Danish culture had blossomed exceedingly, thanks to the wisdom,
the clever management, and untiring industry of the King. He
built factories, cloth-mills, silk-mills, paper-mills, dammed the
North Sea out from the rich marshlands with great dikes, taught
the farmers profitable ways of tilling their fields; for he was a
wondrous manager for whom nothing was too little and nothing too
big. He kept minute account of his children’s socks and little
shirts, and found ways of providing money for his war-ships and
for countless building schemes he had in hand both in Denmark and
Norway. For many of them he himself drew the plans. Wherever one
goes to this day, his monogram, which heads this story, stares
at him from the splendid buildings he erected. The Bourse in
Copenhagen and the Round Tower, the beautiful palace of Rosenborg,
a sort of miniature of his beloved Frederiksborg which also he
rebuilt on a more magnificent scale—these are among his works
which every traveller in the North knows. He built more cities
and strongholds than those who went before or came after him for
centuries. Christiania and Christiansand in Norway bear his name.
He laid out a whole quarter of Copenhagen for his sailors, and
the quaint little houses still serve that purpose. Regentsen, a
dormitory for poor students at the university, was built by him.
He created seven new chairs of learning and saw to it that all
the professors got better pay. He ferreted out and dismissed in
disgrace all the grafting officials in Norway, and administered
justice with an even hand. At the same time he burned witches
without end, or let it be done for their souls’ sake. That was
the way of his time; and when he needed fireworks for his son’s
wedding (he made them himself, too), he sent around to all the old
cloisters and cathedral churches for the old parchments they had.
Heaven only knows what treasures that can never be replaced went up
in fire and smoke for that one night’s fun.
King Christian founded a score of big trading companies to
exploit the East, taking care that their ships should have their
bulwarks pierced for at least six guns, so that they might serve
as war-ships in time of need. He sent one expedition after another
to the waters of Greenland in search of the Northwest Passage.
It was on the fourth of these, in 1619, that Jens Munk with two
ships and sixty-four sailors was caught in the ice of Hudson Bay
and compelled to winter there. One after another the crew died of
hunger and scurvy. When Jens Munk himself crept out from what he
had thought his death-bed, he found only two of them all alive.
Together they burrowed in the snow, digging for roots until spring
came when they managed to make their way down to Bergen in the
smallest of the two vessels. Jens Munk had deserved a better end
than he got. He spun his yarns so persistently at court that he
got to be a tiresome bore, and at last one day the King told him
that he had no time to listen to him. Whereat the veteran took
great umbrage and, slapping his sword, let the King know that he
had served him well and was entitled to better treatment. Christian
snatched the weapon in anger and struck him with the scabbard. The
sailor never got over it. “He withered away and died,” says the
tradition. It was the old superstition; but whether that killed him
or not, the King lost a good man in Jens Munk.
He was not averse to hearing the truth, though, when boldly put.
When Ole Vind, a popular preacher, offended some of the nobles
by his plain speech and they complained to the King, he bade him
to the court and told him to preach the same sermon over. Master
Vind was game and the truths he told went straight home, for he
knew well where the shoe pinched. But King Christian promptly made
him court preacher. “He is the kind we need here,” he said. There
was never a day that the King did not devoutly read his Bible,
and he was determined that everybody should read it the same way.
The result was a kind of Puritanism that filled the churches and
compelled the employment of men to go around with long sticks to
rap the people on the head when they fell asleep. Christian the
Fourth was not the first ruler who has tried to herd men into
heaven by battalions. But his people would have gladly gone in the
fire for him. He was their friend. When on his tramps, as likely
as not he would come home sitting beside some peasant on his
load of truck, and would step off at the palace gate with a “So
long, thanks for good company!” He was everywhere, interested in
everything. In his walking-stick he carried a foot-rule, a level,
and other tools, and would stop at the bench of a workman in the
navy-yard and test his work to see how well he was doing it. “I
can lie down and sleep in any hut in the land,” was his contented
boast. And he would have been safe anywhere.
