No More Learning

29
nowned generals, soon outwitted the eter-
nal enemy of Ms race, Sigismond, who had
used all his power to overthrow him, and
had even seized one of his continental
provinces. Gustavus soon forced him to
withdraw from it, and he also took several
Prussian cities which had favored the at-
tempts of Sigismond.
His power, threatened on all sides, was
thus assured by a succession of victories;
and the liberal spirit of the Swedes, whose
devotion to their king shrank before no
sacrifice, joined to a wise administration,
soon replenished the public treasury, which
had been drained by so many wars.
It has been well remarked, that no king
ever took into his hands the reins of gov-
ernment under more unfavorable circum-
stances; and we may add, that never
were difficulties more swiftly surmounted.
It was necessary for him, so to speak, to
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? 30 GusTAvus Adolphus.
conquer his inheritance, and to purchase
his right to the throne with his blood.
He never drew the sword in a spirit of
conquest, nor for the mere love of war;
the interest of his country was his only
motive of action; he made war only that
he might bring peace. He sternly dis-
countenanced every act of vengeance; he
gave the example of courage in battle, and
of generosity and magnanimity after tri-
umph and victory. He was full of solici-
tude for his soldiers, but he tolerated on
their part no license, and insisted on a strict
cultivation of etiquette and religion in
camp. Regular worship was held there --
morning and evening, the entire army bent
the knee before God and reverently im-
plored his aid and his favor. The king
himself was every-where; giving encour-
agement and counsel here, lifting with a
helping hand there, marching ahead in
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? GusTAvus Adolphus. 31
the midst of bloody contest, and handling
the pickax in the trenches. While main-
taining discipline among his soldiers he
suppressed the bastinado as a punishment,
and thus showed himself even more jealous
of the dignity of humanity than do several
civilized nations of to-day. He v^as also
as prudent as brave, always surrounding
himself with the wisest counselors, and
consulting each of his States before enter-
ing upon any public enterprise.
His energy and power of endurance
were almost incredible. When sick or
wounded he was never heard to complain,
nor was he ever seen taking care of him-
self. During the Russian campaign he
was attacked by an intermittent fever,
but, far from keeping his bed, he amused
himself by fencing with one of his of-
ficers, and gave himself up to the sport
with such ardor that he broke out in a
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? 32 GusTAvus Adolphus.
profuse perspiration, and thus conquered
the fever.
Several times during his career he was
saved from death, almost as by miracle.
During the Livonian campaign with the
Poles, a shot swept the place he had occu-
pied the moment after he had left it. On
another occasion several fell around him
under a shower of balls, so close that the
blood of their wounds spurted upon his
clothes, and a few moments later a shot
pierced his tent and passed just above his
head. At Dantzic he gave orders to seven
small boats to seize a redoubt, and, in
order to be more sure of the result, he di-
rected one of the embarkations himself.
While thus employed he received a shot
in his stomach. The wound was quite
severe, but he wrote home the same day:
"It was a warm engagement, and I was
also wounded; but I thank God that my
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? GUSTAVUS Al>OLPHUS.
life and health are not in danger, and trust,
that, after a few days, I shall be able to
resume the command. "
Three months later, in Prussia, he was
again severely wounded in a battle with
the Duke of Brandenbui^g, an ally of his
rival, the King of Poland.
The day after the accident he again
wrote a letter to his people, in which we
are at a loss to know which most to ad-
mire, his courage or his resignation. ^
" We presented ourselves before the ene-
my," said he, "mounted and on foot, and
we played so well our artillery that we
thought we had put them to flight. But
God permitted it otherwise. Just arrived
at the spot where we expected and hoped
to rout them entirely, a ball struck me on
the shoulder, near the neck. It was this
alone that prevented us from finishing the
battle. Nevertheless, I thank God that in
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? 34 GusTAvus Adolphus.
the midst of my misfortune he permits me
to hope for the speedy recovery of my
health and strength.
