price which he asked was large--a principality in hand, a province to be
conquered, supreme command of the army which he had raised. The court
suggested that if the emperor's son, the King of Hungary, were put over
Wallenstein's head, his name would be a tower of strength, but
Wallenstein answered with a blasphemous frankness which must have made
the ears of courtiers tingle. He would be emperor of the army; he would
be emperor in the matter of confiscations. The last article shows how he
won the soldier's heart. Perhaps in framing his terms, he gave something
to his wounded pride. If he did, the luxury cost him dear, for here he
trod upon the serpent that stung his life.
The career of Gustavus was at once arrested, and he took shelter against
the storm in an entrenched camp protected by three hundred cannon under
the walls of Nuremberg--Nuremberg the eldest daughter of the German
Reformation, the Florence of Germany in art, wealth and freedom, then
the beautiful home of early commerce, now its romantic tomb. The
desolation of her grass-grown streets dates from that terrible day. The
Swedish lines were scarcely completed when Wallenstein appeared with all
his power, and sweeping past, entrenched himself four miles from his
enemy in a position the key of which were the wooded hill and old castle
of the Altenberg. Those who chance to visit that spot may fancy there
Wallenstein's camp as it is in Schiller, ringing with the boisterous
revelry of its wild and motley bands. And they may fancy the sudden
silence, the awe of men who knew no other awe, as in his well-known
dress, the laced buff coat with crimson scarf, and the grey hat with
crimson plume, Wallenstein rode by. Week after week and month after
month these two heavy clouds of war hung close together, and Europe
looked for the bursting of the storm. But famine was to do Wallenstein's
work; and by famine and the pestilence, bred by the horrible state of
the camp, at last his work was done. The utmost limit of deadly inaction
for the Swedes arrived. Discipline and honour gave way, and could
scarcely be restored by the passionate eloquence of Gustavus. Oxenstiern
brought large reinforcements; and on the 24th August Wallenstein saw--
with grim pleasure he must have seen--Gustavus advancing to attack him
in his lines. By five hundred at a time--there was room for no more in
the narrow path of death--the Swedes scaled the flashing and thundering
Altenberg. They scaled it again and again through a long summer's day.
Once it was all but won. But at evening the Nurembergers saw their hero
and protector retiring, for the first time defeated, from the field. Yet
Gustavus had not lost the confidence of his soldiers. He had shared
their danger and had spared their blood. In ten hours' hard fighting he
had lost only 2,000 men. But Wallenstein might well shower upon his
wounded soldiers the only balm for the wounds of men fighting without a
country or a cause. He might well write to the emperor: "The King of
Sweden has blunted his horns a good deal. Henceforth the title of
Invincible belongs not to him, but to your Majesty." No doubt Ferdinand
thought it did.
Gustavus now broke up and marched on Bavaria, abandoning the great
Protestant city, with the memory of Magdeburg in his heart. But
Nuremberg was not to share the fate of Magdeburg. The Imperial army was
not in a condition to form the siege. It had suffered as much as that of
Gustavus. That such troops should have been held together in such
extremity proves their general's power of command. Wallenstein soon
gladdened the eyes of the Nurembergers by firing his camp, and declining
to follow the lure into Bavaria, marched on Saxony, joined another
Imperial army under Pappenheim and took Leipsic.
To save Saxony Gustavus left Bavaria half conquered. As he hurried to
the rescue, the people on his line of march knelt to kiss the hem of his
garment, the sheath of his delivering sword, and could scarcely be
prevented from adoring him as a god. His religious spirit was filled
with a presentiment that the idol in which they trusted would be soon
laid low. On the 14th of November he was leaving a strongly entrenched
camp, at Naumberg, where the Imperialists fancied, the season being so
far advanced, he intended to remain, when news reached his ear like the
sight which struck Wellington's eye as it ranged over Marmont's army on
the morning of Salamanca. [Footnote: We owe the parallel, we believe, to
an article by Lord Ellesmere, in the _Quarterly Review_.] The
impetuous Pappenheim, ever anxious for separate command, had persuaded
an Imperial council of war to detach him with a large force against
Halle. The rest of the Imperialists, under Wallenstein, were quartered
in the villages around Lutzen, close within the king's reach, and
unaware of his approach. "The Lord," cried Gustavus, "has delivered him
into my hand," and at once he swooped upon his prey.
