Scholars have often attributed the avoidance of another religious war in Germany after the conclusion of the Thirty Years War to the confessional compromise settlement established with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Historians of Early Modern Germany view its judicial-political, conflict regulation mechanisms—based on confessional consensus as opposed to majority voting, the parity of religious representation in Imperial institutions, and a freezing of confessional conditions according to a “normative year”—as largely successful constitutional peacekeeping arrangements.Footnote 1 They similarly regard as a truism the recognition that confessional tensions and confrontations in the Old Reich did not simply cease after the treaties of Westphalia, but instead began to be played out judicially, politically, and diplomatically.Footnote 2 This so-called juridification (Verrechtlichung) of conflict has been a traditional topos in the literature on Early Modern Germany, but has rarely been subject to detailed empirical investigation in post-Westphalian religious disputes.Footnote 3 The juridification of conflict in the Reich has been more thoroughly analyzed in the context of socioeconomic conflicts between rulers and their subjects: one reason for this is that these disputes were more frequently played out through litigation at the highest Imperial judicial tribunals, thus falling more obviously into the category of juridification.Footnote 4
The concept employed as an interpretative tool in the present article is, by contrast, a broader one, encompassing not only litigation but also the settlement of conflict and the deescalation of tensions through political and diplomatic means, e.g., negotiations, compromises, legalistic debates, and other processes at the consultative-representative bodies of the Empire—primarily the Reichstag. This wider conception is appropriate given the often inseparable nexus between law and politics in the Reich.Footnote 5 The purpose and novelty of this article is, therefore, to apply the concept of juridification to the religious disputes of the early eighteenth-century Reich, and to test its success—or lack thereof—during a period of bitter confessional strife, when a system involving the legal-political settlement of religious conflict seemed close to collapsing into warfare.
The religious crisis of 1719 to ca. 1723 is a relatively well known but understudied German constitutional dispute. The Elector Palatine's banning of the Calvinist catechism and the expulsion of Protestant subjects from the Heiliggeist church in Heidelberg, along with a spate of other complaints from the Rhineland, led to a serious confrontation between many Protestant rulers, on the one hand, and, on the other, Catholic princes and the Emperor. Several accounts of this already exist in the literature. Studies from the 1930s provided detailed but often confessionally biased narratives.Footnote 6 The importance of Gabriele Haug-Moritz's more recent work lies in the way it highlights the development of the Protestants' interpretation of the Imperial constitution.Footnote 7 Placing the crisis in the context of British foreign policy, Andrew Thompson has demonstrated the importance of the international context.Footnote 8
Many scholars have noted that the importance of theological aspects of the crisis soon receded and that broader political dimensions then took the center stage.Footnote 9 What needs to be stressed, however, is that the crisis was essentially a political-constitutional dispute over the question of who had the right to intervene against ruling princes on behalf of their subject populations. This was of great importance because intervention could potentially be used to further political goals. Intervention by the Imperial judicial tribunals under the authority of the Emperor's supreme judicial office was broadly accepted in the political culture of the Reich.Footnote 10 By contrast, the Protestant princes challenged the Emperor's claimed monopoly on protective measures in the Empire during the confessional crisis. This amounted to a questioning of the Emperor's judicial competence in religious matters, something that could be interpreted broadly. During the crisis, the grouping of Protestant territories (Imperial estates) represented at the Reichstag, the Corpus Evangelicorum (CE), asserted the right to “horizontal” intervention. This involved irregular protective measures that were unauthorized by the Emperor (as highest judge and feudal overlord) and carried out by princes against fellow princes. In contrast to regular, Imperial, “vertical” interventions mandated under the Emperor's authority, they instead cut horizontally across the Imperial hierarchy.
Haug-Moritz has rightly argued that the CE's alternative interpretation of the Imperial constitution represented a formidable challenge to the interpretation favored by the Emperor and most Catholic princes.Footnote 11 Recent contributions by Andreas Kalipke have investigated the CE's internal decision-making procedures, while Peter Brachwitz and Edith Koller have described how the CE made use of subjects' appeals and media communications to establish itself as an authority in confessional conflicts.Footnote 12 Their insightful studies help illuminate general characteristics of the CE and the nature of confessional conflict in the Empire, but the religious crisis centered around the Palatinate and other Rhineland territories in the early eighteenth century requires deeper analysis. This article provides the first true multi-angle assessment of all the different steps taken by the main actors, as well as the conceptions and approaches they developed, just before and during the crisis.
This approach is necessary for reaching a balanced assessment of the functioning of the juridification of religious conflict, which requires an investigation of how all sides and parties involved in a conflict worked and maneuvered through the Empire's politico-judicial system. This provides, in turn, a deeper understanding of the confessional crisis by highlighting previously underresearched aspects, such as the internal dynamics and disputes within the CE. It also offers an analysis of how Catholic princes accused of confessional violations reacted and responded to the charge of religious persecution, and of how Imperial authorities and Emperor Charles VI (r. 1711–1740), as a nominally impartial judge, dealt with the challenge to Imperial authority. Previous treatments of the subject, which have focused almost exclusively on the Protestant side of the debate, have neglected these aspects. The present account is the first to use Electoral-Mainz archival material pertaining to the crisis, while also using the Imperial authorities' archival sources. It keeps the spotlight on the international European dimension and its manifold entanglements with Imperial politics, which many studies of confessional conflict in the Reich—with the exception of Thompson's work—neglect.
The wider implications of the article's findings are no less significant. They allow for an assessment of the working of the juridification of conflict at a time when its mechanisms faced one of their most testing challenges during a reconfessionalized period, one arguably marked by the emergence of a new confrontational culture in the politics of religion. The article also offers novel reflections on the relationship between the militarized Protestant territorial states and the Habsburg emperorship, specifically with regard to the latter's judicial authority, for it was precisely in confessional matters that the Emperor's supreme judicial office was often challenged. The material presented here also brings to the fore insights into the political culture of the Reich, especially with regard to the political significance of subjects' confessional rights; at the same time, it offers insights into the adaptability of the Imperial constitution as it operated in practice during times of crisis.
The article begins by outlining the relevant constitutional and contextual background of confessional conflict in the early eighteenth-century Empire. It then briefly examines a (partially) confessional conflict in Nassau-Siegen, one involving the CE before it had fully elaborated and asserted its set of self-help principles during the subsequent 1719 crisis. Instead of providing a narrative charting the course of events during the 1719–1723 confessional crisis, the article addresses the concepts and principles espoused by the main actors—the Protestant side (i.e., the CE and its leading members), the Catholic side, and finally, the Emperor's court at Vienna—with regard to the central issue of external intervention, as well as the approaches they adopted.
