heaven, and officered by Italians, Irishmen, Czechs, Croats, Danes, Spaniards and Walloons. Gustavus’s army has often been described by German historians as an army of foreign invaders; in reality it was far more truly Teutonic than the official defenders of Germany at that period. Gustavus’s political difficulties (see Sweden: History) chained him to his camp for the remainder of the year. But the dismissal of Wallenstein and the declaration in Gustavus’s favour of Magdeburg, the greatest city in the Lower Saxon Circle, and strategically the strongest fortress of North Germany, encouraged him to advance boldly. But first, honour as well as expediency moved him to attempt to relieve Magdeburg, now closely invested by the imperialists, especially as his hands had now been considerably strengthened by a definite alliance with France (treaty of Bärwalde, 13th of January 1631). Magdeburg, therefore, became the focus of the whole campaign of 1631; but the obstructive timidity of the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony threw insuperable obstacles in his way, and, on the very day when John George I. of Saxony closed his gates against Gustavus the most populous and prosperous city in North Germany became a heap of smoking ruins (20th of May). Gustavus, still too weak to meet the foe, entrenched himself at Werben, at the confluence of the Havel and Elbe. Only on the 12th of September did the elector of Saxony, alarmed for the safety of his own states, now invaded by the emperor, place himself absolutely at the disposal of Gustavus; and, five days later, at the head of the combined Swedish-Saxon army, though the Swedes did all the fighting, Gustavus routed Tilly at the famous battle of Breitenfeld, north of Leipzig.
The question now was: In what way should Gustavus utilize his advantage? Should he invade the Austrian crown lands, and dictate peace to Ferdinand II. at the gates of Vienna? Or should he pursue Tilly westwards and crush the league at its own hearth and home? Oxenstjerna was the first alternative, but Gustavus decided in favour of the second. His decision has been greatly blamed. More than one modern historian has argued that if Gustavus had done in 1631 what Napoleon did in 1805 and 1809, there would have been a fifteen instead of a thirty years’ war. But it should be borne in mind that, in the days of Gustavus, Vienna was by no means so essential to the existence of the Habsburg monarchy as it was in the days of Napoleon; and even Gustavus could not allow so dangerous an opponent as Tilly time to recover himself. Accordingly, he set out for the Rhine, taking Marienberg and Frankfort on his way, and on the 20th of December entered Mainz, where he remained throughout the winter of 1631–1632. At the beginning of 1632, in order to bring about the general peace he so earnestly desired, he proposed to take the field with an overwhelming numerical majority. The signal for Gustavus to break up from the Rhine was the sudden advance of Tilly from behind the Danube. Gustavus pursued Tilly into Bavaria, forced the passage of the Danube at Donauwörth and the passage of the Lech, in the face of Tilly’s strongly entrenched camp at Rain, and pursued the flying foe to the fortress of Ingolstadt where Tilly died of his wounds a fortnight later. Gustavus then liberated and garrisoned the long-oppressed Protestant cities of Augsburg and Ulm, and in May occupied Munich. The same week Wallenstein chased John George from Prague and manœuvred the Saxons out of Bohemia. Then, armed as he was with plenipotentiary power, he offered the elector of Saxony peace on his own terms. Gustavus suddenly saw himself exposed to extreme peril. If Tilly had made John George such an offer as Wallenstein was now empowered to make, the elector would never have become Gustavus’s ally; would he remain Gustavus’s ally now? Hastily quitting his quarters in Upper Swabia, Gustavus hastened towards Nuremberg on his way to Saxony, but finding that Wallenstein and Maximilian of Bavaria had united their forces, he abandoned the attempt to reach Saxony, and both armies confronted each other at Nuremberg which furnished Gustavus with a point of support of the first order. He quickly converted the town into an entrenched and fortified camp. Wallenstein followed the king’s example, and entrenched himself on the western bank of the Regnitz in a camp twelve English miles in circumference. His object was to pin Gustavus fast to Nuremberg and cut off his retreat northwards. Throughout July and August the two armies faced each other immovably. On the 24th of August, after an unsuccessful attempt to storm Alte Veste, the key of Wallenstein’s position, the Swedish host retired southwards.
