Chapter XII: Part 12

The king of Navarre was now thirty-one years old; for the three Henrys were nearly of the same age. The first indications of his existence had been recognized amid the cannon and trumpets of a camp in Picardy, and his mother had sung a gay Bearnese song as he was coming into the world at Pau. “Thus,” said his grandfather, Henry of Navarre, “thou shalt not bear to us a morose and sulky child.” The good king without a kingdom, taking the child as soon as born in the lappel of his dressing-gown, had brushed his infant lips with a clove of garlic and moistened them with a drop of generous Gascon wine. “Thus,” said the grandfather again, “shall the boy be both merry and bold.” There was something mythologically prophetic in the incidents of his birth.

The best part of Navarre had been long since appropriated by Ferdinand of Aragon. In France there reigned a young and warlike sovereign with four healthy boys. But the newborn infant had inherited the lilies of France from St. Louis, and a later ancestor had added to the escutcheon the motto “_Espoir_.” His grandfather believed that the boy was born to revenge upon Spain the wrongs of the house of Albret, and Henry’s nature seemed ever pervaded with Robert of Clermont’s device.

The same sensible grandfather, having different views on the subject of education from those manifested by Catharine de Medici toward her children, had the boy taught to run about bareheaded and barefooted, like a peasant, among the mountains and rocks of Béarn, till he became as rugged as a young bear and as nimble as a kid. Black bread and beef and garlic were his simple fare; and he was taught by his mother and his grandfather to hate lies and liars, and to read the Bible.

When he was fifteen, the third religious war broke out. Both his father and grandfather were dead. His mother, who had openly professed the Reformed faith since the death of her husband, who hated it, brought her boy to the camp at Rochelle, where he was received as the chief of the Huguenots. His culture was not extensive. He had learned to speak the truth, to ride, to shoot, to do with little sleep and less food. He could also construe a little Latin, and had read a few military treatises; but the mighty hours of an eventful life were now to take him by the hand and to teach him much good and much evil, as they bore him onward. He now saw military treatises expounded practically by professors like his uncle Condé, and Admiral Coligny, and Lewis Nassau in such lecture rooms as Laudun, and Jarnac, and Moncontour, and never was apter scholar.

The peace of Arnay-le-Duc succeeded, and then the fatal Bartholomew marriage with the Messalina of Valois. The faith taught in the mountains of Béarn was no buckler against the demand of “The mass, or death!” thundered at his breast by the lunatic Charles, as he pointed to thousands of massacred Huguenots. Henry yielded to such conclusive arguments, and became a Catholic. Four years of court-imprisonment succeeded, and the young king of Navarre, though proof to the artifices of his gossip Guise, was not adamant to the temptations spread for him by Catharine de Medici. In the harem entertained for him in the Louvre, many pitfalls entrapped him, and he became a stock-performer in the state comedies and tragedies of that plotting age.

A silken web of palace-politics, palace-diplomacy, palace-revolutions enveloped him. Schemes and counter-schemes, stratagems and conspiracies, assassinations and poisonings; all the state machinery which worked so exquisitely in fair ladies’ chambers, to spread havoc and desolation over a kingdom, were displayed before his eyes. Now campaigning with one royal brother against Huguenots, now fighting with another on their side, now solicited by the queen-mother to attempt the life of her son, now implored by Henry III to assassinate his brother, the Bearnese, as fresh antagonisms, affinities, combinations, were developed, detected, neutralized almost daily, became rapidly an adept in Medician state-chemistry. Charles IX in his grave, Henry III on the throne, Alençon in the Huguenot camp--Henry at last made his escape. The brief war and peace of Mercœur succeeded, and the king of Navarre formally abjured the Catholic creed. The parties were now sharply defined. Guise mounted upon the League, Henry astride upon the Reformation, were prepared to do battle to the death. The temporary “war of the amorous” was followed by the peace of Fleix.

Four years of peace again--four fat years of wantonness and riot preceding fourteen hungry, famine-stricken years of bloodiest civil war. The voluptuousness and infamy of the Louvre were almost paralleled in vice, if not in splendor, by the miniature court at Pau. Henry’s Spartan grandfather would scarcely have approved the courses of the youth whose education he had commenced on so simple a scale. For Margaret of Valois, hating her husband, and living in most undisguised and promiscuous infidelity to him, had profited by her mother’s lessons. A seraglio of maids of honor ministered to Henry’s pleasures, and were carefully instructed that the peace and war of the kingdom were playthings in their hands. While at Paris royalty was hopelessly sinking in a poisonous marsh, there was danger that even the hardy nature of the Bearnese would be mortally enervated by the atmosphere in which he lived.

The unhappy Henry III, baited by the Guises, worried by the Alençon and his mother, implored the king of Navarre to return to Paris and the Catholic faith. M. de Segur, chief of Navarre’s council, who had been won over during a visit to the capital, where he had made the discovery that “Henry III was an angel, and his ministers devils,” came back to Pau, urging his master’s acceptance of the royal invitation. Henry wavered. Bold D’Aubigné, stanchest of Huguenots and of his friends, next day privately showed Segur a palace window opening on a very steep precipice over the Bayse, and cheerfully assured him that he should be flung from it did he not instantly reverse his proceedings and give his master different advice. “If I am not able to do the deed myself,” said D’Aubigné, “here are a dozen more to help me.” The chief of the council cast a glance behind him, saw a number of grim Puritan soldiers, with their hats plucked down upon their brows, looking very serious; so made his bow, and quite changed his line of conduct.

