Hans Von Schweinichen.
About the end of the sixteenth century the deeds of violence of the noble landed proprietors were less barefaced and less frequent. Most of them became peaceful Landjunkers, the ablest and poorest sought shelter at the numerous courts. When Götz was young every Landjunker was a soldier, for he was a knight, and the traditions of knighthood had influence even in great wars. But it was just then that the great change was preparing which made the infantry the nucleus of the new army; from that time an experienced Landsknecht who had influence over his comrades, or a burgher master-gunner, who understood how to direct a carronade, was of more value to a general than a dozen undisciplined Junkers with their retainers. The power of the princes had for the most part, through the new art of war, mastered that of the lower nobility, and had made the descendants of the free knights of the Empire, chamberlains and attendants of the great dynasties. The new roads to fortune were flattery and cringing. The old martial spirit was lost, but the craving for excitement remained. The Germans had always been hard drinkers; now drunkenness became the most prominent vice in those provinces where the vine was not cultivated. Ruined property, prodigious debts, and insupportable lawsuits disturbed the few sober hours of the day. The sons of the country nobility attended Latin schools and the University, but the number of those who pursued a regular course of study was small, for even throughout the whole of the next century the higher offices of the state which required knowledge and skill in business, as well as the most important posts as ambassadors, were generally filled by burghers, and whilst the nobility seemed only capable of holding the higher court appointments, it was generally found necessary to send the son of a shoemaker, or of a village pastor, to a foreign court as the representative of sovereign dignity, and to make the noble courtier his subordinate travelling chamberlain. Thus the country nobility continued to vegetate--sometimes struggling against the new times, at others serving obsequiously, till, in the Thirty years' war, those of superior character were drawn into the violent struggle, and the weaker sank still lower.
Hans von Schweinichen lived during this period of transition, which was about the end of the sixteenth century; he was a Silesian nobleman of old family, groom of the bedchamber, chamberlain, and factotum of the Quixotic Duke Heinrich XI. of Liegnitz. We see the characters of both, in juxta-position in two biographies written by Schweinichen. One is the account of his own life, 'Life and Adventures of the Silesian Knight, Hans von Schweinichen, published by Büsching, three parts, 1820;' the other an extract from it, with some alterations and additions: 'The Life of Duke Heinrich XI., published in Stenzel; Script. Rer. Siles. iv.,' both, works of great value as a history of the manners of the sixteenth century.
The old royal house of Silesian Piastens produced, with a few exceptions, a set of wild, wrong-headed rulers, with great pretensions and small powers.
One of the most remarkable among them is Heinrich XI. von Liegnitz, the dissolute son of a worthless father. When the latter, Duke Friedrich III. was deposed by the Imperial commissioners in the year 1559, and put under arrest as a disturber of the community, the government of the principality devolved upon his son, then twenty years of age. After ten years of misrule he quarrelled with his brother Friedrich and his nobility, and in a fit of despotic humour caused the States of the duchy to be all imprisoned. Whilst the indignant members were appealing against him to the Emperor, he himself undertook an adventurous expedition through Germany, making the round of numerous courts and towns as a beggar, during which, the lack of money plunged him into one embarrassment after another, and led him into every kind of unworthy action. Meanwhile he was suspended, and his brother, who was not much better, was established as administrator. Heinrich complained querulously, undertook a new begging expedition to the German courts, and at last made his solicitations to the Emperor at Prague; he was still under the severe pressure of pecuniary embarrassments, but finally succeeded in obtaining the restoration of his duchy. Now followed fresh recklessness and open opposition to the Imperial commissary, a new deposition and strict imprisonment at Breslau. From this imprisonment he escaped and wandered about in foreign parts as a friendless adventurer; he offered his services to Queen Elizabeth of England in her war with Philip of Spain; and at last went to Poland to fight against Austria. He died suddenly at Cracow in 1586, probably of poison.
If in his shatterbrained character there was anything out of the common way, it was his being entirely devoid of all one is accustomed to consider as honourable and conscientious. He had not the frivolity of his courtiers who cast off all reflection, but he entirely lacked all moral feeling. Being a prince, this recklessness for a long time answered, for with a pleasing facility he slipped out of all difficulties, and with a smile or dignified surprise, made his way out of positions that would have brought burning blushes to the cheeks of most others. It was indifferent to him how he obtained money; when in distress he wrote begging letters to all the world, even to the Romish Legate, though himself a Protestant; from every court and city which he visited, and where according to the custom of those times he was entertained, he endeavoured to borrow money. Generally the host, taken by surprise, came to terms with Schweinichen, and instead of the loan, a small travelling fee was given, with which the Prince was content. He had a wife, an insignificant woman, whom he was sometimes compelled to take with him; she had also to make shift and contract debts like him, and after having forced herself on the hospitality of the rich Bohemian nobles, she sought for loans through Schweinichen, and received their courtly refusals with princely demeanour. All this would be simply contemptible if there was not something original in it, as Duke Heinrich, in spite of all, had a strong feeling of the princely dignity which he so often disgraced, and was as far as outward appearance was concerned a distinguished man. Not only with his Schweinichen, but also in the courts of foreign princes, indeed even in social intercourse with the Emperor, he was according to the ideas of those times an agreeable companion, well skilled in knightly pursuits, always good humoured, amused with every joke made by others, quick at repartee, and in serious things he appeared really eloquent. In some matters also he showed in his actions traces of a manly understanding. However unseemly his tyrannical conduct, as Duke, towards his States, however strange his open resistance to the Imperial power, and however childish his hope of becoming elective King of Poland, yet the foundation of all this was the abiding feeling that his noble origin gave him the right to aspire to the highest position. He was always engrossed with political interests and plans. Nothing ever prospered to him, for he was unstable, reckless, and not to be trusted, but his aims were always great, either a king's throne or a field-marshal's staff. It was this, and not his drunken follies, that cast him down from his throne, and at last into the grave. On one other point he was steadfast,--he was a Protestant; although he did not hesitate a moment to demand loans of his Catholic opponents in the most shameless way; yet when the Papal Legate promised him a considerable revenue, and indeed his reinstatement in his principality if he would become a Roman Catholic, he rejected this proposal with contempt. If he engaged himself as a soldier, it was by preference against the Hapsburgers. Such a personage, with his freedom from all principle, his complete recklessness, his impracticable and at the same time elastic character, and his mind filled with the highest projects, appears to us as a representative of the dark side which is developed in the Sclavonic nature.