Gustav Adolf was a wise and generous foe. While he lived he refused
to listen to proposals for the partition of Denmark after King
Christian’s defeat in Germany. He knew well that she was a barrier
against the ambition of the German princes and that, once she was
out of the way, Sweden’s turn would come next. But when he had
fallen on the battle-field of Lützen, and his generals, following
in his footsteps, had achieved fame and lands and the freedom
of worship for which he gave his life, the Swedish statesmen
lost their heads and dreamed of the erection of a great northern
Protestant state by the conquest of Denmark and Norway, to balance
the power of the German empire. Without warning or declaration of
war a great army was thrown into the Danish peninsula from the
south. Another advanced from Sweden upon the eastern provinces, and
a fleet hired in Holland for Swedish money came through the North
Sea to help them over to the Danish islands. If the two armies
met, Denmark was lost. In Swedish harbors a still bigger fleet was
fitting out for the Baltic.
King Christian was well up in the sixties, worn with the tireless
activities of a long reign; but once more he proved himself greater
than adversity. When the evil tidings reached him, in the midst
of profound peace, the enemy was already within the gates. The
country lay prostrate. The name of Torstenson, the Swedish general,
spread terror wherever it was heard. In the German campaigns he had
been known as the “Swedish Lightning.” Beset on every side, never
had Denmark’s need been greater. The one man who did not lose his
head was her king. By his personal example he put heart into the
people and shamed the cowardly nobles. He borrowed money wherever
he could, sent his own silver to the mint, crowded the work in the
navy-yard by night and by day, gathered an army, and hurried with
it to the Sounds where the enemy might cross. When the first ships
were ready he sailed around the Skaw to meet the Dutch hirelings.
“I am old and stiff,” he said, “and no good any more to fight on
land. But I can manage the ships.”
And he did. He met the Dutchmen in the North Sea, in under the
Danish coast, and whipped them, almost single-handed, for his own
ship _Trefoldigheden_ was for a long while the only one that wind
and tide would let come up with them. That done, he left one of his
captains to watch lest they come out from among the islands where
their ships of shallower draught had sought refuge, and sailed for
Copenhagen. Everything that could carry sail was ready for him
by that time; also the news that the Swedish fleet of forty-six
fighting ships under Klas Fleming had sailed for the coast of
Holstein to take on board Torstenson’s army.
King Christian lost no time. He hoisted his flag on
_Trefoldigheden_ and made after them with thirty-nine ships, vowing
that he would win this fight or die. At Kolberger Heide, the water
outside the Fjord of Kiel, he caught up with them and attacked at
once. The battle that then ensued is the one of which the poet
sings and with which the name of Christian IV is forever linked.
At the outset the Danish fleet was in great peril. The Swedes
fought gallantly as was their wont, and they were three or four
against one, for most of the King’s ships came up slowly, some of
them purposely, so it seems. The King said after the battle of
certain of his captains, “They used me as a screen between them
and the enemy.” His own ship and that of his chief admiral’s bore
the brunt of the battle for a long time. _Trefoldigheden_ fired
315 shots during the engagement, and at one time had four hostile,
ships clustering about her. King Christian was on the quarter-deck
when a cannon-ball shivered the bulwark and one of his guns,
throwing a shower of splintered iron and wood over him and those
near him, killing and wounding twelve of the crew. The King himself
fell, stunned and wounded in twenty-three places. His right eye was
knocked out, two of his teeth, and his left ear hung in shreds.
The cry was raised that the King was dead and panic spread on
board. The story has it that a sailor was sent aloft to strike the
flag but purposely entangled it in the rigging so that it could not
fall; he could not bear to see the King’s ship strike its colors.
In the midst of the tumult the aged monarch rose to his feet, torn
and covered with blood. “I live yet,” he cried, “and God has left
me strength to fight on for my country. Let every man do his duty.”
Leaning on his sword, he led the fight until darkness fell and the
battle was won. Denmark was saved. The danger of an invasion was
averted. In the palace of Rosenborg the priceless treasure they
show to visitors is the linen cloth, all blood-stained, that bound
the King’s face as he fought and won his last and biggest fight
that day.
