210 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
time’. The effect was to free Maximilian to start his advance on Bohemia,
leaving Albrecht to threaten the Palatinate, although with the Union
army prevented from attacking Bavaria or other League territories a
diversionary invasion of the Palatinate was no longer really neces-
sary. This decidedly one-sided outcome was not what the French had
intended, as they had anticipated following it up with further diplomacy
which would bring the war in Bohemia to an end by agreement rather
than by a League and Imperialist victory, but when Angoulême’s dele-
gation reached Vienna they found that with Maximilian’s army already
on the march eastwards Ferdinand was not interested.
Earlier historians frequently regarded the Ulm treaty as a Union
climb-down, a defeat or even a disgrace, but although it undoubt-
edly had serious consequences for the Bohemian revolt Gotthard, in
a modern interpretation, argues that viewed strictly in terms of mat-
ters in the Empire it did not disadvantage the Union, and indeed quite
the contrary. In the south, where the Catholic forces had been much
the stronger, the members’ territories were now guaranteed against
attack (and in much of the north the Protestant princes had protection
against forcible repossession of secularised church properties under the
Mühlhausen agreement made a few months earlier), while the League
army would be moved far away towards Bohemia. Admittedly the Union
had not succeeded in excluding an attack on the Palatinate by Archduke
Albrecht, but they had gained the freedom to deploy their own forces
in their entirety against him to defend it. Moreover the Union had rea-
son to fear that a rejection of the French mediation could have driven
France actively over to the Habsburg side, noting that their emissary had
learned of the plan to send French troops to Bohemia during a visit to
Paris earlier in the year. The same man, a Württemberg councillor, wel-
comed the treaty, reporting back in Stuttgart that ‘God gave his blessing
to Ulm and averted the danger on the Danube.^19 The French them-
selves were less happy with the implications, as Albrecht’s agent noted
in early September, reporting that their chancellor had complained that
‘it would not be good for France if the Spaniards gained a foothold in
Germany’.^20
The conquest of Bohemia
Maximilian’s first target was not in fact Bohemia but Upper Austria.
Although small, this territory had been the most militant of the
Habsburgs’ internal opponents after Bohemia itself, taking a strong line
in confronting their efforts at counter-Reformation from the time of