"Break up and march with every man and gun. The enemy is advancing
hither. He is already at the pass by the hollow road." So wrote
Wallenstein to Pappenheim. The letter is still preserved, stained with
Pappenheim's life-blood. But, in that mortal race, Pappenheim stood no
chance. Halle was a long day's march off, and the troopers, whom
Pappenheim could lead gallantly, but could not control, after taking the
town had dispersed to plunder. Yet the Swede's great opportunity was
lost. Lutzen, though in sight, proved not so near as flattering guides
and eager eyes had made it. The deep-banked Rippach, its bridge all too
narrow for the impetuous columns, the roads heavy from rain, delayed the
march. A skirmish with some Imperial cavalry under Isolani wasted
minutes when minutes were years; and the short November day was at an
end when the Swede reached the plain of Lutzen.
No military advantage marks the spot where the storm overtook the Duke
of Friedland. He was caught like a traveller in a tempest off a
shelterless plain, and had nothing for it but to bide the brunt. What
could be done with ditches, two windmills, a mud wall, a small canal, he
did, moving from point to point during the long night; and before
morning all his troops, except Pappenheim's division, had come in and
were in line.
When the morning broke a heavy fog lay on the ground. Historians have
not failed to remark that there is a sympathy in things, and that the
day was loath to dawn which was to be the last day of Gustavus. But if
Nature sympathized with Gustavus, she chose a bad mode of showing her
sympathy, for while the fog prevented the Swedes from advancing, part of
Pappenheim's corps arrived. After prayers, the king and all his army
sang Luther's hymn, "Our God is a strong tower"--the Marseillaise of the
militant Reformation. Then Gustavus mounted his horse, and addressed the
different divisions, adjuring them by their victorious name, by the
memory of the Breitenfeld, by the great cause whose issue hung upon
their swords, to fight well for that cause, for their country and their
God. His heart was uplifted at Lutzen, with that Hebrew fervour which
uplifted the heart of Cromwell at Dunbar. Old wounds made it irksome to
him to wear a cuirass. "God," he said, "shall be my armour this day".
Wallenstein has been much belied if he thought of anything that morning
more religious than the order of battle, which has been preserved, drawn
up by his own hand, and in which his troops are seen still formed in
heavy masses, in contrast to the lighter formations of Gustavus. He was
carried down his lines in a litter being crippled by gout, which the
surgeons of that day had tried to cure by cutting into the flesh. But
when the action began, he placed his mangled foot in a stirrup lined
with silk, and mounted the small charger, the skin of which is still
shown in the deserted palace of his pride. We may be sure that
confidence sat undisturbed upon his brow; but in his heart he must have
felt that though he had brave men around him, the Swedes, fighting for
their cause under their king, were more than men; and that in the
balance of battle then held out, his scale had kicked the beam. There
can hardly be a harder trial for human fortitude than to command in a
great action on the weaker side. Villeneuve was a brave man, though an
unfortunate admiral, but he owned that his heart sank within him at
Trafalgar when he saw Nelson bearing down.
"God with us," was the Swedish battle cry. On the other side the words
"Jesu-Maria" passed round, as twenty-five thousand of the most godless
and lawless ruffians the world ever saw, stood to the arms which they
had imbrued in the blood not of soldiers only, but of women and children
of captured towns. Doubtless many a wild Walloon and savage Croat, many
a fierce Spaniard and cruel Italian, who had butchered and tortured at
Magdeburg, was here come to bite the dust. These men were children of
the camp and the battlefield, long familiar with every form of death,
yet, had they known what a day was now before them, they might have felt
like a recruit on the morning of his first field. Some were afterwards
broken or beheaded for misconduct before the enemy; others earned rich
rewards. Most paid, like men of honour, the price for which they were
allowed to glut every lust and revel in every kind of crime.
