Chapter XXII: Section I: Christian IV. and Gustavus Adolphus

[Sidenote: § 1. Denmark and Sweden.]

Whilst France was thus temporarily hindered from taking part in German affairs, and whilst James and his son were promising more than their poverty would allow them to perform, the rulers of Denmark and Sweden were watching with increasing interest the tide of war as it rolled northwards.

[Sidenote: § 2. Christian IV.]

Christian IV. of Denmark had every reason to look with anxiety upon the future. As Duke of Holstein, he was a member of the Lower Saxon circle, and he had long been doing his best to extend his influence over the coasts of the North Sea. By his new fortifications at Glückstadt he aimed at intercepting the commerce of Hamburg, and his success in procuring for one of his sons the Bishopric of Verden and the coadjutorship and eventual succession to the archbishopric of Bremen was doubtless specially grateful to him on account of the position he thus acquired on the Elbe and the Weser. The question of the Protestant bishoprics was therefore a very important question to him personally, and he was well aware that a real national empire in Germany would make short work with his attempts to establish his dominion over the mouths of the German rivers.

[Sidenote: § 3. His early interest in the war.]

His attention was not now called for the first time to the progress of the war. Like all the Lutheran princes, he had thoroughly disapproved of Frederick's Bohemian enterprise. But when Frederick was a fugitive he had seen that a strong force was needed to stop the Emperor from a retaliation which would be ruinous to the Protestants, and he had in the beginning of 1621 given a willing ear to James's proposal for a joint armament in defence of the Palatinate. Had the war been undertaken then, with the character of moderation which James and Christian would have been certain to impress upon it, the world might perhaps have been spared the spectacle of Mansfeld's plunderings, with their unhappy results. But James came too soon to the conclusion that it was unnecessary to arm till mediation had failed; and Christian, auguring no good from such a course, drew back and left the Palatinate to its fate. But the events which followed had increased his anxiety, and in 1624 his mind was distracted between his desire to check the growth of the imperial power and his hesitation to act with allies so vacillating and helpless as the Lower Saxon princes were proving themselves to be. In his own lands he had shown himself a good administrator and able ruler. Whether he was possessed of sufficient military capacity to cope with Tilly remained to be seen.

[Sidenote: § 4. Gustavus Adolphus.]

Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, was a man of a higher stamp. His is the one of the few names which relieve the continental Protestantism of the seventeenth century from the charge of barrenness. Possessed of a high and brilliant imagination, and of a temperament restless and indefatigable, to which inaction was the sorest of trials, he was never happier than when he was infusing his own glowing spirit into the comrades of some perilous enterprise. Christian of Brunswick was not more ready than he to lead a charge or to conduct a storm. But he had, too, that of which no thought ever entered the mind of Christian for an instant--the power of seeing facts in their infinite variety as they really were, and the self-restraint with which he curbed in his struggling spirit and his passionate longing for action whenever a calm survey of the conditions around showed him that action was inexpedient. In all the pages of history there is probably no man who leaves such an impression of that energy under restraint, which is the truest mark of greatness in human character as it is the source of all that is sublime or lovely in nature or in art.

[Sidenote: § 5. His conflict with Poland and Russia.]

Such a man was certain not to be a mere enthusiast embarking heedlessly in a Protestant crusade. Neither would he be careful for mere temporal or political power, regardless of the higher interests of his time. His first duty, and he never forgot it, was to his country. When he came to the throne, in 1611, Sweden was overrun by Danish armies, and in an almost desperate condition. In two years he had wrested a peace from the invaders, under conditions hard indeed, but which at least secured the independence of Sweden. His next effort, an effort which to the day of his death he never relaxed, was to bring into his own hands the dominion of the Baltic. He drove the Russians from its coasts. 'Now,' he said triumphantly in 1617, 'this enemy cannot, without our permission launch a single boat upon the Baltic.' He had another enemy more dangerous than Russia. Sigismund, King of Poland, was his cousin, the son of his father's elder brother, who had been driven from the throne of Sweden for his attachment to the Catholic belief. And so Gustavus was involved in the great question which was agitating Europe. The bare legal right which gave the whole of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands to Spain, which gave Bohemia to Ferdinand, and the Protestant bishoprics and the secularized lands to the Catholic clergy, gave also Sweden to Sigismund. Was it strange if Gustavus stood forth to combat this doctrine to the death, or if in his mind the growth of the two branches of the House of Austria, by whom this doctrine was maintained, became inextricably blended with the creed which that doctrine was to favour? Was it strange, too, if Protestantism and the national right of each separate country to go its own way untrammelled by such a doctrine appeared in his eyes, as in his days for the most part they really were, but two forms of the same spirit?

