28 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
which rivalry was as much in evidence as cooperation between the
attackers, while the main French army arrived just in time to share in
the honours. Leopold himself had already slipped away, and his heav-
ily outnumbered garrison surrendered the fortress at the beginning of
September in return for their own free passage out. The Catholic League
had belatedly raised a considerable army but had not deployed it, and
once it became clear that the Union had no further military intentions
they too demobilised.
Whether a major war would really have broken out had Henri not
been assassinated is one of history’s great imponderables, as despite
many theories no-one really knows what his intentions were. The ques-
tion is further complicated by the fact that during the key period
when Henri was making preparations to intervene in Jülich he was
also involved in a bitter dispute with both the Spanish government
and Archduke Albrecht of the Netherlands, triggered by the 56-year-old
king’s romantic involvement with a girl of sixteen. With his prompt-
ing she had recently been married off to the young Prince Henri II de
Condé, who as next in line to the throne after Henri’s own sons was
required to live at court, a convenient arrangement for pursuing the
liaison. The prince, however, did not prove as accommodating as had
been anticipated, and in November 1609 he absconded with his wife
to take refuge in the Netherlands. There the embarrassed Archduke
Albrecht reluctantly allowed the lady to stay but asked the prince to
move on, eventually to Milan, where the Spanish government were
happy to exploit Henri’s problems by refusing all French requests for his
return. Thus the negotiations surrounding the Cleves-Jülich dispute and
the likelihood that if France intervened its army would march through
Spanish Netherlands territory became entangled with the king’s private
passion, so that ‘in his correspondence with his ambassadors and in his
interviews with foreign envoys Henri passed from one question to the
other as if the two were inextricable’.^27 Historians differ over the actual
significance of this affair, but it does at least help to explain why Henri’s
aims were less than clear.^28
Nevertheless he will have been very conscious that France’s long-
drawn-out religious civil wars had ended barely ten years earlier, and
the scars were far from healed, so that involvement in a war against
Catholic powers and with entirely Protestant allies might well have pro-
voked renewed internal troubles. Faced with the same problem, France
under first his widow and then his son virtually withdrew from the
international scene for most of the next twenty years. Clearly Henri did
not want a strategically important territory not very far from France’s