As a statesman, his only drawback was that he had no interests beyond self-interest, no grasp of any pulse but the weak one of that adenoidal child, Charles I, his master, and confused power politics with that jostle for place and favor in which his own sharp elbows had served him best.
The titter at the English court was that Gustavus was the dragoon king, for fighting simply was not done. Charles I, who had the dignity of a rather stupid toy dog, had relaxed sufficiently to enjoy that mot. It was the creation of the Earl of Carlisle, whose Scots was thick, so he may have meant dragon.
This being so, it was a waste of time to be vexed by him. One might as well be vexed by mice. Unfortunately one is vexed by mice. He was whey-faced, emptyheaded, and treacherous. He had no friends. He was just the English King’s present creature. And the English did not seem disposed to pay up.
I.iii.5: When Cassius demanded assistance of the Rhodians, according to treaty, they answered they would send it, if the Senate thought proper…. All political investigation requires a cool and steady judgment, not to be biased by examples, which may rather be excused than vindicated.
“Show him in, said Gustavus, at Würzburg.
In came the carrot pudding of a creature, pompous, self-important, childish, with the small close-set eyes of a discontented baby.
Gustav Adolf, it must be admitted, stank from a day in the field. Vane wrinkled his small nose and paused. This moue was not missed by the King. But as the ruler of a proud and sovereign people, he was apt to view impertinence as no more than a slide under the microscope: it showed you the mediocrity of the tick in fuller detail, but you already knew what beastie it came from.
Ah yes, the Britons. What a pity they no longer paint themselves blue: it would make them the that much more easy to avoid at a distance. It would also lend them color, thought Gustavus. It is as though they were as ashamed of joy as of a country cousin. They will not warm up. “Angli sua suosque impensè mirantur, caeteras nationes despectui habent‚” says Barclay in his Euphormio. So one must have patience.
Vane was a navigator who sailed no general wind in the ocean of politics, but affected to lie becalmed in the briskest gales. Well, let us see if he can lie becalmed in this one, thought Gustavus, and mentally laid out his temper ready for use, like a set of surgical tools, scalpel, probe, protractor, trocar, gold wire, and clamps. It was Ambrose Paré, at the battle of Pavia, who first taught us how to tie up men’s parts. The Snow King was as close a student of field surgery as he was of everything else, and saw no difficulty.
With the best will in the world, now and again, and always unexpectedly, we are apt to run aground on a purely biochemical mutual antipathy. This reminder that, mind or no mind, we are animals makes the adrenals to run, and has its own stench to give us warning. The only thing to do is get the hell out instanter, keep mum, and avoid each other afterwards.
Gustavus stared at Vane’s retroussé nose. Who could take seriously a man with a retroussé nose? People, like hunting dogs and mongrels, are bred to different purposes. Look at the muzzle and you know all. No doubt in the winter it dripped.
The immediate trouble was the Marquis of Hamilton. Vane was Hamilton’s creature, as well as English Ambassador. Hamilton had been sent over to command an auxiliary force, but was only a youth in his early twenties, had never seen any fighting, had looted Silesia without permission and refused to obey the Great King, who was not British. The Great King had prudently given General Banér written orders to overrule Hamilton in every case.
Vane looked shocked. He was the Marquis of Hamilton. Gustavus continued bland. He seemed to recollect that he had heard this before. It did not have much to do with the restoration of Frederick of Bohemia and the Winter Queen (Elizabeth, the King of England’s sister) to the Palatinate, in return for subsidies and men.
Also, Hamilton’s English troops were not good for much. A great number of them died from eating German bread, which is heavier and more sour than English, German beer was too strong for them, and others had become delirious from an immoderate fondness for new honey. What in God’s name could the diet in England be like, if good plain coarse food killed them outright?
