САМЕО XVIII. Siege of Stralsund. 1628. But the citizens were brave, and they had heard stories of the ferocity of the soldiery which determined them to hold out to the utmost. Wallenstein declared it his principle never to let anything be held back from him, and the siege began, while the burghers swore to one another to defend their religion and liberty to the last drop of their blood. The Kings of Denmark and Sweden sent them supplies of provisions and powder, and though Wallenstein declared that he would have Stralsund, though it were fastened by chains to heaven, and told a deputation of burghers that he would lay all their towns as flat as the top of the table, still he made no progress. A sally drove him out of Dunholm, his first defeat; and after the siege had lasted from March to August he drew off his forces. In the meantime, Charles I., by means of a forced loan, had contrived to send Sir Charles Morgan and about 6,000 men to the aid of his Danish uncle; but his subjects would let him do no more, and the war was equally unpopular in Denmark. King Christian was driven step by step out of Lower Saxony, and then into Holstein, his own duchy. Town after town fell into Tilly's hands, and at Stadt, Morgan and his men were made prisoners. Glückstadt, however, held out gallantly, and the successful resistance of Stralsund not only encouraged opposition, but showed Wallenstein that schemes of power on the Baltic must be given up. The Catholic Electors, too, were manifesting alarm and displeasure at the predominance of Austria, the Catholic League could not be depended on, and in order to be free to deal with the enemies at home, both Ferdinand and Wallenstein felt that they must be free from the Danes. On his side, Christian was worn out with the struggle, and the war was highly unpopular in the country. So the mediation of the Elector of Brandenburg was accepted. Christian engaged not to interfere again in the affairs of the Empire, unless his rights as Duke of Holstein were invaded, and he received back the whole of his hereditary dominions. Envoys were sent from Sweden but were not admitted to the conference at Lubeck, where peace was signed in the May of 1629 between Denmark and Austria. The Emperor now had two objects, to reward his general, and to restore the Church. The Catholic League, under Maximilian of Bavaria, were willing enough that the latter should be done, but they had the feelings of hereditary German princes when the haughty upstart Bohemian was invested with the old dukedom of Mecklenburg, and its hereditary prince expelled. Maximilian held the greater part of the Palatinate. Here he used every means of expelling Protestant pastors, and putting in Catholic priests. Jesuits were sent to Heidelberg as missioners, and made many converts. In June, 1628, all the nobles had been informed that they must either change their religion, or give up their estates and go into exile. In September, the command was extended to the rest of the country. There were no burnings-no open persecutions; the war-wasted people seem to have made no resistance, but to have accepted whatever gave them a hope of quiet. Ferdinand meantime sent commissioners to discover what churches and property had been taken by Protestants since the pacification of Passau. All these were resumed, even at Nordlingen, where not a single inhabitant was Catholic. The subject of a German prince was, it was understood, necessarily of the same religion as his sovereign, and the restoration of two prince bishoprics and twelve smaller sees does not seem to have provoked much opposition in the dejected people from whom the ardour of converts had burnt out. The Catholic League approved of all this, but they had been promised that Wallenstein's army should be reduced, whereas it had been increased to 100,000 men, whom he maintained out of forced contributions from the neighbourhood of his camps. The Friedlanders, as his troops were called, were as cruel and oppressive as any of the other enemies, and though Pomerania had been friendly to the Imperialists throughout the siege of Stralsund, the exactions were so fearful that the villagers were trying to exist on grass and leaves, and horrid stories were told of people eating their own children. Wallenstein was absolutely pitiless and remorseless to the people, and equally haughty and despotic to the princes. He was known to declare that the Emperor ought to be master of his own dominions, as the Kings of Spain or France were, and to be urging him to reduce the princes to the level of mere nobles. Cardinal de Richelieu fomented these discontents. There was a sharp war between France and Austria going on in Italy and Savoy about the Duchy of Mantua, which need not here be described, but one effect of it was to make the Pope, Urban VIII., as an Italian prince, dread the Emperor, and be willing to weaken him, staunch Catholic though he were. And Richelieu suggested to Urban that the way to do this was to make him dismiss his best general, and likewise alienate his subjects by insisting on the surrender of Church property. The Cardinal likewise sent his own great confidant and adviser, the Capuchin, Père Joseph, with the French ambassadors to Vienna, to represent privately to Ferdinand that he had better oblige the Catholic League, since he could at any time recall Wallenstein. A Diet was convoked at Ratisbon, where the Emperor hoped to have his eldest son elected King of the Romans, but the Electors had represented to Ferdinand Wallenstein's exactions and the cruelties of his troops, and refused to choose the young Ferdinand, save on condition that Wallenstein was dismissed. Père Joseph's counsel prevailed, as the Emperor had once said that if an angel and a monk gave him contrary advice he should follow the monk's. But the Capuchin also intrigued with the Electors when Wallenstein was dismissed, and they not only refused to choose the Archduke, but even talked of electing Maximilian of Bavaria. Wallenstein quietly said, "I pity and forgive; I grieve for his weakness, and obey." He broke up his army of 100,000 men, and returned VOL. VI. САМЕО XVIII. home with sixty carriages containing his suite, and 100 waggons with their luggage. He took up his abode in the castle of Prague, where he kept princely state. Dark, silent, prompt, and resolute, gloomy and Frederick haughty, yet liberal of gifts, he was greatly dreaded and hated by most, and yet enthusiastically beloved by those who were in his service. Death of Henry. 