Lectures and Essays. Smith Goldwin

void left by religion in his soul was filled with wild superstitions, bullet charming and spells against bullets, the natural reflection in dark hearts of the blind chance which since the introduction of firearms seemed to decide the soldier's fate. Having no home but the camp, he carried with him his family, a she wolf and her cubs, cruel and marauding as himself; and the numbers and unwieldiness of every army were doubled by a train of waggons full of women and children sitting on heaps of booty. It was not, we may guess, as ministering angels that these women went among the wounded after a battle. The chiefs made vast fortunes. Common soldiers sometimes drew a great prize; left the standard for a time and lived like princes; but the fiend's gold soon found its way back to the giver through the Jews who prowled in the wake of war, or at the gambling table which was the central object in every camp. When fortune smiled, when pay was good, when a rich city had been stormed, the soldier's life was in its way a merry one; his camp was full of roystering revelry; he, his lady and his charger glittered with not over-tasteful finery, the lady sometimes with finery stripped from the altars. Then, glass in hand he might joyously cry, "The sharp sword is my farm and plundering is my plough; earth is my bed, the sky my covering, this cloak is my house, this wine my paradise;" or chant the doggerel stave which said that "when a soldier was born three boors were given him, one to find him food, another to find him a comely lass, a third to go to perdition in his stead." But when the country had been eaten up, when the burghers held the city stoutly, when the money-kings refused to advance the war kings any more gold, the soldier shared the miseries which he inflicted, and, unless he was of iron, sank under his hardships, unpitied by his stronger comrades; for the rule of that world was woe to the weak. Terrible then were the mutinies. Fearful was the position of the commander. We cannot altogether resist the romance which attaches to the life of these men, many a one among whom could have told a tale as wild as that with which Othello, the hero of their tribe, won his Desdemona, in whose love he finds the countercharm of his wandering life. But what sort of war such a soldiery made, may be easily imagined. Its treatment of the people and the country wherever it marched, as minutely described by trustworthy witnesses, was literally fiendish. Germany did not recover the effects for two hundred years.

      A century had passed since the first preaching of Luther. Jesuitism, working from its great seminary at Ingoldstadt, and backed by Austria, had won back many, especially among the princes and nobility, to the Church of Rome; but in the main the Germans, like the other Teutons, were still Protestant even in the hereditary domains of the House of Austria. The rival religions stood facing each other within the nominal unity of the Empire, in a state of uneasy truce and compromise, questions about ecclesiastical domains and religious privileges still open; formularies styled of concord proving formularies of discord; no mediating authority being able to make church authority and liberty of private judgment, Reaction and Progress, the Spirit of the Past and the Spirit of the Future lie down in real peace together. The Protestants had formed an Evangelical Union, their opponents a Catholic League, of which Maximilian, Elector of Bavaria, a pupil of the Jesuits, was chief. The Protestants were ill prepared for the struggle. There was fatal division between the Lutherans and the Calvinists, Luther himself having said in his haste that he hated a Calvinist more than a Papist. The great Protestant princes were lukewarm and weak-kneed: like the Tudor nobility of England, they clung much more firmly to the lands which they had taken from the Catholics than to the faith in the name of which the lands were taken; and as powers of order, naturally alarmed by the disorders which attended the great religious revolution, they were politically inclined to the Imperial side. The lesser nobility and gentry, staunch Protestants for the most part, had shown no capacity for vigorous and united action since their premature attempt under Arnold Von Sickingen. On the peasantry, also staunch Protestants, still weighed the reaction produced by the Peasants' war and the excesses of the Anabaptists. In the free cities there was a strong burgher element ready to fight for Protestantism and liberty; but even in the free cities wealth was Conservative, and to the Rothschilds of the day the cause which offered high interest and good security was the cause of Heaven.

