The Empire of Austria - John S. C. Abbott (best books to read now TXT) 📗

languid cry of "Long live Ferdinand," they returned to duty.

Two of the leading assassins hastened to Vienna to inform the emperor of the deed they had perpetrated. It was welcome intelligence to Ferdinand, and he finished the work they had thus commenced by hanging and beheading the adherents of Wallenstein without mercy. The assassins were abundantly rewarded. The emperor still prosecuted the war with perseverance, which no disasters could check. Gradually the imperial arms gained the ascendency. The Protestant princes became divided and jealous of each other. The emperor succeeded in detaching from the alliance, and negotiating a separate peace with the powerful Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg. He then assembled a diet at Ratisbon on the 15th of September, 1639, and without much difficulty secured the election of his son Ferdinand to succeed him on the imperial throne. The emperor presided at this diet in person. He was overjoyed in the attainment of this great object of his ambition. He was now fifty-nine years of age, in very feeble health, and quite worn out by a life of incessant anxiety and toil. He returned to Vienna, and in four months, on the 15th of February, 1637, breathed his last.

For eighteen years Germany had now been distracted by war. The contending parties were so exasperated against each other, that no human wisdom could, at once, allay the strife. The new king and emperor, Ferdinand III., wished for peace, but he could not obtain it on terms which he thought honorable to the memory of his father. The Swedish army was still in Germany, aided by the Protestant princes of the empire, and especially by the armies and the treasury of France. The thunders of battle were daily heard, and the paths of these hostile bands were ever marked by smoldering ruins and blood. Vials of woe were emptied, unsurpassed in apocalyptic vision. In the siege of Brisac, the wretched inhabitants were reduced to such a condition of starvation, that a guard was stationed at the burying ground to prevent them from devouring the putrid carcasses of the dead.

For eleven years history gives us nothing but a dismal record of weary marches, sieges, battles, bombardments, conflagrations, and all the unimaginable brutalities and miseries of war. The war had now raged for thirty years. Hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost. Millions of property had been destroyed, and other millions squandered in the arts of destruction. Nearly all Europe had been drawn into this vortex of fury and misery. All parties were now weary. And yet seven years of negotiation had been employed before they could consent to meet to consult upon a general peace. At length congresses of the belligerent powers were assembled in two important towns of Westphalia, Osnabruck and Munster. Ridiculous disputes upon etiquette rendered this division of the congress necessary. The ministers of electors enjoyed the title of excellency . The ministers of princes claimed the same title. Months were employed in settling that question. Then a difficulty arose as to the seats at table, who were entitled to the positions of honor. After long debate, this point was settled by having a large round table made, to which there could be no head and no foot.

For four years the great questions of European policy were discussed by this assembly. The all-important treaty, known in history as the peace of Westphalia, and which established the general condition of Europe for one hundred and fifty years, was signed on the 24th of October, 1648. The contracting parties included all the great and nearly all the minor powers of Europe. The articles of this renowned treaty are vastly too voluminous to be recorded here. The family of Frederic received back the Palatinate of which he had been deprived. The Protestants were restored to nearly all the rights which they had enjoyed under the beneficent reign of Maximilian II. The princes of the German empire, kings, dukes, electors, marquises, princes, of whatever name, pledged themselves not to oppress those of their subjects who differed from them in religious faith. The pope protested against this toleration, but his protest was disregarded. The German empire lost its unity, and became a conglomeration of three hundred independent sovereignties. Each petty prince or duke, though possessing but a few square miles of territory, was recognized as a sovereign power, entitled to its court, its army, and its foreign alliances. The emperor thus lost much of that power which he had inherited from his ancestors; as those princes, whom he had previously regarded as vassals, now shared with him sovereign dignity.

Ferdinand III., however, weary of the war which for so many years had allowed him not an hour of repose, gladly acceded to these terms of peace, and in good faith employed himself in carrying out the terms of the treaty. After the exchange of ratifications another congress was assembled at Nuremburg to settle some of the minute details, which continued in session two years, when at length, in 1651, the armies were disbanded, and Germany was released from the presence of a foreign foe.

Internal peace being thus secured, Ferdinand was anxious, before his death, to secure the succession of the imperial crown to his son who bore his own name. He accordingly assembled a meeting of the electors at Prague, and by the free use of bribes and diplomatic intrigue, obtained their engagement to support his son. He accomplished his purpose, and Ferdinand, quite to the astonishment of Germany, was chosen unanimously, King of the Romans - the title assumed by the emperor elect. In June, 1653, the young prince was crowned at Ratisbon. The joy of his father, however, was of short duration. In one year from that time the small-pox, in its most loathsome form, seized the prince, and after a few days of anguish he died. His father was almost inconsolable with grief. As soon as he had partially recovered from the blow, he brought forward his second son, Leopold, and with but little difficulty secured for him the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, but was disappointed in his attempts to secure the suffrages of the German electors.