Oxenstierna told Vane bluntly to remember his place. There were other incidents. “He will have things so, because he says they are so, and how could they be, he does not speak from knowledge,” complained Oxenstierna. “He actually confided to me that he had been sent unto us, not to propose, but to hear. And besides, he speaks French and Latin like a man shooting warm porridge from a blunderbuss. Say what he will, he leaves you bedaubed.”
They had each placed Vane in that category of those unclean emotionally, unclean physically, unclean through and through. A pebble put on this heap was never picked up again. He was also a nagger. He did not feel the King should discipline his own troops, should these be British.
“Sire, you cannot be offended when an ambassador of Britain interferes for one of his master’s subjects.”
“If you speak one more syllable on that subject, I will order the man hanged before your eyes.”
“I hope Your Majesty would never commit such a sort of action.”
“Why so? By heaven, were your master present, I would do the same, and if the man who so affronted me were held in the arms of His Britannic Majesty, I would tear him thence, although obliged to go to England for that purpose and commence a war of an hundred years’ duration.” There was a clatter of surgical tools. “You are dismissed.”
Vane stuck his nose up. A Vasa does not dismiss a Vane. Only royalty may do that, and as the Earl of Carlisle had so aptly said, Gustav Adolf was only a dragoon (or dragon) king. Come to think of it, which was it?
“I feel that upon calm reflection, Your Majesty …”
“Dismissed,” shouted Gustavus, got into his carriage, and drove off, this meeting having detained him from a conference with his staff.
Then there was the curious matter of the King’s Pictures, should Gustavus invade Bavaria next year.
“I hope shortly you will be in a possibility to perform your promise, concerning pictures and statues at Muenchen; therefore now, in earnest, do not forget it,” wrote Charles I to Vane. The king’s self-appointed picture taker, Sir Balthasar Gerbier, had provided an itemized checklist of those paintings and statues in the Wittelsbach collections Charles I wished looted and sent on.
“What?” demanded Gustav Adolf, nonplused. In twenty years of war, the only thing he had stolen (apart from treasure, armaments, and several state libraries: Sweden suffered from a shortage of books) was a large, ugly, and ornate marble mantelpiece, and even that he had paid for.
“You must know that His Britannic Majesty is a connoisseur of the arts,” said Vane.
“Why?”
It was Vane’s turn to look nonplused. He didn’t rightly know why. Gustavus decided to help him out.
“I mean why must I know it. It seems to me that considering the circumstances, the less I know of it, the better. And I believe your late sovereign, Elizabeth, once observed that must is not a word to use to princes. I can give you the exact citation. ‘Little man, little man,’ she is reported to have said, ‘must is not a word to use to princes.’”
Vane blinked, certain he was dealing with a northern Barbarian. “I have here a list,” he said, “of those pictures and sculpture needed to stop gaps in His Majesty’s collections. He insists only upon the Correggio, the Titian, and in particular the van Dyke, which is the missing of a pair. His Majesty is a patron of van Dyke. As undoubtedly you know, van Dyke, during his residence in Genoa …”
“If I do not condone theft on the part of my soldiers, I can scarcely be expected to condone it in myself,” said Gustavus. “Pray tell me, are there no painters now living in England, to daub him up a copy if he wants one?”
And here, to Vane’s astonishment, the Snow King began to guffaw. He could not help it. The King of England’s sister had been turned out of Bohemia and the Palatinate, Charles I would not pay for
her establishment, let alone provide an army to get the Palatinate back, he shilly-shallied and would not cough up more than sixpence, and here, if you please, was his shopping list. It was absurd.
Not a picture would he get.
A few more such interviews, and England’s foothold and bulwark against France seemingly lost for good, Vane went triumphantly home, proud to denounce an ally so ill-bred as to ruffle him, and quite the poodle who has done its capriole.
“Through your wise and dexterous carriage of that great business, you have saved His Majesty’s money and his honour,” wrote a fellow Privy Councillor to him. The money was spent to buy the state collections of Mantua. Just what happened to the honor, nobody seems to recollect.
