The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins
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Political power resided in the eight hundred nobles who owned half the land, kept the peasants in serfdom, elected the king, and ruled the country through the Rigsdag, or National Diet, and the Rigsraad, or Council of State. They had profited from the Reformation by absorbing most of the property formerly belonging to the Catholic Church. In return for exemption from taxation, they were expected, but they often refused, to arm and lead their peasants in war at the call of the king. The Protestant clergy, shorn of wealth, had a minor social standing and little political influence; however, they controlled education and held a censorship over literature, which consequently produced mainly theology and hymns. The general population, numbering a million, enjoyed heavy meals and heavy drinking. A barber-surgeon advised his clients: “It is very good for persons to drink themselves intoxicated once a month, for the excellent reasons that it frees their strength, furthers sound sleep, eases the passing of water, increases perspiration, and stimulates general well-being.”1
Two Danes in this period have a special claim on history: Tycho Brahe, the greatest astronomer of his generation, and Christian IV, who not only was King of Denmark for sixty years (1588–1648) but would have been a leader of men even without the advantage of royal birth. We pass by his father, Frederick II, merely noting that for him the Flemish architect Anthonis van Obberger designed (1574–85) the fortress of Kronborg Castle at Helsingör—Hamlet’s Elsinore.
When Frederick died (1588), Christian was a boy of eleven; a regency of four nobles ruled for eight years; then Christian took the reins. For the next half century he lived the abundant life with such exuberance and versatile energy that all Europe marveled. He bettered the instruction of the aforesaid barber-surgeon, for he regularly required to be helped home after an evening’s carouse. His profanity set a standard that few of his subjects surpassed. The number of his bastards created a problem in accountancy. His people laughed these popular faults away and loved him, for he danced at their weddings, joined in their labor, and risked his life repeatedly in their service. To all this he added a knowledge of Latin and science, an educated taste in the arts, and a simple religious faith that raised no sophomoric questions about credibility and no qualms about fun. In his spare time he helped to make Copenhagen (Købmannehavn, merchants’ harbor) one of Europe’s most attractive capitals. His building program doubled the circumference of the city.2 In his reign Schloss (Castle) Rosenborg took form; soon thereafter the Bourse spread its vast façade and raised its twisted steeple high. He reformed the government of Norway, developed its industries, and rebuilt its capital, which for three centuries bore his name as Christiania. (It was renamed Oslo in 1925.) In Denmark he improved administration, promoted manufactures, organized commercial companies, founded colleges and towns, and raised the condition of the peasants on the Crown estates.
Ambition toppled him, for he dreamed of reuniting all Scandinavia under one head, his own. The nobles objected that Sweden was unconquerable, and they refused their support. Chiefly with foreign mercenaries he waged against Sweden the Kalmar War (1611–13). When the Thirty Years’ War came he found himself uncomfortably allied with Sweden in defense of the Protestant cause. That peril over, he resumed the struggle with Sweden (1643), though he was now sixty-seven years old. He led his inadequate forces with romantic ardor. In the naval battle of Kolberg (1644) he fought all through the day, despite twenty wounds and a blinded eye, and won a temporary victory. In the end Sweden proved stronger, and the Peace of Brömsebro (1645) freed Sweden from paying dues for her commerce in the Sound, and ceded to her Gotland, ösel, and three provinces on the Scandinavian peninsula. When Christian IV died, after fifty years of constructive labor and destructive wars, his kingdom was smaller than at his accession, and the ascendancy of Denmark had passed away.
II. SWEDEN: 1560–1654
1. The Rival Faiths: 1560–1611
Between Gustavus Vasa, the founder of modern Sweden, and Gustavus Adolphus, the savior of Protestantism, Swedish history is clouded by the contest of religious creeds for political power. The first Vasa had freed Sweden from Denmark and had united his country under a strong hereditary monarchy, while noble oligarchies kept Denmark and Poland feudal and weak. The Swedish peasantry was free, and was represented, along with the nobles, the clergy, and the towns, in the Riksdag, or Diet; the same word bonde that in Denmark had come to mean serf was in Sweden the proud title of a freeman tilling his own soil. But the resources of the land were severely limited by climate, by inadequate population, and by Danish control of three peninsular provinces and the Sound. The nobles chafed in their new subordination to the king, and the Catholic Church, despoiled of her Swedish wealth, plotted patiently to recapture the people, her property, and the throne.
