ALBERT OF BRADENBURG

 

1553.] As the French had never given so severe a check to the emperor in any former campaign, they expressed immoderate joy at the success of their arms. Charles himself; accustomed to a long series of prosperity, felt the calamity most sensibly, and retired from Metz into the Low-Countries, much dejected with the cruel reverse of fortune which affected him in his declining age, when the violence of the gout had increased to such a pitch, as entirely broke the vigour of his constitution, and rendered him peevish, difficult of access, and often incapable of applying to business. But whenever he enjoyed any interval of ease, all his thoughts were bent on revenge; and he deliberated, with the greatest solicitude, concerning the most proper means of annoying France, and of effacing the stain which had obscured the reputation and glory of his arms. All the schemes concerning Germany which had engrossed him so long, being disconcerted by the peace of Passau, the affairs of the empire became only secondary objects of attention, and enmity to France was the predominant passion which chiefly occupied his mind.

The turbulent ambition of Albert of Brandenburg excited violent commotions, which disturbed the empire during this year. That prince's troops having shared in the calamities of the siege of Metz, were greatly reduced in number. But the emperor, prompted by gratitude for his distinguished services on that occasion, or perhaps with a secret view of fomenting divisions among the princes of the empire, having paid up all the money due to him, he was enabled with that sum to hire so many of the soldiers dismissed from the Imperial army, that he was soon at the head of a body of men as numerous as ever. The bishops of Bamberg and Würzburg having solicited the Imperial chamber to annul, by its authority, the iniquitous conditions which Albert had compelled them to sign, that court unanimously found all their engagements with him to be void in their own nature, because they had been extorted by force; enjoined Albert to renounce all claim to the performance of them; and, if he should persist in such an unjust demand, exhorted all the princes of the empire to take arms against him as a disturber of the public tranquility. To this decision, Albert opposed the confirmation of his transactions with the two prelates, which the emperor had granted him as the reward of his having joined the Imperial army at Metz and in order to intimidate his antagonists, as well as to convince them of his resolution not to relinquish his pretensions, he put his troops in motion, that he might secure the territory in question. Various endeavors were employed, and many expedients proposed, in order to prevent the kindling a new war in Germany. But the same warmth of temper which rendered Albert turbulent and enterprising, inspiring him with the most sanguine hopes of success, even in his wildest undertakings, he disdainfully rejected all reasonable overtures of accommodation.

Upon this, the Imperial chamber issued its decree against him, and required the elector of Saxony, together with several other princes mentioned by name, to take arms in order to carry it into execution. Maurice, and those associated with him, were not unwilling to undertake this service. They were extremely solicitous to maintain public order by supporting the authority of the Imperial chamber, and saw the necessity of giving a timely check to the usurpations of an ambitious prince, who had no principle of action but regard to his own interest, and no motive to direct him but the impulse of ungovernable passions. They had good reason to suspect, that the emperor encouraged Albert in his extravagant and irregular proceedings, and secretly afforded him assistance that, by raising him up to rival Maurice in power, he might, in any future broil, make use of his assistance to counterbalance and control the authority which the other had acquired in the empire.

These considerations united the most powerful princes in Germany in a league against Albert, of which Maurice was declared generalissimo [April 2]. This formidable confederacy, however, wrought no change in Albert's sentiments; but as he knew that he could not resist so many princes, if he should allow them time to assemble their forces, he endeavored, by his activity, to deprive them of all the advantages which they might derive from their united power and numbers; and for that reason marched directly against Maurice, the enemy whom he dreaded most. It was happy for the allies that the conduct of their affairs was committed to a prince of such abilities. He, by his authority and example, had inspired them with vigour; and having carried on their preparations with a degree of rapidity of which confederate bodies are seldom capable, he was in condition to face Albert before he could make any considerable progress.

Their armies, which were nearly equal in number, each consisting of twenty-four thousand men, met at Seiverhausen, in the duchy of Lunenburg; and the violent animosity against each other, which possessed the two leaders, did not suffer them to continue long inactive. The troops inflamed with the same hostile rage, marched fiercely to the combat [June 9]; they fought with the greatest obstinacy; and as both generals were capable of availing themselves of every favorable occurrence, the battle remained long doubtful, each gaining ground upon the other alternately. At last victory declared for Maurice, who was superior in cavalry, and Albert's army fled in confusion, leaving four thousand dead in the field, and their camp, baggage, and artillery in the hands of the conquerors. The allies bought their victory dear, their best troops suffered greatly, two sons of the duke of Brunswick, a duke of Lunenburg, and many other persons of distinction, were among the number of the slain. But all these were soon forgotten; for Maurice himself, as he led up to a second charge a body of horse which had been broken, received a wound with a pistol bullet in the belly, of which he died two days after the battle, in the thirty-second year of his age, and in the sixth after his attaining the electoral dignity.