15
Gustavus, who had learned from Caesar that the best diplomacy is to go on winning battles until there is no longer anything left to discuss, marched down through the Pfaffengasse, or priests’ alley, taking Urfurt, Schweinfurt, Würzburg, Marienberg Castle, Wetheim, Hanau, and in November made his public entry into Frankfort am Main. There seemed no way to stop him. Oxenstierna had already been made legatus ab exercitu, and set over all civil affairs in the Germanies. He was now summoned to Frankfort am Main, to govern in closer collaboration with the King. On December 13, Gustavus took Mainz, celebrating that month his thirty-eighth birthday. Mainz was an Imperial arsenal and the center of the commissary, the garrison being Spaniards.
It was the coldest winter in memory, colder even than the winter before. A page was shot dead in the act of handing Gustavus dispatches. The dispatches fluttered down into the blood. The congealed breath of the page lingered above him after his fall.
De Pau, the Dutch minister, also not a man to hide himself, who was nearby, told the King he must be more careful of a life so valuable.
“No king, hitherto, has ever been killed by a cannonball,” said Gustavus. But it was a warning. There were to be others. He was a difficult man to camouflage, apart from his puppy curiosity.
Mainz yielded provisions, 80 pieces of artillery, 600 quintals of powder, and a gratuity of £8,000, with 3,000 more from the spirituality of the Jews, as the ghetto was known in those days, as a reward for not being plundered. The library was given to Oxenstierna, who shipped it to the University of Upsala, but the ship sank on the way.
The Spaniards had not expected to be driven out. Now the camp followers did not so much leave as swarm like rats down a hawser and scamper into the surrounding fields. This clogged communications, for your man of initiative cuts across the meadow, but fortunately for those of us who have to control the rest, there are few men of initiative, most click and jerk along in single file, carrying their bundles and pushing their carts. It had been hoped to detect spies and informers, but this turned out not to be possible. They merged with the rest. The informer, like the shill, owes his vocation to a forgettable face.
Well ahead of the other refugees were two people who did not look ordinary. Realizing this, they had left early. In time of great trouble, any distinction marks you down for death. So they had fled.
They were an unlikely couple, and yet had something in common, for there are leaders at all levels of society, and leaders everywhere look much the same. The man was tall, gaunt, slightly stooped, and had little hair on his head and none on his body. He was neatly dressed in a gray, fur-lined cloak. He moved surrounded by an entirely impersonal silence. The woman was a gaudier creature, tall, statuesque, immovable, solidly put together, with a handsome face. She was coarse but not common. She was thought to be his daughter. Needing a daughter, he had found her along the road somewhere, scrubbed her clean, and told her to take care of him. Needing someone to take care of, she had obeyed him. He had thought she would. The Magician is a very wise man. With a grunt, he allowed her to sew buttons on.
It cannot be said that the Magician felt himself to possess what others would call occult powers. His powers were of a different order. Nor could he foresee the future motionless in a bowl of water. But in his lifetime he had played many games, and had learned from them that with every successive move we make, the more inevitable becomes the next move. Original Sin is a toy for children, a handicap in the race with God. He did not believe in it for a moment. But of the inevitabilities of consequential sin his knowledge was extensive, and he did not intend to be the victim of them. The only way to avoid that is to know the strategy of the opponent side. And man’s opponent is man. Therefore, Magician, know thyself. He was accomplished at these things.
Two-thirds of the way down an empty stretch of road where it left and then re-entered the woods as though coming from and passing to a tunnel, weighing the time, events, the day, and men’s minds, he took the woman’s arm and said, “Up there.”
Picking up her skirts, she followed him through a still crisp avalanche of fallen snow which flashed up separate in drops under her heels, until they reached the low shelter of some black boughs above them, just as a group of cavalry emerged on the road.
“Ah,” said the Magician. “I thought so.” And without any fuss, took a sausage out of his pocket and began to break it into chunks. He had strong hands. Dividing the pieces, he next took out a short brass cylinder. This he expanded by three (the thing was an early telescope), grunted, and handed the instrument over to the woman.
