the country, and when the parson’s housekeeper one day saw him hold
the wash-bowl for his guest she wanted to know why he was so polite
to a common clod. Master Jon told her that it was none of her
business, but that night he piloted his friend across the lake to
Isala, where Sven Elfsson lived, a gamekeeper who knew the country
and could be trusted. The good parson was hardly out of sight on
his way back when the sheriff’s men came looking for Gustav. It
did not occur to them that the yokel who stood warming himself by
the stove might be the man they were after. But the gamekeeper’s
wife was quick to see his peril. She was baking bread and had just
put the loaves into the oven with a long-handled spade. “Here, you
lummox!” she cried, and whacked him soundly over the back with
it, “what are ye standing there gaping at? Did ye never see folks
afore? Get back to your work in the barn.” And Gustav, taking the
hint, slunk out of the room.
For three days after that he lay hidden under a fallen tree in
the snow and bitter cold; but even there he was not safe, and the
gamekeeper took him deeper into the forest, where a big spruce grew
on a hill in the middle of a frozen swamp. There no one would seek
him till he could make a shift to get him out of the country. The
hill is still there; the people call it the King’s Hill, and not
after King Christian, either. But in those long nights when Gustav
Vasa listened to the hungry wolves howling in the woods and nosing
about his retreat, it was hardly kingly conceits his mind brooded
over. His father and kinsmen were murdered; his mother and sister
in the pitiless grasp of the tyrant who was hunting him to his
death; he, the last of his race, alone and forsaken by his own.
Bitter sorrow filled his soul at the plight of his country that had
fallen so low. But the hope of the young years came to the rescue:
all was not lost yet. And in the morning came Sven, the gamekeeper,
with a load of straw, at the bottom of which he hid him. So no one
would be the wiser.
It was well he did it, for half-way to the next town some prowling
soldiers overtook them, and just to make sure that there was
nothing in the straw, prodded the load with their spears. Nothing
stirred, and they went on their way. But a spear had gashed
Gustav’s leg, and presently blood began to drip in the snow. Sven
had his wits about him. He got down, and cut the fetlock of one of
the beasts with his jack-knife so that it bled and no one need ask
questions. When they got to Marnäs, Gustav was weak from the loss
of blood, but a friendly surgeon was found to bind up his wounds.
Farther and farther north he fled, keeping to the deep woods in the
day, until he reached Rättwik. Feeling safer there, he spoke to the
people coming from church one Sunday and implored them to shake off
the Danish yoke. But they only shook their heads. He was a stranger
among them, and they would talk it over with their neighbors. Not
yet were his wanderings over. To Mora he went next, where Parson
Jakob hid him in a lonely farm-house. Evil chance led the spies
direct to his hiding-place, and once more it was the housewife
whose quick wit saved him. Dame Margit was brewing the Yule beer
when she saw them coming. In a trice she had Gustav in the cellar
and rolled the brewing vat over the trap-door. Then they might
search as they saw fit; there was nothing there. The first blood
was spilled for Gustav Vasa while he was at Mora, and it was a
Dane who did it. He was the kind that liked to see fair play; when
an under-sheriff came looking for the hunted man there, the Dane
waylaid and killed him.
Christmas morning, when Master Jakob had preached his sermon in the
church, Gustav spoke to the congregation out in the snow-covered
churchyard. A gravestone was his pulpit. Eloquent always, his
sorrows and wrongs and the memory of the hard months lent wings to
his words. His speech lives yet in Dalecarlia, for now he was among
its mountains.
“It is good to see this great meeting,” he said, “but when I think
of our fatherland I am filled with grief. At what peril I am here
with you, you know who see me hounded as a wild beast day by day,
hour by hour. But our beloved country is more to me than life. How
long must we be thralls, we who were born to freedom? Those of you
who are old remember what persecution Swedish men and women have
suffered from the Danish kings. The young have heard the story of
it and have learned from they were little children to hate and
resist such rule. These tyrants have laid waste our land and sucked
its marrow, until nothing remains for us but empty houses and lean
fields. Our very lives are not safe.” He called upon them to rise
and drive the invaders out. If they wanted a leader, he was ready.
