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NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS CLASSICS THE THIRTY YEARS WAR CICELY VERONICA WEDGWOOD (1910-1997) was bom into an innovative and intellectual English family. Her father, a direct descendant of the potter Josiah Wedgwood, was the chief general manager of the London and North Eastern Railway and her mother was a novelist and travel writer. After success at Oxford, Wedgwood rejected an academic career and took up writing instead. She published her first history, The Thirty Years War (1938), before her thirtieth birthday, and in the years that followed wrote a succession of chronicles of seventeenth-century Europe that made her one of the most popular and best-known historians in Britain. Her most important works include The King's Peace; The King’s War; and William the Silent: William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, 1533-1584, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography in 1944. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies, a Dame of the British Empire, and in 1969 became the third woman to be appointed a member of the British Order of Merit. ANTHONY GRAFTON teaches the history of Renaissance Europe at Princeton University. His books include Joseph Scaliger, Cardano’s Cosmos, and Bring Out Your Dead. THE THIRTY YEARS WAR C.V. WEDGWOOD Foreword by ANTHONY GRAFTON NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS New York This is a New York Review Book Published by The New York Review of Books 1755 Broadway, New York, NY 10019 www.nyrb.com Copyright © by the Estate of C. V. Wedgwood Foreword copyright © 2005 by Anthony Grafton All rights reserved. First published by Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1938 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wedgwood, C. V. (Cicely Veronica), 1910— The Thirty Years War I C.V. Wedgwood ; introduction by Anthony Grafton. p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics) Originally published: London : J. Cape, 1938. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-59017-146-2 (alk. paper) 1. Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648. 2. Habsburg, House of. I. Title. II. Series. D258.W4 2005 940.2'4—dc22 2004027336 ISBN 1-59017-146-2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. 10 987654321 Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 7 1 GERMANY AND EUROPE: 1618 11 2 A KING FOR BOHEMIA: 1617-19 69 3 SPANISH TOCSIN, GERMAN ALARUM: 1619-21 101 4 THE EMPEROR FERDINAND AND THE ELECTOR Maximilian: 1621-5 137 5 TOWARDS THE BALTIC: 1625-8 192 6 deadlock: 1628-30 223 7 THE KING OF SWEDEN: 1630-2 259 8 FROM LÜTZEN TO NÖRDLINGEN—AND BEYOND 1632-5 325 9 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE RHINE: 1635-9 383 10 THE COLLAPSE OF SPAIN: 1639-43 414 11 towards peace: 1643-8 445 12 THE PEACE AND AFTER 485 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 507 INDEX 511 MAPS AND CHARTS THE RHINE, THE VAL TELLINE, AND NORTH ITALY 12 CENTRAL EUROPE IN 1618 16-17 GENEALOGICAL TREES: HAPSBURG DYNASTY 509 LEADING PROTESTANT DYNASTIES 510 FOREWORD Veronica Wedgwood had not yet turned thirty when The Thirty Years War appeared. But the book shows no signs of imma turity in content or style. Wedgwood carves her facts directly from the coalface, using the original documents in half a dozen lan guages that she would always prefer to the conclusions of any modem “Dr. Stumpfnadel.” More remarkably, she imposes a clear story line on a turbulent and chaotic war that raged from 1618 to 1648, and that can be understood only when set against an inter national background of high court politics and negotiation in a dozen countries. The foreground presents a scene of varied and al most inconceivable sufferings. Wedgwood’s elegant prose, fluid, dynamic, and limpidly clear, evokes the deliberations of saturnine monarchs as vividly as the miseries of mercenary soldiers lying out in the cold and peasants robbed of their animals and crops. Early in the book she brings one of the war’s first defining events, the Defenestration of Prague, into focused, cinematic life. No reader can forget the extraordinary story of the Catholic members of the Bohemian Estates, hurled from the windows of the Hradcany Castle, only to survive—their fall was cushioned by a heap of refuse lying be low—and sneak off or be carried away. In one crisp, breathless set piece, Wedgwood pulls off an astonishing range of literary effects, including a splendid virtual close-up: “Slavata fought longer, call ing on the Blessed Virgin and clawing at the window frame under a rain of blows until someone knocked him senseless and the bleeding hands relaxed.” And she sustains the same energy and viii FOREWORD displays the same eye for the detail that makes a past character or scene live throughout her exhausting, wretched tale of human knavery, folly, and will to destroy. The young author’s understanding of the seventeenth-century German world, in all its Baroque splendor and misery, is as im pressive as the panache with which she stages its defining events. She lays her strongest emphasis on personalities—those of the great leaders who, she argues, made all vital decisions in this pe riod. But she also justifies this approach with a striking discussion of the information systems of a time when “faulty transmission of news excluded public opinion from any dominant part in politics.” A series of brief but deeply researched sketches, no less detailed and compelling than her accounts of historical events, tells us about life in cities and on the land, about the development of mili tary organizations and tactics, about