The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07

by Unknown

The hot irons used in this barbarous punishment, the Swiss are fond of saying, went deeper than the tyrant intended, and penetrated to the hearts and aroused the sympathies of their ancestors to perform such acts of heroism that tyranny fled in fear from the land. The conduct of Arnold, however, can hardly at this period of his life warrant the eulogies bestowed upon his memory, though he subsequently figures as one of the "Men of Ruetli."

Landenburg lived in a castle near Sarnen, in Unterwalden, where his imperious temper, his exactions, his cruelties, and his debaucheries aroused a universal feeling of hatred among the peasants, that culminated in his expulsion and the destruction of his stronghold. The latter is popularly believed to have occurred on January 1, 1308. As the bailie left his castle to attend mass, some forty determined peasants, who had already bound themselves by oath to free their country at a solemn meeting on the steep promontory over the Lake of Lucerne known as the Ruetli, appeared before him carrying sheep, fowls, and other customary presents, and thus gained admission to the castle. No sooner were they past the gates than, drawing the weapons they had till then concealed beneath their clothes, they disarmed the guard and took possession of the fortress. Other conspirators were admitted, and the people at once rose in revolt. Landenburg, hearing while still at church of what had occurred, managed to effect his escape, and fled to Lucerne. Of the other bailies, Gessler and Wolfenschiess are believed to have excited even more hatred than their colleague Landenburg, and to have exceeded him in acts of savage cruelty and vicious living.

One example out of many similar ones will show the spirit in which the Swiss traditions have treated the memory of Wolfenschiess. On a certain day, finding that a peasant named Conrad, of Baumgarten, whose wife he had frequently tried in vain to seduce, was absent from home, Wolfenschiess entered Conrad's house and ordered his wife to prepare him a bath, at the same time renewing with ardor his former proposals. With the cunning of her sex, the wife feigned to be willing to accede to his wishes, and on the pretence of retiring to another room to undress sped to her husband, who quickly returned and slew Wolfenschiess while he was still in the bath. After this exploit an entrance was effected into the bailies' castle of Rotzberg by one of the conspirators, who was in the habit of paying nightly visits to a servant living in the castle, by means of a rope attached to her window, and who then admitted his companions, who were lying concealed in the moat.

But, probably in consequence of his supposed connection with the legend of William Tell, the bailie to whom the name of Gessler has been given stands out more prominently in Swiss history than any other. Gessler's residence, according to tradition, was a strongly fortified castle built in the valley of Uri, near Altorf, and this he named Zwing Uri ("Uri's Restraint"). He used every means that cruelty or avarice could suggest in his conduct as governor, and incurred additional hatred from the methods he adopted to discover the members of a secret conspiracy he believed existed against him in the district. With this object in view, Gessler caused a pole, surmounted with the ducal cap of Austria, to be set up in the market-place at Altorf, before which emblem of authority he ordered every man to uncover and do reverence as he passed. The refusal of a peasant to obey this command, his arrest, trial, and condemnation to pierce with an arrow an apple placed on his own child's head, his dexterity in performing this feat, his escape from his enemies, his murder of the tyrant Gessler, the solemn compact sworn at Ruetli, and the revolutionary events that followed form the motive of the much-celebrated legend of William Tell.

The mythical hero of this shadowy romance has long embodied in his person the virtues of the typical avenger of the wrongs of the poor and the oppressed against the tyranny of the rich and the powerful; his name has been honored and his manly deeds have been lauded in prose and verse by thousands in many lands for many centuries, exciting doubtless many a noble deed of self-denial, and spurring to the forefront many a popular act of patriotic daring. In Switzerland certainly this picturesque representative of liberty has done much to mould the political life, if not also to write many pages of the history of the people, and that in spite of the questionable morality of the received narrative of his career, and its unquestionable untruth. The emergence of the Swiss from slavery to freedom, as in the case of all other nations, was undoubtedly a gradual process, and there is now every reason for believing that the narrative relating to William Tell and the other heroes who are said to have been the prime instruments in the expulsion of the Austrian bailies from the districts of the Waldstaette are purely apocryphal, with a possible substratum of actual fact.