[Illustration: CHRISTIAN IV AT THE BATTLE OF KOLBERGER HEIDE]
Half blind, his body black and blue and sore from many bruises,
King Christian yet refused to sail for Copenhagen to have his
wounds attended. Three weeks he lay watching the narrow inlet
behind which the beaten enemy was hiding, to destroy his ships
when he came out. Then he gave over the command to another and
hastened to the province of Skaane on the Swedish mainland, from
which he expelled a hostile army. But when his back was turned, the
men he had set to watch fell asleep and let the Swedish admiral
steal out into the open. There he found and joined the Dutch ships
that had slipped around the Skaw during the rumpus. Together they
overwhelmed the Danish fleet, being now three to one, and crushed
it. The slothful admiral paid for it with his life, but the harm
was done. It was the last and heaviest blow. The old King sheathed
his sword and set his name to a peace that took from Denmark some
of her ancient provinces, with the bitter sigh: “God knows I had
no share in this,” and he had not. Even at the last he appealed
to the country to try the fortunes of war with him once more. The
people were willing, but the nobles wanted peace, “however God
send it,” and he had to yield. The treaty was made at Brömsebro,
where a bridge crossed the river dividing the two kingdoms. In
the middle of the river was an island and the negotiations were
carried on in a tent erected there, the French and the Dutch being
the arbitrators. The envoys of Sweden and Denmark sat on opposite
sides of the boundary post where the line cut through, each on the
soil of his own country. So bitterly did they hate one another that
they did not speak but wrote their messages, though they could have
shaken hands where they sat. Even that was too close quarters, and
they ended up by negotiating at second hand through the foreign
ambassadors, all at the same table, but each looking straight past
the other as if he were not there.
Another touch of comedy relieves the gloom of that heavy day. It
was the conquest of the Särnadal, a mountain valley in Norway
just over the Swedish frontier, by Pastor Buschovius who, Bible
in hand, at the head of two hundred ski-men invaded and captured
it one winter’s day without a blow. He came over the snow-fields
into the valley that had not seen a preacher in many a long day,
had the church bells rung to summon the people, preached to them,
married and christened them, and gave them communion. The simple
mountaineers had hardly heard of the war and had nothing against
their neighbors over the mountain. They joined Sweden then and
there at the request of the preacher, and they stayed Swedes too,
for in the final muster they were forgotten with their valley. Very
likely the treaty-makers did not know that it existed.
King Christian died four years later, in 1648, past the three score
and ten allotted to man. He was not a great leader like Gustav
Adolf, and he was very human in some of his failings. But he was a
strong man, a just king, and a father of his people who still cling
to his memory with more than filial affection.
GUSTAV ADOLF, THE SNOW-KING
The city of Prague, the capital of Bohemia, went wild with
excitement one spring morning in the year 1618. The Protestant
Estates of Germany had met there to protest against the aggressions
of the Catholic League and the bad faith of the Emperor, who
had guaranteed freedom of worship in the land and had now sent
two envoys to defy the meeting and declare it illegal. In the
old castle they delivered their message and bade the convention
disperse; and the delegates, when they had heard, seized them and
their clerk and threw them out of the window “in good old Bohemian
fashion.” They fell seventy feet and escaped almost without a
scratch, which fact was accepted by the Catholics of that strenuous
day as proof of their miraculous preservation; by the Protestants
as evidence that the devil ever takes care of his own.
It was the tiny spark that set Europe on fire. Out of it grew
the Thirty Years’ War, the most terrible that ever scourged the
civilized world. When Catholic League and Evangelical Union first
mustered their armies, Bohemia had a prosperous population of four
million souls; when the war was over there were less than eight
hundred thousand alive in that unhappy land, and the wolves that
roamed its forests were scarcely more ferocious than the human
starvelings who skulked among the smoking ruins of burned towns and
hamlets. Other states fared little better. Two centuries did not
wipe out the blight of those awful years when rapine and murder,
inspired by bigotry and hate, ran riot in the name of religion.
In the gloom and horror of it all a noble figure stands forth
alone. It were almost worth the sufferings of a Thirty Years’ War
for the world to have gained a Gustav Adolf. The “snow-king” the
Emperor’s generals named him when he first appeared on German soil
at the head of his army of Northmen, and they prophesied that he
would speedily melt, once the southern sun shone upon his host.
