368 Mr. A. W. Ward [March 8. 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, March 8, 1912. 



His Grace the Duke of Northumberland, K.G. P.C. 

 D.C.L. LL.D. F.R.S., President, in the Chair. 



A. W. Ward, Esq., Litt.D. LL.D., Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. 

 The Effects of the Thirty Years' War. 



When we speak of the Thirty Years' War, and occupy ourselves 

 with discussing the causes, the characteristics or (as I propose, in an 

 avowedly partial and incomplete fashion, to do to-night) the effects 

 of the long struggle called as a whole by that dread name — are we 

 at bottom only using it as an historical expression ? Let us feel 

 quite sure of our ground at the outset ; for the historical critics of 

 our own day, whose comments have suggested to me that it might 

 be worth while to ask you to go once more over some of the ground 

 that must be already familiar to most of you, are within their right 

 in demanding that no statement, and no form of words that implies 

 a statement, should be taken at more than its actual value. Gus- 

 tavus Adolphus, we know, described the Thirty Years' War as the 

 whole of the wars of Europe grown into one ; but this was a saying 

 rather than a definition, and one which, from the very nature of the 

 case, could hardly be applied to the earlier part of the struggle — the 

 twelve years, let us say, which preceded his own intervention in the 

 affairs of the Empire. The Bohemian, the Palatinate, and the 

 Lower-Saxon or Danish War, were, all of them, still more or less 

 localized ; and to the last there were certain portions of the Empire — 

 notably some of the Austrian crown lands in the south — which never 

 suffered from the actual presence of war. Still, these exceptions 

 amount to relatively little ; and the localization of which I have 

 spoken was not — unless it were by King James I. — expected to 

 endure. Thus the continuity of place, though imperfect, was enough 

 to allow us to speak of the Thirty Years' War as one war ; and I 

 think the same may be said of another continuity — the cohesion of 

 the successive stages of a struggle which lasted for the whole of 

 what we reckon as a human generation. At first sight, indeed, the 

 defenestration at Prague — the incident from which it has always 

 been customary to date the beginning of the Thirty Years' War- 

 might seem far removed from the solemn gathering in the two 

 Westphalian towns of European diplomacy prepared for its long- 

 protracted labours — amidst pomp and circumstance scarcely inferior 

 to those in which, a century and a half later, it assembled at Vienna 