But Henry--no longer the unsophisticated youth who had been used to run barefoot among the cliffs of Coarraze--was grown too crafty a politician to be entangled by Spanish or Medician wiles. The duke of Anjou was now dead. Of all the princes who had stood between him and the throne, there was none remaining save the helpless, childless, superannuated youth who was its present occupant. The king of Navarre was legitimate heir to the crown of France. “_Espoir_” was now in letters of light upon his shield, but he knew that his path to greatness led through manifold dangers, and that it was only at the head of his Huguenot chivalry that he could cut his way. He was the leader of the nobles of Gascony, and Dauphiny, and Guienne, in their mountain fastnesses; of the weavers, cutlers, and artisans in their thriving manufacturing and trading towns. It was not Spanish gold, but carbines and cutlasses, bows and bills, which could bring him to the throne of his ancestors.

And thus he stood the chieftain of that great, austere party of Huguenots, the men who went on their knees before the battle, beating their breasts with their iron gantlets, and singing in full chorus a psalm of David before smiting the Philistines hip and thigh.

Their chieftain, scarcely their representative--fit to lead his Puritans on the battle-field--was hardly a model for them elsewhere. Yet, though profligate in one respect, he was temperate in every other. In food, wine, and sleep, he was always moderate. Subtle and crafty in self-defence, he retained something of his old love of truth, of his hatred for liars. Hardly generous, perhaps, he was a friend of justice; while economy in a wandering king like himself was a necessary virtue, of which France one day was to feel the beneficent action. Reckless and headlong in appearance, he was in truth the most careful of men. On the religious question most cautious of all, he always left the door open behind him, disclaimed all bigotry of opinion, and earnestly implored the papists to seek, not his destruction, but his instruction. Yet, prudent as he was by nature in every other regard, he was all his life the slave of one woman or another; and it was by good luck rather than by sagacity that he did not repeatedly forfeit the fruits of his courage and conduct in obedience to his master-passion.

Always open to conviction on the subject of his faith, he repudiated the appellation of heretic. A creed, he said, was not to be changed like a shirt, but only on due deliberation and under special advice. In his secret heart he probably regarded the two religions as his chargers, and was ready to mount alternately the one or the other, as each seemed the more likely to bear him safely in battle. The Bearnese was no Puritan, but he was most true to himself and to his own advancement. His highest principle of action was to reach his goal, and to that principle he was ever loyal. Feeling, too, that it was for the interest of France that he should succeed, he was even inspired--compared with others on the stage--by an almost lofty patriotism.

Amiable by nature and by habit, he had preserved the most unimpaired good-humor throughout the horrible years which succeeded St. Bartholomew, during which he carried his life in his hand, and learned not to wear his heart upon his sleeve. Without gratitude, without resentment, without fear, without remorse, entirely arbitrary, yet with the capacity to use all men’s judgments; without convictions, save in regard to his dynastic interests, he possessed all the qualities necessary to success. He knew how to use his enemies. He knew how to use his friends, to abuse them, and to throw them away. He refused to assassinate Francis Alençon at the bidding of Henry III, but he attempted to procure the murder of the truest of his own friends, one of the noblest characters of the age, whose breast showed twelve scars received in his service--Agrippa D’Aubigné--because the honest soldier had refused to become his pimp, a service the king had implored upon his knees.

Beneath the mask of perpetual, careless good-humor, lurked the keenest eye, a subtle, restless, widely combining brain, and an iron will. Native sagacity had been tempered into consummate elasticity by the fiery atmosphere in which feebler natures had been dissolved. His wit was as flashing and as quickly unsheathed as his sword. Desperate, apparently reckless temerity on the battle-field was deliberately indulged in, that the world might be brought to recognize a hero and chieftain in a king. The do-nothings of the Merovingian line had been succeeded by the Pepins; to the effete Carlovingians had come a Capet; to the impotent Valois should come a worthier descendant of St. Louis. This was shrewd Gascon calculation, aided by constitutional fearlessness. When dispatch-writing, invisible Philips, star-gazing Rudolphs, and petticoated Henrys sat upon the thrones of Europe, it was wholesome to show the world that there was a king left who could move about in the bustle and business of the age, and could charge as well as most soldiers at the head of his cavalry; that there was one more sovereign fit to reign over men, besides the glorious virgin who governed England.

Thus courageous, crafty, far-seeing, consistent, untiring, imperturbable, he was born to command, and had a right to reign. He had need of the throne, and the throne had still more need of him.

WALLENSTEIN, DUKE OF FRIEDLAND.

BY FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER.

[Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, a distinguished Austrian
general, the most noted opponent of Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty
Years’ War, born 1583, assassinated 1634. Wallenstein had already
achieved the most brilliant rank among the Imperialist generals,
except Tilly, when the defeat of the latter made the ambitious
soldier, whose great wealth and unscrupulous daring had excited the
jealousy of the Emperor Ferdinand, again a necessity to the
Catholic cause. Wallenstein, who had raised and subsisted an
immense army at his own expense at a time of pressing imperial
need, had afterward been retired from command. When called again to
the help of the imperial cause, Wallenstein dictated his own terms,
which practically left Ferdinand a mere puppet in his hands. Though
Gustavus Adolphus was victor at the battle of Lützen, it was at the
cost of his own life, a result welcomed by the Catholic league as a
great victory. Wallenstein reorganized his army, and was again
ordered by the emperor to lay down his baton on the just suspicion
that he was negotiating with the Swedes disloyally. His official
removal was made known to his principal generals, and Wallenstein,
deserted by a large portion of his troops, was assassinated by a
conspiracy of his minor officers, who had become satisfied that it
would be impracticable to secure his person alive, or to prevent
his immediate junction with the advancing Swedes.]