They little knew the man. He went from victory to victory, less
because he was the greatest general of his day than because he, and
all his army with him, believed himself charged by the Almighty
with the defence of his country and of his faith. The Emperor had
attacked both, the first by attempting to extend his dominion to
the Baltic; but Pommerania and the Baltic provinces were regarded
by the Swedish ruler as the outworks of his kingdom; and Sweden was
Protestant. Hence he drew the sword. “Our brethren in the faith are
sighing for deliverance from spiritual and bodily thraldom,” he
said to his people. “Please God, they shall not sigh long.” That
was his warrant. Axel Oxenstjerna, his friend and right hand who
lived to finish his work, said of him, “He felt himself impelled by
a mighty spirit which he was unable to resist.” As warrior, king,
and man, he was head and shoulders above his time. Gustav Adolf
saved religious liberty to the world. He paid the price with his
life, but he would have asked no better fate. A soldier of God,
he met a soldier’s death on the field of battle, in the hour of
victory.
A man of destiny he was to his people as to himself. Long years
before his birth, upon the appearance of the comet of 1577, Tycho
Brahe, the astronomer, who was deep in the occultism of his day,
had predicted that a prince would appear in Finland who would do
great things in Germany and deliver the Protestant peoples from the
oppression of the popes, and the prophecy was applied to Gustav
Adolf by his subjects all through his life. He was born on December
9, 1594, old style, as they still reckon time in Russia. Very early
he showed the kind of stuff he was made of. When he was yet almost
a baby he was told that there were snakes in the park, and showed
fight at once: “Give me a stick and I will kill them.” With the
years he grew into a handsome youth who read his books, knew his
Seneca by heart, was fond of the poets and the great orators, and
mastered eight languages, living and dead. At seventeen he buckled
on the sword and put the books away, but kept Xenophon as his
friend; for he was a military historian after his own heart. He was
then Duke of Finland.
The King, his father, was a stern but observant man who, seeing
his bent, threw him with soldiers to his heart’s content, glad to
have it so, for it was a warlike age. From his tenth year he let
him sit in council with him and early delegated to him the duty of
answering ambassadors from foreign countries. The lad was the only
one who dared oppose the king when he was in a temper, and often he
made peace and healed wounds struck in anger. The people worshipped
the fair young prince, and his father, when he felt the palsy of
old age and bodily infirmities creeping upon him and thought of
his unfinished tasks, would murmur as his eyes rested upon the
bonny youth: “_Ille faciet_—He will do it.” There is still in
existence a document in which he laid down to him his course as a
sovereign. “First of all,” he writes, “you shall fear God and honor
your father and mother. Give your brothers and sisters brotherly
affection; love your father’s faithful servants and requite them
after their due. Be gracious to your subjects; punish evil and love
the good. Believe in men, but find out first what is in them. Hold
by the law without respect of person.”
It was good advice to a prince, and the king took it to heart. On
the docket of the Supreme Court at Stockholm is a letter written
by Gustav Adolf to the judges and ordered by him to be entered
there, which tells them plainly that if any of them is found
perverting justice to suit him, the King, or any one else, he will
have him flayed alive and his hide nailed to the judgment-seat,
his ears to the pillory! Not a nice way of talking to dignified
judges, perhaps, but then the prescription was intended to suit the
practice, if there was need.
The young king earned his spurs in a war with Denmark that came
near being his last as it was his first campaign. He and his
horsemen were surprised by the Danes on a winter’s night as they
were warming themselves by a fire built of the pews in the Wittsjö
church, and they cut their way through only after a desperate fight
on the frozen lake. The ice broke under the king’s horse and he was
going down when two of his men caught him in the nick of time. He
got away with the loss of his sword, his pistols, and his gloves.
“I will remember you with a crust that shall do for your bairns
too,” he promised one of his rescuers, a stout peasant lad, and he
kept his word. Thomas Larssön’s descendants a generation ago still
tilled the farm the King gave him. When the trouble with Denmark
was over for the time being, he settled old scores with Russia and
Poland in a way that left Sweden mistress of the Baltic. In the
Polish war he was wounded twice and was repeatedly in peril of his
life. Once he was shot in the neck, and, as the bullet could not
be removed, it ever after troubled him to wear armor. His officers
pleaded with him to spare himself, but his reply was that Cæsar and
Alexander did not skulk behind the lines; a general must lead if he
expected his men to follow.
