Electoral Palatinate

His contemporaries accused him of forsaking the Protestant cause in the very midst of the storm, of preferring the aggrandizement of his house to the emancipation of his country.

of exposing the whole evangelical or lutheran church of germany to ruin rather than raise an arm in defence of the reformed or calvinists of injuring the common cause by his suspicious friendship more seriously than the open enmity of his avowed opponents but it would have been well if his accusers had imitated the wise policy of the elector if in spite of the prudent policy the saxons like all others groaned at the cruelties which marked the emperor's progress if all germany was a witness how ferdinand deceived his confederates and trifled with his engagements if even the elector himself at last perceived this the more shame to the emperor who could so basely betray such implicit confidence if an excessive reliance on the emperor and the hope of enlarging his territories tied the hands of the elector of saxony the weak george william elector of brandenburg was still more shamefully fettered by fear of austria and the loss of his dominions What was made a reproach against these princes would have preserved to the elector Palatine his fame and his kingdom.

A rash confidence in his untried strength, the influence of French councils, and the temptation of a crown had seduced that unfortunate prince into an enterprise for which he had neither adequate genius nor political capacity.

The partition of his territories among discordant princes enfeebled the Palatinate, which, united, might have made a stronger resistance.

Eager to get the start of his competitor, the King of Denmark hastened to take the field.

appointed generalissimo of the circle of lower saxony he soon had an army of sixty thousand men in motion the administrator of magdeburg and the dukes of brunswick and mecklenburg entered into an alliance with him encouraged by the hope of assistance from england and the possession of so large a force he flattered himself he should be able to terminate the war in a single campaign At Vienna it was officially notified that the only object of these preparations was the protection of the circle and the maintenance of peace.

But the negotiations with Holland, England, and even France, the extraordinary exertions of the circle, and the raising of so formidable an army, seemed to have something more in view than defensive operations, and to contemplate nothing less than the complete restoration of the Elector Palatine, and the humiliation of the dreaded power of Austria.

After negotiations, exhortations, commands, and threats had in vain been employed by the emperor in order to induce the king of Denmark and the circle of Lower Saxony to lay down their arms, hostilities commenced, and Lower Germany became the theater of war.