Vasa’s son Eric XIV (1560–68) was unfitted to meet these problems. He had courage and ability, but his violent temper stultified his diplomacy, and led him to murder and madness. He infuriated the nobles by killing five of their leaders, one with his own hand. He carried on against Denmark the “Northern Seven Years’ War” (1563–70), and prepared future wars by conquering Livonia. He alienated his brother John by obstructing a marriage that would have made John heir to the Polish crown; and when John nevertheless married Princess Catharine Jagellon, Eric shut him up in the fortress of Gripsholm. Catharine came to share the rigors of John’s imprisonment, and inclined his ear to the Catholic faith. In 1568 Eric’s brothers compelled him to abdicate, and after six years in confinement he was put to death by order of the Riksdag and the new King.
John III (1568–92) made peace with Denmark and his nobles, and renewed the conflict of the faiths. His wife pleaded with him, more by night than by day, to accept Catholicism. With his permission Jesuits entered Sweden in disguise, and the ablest of them. Antonio Possevino, undertook the conversion of the King. John’s conscience burned with the memory that he had consented to his brother’s death; for such a fratricide the fires of hell seemed an inevitable punishment; this, Possevino urged, could be escaped only by confession and absolution in the Church which all believed to have been founded by Christ. John yielded; he received the Sacrament according to the Roman rite, and promised to make Catholicism the religion of the state provided the Pope would allow the Swedish clergy to marry, the Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular, and the Eucharist to be administered in wine as well as bread. Possevino went to Rome; the Pope rejected the conditions; Possevino returned empty-handed. John ordered the Jesuits to receive the Sacrament in both kinds and recite the Mass in Swedish. They refused and departed. In 1584 Catholic Catharine died; a year later John married a Protestant lady, who, more by night than by day, brought him back to the Lutheran faith.
In August 1587 his Catholic son was elected to the Polish throne as Sigismund III. By the Statute of Kalmar father and son agreed that after John’s death Sigismund should reign over both Poland and Sweden; but Sigismund pledged himself to respect Sweden’s political independence and Protestant faith. When John died (1592) the Riksdag, under the lead of his brother Duke Charles, met at Uppsala (February 25, 1593) with three hundred clergymen and three hundred laymen—nobles, burgesses, miners, and peasants—and adopted the Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530 as the official creed of the Swedish Church and state. The historic synod (Uppsala-mote) declared that no religion but Lutheranism was to be tolerated in the nation, that none but orthodox Lutherans were to be appointed to ecclesiastical or political office, and that Sigismund would be crowned in Sweden only after he had accepted these principles. Meanwhile Duke Charles was recognized as regent in the absence of the King.
Sigismund, who had been educated by the Jesuits, dreamed of bringing Sweden and Russia into the Catholic fold. When he landed at Stockholm (September 1593) he found the Swedish leaders almost unanimous in demanding his solemn guarantee to obey the Uppsala declarations. For five months he sought to win a compromise; the leaders were obdurate, and Duke Charles collected an army. Finally Sigismund gave the required pledge, and a Lutheran bisho
p crowned him at Uppsala (February 1594). Soon thereafter he issued a statement protesting that his pledge had been given under duress. He appointed six lords lieutenant to protect the remaining Catholics in Sweden, and in August he returned to Poland.
Duke Charles and Archbishop Angermannus of Uppsala prepared to enforce the synod’s decrees. The Diet of Süderköping (1595) called for an end to all Catholic worship and the banishment of “all sectaries opposed to the evangelical religion.” The Archbishop ordered that whoever neglected to attend Lutheran services was to be beaten with rods, and in his visitation of the churches he personally attended such punishments.3 All surviving monasteries were closed, and all Catholic shrines were removed.
