all night upon the field, at once the reward and the evidence of victory
to him who should hold it. Wallenstein, in his haste to leave Leipzig
and Saxony, forgot to remove his part. Not long after the battle was
ended, Pappenheim's infantry, who had been unable to follow the rapid
movements of their general, and who amounted to six regiments, marched
on the field, but the work was done. A few hours earlier, so
considerable a reinforcement would perhaps have decided the day in
favour of the Imperialists; and, even now, by remaining on the field,
they might have saved the duke's artillery, and made a prize of that of
the Swedes. But they had received no orders to act; and, uncertain as
to the issue of the battle, they retired to Leipzig, where they hoped to
join the main body.
The Duke of Friedland had retreated thither, and was followed on the
morrow by the scattered remains of his army, without artillery, without
colours, and almost without arms. The Duke of Weimar, it appears, after
the toils of this bloody day, allowed the Swedish army some repose,
between Lutzen and Weissenfels, near enough to the field of battle to
oppose any attempt the enemy might make to recover it. Of the two
armies, more than 9,000 men lay dead; a still greater number were
wounded, and among the Imperialists, scarcely a man escaped from the
field uninjured. The entire plain from Lutzen to the Canal was strewed
with the wounded, the dying, and the dead. Many of the principal
nobility had fallen on both sides. Even the Abbot of Fulda, who had
mingled in the combat as a spectator, paid for his curiosity and his
ill-timed zeal with his life. History says nothing of prisoners; a
further proof of the animosity of the combatants, who neither gave nor
took quarter.
Pappenheim died the next day of his wounds at Leipzig; an irreparable
loss to the imperial army, which this brave warrior had so often led on
to victory. The battle of Prague, where, together with Wallenstein, he
was present as colonel, was the beginning of his heroic career.
Dangerously wounded, with a few troops, he made an impetuous attack on a
regiment of the enemy, and lay for several hours mixed with the dead
upon the field, beneath the weight of his horse, till he was discovered
by some of his own men in plundering. With a small force he defeated,
in three different engagements, the rebels in Upper Austria, though
40,000 strong. At the battle of Leipzig, he for a long time delayed the
defeat of Tilly by his bravery, and led the arms of the Emperor on the
Elbe and the Weser to victory. The wild impetuous fire of his
temperament, which no danger, however apparent, could cool, or
impossibilities check, made him the most powerful arm of the imperial
force, but unfitted him for acting at its head. The battle of Leipzig,
if Tilly may be believed, was lost through his rash ardour. At the
destruction of Magdeburg, his hands were deeply steeped in blood; war
rendered savage and ferocious his disposition, which had been cultivated
by youthful studies and various travels. On his forehead, two red
streaks, like swords, were perceptible, with which nature had marked him
at his very birth. Even in his later years, these became visible, as
often as his blood was stirred by passion; and superstition easily
persuaded itself, that the future destiny of the man was thus impressed
upon the forehead of the child. As a faithful servant of the House of
Austria, he had the strongest claims on the gratitude of both its lines,
but he did not survive to enjoy the most brilliant proof of their
regard. A messenger was already on his way from Madrid, bearing to him
the order of the Golden Fleece, when death overtook him at Leipzig.
Though Te Deum, in all Spanish and Austrian lands, was sung in honour of
a victory, Wallenstein himself, by the haste with which he quitted
Leipzig, and soon after all Saxony, and by renouncing his original
design of fixing there his winter quarters, openly confessed his defeat.
It is true he made one more feeble attempt to dispute, even in his
flight, the honour of victory, by sending out his Croats next morning to
the field; but the sight of the Swedish army drawn up in order of
battle, immediately dispersed these flying bands, and Duke Bernard, by
keeping possession of the field, and soon after by the capture of
Leipzig, maintained indisputably his claim to the title of victor.
But it was a dear conquest, a dearer triumph! It was not till the fury
of the contest was over, that the full weight of the loss sustained was
felt, and the shout of triumph died away into a silent gloom of despair.
He, who had led them to the charge, returned not with them; there he lay
upon the field which he had won, mingled with the dead bodies of the
common crowd. After a long and almost fruitless search, the corpse of
the king was discovered, not far from the great stone, which, for a
hundred years before, had stood between Lutzen and the Canal, and which,
from the memorable disaster of that day, still bears the name of the
Stone of the Swede. Covered with blood and wounds, so as scarcely to be
recognised, trampled beneath the horses' hoofs, stripped by the rude
hands of plunderers of its ornaments and clothes, his body was drawn
from beneath a heap of dead, conveyed to Weissenfels, and there
delivered up to the lamentations of his soldiers, and the last embraces
of his queen. The first tribute had been paid to revenge, and blood had
atoned for the blood of the monarch; but now affection assumes its
rights, and tears of grief must flow for the man. The universal sorrow
absorbs all individual woes. The generals, still stupefied by the
unexpected blow, stood speechless and motionless around his bier, and no
one trusted himself enough to contemplate the full extent of their loss.
