The ascendancy of France, 1598-1715

by Henry Offley Wakeman

While the great powers of Europe were battling for the Rhine and the Pyrenees, the smaller nations of the north were struggling for the command of the Baltic. It was a contest in which Denmark played the part of the Empire, the traditional but feeble possessor of rightful authority, while Sweden, like another France, strong in her new-found national unity, was impelled by her geographical position to claim a freedom which could not fail to end in leadership. When Gustavus Adolphus fell on the field of Lützen in 1632 he had succeeded in winning for his country supremacy on the Baltic and a foothold on German soil; but his life had been too short, his career too meteor-like for him to have had time to consolidate by his statesmanship what he had won by his genius. Character and policy of Oxenstjerna. That task was left to his friend and confidant, Axel Oxenstjerna, during the minority of the young Christina who was only four and a half years old when her father died. The man was well fitted to the task. Cautious, deliberate, and cold-blooded, complete master of his emotions, he was a man of fixed ideas and tenacious policy. Nothing moved him, nothing changed him. Twice only in a long and anxious life did he know what it was to be sleepless, once after the battle of Lützen, once after the battle of Nördlingen. Patriotism in him took bodily form in the House of Vasa and Gustavus Adolphus. During the life of the king his whole energies were devoted to carrying out his master’s wishes, after his death to the completion of his master’s policy. In the Thirty Years’ War, as we have seen, he was the most strenuous and uncompromising enemy of peace. The miseries of Germany, the dangerous ambition of France, even the deterioration of his own country, were as nothing to him compared with the duty of obtaining for Sweden all that Gustavus might fairly have claimed. It required the personal intervention of the young queen herself to prevent her minister from ruining the country in order to preserve its dignity. At home his chief work was to place on a permanent basis the alliance of the crown with the official nobility, which it had been the special object of Gustavus Adolphus to create as a counterpoise to the influence of the hereditary nobility and the clergy.

The Form of Government, 1634.

In the Form of Government adopted in 1634, Sweden received from Oxenstjerna’s hands the first of modern written constitutions. By it Lutheranism in the form of the Confession of Augsburg was imposed upon the sovereign and all his subjects. Government was vested in the king, advised by a senate of twenty members chosen by him from the nobility, to whom were added five ex officio members being the great officers of state, i.e. the steward, the marshal, the treasurer, the chancellor and the admiral. The whole direction of affairs during the illness or minority of the king was placed in their hands, subject only to the provision that all laws passed, privileges conferred, and alienation of crown lands effected during the incapacity of the king must receive his subsequent ratification. Other provisions of a less important nature regulated the administration of justice, but in all of them the same care for securing the supremacy of the noble and official class is everywhere observable. In fact, the result of the Form of Government was to place the chief direction of affairs in Sweden for nearly fifty years in the hands of a narrow aristocratic clique of official families. During the minority of Christina, no less than three out of the five great officers of state were members of the Oxenstjerna family alone. The government a narrow oligarchy. The policy of the regency was conceived in the interests of the nobility. They profited by the continuance of the war in Germany, for to them fell the high commands in the army, and the opportunities of amassing wealth by plunder and confiscation. They profited equally by the necessities of the Crown at home, for they became the possessors either by purchase or grant of large tracts of crown lands made over to them by the government, partly to secure their loyalty and partly to relieve its embarrassments. But what was meat to the nobles was poison to the peasantry. The people soon found that the court noble or the successful general was a far harder master to serve than ever the Crown had been. The long-continued war raised the taxes, checked the growth of manufactures, and drained the country of its best peasant blood, only to return to it a body of brigand soldiers ruined in morals and incapable of honest industry. Had it lasted but a few years longer, it is by no means improbable that Oxenstjerna would have found that he had purchased a foreign empire at the cost of a domestic revolution. The quick intelligence of Christina, brought up as she was in Sweden, while the Chancellor was forced to spend a large part of his time in Germany, appreciated the danger; and this, quite as much as her natural humanity, prompted her to put an end to a war, which had ceased to have a serious political object, and was being waged in the interests of a class and in honour of a memory.

