Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics

by Aldous Huxley

was amazed by the way in which a man with so many and such important things to do could concentrate on any given piece of business, however trifling, as though it were the only one he had to deal with.

This austere and busy life was lived out against a background of ever-deepening popular misery, ever-increasing governmental ruthlessness.

Those who felt the full weight of his fiscal tyranny were the poor

So intense was the hardship inflicted by the Cardinal’s fiscal policy that its despairing victims rose repeatedly in revolts,

rebellion followed rebellion.

He felt sorry for the poor; but, as he wrote philosophically,

‘only God can make something out of nothing, and extortions which are intolerable in their nature, become excusable from the necessities of war.’

Beyond France’s eastern frontiers conditions were, of course, incomparably worse.

From etching to etching we follow the artist’s record of pillage, murder, arson, rape, torture and execution.

they knew nothing of those two men, hundreds of miles to the West, in Paris, one dressed in scarlet, the other in tattered grey, and both of them working, working all day long and far into the night, to make quite sure that there should be no peace, that the soldiers should go on marching and the nightmare be prolonged.

In 1633, when Callot drew that dry and unimpassioned portrait of the Man with the Flail, the Thirty Years’ War had run exactly half its course.

There were still fifteen years of misères et ...

Gustavus’s function was to wound and exhaust not only the bull, but himself and all the Protestants as well.

After which the French were to step in and occupy the entire bull-ring.

This policy of playing both ends against the middle had been employed in the previous century by the Papacy, which had encouraged Charles V against those enemies of Catholic unity, the Protestants, and the Protest...

by way of retaliation, killed exactly as many Catholic prisoners as Tilly had slaughtered Swedes.

Catholic Germany rang bells, said Te Deums and got drunk in honour of its conquering heroes.

Augsburg and Munich were now occupied by the Swedes, and the peasants who, a few years before, had been driven to ineffectual revolt by the domestic tyranny of their own government, now found themselves at the mercy of a conquering army.

In despair, the Emperor was forced, as Father Joseph and the planets had prophesied that he would be, to turn once more to Wallenstein,

The fourteen years of war, and before them the long period of rearmament, had created all over Europe a class of military adventurers, landless, homeless, without family, without any of the natural pieties, without religion or scruple, without knowledge of any trade but war and incapable of anything but destruction.

In 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia was finally signed, many of the armies mutinied, and it was with the greatest difficulty that their commanders were able to induce them to accept the fait accompli.

The imperialist army was defeated; but Gustavus was killed in the action.

To Richelieu and Father Joseph the news of Gustavus’s death came as an immense relief.

Father Joseph had accepted the Swedish pact with a ...

Of Protestant alliances in general he remarked that ‘one should make use of these things as of a drug, of which a small dose acts as an antidote and a large one kills outright’.

The trouble with Gustavus was that, being a military genius of the first order, he had been able to force his French allies to swallow doses of Protestantism far longer than were good for a Catholic stomach.

Or, to revert to an earlier metaphor, the picador had turned espada and, when Lützen happily put an end to him, was on the point of administering...

But, as we have seen, Richelieu did not desire the death of th...

All he wanted was, in the words of a French historian, ‘to break the ring of Catholic states united around the House of Austria and to draw them unde...

If he made use of Protestant England, Protestant Holland, Protestant Denmark and, finally, Protestant Sweden, it was because the only persuasions to which the German Catholic princes would listen were those brought to them by Anglican, Lutheran and Calvinist armies.

His death redressed the balance between Catholics and Protestants, restored the equilibrium of mutually destructive forces.

It was whispered that Gustavus had been killed, not by Wallenstein’s soldiers, but by assassins in the ranks of his own army. And who had hired the assassins?

the ubiquitously sinister Father Joseph.

Such was the friar’s reputation that people now connected his name with every strange and questionable occurrence of the time.

he was also deeply implicated in that...

the case of Father Urbain Grandier of Loudun and the nuns he was said to have bewitched.

Gossip incriminated both the Eminences, the scarlet and the grey.

Both accusations were unfounded.

In the Loudun affair, neither Richelieu nor Father Joseph exhibited anything worse than weakness.

Meanwhile, in Germany, things were rapidly going from bad to worse.

At the same time, with the help of Father Joseph’s agents and a number of Czech nobles, he was plotting to have himself crowned King of Bohemia.

Alarmed, the Emperor dismissed him for a second time.

Wallenstein was outlawed, took flight and, on February 25th, 1634, was murdered at

having lost four-fifths of its population by hunger and disease.

The picture illustrates a fact all too frequently ignored by ‘philosophic’ historians – namely, that art can be almost completely irrelevant to life, and that the study of the masterpieces of painting and poetry and music throws very little light upon the actual character of the age in which they were produced.

shows at best what their contemporaries would have liked to be, not what they were.

Eger put an end to Wallenstein’s dream of a Germany united under military dictatorship;

Nordlingen put an end to Gustavus’s dream of a great Protestant German empire, ruled from Stockholm.

Parodoxically enough, Nordlingen also put an end to Ferdinand’s dream of a Catholic, Counter-Reformation empire unde...

Gallas’s all too decisive victory precipitated the active intervention of France; and that active intervention was to result in the final ruin of Spain and the permanent exclusi...