Count Wallenstein, afterward Duke of Friedland, was an experienced officer, and the richest nobleman in Bohemia. From his earliest youth he had been in the service of the house of Austria, and several campaigns against the Turks, Venetians, Bohemians, Hungarians, and Transylvanians had established his reputation. He was present as colonel at the battle of Prague, and afterward, as major-general, had defeated a Hungarian force in Moravia. The emperor’s gratitude was equal to his services, and a large share of the confiscated estates of the Bohemian insurgents was their reward. Possessed of immense property, excited by ambitious views, confident of his own good fortune, and still more encouraged by the existing state of circumstances, he offered, at his own expense and that of his friends, to raise and clothe an army for the emperor, and even undertook the cost of maintaining it if he were allowed to augment it to fifty thousand men.

The project was universally ridiculed as the chimerical offering of a visionary brain; but the offer was highly valuable, if its promises should be but partly fulfilled. Certain circles in Bohemia were assigned to him as depots, with authority to appoint his own officers. In a few months he had twenty thousand men under arms, with which, quitting the Austrian territories, he soon afterward appeared on the frontiers of Lower Saxony with thirty thousand. The emperor had lent this armament nothing but his name. The reputation of the general, the prospect of rapid promotion, and the hope of plunder, attracted to his standard adventurers from all quarters of Germany, and even sovereign princes, stimulated by the desire of glory or of gain, offered to raise regiments for the service of Austria.

The secret how Wallenstein had purposed to fulfill his extravagant designs was now manifest. He had learned the lesson from Count Mansfeld,[25] but the scholar surpassed his master. On the principle that war must support war, Mansfeld and the Duke of Brunswick had subsisted their troops by contributions levied indiscriminately on friend and enemy; but this predatory life was attended with all the inconvenience and insecurity which accompany robbery. Like fugitive banditti, they were obliged to steal through exasperated and vigilant enemies; to roam from one end of Germany to another; to watch their opportunity with anxiety, and to abandon the most fertile territories whenever they were defended by a superior army. If Mansfeld and Duke Christian had done such great things in the face of these difficulties, what might not be expected if the obstacles were removed; when the army raised was numerous enough to overawe in itself the most powerful states of the empire; when the name of the emperor insured impunity to every outrage; and when, under the highest authority, and at the head of an overwhelming force, the same system of warfare was pursued which these two adventurers had hitherto adopted at their own risk, and with only an untrained multitude?

Wallenstein was at the head of an army of nearly a hundred thousand men, who adored him, when the sentence of his dismissal arrived. Most of the officers were his creatures--with the common soldiers his hint was law. His ambition was boundless, his pride indomitable, his imperious spirit could not brook an injury unavenged. One moment would now precipitate him from the height of grandeur into the obscurity of a private station. To execute such a sentence upon such a delinquent seemed to require more address than it cost to obtain it from the judge. Accordingly, two of Wallenstein’s most intimate friends were selected as heralds of these evil tidings, and instructed to soften them as much as possible by flattering assurances of the continuance of the emperor’s favor.

Wallenstein had ascertained the purport of their message before the imperial ambassadors arrived. He had time to collect himself, and his countenance exhibited an external calmness while grief and rage were storming in his bosom. He had made up his mind to obey. The emperor’s decision had taken him by surprise before circumstances were ripe or his preparations complete for the bold measures he had contemplated. His extensive estates were scattered over Bohemia and Moravia, and by their confiscation the emperor might at once destroy the sinews of his power. He looked, therefore, to the future for revenge, and in this hope he was encouraged by the predictions of an Italian astrologer, who led his imperious spirit like a child in leading-strings. Seni had read in the stars that his master’s brilliant career was not yet ended, and that bright and glorious prospects still awaited him. It was, indeed, unnecessary to consult the stars to foretell that an enemy, Gustavus Adolphus, would ere long render indispensable the services of such a general as Wallenstein.

“The Emperor is betrayed,” said Wallenstein to the messengers; “I pity but forgive him. It is plain that the grasping spirit of the Bavarian dictates to him. I grieve that, with so much weakness, he has sacrificed me; but I will obey.” He dismissed the emissaries with princely presents, and, in a humble letter, besought the continuance of the emperor’s favor and of the dignities he had bestowed upon him.

The murmurs of the army were universal on hearing of the dismissal of their general, and the greater part of his officers immediately quitted the imperial service. Many followed him to his estates in Bohemia and Moravia; others he attached to his interests by pensions, in order to command their services when the opportunity should offer.