In the war with Denmark which broke out in 1643 the narrow but unflinching patriotism of Oxenstjerna showed itself to better advantage. War with Denmark, 1643. Free passage through the Sound and the Belts for Swedish ships was as much a commercial necessity for the development of Swedish trade, as free passage through the passes of Savoy was a military necessity for the aggrandisement of France. But Denmark seated astride of the islands, with one foot on Halland and the other on Jutland, by merely raising the dues payable for the passage of ships, could crush the nascent trade at its birth. In doing so it had to reckon not merely with Sweden but with the more important maritime countries of Holland and England who carried on with Sweden, through the Sound, a prosperous and growing trade in skins, fur and copper, and were therefore keenly interested in the question of the Sound tolls. But in 1639, seeing England involved in domestic trouble, and Holland fully occupied in the ceaseless struggle with Spain, Christian IV. thought the opportunity had come for vigorous action. He raised the tolls on the Sound, attempted to take the lead in German affairs by putting himself forward as mediator in the negotiations for peace, and in July 1640 directly insulted the government of Sweden by openly assisting the queen-mother, Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg to escape from the dignified seclusion in which she was kept. For the moment Oxenstjerna had to temporise, for the affairs of Germany absorbed his whole energies, but two years later the opportunity came. Torstenson was suddenly directed upon Holstein without any declaration of war, and in conjunction with Horn quickly overran the whole of the mainland. Christian taken by surprise had to betake himself to his islands and his ships. There he fought like a hero, holding his own manfully for two summers against the combined efforts of Swedish fleets and Dutch sailors. The treaty of Brömsebro, 1645. But the odds were too many for him, and after a severe defeat in October 1644 he found himself obliged to sue for peace. The next year, in August 1645, the treaty of Brömsebro was negotiated through the mediation of France between Christian and Oxenstjerna. Acquisition of Halland and freedom from the Sound dues. By it Sweden was entirely relieved from the payments of tolls on the Sound and the Belts, and acquired the province of Halland on terms which practically involved its annexation. However questionable on the score of public faith its beginning may have been, there is no doubt that this was one of the most important and useful wars waged by Sweden in the seventeenth century. At very little expense to herself, she completed the work of national consolidation by making Denmark retire across the natural frontier of the sea, and secured for the future the free and unhampered development of her commerce. Both of them were acquisitions essential for her national well-being, and when once gained were gained for all time. The more showy rewards of the peace of Westphalia on the contrary, though they mark the zenith of the political glory of Oxenstjerna, were in no way the best gifts which Sweden received at his hands. They contained in themselves the fruit of future contests. Like the battles of Creci and Poitiers and the peace of Bretigni, the battles of Breitenfeld and Wittstock and the peace of Westphalia covered the conqueror with military glory at the cost of a hundred years of war.

Christina of Sweden.

In this long drama of dull warfare, the reign of Christina is a short but picturesque interlude. Alone among Swedes and almost alone among sovereigns, she loved to live a life of culture among men of culture. She was not a student, but a master of classical literature, not the patron of men of letters, but herself a member of the sacred band. It is therefore easy to exaggerate the importance of her reign as an epoch in the civilisation of her country. The learning and the culture which gathered round Christina at Stockholm fixed no roots in the country, answered to no demand even in the university. It was a pure exotic, called into existence by the strange accident that Sweden had a cultured queen. It died on her abdication. It was personal and artificial not national and spontaneous, as unlike the great outburst of English literature under Elizabeth with which it has sometimes been compared, as the bouquet of the theatre to the flowers of the Alps. The men of letters themselves formed, it is to be feared, an unwelcome and unpopular element in the half barbaric court. To the rough nobles they were but a côterie of the queen’s friends, a clique with whom she liked to live, a sort of superior race of pet animals which Sweden had to feed and maintain in order to please the queen. But the very fact that some of the most intellectual minds of the day were content to endure the cold and discomforts of Swedish simplicity, and the hardly concealed dislike of a barbarous and homely people, rather than lose the distinction of being numbered among the friends of Christina, is no mean tribute to her character and her mind. To be with her, to be received into her friendship, to listen to her conversation, to take part in her studies, this was the attraction which made Stockholm for the moment the Athens of the north.

Character of Christina.

Christina is one of those few sovereigns who have made history by sheer force of personal character. In the whole range of the seventeenth century, there is no crowned head who can pretend to equality with her in the rare gifts of originality and distinction. A sworn foe to conventionality in all forms, with a mind uncompromisingly logical, she went straight to the root of a matter, to the horror of diplomatists and courtiers. The salient point of her character is her straightforwardness. There was nothing artificial about her and singularly little which was not original. She formed her own conceptions of policy, of religion, of culture, of manners. She adhered to them at all costs. She carried them out unhesitatingly. When one of them came into collision with another, instantly she surrendered the less to the greater. She abdicated the crown of Sweden because she was convinced that she ought to become a Roman Catholic. She procured the recognition of Charles Gustavus as her successor because she was determined not to marry. At the age of eighteen she forced the all-powerful Chancellor into making a peace which he loathed. Ten years later, after her abdication, she murdered her steward Monaleschi through a wilfully mistaken view of her sovereign rights. Throughout her life she was the same,—clear-minded, self-willed, of keen decision and petulant temper, warmhearted and true to those she loved, malicious to those she disliked, a hater of humbug, a despiser of conventionality, cynical in speech, generous in action, prodigal with money, avaricious of fame, hating and hated by women, always attractive to men. In truth Christina was one of nature’s mistakes. She was intended for a man. Masculine in intellect, masculine in will, masculine in bodily endurance, masculine in the roughness of her sensibilities, she showed her sex mainly in her dislike of women. She knew herself to be a man, and resented bitterly the freak of nature which had clothed her with a woman’s form. She dressed like a man, rode like a man, at times swore like a man, and confessed that one of her greatest desires was to see a battle. No noble at the Swedish court could tire her when hunting, or could surpass her presence of mind in the hour of danger. She knew not what fear was, she was never seen in tears. Yet there was something feminine in her love of intrigue, her passion for notoriety, her want of shame. At the French court she busied herself in making mischief between the young king and his mother by encouraging his infatuation for Marie Mancini. She delighted in shocking the etiquette of the royal circle by the freedom of her conversation and the unconventionality of her attitudes, and she went out of her way to outrage all sense of propriety by choosing the famous courtesan Ninon de L’Enclos as the only Frenchwoman to whom she would be decently civil. When a queen demeans herself thus, she must expect to make enemies, and Christina had only herself to thank if she was afterwards denied permission to visit the French court at Paris, and found among French women her most persistent detractors.

