Entering fully into the ambitious views of his master, the Emperor, who, in making him Duke of Mechlenburg, had violated the laws and trampled upon the rights of the Germanic confederation, this great and warlike noble resolved to bend his whole energies to destroy the political independence of Germany, exterminate the heresy of Luther, and conquer Scandinavia. We heard that, for this gigantic project, he was rapidly building and equipping a flotilla of ships and gunboats at Rostock, Weimar, and other Hanse towns, which his Spanish fleet had seized.
Lavishing by thousands florins and ducats, the spoil of ravished kingdoms, on all sides among his reckless favourites and military followers, he led an army a hundred thousand strong across the Elbe, from whence it poured through Saxony and spread along the shores of the Baltic sea. Terror, extortion, outrage, and contribution, levied by beat of drum, at the sword's point, and the cannon's mouth, amassed to Wallenstein in seven years, the vast sum of sixty thousand millions of dollars!
Extolling his generosity, his soldiers adored him, while the ruined burghers and rifled boors viewed him with horror and aversion. Thus, amid wealth and rapine, conquest and desolation, splendour, dissipation, and crime, the great army of the Empire flourished, and rolled like a cloud of flame over Germany; while provinces became deserts, and their people perished by famine, by disease, and by the sword.
CHAPTER XVI.
BOMBARDMENT OF KIEL.
On being joined by a regiment of Dutch, under Colonel Dübbelstiern, brother of the burgomaster of Glückstadt, the expedition resolved upon by the council of war was against Kiel, where Count Kœningheim, lately Tilly's aide-de-camp, commanded. Knowing well the reputed bravery of the count, and, moreover, that, notwithstanding his Germanised name, he was our own countryman, we expected to encounter unusual difficulties and dangers in the performance of our duty.
Spring had passed and summer come again; the snows had melted; the woods were putting forth their bright green leaves, and the migratory storks had returned, from the unknown regions of the south, to their former nests under the cottage eaves, or on the steep old burgh gables and the older village spires.
At daybreak on the morning of the first of May, the whole of the king's small force embarked on board his vessels; the colonels of regiments, with their staffs and colours, were all on board the Anna Catharina; with my company, I accompanied Ian Dhu. Though we were at sea, and ploughing the waves of the Baltic, as we ran round Danische-walde our men did not forget to welcome the rising sun on that auspicious morning, by baking their Beltane bannocks in the old Highland fashion, and breaking them crosswise, with as much ceremony as if they were at home in the land of hills and valleys.
The sorrow and alarm of Ernestine were increased by the greater distance which was now to be placed between her and her sister, whom, from various reports that reached us, she firmly believed to be, as Bandolo had said, in the power of Merodé at Fredricksort. The good King Christian, to whom Ernestine was presented by Ian, did all in his power to console her.
"Madame," said he, among many other remarks, "it is useless now to regret that you so unwisely permitted your sister and yourself to be wiled away from the castle of the queen, my mother, at Nyekiöbing, by the cunning tale of a rascal. It is enough that you were so—that much evil has come of it—evil that we must undo. Necessity has seldom pity for women's tears—and war, never! Yet, though my necessities are sore, and that, with scarcely three thousand men, I am wandering like a pirate among my own Danish isles, while Wallenstein and Tilly, with one hundred and thirty thousand men, have marched along the Elbe, and through all Juteland, even to the Skagen Cape, I will endeavour to free your sister from Fredricksort, though I may lose all in the attempt. Rest assured of that, lady. A week will not pass until I have done something in the matter. By force of arms perhaps I cannot reach her; but in my desperate fortune, though valour may fail, craft and guile may ultimately succeed."