      The smouldering fire burst into a flame in Bohemia, a kingdom of the House of Austria, and a member of the Empire, but peopled by hot, impulsive Sclavs, jealous of their nationality, as well as of their Protestant faith—Bohemia, whither the spark of Wycliffism had passed along the electric chain of common universities by which mediaeval Christendom was bound, and where it had kindled first the martyr fire of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, then the fiercer conflagration of the Hussite war. In that romantic city by the Moldau, with its strange, half Oriental beauty, where Jesuitism now reigns supreme, and St. John Nepemuch is the popular divinity, Protestantism and Jesuitism then lay in jealous neighbourhood, Protestantism supported by the native nobility, from anarchical propensity as well as from religious conviction; Jesuitism patronized and furtively aided by the intrusive Austrian power. From the Emperor Rudolph II., the Protestants had obtained a charter of religious liberties. But Rudolph's successor, Ferdinand II., was the Philip II. of Germany in bigotry, though not in cruelty. In his youth, after a pilgrimage to Loretto, he had vowed at the feet of the Pope to restore Catholicism at the hazard of his life. He was a pupil of the Jesuits, almost worshipped priests, was passionately devoted to the ceremonies of his religion, delighting even in the functions of an acolyte, and, as he said, preferred a desert to an empire full of heretics. He had, moreover, before his accession to the throne, come into collision with Protestantism where it was triumphant, and had found in its violence too good an excuse for his bigotry. It was inevitable that as King of Bohemia he should attempt to narrow the Protestant liberties. The hot Czech blood took fire, the fierceness of political turbulence mingled with that of religious zeal, and at a council held at Prague, in the old palace of the Bohemian kings, Martiniz and Slavata, the most hated of Ferdinand's creatures, were thrown out of a window in what was called good Bohemian fashion, and only by a marvellous accident escaped with their lives. The first blow was struck, the signal was given for thirty years of havoc. Insurrection flamed up in Bohemia. At the head of the insurgents, Count Thurn rushed on Vienna. The Emperor was saved only by a miracle, as Jesuitism averred—as Rationalism says, by the arrival of Dampierre's Imperial horse. He suffered a fright which must have made him more than ever prefer a desert to an empire full of heretics. By a vote of the States of Bohemia the crown was taken from Ferdinand and offered to Frederic, Elector Palatine. Frederic was married to the bright and fascinating Princess Elizabeth of England, the darling of Protestant hearts; other qualifications for that crown of peril he had none. But in an evil hour he accepted the offer. Soon his unfitness appeared. A foreigner, he could not rein the restive and hard mouthed Czech nobility, a Calvinist and a pupil of the Huguenots, he unwisely let loose Calvinist iconoclasm among a people who clung to their ancient images though they had renounced their ancient faith. Supinely he allowed Austria and the Catholic League to raise their Croats and Walloons with the ready aid, so valuable in that age of unready finance, of Spanish gold. Supinely he saw the storm gather and roll towards him. Supinely he lingered in his palace, while on the White Hill, a name fatal in Protestant annals, his army, filled with his own discouragement, was broken by the combined forces of the Empire, under Bucquoi, and of the Catholic League, under Count Tilly. Still there was hope in resistance, yet Frederic fled. He was in great danger, say his apologists. It was to face a great danger, and show others how to face it, that he had come there. Let a man, before he takes the crown of Bohemia, look well into his own heart. Then followed a scaffold scene like that of Egmont and Horn, but on a larger scale. Ferdinand, it seems, hesitated to shed blood, but his confessor quelled his scruples. Before the City Hall of Prague, and near the Thein Church, bearing the Hussite emblems of the chalice and sword, amidst stern military pomp, the Emperor presiding in the person of his High Commissioner, twenty- four victims of high rank were led forth to death. Just as the executions commenced a bright rainbow spanned the sky. To the victims it seemed an assurance of Heaven's mercy. To the more far-reaching eye of history it may seem to have been an assurance that, dark as the sky then was, the flood of Reaction should no more cover the earth. But dark the sky was: the counter-reformation rode on the wings of victory, and with ruthless cruelty, through Bohemia, through Moravia, through Austria Proper, which had shown sympathy with the Bohemian revolt. The lands of the Protestant nobility were confiscated, the nobility itself crushed; in its place was erected a new nobility of courtiers, foreigners, military adventurers devoted to the Empire and to Catholicism, the seed of the Metternichs.

      For ten years the tide ran steadily against Protestantism and German Independence.