But repose was the last thing that Wallenstein contemplated when he returned to private life. In his retreat he surrounded himself with a regal pomp which seemed to mock the sentence of degradation. Six gates led to the palace he inhabited in Prague, and a hundred houses were pulled down to make way for his courtyard. Similar palaces were built on his other numerous estates. Gentlemen of the noblest houses contended for the honor of serving him, and even imperial chamberlains resigned the golden key to the emperor to fill a similar office under Wallenstein. He maintained sixty pages, who were instructed by the ablest masters. His antechamber was protected by fifty life-guards. His table never consisted of less than one hundred covers, and his seneschal was a person of distinction. When he traveled his baggage and suite accompanied him in a hundred wagons drawn by six or four horses; his court followed in sixty carriages attended by fifty led horses. The pomp of his liveries, the splendor of his equipages, and the decorations of his apartments were in keeping with all the rest. Six barons and as many knights were in constant attendance about his person, and ready to execute his slightest order. Twelve patrols went their rounds about his palace to prevent any disturbance. His busy genius required silence. The noise of coaches was to be kept away from his residence, and the streets leading to it were frequently blocked up with chains. His own circle was as silent as the approaches to his palace. Dark, reserved, and impenetrable, he was more sparing of his words than of his gifts, while the little that he spoke was harsh and imperious. He never smiled, and the coldness of his temperament was proof against sensual seductions.

Ever occupied with grand schemes, he despised all those idle amusements in which so many waste their lives. The correspondence he kept up with the whole of Europe was chiefly managed by himself, and, that as little as possible might be trusted to the silence of others, most of the letters were written by his own hand. He was a man of large stature, thin, of a sallow complexion, with short, red hair, and small, sparkling eyes. A gloomy and forbidding seriousness sat upon his brow, and his magnificent presents alone retained the trembling crowd of his dependents.

In this stately obscurity did Wallenstein silently but not inactively await the hour of revenge. The victorious career of Gustavus Adolphus soon gave him a presentiment of its approach. Not one of his lofty schemes had been abandoned, and the emperor’s ingratitude had loosened the curb of his ambition. The dazzling splendor of his private life bespoke high soaring projects, and, lavish as a king, he seemed already to reckon among his certain possessions those which he contemplated with hope.

Wallenstein, at the age of fifty, terminated his active and extraordinary life. To ambition he owed both his greatness and his ruin. With all his failings he possessed great and admirable qualities; and, had he kept himself within due bounds, he would have lived and died without an equal. The virtues of the ruler and of the hero--prudence, justice, firmness, and courage--are strikingly prominent features in his character; but he wanted the gentler virtues of the man, which adorn the hero and make the ruler beloved. Terror was the talisman with which he worked; extreme in his punishments as in his rewards, he knew how to keep alive the zeal of his followers, while no general of ancient or modern times could boast of being obeyed with equal alacrity. Submission to his will was more prized by him than bravery; for, if the soldiers work by the latter, it is on the former that the general depends. He continually kept up the obedience of his troops by capricious orders, and profusely rewarded the readiness to obey even trifles, because he looked rather to the act itself than its object. He once issued a decree, with the penalty of death on disobedience, that none but red sashes should be worn in the army. A captain of horse no sooner heard the order, than, pulling off his gold-embroidered sash, he trampled it under foot. Wallenstein, on being informed of the circumstance, promoted him on the spot to the rank of colonel.

His comprehensive glance was always directed to the whole, and in all his apparent caprice, he steadily kept in view some general scope or bearing. The robberies committed by the soldiers in a friendly country had led to the severest orders against marauders; and all who should be caught thieving were threatened with the halter. Wallenstein himself having met a straggler in the open country upon the field, commanded him to be seized without trial, as a transgressor of the law, and, in his usual voice of thunder, exclaimed, “Hang the fellow,” against which no opposition ever availed. The soldier pleaded and proved his innocence, but the irrevocable sentence had gone forth. “Hang, then, innocent,” cried the inexorable Wallenstein, “the guilty will have then more reason to tremble.” Preparations were already making to execute the sentence, when the soldier, who gave himself up for lost, formed the desperate resolution of not dying without revenge. He fell furiously upon his judge, but was overpowered by numbers and disarmed before he could fulfil his design. “Now let him go,” said the duke, “it will excite sufficient terror.”

His munificence was supported by an immense income, which was estimated at three millions of florins yearly, without reckoning the enormous sums which he raised under the name of contributions. His liberality and clearness of understanding raised him above the religious prejudices of his age; and the Jesuits never forgave him for having seen through their system, and for regarding the pope as nothing more than a bishop of Rome.

But as no one ever yet came to a fortunate end who quarrelled with the Church, Wallenstein, also, must augment the number of its victims. Through the intrigues of monks, he lost at Ratisbon the command of the army, and at Egra his life; by the same arts, perhaps, he lost what was of more consequence, his honorable name and good repute with posterity.

For, in justice, it must be admitted that the pens which have traced the history of this extraordinary man are not untinged with partiality, and that the treachery of the duke, and his designs upon the throne of Bohemia, rest not so much upon proved facts, as upon probable conjecture. No documents have yet been brought to light which disclose with historical certainty the secret motives of his conduct; and among all his public and well-attested actions, there is, perhaps, not one which could have had an innocent end. Many of his most obnoxious measures proved nothing but the earnest wish he entertained for peace; most of the others are explained and justified by the well-founded distrust he entertained of the emperor, and the excusable wish of maintaining his own importance. It is true, that his conduct toward the Elector of Bavaria looks too like an unworthy revenge, and the dictates of an implacable spirit; but still, none of his actions perhaps warrant us in holding his treason to be proved. If necessity and despair at last forced him to deserve the sentence which had been pronounced against him while innocent, still this will not justify that sentence. Thus Wallenstein fell, not because he was a rebel, but he became a rebel because he fell. Unfortunate in life that he made a victorious party his enemy, but still more unfortunate in death, that the same party survived him and wrote his history.