Near the end of the same war against
Poland and Prussia, Gustavus ran still an-
other risk of losing his life. An Austrian
army, composed of eight thousand infantry
and two thousand cavalry, came up to the
aid of Poland. Gustavus Adolphus de-
manded of Wallenstein, Duke of Fried-
land, who had sent the army, what motive
he had in mingling himself in his affairs.
Wallenstein replied arrogantly, "My mas-
ter, the Emperor, has too many troops, and
is obliged to send a few of them to his
friends. "
In order to combat this new adversary
the Swedish king had need of re-enforce-
ments, and, while waiting, he desired to
take refuge behind the ramparts of Marien-
burg, one of the cities he had taken from
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? GusTAvus Adolphus. 35
Prussia. But one of his generals allowed
himself to be drawn into an engagement
with the Imperialists and exposed his
whole corps to comjDlete destruction. Al-
ready the Swedish battalions began to
fall back before the forces of Wallenstein,
when Gustavus Adolphus, warned of the
threatened defeat, rushed with all haste to
the rescue. Drawn into the general tu-
mult, and, so to speak, lost in it, he was
on the point of being taken by one of the
enemy's cavalry, whose saber brushed his
head and occasioned the loss of his hat.
Scarcely escaped from this danger, he near-
ly fell into the hands of another of the
cavalry, who even seized him by the arm.
All would soon have been over with Gus-
tavus Adolphus had he not been seen by
a Swedish dragoon, who flew to his de-
fense, and delivered him from death by
giving death to the Austrian.
3
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? S6 GusTAVus Adolphus.
Providence evidently protected the life
of the King of Sweden, and reserved him
for yet greater purposes. And the king
always recognized, and was always grate-
ful for this Divine protection. He con-
fided in it without reserve. In the midst
of bloody battles, as at home, he felt him-
self as under the eye of God, and ever
renewedly placed himself in his hands.
'' God," said he often, " has given me the
crown, not that I should fear or remain in
repose, but that I may consecrate my life
to his glory and to the good of my sub-
jects. " In fact, the glory of God seemed
to be the continual aim of all the king's
movements. His faith shone out in all his
words. The cause of the Gospel was his
own cause, and its triumph was his most
ardent wish.
Master of Prussia as far as Dantzic, his
first care was to write to the authorities of
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? Gustavus found Studying the Bible,
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? GusTAVus Adolphus. 39
all the conquered cities, to deliver up to
the Protestants all their places of worship
of which they had been deprived. He
recommended to the Pastors to preach
faithfully the Word of God, to administer
the Lord's Supper with care, and to awak-
en every-where, as much as possible, true
Christian life.
He could not tolerate profanity, nor
light and disrespectful jesting of any kind
concerning religion. He was often found
alone, reading his Bible. At one time he
said: "I seek to fortify myself against
perverse flatterers by meditating on the
Sacred Word. A person in my position
owes only to God an account of his actions,
and it is precisely this independence of
position which occasions a multitude of
temptations, against which we are never
sufficiently on our guard. "
His private and family life was as beau-
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? 40 GusTAvus Adolphus.
tiful as was his public career. Mild and
loving toward all his relatives, he was, to
his mother especially, the kindest and most
respectful of sons; nor did power change
at all his sentiments in this regard. Long
after coming to the throne he begged his
mother to still remain with him, and to
love him as she ever had done.
Eiga had held out in a siege to the last
extremity, and had caused great losses in
the Swedish army. The city being finally
taken, the inhabitants could only expect
severe terms and heavy chastisement ; but
Gustavus Adolphus, here as elsewhere,
displayed a wonderful Christian magna-
nimity. He treated the conquered with
a mildness that equally astonished both
friends and enemies.