With energy, moderation and sagacity, the peacefully disposed Ferdinand so administered the government as to allay for seven years all the menaces of war which were continually arising. For so long a period had Germany been devastated by this most direful of earthly calamities, which is indeed the accumulation of all conceivable woes, ever leading in its train pestilence and famine, that peace seemed to the people a heavenly boon. The fields were again cultivated, the cities and villages repaired, and comfort began again gradually to make its appearance in homes long desolate. It is one of the deepest mysteries of the divine government that the destinies of millions should be so entirely placed in the hands of a single man. Had Ferdinand II. been an enlightened, good man, millions would have been saved from life-long ruin and misery.

One pert young king, in the search of glory, kindled again the lurid flames of war. Christina, Queen of Sweden, daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, influenced by romantic dreams, abdicated the throne and retired to the seclusion of the cloister. Her cousin, Charles Gustavus, succeeded her. He thought it a fine thing to play the soldier, and to win renown by consigning the homes of thousands to blood and misery. He was a king, and the power was in his hands. Merely to gratify this fiend-like ambition, he laid claim to the crown of Poland, and raised an army for the invasion of that kingdom. A portion of Poland was then in a state of insurrection, the Ukraine Cossacks having risen against John Cassimar, the king. Charles Gustavus thought that this presented him an opportunity to obtain celebrity as a warrior, with but little danger of failure. He marched into the doomed country, leaving behind him a wake of fire and blood. Cities and villages were burned; the soil was drenched with the blood of fathers and sons, his bugle blasts were echoed by the agonizing groans of widows and orphans, until at last, in an awful battle of three days, under the walls of Warsaw, the Polish army, struggling in self-defense, was cut to pieces, and Charles Gustavus was crowned a conqueror. Elated by this infernal deed, the most infernal which mortal man can commit, he began to look around to decide in what direction to extend his conquests.

Ferdinand III., anxious as he was to preserve peace, could not but look with alarm upon the movements which now threatened the States of the empire. It was necessary to present a barrier to the inroads of such a ruffian. He accordingly assembled a diet at Frankfort and demanded succors to oppose the threatened invasion on the north. He raised an army, entered into an alliance with the defeated and prostrate, yet still struggling Poles, and was just commencing his march, when he was seized with sudden illness and died, on the 3d of March, 1657. Ferdinand was a good man. He was not responsible for the wars which desolated the empire during the first years of his reign, for he was doing every thing in his power to bring those wars to a close. His administration was a blessing to millions. Just before his death he said, and with truth which no one will controvert, "During my whole reign no one can reproach me with a single act which I knew to be unjust." Happy is the monarch who can go into the presence of the King of kings with such a conscience.

The death of the emperor was caused by a singular accident. He was not very well, and was lying upon a couch in one of the chambers of his palace. He had an infant son, but a few weeks old, lying in a cradle in the nursery. A fire broke out in the apartment of the young prince. The whole palace was instantly in clamor and confusion. Some attendants seized the cradle of the young prince, and rushed with it to the chamber of the emperor. In their haste and terror they struck the cradle with such violence against the wall that it was broken to pieces and the child fell, screaming, upon the floor. The cry of fire, the tumult, the bursting into the room, the dashing of the cradle and the shrieks of the child, so shocked the debilitated king that he died within an hour.

Leopold was but eighteen years of age when he succeeded to the sovereignty of all the Austrian dominions, including the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia. It was the first great object of his ambition to secure the imperial throne also, which his father had failed to obtain for him. Louis XIV. was now the youthful sovereign of France. He, through his ambitious and able minister, Mazarin, did every thing in his power to thwart the endeavors of Ferdinand, and to obtain the brilliant prize for himself. The King of Sweden united with the French court in the endeavor to abase the pride of the house of Austria. But notwithstanding all their efforts, Leopold carried his point, and was unanimously elected emperor, and crowned on the 31st of July, 1657. The princes of the empire, however, greatly strengthened in their independence by the articles of the peace of Westphalia, increasingly jealous of their rights, attached forty-five conditions to their acceptance of Leopold as emperor. Thus, notwithstanding the imperial title, Leopold had as little power over the States of the empire as the President of the United States has over the internal concerns of Maine or Louisiana. In all such cases there is ever a conflict between two parties, the one seeking the centralization of power, and the other advocating its dispersion into