§ 6. The passage of the Lech and the death of Tilly.
On the 14th the Swedes found the passage of the Lech guarded by Tilly. Every advantage appeared to be on the side of the defenders. But Gustavus knew how to sweep their positions with a terrible fire of artillery, and to cross the river in the very teeth of the enemy. In the course of the battle Tilly was struck down, wounded by a cannon shot above the knee. His friends mournfully carried him away to Ingolstadt to die. His life's work was at an end. If simplicity of character and readiness to sacrifice his own personal interests be a title to esteem, that esteem is but Tilly's due. To the higher capacity of a statesman he laid no claim. Nor has he any place amongst the masters of the art of war. He was an excellent officer, knowing no other rule than the orders of constituted authorities, no virtue higher than obedience. The order which he reverenced was an impossible one, and there was nothing left him but to die for it.
§ 7. Gustavus at Augsburg and Munich.
The conqueror pushed on. In Augsburg he found a city which had suffered much from the Commissions of Resumption which had, in the south, preceded the Edict of Restitution. The Lutheran clergy had been driven from their pulpits; the Lutheran councillors had been expelled from the town hall. In the midst of the jubilant throng Gustavus felt himself more strongly seated in the saddle. Hitherto he had asked the magistrates of the recovered cities to swear fidelity to him as long as the war lasted. At Augsburg he demanded the oath of obedience as from subjects to a sovereign. Gustavus was beginning to fancy that he could do without France.
Then came the turn of Bavaria. As Gustavus rode into Munich, Frederick, the exiled Elector Palatine, was by his side, triumphing over the flight of his old enemy. It was not the fault of Gustavus if Frederick was not again ruling at Heidelberg. Gustavus had offered him his ancestral territories on the condition that he would allow Swedish garrisons to occupy his fortresses during the war, and would give equal liberty to the Lutheran and the Calvinist forms of worship. Against this latter demand Frederick's narrow-hearted Calvinism steeled itself, and when, not many months later, he was carried off by a fever at Bacharach, he was still, through his own fault, a homeless wanderer on the face of the earth.
§ 8. Gustavus at Munich.
At Munich Gustavus demanded a high contribution. Discovering that Maximilian had buried a large number of guns in the arsenal, he had them dug up again by the Bavarian peasants, who were glad enough to earn the money with which the foreign invader paid them for their labours. When this process was over—waking up the dead, he merrily called it—he prepared to leave the city with his booty. During his stay he had kept good discipline, and took especial care to prohibit any insult to the religion of the inhabitants. If, as may well have been the case, he was looking beyond the Corpus Evangelicorum to the Empire itself, if he thought it possible that the golden crown of Ferdinand might rest next upon a Lutheran head, he was resolved that religious liberty, not narrow orthodoxy, should be the corner-stone on which that Empire should be built.
§ 9. Strong position of Gustavus.
All Germany, except the hereditary dominions of the House of Austria, was at his feet. And he knew well that, as far as those dominions were concerned, there was no strength to resist him. Ferdinand had done enough to repress the manifestation of feeling, nothing to organize it. He would have been even more helpless to resist a serious attack than he had been in 1619, and this time Bavaria was as helpless as himself. Even John George, who had fled hastily from the field of Breitenfeld, marched through Bohemia without finding the slightest resistance. His army entered Prague amidst almost universal enthusiasm.