CARDINAL RICHELIEU.

BY SIR JAMES STEPHEN.

[Armand Jean Duplessis, Cardinal and Duke de Richelieu, born 1585,
died 1642. Originally trained to arms, as Marquis du Chillon, he
decided to take orders, studied theology and was made Bishop of
Luçon in 1607. During the minority of Louis XIII he enjoyed the
confidence of the queen regent, Maria de’ Medici, and in 1622
received the cardinal’s hat. In spite of the dislike of the king he
became prime minister and practically ruled France till his death.
Though a prince of the Church, Richelieu secretly assisted the
parliamentary party in the English Revolution of 1640; and gave
most important assistance both in money and armies, as a matter of
state policy, to the Protestants during the Thirty Years’ War.]

Richelieu was one of the rulers of mankind in virtue of an inherent and indefeasible birthright. His title to command rested on that sublime force of will and decision of character by which, in an age of great men, he was raised above them all. It is a gift which supposes and requires in him on whom it is conferred convictions too firm to be shaken by the discovery of any unperceived or unheeded truths. It is, therefore, a gift which, when bestowed on the governors of nations, also presupposes in them the patience to investigate, the capacity to comprehend, and the genius to combine, all those views of the national interest, under the guidance of which their inflexible policy is to be conducted to its destined consummation; for the stoutest hearted men, if acting in ignorance, or under the impulse of haste or of error, must often pause, often hesitate, and not seldom recede. Richelieu was exposed to no such danger. He moved onward to his predetermined ends with that unfaltering step which attests, not merely a stern immutability of purpose, but a comprehensive survey of the path to be trodden, and a profound acquaintance with all its difficulties and all its resources. It was a path from which he could be turned aside neither by his bad nor by his good genius; neither by fear, lassitude, interest, nor pleasure; nor by justice, pity, humanity, nor conscience.

The idolatrous homage of mere mental power, without reference to the motives by which it is governed, or to the ends to which it is addressed--that blind hero-worship, which would place Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus on the same level, and extol with equal warmth the triumphs of Cromwell and of Washington, though it be a modern fashion, has certainly not the charm of novelty. On the contrary, it might, in the language of the Puritans, be described as one of the “old follies of the old Adam”; and to the influence of that folly the reputation of Richelieu is not a little indebted.

In his estimate, the absolute dominion of the French crown and the grandeur of France were convertible terms. They seemed to him but as two different aspects of the great consummation to which every hour of his political life was devoted. In approaching that ultimate goal, there were to be surmounted many obstacles which he distinctly perceived, and of which he has given a very clear summary in his “Testament Politique.” “When it pleased your majesty,” he says, “to give me not only a place in your council, but a great share in the conduct of your affairs, the Huguenots divided the state with you. The great lords were acting, not as your subjects, but as independent chieftains. The governors of your provinces were conducting themselves like so many sovereign princes. Foreign affairs and alliances were disregarded. The interest of the public was postponed to that of private men. In a word, your authority was, at that time so torn to shreds, and so unlike what it ought to be, that, in the confusion, it was impossible to recognize the genuine traces of your royal power.”

Before his death, Richelieu had triumphed over all these enemies, and had elevated the house of Bourbon upon their ruins. He is, I believe, the only human being who ever conceived and executed, in the spirit of philosophy, the design of erecting a political despotism; not, indeed a despotism like that of Constantinople or Teheran, but a power which, being restrained by religion, by learning, and by public spirit, was to be exempted from all other restraints; a dynasty which, like a kind of subordinate providence, was to spread wide its arms for the guidance and shelter of the subject multitude, itself the while inhabiting a region too lofty to be ever darkened by the mists of human weakness or of human corruption.

To devise schemes worthy of the academies of Laputa, and to pursue them with all the relentless perseverance of Cortés or of Clive, has been characteristic of many of the statesmen of France, both in remote and in recent times. Richelieu was but a more successful Mirabeau. He was not so much a minister as a dictator. He was rather the depositary than the agent of the royal power. A king in all things but the name, he reigned with that exemption from hereditary and domestic influences which has so often imparted to the papal monarchs a kind of preterhuman energy, and has so often taught the world to deprecate the celibacy of the throne.

Richelieu was the heir of the designs of Henry IV, and the ancestor of those of Louis XIV. But they courted, and were sustained by, the applause and the attachment of their subjects. He passed his life in one unintermitted struggle with each, in turn, of the powerful bodies over which he ruled. By a long series of well-directed blows, he crushed forever the political and military strength of the Huguenots. By his strong hand, the sovereign courts were confined to their judicial duties, and their claims to participate in the government of the state were scattered to the winds. Trampling under foot all rules of judicial procedure and the clearest principles of justice, he brought to the scaffold one after another of the proudest nobles of France, by sentences dictated by himself to extraordinary judges of his own selection; thus teaching the doctrine of social equality by lessons too impressive to be misinterpreted or forgotten by any later generation. Both the privileges, in exchange for which the greater fiefs had surrendered their independence, and the franchises, for the conquest of which the cities, in earlier times, had successfully contended, were alike swept away by this remorseless innovator. He exiled the mother, oppressed the wife, degraded the brother, banished the confessor, and put to death the kinsmen and favorites of the king, and compelled the king himself to be the instrument of these domestic severities. Though surrounded by enemies and by rivals, his power ended only with his life. Though beset by assassins, he died in the ordinary course of nature. Though he had waded to dominion through slaughter, cruelty, and wrong, he passed to his great account amid the applause of the people, with the benedictions of the Church; and, as far as any human being ever could perceive, in hope, in tranquility, and in peace.