“I do believe,” he began, and did not finish. It was a good sausage.
Selina, such was her somewhat unusual name, pointed the cylinder where he had trained it, and saw through the glass a white-skinned young Spaniard with thick eyebrows, a jaunty carriage, and a shock of black hair.
“Was he better than most?” asked the Magician. He had learned by now that his companion liked always young men of the same sort. What would happen when she was too old to attract such he did not distress himself to inquire. In his way, he was fond of her.
Selina closed the telescope with a decisive snap. It was once more the exact size and shape of a Torah tube.
“Men die,” she said, and walked ahead of him into the wood.
The Magician followed. In his opinion she had been with that young man long enough. He peered around him inquisitively.
“I too, I suppose,” he said, looked back at their footprints, and blinked. The little flurries they had raised in climbing had obliterated all trace of their passage. It was a steep declivity. On the edge of it was a boulder. Pushing the boulder over, he started an avalanche abrupt enough to bury the men almost at once. They would now disappear without a trace, as one way and another favorites usually did, if they lingered. It was now time for themselves to disappear without a trace. This was not difficult to accomplish, for no one ever looks for anyone in the middle of a dark wood, if only for fear of finding him there. In this thought there is much safety. And besides, he knew (she did not) where they were going.
Ahead of him Selina, in her rich, brocaded dress, looked like something sent back from the dead to fetch us. But then, thought the Magician, who is not? Nonetheless, he was struck for the moment by beauty, the one thing he had never tired of.
They vanished. The cold snap brought the smell of the pine needles up. Below and behind them, the bells of Mainz began to ring an alarm.
The Swedes liked Mainz. It was less dark than the northern Germanies, for this was the Rhineland, where the day lasts longer, and the golden fleece hangs in a blue sky. It appeared (it was what the German princelings had been afraid of) that Gustavus had come to stay. He built two bridges over the rivers, a fortress at their confluence, established a court, and sent for the Queen.
It was all done in the best Dutch taste, sumptuous, smiling, massive, and austere, a successful exhibition of supreme power, with five princelings and thirteen ambassadors or foreign ministers arrived to defeat, the one their savior, the other their ally, for whatever they could get, and 30,000 troops to make sure they did not get it. The French, in particular, were distressed to find Gustavus on the left bank of the Rhine, and wished him to remove himself.
“If they wish it,
let them come sword in hand to take it,” said Gustavus. “I know geography well enough to find my way as easily to Paris as to Vienna.”
But sometimes a minnow escaped that net which, though fine, was not fine enough to take up grunion. It was a matter of spies and counterspies.
“A man, a charlatan of some sort, going about as a magician, a fortune-teller, a clever man, we have heard of him before. He was working for us here. And he has disappeared,” said Oxenstieraa.
Gustavus heard the story and then shrugged. A war sucks odd creatures out from their burrows. It is like an earthquake at sea, it casts up spindrift and dislodges hermit crabs. It was nothing to worry about.
“I do not question, I judge,” he said to his fellow judge, Axel, put his finger to one side of his nose, humorously, and forgot about it. But not quite. He never forgot anything, quite. Instead, he threw it into the distance with a practiced curve, certain that if and when needed, it would come hurtling back out of the mist into his hand.
“A magician,” he repeated. A clumsy man himself, he greatly admired sleight of hand. And to be able to make one’s self disappear is certainly the supreme skill. It would free one, for one thing, of all need of confederates, and confederates are never dependable; though true, the more you know of men, the more you can trust them, for then you know what their limitations are.
“He must be very lonely,” he said unexpectedly. “It is an art, that, to disappear.” And a vision of an empty clearing, snow, the plop from branches, spruce, a black silhouette plodding toward the far grove, and then, abruptly, nothing at all, not even a footstep, only a twang in the air, occurred to him.
People of the Book Page 13