The Reformation in Sweden (New York, 1883); Sveriges Historia
(Stockholm, 1877–1881); J. Weidling, Schwedische Geschichte im
Zeitalter der Reformation (Gotha, 1882). (R. N. B.)
GUSTAVUS II. ADOLPHUS (1594–1632), king of Sweden,
the eldest son of Charles IX. and of Christina, daughter of
Adolphus, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, was born at Stockholm
castle on the 9th of December 1594. From the first he was
carefully nurtured to be the future prop of Protestantism by his
austere parents. Gustavus was well grounded in the classics,
and his linguistic accomplishments were extraordinary. He may
be said to have grown up with two mother-tongues, Swedish and
German; at twelve he had mastered Latin, Italian and Dutch;
and he learnt subsequently to express himself in Spanish, Russian
and Polish. But his practical father took care that he should
grow up a prince, not a pedant. So early as his ninth year he was
introduced to public life; at thirteen he received petitions and
conversed officially with the foreign ministers; at fifteen he
administered his duchy of Vestmanland and opened the Örebro
diet with a speech from the throne; indeed from 1610 he may be
regarded as his father’s co-regent. In all martial and chivalrous
accomplishments he was already an adept; and when, a year
later, he succeeded to supreme power, his superior ability was as
uncontested as it was incontestable.
The first act of the young king was to terminate the fratricidal struggle with Denmark by the peace of Knäred (28th of January 1613). Simultaneously, another war, also an heritage from Charles IX., had been proceeding in the far distant regions round lakes Ilmen, Peipus and Ladoga, with Great Novgorod as its centre. It was not, however, like the Danish War, a national danger, but a political speculation meant to be remunerative and compensatory, and was concluded very advantageously for Sweden by the peace of Stolbova on the 27th of February 1617 (see Sweden: History). By this peace Gustavus succeeded in excluding Muscovy from the Baltic. “I hope to God,” he declared to the Stockholm diet in 1617, when he announced the conclusion of peace, “that the Russians will feel it a bit difficult to skip over that little brook.” The war with Poland which Gustavus resumed in 1621 was a much more difficult affair. It began with an attack upon Riga as the first step towards conquering Livonia. Riga was invested on the 13th of August and surrendered on the 15th of September; on the 3rd of October Mitau was occupied; but so great were the ravages of sickness during the campaign that the Swedish army had to be reinforced by no fewer than 10,000 men. A truce was thereupon concluded and hostilities were suspended till the summer of 1625, in the course of which Gustavus took Kokenhusen and invaded Lithuania. In January 1626 he attacked the Poles at Walhof and scattered the whole of their army after slaying a fifth part of it. This victory, remarkable besides as Gustavus’s first pitched battle, completed the conquest of Livonia. As, however, it became every year more difficult to support an army in the Dvina district, Gustavus now resolved to transfer the war to the Prussian provinces of Poland with a view to securing the control of the Vistula, as he had already secured the control of the Dvina. At the end of 1626, the Swedish fleet, with 14,000 men on board, anchored in front of the chain of sand-dunes which separates the Frische-Haff from the Baltic. Pillau, the only Baltic port then accessible to ships of war, was at once occupied, and Königsberg shortly afterwards was scared into an unconditional neutrality. July was passed in conquering the bishopric of Ermeland. The surrender of Elbing and Marienburg placed Gustavus in possession of the fertile and easily defensible delta of the Vistula, which he treated as a permanent conquest, making Axel Oxenstjerna its first governor-general. Communications between Danzig and the sea were cut off by the erection of the first of Gustavus’s famous entrenched camps at Dirschau. From the end of August 1626 the city was blockaded, and in the meantime Polish irregulars, under the capable Stanislaus Koniecpolski, began to harass the Swedes. But the object of the campaign, a convenient basis of operations, was won; and in October the king departed to Sweden to get reinforcements. He returned in May 1627 with 7000 men, which raised his forces to 14,000, against which Koniecpolski could only oppose 9000. But his superior strategy frustrated all the efforts of the Swedish king, who in the course of the year was twice dangerously wounded and so disabled that he could never wear armour again. Gustavus had made extensive preparations for the ensuing campaign and took the field with 32,000 men. But once again, though far outnumbered, and unsupported by his own government, the Polish grand-hetman proved more than a match for Gustavus, who, on the 10th of September, broke up his camp and returned to Prussia; the whole autumn campaign had proved a failure and cost him 5000 men. During the ensuing campaign of 1629 Gustavus had to contend against the combined forces of Koniecpolski and 10,000 of Wallenstein’s mercenaries. The Polish commander now showed the Swedes what he could do with adequate forces. At Stuhm, on the 29th of June, he defeated Gustavus, who lost most of his artillery and narrowly escaped capture. The result of the campaign was the conclusion of the six years’ truce of Altmark, which was very advantageous to Sweden.
And now Gustavus turned his attention to Germany. The motives which induced the Swedish king to intervene directly in the Thirty Years’ War are told us by himself in his correspondence with Oxenstjerna. Here he says plainly that it was the fear lest the emperor should acquire the Baltic ports and proceed to build up a sea-power dangerous to Scandinavia. For the same reason, the king rejected the chancellor’s alternative of waging a simply defensive war against the emperor by means of the fleet, with Stralsund as his base. He was convinced by the experience of Christian IV. of Denmark that the enemies’ harbours could be wrested from them only by a successful offensive war on land; and, while quite alive to the risks of such an enterprise in the face of two large armies, Tilly’s and Wallenstein’s, each of them larger than his own, he argued that the vast extent of territory and the numerous garrisons which the enemy was obliged to maintain, more than neutralized his numerical superiority. Merely to blockade all the German ports with the Swedish fleet was equally impossible. The Swedish fleet was too weak for that; it would be safer to take and fortify the pick of them. In Germany itself, if he once got the upper hand, he would not find himself without resources. It is no enthusiastic crusader, but an anxious and farseeing if somewhat speculative statesman who thus opens his mind to us. No doubt religious considerations largely influenced Gustavus. He had the deepest sympathy for his fellow-Protestants in Germany; he regarded them as God’s peculiar people, himself as their divinely appointed deliverer. But his first duty was to Sweden; and, naturally and rightly, he viewed the whole business from a predominantly Swedish point of view. Lutherans and Calvinists were to be delivered from a “soul-crushing tyranny”; but they were to be delivered by a foreign if friendly power; and that power claimed as her reward the hegemony of Protestant Europe and all the political privileges belonging to that exalted position.
On the 19th of May 1630 Gustavus solemnly took leave of the estates of the realm assembled at Stockholm. He appeared before them holding in his arms his only child and heiress, the little princess Christina, then in her fourth year, and tenderly committed her to the care of his loyal and devoted people. Then he solemnly took the estates to witness, as he stood there “in the sight of the Almighty,” that he had begun hostilities “out of no lust for war, as many will certainly devise and imagine,” but in self-defence and to deliver his fellow-Christians from oppression. On the 7th of June 1630 the Swedish fleet set sail, and two days after midsummer day, the whole army, 16,000 strong, was disembarked at Peenemünde. Gustavus’s plan was to take possession of the mouths of the Oder Haff, and, resting upon Stralsund in the west and Prussia in the east, penetrate into Germany. In those days rivers were what railways now are, the great military routes; and Gustavus’s German war was a war waged along river lines. The opening campaign was to be fought along the line of the Oder. Stettin, the capital of Pomerania, and the key of the Oder line, was occupied and converted into a first-class fortress. He then proceeded to clear Pomerania of the piebald imperial host composed of every nationality under