His words stirred the mountaineers deeply. Cries of anger were
heard in the crowd; it was not the first time they had taken up
arms in the cause of freedom. But when they talked it over, the
older heads prevailed; there had not been time enough to hear both
sides. They told him that they would not desert the King; he must
expect nothing of them.
Broken-hearted and desperate, Gustav Vasa turned toward the
Norwegian frontier. He would leave the country for which there was
no hope. While the table in the poorest home groaned with Yuletide
cheer, Sweden’s coming king hid under an old bridge, outcast and
starving, till it was safe to leave. Then he took up his weary
journey alone. The winter cold had grown harder as the days grew
shorter. Famished wolves dogged his steps, but he outran them on
his snow-shoes. By night he slept in some wayside shelter, such
as they build for travellers in that desolate country, or in the
brush. The snow grew deeper, and the landscape wilder, as he went.
For days he had gone without food, when he saw the sun set behind
the lofty range that was to bar him out of home and hope forever.
Even there was no abiding place for him. What thoughts of his
vanished dream, perchance of the distant lands across the seas
where the tyrant’s hand could not reach him, were in his mind, who
knows, as he bent his strength to the last and hardest stage of his
journey? He was almost there, when he heard shouts behind him and
turned to sell his life dear. Two men on skis were calling to him.
They were unarmed, and he waited to let them come up.
Their story was soon told. They had come to call him back. After he
left, an old soldier whom they knew in Mora had come from the south
and told them worse things than even Gustav knew. It was all true
about the Stockholm murder; worse, the King was having gallows set
up in every county to hang all those on who said him nay; a heavy
tax was laid upon the peasants, and whoever did not pay was to have
a hand or foot cut off; they could still follow the plow. And now
they had sent away the one man who could lead against the Danes,
with the forests full of outlawed men who would have enlisted
under him as soon as ever the cry was raised! While the men of
Dalecarlia were debating the news among themselves orders came from
the bailiff at Westerås that the tax was to be paid forthwith. That
night runners were sent on the trail of Gustav to tell him to come
back; they were ready.
When he came, it was as if a mighty storm swept through the
mountains. The people rose in a body. Every day whole parishes
threw off their allegiance to King Christian. Sunday after Sunday
Gustav spoke to the people at their meeting-houses, and they raised
their spears and swore to follow him to death. Two months after
the murder in Stockholm an army of thousands that swelled like an
avalanche was marching south, and province after province joined
in the rebellion. King Christian’s host met them at Brunbäck in
April. One of its leaders asked the country folk what kind of men
the Dalecarlians were, and when he was told that they drank water
and ate bread made of bark, he cried out, “Such a people the devil
himself couldn’t whip; let us get out.” But his advice was not
taken and the Danish army was wiped out. Gustav halted long enough
to drill his men and give them time to temper their arrows and
spears, then he fell upon Westerås and beat the Danes there. The
peasant mob scattered too soon to loot the town, and the King’s men
came back with a sudden rush. Only Gustav’s valor and presence of
mind saved the day that had been won once from being lost again.
When it was seen that the Danes were not invincible, the whole
country rose, took the scattered castles, and put their defenders
to the sword. Gustav bore the rising on his shoulders from first
to last. He was everywhere, ordering and leading. His fiery
eloquence won over the timorous; his irresistible advance swept
every obstacle aside. In May he took Upsala; by midsummer he was
besieging Stockholm itself. Most of the other cities were in his
hands. The Hanse towns had found out what this Gustav could do
at home. They sang his praise, but as for backing him with their
purse, that was another matter. They refused to lend Gustav two
siege-guns when he lay before Stockholm, though he offered to
pledge a castle for each. He had no money. Happily his enemy,
Christian, was even worse off. Neither pledges nor promises could
get him the money he needed. His chief men were fighting among
themselves and made peace only to turn upon him. Within a year
after the Swedish people had chosen Gustav Vasa to be Regent at
the Diet of Vadstena, Christian went into exile and, when he tried
to get his kingdom back, into prison, where he languished the rest
of his life. He fully deserved his fate. Yet he meant well and had
done some good things in his day. Had he been able to rule himself,
he might have ruled others with better success. Schoolboys remember
with gratitude that he forbade teachers to “spank their pupils
overmuch and without judgment, as was their wont.”