At nine the sky began to clear, straggling shots told that the armies
were catching sight of each other, and a red glare broke the mist, where
the Imperialists had set fire to Lutzen to cover their right. At ten
Gustavus placed himself at the head of his cavalry. War has now changed;
and the telescope is the general's sword. Yet we cannot help feeling
that the gallant king, who cast in his own life with the lives of the
peasants he had drawn from their Swedish homes, is a nobler figure than
the great Emperor who, on the same plains, two centuries afterwards,
ordered to their death the masses of youthful valour sent by a ruthless
conscription to feed the vanity of a heart of clay. The Swedes, after
the manner of war in that fierce and hardy age, fell at once with their
main force on the whole of the Imperial line. On the left, after a
murderous struggle, they gained ground and took the enemy's guns. But on
the right the Imperialists held firm, and while Gustavus was carrying
victory with him to that quarter, Wallenstein restored the day upon the
right. Again Gustavus hurried to that part of the field. Again the
Imperialists gave way, and Gustavus, uncovering his head, thanked God
for his victory. At this moment it seems the mist returned. The Swedes
were confused and lost their advantage. A horse, too well known, ran
riderless down their line, and when their cavalry next advanced, they
found the stripped and mangled body of their king. According to the most
credible witness, Gustavus who had galloped forward to see how his
advantage might be best followed up, got too near the enemy, was shot
first in the arm, then in the back, and fell from his horse. A party of
Imperial cuirassiers came up, and learning from the wounded man himself
who he was, finished the work of death. They then stripped the body for
proofs of their great enemy's fate and relics of the mighty slain. Dark
reports of treason were spread abroad, and one of these reports followed
the Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg, who was with Gustavus that day, through his
questionable life to his unhappy end. In those times a great man could
scarcely die without suspicion of foul play, and in all times men are
unwilling to believe that a life on which the destiny of a cause or a
nation hangs can be swept away by the blind, indiscriminate hand of
common death.
Gustavus dead, the first thought of his officers was retreat; and that
thought was his best eulogy. Their second thought was revenge. Yet so
great was the discouragement that one Swedish colonel refused to
advance, and Bernard of Saxe-Weimar cut him down with his own hand.
Again the struggle began, and with all the morning's fury. Wallenstein
had used his respite well. He knew that his great antagonist was dead,
and that he was now the master-spirit on the field. And with friendly
night near, and victory within his grasp, he directed in person the most
desperate combat, prodigal of the life on which, according to his
enemies, his treasonable projects hung. Yet the day was again going
against him, when the remainder of Pappenheim's corps arrived, and the
road was once more opened to victory by a charge which cost Pappenheim
his own life. At four o'clock the battle was at its last gasp. The
carnage had been fearful on both sides, and as fearful was the
exhaustion. For six hours almost every man in both armies had borne the
terrible excitement of mortal combat with pike and sword; and four times
that excitement had been strained by general charges to its highest
pitch. The Imperialists held their ground, but confused and shattered;
their constancy sustained only by that commanding presence which still
moved along their lines, unhurt, grazed and even marked by the storm of
death through which he rode. Just as the sun was setting, the Swedes
made the supreme effort which heroism alone can make. Then Wallenstein
gave the signal for retreat, welcome to the bravest, and as darkness
fell upon the field, the shattered masses of the Imperialists drew off
slowly and sullenly into the gloom. Slowly and sullenly they drew off,
leaving nothing to the victor except some guns of position; but they had
not gone far when they fell into the disorganization of defeat.
The judgment of a cause by battle is dreadful. Dreadful it must have
seemed to all who were within sight or hearing of the field of Lutzen
when that battle was over. But it is not altogether irrational and
blind. Providence does not visibly interpose in favour of the right. The
stars in their courses do not now fight for the good cause. At Lutzen
they fought against it. But the good cause is its own star. The strength
given to the spirit of the Swedes by religious enthusiasm, the strength
given to their bodies by the comparative purity of their lives, enabled
them, when the bravest and hardiest ruffians were exhausted in spirit
and body, to make that last effort which won the day.