The Contextual Background and Legal-Constitutional Parameters of Confessional Coexistence in the Reich
The protagonists during confessional crises conducted debates and arguments in legal-constitutional instead of theological terms, reflecting the Reich's highly legalistic political culture. The Imperial constitution was a protean body of occasionally contradictory constitutive elements.Footnote 13 Those who were adept at persuasively and effectively tailoring their interpretation of the law to their political goals could achieve political influence.Footnote 14 The main argument during the 1719–1723 crisis revolved around the right—or absence thereof—to intervene against another prince, ostensibly for the protection of his subjects' confessional rights. The promulgation of the Eternal Territorial Peace and the simultaneous establishment of a supreme court (the Reichskammergericht) at the Worms Reichstag of 1495 arranged the Reich as an order of peaceful legality, which outlawed interterritorial violence and provided for the judicial—as opposed to the military—settlement of conflicts. This basic order was continually reaffirmed throughout the early modern period. The Religious Peace of 1555 was an attempt to integrate the confessional factor into the constitutional framework predicated upon peace and the rule of law. It embodied, for the first time, the recognition of the importance of managing religious coexistence legally and politically within the framework of the Eternal Peace, while bracketing out intractable questions of theological truth. It granted territorial rulers far-reaching authority to determine confessional affairs within their territories by conferring the right of reformation (ius reformandi), whereby the ruler could impose his own faith on his subjects.Footnote 15 It was arguably designed to prevent territorial princes from interfering in each other's internal affairs and thereby avoid renewed confessional conflict.Footnote 16
Because the 1555 framework had failed to secure a lasting peace in the long term, the Westphalian settlement introduced updated arrangements, notably the addition of Reformed Calvinism to Catholicism and Lutheranism as one of the officially recognized confessions. Westphalia reaffirmed the princes' ius reformandi of Augsburg, along with their general “rights of territorial rule.”Footnote 17 Other provisions limited princely prerogatives, however.Footnote 18 The stipulation of the normative year of 1624 (1618 for the special case of the Lower Palatinate and Baden-Durlach) constituted a potentially far-reaching curtailment of princely authority over their subjects: confessional possessions, the right of public worship, and the official confessional status of each territory were all fixed to the state in which they had been on January 1, 1624—an arrangement that potentially negated the validity of the reconfirmed ius reformandi.Footnote 19 In light of this and other constitutional features, the historiography has increasingly recognized that the German princes were far from sovereign.Footnote 20 The treaties also granted adherents of the three recognized confessions a graded form of toleration, in which the dominant confession in each territory enjoyed greater rights of public worship, but which nevertheless included guarantees enshrining every individual's “Liberty of Conscience,” providing for the toleration of private worship by subjects whose religion had neither been official nor tolerated in 1624.Footnote 21
The treaties' provisions for the Imperial institutions also reflected the confessional compromise. The supreme judicial tribunals—the Reichshofrat (Imperial Aulic Council) and the Reichskammergericht (Imperial Cameral Court)—were to include several Protestant members, whose unanimous vote in confessional matters would function as a veto.Footnote 22 Protestants routinely complained that confessional bias persisted in practice, especially at the Reichshofrat, which was largely under the Emperor's control in Vienna.Footnote 23 At the Reichstag, the religious groups were to separate and reach an amicable settlement on confessional matters through direct negotiation—without either side being defeated by a majority vote: this compensated for the Protestants' numerical inferiority.Footnote 24 The CE attached great importance to defending this right of itio in partes (separating into parts), to which it traced its genesis as a corporate entity.Footnote 25 Westphalia's guarantee clauses were central to the debate over the right to intervene in other rulers' domestic confessional affairs: they provided for the potential use of force against anyone (including the Emperor) by all contracting parties—including the external guarantors, France and Sweden—to ensure that the terms and rights stipulated in the treaties were upheld.Footnote 26
Although the Westphalian treaties provided a functioning politico-legal and confessional framework for peace that would last the next 150 years, many of the religious disputes and crises during the post-1648 period arose from tensions and contradictions within the texts of the treaties. The most problematic of these was the unresolved issue of how exactly the princes' reaffirmed Right of Reformation of 1555 was related to and limited by the introduction of the normative year in 1648. This legal ambivalence became most politically salient in cases in which Catholic princes succeeded as territorial rulers in Protestant territories. It was against this backdrop in the Palatinate that the confessional crisis of 1719–1723 occurred; the basic constellation had nevertheless been the reason for numerous religious disputes in the Empire prior to 1719.Footnote 27
The rights guaranteed by the treaties of Westphalia constituted the primary reference point for Protestants seeking to defend their legal-political standing. This gave the external guarantors of the Peace a potentially influential role in safeguarding Protestant rights and galvanizing the members of the Protestant corpus at the Reichstag into forming a united front. Guarantor interventions were another aspect of the juridification of religious conflict in the Reich—in this case not only by being provided for in Imperial constitutional law, but also by being embedded in international treaty law. As legally sanctioned external interventions by foreign powers, they were conceived as a measure of last resort in redressing violations of Westphalian terms in cases where the internal judicial-political mechanisms of conflict resolution within the Reich (i.e., three years of litigation at the supreme courts, and/or “good offices” through diplomatic intercession and negotiations) had failed to procure redress.Footnote 28
Under Emperor Charles VI, the Imperial ministry recognized that Westphalia represented “the fundamental pillar of support (Grundstütze) grasped by the Protestants at all times.”Footnote 29 But the Emperor was adamant that the Protestant princes must not seek foreign support (except, under certain circumstances, from the guarantors), and that confessional grievances could be adequately redressed internally through his judicial office.Footnote 30 Seeking foreign assistance indeed had a long tradition among Protestants in the Reich, but sporadic interventions by the guarantors had largely failed to foster effective unity among the Protestant princes.
The Rheinbund (Rhenish League defensive alliance) of 1658, which both France and Sweden had joined, was an early example of the involvement of the Westphalian guarantors in Imperial politics. It was explicitly designed, however, to be a supraconfessional alliance asserting princely freedoms against the Emperor, thereby avoiding any rallying cry by Protestants.Footnote 31 As a regional great power, and as the Protestant guarantor of Westphalia, Sweden could capitalize on its traditional image as a protector of the Protestant religion in the Reich, which had become widespread during the Thirty Years War.Footnote 32 In fact, Charles XII of Sweden carried out a dramatic intervention against the Emperor on behalf of the Protestant subjects of Silesia in 1707–1709.Footnote 33 Such interventions contributed to the prestige that Sweden enjoyed within the CE, as suggested by its decision to appeal to Stockholm in 1697 against the upcoming Treaty of Ryswick, whose fourth article threatened to limit the Westphalian rights of Protestants in the Palatinate by stipulating the continued Catholicization of those areas occupied by France during the previous war.Footnote 34 This clause, together with the conversion of the Elector of Saxony—and director of the CE—to Catholicism that same year, led to a greater degree of Protestant unity under Hanoverian-Prussian leadership, something that had earlier been lacking.Footnote 35 The reasons why a powerful alignment of Sweden with the Protestant princes—which could have secured Protestant rights, as well as Swedish interests, in Germany—failed to materialize were related to this Protestant disunity before 1697, as well as to Sweden's eclipse as a regional power, especially during the later stages of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). This decline necessitated a relinquishment of Sweden's traditional protective role over German Protestants during confessional crisis, which allowed Britain-Hanover and Brandenburg-Prussia to assume that role with greater vigor.Footnote 36
Interconfessional relations on the eve of the crisis were already poor in the Reich because of a series of disputes, including one over the Rheinfels restitution, in which leading Catholic princes, acting under instructions from the Emperor, had enforced the return of the fortress of Rheinfels from the Protestant Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel to the Catholic Landgrave of Hessen-Rheinfels between 1716 and 1718. This had coincided with heightened Protestant sensibilities during the two-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation.Footnote 37 Against a broader European backdrop of Protestant anxiety stemming from the 1685 expulsion of Huguenots from France and from fears of Jacobite uprisings in Britain after 1714, events in the Reich—such as princely conversions to Catholicism, as well as localized conflicts at the territorial level—increasingly received attention at the Imperial and European levels. This created a pervasive sense among Protestants of being under siege and threatened by an Imperial-Catholic revival.Footnote 38 It contributed to a resurgence of confessionalized politics in the Reich, which colored the way in which political relations between princes and statesmen were conducted.Footnote 39
The 1719 crisis was triggered by events in the Palatinate, which had long been a flashpoint for confessional-constitutional disputes. The Electorate had been classified as Reformed-Calvinist at Westphalia, but following the accession of a Catholic Electoral line in 1685, the Reformed lost control of many churches; at the same time, shared usages (simultaneum) were introduced in others, i.e., measures that were later perpetuated in the Ryswick clause.Footnote 40 The Peace of Baden confirmed these arrangements in 1714.Footnote 41 Brandenburg brokered a deal in 1705 that sought to protect the existing rights of its Reformed coreligionists.Footnote 42 Protestant rights and possessions were nevertheless a far cry from the ones stipulated by Westphalia, according to which the Palatinate would be almost entirely Protestant. Although the Elector and his ministry were Catholic, the ecclesiastical council was still Reformed, yet tensions with the disadvantaged Lutherans precluded a united Protestant Palatine party.Footnote 43
The Elector Palatine Karl Philipp introduced various restrictions on Protestant rights over the course of 1717–1719, including seizures of church revenues. It was the banning of the Reformed Heidelberg catechism in April 1719, however, and the seizure of the Heiliggeist church in Heidelberg, which caused the greatest outrage among Protestants and thus precipitated the crisis. The simultaneum had been introduced into the formerly Reformed church in 1706 and, in September 1719, the Reformed were deprived of the use of their remaining half.Footnote 44 The Reformed church council immediately appealed to various Protestant princes and to the CE at Regensburg, where the news caused a sensation.Footnote 45 The CE also received confessional grievances from the subjects of other Catholic princes in the Rhineland, including the archbishop-electors of Mainz and Trier, the prince-bishop of Speyer, the duke of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, and various small counts.Footnote 46
The Protestant princes' demand of redress soon developed into a full-fledged constitutional crisis, which manifested itself in a polemical exchange of statements and counterstatements, legal expositions, and declarations. Leading Protestant princes and European powers resorted to reprisals against their own Catholic subjects, exchanged letters that were also then published, and dispatched special diplomatic missions.Footnote 47 The climax of the crisis occurred around the turn of the year 1719–1720, when a military intervention against the Catholic Gravanten (princes accused of offences) seemed possible.