At the Diet of Vadstena the people had offered Gustav the crown,
but he put it from him. Scarce eight months had passed since he hid
under the bridge, hunted and starving. When Stockholm had fallen
after a siege of two years and all Sweden was free, the people met
(1523) and made him King, whether or no. He still objected, but
gave in at last and was crowned.
Popular favor is fickle. Hard times came that were not made easier
by Gustav’s determination to fill the royal coffers, and the very
Dalecarlians who had put him in the high seat rose against him and
served notice that if things did not mend they would have none of
him. Gustav made sure that they had no backing elsewhere, then went
up and persuaded them to be good by cutting off the heads of their
leaders, who both happened to be priests: one was even a bishop.
He had been taught in a school that always found an axe ready to
hand. Let those who lament the savagery of modern warfare consider
what happened then to a Danish fleet that tried to bring relief
to hard-pressed Stockholm. It was beaten in a fight in which six
hundred men were taken prisoners. They were all, say the accounts,
“tied hand and foot and flung overboard amid the beating of drums
and blowing of trumpets to drown their cries.” The clergy fared
little better than the laymen in that age, but then it was their
own fault. In plotting and scrapping they were abreast of the worst
and took the consequences.
They were the days of the Reformation, and Gustav would not have
been human had he failed to see a way out of his money troubles by
confiscating church property. He had pawned the country’s trade to
the merchants of Lübeck and there was nothing else left. Naturally
the church opposed him. The King took the bull by the horns. He
called a meeting and told the people that he was sick of it all. He
had encouraged the Reformation for their good; now, if they did not
stand by him, they might choose between him and his enemies. The
oldest priest arose at that and said that the church’s property was
sacred. The King asked if the rest of them thought the same way.
Only one voice was raised, and to say yes.
“Then,” said Gustav, “I don’t want to be your King any more. If it
does not rain, you blame me; if the sun does not shine, you do the
same. It is always so. All of you want to be masters. After all my
trouble and labor for you, you would as lief see my head split with
an axe, though none of you dare lay hold of the handle. Give me
back what I have spent in your service and I will go away and never
come back.” And go he did, to his castle, with half a dozen of his
nearest friends.
They sat and looked at one another when he was gone, and then
priests and nobles fell to arguing among themselves, all talking
at once. The plain people, the burghers and the peasants, listened
awhile, but when they got no farther, let them know that if
they couldn’t settle it, they, the people, would, and in a way
that would give them little joy. The upshot of it all was that
messengers were sent to bring the King back. He made them go three
times, and when he came at last, it was as absolute master. In the
ordering of the kingdom that was made there, he became the head of
the church as well as of the state. Gustav’s pen was as sharp as
his tongue. When Hans Brask, the oldest prelate in the land, who
had stood stoutly by the old régime, left the country and refused
to come back, he wrote to him: “As long as you might milk and shear
your sheep, you staid by them. When God spake and said you were to
feed them, not to shear and slaughter them, you ran away. Every
honest man can judge if you have done well.” Hard words to a good
old man; but there were plenty of others who deserved them. That
was the end of the hierarchy in Sweden.
But not of the unruly peasants who had tasted the joys of
king-making. How kindly they took to the Reformation at the outset
one can judge from the demand of some of them that the King should
“burn or otherwise kill such as ate meat on Friday.” They rose
again and again, and would listen only to the argument of force.
When the Lübeckers pressed hard for the payment of old debts,
and the treasury was empty as usual, King Gustav hit upon a new
kind of revenue. He demanded of every church in the land that it
give up its biggest bell to the funds. It was the last straw.