_Te Deum_ was sung at Vienna and Madrid, and with good reason. For
Vienna and Madrid the death of Gustavus was better than any victory. For
humanity, if the interests of humanity were not those of Vienna and
Madrid, it was worse than any defeat. But for Gustavus himself, was it
good to die glorious and stainless, but before his hour? Triumph and
empire, it is said, might have corrupted the soul which up to that time
had been so pure and true. It was, perhaps, well for him that he was
saved from temptation. A deeper morality replies that what was bad for
Gustavus' cause and for his kind, could not be good for Gustavus; and
that whether he were to stand or fall in the hour of temptation, he had
better have lived his time and done his work. We, with our small
philosophy, can make allowance for the greater dangers of the higher
sphere; and shall we arrogate to ourselves a larger judgment and ampler
sympathies than we allow to God? Yet Gustavus was happy. Among soldiers
and statesmen, if there is a greater, there is hardly a purer name. He
had won not only honour but love, and the friend and comrade was as much
bewailed as the deliverer and the king. In him his Sweden appeared for
the first and last time with true glory on the scene of universal
history. In him the spirit of the famous house of Vasa rose to the first
heroic height. It was soon to mount to madness in Christina and Charles
XII.
Not till a year had passed could Sweden bring herself to consign the
remains of her Gustavus to the dust. Then came a hero's funeral, with
pomp not unmeaning, with trophies not unbecoming the obsequies of a
Christian warrior, and for mourners the sorrowing nations. In early
youth Gustavus had loved the beautiful Ebba Brahe, daughter of a Swedish
nobleman, and she had returned his love. But etiquette and policy
interposed, and Gustavus married Eleanor, a princess of Brandenburg,
also renowned for beauty. The widowed Queen of Gustavus, though she had
loved him with a fondness too great for their perfect happiness,
admitted his first love to a partnership in her grief, and sent Ebba
with her own portrait the portrait of him who was gone where, if love
still is, there is no more rivalry in love.
The death of Gustavus was the death of his great antagonist. Gustavus
gone, Wallenstein was no longer indispensable, and he was far more
formidable than ever. Lutzen had abated nothing either of his pride or
power. He went forth again from Prague to resume command in almost
imperial pomp. The army was completely in his hands. He negotiated as an
independent power, and was carrying into effect a policy of his own,
which seems to have been one of peace for the empire with amnesty and
toleration, and which certainly crossed the policy of the Jesuits and
Spain, now dominant in the Imperial councils. No doubt the great
adventurer also intended that his own grandeur should be augmented and
secured. Whether his proceedings gave his master just cause for alarm
remains a mystery. The word, however, went forth against him, and in
Austrian fashion, a friendly correspondence being kept up with him when
he had been secretly deposed and his command transferred to another.
Finding himself denounced and outlawed, he resolved to throw himself on
the Swedes. He had arrived at Eger, a frontier fortress of Bohemia. It
was a night apt for crime, dark and stormy, when Gordon, a Scotch
Calvinist, in the Imperial service (for Wallenstein's camp welcomed
adventurers of all creeds), and commandant of Eger, received the most
faithful of Wallenstein's officers, Terzka, Kinsky, Illo and Neumann, at
supper in the citadel. The social meal was over, the wine cup was going
round; misgiving, if any misgiving there was, had yielded to comradeship
and good cheer, when the door opened and death, in the shape of a party
of Irish troopers, stalked in. The conspirators sprang from the side of
their victims, and shouting, "Long live the Emperor," ranged themselves
with drawn swords against the wall, while the assassins overturned the
table and did their work. Wallenstein, as usual, was not at the banquet.
