Gustavus returned to carry on the war with Poland with renewed vigour. In 1621 Riga surrendered to him. The next year he concluded a truce which gave him leisure to look about him.
§ 9. His interest in the German war.
The year 1624 brought with it fresh alarm. The empire, hostile to Sweden and the religion of Sweden, was growing terribly strong. Unlike Christian of Denmark, Gustavus had sympathized with Frederick's Bohemian undertaking, although he had expected but little from an enterprise under Frederick's guidance. And now the tide of victory was running northward. An empire with a firm grasp on the shores of Mecklenburg and Pomerania would soon call in question the Swedish dominion of the Baltic. If this was to be the end, Gustavus had gained but little by his victories over Russia and Poland.
§ 10. Character of his policy.
It all sounds like mere selfishness,—Christian alarmed for his family bishoprics, and his hold upon the Elbe and the Weser; Gustavus providing against an attack upon his lordship in the Baltic. But it does not follow that with both of them, and especially with Gustavus, the defence of the persecuted Gospel was not a very real thing. Historians coolly dissect a man's thoughts as they please, and label them like specimens in a naturalist's cabinet. Such a thing, they argue, was done for mere personal aggrandizement; such a thing for national objects; such a thing from high religious motives. In real life we may be sure it was not so. As with Ferdinand and Maximilian, the love of law and orderly government was indissolubly blended with the desire to propagate the faith on which their own spiritual life was based; so it was with Gustavus. To extend the power of Sweden, to support the princes of Germany against the Emperor's encroachments, to give a firm and unassailable standing ground to German Protestantism, were all to him parts of one great work, scarcely even in thought to be separated from one another. And, after all, let it never be forgotten that the unity which he attacked was the unity of the Jesuit and the soldier. It had no national standing ground at all. The Germany of a future day, the Germany of free intelligence and ordered discipline, would have far more in common with the destroyer than with the upholder of the hollow unity of the seventeenth century.
[Section II.]—English Diplomacy.
§ 1. English proposal to Sweden and Denmark.
In August 1624 two English ambassadors, Sir Robert Anstruther and Sir James Spens, set out from London; the first to the King of Denmark, the second to the King of Sweden. The object of the embassies was identical, to urge upon the two kings the necessity of stirring themselves up to take part in a war for the recovery of the Palatinate, and for the re-establishment of the old condition of things in Germany.
§ 2. The Danish answer.