Prelude: Nassau-Siegen, 1707–1716
Before turning to the religious conflict in the Palatinate, a brief discussion of an earlier confessional dispute usefully shows how the CE responded to a more localized conflict at a time when its defined set of principles pertaining to its interpretation of the confessional components of the Imperial constitution was still in a formative stage. The conflict can be seen as a precursor to the subsequent, more systemic crisis of 1719 because, to some extent, it foreshadowed aspects of the new confrontational politics of religion evident a decade later—primarily the way in which some Protestant powers resorted to threatening reprisals against their own Catholic minorities.
The violent and extortionate Prince William Hyacinth ruled the small principality of Catholic Nassau-Siegen, located in the Lower Rhenish Westphalian Kreis, during this period. His conduct led to lawsuits at the Reichshofrat, which resulted, in turn, in several armed interventions in his territory, culminating in his deposition in 1707. Following his removal from power, the Reichshofrat commissioned the Catholic cathedral chapter of the Electorate of Cologne to administer his territory; another administration, consisting of the prince-directors of the Kreis, replaced this one in 1711.Footnote 48 Although the prince was removed from power because of his abuse of governmental authority, an important element in the complaints against his regime, as well as against the subsequent external administrations, was confessional in nature, for Protestant subjects were disproportionately victimized. Alongside the Reichshofrat, the CE established itself as an additional instance of appeal to which Protestant subjects could turn for redress.
The first appeal received by the CE in 1707 detailed the range of confessional persecution suffered by local Protestants: physical attacks, the confiscation of property, fines for Protestant worship, the seizure of chapels, and the removal of Protestant school masters. The appeal stated that Prince Hyacinth's measures “run directly contrary to law and justice, the Peace of Westphalia, Christian love itself.”Footnote 49 Reports indicated that confessional restrictions had resumed under the administration commission, which was later installed in 1707.Footnote 50 The resulting CE resolution instructed “all neighboring Protestant Estates… to lend a helping hand” in ensuring that Westphalian rights were restored to all subjects.Footnote 51
New appeals were forwarded to the CE in 1709.Footnote 52 A neighboring Protestant government called for more active intervention by that body, stressing that the “entire Protestant well being” depended upon the respect of “clear and settled” Westphalian rights everywhere.Footnote 53 After appeals to the Corpus Catholicorum to settle the matter by direct negotiation were unsuccessful, the CE turned to the Emperor with requests for redress.Footnote 54 It then resorted to a more robust mandate in 1710, requesting that Brandenburg, Hanover, and Hessen-Kassel carry out a (possibly military) intervention.Footnote 55 The Kreistag (district diet) envoys of the three designated interveners threatened the cathedral chapter in Cologne in hopes of effecting redress, which caused apprehension among the local Catholic princes.Footnote 56
Confessional grievances continued under the subsequent administration by the Kreis directors.Footnote 57 Violent confrontations in Siegen in 1712 and 1716, during which Palatine and Münster administration troops killed several Protestants, led to a flurry of CE activity.Footnote 58 The king of Prussia (as Kreis codirector) criticized the actions of his fellow administrators' troops as “highly criminal acts of violence that cannot be justified before God and humans.”Footnote 59 Although not a member of the administration, George I of Britain-Hanover pointed out that “this matter is of far too great a consequence not to attract our attention and that of the other Protestant estates… and not to lead them to sympathize with their highly oppressed coreligionists.”Footnote 60
King Frederick William I of Brandenburg-Prussia informed his Reichstag envoy, Ernst Metternich, that he had ordered a contingent of troops into Nassau-Siegen to protect the Reformed subjects against further mistreatment—“as directed by the… Corpus Evangelicorum.” Metternich was instructed to ascertain whether Hanover and Hessen-Kassel wished to send troops into Nassau-Siegen as well, in accordance with the CE resolution of 1710.Footnote 61 The Hanoverian envoy, Rudolf Wrisberg, reported in July that Metternich had told him, “His Majesty of Prussia hoped that he would not be expected to settle this business alone. He had done his part and would have to lower his fists if he were not seconded.”Footnote 62 A Prussian memo distributed at the Reichstag argued that Protestant princes could not be blamed for “assisting their suppressed and innocently persecuted coreligionists against all acts of violence contrary” to Westphalia. Not to intervene would be “unjustifiable before God and the world.”Footnote 63
Apart from Brandenburg increasing its military presence in Nassau-Siegen, the CE's intercessions remained largely ineffectual. Although the CE implicitly claimed a right to authorize external interventions independently, the regular channel of intervention authorized by the Emperor and the Reichshofrat appears to have been more authoritative. Similar Reichshofrat mandates to intervene had, after all, been promptly executed by Electoral Cologne and the Kreis in 1706 and 1707. Imperial intervention had been a longstanding and well-established aspect of the Reich's political system, whereas the CE's claimed right of intervention was only in an incipient stage during the Nassau-Siegen conflict. The set of principles espoused by the CE and its graded modus operandi (i.e., appeals to the Corpus Catholicorum and to the Emperor, followed, if necessary, by a mandate to its most powerful members to carry out an intervention), had therefore already been formulated in basic outline before the German confessional crisis.Footnote 64 It is noteworthy that Frederick William justified his decision to dispatch more troops on the basis of the previous CE resolution, instead of on the basis of having been appointed by the Kreis as a co-administrator of the territory. For some Protestant powers at least, the perceived legitimizing power of the CE was thus apparently greater than that of the Kreis when it came to justifying interventions.
The involvement of the CE in this case helped to consolidate it—both as a platform for common Protestant action, and as a new, alternative channel of appeal against perceived transgressions by Catholic rulers: an informal tribunal that operated in parallel to the courts, and that represented a new type of juridification of religious conflict. That the subsequent 1719 confessional crisis—unlike the Nassau-Siegen dispute—reached “systemic” proportions (i.e., affecting the Empire as a whole) was neither coincidental, nor a result of the gravity of the persecution (which was worse in Nassau-Siegen), but rather because the Palatinate crisis took place in a large and prominent, officially Protestant electorate that had long been the site of neuralgic Protestant sensitivity. Moreover, the events in Heidelberg occurred at a time of heightened sensitivity in the wake of a host of other high profile confessional incidents and disputes, all of which helped rapidly escalate the local conflict in the Palatinate to crisis level.Footnote 65
The Methods and Principles of the Corpus Evangelicorum during the 1719–1723 Crisis
Because of its differing conception of the role of the religious groupings at the Reichstag, the CE aspired to and achieved a far greater degree of internal cohesion than its Catholic counterpart did.Footnote 66 The trend of princely conversions in the decades leading up to the crisis had been almost exclusively to the disadvantage of the Protestant camp. This fluidity of princely confessional affiliations put the CE on the defensive, in fact, which was why it tenaciously held on to the rigid stipulations of the Westphalian normative year as the sole legitimate determinant of religious possessions. It viewed any alterations to the conditions existing in 1624—such as the 1697 Ryswick clause in particular, as well as introductions of simultanea—as unconstitutional violations of the Peace of Westphalia. The Protestants certainly opposed, from the 1680s onwards, the introduction of simultanea in churches and areas classified as Protestant according to the normative year. Their subsequent expulsion in 1719 from such newly shared sacred places met with outrage, and, in light of the Emperor's reluctance to act, with calls to enforce the law on their own authority. By the winter of 1719, the CE concluded that it faced a campaign aiming at “the complete extirpation of Protestantism and the undermining of… all its security.”Footnote 67 It dealt with this challenge in a number of ways.
