The Thirty Years' War [Paperback]

This is quite simply one of the finest works of history produced by an English or American historian during the twentieth century. It occupies a place of honor on my bookshelf alongside the works of Steven Runciman, Peter Green, and C. Vann Woodward.

Wedgwood's book has three great virtues: (1) the clarity and directness of her analysis; (2) her extensive research in a wide variety of incredibly obscure sources in many different languages; and (3) her remarkable gifts as a literary stylist. She writes beautiful, classic English prose and has a genius for portraiture. Moreover, she has visited many of the sites of the events in question and her feel for the physical background of the story is a particularly engaging part of the book.

To most history lovers, the Thirty Years' War is an obscure and impenetrable thicket considered too much trouble to explore. But Wedgwood recognized that it was one of the decisive episodes in early modern European history. It delayed the unification of Germany by two centuries; began the slow relative decline of Austrian power; paved the way for France's superpower status under Louis XIV; and accelerated Spain's decay into the sick man of eighteenth-century Europe.

One of the other reviewers suggested that Wedgwood's account was marked at times by debatable interpretations influenced by 1930's pacifism. I can see where that idea might come from, but I disagree with it. Certainly, one of Wedgwood's concerns is why the statesmen of the time were repeatedly unable to bring an end to this horribly destructive war, which took on a life of its own that defeated the original intentions of just about all of the participants (much like the Great War of Wedgwood's youth). But in contrast to a lot of other people in England in the mid-1930's, Wedgwood recognized the Nazi regime as the unmitigated evil that it was. Her book seems to have been written in part to explore how it was that Germany's past history had produced the country's monstrous new regime.

I also have a slight disagreement with the suggestion by another reviewer that Wedgwood skimps on military history. The major battles -- particularly Breitenfeld, Nordlingen and Rocroi -- are discussed here in vivid and memorable terms. But Wedgwood doesn't make dramatic battle descriptions an end in themselves. To Wedgwood, the outcome of battles is important insofar as it affected the balance of political forces and thereby made it impossible at a series of critical points to bring the war to an end.

Finally, I have to quote some representative passages to show Wedgwood's gift for language and deft portraits of the major participants. This is perhaps my favorite of the latter:

"General and private opinion flattered the archduke [Ferdinand II]'s virtues, but not his ability. Kindly contemptuous, the greater number of his contemporaries wrote him off as a good-natured simpleton wholly under the control of his chief minister Ulrich von Eggenburg. Yet Ferdinand's apparent lack of personal initiative may have been a pose . . . . He does not appear to have taken political advice from his confessors, and his subjection to the Church did not prevent him from laying violent hands on a Cardinal and defying the Pope in pursuit of what he himself felt to be right. Repeatedly in the course of his life he twisted disaster into advantage, wrenched unexpected safety out of overwhelming danger, snatched victory from defeat. His contemporaries, unimpressed, commented on his astonishing luck. If it was luck, it was indeed astonishing."

Here is her elegy for the power of imperial Spain following the disastrous battle of Rocroi:

"It was the end of the Spanish army. The cavalry survived, but they were so broken in discipline and morale as to be useless without that splendid infantry which had been the strength of the army. They had not lost their reputation at Rocroy, as the Swedes had done at Nordlingen, but they had died to keep it. . . . In the centre of their position on the fields before Rocroy there stands today a little modern monument, an unassuming grey monolith, the gravestone of the Spanish army; almost, one might say, the gravestone of Spanish greatness."

This is by far the best book ever written on the Thirty Years war and this judgement is unlikely to change very soon. Wedgewood is one of the 20th century's distiguished historians. This book was written and published during WWII and as such this gives the works a sense of dramatic urgency. Wedgewood saw clear parallels between what happened in the 17th century and what was happening to Europe in the 1940s. The Jesuits for example are referred to as "the storm troopers of the counter-Reformation.

Wedgewood's sympathies are clearly with the Protestants and there is no doubt who the hero of the book is, Gustavus Adolphus, who is in nearly every way portrayed positively. That is not to say that this is a flaw with the book, rather it is a strength. In these days of sprin doctors, it sometimes seems difficult to realize that good press was sometimes earned and deserved.