Other princes of his race, above all his brother Friedrich, are epitomes of the faults of the German character. Mean, egotistic, narrow-minded, and suspicious, without decision or energy, Duke Friedrich was his perfect opposite.
Another contrast is to be found in his biographer and companion, the Junker Hans von Schweinichen. This comical madcap was a thorough German Silesian. When a boy, as page of the imprisoned Duke Friedrich, and as whipping-boy of the son, he had early made a thorough acquaintance with the wild proceedings of the Liegnitzer court, and been initiated into all its intrigues. His father, a landed proprietor, had fallen into debt in consequence of having once become security for Duke Heinrich. Schweinichen was co-heir to a deeply involved property, and up to an advanced age was engaged in endless quarrels with the creditors, and also with his relations, who had been surety for him, and for whom he had been surety. This was indeed, towards the end of the sixteenth century, the usual lot of landed proprietors. But besides this, he for many years joined in all the mad pranks of his princely master, which were for the most part rather of a lax nature, so he came in for no unimportant share of these frivolous proceedings. The moral cultivation of those times was undoubtedly on the whole much lower than that of ours, and he must only be judged by the standard of his own time. He was no man of the sword, and his valour was tempered by a strong degree of caution. Always in good humour, and at the same time crafty, furnished with great powers of persuasion, he contrived to glide like an eel through the most difficult situations with the open bearing of an honest man, and the most good humoured countenance in the world. Even when most dissolute he still clung to the hope of redeeming the future, and whilst living as a wild courtier, he considered himself as an honourable country nobleman, who had to preserve the good opinion of his fellows. He had always a small degree of conscientiousness in domestic matters; his was not however a burdensome or strict conscience, and demanded only occasional obedience. He valued himself not a little, and gradually began to take less pleasure in his master's vagaries. The endless changes, the quarrels with Jews and Christians, and the anxieties about the daily wine, made this life at last too irregular for him; he had always kept a diary of his own life, and seldom forgot to note down that on the previous evening he had been tipsy: at the end of each year's diary, which sometimes contained nothing but a succession of convivial parties and discreditable money transactions, he would commend his soul to God, and after that, note the price of corn in the last year. All that he had mortgaged for his lord we find marked down in his diary with a statement, as precise as superfluous, of the real worth in silver. After he had thus pretty nearly mortgaged everything, he experienced the heartfelt grief of seeing his Duke in the Imperial prison, there he parted with him, not without grief, as one parts from the friend of one's youth; but his German understanding told him that this parting was fortunate for himself. Then followed years in which he drank with his neighbours, reconciled himself with Duke Friedrich, to whom he even became chamberlain, married, leased a small property, and half as landlord, half as courtier, lived respectably like others. Afterwards, when another prince ruled the country, Schweinichen became a royal councillor, and an active member of the government; he had the gout, lost his wife and married another. He still continued to move restlessly about the country, adjusted the differences of the noblemen and peasants, occasionally got tipsy with good comrades, discharged debts, acquired landed property, increased in respectability as in age, and died highly esteemed. His escutcheon, emblazoned with eight quarterings, shone conspicuously upon the black mourning horses at his funeral, as it had done when arranged by himself for his deceased father; his effigy was cut in stone upon his tomb in the village church, and his banner hung above it, whilst the coffin of his unhappy prince was still above ground unconsecrated, walled up in a ruined chapel by zealous monks, as that of a heretic.
The following episode is taken from the biography of Schweinichen. It occurred in 1578, the time in which Duke Heinrich was suspended in his government by Imperial mandate and lived in Hainau on a fixed income under the sovereignty of his younger brother. Schweinichen was then six-and-twenty; Schärtlin had died two months before at the advanced age of eighty-two.
"Duke Heinrich found that it was no longer possible to hold a court in Hainau, and notified to his Imperial Majesty, that as Duke Friedrich would no longer give him an allowance, his Princely Grace would take it himself where he could. To this the Emperor gave no answer, but allowed things to take their course, as neither party would conform to his Imperial Majesty's commands, 'as the one prince broke jugs and the other pitchers.' Now his Princely Grace knew that the States had a great store of corn at Gröditzberg, so the Duke took counsel with me how he should capture Gröditzberg, and there keep house till he learned the Imperial determination. I could by no means approve of this affair nor give counsel thereto, for many serious reasons which I laid before his Princely Grace's consideration. For his Imperial Majesty would interpret it as a breach of the peace, and his Princely Grace would thereby make matters worse rather than better. Because I thus discussed it with the Duke, his Princely Grace was ill-content with me, and said I was good for nothing in such affairs; for he had in his own mind, determined to march out and try whether he could not take the fortress; so he commanded me to prepare twelve troopers, and to tell the Junkers that they were to ride with him, yet not to inform them where his Princely Grace was going.