The Dalecarlians rose against what they deemed sacrilege, under
the leadership of Måns Nilsson and Anders Persson of Rankhyttan,
the very men who had befriended Gustav in his need, and the
insurrection spread. The “War of the Bells” was settled with the
sword, and the peasants gave in. But Gustav came of a stock that
“never forgot.” Two years later, when his hands were free at home,
he suddenly invaded Dalecarlia with a powerful army, determined to
“pull those weeds up by the roots.” He summoned the peasants to
Thing, made a ring around them of armed men, and gave them their
choice:
“Submit now for good and all,” he said, “or I will spoil the land
so that cock shall not crow nor hound bark in it again forever!”
The frightened peasants fell on their knees and begged for mercy.
He made them give up their leaders, including his former friends,
and they were all put to the sword. After that there was peace in
Dalecarlia.
Gustav Vasa’s long reign ended in 1560. Like his enemy, Christian
II, he was a strange mixture of contradictions. He was brave in
battle, wise in council, pious, if not a saint, clean, and merciful
when mercy fitted into his plans. His enemies called him a greedy,
suspicious despot. Greedy he was. More than eleven thousand farms
were confiscated by the crown during his reign, and he left four
thousand farms and a great fortune to his children as his personal
share. But historians have called him “the great housekeeper” who
found waste and loss and left an ordered household. He gave all
for Sweden, and all he had was at her call. It was share and share
alike, in his view. Despotic he could be, too. _L’état c’est moi_
might have been said by him. But he did not exploit the state;
he built it. He fashioned Sweden out of a bunch of quarrelsome
provincial governments into a hereditary monarchy, as the best
way—indeed, the only way then—of giving it strength and stability.
He was suspicious because everybody had betrayed him, or had tried
to. With all that, his steady purpose was to raise and enlighten
his people and make them keep the peace, if he had to adopt the
Irishman’s plan of keeping it himself with an axe. He was the
father of a line of great warriors. Gustav Adolf was his grandson.
[Illustration: GUSTAV VASA BIDDING HIS PEOPLE GOOD-BY]
Bent under the burden of years, he bade his people good-by at the
Diet of Stockholm, a few weeks before his death. His old eloquence
rings unimpaired in the farewell. He thanked God, who had chosen
him as His tool to set Sweden free from thralldom. Almost might
he liken himself to King David, whom God from a shepherd had made
the leader of his people. No such hope was in his heart when,
forty years before, he hid in the woods from a bloodthirsty enemy.
For what he had done wrong as king, he asked the people’s pardon;
it was not done on purpose. He knew well that many thought him a
hard ruler, but the time would come when they would gladly dig him
up from his grave if they only could. And with that he went out,
bowing deeply to the Diet, the tears streaming down his face.
They saw him no more; but on his tomb the Swedish people,
forgetting all else, have written that he was the “Father of his
Country.”
Footnotes:
[2] The older spelling of this name is followed here in preference
to the more modern Gustaf. Gustav Vasa himself wrote his name so.
ABSALON, WARRIOR BISHOP OF THE NORTH
A welcome change awaits the traveller who, having shaken off the
chill of the German Dreadnaughts at Kiel, crosses the Baltic to
the Danish Islands—a change from the dread portents of war to
smiling peace. There can be nothing more pastoral and restful than
the Seeland landscape as framed in a car window; yet he misses
its chief charm whom its folk-lore escapes—the countless legends
that cling to field and forest from days long gone. The guide-book
gives scarce a hint of them; but turn from its page and they meet
you at every step, hail you from every homestead, every copse. Nor
is their story always of peace. Here was Knud Lavard slain by his
envious kinsman for the crown, and a miraculous spring gushed forth
where he fell. Of the church they built for the pilgrims who sought
it from afar they will show you the site, but the spring dried
up with the simple old faith. Yonder, under the roof of Ringsted
church, lie Denmark’s greatest dead. Not half an hour from the
ferry landing at Korsör, your train labors past a hill crowned by a
venerable cross, Holy Anders’ Hill. So saintly was that masterful
priest that he was wont, when he prayed, to hang his hat and gloves
on a sunbeam as on a hook. And woe to the land if his cross be
disturbed, for then, the peasant will tell you, the cattle die of
plague and the crops fail. A little further on, just beyond Sorö,
a village church rears twin towers above the wheat-field where the
skylark soars and sings to its nesting mate. For seven hundred
years the story of that church and its builder has been told at
Danish firesides, and the time will never come when it is forgotten.