It would be too difficult to try and summarize the book in the space provided. In a nutshell, the Thirty Years war evolved into a general European conflict (with the English sitting this one out) due to many of the unresolved issues of the previous century. The Hapsburgs of Austria wanted to dominate the Holy Roman Empire, France wanted to contain the Spainish and Austrian branches, and Sweden was on its way to becoming a world power (for at least the next 100 years). The reason the war went on for so long was that no one really had the strength to land a decisive blow. Oddly enough whenever a power did come close some disaster would over take the army and the powers would have to start over again. Supplying, paying and feeding armies in the field was probably the most problematical undertaking of the entire conflict, along with finding the funds to continue the war for yet another year.

Wedgewood masterfully is able to describe a number of personalities, political situations and religious conflicts to give a real sense of both the era and the people who made it.

Halfway through this splendid book and a third of the way through this dreadful war, the reader confronts Germany as a wasteland: its crops ravaged or burnt or trampled, its peasantry slaughtered or starved or dead of disease. One might well expect that the combatants, even if they had reached no closure, would fall back exhausted. But no: there was worse to come-another 18 years of pillage and devastation until at last the participants, by now nearly bled dry, at last reconciled themselves, if not to an understanding, then at least to go home. Oddly enough the Peace of Westphalia, which at last brought the conflict to a conclusion, came in time to serve as a template for the modern political world.

This latter fact might be reason enough to read C. V. Wedgewood's classic account of the conflict. But there is a happier reason, and that is that her exposition is, from start to finish, a delight. In his introduction, Grafton calls her "the greatest narrative historian of [the 20th Century," and it is hard to quarrel with him: she is brisk precise, compassionate, mordant and energetic

Having said this, it is no contradiction to say that her story doesn't really gain traction until the coming of Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, the man who, as it is said, secured the permanent establishment of Protestantism on the continent. Gustavus is the only character to get a chapter of his own and from Wedgewood, the fullest personal description. "Coarsely made and immensely strong, he was slow and rather clumsy in movement, but he could swing a spade or pick-axe with any sapper in his army. ..." Wedgewood goes on for several pages like this. It is all good reading, and in the end, it is not quite hero-worship: no matter how much she may seem to admire Gustavus (and perhaps, to a much lesser extent, some of the other protagonists), still in the end the primary focus of her attention is on the German peasants-the poor pawns, battered and abused, in this miserable contention. Nobody knows how much population Germany lost in the Thirty Years' War: some estimates say 40 percent. Whatever the number, it is hard to imagine any feats of heroism or achievements of policy than justify all the bloodshed and is fortune.

Grafton says Wedgewood writes like Gibbon. In the end she writes like herself, but against Gibbon, a better comparison might be Tacitus: Ferdinand "was no a clever man but he had a certain unconscious ability for appropriating the ideas of clever men." John George of Saxony "had been known to sit at table gorging homely foods and swilling native beer for seven hours on end, his sole approach at conversation to box his dwarf's ears or to pour the dregs of a tankard over a servant's head as a signal for more. ... [H]e drank too much and too often. ... It made diplomacy difficult." Gustavus (again) "had, like many great leaders, an unlimited capacity for self-deception. In his own eyes the Protestant champion, in Richelieu's eyes a convenient instrument against the House of Austria, he was in sober fact the protagonist of Swedish expansion on German soil. Sweden stood to gain. Protestantism stood to gain, but the German people stood to lose."

"Just imagine," someone said, "if Gustavus had not taken a bullet at Lutzen in 1632, we might have a Lutherana Pope!" Maybe. Instead we are left with a heritage no less durable for being unintended: the system of nation-states, with individual sovereignty and at least the rudiments of religious freedom-also, perhaps, the notion that nothing is worth fighting for quite this much, and that we are often better off just cultivating our garden.

And yet a final irony is that Wedgewood published her first edition with the echoes of Hitler's rhetoric in her ears. In an almost unexampled instance of contemporaneous comment, she remarks that "three centuries have smoothed every scar from [the] placid landscape, even as the philosophy of the new Germany [sc., in 1937] has submerged the spiritual landmark. `Freedom of belief for all the world'-forgotten yearning of an age forgotten among men who have no choice but to believe what they are told."

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 36 reviews  4.5 out of 5 stars