Abdications among sovereigns are so rare that the attention of historians has been naturally attracted by the picturesqueness of that of Christina to the detriment of her real title to fame. Her political ability. In the ten years of her rule over Sweden she conducted a great war to a glorious end, she established her authority by sheer ascendency of character over a narrow and jealous oligarchy, she settled a most difficult constitutional question, that of the devolution of the Crown, in the best way for the nation, by her own firmness of will. She made herself beloved by her people, and easily suppressed the conspiracy of Messenius in spite of its wide ramifications among the democracy. She made Stockholm for the time the most learned and cultured court of Europe. Above all when her own religious convictions forced her into antagonism with the constitution of her country, she never hesitated to prefer the interests of her country to her own dignity. She recognised from the first that in the seventeenth century it was impossible for Sweden to permit her sovereign to be of any religion except that of Luther, and when she had made up her mind to become a Roman Catholic she accepted the inevitable and abdicated her throne. There are few sovereigns who can claim to have done more for their country by activity or by renunciation than Christina. Her abdication was right and unavoidable. The mistake she made lay in not carrying it far enough. She ought to have retired into private life, but this was too great a self-denial for so active a mind and so vigorous a personality. She ceased to be queen of Sweden, but she determined still to be queen. She maintained royal state, she claimed royal rights, she plunged into intrigue, she interfered in politics, she tried to dominate over literature and taste. Deprived of all right to express, and shorn of all power to enforce, her wishes, she soon sank into becoming the common bore of Europe, and found herself politely relegated to her palace at Rome, where she became one of the sights of the city and the leader of a fashionable and artistic côterie.

While Christina was witching the northern world by the vigour and charm of her personality, Brandenburg under the cautious and unscrupulous Frederick William was slowly winning its way to predominance in north Germany. Frederick William of Brandenburg. No two persons could well be more different than the queen and the elector, whom at one time a marriage project of Gustavus Adolphus had attempted to unite in a most unequal yoke. Christina, worldly though she might be in her love of mischief-making and petulance of disposition, was essentially a woman of noble character and lofty aspirations. She lived amongst great thoughts and high ideals. Frederick William grovelled upon the earth, and cherished its mire and its dirt if only he could possess himself of one acre the more of it. A true Hohenzollern in his absolute identification of his country with his own crown, he never rose above the pure selfishness of patriotism. Not one spark of generosity illuminated his policy, not one grain of idealism coloured his ambition, no sentiment of moral right ever interfered with his judgment, no fear of future retribution arrested his action. Mean-minded, false, and unscrupulous, he was the first sovereign to display the principles of seventeenth century Machiavellianism, stripped of their cloak of Italian refinement, in all the hideous brutality of German coarseness. Yet the political world was not the worse for the rule of the Great Elector. Putting all questions of right and wrong on one side, the success achieved by Frederick William was in the direction of progress. Ultimate aim of his policy. The Thirty Years’ War left Germany shattered into fragments as if by the stroke of a giant’s hammer, at a time when all Europe was drawing itself together and coalescing into powerful states. Had that disintegration continued, had no one come forward to establish a power in northern Europe, which might at any rate form a nucleus round which the floating atoms of northern Germany and northern Protestantism might gather, central Europe must have fallen a prey to French ambition or Russian barbarism. Events have shown clearly enough, that neither Sweden, nor England, nor the United Provinces, could have saved Europe from such a catastrophe, had there not been in northern Germany itself a power, centralised in government and military in spirit, which could unfurl the flag of German nationality. To found such a power was the work of the Great Elector’s life, and before his death the results had made themselves visible in European politics. He it is who is the real founder of the state of Prussia. Cradled in the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, nourished by the falseness and the tyranny of Frederick William, ushered into manhood by the cynical ambition of Frederick the Great, she has yet become in her steady protest against French domination one of the chief bulwarks of European order, in her assertion of German unity the centre of the noblest of German aspirations.