1629, There were six gates to his palace, each guarded by a sentinel, fifty halberdiers in splendid uniforms waited in his ante-chamber, twelve watchmen patrolled the precincts to prevent the slightest noise—for of noise he had an absolute horror, when engaged in his high tower in the astrological calculations in which he implicitly believed. He would even have chains hung up to prevent the rumbling of vehicles in the surrounding streets. Six barons and as many knights waited on him, four gentlemen ushers presented his guests, sixty pages of high birth attended on him, and were trained in arts and arms. His steward was a baron of the Empire, his chamberlain equally noble, a hundred guests were daily provided for with royal splendour and profusion at his own table. His gardens were extremely costly and beautiful, and his horses ate and drank out of marble mangers, and from troughs supplied with streams constantly flowing from artificial fountains. Even in his retirement he kept all men's eyes on him by this splendour. The year 1629 brought a great blow to the unfortunate ex-King and Queen of Bohemia. Frederick and his eldest son had gone out in a yacht to see the return of the West Indian fleet, when a collision took place with a much larger vessel, and their own sank. The Elector was saved by a sailor, but the young Frederick Henry, a youth of great promise, was drowned. The family was too poor for a costly funeral or a public mourning, and indeed, whatever was spent came from King Charles. There was, however, much lamentation in England, where the boy had been regarded as a promising Protestant heir. Germany, however, had little compassion for the family which had begun the terrible war, not yet, alas! half finished. Indeed the lull of 1629 was as full of misery to the conquered Protestant states as the war itself, since they were required to accept the Romanist faith forced on them at the sword's point. Some cities held out, notably that of Löwenberg, where the burgher women, finding their husbands decided on the worldly prudent measure of submission to the Edict of Restitution, all locked themselves up in the market house and left their husbands to take care of themselves and their babies, till the men folk yielded to the nearer tyrants. But the ladies of Löwenberg had to suffer cruelly for their resistance, and the Edict of Restitution to which Ferdinand had been urged by the cunning of Richelieu and the Pope, was working great wretchedness among those violently dispossessed of what indeed ought never to have been seized by their forefathers, but which seemed securely their own. Nor could a single Lutheran prince, city, or village feel secure. ONLY one great man appeared on the stage during the Thirty Years' War, and he was no native of the Empire. Indeed it has been remarked that none of the really able generals were Germans, but that they were Bohemian, Hungarian, Flemish, or Italian. Denmark had made an attempt on behalf of the Protestant cause and had been beaten off the field; but even while the cunning Richelieu was making peace with the Emperor, and obtaining the dismissal of the best general of Austria, he was corresponding with the King of Sweden, and adding to the ardour of the impulse that made that young hero hope to be the deliverer of the liberties and faith of the Protestant princes. "Here Gustaf Adolf, his true baptismal name, was born at Stockholm in 1594, the son of Charles IX. of Sweden. From the first his father Charles IX., had him carefully educated by the learned Johann Skytte, and when only ten years old, he sat by his father in the Thing, and in the Councils of State, and was practised in replying to foreign envoys either in their own tongues or in Latin. His father had such expectations of his abilities that when a difficulty for the future was propounded, he would put his hand on the boy's head, and say is he who will provide for this! Ille faciet. He will do it." By the time he was fifteen he could talk with ease in German, Dutch, French, Italian, and Latin, and was learning Greek. Throughout his life, he kept up his studies as much as possible, giving an hour or two a day whenever he could, to study. He read in the original, Hugo Grotius's great Latin treatise on the Law of Nations in peace and war, and he studied in the Greek the works of Xenophon, whom he regarded as the greatest military writer. At fifteen, his father sent him to practise CAMEO Gustavus Adolphus. CAMEO Youth of Gustavus. government in Finland and Esthonia, with Skytte to direct both his out of a frozen bog under the horses' feet, and often had his horse In 1611, the year of his knighthood, his father died, and the first years of his reign were passed in petty wars with Denmark, Russia, and Poland, in which he was often in great personal danger. In the intervals, he did much for the improvement of his kingdom, and he thought out and established a discipline that made his soldiers exceed. ingly unlike the terrible bands of Tilly and Wallenstein. There was a firm hand over them, which punished all crimes, such as impiety, theft and violence, permitted no plunder, made the services of the chaplains no mere empty form, and while taking the soldiers' families and the necessary attendants under the protection and discipline of the camp, permitted none of the disorderly camp followers who were a worse scourge than the regiments themselves, His service was the only one where there was any heed to the comfort of the soldiers, whom he viewed as men with souls and bodies to be cared for, not as parts of a machine, and food for powder Old Tilly's saying was A bright musket, a ragged soldier," but Gustavus took care that his men should be well fed, shod, and clothed, with sheepskins for the winter, and sound tents, and while other armies left their wounded to chance, he provided four surgeons for each regiment. He knew all his officers and many of his men by sight, and if he saw a man deficient in his exercises, he would himself give instruction, with great mildness and patience. Though strict with the officers, he was lenient with the rank and file, to whom the camp was like a home, and the King a father. There were schools for them, and for their children, ani regular services. In spite of this strictness, his service was very popular, but he was unwilling ever to have more than 40,000 men in his army, since larger numbers could hardly have been kept in this perfect state of order. Many of the English and Scottish gentlemen |