One prerequisite for a common response to the perceived threat was to strengthen the unity of the CE through the imposition of “party discipline” among its members, which would allow for the invocation of the itio in partes.Footnote 68 It was a testimony to the effectiveness of CE organization and solidarity that the initially dissenting envoys of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Swedish Pomerania soon voted in line with the rest of the body—despite the fact that the duke of Mecklenburg had only recently been dispossessed by the leading CE member Hanover (acting through an Imperial commission), and the fact that Sweden had fallen victim to an opportunistic Prusso-Hanoverian campaign of territorial conquest during the Great Northern War.Footnote 69 To maximize its political impact, the CE also sought to foster greater cooperation—even theological union—among Reformed-Calvinists and Lutherans at the local and Imperial level.Footnote 70 A central strategy, both encouraged and facilitated by effective CE unity, was the publicizing of Protestant grievances during the crisis.Footnote 71 The CE seized upon such grievances from throughout the Reich to strengthen its case that there was a broad-based assault against German Protestantism—something that placed the CE in direct competition with the Emperor's protective role.Footnote 72 In mid-1720, it asked the envoy of Hohenlohe to address its complaint to the CE directly, despite the fact that the Emperor's representatives had previously warned the envoy that such complaints must be addressed to the Emperor directly.Footnote 73
The CE resorted to several measures aiming at protecting the rights of Protestant subjects and princes: appealing to the Corpus Catholicorum and to the Emperor on behalf of persecuted subjects, interceding directly with offending princes, mediating internal settlements with the aim of safeguarding Protestant rights in the territories in question.Footnote 74 The salient point of such treaties was that they were not only brokered but also guaranteed by the CE, which consequently believed that any future violation provided grounds to intervene and enforce its stipulations.Footnote 75 The strongest tool at its disposal was the mandated intervention. Hanover, Brandenburg-Prussia, and Hessen-Kassel were all called upon to persuade the Elector Palatine to agree to CE demands—if necessary by force.Footnote 76 The CE also issued Württemberg and Hessen-Kassel with a Protectorium over the city of Speyer, which had been complaining of encroachments by the prince-bishop of Speyer.Footnote 77
The CE thus pursued a dual-track approach to intervention: while calling for the Emperor to carry out a vertical Imperial intervention to protect the rights of Protestants, it was simultaneously threatening horizontal intervention by its own members. At times the CE cast its protective net even wider, calling for external European powers to defend Protestant rights in Germany. In April 1720, for example, it asked Britain to protect Protestant rights in Osnabrück and Hildesheim.Footnote 78 The CE also decided to seek France's help as a Westphalian guarantor.Footnote 79
In order to deny the Emperor's monopoly on protective measures over the subjects of other rulers, the CE had long stressed that the final decision in confessional matters and disputes did not lay with the Emperor as the highest judge: “nor would the majority be decisive… [I]nstead only the path of amicabilis compositio remains valid, according to the clear stipulations of the Peace of Westphalia.”Footnote 80 The Protestants did not go so far as to deny the supreme judicial office and overlordship of the Emperor, but did seek to remind him that he was obliged to exercise his office, including his obligations as chief executor of the terms of Westphalia.Footnote 81 They asserted in 1716 that one should not assume that the Imperial judicial tribunals were absolutely “infallible or incorruptible”: the princes must therefore “keep an eye” on judicial matters to ensure “the equal, impartial administration of justice.”Footnote 82 In December 1719, the CE emphasized its determination to avoid longwinded litigation on matters that had already been stipulated at Westphalia: “the peace treaties do not refer religious grievances to lawsuits at the highest Imperial courts, but to speedy execution according to the simple facts of possession in the regulative years.”Footnote 83 The CE cited two main legitimizing factors for its claimed right to intervene: “the authorization, deriving from natural law, of assisting oppressed fellow estates against measures that cannot be offset by judicial means,” and the fact that the princes, including the party of Protestant ones, constituted a contracting party at Westphalia and were therefore to be considered its guarantors.Footnote 84 They also argued that the principle of noninterference in domestic affairs was dangerous: “Territorial rulers refusing to accept that other fellow estates of the Reich protect foreign inhabitants and subjects was one of the greatest causes leading to the wretched Thirty Years' War. It is precisely this wound that has been healed by the Peace of Westphalia.”Footnote 85 The CE thus believed that stability could not be achieved by an absence of external intervention. By opening up domestic affairs to mutual and reciprocal scrutiny, Westphalia was seen as a corrective measure against previous constitutional shortcomings. Appealing to notions of princely prerogative, CE principles sought to deprive the Emperor of a fundamental part of Imperial authority by partially reallocating his protective function to the princes.Footnote 86 Yet, they also paradoxically entailed the prospect of greater interference in domestic territorial affairs by adding another horizontal channel of intervention in the territories, one the princes who were affected could see as inimical to their own authority.
The CE's claimed right of intervention challenged the Eternal Peace that had been in force since 1495, according to which interterritorial violence was only permissible for the execution of judicial verdicts. But the Protestants' claimed rights did not constitute an outright rejection of the idea of the juridification of religious conflict, precisely because they conceived of such interventions as implementations of settled law. The Protestant party sought instead to adapt the judicial-political mechanisms of confessional conflict resolution in a way that was more in line with its own perceived interests: chiefly the return to the normative year as the gold standard of confessional law. This necessarily involved scaling down the Emperor's judicial capacity in favor of an enhanced semi-judicial function of its own organization, serving as an informal tribunal of appeal capable of mandating legally sanctioned interventions according to a certain reading of the Westphalian treaties. This explains the determination with which the CE invoked the itio in partes: it was precisely this Westphalian provision that had the power to negate Catholic numerical predominance at the voting colleges of the Reichstag, and to suspend the Emperor's monopoly on the politico-judicial protection of mediate and immediate subjects.
The Confessional Policies of the Individual Protestant Powers and Princes
The CE was merely the sum total of its individual members, in theory, but, in practice, its activities were directed, to a considerable degree, by its group of Protestant envoys at Regensburg, whose individual principals did not necessarily always pursue the same goals. The British-Hanoverian King-Elector George I became involved in the crisis in a coordinated campaign of diplomatic intercession that involved plans and threats of military intervention. Increased British interventionism in the Reich was a consequence of the succession of the Hanoverian Guelph dynasty to the British throne in 1714. External protection of German Protestants also represented common British and Hanoverian interests, which could strengthen and justify the new personal union.Footnote 87 Similar to the approach of the CE, British-Hanoverian statesmen and diplomats pressed for swift Imperial execution mandates, while, at the same time, applying pressure by threatening intervention by the CE.
The crisis coincided with a British-Hanoverian diplomatic realignment toward Brandenburg-Prussia. Hanover and Brandenburg, the respective leaders of the Lutheran and Calvinist Estates, effectively bridged the political divisions between the two brands of Protestantism that had plagued the unity of the Corpus at the beginning of the century. This was primarily meant to facilitate the achievement of common political goals, which were pursued despite continuing theological differences.Footnote 88 Improved relations paved the way for a common Protestant stance regarding the protection of German Protestants; this, it was believed, would reinforce the geopolitical goal of isolating Russia and preventing the return of its forces to Germany.Footnote 89
A British diplomat, James Haldane, was sent to the Palatinate in September 1719—because, according to his instructions, of the “violences and severities… against [the Elector Palatine's] Protestant Subjects.”Footnote 90 Haldane believed that the regular channel of redress—through lengthy litigation at the Imperial courts—was deficient. Forceful means, he believed, should not be ruled out to counter the “Tiranny (sic) of the Elector's Proceedings.”Footnote 91 He wrote to the British representative in Berlin, Charles Whitworth, that he disputed Karl Philipp's claim to unlimited ius reformandi, upon which, he argued, Westphalia had imposed certain restrictions; Whitworth concurred.Footnote 92 They both believed, however, that insisting on a strict return to Westphalia's provisions was unrealistic.Footnote 93 By adopting such an attitude, the British statesmen displayed a similar willingness to compromise as that of many of their German counterparts—a trait conducive to the diplomatic and judicial settlement of conflict.