He was, indeed, in no condition for revelry. Gout had shattered his
stately form, reduced his bold handwriting to a feeble scrawl, probably
shaken his powerful mind, though it could rally itself, as at Lutzen,
for a decisive hour; and, perhaps, if his enemies could have waited, the
course of nature might have spared them the very high price which they
paid for his blood. He had just dismissed his astrologer, Seni, into
whose mouth the romance of history does not fail to put prophetic
warnings, his valet was carrying away the golden salver, on which his
night draught had been brought to him, and he was about to lie down,
when he was drawn to the window by the noise of Butler's regiment
surrounding his quarters, and by the shrieks of the Countesses Terzka
and Kinsky, who were wailing for their murdered husbands. A moment
afterwards the Irish Captain Devereux burst into the room, followed by
his fellow-assassins shouting, "Rebels, rebels!" Devereux himself, with
a halbert in his hand, rushed up to Wallenstein, and cried, "Villain,
you are to die!" True to his own majesty the great man spread out his
arms, received the weapon in his breast, and fell dead without a word.
But as thought at such moments is swift, no doubt he saw it all--saw the
dark conclave of Italians and Spaniards sitting at Vienna--knew that the
murderer before him was the hand and not the head--read at once his own
doom and the doom of his grand designs for Germany and Friedland. His
body was wrapped in a carpet, carried in Gordon's carriage to the
citadel, and there left for a day with those of his murdered friends in
the court-yard, then huddled into a hastily constructed coffin, the legs
of the corpse being broken to force it in. Different obsequies from
those of Gustavus, but perhaps equally appropriate, at least equally
characteristic of the cause which the dead man served.
Did Friedland desire to be more than Friedland, to unite some shadow of
command with the substance, to wear some crown of tinsel, as well as the
crown of power? We do not know, we know only that his ways were dark,
that his ambition was vast, and that he was thwarting the policy of the
Jesuits and Spain. Great efforts were made in vain to get up a case
against his memory; recourse was had to torture, the use of which always
proves that no good evidence is forthcoming; absurd charges were
included in the indictment, such as that of having failed to pursue and
destroy the Swedish army after Lutzen. The three thousand masses which
Ferdinand caused to be sung for Wallenstein's soul, whether they
benefited his soul or not, have benefited his fame, for they seem like
the weak self-betrayal of an uneasy conscience, vainly seeking to stifle
infamy and appease the injured shade. Assassination itself condemns all
who take part in it or are accomplices in it, and Ferdinand, who
rewarded the assassins of Wallenstein, was at least an accomplice after
the fact. Vast as Wallenstein's ambition was, even for him age and gout
must have begun to close the possibilities of life, and he cannot have
been made restless by the pangs of abortive genius, for he had played
the grandest part upon the grandest stage. He had done enough, it would
seem, to make repose welcome, and his retirement would not have been
dull. Often in his letters his mind turns from the camp and council to
his own domains, his rising palaces, his farms, his gardens, his
schools, his manufactures, the Italian civilization which the student of
Padua was trying to create in Bohemian wilds, the little empire in the
administration of which he showed that he might have been a good Emperor
on a larger scale. Against his Imperial master he is probably entitled
at least to a verdict of not proven, and to the sympathy due to vast
services requited by murder. Against accusing humanity his plea is far
weaker, or rather he has no plea but one of extenuation. If there is a
gloomy majesty about him the fascination of which we cannot help owning,
if he was the noblest spirit that served evil, still it was evil that he
served. The bandit hordes which he led were the scourges of the
defenceless people, and in making war support war he set the evil
example which was followed by Napoleon on a greater scale, and perhaps
with more guilt, because in a more moral age. If in any measure he fell
a martyr to a policy of toleration, his memory may be credited with the
sacrifice. His toleration was that of indifference, not that of a
Christian; yet the passages of his letters in which he pleads for milder
methods of conversion, and claims for widows an exemption from the
extremities of persecution, seem preserved by his better angel to shed a
ray of brightness on his lurid name. Of his importance in history there
can be no doubt. Take your stand on the battle field of Lutzen. To the
North all was rescued by Gustavus, to the South all was held till
yesterday by the darker genius of Wallenstein.