What, then, is the reason why so tumultuous a career reached at length so serene a close? The reason is that, amid all his conflicts, Richelieu wisely and successfully maintained three powerful alliances. He cultivated the attachment of men of letters, the favor of the commons, and the sympathy of all French idolaters of the national glory.

He was a man of extensive, if not of profound, learning, a theologian of some account, and an aspirant for fame as a dramatist, a wit, a poet, and a historian. But if his claims to admiration as a writer were disputable, none contended his title to applause as a patron of literature and of art. The founder of a despotism in the world of politics, he aspired also to be the founder of a commonwealth in the world of letters. While crushing the national liberties, he founded the French Academy as the sacred shrine of intellectual freedom and independence. Acknowledging no equal in the state, he forbade the acknowledgment, in that literary republic, of any superiority save that of genius. While refusing to bare his head to any earthly potentate, he would permit no eminent author to stand bareheaded in his presence. By these cheap and not dishonest arts, he gained an inestimable advantage. The honors he conferred on the men of learning of his age they largely repaid, by placing under his control the main-springs of public opinion.

To conciliate the commons of France, Richelieu even ostentatiously divested himself of every prejudice hostile to his popularity. A prince of the Church of Rome, he cherished the independence of the Gallican Church and clergy. The conqueror of the Calvinists, he yet respected the rights of conscience. Of noble birth and ancestry, his demeanor was still that of a tribune of the people. But it was not by demeanor alone that he labored to win their regard. He affected the more solid praise of large and salutary reformations.

GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS, KING OF SWEDEN.

BY FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER.

[Known as the Protector of the Protestant Faith, the most brilliant
hero of the Thirty Years’ War, and one of the greatest soldiers of
modern times, born 1594, killed at the battle of Lutzen, 1632. In
1630, the Swedish king having satisfactorily disposed of the
various national difficulties which had so far embarrassed his
career, threw the weight of his gantlet into the struggle going on
between the Catholic league, headed by Ferdinand of Austria, and
the Protestant princes of Germany. The great genius of Gustavus
Adolphus, who taught an entirely new system of tactics, made him
irresistible, and in two years he firmly established a Protestant
ascendancy in German affairs which no power afterward could break.
Wallenstein was his most brilliant antagonist. After the death of
the Swedish hero, the generals who had been trained in his school
continued the war with various vicissitudes till peace was
declared, substantially granting the rights for which the
Protestant chieftains had been fighting.]

Gustavus Adolphus had not completed his seventeenth year when the Swedish throne became vacant by the death of his father; but the early maturity of his genius enabled the Estates to abridge in his favor the legal period of minority. With a glorious conquest over himself, he commenced a reign which was to have victory for its constant attendant--a career which was to begin and end in success. The young Countess of Brahe, the daughter of a subject, had gained his early affections, and he had resolved to share with her the Swedish throne; but, constrained by time and circumstances, he made his attachment yield to the higher duties of a king, and heroism again took exclusive possession of a heart which was not destined by nature to confine itself within the limits of quiet domestic happiness.

Christian IV of Denmark, who ascended the throne before the birth of Gustavus, in an inroad upon Sweden, had gained some considerable advantages over the father of that hero. Gustavus Adolphus hastened to put an end to this destructive war, and, by prudent sacrifices, obtained a peace in order to turn his arms against the czar of Muscovy. The questionable fame of a conqueror never tempted him to spend the blood of his subjects in unjust wars; but he never shrunk from a just one. His arms were successful against Russia, and Sweden was augmented by several important provinces on the east.

In the meantime, Sigismund of Poland retained against the son the same sentiments of hostility which the father had provoked, and left no artifice untried to shake the allegiance of his subjects, to cool the ardor of his friends, and to embitter his enemies. Neither the great qualities of his rival, nor the repeated proofs of devotion which Sweden gave to her loved monarch, could extinguish in this infatuated prince the foolish hope of regaining his lost throne. All Gustavus’s overtures were haughtily rejected. Unwillingly was this really peaceful king involved in a tedious war with Poland, in which the whole of Livonia and Polish Prussia were successively conquered. Though constantly victorious, Gustavus Adolphus was always the first to hold out the hand of peace.

After the unsuccessful attempt of the king of Denmark to check the emperor’s[26] progress, Gustavus Adolphus was the only prince in Europe to whom oppressed liberty could look for protection--the only one who, while he was personally qualified to conduct such an enterprise, had both political motives to recommend and wrongs to justify it. Before the commencement of the war in Lower Saxony, important political interests induced him, as well as the king of Denmark, to offer his services and his army for the defense of Germany; but the offer of the latter had, to his own misfortune, been preferred. Since that time Wallenstein and the emperor had adopted measures which must have been equally offensive to him as a man and as a king. Imperial troops had been dispatched to the aid of the Polish king, Sigismund, to defend Prussia against the Swedes. When the king complained to Wallenstein of this act of hostility, he received for answer, “The emperor has more soldiers than he wants for himself; he must help his friends.” The Swedish ambassadors had been insolently ordered by Wallenstein to withdraw from the conference at Lubeck; and when, unawed by this command, they were courageous enough to remain, contrary to the law of nations, he had threatened them with violence.