Of all the personages who have appeared in the history of this active age, when great occurrences and sudden revolutions called forth extraordinary talents to view, and afforded them full opportunity to display themselves, Maurice may justly he considered as the most remarkable. If his exorbitant ambition, his profound dissimulation, and his unwarrantable usurpation of his kinsman's honors and dominions exclude him from being praised as a virtuous man; his prudence in concerting his measures, his vigor in executing them, and the uniform success with which they were attended, entitle him to the appellation of a great prince. At an age when impetuosity of spirit commonly predominates over political wisdom, when the highest effort even of a genius of the first order is to fix on a bold scheme, and to execute it with promptitude and courage, he formed and conducted an intricate plan of policy, which deceived the most artful monarch in Europe. At the very juncture when the emperor had attained to almost unlimited despotism, Maurice, with power seemingly inadequate to such an undertaking, compelled him to relinquish all his usurpations, and established not only the religious but civil liberties of Germany on such foundations as have hitherto remained unshaken. Although, at one period of his life, his conduct excited the jealousy of the protestants, and at another drew on him the resentment of the Roman catholics, such was his masterly address, that he was the only prince of the age who in any degree possessed the confidence of both, and whom both lamented as the most able as well as faithful guardian of the constitution and laws of his country.

The consternation which Maurice’s death occasioned among his troops, prevented them from making the proper improvement of the victory which they had trained. Albert, whose active courage, and profuse liberality, rendered him the darling of such military adventurers as were little solicitous about the justice of his cause, soon reassembled his broken forces, and made fresh levies with such success that he was quickly at the head of fifteen thousand men, and renewed his depredations with additional fury. But Henry of Brunswick having taken the command of the allied troops, defeated him in a second battle [Sept. 12] scarcely less bloody than the former. Even then his courage did not sink, nor were his resources exhausted. He made several efforts, and some of them very vigorous, to retrieve his affairs: but being laid under the ban of the empire by the Imperial chamber; being driven by degrees out of all his hereditary territories, as well as those which he had usurped; being forsaken by many of his officers, and overpowered by the number of his enemies, he fled for refuge into France. After having been, for a considerable time, the terror and scourge of Germany, he lingered out some years in an indigent and dependent state of exile, the miseries of which his restless and arrogant spirit endured with the most indignant impatience. Upon his death without issue [Jan. 12, 1577], his territories, which had been seized by the princes who took arms against him, were restored, by a decree of the emperor, to his collateral heirs of the house of Brandenburg.

Maurice having left only one daughter, who was afterwards married to William prince of Orange, by whom she had a son who bore his grand­father's name, and inherited the great talents for which he was conspicuous, a violent dispute arose concerning the succession to his honors and territories. John Frederick, the degraded elector, claimed the electoral dignity, and that part of his patrimonial estate of which he had been violently stripped after the Smalkaldic war. Augustus, Maurice's only brother, pleaded his right not only to the hereditary possessions of their family, but to the electoral dignity, and to the territories which Maurice had acquired. As Augustus was a prince of considerable abilities, as well as of great candor and gentleness of manners, the states of Saxony, forgetting tHe merits and sufferings of their former master, declared warmly in his favor. His pretensions were powerfully supported by the king of Denmark, whose daughter he had married, and zealously espoused by the king of the Romans, out of regard to Maurice's memory. The degraded elector, though secretly favored by his ancient enemy the emperor, was at last obliged to relinquish his claim, upon obtaining a small addition to the territories which had been allotted to him, together with a stipulation, securing to his family the eventual succession, upon a failure of male heirs in the Albertine line. That unfortunate, but magnanimous prince, died next year, soon after ratifying this treaty of agreement; and the electoral dignity is still possessed by the descendants of Augustus.