The Emperor, we are told by Khevenhuller, showed symptoms of deep, and
apparently sincere feeling, at the sight of the king's doublet stained
with blood, which had been stripped from him during the battle, and
carried to Vienna. "Willingly," said he, "would I have granted to the
unfortunate prince a longer life, and a safe return to his kingdom, had
Germany been at peace." But when a trait, which is nothing more than a
proof of a yet lingering humanity, and which a mere regard to
appearances and even self-love, would have extorted from the most
insensible, and the absence of which could exist only in the most
inhuman heart, has, by a Roman Catholic writer of modern times and
acknowledged merit, been made the subject of the highest eulogium, and
compared with the magnanimous tears of Alexander, for the fall of
Darius, our distrust is excited of the other virtues of the writer's
hero, and what is still worse, of his own ideas of moral dignity. But
even such praise, whatever its amount, is much for one, whose memory his
biographer has to clear from the suspicion of being privy to the
assassination of a king.
It was scarcely to be expected, that the strong leaning of mankind to
the marvellous, would leave to the common course of nature the glory of
ending the career of Gustavus Adolphus. The death of so formidable a
rival was too important an event for the Emperor, not to excite in his
bitter opponent a ready suspicion, that what was so much to his
interests, was also the result of his instigation. For the execution,
however, of this dark deed, the Emperor would require the aid of a
foreign arm, and this it was generally believed he had found in Francis
Albert, Duke of Saxe Lauenburg. The rank of the latter permitted him a
free access to the king's person, while it at the same time seemed to
place him above the suspicion of so foul a deed. This prince, however,
was in fact not incapable of this atrocity, and he had moreover
sufficient motives for its commission.
Francis Albert, the youngest of four sons of Francis II, Duke of
Lauenburg, and related by the mother's side to the race of Vasa, had, in
his early years, found a most friendly reception at the Swedish court.
Some offence which he had committed against Gustavus Adolphus, in the
queen's chamber, was, it is said, repaid by this fiery youth with a box
on the ear; which, though immediately repented of, and amply apologized
for, laid the foundation of an irreconcileable hate in the vindictive
heart of the duke. Francis Albert subsequently entered the imperial
service, where he rose to the command of a regiment, and formed a close
intimacy with Wallenstein, and condescended to be the instrument of a
secret negociation with the Saxon court, which did little honour to his
rank. Without any sufficient cause being assigned, he suddenly quitted
the Austrian service, and appeared in the king's camp at Nuremberg, to
offer his services as a volunteer. By his show of zeal for the
Protestant cause, and prepossessing and flattering deportment, he gained
the heart of the king, who, warned in vain by Oxenstiern, continued to
lavish his favour and friendship on this suspicious new comer. The
battle of Lutzen soon followed, in which Francis Albert, like an evil
genius, kept close to the king's side and did not leave him till he
fell. He owed, it was thought, his own safety amidst the fire of the
enemy, to a green sash which he wore, the colour of the Imperialists.
He was at any rate the first to convey to his friend Wallenstein the
intelligence of the king's death. After the battle, he exchanged the
Swedish service for the Saxon; and, after the murder of Wallenstein,
being charged with being an accomplice of that general, he only escaped
the sword of justice by abjuring his faith. His last appearance in life
was as commander of an imperial army in Silesia, where he died of the
wounds he had received before Schweidnitz. It requires some effort to
believe in the innocence of a man, who had run through a career like
this, of the act charged against him; but, however great may be the
moral and physical possibility of his committing such a crime, it must
still be allowed that there are no certain grounds for imputing it to
him. Gustavus Adolphus, it is well known, exposed himself to danger,
like the meanest soldier in his army, and where thousands fell, he, too,
might naturally meet his death. How it reached him, remains indeed
buried in mystery; but here, more than anywhere, does the maxim apply,
that where the ordinary course of things is fully sufficient to account
for the fact, the honour of human nature ought not to be stained by any
suspicion of moral atrocity.
But by whatever hand he fell, his extraordinary destiny must appear a
great interposition of Providence. 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 sunk 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 all-engrossing power of an individual was at an end, but many came
forward to essay their strength; the equivocal assistance of an
over-powerful protector, gave place to a more noble self-exertion on the
part of the Estates; and those who were formerly the mere instruments of
his aggrandizement, now began to work for themselves. They now looked
to their own exertions for the emancipation, which could not be received
without danger from the hand of the mighty; and the Swedish power, now
incapable of sinking into the oppressor, was henceforth restricted to
the more modest part of an ally.
The ambition of the Swedish monarch aspired unquestionably to establish
a power within Germany, and to attain a firm footing in the centre 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 afterwards 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 neighbours, 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 honour demanded its
full and immediate restoration to the legitimate sovereign. But, by a
subtlety unworthy of a great mind, and disgraceful to the honourable
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 favour, 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 towards 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. Saxony was already disposed to abandon him,
Denmark viewed his success with alarm and jealousy; and even France, the
firmest and most potent of his allies, terrified at the rapid growth of
his power and the imperious tone which he assumed, looked around at the
very moment he past the Lech, for foreign alliances, in order to check
the progress of the Goths, and restore to Europe the balance of power.