Fjenneslev is the name of the village, and Asker Ryg[3] ruled
there in the Twelfth Century, when the king summoned his men to
the war. Bidding good-by to his wife, Sir Asker tells her to build
a new church while he is away, for the old, “with wall of clay,
straw-thatched and grim,” is in ruins. And let it be worthy of the
Master:
“The roof let make of tiling red;
Of stone thou build the wall;”
and then he whispers in her ear:
“Hear thou, my Lady Inge,
Of women thou art the flower;
An’ thou bearest to me a son so bold,
Set on the church a tower.”
Should the child be a girl, he tells her to build only a spire, for
“modesty beseemeth a woman.” Well for Sir Asker that he did not
live in our day of clamoring suffragists. He would have “views”
without doubt. But no such things troubled him while he battled
in foreign lands all summer. It was autumn when he returned and
saw from afar the swell behind which lay Fjenneslev and home.
Impatiently he spurred his horse to the brow of the hill, for no
news had come of Lady Inge those many months. The bard tells us
what he saw there:
“It was the good Sir Asker Ryg;
Right merrily laughed he,
When from that green and swelling hill
Two towers did he see.”
Two sons lay at the Lady Inge’s breast, and all was well.
“The first one of the brothers two
They called him Esbern Snare.[4]
He grew as strong as a savage bear
And fleeter than any hare.
“The second him called they Absalon,
A bishop he at home.
He used his trusty Danish sword
As the Pope his staff at Rome.”
Absalon and Esbern were not twins, as tradition has it. They were
better than that. They became the great heroes of their day, and
the years have not dimmed their renown. And Absalon reached far
beyond the boundaries of little Denmark to every people that speaks
the English tongue. For it was he who, as archbishop of the North,
“strictly and earnestly” charged his friend and clerk Saxo to
gather the Danish chronicles while yet it was time, because, says
Saxo, in the preface of his monumental work, “he could no longer
abide that his fatherland, which he always honored and magnified
with especial zeal, should be without a record of the great deeds
of the fathers.” And from the record Saxo wrote we have our Hamlet.
It was when they had grown great and famous that Sir Asker and his
wife built the church in thanksgiving for their boys, not when they
were born, and the way that came to light was good and wholesome.
They were about to rebuild the church, on which there had been
no towers at all since they crumbled in the middle ages, and had
decided to put on only one; for the sour critics, who are never
content in writing a people’s history unless they can divest it of
all its flesh and make it sit in its bones, as it were, sneered
at the tradition and called it an old woman’s tale. But they did
not shout quite so loud when, in peeling off the whitewash of the
Reformation, the mason’s hammer brought forth mural paintings that
grew and grew until there stood the whole story to read on the
wall, with Sir Asker himself and the Lady Inge, clad in garments
of the Twelfth Century, bringing to the Virgin the church with the
twin towers. So the folk-lore was not so far out after all, and the
church was rebuilt with two towers, as it should be.
Under its eaves, whether of straw or tile, the two boys played
their childish games, and before long there came to join in them
another of their own age, young Valdemar, whose father, the very
Knud Lavard mentioned above, had been foully murdered a while
before. It was a time, says Saxo, in which “he must be of stout
heart and strong head who dared aspire to Denmark’s crown. For
in less than a hundred years more than sixteen of her kings and
their kin were either slain without cause by their own subjects,
or otherwise met a sudden death.” Sir Asker and the murdered
Knud had been foster brothers, and throughout the bloody years
that followed, he and his brothers, sons of the powerful Skjalm
Hvide,[5] espoused his cause in good and evil days, while they saw
to it that no harm came to the young prince under their roof.