[Sidenote: § 6. His visit to Germany.]

The peace concluded by Gustavus with Russia in 1617 was accompanied by a fresh outbreak of the war with Poland; and this renewal of the contest with the old rival of his house naturally drew the king's attention to affairs in Germany; for Ferdinand, now rising into power, was the brother-in-law of Sigismund, and likely to give him what aid he could in his Swedish enterprise. And Gustavus, too, was not quite a foreigner in Germany. Through his mother German blood ran in his veins, and when, in the summer of 1618, he visited Berlin in secret, he was won by the lovely face of the daughter of that energetic Elector of Brandenburg who after boxing the ears of the rival candidate for the dukedom of Cleves had adopted the Calvinist creed and had entered the Union. The death of the Elector delayed the marriage, and it was not till 1620 that, on a second visit, Gustavus wrung a consent from the new Elector, George William, whose weakness and vacillation were to be a sore trial to the Swedish king in after years. In strict incognito, Gustavus travelled as far as Heidelberg, at a time when the Elector was far away, in the midst of his short-lived splendour at Prague. Gustavus learned something from that visit which he never forgot. He saw the rich luxuriance of that fair Rhine valley, stretching away till the western hills are but dimly visible in the blue distance, and which, compared by Venetian travellers to the green Lombard plain, must have caused strange sensations of wonder in the wanderer from the cold and barren north. And he saw another sight, too, which he never forgot--the wealth and magnificence of the Rhenish prelates. 'If these priests were subjects to the king my master' (he spoke in the assumed character of a Swedish nobleman) 'he would long ago have taught them that modesty, humility, and obedience are the true characteristics of their profession.'

[Sidenote: § 7. His daring and prudence.]

Plainly in this man there was something of Christian of Anhalt, something of the desire to overthrow existing institutions. But there was that in him which Christian of Anhalt was ignorant of--the long and calm preparation for the crisis, and the power of establishing a new order, if his life should be prolonged, to take the place of the old which was falling away.

[Sidenote: § 8. Renewed war with Poland.]

Gustavus returned to carry on the war with Poland with renewed vigour. In 1621 Riga surrendered to him. The next year he concluded a truce which gave him leisure to look about him.

[Sidenote: § 9. His interest in the German war.]

The year 1624 brought with it fresh alarm. The empire, hostile to Sweden and the religion of Sweden, was growing terribly strong. Unlike Christian of Denmark, Gustavus had sympathized with Frederick's Bohemian undertaking, although he had expected but little from an enterprise under Frederick's guidance. And now the tide of victory was running northward. An empire with a firm grasp on the shores of Mecklenburg and Pomerania would soon call in question the Swedish dominion of the Baltic. If this was to be the end, Gustavus had gained but little by his victories over Russia and Poland.

[Sidenote: § 10. Character of his policy.]

It all sounds like mere selfishness,--Christian alarmed for his family bishoprics, and his hold upon the Elbe and the Weser; Gustavus providing against an attack upon his lordship in the Baltic. But it does not follow that with both of them, and especially with Gustavus, the defence of the persecuted Gospel was not a very real thing. Historians coolly dissect a man's thoughts as they please, and label them like specimens in a naturalist's cabinet. Such a thing, they argue, was done for mere personal aggrandizement; such a thing for national objects; such a thing from high religious motives. In real life we may be sure it was not so. As with Ferdinand and Maximilian, the love of law and orderly government was indissolubly blended with the desire to propagate the faith on which their own spiritual life was based; so it was with Gustavus. To extend the power of Sweden, to support the princes of Germany against the Emperor's encroachments, to give a firm and unassailable standing ground to German Protestantism, were all to him parts of one great work, scarcely even in thought to be separated from one another. And, after all, let it never be forgotten that the unity which he attacked was the unity of the Jesuit and the soldier. It had no national standing ground at all. The Germany of a future day, the Germany of free intelligence and ordered discipline, would have far more in common with the destroyer than with the upholder of the hollow unity of the seventeenth century.