After the siege of Riga, Gustavus's broth-
er, Charles Philip, fell very sick. He was
so tenderly cared for, and so surrounded
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? GusTAvus Adolphus. 41
by his brother's watchful kindness, that
the young Duke wrote to his sister Cath-
arine : " The converse of the king is so in-
teresting, and his society so agreeable, that
the time passes without my being able to
think of my sufferings. " The death of this
prince was a great grief to the heart of the
king. In a letter written on this occasion
the following touching and appreciative
passage is found :
"His heart was never cast down by
misfortunes and reverses. In spite of his
youth, he loved his country too well to
remain at rest in his house when Poland
attacked Sweden. He constantly sought
to excite to courage the young nobility.
O, my country ! what hast thou not lost
in him ! "
Charles Philip had just attained his
twenty-fii'st year, and aw^akened many brill-
iant hopes. The royal family of Sweden,
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? 42 GusTAvus Adolphus.
which, a few years before, numbered three
members, was now reduced to a single
one.
Gustavus Adolphus married the beauti-
ful Marie Eleonore, of the house of Bran-
denburg. Never was there a royal union
of purer love, nor one that took place
under more favorable auspices. It had
been long and lovingly anticipated by
both princess and king. The gift of the
heart had really preceded that of the
hand.
His religion was important above all
other matters, and he did not neglect it
even during his very brief sojourn at Ber-
lin, whither he went to demand the con-
sent of the mother of the princess. He
went into the sanctuary to implore God's
blessing on his choice, and paid so close
attention to the sermon that he noted
down all the principal points.
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? GusTAvus Adolphus. 43
His marriage was celebrated with mucli
pomp, Nov. 28, 1620, in his palace at
Stockholm.
Their domestic happiness was untroub-
led until the sorrow of a dead-born child
fell over them, and changed a day that
would have been one of rejoicing into one
of mourning. This was a great grief to
the king, but he recognized it as the will
of his heavenly Father, and as a chastise-
ment for him. He wrote to his brother-in-
law, the Duke of Brandenburg :
"I must tell you the sorrow that has
come to my house. God has punished me
in giving me a dead child. "
But he did not in anywise rebel against
Providence when another similar sorrow
fell to his lot, and made him fear that he
should have no inheritor to the throne.
Finally, he had a daughter, and, although
having greatly desired a son, he took the
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? 44 GusTAVus Adolphus.
child in Lis arms, caressed it, and reverent-
ly said :
" God be praised ! I trust this daughter
may be worth as much to me as a son.
May God, who has given her to me, pre-
serve her for me ! " Then he added, smiling,
"She will be artful, for she has deceived
us all," alluding to the expectation of all
that it would be a prince.
He did not then think that he foretold
what was to be but too true in after years.
He little mistrusted that the daughter of
Gustavus Adolphus would ever dishonor
his name by debauchery and apostasy. *
What a sad prophecy in the playful
* Christina, daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, idolized
by the Swedes on account of her father, betrayed their
affection by surrounding herself with corrupt men, and
by wasting the public finances in order to gratify her
guilty caprices. Weary of these material embarrassments,
she afterward abdicated, went to Belgium, thence to
Trance, where she was instrumental in the murder of
Monaldeschi. She died in Kome.
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? GusTAvus Adolphus.
45
words of the king, and how plainly it
shows that religions faith is not hereditary,
but a personal matter! God spared the
Christian hero from living to see this
double shame.
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? CHAPTER III.
THE THIETY YEAES' WAE.
Its Beginnings-- Intervention of Gustavus Adolphus-- His
Departure.
THE eventful moment had come when
Gustavus Adolphus was to enter up-
on the work to which Providence had des-
tined him. For a long time he had longed
to devote his life and, if necessary, to shed
his blood for the Protestant Church, at-
tacked while he was in his cradle. The
perils and hardships of the German Prot-
estants stirred his most lively sympathy.
Their every groan awakened an echo in
his heart. At the beginning^of the Thirty
Years' War he was occupied with three
wars, the finishing of which Ms father had
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? GusTAvus Adolphus. 47
bequeathed to him, so that, until his hands
were free from these, he could only remain
a distant and sympathetic witness of the
trials of his suffering brethren, and leave
his projects for assisting them to a future
need.