It is sad for an individual, and still more so for a nation, to lose the illusions of youth, if not of innocence, and to awake to the knowledge of an unbeautiful reality, bereft of all fictitious adornment. When, however, the naked truth can be discovered—and that is seldom the case—it must be faced; if the national or individual mind cannot receive it, the fault lies with the immaturity or morbid condition of the former, not with the material of the latter.

As the legend of William Tell is more devoid of actual historical foundation, and is more widely known and believed than are the many others related as the records of events happening at the period from which the Swiss date their independence, it may be as well to devote some little space to its consideration. All the local records that might possibly throw some light on the existence and career of Tell have now been thoroughly searched by many impartial and competent scholars, as well as by enthusiastic partisans, with the invariable result that, till a considerable lapse of years after the presumed date of their deaths, not one particle of evidence has been discovered tending to prove the identity of either William Tell or of the tyrant Gessler. On the other hand, many local authorities, as early as the beginning of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the story was fully established, have gone out of their way to deny its truth and prove its entire falsity from their own researches. Materials, indeed, are many relating to the events that befell the Waldstaette during their conflicts with the bailies, whom they succeeded in expelling from their country; and it seems in the highest degree improbable that, had Tell and his friends lived and taken so prominent a part in effecting their country's freedom as is popularly assigned to them, they should have been entirely ignored by all contemporary writers, as well as by subsequent ones, for a hundred and fifty or two hundred years—yet such is the case.

William Tell is supposed to have performed his heroic deeds in or about the year 1291, and not till between 1467 and 1474 are his acts recorded, when in a collection of the traditions of the Canton of Unterwalden, transcribed by a notary at Sarnen, an account is given of the apple episode and the subsequent escape of the famous archer, and his murder of Gessler, though nothing is said of his having taken part in a league to free his country or of his being the founder of the confederation. A little prior to the compilation of the White Book of Sarnen, as this collection is called, an anonymous poet composed a Song of the Origin of the Confederation, in which, although no reference is made to Gessler, the other details are related concerning William Tell shooting at the apple, the revolt of the peasants, the expulsion of the bailies, and the formation of a patriotic league. It is, of course, quite possible that a Gessler was killed by the peasants, as the name was common enough at the time, but no member of that family—the records of which have now been most carefully traced—held any office under the Austrians at that period in any of the Waldstaette, nor is it at all probable that Austrian bailies governed the districts later than 1231. Neither is it possible for a bailie named Gessler to have occupied the castle at the date assigned, the ruins of which have so long been pointed out as being those of his former abode. So, also, the celebrated Tell's Chapel on the Vier Waldstaette See, at Kuesnach, was certainly not built to commemorate the exploits of Schiller's and Rossini's Swiss hero.

"The fact is that in Gessler we are confronted by a curious case of confusion in identity. At least three totally different men seem to have been blended into one in the course of an attempt to reconcile the different versions of the three cantons. Felix Hammerlin, of Zurich, in 1450, tells of a Hapsburg governor being on the little island of Schwanan, in the lake of Lowerz, who seduced a maid of Schwyz, and was killed by her brothers. Then there was another person, strictly historical, Knight Eppo, of Kuesnach, who, while acting as bailiff for the Duke of Austria, put down two revolts of the inhabitants in his district, one in 1284 and another in 1302. Finally, there was the tyrant bailiff mentioned in the ballad of Tell, who, by the way, a chronicler, writing in 1510, calls, not Gessler, but the Count of Seedorf. These three persons were combined, and the result was named Gessler."

Moreover, it is extremely doubtful whether the green plateau of the Ruetli below Seelisberg, and some six hundred and fifty feet above the lake, with its miraculous springs, ever witnessed the patriotic gathering of the thirty-three peasants who, tradition asserts, there formed the league against Austrian rule, or heard the solemn oath they and their leaders, Stauffacher, Fuerst, and Arnold, mutually swore.