Sigismund’s advisers begged him to invade Sweden with a large army. He thought five thousand men would suffice; with these he landed in Sweden in 1598. At Stegeborg Duke Charles gave him battle and was defeated; in a second engagement, at Stängebro, Charles won; Sigismund again agreed to the Uppsala declarations and returned to Poland. In July 1599 the Swedish Diet deposed him, and Duke Charles, still as regent, became the actual ruler of the state. The Diet of 1604 passed a succession act entailing the crown upon such male or female members of the Vasa family as accepted the established Lutheran religion, and enacting that no dissenters from that religion should be allowed to dwell or hold property in Sweden. “Every prince who should deviate from the Confession of Augsburg should ipso facto lose the crown.”4 So the road was opened to the accession of Charles’s son Gustavus Adolphus, and to the abdication of his granddaughter Christina. In 1607 Charles IX was crowned King.
He reformed the disordered government, vigorously promoted education, commerce, and industry, and founded the cities of Karlstad, Filipstad, Mariestad, and Göteborg; this last settlement gave Sweden clear access to the North Sea, circumventing Danish control of the straits. Christian IV declared war (April 1611) and invaded Sweden. Charles, aged sixty-one, challenged Christian to single combat; Christian refused. At the height of the conflict (October 1611) Charles died; but before his death he laid his hand upon the head of his son, saying, “Ille faciet” (He will do it).5 He did.
2. Gustavus Adolphus: 1611–30
The most romantic figure in Swedish history was now sixteen. His mother was a German, daughter of Duke Adolphus of Holstein-Gottorp. Father and mother gave him a rigorous education in the Swedish and German languages and in Protestant doctrine. By the age of twelve he had learned Latin, Italian, and Dutch; later he picked up English, Spanish, even some Polish and Russian; to which was added as strong a dose of the classics as comported with training in sports, public affairs, and the arts of war. At the age of nine he began to attend the sessions of the Riksdag; at thirteen he received ambassadors; at fifteen he ruled a province; at sixteen he fought in battle. He was tall, handsome, courteous, generous, merciful, intelligent, brave; what more could history ask of a man? His popularity was so universal in Sweden that even the sons of nobles whom Charles IX had executed for treason came willingly to serve him.
He did not display the Vasa tendency to personal temper and violence, but it appeared in his relish for war. He inherited from his father the Kalmar War with Denmark; he waged it zealously, but he felt that it was leading him in the wrong direction, and in 1613 he gave Denmark a million thalers ($10,000,000?) in exchange for peace and the free passage of Swedish vessels through the straits and the Sound. At this stage of his career he was more interested in keeping Russia out of the Baltic. “If at any time,” he wrote to his mother, “Russia should … learn her strength, she would be able not only to attack Finland [then part of Sweden] on both sides, but also to get such a fleet on the Baltic as would endanger our Fatherland.”6 He sent his most resourceful general, Jacob de la Gardie, to conquer Ingria, and in 1615 he himself laid siege to Pskov. The Russian resistance was troublesome, but by threatening to ally himself with Poland Gustavus persuaded Czar Michael Romanov to sign a peace (1617) recognizing Swedish control of Livonia, Esthonia, and northwestern Ingria, including what is now Leningrad. For the time being Russia was blocked from the Baltic. Gustavus boasted that without Swedish permission Russia could not launch a single boat upon that sea.
Now he turned his attention to Poland, whose Sigismund III still claimed the Swedish throne. Catholicism was by this time victorious in Poland and was eager for another chance to capture Sweden; moreover, Poland, with great ports at Danzig, Memel, Libau, and Riga, was then a stronger competitor than Russia for control of the Baltic. In 1621 Gustavus led 158 ships and 19,000 men to the siege of Riga, through which a third of Polish exports passed. Its population was predominantly Protestant and might not resent a Lutheran overlord. When it capitulated, Gustavus dealt with it leniently to attach it to his cause. During a three-year truce with Poland he strengthened the spirit and discipline of his army and, like his contemporary Cromwell, made piety an instrument of martial morale. He studied the military art of Maurice of Nassau and learned how to win campaigns by swift movement and farseeing strategy. He brought in technicians from Holland to instruct his men in siege tactics and the use of artillery. In 1625 he crossed the Baltic again, captured Dorpat, confirmed Swedish control of Livonia, and completely shut out Lithuania from the Baltic Sea. A year later his armies subdued both East and West Prussia, which were fiefs of the Polish Crown; only Danzig held out. The conquered regions became provinces of Sweden, the Jesuits were expelled, Lutheranism was made official. All Protestant Europe now looked to Gustavus as a possible savior in the great war that was then devastating Germany.