theology and the pursuit of witches. Yet Wedgwood sets out not to explain the war but to re count its story. She denies any desire to offer deeper explanations, and argues here, as she would elsewhere, that most of the combat ants had no high purpose, and that contingency determined its course and outcome. Her final judgment on the whole spectacle has the balance and power of a Latin epitaph: “Morally subver sive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its results, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.” The voice with which Wedgwood speaks here is Victorian in its clarity and almost eighteenth-century in its crisp, balanced clauses, but radically modem in its unsparing insistence that war has no higher mean ing—a. mature voice, appropriate to its century and better than the ones in which we speak now. Some of Wedgwood’s qualities as scholar and writer can be explained by her formation. Bom into a branch of the great china making family, as a child she traveled endlessly with her father, a successful railway executive. She was educated at a private school in London, which she loved, and by governesses, and she studied German and French on the Continent before she went up to Oxford. There she deeply impressed her tutor, the young A. L. Rowse, and won the highest honors, first in honor moderations FOREWORD ix (classics) and then in history. She registered to write a dissertation with R. H. Tawney, Christian socialist and pioneering student of social and economic history. An academic career lay open before her, and she did, for a time, give tutorials at Somerville College, Oxford. But Wedgwood could never have forced herself into the academic straitjacket. She seems to have inherited, as so many of her generation did, something of the endless curiosity and courage of the great Victorians, however skeptically she regarded their re ligious and political verities. Reading history had obsessed her since childhood, when she plundered her father’s rich library. So had writing: “By the time I was twelve,” she later recalled, my writing had grown dangerously swift. There was a special kind of writing pad called “The Mammoth,” two hundred pages, quarto, ruled faint; under my now prac ticed pen Mammoths disappeared in a twinkling. Wedgwood’s father, hoping to slow her down, suggested that she write history: “Even a bad writer,” he told her in another lost language, that of informed paternal admonition, “may be a useful historian.” After she left Oxford, he drew on his own network of friends to give her career some direction. His dazzling cohort of fellow students at Cambridge had included G.E. Moore, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the historian G. M. Trevelyan. Wedgwood spent a weekend with Trevelyan, and he in turn suggested that she drop her dry, analytical dissertation and instead write a biog raphy of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, whose policy of “Thorough” supported Charles I’s efforts to impose an absolutist regime in England. Wedgwood delighted in the primary research needed to carry out this project, and with the help of Sir John Neale, she revised her first draft, which she later described to Ved Mehta as “very feminine and sentimental,” making it into a sharp, accessible work that followed with sympathy the career of a statesman who had been treated with disdain by most historians since his execution by the Long Parliament in 1641. By 1935, when the trade publisher Jonathan Cape brought out Wedgwood’s first book, she was on the course she would continue X FOREWORD to pursue. She lived and prospered as a professional writer of his tory. The Thirty Years War, which appeared just three years after Strafford, confirmed her reputation for learning and judgment and found a wide audience. When her royalties fell short of her needs—as they occasionally did—Wedgwood supported herself “very, very well” by turning out articles for Time and Tide, a feminist weekly, writing reviews for the Daily Telegraph, and do ing translations—including one of Elias Canetti’s Auto da Fé. Throughout her career, she devoted herself, in opposition to the Why histories of the professional academics, to what she called How history: detailed, vivid narratives that eschewed any effort to provide structural or social or economic explanations for such great events as the English Civil War, to which she devoted two superbly written, rather Royalist volumes out of a planned three. Wedgwood never lost her love for the documents—unlike many distinguished academic historians. “Nothing,” she once wrote, seems to bridge the gap of the years so much as the fold ing and unfolding of ancient letters; sometimes minute particles of sand which had long adhered in some thick down stroke where the ink had been wet, detach them selves after three hundred years to blow away and join with yesterday’s dust. When Strafford’s private papers became available, a generation after her biography of him came out, she worked through them and radically revised her original work. Her passion for research, moreover, never degenerated into a mere paper chase after new facts. Wedgwood never lost her eye for the supremely telling de tail. Long before the new social and cultural history of the 1990s was bom or thought of, she had seen, and shown, in essays as brief and vivid as Virginia Woolf’s, how the dress that Charles I wore for his last Christmas masque in 1639 or the words and ges tures of a forgotten highwayman could give her readers a uniquely direct sense of the past. Above all, Wedgwood never lost the humanity, the love for
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