Towards the end of October, Wallenstein, after devastating Saxony, was preparing to go into winter quarters at Lützen, when the king surprised him as he was crossing the Rippach (1st of November) and a rearguard action favourable to the Swedes ensued. Indeed, but for nightfall, Wallenstein’s scattered forces might have been routed. During the night, however, Wallenstein re-collected his host for a decisive action, and at daybreak on the 6th of November, while an autumn mist still lay over the field, the battle began. It was obviously Gustavus’s plan to drive Wallenstein away from the Leipzig road, north of which he had posted himself, and thus, in case of success, to isolate, and subsequently, with the aid of the Saxons in the Elbe fortresses, annihilate him. The king, on the Swedish right wing, succeeded in driving the enemy from the trenches and capturing his cannon. What happened after that is mere conjecture, for a thick mist now obscured the autumn sun, and the battle became a colossal mêlée the details of which are indistinguishable. It was in the midst of that awful obscurity that Gustavus met his death—how or where is not absolutely certain; but it would seem that he lost his way in the darkness while leading the Småland horse to the assistance of his infantry, and was despatched as he lay severely wounded on the ground by a hostile horseman.
By his wife, Marie Eleonora, a sister of the elector of Brandenburg, whom he married in 1620, Gustavus Adolphus had one daughter, Christina, who succeeded him on the throne of Sweden.
See Sveriges Historia (Stockholm, 1877, 81), vol. iv.; A. Oxenstjerna, Skrifter och Brefvexling (Stockholm, 1900, &c.); G. Björlen, Gustaf Adolf (Stockholm, 1890); R. N. Bain, Scandinavia (Cambridge, 1905); C. R. L. Fletcher, Gustavus Adolphus (London, 1892); J. L. Stevens, History of Gustavus Adolphus (London, 1885); J. Mankell, Om Gustaf II. Adolfs politik (Stockholm, 1881); E. Bluemel, Gustav Adolf, König von Schweden (Eisleben, 1894); A. Rydfors, De diplomatiska förbindelserna mellan Sverige och England 1624–1630 (Upsala, 1890). (R. N. B.)
GUSTAVUS III. (1746–1792), king of Sweden, was the eldest
son of Adolphus Frederick, king of Sweden, and Louisa Ulrica of
Prussia, sister of Frederick the Great, and was born on the 24th
of January 1746. Gustavus was educated under the care of two
governors who were amongst the most eminent Swedish statesmen
of the day, Carl Gustaf Tessin and Carl Scheffer; but he
owed most perhaps to the poet and historian Olof von Dalin.
The interference of the state with his education, when he was
quite a child, was, however, doubly harmful, as his parents
taught him to despise the preceptors imposed upon him by the
diet, and the atmosphere of intrigue and duplicity in which he
grew up made him precociously experienced in the art of dissimulation.
But even his most hostile teachers were amazed by the
brilliance of his natural gifts, and, while still a boy, he possessed
that charm of manner which was to make him so fascinating and
so dangerous in later life, coupled with the strong dramatic
instinct which won for him his honourable place in Swedish
literature. On the whole, Gustavus cannot be said to have been
well educated, but he read very widely; there was scarce a
French author of his day with whose works he was not intimately
acquainted; while his enthusiasm for the new French ideas of
enlightenment was as sincere as, if more critical than, his
mother’s. On the 4th of November 1766, Gustavus married
Sophia Magdalena, daughter of Frederick V. of Denmark. The
match was an unhappy one, owing partly to incompatibility of
temper, but still more to the mischievous interference of the
jealous queen-mother.
Gustavus first intervened actively in politics in 1768, at the time of his father’s interregnum, when he compelled the dominant Cap faction to summon an extraordinary diet from which he hoped for the reform of the constitution in a monarchical direction. But the victorious Hats refused to redeem the pledges which they had given before the elections. “That we should have lost the