Ferdinand had also insulted the Swedish flag, and intercepted the king’s dispatches to Transylvania. He also threw every obstacle in the way of a peace between Poland and Sweden, supported the pretensions of Sigismund to the Swedish throne, and denied the right of Gustavus to the title of king. Deigning no regard to the repeated remonstrances of Gustavus, he rather aggravated the offence by new grievances than conceded the required satisfaction.

So many personal motives, supported by important considerations, both of policy and religion, and seconded by pressing invitations from Germany, had their full weight with a prince who was naturally the more jealous of his royal prerogative the more it was questioned, who was flattered by the glory he hoped to gain as Protector of the Oppressed, and passionately loved war as the element of his genius.

But the strongest pledge for the success of his undertaking Gustavus found in himself. Prudence demanded that he should embrace all the foreign assistance he could, in order to guard his enterprise from the imputation of rashness; but all his confidence and courage were entirely derived from himself. He was indisputably the greatest general of his age, and the bravest soldier in the army which he had formed. Familiar with the tactics of Greece and Rome, he had discovered a more effective system of warfare, which was adopted as a model by the most eminent commanders of subsequent times. He reduced the unwieldly squadrons of cavalry, and rendered their movements more light and rapid; and, with the same view, he widened the intervals between his battalions. Instead of the usual array in a single line, he disposed his forces in two lines, that the second might advance in the event of the first giving way.

He made up for his want of cavalry, by placing infantry among the horse; a practice which frequently decided the victory. Europe first learned from him the importance of infantry. All Germany was astonished at the strict discipline which, at the first, so creditably distinguished the Swedish army within their territories; all disorders were punished with the utmost severity--particularly impiety, theft, gambling, and duelling. The Swedish articles of war enforced frugality. In the camp, the king’s tent not excepted, neither silver nor gold was to be seen. The general’s eye looked as vigilantly to the morals as to the martial bravery of his soldiers; every regiment was ordered to form round its chaplain for morning and evening prayers. In all these points the lawgiver was also an example. A sincere and ardent piety exalted his courage. Equally free from the coarse infidelity which leaves the passions of the barbarian without control; and from the grovelling superstition of Ferdinand, who humbled himself to the dust before the Supreme Being, while he haughtily trampled on his fellow creature--in the height of his success he was ever a man and a Christian; in the height of his devotion a king and a hero.

The hardships of war he shared with the meanest soldier in his army; maintained a calm serenity amid the hottest fury of battle; his glance was omnipresent, and he intrepidly forgot the danger while he exposed himself to the greatest peril. His natural courage, indeed, too often made him forget the duty of a general; and the life of a king ended in the death of a common soldier. But such a leader was followed to victory alike by the coward and the brave, and his eagle glance marked every heroic deed which his example had inspired. The fame of their sovereign excited in the nation an enthusiastic sense of their own importance; proud of their king, the peasant in Finland and Gothland joyfully contributed his pittance; the soldier willingly shed his blood; and the lofty energy which his single mind had imparted to the nation long survived its creator.

If Gustavus Adolphus owed his successes chiefly to his own genius, at the same time, it must be owned, he was greatly favored by fortune and by circumstance. Two great advantages gave him a decided superiority over the enemy. While he removed the scene of war into the lands of the League, drew their youths as recruits, enriched himself with booty, and used the revenue of their fugitive princes as his own, he at once took from the enemy the means of effectual resistance, and maintained an expensive war with little cost to himself. And, moreover, while his opponents, the princes of the League, divided among themselves, and governed by different and conflicting interests, acted without unanimity, and therefore without energy; while the generals were deficient in authority, their troops in obedience, the operations of their scattered armies without concert; while the general was separated from the lawgiver and the statesman; these several functions were united in Gustavus Adolphus, the only source from which authority flowed, the sole object to which the eye of the warrior turned; the soul of his party, the inventor as well as the executor of his plans. In him, therefore, the Protestants had a center of unity and harmony, which was altogether wanting to their opponents. No wonder, then, if favored by such advantages, at the head of such an army, with such a genius to direct it, and guided by such political prudence, Gustavus Adolphus was irresistible.

With the sword in one hand, and mercy in the other, he traversed Germany as a conqueror, a lawgiver, and a judge, in as short a time almost as the tourist of pleasure. The keys of towers and fortresses were delivered to him, as if to a native sovereign. No fortress was inaccessible; no river checked his victorious career. He conquered by the very terror of his name.

History, too often confined to the ungrateful task of analyzing the uniform play of human passions, is occasionally rewarded by the appearance of events which strike like a hand from heaven into the nicely adjusted machinery of human plans, and carry the contemplative mind to a higher order of things. Of this kind, is the sudden retirement of Gustavus Adolphus from the scene; stopping for a time the whole movement of the political machine, and disappointing all the calculations of human prudence. Yesterday, the very soul, the great and animating principle of his own creation; to-day struck unpitiably to the ground in the very midst of his eagle flight; untimely torn from a whole world of great designs, and from the ripening harvest of his expectations, he left his bereaved party disconsolate; and the proud edifice of his past greatness sank into ruins. The Protestant party had identified its hopes with its invincible leader, and scarcely can it now separate them from him; with him, they now fear all good fortune is buried. But it was no longer the benefactor of Germany who fell at Lutzen; the beneficent part of his career, Gustavus Adolphus had already terminated; and now the greatest service which he could render to the liberties of Germany was--to die.