Haldane's reports make it clear that he was not merely concerned with politico-strategic goals. They reveal a real concern for the well being and confessional rights of the Protestant subjects he had met in the Palatinate, for he believed it would have been a sin “to abandon these poor people.”Footnote 94 Surprised that Lutheran rulers were interceding on behalf of Reformed subjects, he told the Elector Palatine that “it was not out of a principle of bigottry (sic) to any particular sect that made His Majesty and those other Princes interest themselves in this matter, but their care of the publick Peace.”Footnote 95 George expressed himself in similar terms, stating that “we cannot abandon our religious relatives in the face of such hard persecution and oppression.”Footnote 96
Although George opted to intercede as king, his British secretary of state, James Stanhope, was aware that British involvement in the crisis was legally dubious.Footnote 97 The Catholic Gravanten were accused of breaching Westphalia, but Stanhope was concerned that George could be equally accused of a violation: after all, Hanover (and Brandenburg) had recently annexed Swedish territory located within the borders of the Reich. Indicative of the importance attached to the semblance of legality in Imperial politics, he suggested that Britain consider seeking the status of a guarantor of Westphalia, which would permit George to “intervene with more justification and weight for the cause of the Protestants of the Empire.”Footnote 98
By the winter of 1719–1720, the Britons and Hanoverians both became more belligerent in response to the Gravanten's refusal to change their policies and to the Imperial court's failure to order restitutions. Stanhope argued that enforcing Westphalian rights in the Palatinate was necessary for its demonstrative effect: unchecked oppression by the Elector Palatine represented “a pernicious example to all other Roman-Catholick (sic) princes.”Footnote 99 Whitworth noted that the Emperor ought to be more forthcoming to George's requests of restitution mandates in light of the naval assistance he had given Austria against Spain.Footnote 100 He also believed that the Elector Palatine should be warned that a military intervention in his territory was a real possibility.Footnote 101 For his part, the Hanoverian envoy in Vienna, Daniel Huldenberg, warned the Imperial ministers that the Protestant princes might resort to “taking even stronger coercive action.”Footnote 102
Although relations between George and Charles VI had deteriorated since early 1719, the British resident in Vienna, François de St. Saphorin, remained convinced that it was in Britain's interests to stay on good terms with the Emperor.Footnote 103 He nonetheless wanted to see Protestant rights enforced in the Palatinate, preferably without any direct British-Hanoverian military participation.Footnote 104 The British ministry decided to manipulate Brandenburg into threatening the Elector Palatine with military force to maintain an appearance of moderation in the eyes of the Emperor.Footnote 105
Reflecting on the Imperial court's handling of the crisis, Saphorin believed that the Emperor's passivity was a miscalculation. The Catholic Gravanten had hardened their stance because they had seen that the Emperor had not been serious about imposing his authority by forcing them to restore Protestant rights, whereas the Protestants had seen that he could not be relied upon to redress their grievances and were thus considering self-help measures. His authority as an impartial adjudicator was, as this suggests, suffering in the eyes of both religious groups.Footnote 106
Faced with repeated rebuffs by the Palatine court and a continuing absence of Imperial restitution mandates, Haldane started advocating more robust measures. He was opposed to Hanover's imposition of reprisals, which, he felt, diverted the Emperor's attention away from dealing with the offending Catholic princes.Footnote 107 In January 1720, he called for a military intervention: “Vienna would not certainly support the Elector, if the Emperor saw that the King… sent Troops into the Palatinate, without any other View but to relieve the oppressed… All the little neighboring Princes who follow the Elector's Example in persecuting their Protestant Subjects would without delay submit.”Footnote 108
The intervention suggested by Haldane was thus conceived as a preventive strike, designed to prevent a full-scale religious war and forestall similar persecutions elsewhere. The fact that British statesmen actually considered military intervention is instructive, for it shows that despite the emphasis on the protection of legally enshrined rights, methods that were legally dubious were considered a viable option when it involved protecting coreligionists. The notion of common codes of civilized practice not necessarily commensurate with the law was suggested by Whitworth's comments that a ruler should not mistreat his subjects—even in a manner that did not strictly violate any laws.Footnote 109 The desire to conduct, and to be seen to conduct, foreign policy according to perceived legal guidelines was not so normatively entrenched as to preclude the consideration of protective military intervention beyond the regular Imperial-legal channels.
The realization that the initial Imperial restitution mandates of March 1720 would not succeed in redressing most of the Protestants' grievances led to a revival of British-Hanoverian activism. William Cadogan was sent to Vienna, where he was to seek the Emperor's enfeoffment with the investitures for territories annexed by Hanover from Sweden, and press for a more active stance by the Emperor in redressing the grievances of Protestant subjects. George stressed that the two issues should be treated separately, because “neither the investitures, nor anything else in the world, would ever be able to move us to sacrifice the common cause of the Protestants.”Footnote 110
An increasing divergence with regard to aims and methods emerged beginning in mid-1720 between George's British personnel, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Hanoverians and the rest of the CE. This was mainly related to strategic concerns, namely, the British desire to isolate the Czar by pushing Russia away from the Baltic. At the outset of the crisis, the British and the Hanoverians agreed on a vigorous approach to the confessional crisis. Not only would this contribute toward helping persecuted coreligionists, but also undermine the Emperor's prerogatives.Footnote 111 Moreover, a strong Protestant alignment would simultaneously help to counteract Russian influence. The British and the Hanoverians similarly agreed on the dangers posed by Russia, but the Hanoverians assessed the threat from a more narrow perspective, i.e., in terms of the extent to which the Russians were in a position to access directly Hanoverian territory, in particular from neighboring Mecklenburg.Footnote 112 Following the expulsion of the Russians from Mecklenburg, the Hanoverians would be less concerned than Britain was with the Czar's advances in other regions. The British aimed to curtail Russian gains in order to uphold a Baltic (and European) balance of power, as well as to deprive Russia of a monopoly over Baltic naval stores. This required a broad-based coalition against Russia that could be facilitated by a common Protestant front in northern Germany (particularly Hanover-Prussia-Kassel), but in which Austrian participation was also desirable.Footnote 113 An aggressive stance in the confessional crisis was thus a double-edged sword, for it also risked alienating the Emperor and thus deterring his participation in an anti-Russian alliance. The news of Austro-Russian negotiations therefore caused considerable concern among British politicians.Footnote 114 Cadogan and Saphorin wrote that if Prusso-Hanoverian tensions with Austria were reduced, Austria's reliance on Russia against the Protestants would also recede, and that it would then be easier to draw the Emperor into an anti-Russian system. In light of these considerations, the British envoys came to believe that Wrisberg's behavior was too confrontational and hotheaded. Wrisberg, for his part, insinuated that the British were too timid and warned that many of the CE envoys were losing faith in George, fearing that he was willing to strike a deal for the investitures, which would consequently leave German Protestants out in the cold.Footnote 115
It was the energetic intercession of Britain, as the foremost Protestant power, that initially spurred the CE into action. Yet, a growing suspicion among the smaller Protestant princes (especially since Cadogan's mission to Vienna), that George was primarily interested in pursuing confessional appeals to further his own great power interests, increasingly cooled their resolve to confront the Catholics and the Emperor. Indeed, the British representatives in Vienna were hoping for redress for the Protestants' grievances through regular Imperial-judicial channels.Footnote 116 George agreed that the CE should moderate its language, but in his confidential letter to Saphorin, he displayed an attitude toward the protection of Protestant rights that was no less robust than that of the CE: the Emperor would have to intervene against Mainz and Speyer in order to redress Protestant grievances—or else the Protestant rulers would be compelled to enforce Westphalian stipulations there themselves.Footnote 117
They knew little about the Austro-Russian talks in mid-1720. Given the lack of concrete evidence about the content of the negotiations, the fear of an aggressive Protestant stance that might potentially push Austria closer to Russia was not great enough to derail the campaign that sought to protect Protestant rights.Footnote 118 Saphorin therefore continued to press the Imperial ministers for redress and to defend the CE-ordered intervention in Speyer.Footnote 119 He regretted that the chances were slim that traditional juridification under Imperial auspices would be brought to bear through the issuing of restitution mandates by the Reichshofrat, given the diffidence of its Protestant members.Footnote 120