During these transactions in Germany, war was carried on in the Low-Countries with considerable vigour. The emperor, impatient to efface the stain which his ignominious repulse at Metz left upon his military reputa­tion, had an army early in the field, and laid siege to Terouane. Though the town was of such importance, that Francis used to call it one of the two pillows on which a king of France might sleep with security, the fortifications were in bad repair: Henry, trusting to what had happened at Metz, thought nothing more was necessary to render all the efforts of the enemy abortive, than to reinforce the garrison with a considerable number of the young nobility. But d'Esse, a veteran officer who commanded them, being killed, and the Imperialists pushing the siege with great vigor and perseverance, the place was taken by assault [June 21]. That it might not fall again into the hands of the French, Charles ordered not only the fortifications but the town itself to be razed, and the inhabitants to be dis­persed in the adjacent cities. Elated with this success, the Imperialists immediately invested Hesden, which, though defended with great bravery, was likewise taken by assault, and such of the garrison as escaped the sword were made prisoners. The emperor entrusted the conduct of this siege to Emanuel Philibert of Savoy, prince of Piedmont, who, on that occasion, gave the first display of those great talents for military command, which soon entitled him to be ranked among the first generals of the age, and facilitated his re-establishment in his hereditary dominions, the greater part of which having been overrun by Francis in his expeditions into Italy, were still retained by Henry.

The loss of these towns, together with so many persons of distinction, either killed or taken by the enemy, was no inconsiderable calamity to France, and Henry felt it very sensibly; but he was still more mortified at the emperor's having recovered his wonted superiority in the field so soon after the blow at Metz, which the French had represented as fatal to his power. He was ashamed too, of his own remissness and excessive security at the opening of the campaign; and in order to repair that error, he assembled a numerous army, and led it into the Low-Countries.

Roused at the approach of such a formidable enemy, Charles left Brussels, where he had been shut up so closely during seven months, that it came to be believed in many parts of Europe that he was dead; and though he was so much debilitated by the gout that he could hardly bear the motion of a litter, he hastened to join his army. The eyes of all Europe were turned with expectation towards those mighty and exasperated rivals, between whom a decisive battle was now thought unavoidable. But Charles having prudently declined to hazard a general engagement, and the violence of the autumnal rains rendering it impossible for the French to undertake any siege, they retired, without having performed anything suitable to the great preparations which they had made.

The Imperial arms were not attended with the same success in Italy. The narrowness of the emperor's finances seldom allowed him to act with vigor in two different places at the same time; and having exerted himself to the utmost in order to make a great effort in the Low-Countries, his operations on the other side of the Alps were proportionally feeble. The viceroy of Naples, in conjunction with Cosmo di Medici, who was greatly alarmed at the introduction of French troops into Sienna, endeavored to become master of that city. But, instead of reducing the Siennese, the Imperialists were obliged to retire abruptly, in order to defend their own country, upon the appearance of the Turkish fleet, which threatened the coast of Naples; and the French not only established themselves more firmly in Tuscany, but, by the assistance of the Turks, conquered a great part of the island of Corsica, subject at that time to the Genoese.

The affairs of the house of Austria declined no less in Hungary during the course of this year. As the troops which Ferdinand kept in Transylvania received their pay very irregularly, they lived almost at discretion upon the inhabitants; and their insolence and rapaciousness greatly disgusted all ranks of men, and alienated them from their new sovereign, who, instead of protecting, plundered his subjects. Their indignation at this, added to their desire of revenging Martinuzzi's death, wrought so much upon a turbulent nobility impatient of injury, and upon a fierce people prone to change, that they were ripe for a revolt. At that very juncture, their late queen Isabella, together with her son, appeared in Transylvania. Her ambitious mind could not bear the solitude and inactivity of a private life; and repenting quickly of the cession which she had made of the crown in the year one thousand live hundred and fifty-one, she left the place of her retreat, hoping that the dissatisfaction of the Hungarians with the Austrian government would prompt them once more to recognize her son's right to the crown. Some noblemen of great eminence declared immediately in his favor. The basha of Belgrade, by Solyman's order, espoused his cause, in opposition to Ferdinand; the Spanish and German soldiers, instead of advancing against the enemy, mutinied for want of pay, declaring that they would march back to Vienna; so that Castaldo, their general, was obliged to abandon Transylvania to Isabella and the Turks, and to place himself at the head of the mutineers, that by his authority he might restrain them from plundering the Austrian territories through which they passed.