In this campaign he met the League’s troops, sent to chase him back
to his own so that Wallenstein, the leader of the imperial armies,
might be “General of the Baltic Sea,” unmolested. “Go to Poland,”
he commanded one of his lieutenants, “and drive the snow-king out;
or else tell him that I shall come and do it myself.” The proud
soldier never knew how near he came to entertaining the snow-king
as his unwilling guest then. In a fight between his rear-guard and
the imperial army Gustav Adolf was disarmed and taken prisoner by
two troopers. There was another prisoner who had kept his pistol.
He handed it to the King behind his back and with it he shot one
of his captors and brained the other. For all that they nearly got
him. He saved himself only by wriggling out of his belt and leaving
it in the hands of the enemy. Eight years he campaigned in Poland
and Prussia, learning the arts of war. Then he was ready for his
life-work. He made a truce with Poland that freed his hands for a
season, and went home to Sweden.
That spring (1629) he laid before the Swedish Estates his plan
of freeing the Protestants. To defend Sweden, he declared, was
to defend her faith, and the Estates voted supplies for the
war. To gauge fully the splendid courage of the nation it must
be remembered that the whole kingdom, including Finland, had
a population of only a million and a half at the time and was
preparing to attack the mighty Roman empire. In the first year of
the war the Swedish budget was thirteen millions of dollars, of
which nine and a half went for armaments. The whole army which
Gustav Adolf led into Germany numbered only 14,000 soldiers, but
it was made up of Swedish veterans led by men whose names were to
become famous for all time, and welded together by an unshakable
belief in their commander, a rigid discipline and a religious
enthusiasm that swayed master and men with a common impulse. Such a
combination has in all days proven irresistible.
The King’s farewell to his people—he was never to see Sweden
again—moved a nation to tears. He spoke to the nobles, the clergy
and to the people, admonishing them to stand together in the hard
years that were coming and gave them all into the keeping of God.
They stood on the beach and watched his ships sail into the sunset
until they were swallowed up in glory. Then they went back home to
take up the burden that was their share. On the Rügen shore the
King knelt with his men and thanked God for having brought them
safe across the sea, then seized a spade, and himself turned the
first sod in the making of a camp. “Who prays well, fights well,”
he said.
He was not exactly hospitably received. The old Duke of Pommerania
would have none of him, begged him to go away, and only when the
King pointed to his guns and hinted that he had keys well able to
open the gates of Stettin, his capital, did he give in and promise
help. The other German princes, with one or two exceptions, were
as cravenly short-sighted. They held meetings and denounced the
Emperor and his lawless doings, but Gustav they would not help.
The princes of Brandenburg and of Saxony, the two Protestant
Electors of the empire, were rather disposed to hinder him, if they
might, though Brandenburg was his brother-in-law. Only when the
King threatened to burn the city of Berlin over his head did he
listen. While he was yet laboring with them, recruiting his army
and keeping it in practice by driving the enemy out of Pommerania,
news reached him of the fall of Magdeburg, the strongest city in
northern Germany, that had of its own free will joined his cause.
The sacking of Magdeburg is one of the black deeds of history. In
a night the populous city was reduced to a heap of smoking ruins
under which twenty thousand men, women, and children lay buried.
Not since the fall of Jerusalem, said Pappenheim, Tilly’s famous
cavalry leader to whom looting and burning were things of every
day, had so awful a visitation befallen a town. Only the great
cathedral and a few houses near it were left standing. The history
of warfare of the Christian peoples of that day reads like a horrid
nightmare. The fighting armies left a trail of black desolation
where they passed. “They are not made up of birds that feed on
air,” sneered Tilly. Peaceful husbandmen were murdered, the young
women dragged away to worse than slavery, and helpless children
spitted upon the lances of the wild landsknechts and tossed with a
laugh into the blazing ruins of their homes. But no such foul blot
cleaves to the memory of Gustav Adolf. While he lived his men were
soldiers, not demons. In his tent the work of Hugo Grotius on the
rights of the nations in war and peace lay beside the Bible and
he knew them both by heart. When he was gone, the fame of some of
his greatest generals was smirched by as vile orgies as Tilly’s
worst days had witnessed. It is told of John Banér, one of the most
brilliant of them, that he demanded ransom of the city of Prix,
past which his way led. The city fathers permitted themselves an
untimely jest: “Prix giebt nichts—Prix gives nothing,” they said.
Banér was as brief: “Prix wird zu nichts—Prix comes to nothing,”
and his army wiped it out.