Apart from George, the ruler who became most closely involved in the crisis was Frederick William I of Brandenburg-Prussia. Along with its powerful army, the securing of some Protestant rights in the 1705 treaty qualified Brandenburg to be seen as the natural leader of the Protestants. Yet, its bungled attempts at an effective and coherent confessional policy left George to assume the reins of Protestant leadership.Footnote 121 Reports from Regensburg gave an idea of the subordinate position of Brandenburg's Reichstag envoy, Ernst von Metternich, vis-à-vis Wrisberg.Footnote 122 Although Frederick William was keen to impress other Protestant rulers with blustering statements and calls for reprisals against Prussian Catholics (e.g., the closure of the monastery at Hammersleben and of the Minden cathedral), he was rarely willing to take the initiative and seemed content to leave the direction of the Protestant defense to his father-in-law, George.Footnote 123 When the Emperor's envoy to Berlin, Voss, pressed for an end to reprisals, the Prussians told him that he would have to await George's “final decision.”Footnote 124
Frederick William's attitude toward military intervention, and Brandenburg's relationship with the CE in general, were both ambivalent. In January 1720 the chief minister, Heinrich Ilgen, agreed in principle with Whitworth's suggestion to use Prussian force. They decided that Prussian troops stationed in Cleves-Berg would menace Palatine borders around Jülich-Berg, which, as a site of long-standing territorial-dynastic rivalry, was anyway being contested between the two states.Footnote 125 From the Prussian perspective, the initiation of measures ostensibly designed to safeguard the Elector Palatine's Protestant subjects conveniently reinforced pressure on a geopolitical rival. The Imperial envoy Voss was doubtful that Brandenburg had much control over the activities and statements of the CE.Footnote 126 Frederick William and his ministers nevertheless made arguments that were in line with CE principles. In a letter to the Emperor, the king claimed a right to intervene, which he characterized as a “legal, though military, execution.”Footnote 127 In conversation with Voss, Prinzen, the Prussian minister, affirmed the right to intervene “if one can no longer hope for Imperial assistance.” He believed that it was permissible to draw in foreign powers to protect Protestants.Footnote 128
Apart from George and Frederick William, the rulers of Hessen-Kassel, the Netherlands, and Denmark all sent envoys to Heidelberg as well. Landgrave Karl of Hessen-Kassel, a Lutheran, was one of the first rulers to intercede with the Elector Palatine on behalf of the Reformed subjects.Footnote 129 Following his imposition of reprisals, the landgrave sent a circular to the other Protestant princes, advocating more “forceful remedial methods” to “terminate (terminiren)” the grievances.Footnote 130 The landgrave of Hessen-Darmstadt argued in a letter to George that Saxony should no longer head the CE.Footnote 131 Many of the less powerful Protestant princes nevertheless started to worry, beginning in mid-1720, about a perceived Prussian-Hanoverian oligarchy in the CE, and were wary of being unwittingly steered into a war against the Emperor, their traditional protector.Footnote 132 This was why they increasingly aligned themselves with the more conciliatory Saxon CE directorate.Footnote 133
The imposition by individual, leading Protestant princes of reprisals penalizing their own Catholic minorities had, to some extent, been prefigured by Prussian threats issued during the Nassau-Siegen dispute. The reprisals were unilaterally introduced by individual CE members (primarily Brandenburg, Hanover, and Hessen-Kassel) and were not mandated—or even encouraged—by the CE. They arguably reflected a new confrontational system of religious politics, in which confessional minorities were targeted for retaliation, in response to the persecution of coreligionist subjects by princes on the opposing side. At the same time, they were symptomatic of the rapid escalation of tensions in 1719–1720 and, more generally, of the reconfessionalization of early eighteenth-century German politics. As illegal and hostile self-help measures that risked perpetuating the mistreatment of subjects in a cycle of persecution, they went against the principle of the juridification of conflict. Despite such heightened tensions and increased tendencies toward the breakdown of the rule of law, the Reich's capacity for peaceful coexistence through the juridification of religious conflict was nevertheless robust enough to prevent bloodshed, as well as major interterritorial violations.
The Response of the Catholic Princes
The Palatine government attempted to justify its anti-Protestant measures before the Reichstag in Heidelberg. It distributed among the envoys a pamphlet deemed to be “quite superficial” by the Emperor's representatives.Footnote 134 Upon arrival in Heidelberg, Haldane soon realized that Karl Philipp did not believe that he was obliged to account for his domestic actions to George or to any other prince. He underlined his ius reformandi, argued that the Heiliggeistkirche had always been a court church, and complained that his subjects “endeavored to stir up foreign Powers against Him.” By emphasizing that he was “answerable only to the Emperour and Empire,” the Elector Palatine displayed a distinctly hierarchical conception of the Imperial system.Footnote 135 It was paradoxical that his assertion of a far-reaching ius reformandi contradicted his emphasis (as well as that of the other Catholic princes) on princely autonomy and confessional prerogatives.Footnote 136 His statements and actions nevertheless show that he did not deny the Emperor's overlordship and feudal suzerainty. This was made clear to the CE, with the implicit understanding that his internal affairs were none of its business.Footnote 137 Conversely, he was willing to comply with the Emperor's instructions even if these curtailed his control over his own subjects. In March and May 1720, he complied with Imperial mandates instructing him to restore confessional conditions to the state in which they had been at the time of the Peace of Baden in 1714.Footnote 138
The other main ruler against whom Protestants had lodged complaints was the Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, Lothar Franz von Schönborn. Correspondence with his Reichstag envoy, Ignaz Otten, reveals a ruler who, far from being at the center of a coordinated anti-Protestant campaign, was, at times, overwhelmed by the scale of Protestant hostility toward him.Footnote 139 He was largely on the defensive and adopted a reactive approach to the crisis—his seizures of a handful of Protestant churches at the outset of the crisis notwithstanding. What is particularly striking about the Mainz correspondence is the absence of unity and a common approach on the part of the Corpus Catholicorum, whose chairmanship was held at the time by Mainz. Its lack of organization was in stark contrast to that of the CE.Footnote 140
Lothar Franz and Otten addressed several themes and issues, with a priority being the defense and justification of the measures criticized by the CE. Lothar Franz argued that the transfer of certain churches to the Catholics was justified on the basis of the Peaces of Ryswick (1697) and Baden (1714).Footnote 141 Because some of the complaints were already the subject of litigation at the Imperial courts, he averred, they should not be treated at the Reichstag.Footnote 142 Another important theme in the correspondence was the reaction to and assessment of the complaints, principles, and methods of the CE. Otten believed that the CE was actively stirring up Protestant subjects against Catholic rulers so that the Protestant rulers could, in turn, acquire a pretext to deprive their own Catholic subjects of their rights.Footnote 143 He argued that the CE envoys were more aggressive than their respective princely courts and that they were trying to provoke conflict. It was fortunate that the French envoy had reportedly been instructed not to become too closely involved in the contretemps.Footnote 144 Lothar Franz was worried by the escalation of the crisis and deemed the situation dangerous, for the CE had whipped itself into such a frenzy that there was little else for them to do than “actually draw their swords” to avoid suffering the humiliation of backing down.Footnote 145 Like the Emperor's envoy to Berlin, Lothar Franz suspected that individual Protestant powers were using apparent CE independence as a way in which to avoid taking blame for its bellicosity.Footnote 146 Both the Archbishop-Elector and Otten were highly critical of the principles espoused by the CE, especially their claimed right to intervene in other territories. Lothar Franz stated that the CE's methods and principles could lead to the demise of the Empire's judiciary and of the Imperial system in general, from which he derived, of course, his high status as arch-chancellor of Germany.Footnote 147 If CE principles were allowed to become normative, then no confessional conflict could be resolved judicially through due process by Imperial adjudication, and would thus invariably be settled by “self-help” (Selbsthilfe).Footnote 148