The peace of Augsburg, forced from
Charles Fifth by the victorious Lutherans,
in granting liberty of conscience seemed to
have ended the struggle between Catholi-
cism and Protestantism. But this peace
was only of short duration. The Jesuits,
spread every-where through the country,
ever faithful to the Roman Church, which
has never tolerated any other religious
faith than its own, and has ever held, as
rebels and enemies of the divine trath, all
those who refused to accept without re-
serve its doctrines and its practices, pushed
to an open rupture, and loudly demanded
a more speedy conversion of the hei'etics,
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? 48 GusTAvus Adolphus.
by means of arms taken np under sanction
of the emperor. But there must be some
pretext for renewing hostilities; Bohemia
was not long in giving one. The country
of John Huss, the forerunner of the Befor-
mation, whose funeral pile lighted up the
deliberations of the Council of Constance,
commenced by separating itself from Bome
in the celebration of the Lord's Supper,
and ended by embracing Protestantism.
The Emperor Budolph 11. was obliged to
authorize there the free exercise of Protest-
ant worship. He recognized also their
right to build new churches, to establish
schools according to need, and to convoke
their ecclesiastical council. All these con-
cessions, demanded by a people ready to
take them with weapons in their hands
should they be refused, were granted, July
2, 1609, in a famous letter called the Let-
ter of Majesty. Mathias, brother and sue-
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? GusTAvus Adolphus. 49
cesser of Rudolph, not only confirmed, but
increased the religious liberties of Bohemia,
and gave to her for king, his nephew,
Ferdinand de Gratz, the inheritor of the
imperial crown and Archd-uke of Styria.
This king promised, at first, to maintain
the privileges stipulated for in the Letter
of Majesty. But he did not long remain
faithful to his promise. Devoted to the
interests of Catholicism, and a docile sub-
ject of the Eomish court, he was sure
the Pope would sanction his perjury, and
thought, with other Catholic jDrinces, v^hose
example had encouraged him, that there
was no virtue in keeping either faith or
word of honor with a heretic. "It were
preferable," said he, " to rule over a desert
than over a country of heretics. " With
such a man, intolerance and religious per-
secution were inevitable. The Protestant
nobility were excluded from all honors
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? 50 GusTAvus Adolphus.
and deprived even of their employments.
The officers of the crown were chosen from
among the open enemies of the faith of the
majority of the people, and they subjected
them to all manner of vexations. Soon,
Ferdinand, sporting with every right, with
all treaties and promises, opposed all
claims of his subjects sent to his uncle, the
emperor, and managed to bring about the
interdiction of their religious assemblies.
The harsh reply, sent in answer to a
statement of their grievances, excited the
indignation of the Bohemians to its high-
est. Not satisfied with imposing on them
himself, Mathias approved all the violent
measures of which they were the victims,
and was the first to proclaim openly the
abolition of their privileges, and to tyran-
nize over their consciences. The Council
of Kegency, composed of rigid Catholics,
was regarded by the people as the real
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? GusTAvus Adolphus. 51
author of the imperial response, and, in all
cases, as the instigator of the unjust orders
issued at Vienna. They immediately has-
tened to the council chamber at Prague
where the councilors were in session. The
deputies of the Protestant provinces, who
marched at the head of the excited crowd,
summoned the president and his colleagues
to an explanation, and to inform them
whether the imperial response had not been
first prepared there, and then sent to Ma-
thias for his signature. Two of these high
officers of the empire replied with calm-
ness and dignity, and the crowd went no
further than to chase them from the palace.
The other two received the representatives
of the nation with insults and threats ; this
changed the indignation of the people into
rage, and they hurled the two councilors
out of the window into the ditch surround-
ing the royal edifice. They then seized
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? 52 GusTAvus Adolphus.
the secretary, who was an accomplice, and
subjected him to the same fate. "The
whole civilized world," says Schiller, " was
astonished at this savage procedure. The
Bohemians excused themselves by saying
that it was an ancient custom of the coun-
try, and declared that they saw nothing
remarkable in this event, save that the
judges, after such a leap, should have risen
up safe and sound. They really owed this
good fortune to the mass of filth upon
which they fell, which, in softening the
shock of their fall, saved their lives. "
This affair, known in history under the
name of Defenestration of Prague, inau-
gurated the Thirty Years' War, May 25,
1618.