In the intervals of peace, he had faced with less genius than in war the problems of internal administration. During his absence on campaigns he left the government to the nobles, and to ensure their fidelity he allowed them to monopolize office and to buy from the Crown vast estates at little cost. But he found time to stabilize finances, to reorganize the courts, the postal service, the hospitals, and poor relief. He established free schools, founded the University of Dorpat, and richly re-endowed the University of Uppsala. He prodded mining and metallurgy, and it was no small item in his successes that Sweden had materials and skill to manufacture armament. He promoted foreign commerce by granting monopolies and gave a charter to a Swedish South Sea Company. His minister Oxenstierna, known for his calm in crises, was appalled by his master’s energy. “The King,” he said, “controls and steers mines, commerce, manufactures, and customs just as a steersman steers his ship.”7 He begged Gustavus to cool down. “If we were all as cold as you,” answered the King, “we should freeze.” “If we were all as hot as your Majesty,” the minister retorted, “we should burn.”8
Now the consuming fever of the Swedish knight was to get into the Thirty Years’ War. “All wars in Europe hang together,” he said.9 He had noted with deep anxiety the victories of Wallenstein, the advance of Hapsburg armies into northern Germany, the collapse of Danish resistance, the alliance of Catholic Poland and Catholic Austria; soon the Hapsburg power would seek control of the Baltic, and the commerce, religion, and life of Sweden might be at the mercy of the Empire and the papacy. On May 20, 1629, Gustavus sent to the Swedish Diet a warning of Wallenstein’s plan to make the Baltic a Hapsburg sea. He recommended offense as the best defense, and asked the nation to support and finance his entry into the Armageddon that was about to determine the fate of theologies. Sweden was already heavily burdened by his campaigns, but the Diet and the people responded to his call. With the help of Richelieu he persuaded Poland to a six-year truce (September 1629). Nine months he spent collecting ships, provisions, troops, and allies. On May 30, 1630, he addressed the Diet in an eloquent and moving farewell, as if surmising that he would not see Sweden again. On June 26–28 his forces disembarked on an island off the Pomeranian coast, and Gustavus went forth to glory and death.
3. Queen Christina: 1632–54
Since his daughter, heiress to his throne, was a child of four, he appointed as regent one of the ablest statesmen of that genius-crowded age—Count Axel Oxensti
erna. Christina later described him: “He had studied much in his youth, and continued to do so in the midst of business. His capacity and knowledge of the world’s affairs and interests were very great; he knew the strong and weak points of every state in Europe…. He was ambitious, but faithful and incorruptible, withal a little too slow and phlegmatic.”10 He had a reputation for silence, but to say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy. For two years he ruled Sweden well while Gustavus fought on alien fields. Then, as regent for Christina, he directed the armies of Sweden in Germany as well as affairs at home, and no country in Europe had in those twelve years a better government. In 1634 he drew up a “Form of Government” specifying the composition, powers, and duties of each department in the administration; this is the earliest known example of a written constitution.
In 1644 Christina, now eighteen, assumed control. She felt herself fit to rule this vibrant nation, grown to a million and a half souls; and indeed she had all the abilities of a precocious male. “I came into the world,” she said, “all armed with hair; my voice was strong and harsh. This made the women think I was a boy, and they gave vent to their joy in exclamations which at first deceived the King.”11 Gustavus took the discovery of her sex like a gentleman, and came to love her so dearly that he seemed quite content to have her as heir to his power; but her mother, Maria Eleanora of Brandenburg, never forgave her for being a girl. Perhaps this maternal rejection shared in making Christina as much of a man as her physique would allow. She conscientiously neglected her person, scorned ornament, swore manfully, liked to wear male dress, took to masculine sports, rode astride at top speed, hunted wildly, and bagged her game at the first shot; but: “I never killed an animal without feeling pity for it.”12