In addition to the general principles and normative attitudes mentioned earlier, the Mainz correspondence also reflected an awareness of the broader strategic context. Mainz considered the geopolitical situation to be threatening at the outset of the crisis. Otten believed for several reasons that the Protestant side was stronger than the Catholic one: because of the military potential of Brandenburg-Prussia, Britain-Hanover, and Hessen-Kassel; the prospect of peace in the Baltic freeing up Protestant forces; and the possibility that France would join the Protestants.Footnote 149 Lothar Franz obviously felt intimidated by Protestant threats, and instructed Otten to display restraint and modesty in confessional matters in the hope of defusing the crisis.Footnote 150 By November the Archbishop-Elector seemed to have gained some confidence following the first shock at Regensburg. He believed the power-political scales could be tipped in the Catholics' favor if Austria joined them and the Northern War continued.Footnote 151 The conclusion of a peace between Austria and Spain further encouraged him because it meant that the Emperor would be able to support the Catholics more vigorously. Otten considered rumors that France was pressing its British ally to show restraint to be encouraging.Footnote 152
Otten was consistently concerned about the lack of Catholic unity at the Reichstag, especially since he believed that many Catholic envoys secretly supported the CE because they saw it as a champion of princely liberties.Footnote 153 He was concerned about the “expressions of majesty” (majestätische Expressionen) found in public Imperial statements, and reported that many Catholics also shared the Protestants' hostility towards the (in their view) overweening brinkmanship of the Emperor.Footnote 154 Mainz did consider several options for how best to counter the CE and foster a degree of cooperation within the Catholic Corpus, e.g., the procurement of an Imperial and French resolution on the validity of Ryswick and Baden, which could undercut the CE's position.Footnote 155 Otten hoped that one could exploit the disagreement between Hanover and Prussia over the 1705 treaty, and suggested that because the CE was so adept at distributing propagandistic publications, the Catholics should also attempt to generate their own publicity.Footnote 156 Given the dearth of complaints by Catholic subjects, Lothar Franz believed that the Catholic envoys should devise and publicize grievances by Catholic subjects living under Protestant rule in order to redirect some of the scrutiny toward the Protestant territories.Footnote 157
The tension between confessional solidarity and an adherence to princely prerogatives exhibited by some Catholic territories is noteworthy, for it reflected a general characteristic of Imperial politics arising from the territorial fragmentation and political plurality of the Reich: the existence of a multitude of competing political power centers, which produced a varying set of interests that were occasionally overlapping and reinforcing, occasionally diverging. These interests were of a multifarious nature, comprised of political, geostrategic, military, confessional, and ideological elements. This state of affairs naturally resulted in a fluid constellation of alliances and alignments—depending on the issue at stake—in which one particular interest (in this case religious) was, by no means, the sole determinant of policy.Footnote 158 By the spring of 1720, the political goal of strengthening princely autonomy from Imperial control apparently outweighed considerations of confessional solidarity and antagonism—at least among a sizeable proportion of Catholic princes; the extent of the reconfessionalization of Imperial politics must therefore not be exaggerated.
The Emperor's Stance
Vienna first dealt with the conflict after receiving reports from the Reichstag (to which the aggrieved Protestant subjects had opted to appeal)—not grievances addressed to the Emperor. The latter frowned upon debating matters at the Reichstag that were pending at the Imperial judicial tribunals (such as some of the confessional complaints). An Imperial decree from 1715 had proscribed the official treatment of such cases at Regensburg.Footnote 159 The Emperor's principal commissioner (Reichstag representative), Christian von Sachsen-Zeitz, criticized the Elector Palatine's actions because they were causing a great stir.Footnote 160 Vienna was intent upon avoiding a confessional crisis and it reacted relatively quickly by sending warning letters to the Gravanten.Footnote 161 In response to the initial CE appeal of October 1719, the Emperor instructed Sachsen-Zeitz to assure the Protestant envoys that he would procure redress through constitutional means: the accused Catholic princes had already been contacted and the Protestants should thus be patient and await Imperial adjudication.Footnote 162 The Protestant princes' imposition of reprisals and robust assertions of intervention rights soon dashed Vienna's hopes of seeing the crisis nipped in the bud by restraining the Protestant powers and revoking the Catholic innovations. This challenge resulted in less importance being assigned to redress for the Protestant subjects in order to make way for the more pressing imperative of refuting CE principles.
Brandenburg-Prussia was thus ordered in December 1719 to end its reprisals because these were illegal violations of Westphalia.Footnote 163 Imperial statesmen were also quick to criticize CE conduct. Principal commissioner Sachsen-Zeitz believed that the powerful Protestant princes were using confessional grievances as a pretext to put political pressure on their Catholic rivals.Footnote 164 The Imperial envoy in Berlin, Voss, was of a similar opinion, arguing that the CE was unlikely to cease pressing the Catholics over Protestant rights because they were being “animated and driven by numerous political motives that relate to religious affairs.”Footnote 165 Sachsen-Zeitz and his co-commissioner, Michael von Kirchner, wrote that the CE was driving matters too far by illegally and impatiently resorting to self-help, in addition to the legally correct appeal to the Imperial office.Footnote 166 The claimed rights were supposedly dangerous because the Protestants had arrogated judicial powers to themselves.Footnote 167
At the end of December, Reichshofrat President Ernst Windischgrätz reportedly said that the Elector Palatine's measures were “unjust,” but that “using reprisals is not allowed in the Empire.”Footnote 168 Kirchner reportedly believed that Westphalia had not completely abolished the ius reformandi and that the CE's interpretation was a “distortion.”Footnote 169 Reflecting on the crisis in January, Sachsen-Zeitz argued that the main problem was the CE's asserted right to intervene without first awaiting Imperial judicial decisions: the CE showed that it was determined “to take the law into its own hands.” The events in Heidelberg had been the catalyst for the crisis, but they were now being used to restore conditions, by force, to the state of 1618/1624, and to abolish the Ryswick clause.Footnote 170 In effect, the commissioners argued, the CE viewed itself as the judicial overlord of Protestant Germany. Given that the CE had set its sights far beyond the mere redress of grievances in Heidelberg, the commissioners believed it was unlikely that the Elector Palatine's announced intention to return the Heiliggeistkirche would appease the Protestants. Indeed, the CE issued shortly thereafter an “aggravated” version of the existing Speyer Protectorium to Hessen-Kassel.Footnote 171
In late February and early March 1720, the Emperor issued a series of rescripts (official edicts). George received an exhortation to drop his reprisals against a Catholic church in Celle, even though the measure did not strictly breach the provisions of the normative year.Footnote 172 Prussian reprisals, by contrast, were a clear violation of Westphalian provisions. Frederick William was warned that “under no circumstances are you yourself permitted to be an unrestricted judge and commander over your fellow Estates, over your own (or other) subjects, and over the Imperial constitution. Thus, We will not allow Ourselves to be deprived by your arbitrariness of what the Imperial constitution provides Us with by virtue of oath and office.”Footnote 173 In early March Imperial rescripts were sent to Württemberg and Hessen-Kassel, informing them of the Emperor's annulment of the CE-issued Protectorium over Speyer, and warning that its implementation “would lead to punishment for the violated territorial peace [of 1495].”Footnote 174 Shortly thereafter, Charles wrote to his Bohemian Reichstag envoy that the CE was threatening to undermine the “Imperial nexus” between the head of the Empire and its estates.Footnote 175
In April 1720, the Emperor's principal commissioner presented the Imperial Kommissionsdekret (commission decree) to the Reichstag.Footnote 176 It announced that restitution mandates had been issued to Catholic offenders, but the main thrust of the lengthy document was a firm refutation of the principles of the “so-called Corpus Evangelicorum.” It strongly criticized the Protestants' assumed right of intervention and reprisals: the latter were illegal and contrary to Christian love and princely duties. The claimed intervention right was supposedly based on a faulty interpretation of Imperial law because it was only permissible via judicial Imperial channels. The Dekret highlighted the fundamental incompatibility between correctly seeking redress by Imperial legal channels and simultaneously threatening illegal self-help. The Emperor stressed that he wished to preserve the legal rights of each confessional group. He conceded that external intervention was, according to the Westphalian guarantor clauses, possible after three years of futile intercessions and litigation: reprisals, by contrast, were wholly illegal. He condemned as illegal CE attempts to draw foreign powers (other than the Westphalian guarantors) into the crisis.Footnote 177