The ambition of the Swedish monarch aspired unquestionably to establish a power within Germany, and to attain a firm footing in the center of the empire, which was inconsistent with the liberties of the Estates. His aim was the imperial crown; and this dignity, supported by his power, and maintained by his energy and activity, would in his hands be liable to more abuse than had ever been feared from the House of Austria. Born in a foreign country, educated in the maxims of arbitrary power, and by principles and enthusiasm a determined enemy to popery, he was ill qualified to maintain inviolate the constitution of the German States, or to respect their liberties. The coercive homage which Augsburg, with many other cities, was forced to pay to the Swedish crown, bespoke the conqueror, rather than the protector of the empire; and this town, prouder of the title of a royal city than of the higher dignity of the freedom of the empire, flattered itself with the anticipation of becoming the capital of his future kingdom.

His ill-disguised attempts upon the Electorate of Mentz, which he first intended to bestow upon the Elector of Brandenburg, as the dower of his daughter Christina, and afterward destined for his chancellor and friend Oxenstiern, evinced plainly what liberties he was disposed to take with the constitution of the empire. His allies, the Protestant princes, had claims on his gratitude, which could be satisfied only at the expense of their Roman Catholic neighbors, and particularly of the immediate Ecclesiastical Chapters; and it seems probable a plan was early formed for dividing the conquered provinces (after the precedent of the barbarian hordes who overran the German empire) as a common spoil, among the German and Swedish confederates. In his treatment of the Elector Palatine, he entirely belied the magnanimity of the hero, and forgot the sacred character of a protector. The Palatinate was in his hands, and the obligations both of justice and honor demanded its full and immediate restoration to the legitimate sovereign. But, by a subtlety unworthy of a great mind, and disgraceful to the honorable title of protector of the oppressed, he eluded that obligation. He treated the Palatinate as a conquest wrested from the enemy, and thought that this circumstance gave him a right to deal with it as he pleased. He surrendered it to the Elector as a favor, not as a debt; and that, too, as a Swedish fief, fettered by conditions which diminished half its value, and degraded this unfortunate prince into a humble vassal of Sweden. One of these conditions obliged the Elector, after the conclusion of the war, to furnish, along with the other princes, his contribution toward the maintenance of the Swedish army--a condition which plainly indicates the fate which, in the event of the ultimate success of the king, awaited Germany. His sudden disappearance secured the liberties of Germany, and saved his reputation, while it probably spared him the mortification of seeing his own allies in arms against him, and all the fruits of his victories torn from him by a disadvantageous peace.

EARL OF STRAFFORD.

BY DAVID HUME.

[Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, born 1593, executed 1641. At
first a leading member of the opposition to Charles I in
Parliament, he afterward joined the court party and became
successively Viscount Wentworth and Earl of Strafford. As governor
of Ireland, he organized the first standing army in English annals;
and afterward formulated the policy of “Thorough”--an executive
system which would have made Charles an absolute monarch, free of
parliamentary or other shackles. His remarkable political genius
inspired such dread that Parliament looked on his death as
essential to their cause. He was impeached as a traitor, an
indictment undoubtedly true, but which could not be legally proved.
He was finally condemned by a bill of attainder. The worst blot on
Charles I is that he should have yielded up Strafford to his foes
with hardly a struggle. Though traitor to his country, he was the
most loyal and devoted of servants to his king. Hume’s estimate of
Strafford is more lenient than that of other historians.]

In the former situation of the English Government, when the sovereign was in a great measure independent of his subjects, the king chose his ministers either from personal favor, or from an opinion of their abilities, without any regard to their parliamentary interest or talents. It has since been the maxim of princes, wherever popular leaders encroach too much on royal authority, to confer offices on them, in expectation that they will afterward become more careful not to diminish that power which has become their own. These politics were now embraced by Charles; a sure proof that a secret revolution had happened in the constitution, and had necessitated the prince to adopt new maxims of government. But the views of the king were at this time so repugnant to those of the Puritans that the leaders whom he gained lost from that moment all interest with their party, and were even pursued as traitors with implacable hatred and resentment.

This was the case with Sir Thomas Wentworth, whom the king created first a baron, then a viscount, and afterward Earl of Strafford; made him president of the council of York, and deputy of Ireland; and regarded him as his chief minister and counsellor. By his eminent talents and abilities Strafford merited all the confidence which his master reposed in him; his character was stately and austere--more fitted to procure esteem than love; his fidelity to the king was unshaken; but as he now employed all his counsels to support the prerogative, which he had formerly bent all his endeavors to diminish, his virtue seems not to have been entirely pure, but to have been susceptible of strong impressions from private interest and ambition.

The death of Strafford was too important a stroke of party to be left unattempted by any expedient however extraordinary. Besides the great genius and authority of that minister, he had threatened some of the popular leaders with an impeachment; and had he not himself been suddenly prevented by the impeachment of the Commons, he had, that very day, it was thought, charged Pym, Hambden, and others with treason for having invited the Scots to invade England. A bill of attainder was, therefore, brought into the Lower House immediately after finishing these pleadings; and preparatory to it a new proof of the earl’s guilt was produced, in order to remove such scruples as might be entertained with regard to a method of proceeding so unusual and irregular.