After such a step of violence, there re-
mained no other course for the Bohemians
to pursue than to fly to arms to protect
their persons and their religion. There
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? GusTAvus Adolphus. 58
were no possible negotiations to be made,
and force of arms alone could give them
again their rights.
With an energy and promptitude worthy
of the gravity of the circumstances and the
importance of their cause, they constituted
a national government, and gave their king,
Ferdinand, to understand that they felt
themselves freed from every engagement
with a prince who, since he came into
power, had not ceased to conspire against
the faith and laws of his subjects.
The Jesuits, who had caused all these
evils, and destroyed, by their intrigues,
the tranquillity of Bohemia, were banished.
The thirty directors, chosen among the
deputies, to administer public affairs, in-
vited all the Protestants of the kingdom
to second the national movement, and
raised an army, the command of which was
given to Count Thurm, the author of the
4
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? 54 GusTAVUs Adolphus.
revolt which had constrained Rudolph to
sign the Letter of Majesty, and the main
defender of civil and religious liberty in
Bohemia.
At the same time they sent a call to
Hungary, to Moravia, to Silesia, and also
to their brethren of the Evangelical Union,
a powerful league formed, by the Prot-
estant princes of Germany, against their
common enemies, the emperor and the
Pope. Mathias, with the funds and the
soldiery of the Church, formed an army
and sent it against the rebels. Two de-
feats, however, soon taught the imperials
how difficult it is to conquer a people who
fight for their religion and independence.
About this time, and in order to follow up
these first successes, the Evangelical Union
sent to the aid of its brethren a re-inforce-
ment of four thousand men, under the
leadership of Count Mansfeld. This able
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? GusTAvus Adolphus. 55
general signalized his arrival in Boliemia
bv the takinof of Pilsen, the stronefest of
the three cities of the kingdom in which
the Catholics had the ascendancy, and the
one most devoted to the emperor. This
new loss seemed to have assured the Bo-
hemians of triumph. Mathias was pre-
paring peace measures at the moment when
death snatched him from the scene, and
left the imperial crown to Ferdinand of
Styria, the irreconcilable enemy of the
Reformation. All hoj)e of settling affairs
was then lost. Count Thurm took up
his march again after his short respite,
and proceeding from victory to victory,
he soon arrived even at Vienna. Ever in-
creased upon its passage, by recruits from
all the Protestant provinces, which Ferdi-
nand had enraged against him by his vio-
lent and unjust fanaticism, the Bohemian
army was ready to dictate to the emperor
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? 56 GusTAvus Adolphus.
himself, in Ms palace even, and to dis-
pose of the empire according to its own
mind.
The Austrian garrison was exhausted.
Several of their barons rushed into the
king's chamber to urge and, if possible,
compel him to deliver his capital up to the
Bohemians ; but he stubbornly refused, and
while they were discussing, the Flemish
army, sent to his support, appeared in the
city, and this put to flight the insurgents
of the city, and they fled for safety to the
Bohemians, who soon broke up camp and
returned to Prague.
In order to more fully deliver them-
selves from the domination of Ferdinand,
the Bohemians elected for king the Elector
Palatine, Frederick V. , who was at the head
of the Evangelical Union. This choice
was hailed with cries of joy, and the crown-
ing took place August 26, 1619, but it
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? GusTAvus Adolphus. 57
was a reio^n of short duration. Throuo^h
a few missteps, Frederick gave offense to
the Hussites and Lutherans, and he soon
found himself abandoned by all the Prot-
estant princes, of whose support he was in
so much need. He found himself alone
with his subjects, against the united troops
of Austria and of the Catholic league.