The immediate CE response to the Kommissionsdekret indicated that it was not about to back down. Over the course of mid-1720, Vienna became increasingly wary of, and wished to see resolved, the continuing crisis, which was considered deleterious to the Emperor's standing.Footnote 178 This coincided with Cadogan's mission to Vienna. The British envoys reported that the ministers Philipp Sinzendorf and Prince Eugene of Savoy (both of the Austrian faction) were keen for a settlement, but that Vice Chancellor Schönborn and Reichshofrat President Windischgrätz of the “Imperial” faction were less willing to compromise; they were also adamant that all reprisals had to end before any further orders could be issued to the Catholic offenders.Footnote 179 A desire to see the crisis settled comes across clearly in the reports of the privy conference, which was interfactional but dominated by Austria. Its members argued that the Emperor must appear to be completely impartial. Cadogan was to be told that further, more definitive restitution orders could not be issued to the Gravanten before the cessation of reprisals. The latter were nevertheless to be put under pressure informally to offer redress: this would facilitate the Protestants' ending of reprisals, thereby salvaging Imperial authority by only formally mandating redress once reprisals had ceased. Secret arrangements were nonetheless to be made with powerful Catholic princes in case a religious war were to break out. France's restraint and noninvolvement were noted with relief.Footnote 180 The resulting rescript to the Emperor's Reichstag representatives instructed them to display impartiality in their dealings with CE envoys. If necessary, a common Catholic military defense could be organized in Vienna with the Catholic envoys stationed there. Britain's intercession was ostensibly to be rejected because it was a “foreign power that does not belong to the Reich.”Footnote 181
The Austrian court chancery assessed the confessional crisis in the context of Habsburg strategic interests. Britain had requested assistance against Russia in the north. It was necessary to avoid an open break with Britain in light of the power of the Bourbons in France and Spain. This was why its request could not be rejected out of hand. Yet, the Emperor's authority in the Reich also needed to be safeguarded because it was under threat in the confessional crisis. Russia was indeed dangerous, but if a religious war were to break out, its assistance against the Protestants could be very useful. Britain should therefore be told that an answer to its request had to await the ending of the confessional disputes.Footnote 182
Conclusive Imperial restitution mandates to the Catholic offenders (ordering the return to the conditions prevailing at the time of the Peace of Baden in 1714) were issued in September and November 1720 as a result of CE resolutions to end reprisals.Footnote 183 The delayed publication of the CE's detailed reply to the Kommissionsdekret in November 1720 revived some of Vienna's animosity, and the Emperor suspected that the Protestants were “using their religious grievances as a fig leaf” for their actual aim of sabotaging Imperial judicial authority.Footnote 184 Another Kommissionsdekret issued in mid-1722 noted that some reprisals—ones incompatible with the “German form of government”—had not yet been lifted. But by August 1723, the Emperor's representatives at Regensburg were actively working together with the Saxon CE directorate to settle all outstanding disputes.Footnote 185
Conclusion
By the end of 1720 the threat of war had receded, but the debate about the constitutional issues that the crisis had raised dragged on. The main reason that the CE did not carry out its threatened intervention was that the Emperor had agreed to issue the demanded restitution mandates from March 1720 onwards, even before all the Protestant reprisals had ended. The CE was thus deprived of its most compelling argument in favor of horizontal intervention, namely, the failure of the Emperor to exercise adequately his judicial office.
The crisis ostensibly revolved around the treatment of subjects. Whereas the Protestant rulers confronted the offending Catholic princes and the Emperor over the deprivation of the rights of Protestant subjects, the Emperor objected to the Protestant rulers' imposition of reprisals against Catholic subjects under their rule, as well as the CE's asserted right of horizontal intervention. Both sides agreed on the basic normative validity of the necessity of protecting the recognized rights of subjects, but disagreed on what were permissible means to ensure such protection. The settlement of confessional strife in a juridical and diplomatic fashion depended upon preventing the implementation of the CE's threatened right of armed intervention, for this threatened, in turn, the Emperor's and the Catholics' understanding of the Eternal Territorial Peace that had formed the backbone of the Imperial constitution since 1495.
By mandating a return to the conditions of 1714, the Emperor resorted to a compromise settlement that all parties were (more or less) willing to accept. The mandate failed to revive, as the CE had wished, the Westphalian normative year provision as the sole legitimate marker of confessional conditions, but it did overturn the more recent and more serious violations of Protestant rights. In restoring the simultaneum, the Emperor, in his judicial capacity, rehabilitated biconfessional cohabitation, thus strengthening the arrangements characteristic of the successful juridification of religious conflict. Confessional frictions at the local level triggered the conflicts, but the task of defusing them was taken up at the Imperial level of the Reichstag, the Emperor, and the courts, which would seek to impose settlements on the localities during crises. Despite the greater constitutional weight of Westphalia, the mandated return to the status quo ante of 1714 nevertheless represented a success for juridification because it strengthened previous, pragmatically reached local balances and affirmed compromises aimed at peaceful coexistence. More broadly, it was a reflection of the adaptability of the Imperial constitution and its flexibility in achieving legal solutions to religious conflicts through judicial-political expediencies.
From the point of view of the powerful Protestant princes, the cause of Protestant protection overlapped with their political interests because it provided them with an opportunity to enhance their authority and increase their autonomy vis-à-vis the Emperor. Leading members of the CE soon adopted what had begun as a quest for security (confessionally defined) at the local level, and tailored it to serve a political objective. While smaller princes of both confessions appreciated the protective function of the Emperor and the Reich that safeguarded their existence, the more powerful rulers were keen to exploit opportunities to loosen their feudal, hierarchical, and judicial subjection to the Habsburg emperorship. The confessional grievances of the subjects of Catholic princes provided such a possibility.
Despite the reconfessionalized nature of politics in the early eighteenth-century Empire, confession remained only one of many constituent components of the way in which princes assessed their interests and achieved their goals.Footnote 186 Once the crisis had escalated, political motives likely outweighed the desire to protect coreligionists, but, as the confidential correspondence drawn on in this article suggests, this did not negate the authentic protective impulse that had led to the crisis in the first place. Nor was there a desire to break away completely from the Imperial hierarchical system and reject fully the Emperor's judicial capacity. As Joachim Whaley has pointed out, negotiations by the major princes over matters such as the funding of Imperial courts and fortresses continued throughout the crisis.Footnote 187 The CE's appeal to the Emperor in 1723 to respect the principle of confessional parity in commissions appointed by the Reichshofrat to adjudicate interconfessional disputes testifies to the Protestants' continuing essential willingness to work within the Imperial judicial system—even in confessional matters—during the closing phase of the crisis.Footnote 188 More broadly, it indicated the success of juridification because the appeal implied that the Protestants' confidence in Imperial justice had been repaired, to some degree, following the Imperial restitution mandates. It also illustrated how a shared political culture predicated on an adherence to certain mechanisms of coexistence helped hold the Reich together.
In general, the principles expounded by the CE reflected a broader culture of mutual surveillance in the post-1648 Empire, which Brendan Simms has aptly described as a “geopolitical panopticon” in which it was in everyone's interest to ensure that corporate rights were respected at all levels of the hierarchy—not least because the position of every recognized group was dependent upon its legal status and liberties being respected by other groups within the broader system.Footnote 189 Whereas the Augsburg settlement of 1555 had consigned subjects' confessional rights to the inviolable domestic territorial sphere, the overhauled constitution of the Reich established at Westphalia opened up this area to legitimate external scrutiny, enforcement, and intervention.Footnote 190 Vienna and most Catholic princes espoused a hierarchical conception by insisting that such enforcement occur under Imperial-judicial auspices; by contrast, the leading Protestant princes argued, along more federal lines, that, if necessary, they had the right to intervene on their own authority. The considerable possibilities that this provided for mutual oversight in confessional affairs within the territories could also potentially furnish the princes with opportunities to enhance their political position in relation to one another. Holding other princes to account with regard to the treatment of their subjects was, in short, an effective way of putting pressure on dynastic and political rivals.
