.