1912] on the Etfeds of the Thirty Yrars War. 371 



the character of the conflict itself seems to change. The direct 

 religions issue seems to grow dull and dim with the removal of the 

 Protestant champion ; the personalities that carry on the struggle 

 seem to become less vivid to the student of it, as they did to its 

 contemporaries ; it has been pointed out how the songs of the Thirty 

 Years' War, of which we have a plentiful and interesting crop for its 

 earlier half, seem to become extinct after the death of Gustavus. 



Meanwhile, Wallenstein has reassumed the command ; and, with 

 an outspokenness unprecedented in the history of modern warfare, 

 tlie system nakedly proclaims itself of making a great organized 

 mercenary force, not the servitor of nations or other political autho- 

 rities, but the arbiter between them. The great captain concentrates 

 in his native Bohemia the vast armada, by which his master had 

 hoped to restore both the fullness of the Imperial sway and the fixity 

 ■of Catholic ecclesiastical control — but his own mind is intent upon 

 peace. And, though his schemes are dark and interfused with personal 

 ambition, there can be no doubt that the peace at which he aimed 

 was to have been brought about by sacrifices less exacting than those 

 to which the Empire and Germany had actually to submit in the 

 Treaties of Westphalia. After his violent death, the conflict enters on 

 a stage in which Sweden, after at first heading a compact but not 

 Protestant alliance, falls back, when defeated at Nordlingen, upon 

 the more limited task of securing what she can of the territorial ac- 

 quisitions on which she had laid hands so soon as might be after the 

 coming of her King. In her place, France assumes the real control 

 of those princes who have not turned their thoughts once more to a 

 reconciliation with the Emperor, and who finally conclude their 

 separate peace with him at Prague. Half as an auxiliary, half as a 

 ])aid officer of France, Bernard of Weimar ends his heroic career. 

 But it is the divided purpose, the particular ambitions, of Sweden and 

 France, whose alliance might have found a very different end had 

 the great King lived a few years longer who had first concluded it 

 with the far-sighted Cardinal — it is their self-centred ambitions seek- 

 ing to control the policy and the relations to the Emperor of the 

 German princes — even of the Catholic Bavarian — and it is, on the 

 other hand, the close co-operation between the Emperor and Spain, 

 and the consequent inclusion of the revived struggle between Spain 

 and the United Provinces, in the war, which give to its latter half its 

 characteristic aspect. That aspect is one of purposes and policies 

 crossing one another, as the marches of the armies pass from Silesia 

 to Westphalia, and far out to the Baltic shores and to the borderlands 

 of Alsace and Lorraine. The very armies have changed their character, 

 for the system of mercenary armies of the earlier type had given way 

 to that of standing armies organized by princes for the territorial 

 defence ; but the character and conduct of the soldiery had not im- 

 proved in consequence, and the discipline had sunk from the days of 

 Tillv and Gustavus, and, not less distinctly, of Wallenstein. But 



Vol. XX. (No. 106) 2 c 



