On the 19th of May 1630 Gustavus solemnly took leave of the estates of the realm assembled at Stockholm. He appeared before them holding in his arms his only child and heiress, the little princess Christina, then in her fourth year, and tenderly committed her to the care of his loyal and devoted people. Then he solemnly took the estates to witness, as he stood there “in the sight of the Almighty,” that he had begun hostilities “out of no lust for war, as many will certainly devise and imagine,” but in self-defence and to deliver his fellow-Christians from oppression. On the 7th of June 1630 the Swedish fleet set sail, and two days after midsummer day, the whole army, 16,000 strong, was disembarked at Peenemünde. Gustavus’s plan was to take possession of the mouths of the Oder Haff, and, resting upon Stralsund in the west and Prussia in the east, penetrate into Germany. In those days rivers were what railways now are, the great military routes; and Gustavus’s German war was a war waged along river lines. The opening campaign was to be fought along the line of the Oder. Stettin, the capital of Pomerania, and the key of the Oder line, was occupied and converted into a first-class fortress. He then proceeded to clear Pomerania of the piebald imperial host composed of every nationality under heaven, and officered by Italians, Irishmen, Czechs, Croats, Danes, Spaniards and Walloons. Gustavus’s army has often been described by German historians as an army of foreign invaders; in reality it was far more truly Teutonic than the official defenders of Germany at that period. Gustavus’s political difficulties (see [Sweden]: History) chained him to his camp for the remainder of the year. But the dismissal of Wallenstein and the declaration in Gustavus’s favour of Magdeburg, the greatest city in the Lower Saxon Circle, and strategically the strongest fortress of North Germany, encouraged him to advance boldly. But first, honour as well as expediency moved him to attempt to relieve Magdeburg, now closely invested by the imperialists, especially as his hands had now been considerably strengthened by a definite alliance with France (treaty of Bärwalde, 13th of January 1631). Magdeburg, therefore, became the focus of the whole campaign of 1631; but the obstructive timidity of the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony threw insuperable obstacles in his way, and, on the very day when John George I. of Saxony closed his gates against Gustavus the most populous and prosperous city in North Germany became a heap of smoking ruins (20th of May). Gustavus, still too weak to meet the foe, entrenched himself at Werben, at the confluence of the Havel and Elbe. Only on the 12th of September did the elector of Saxony, alarmed for the safety of his own states, now invaded by the emperor, place himself absolutely at the disposal of Gustavus; and, five days later, at the head of the combined Swedish-Saxon army, though the Swedes did all the fighting, Gustavus routed Tilly at the famous battle of Breitenfeld, north of Leipzig.
The question now was: In what way should Gustavus utilize his advantage? Should he invade the Austrian crown lands, and dictate peace to Ferdinand II. at the gates of Vienna? Or should he pursue Tilly westwards and crush the league at its own hearth and home? Oxenstjerna was the first alternative, but Gustavus decided in favour of the second. His decision has been greatly blamed. More than one modern historian has argued that if Gustavus had done in 1631 what Napoleon did in 1805 and 1809, there would have been a fifteen instead of a thirty years’ war. But it should be borne in mind that, in the days of Gustavus, Vienna was by no means so essential to the existence of the Habsburg monarchy as it was in the days of Napoleon; and even Gustavus could not allow so dangerous an opponent as Tilly time to recover himself. Accordingly, he set out for the Rhine, taking Marienberg and Frankfort on his way, and on the 20th of December entered Mainz, where he remained throughout the winter of 1631-1632. At the beginning of 1632, in order to bring about the general peace he so earnestly desired, he proposed to take the field with an overwhelming numerical majority. The signal for Gustavus to break up from the Rhine was the sudden advance of Tilly from behind the Danube. Gustavus pursued Tilly into Bavaria, forced the passage of the Danube at Donauwörth and the passage of the Lech, in the face of Tilly’s strongly entrenched camp at Rain, and pursued the flying foe to the fortress of Ingolstadt where Tilly died of his wounds a fortnight later. Gustavus then liberated and garrisoned the long-oppressed Protestant cities of Augsburg and Ulm, and in May occupied Munich. The same week Wallenstein chased John George from Prague and manœuvred the Saxons out of Bohemia. Then, armed as he was with plenipotentiary power, he offered the elector of Saxony peace on his own terms. Gustavus suddenly saw himself exposed to extreme peril. If Tilly had made John George such an offer as Wallenstein was now empowered to make, the elector would never have become Gustavus’s ally; would he remain Gustavus’s ally now? Hastily quitting his quarters in Upper Swabia, Gustavus hastened towards Nuremberg on his way to Saxony, but finding that Wallenstein and Maximilian of Bavaria had united their forces, he abandoned the attempt to reach Saxony, and both armies confronted each other at Nuremberg which furnished Gustavus with a point of support of the first order. He quickly converted the town into an entrenched and fortified camp. Wallenstein followed the king’s example, and entrenched himself on the western bank of the Regnitz in a camp twelve English miles in circumference. His object was to pin Gustavus fast to Nuremberg and cut off his retreat northwards. Throughout July and August the two armies faced each other immovably. On the 24th of August, after an unsuccessful attempt to storm Alte Veste, the key of Wallenstein’s position, the Swedish host retired southwards.
Towards the end of October, Wallenstein, after devastating Saxony, was preparing to go into winter quarters at Lützen, when the king surprised him as he was crossing the Rippach (1st of November) and a rearguard action favourable to the Swedes ensued. Indeed, but for nightfall, Wallenstein’s scattered forces might have been routed. During the night, however, Wallenstein re-collected his host for a decisive action, and at daybreak on the 6th of November, while an autumn mist still lay over the field, the battle began. It was obviously Gustavus’s plan to drive Wallenstein away from the Leipzig road, north of which he had posted himself, and thus, in case of success, to isolate, and subsequently, with the aid of the Saxons in the Elbe fortresses, annihilate him. The king, on the Swedish right wing, succeeded in driving the enemy from the trenches and capturing his cannon. What happened after that is mere conjecture, for a thick mist now obscured the autumn sun, and the battle became a colossal mêlée the details of which are indistinguishable. It was in the midst of that awful obscurity that Gustavus met his death—how or where is not absolutely certain; but it would seem that he lost his way in the darkness while leading the Småland horse to the assistance of his infantry, and was despatched as he lay severely wounded on the ground by a hostile horseman.
By his wife, Marie Eleonora, a sister of the elector of Brandenburg, whom he married in 1620, Gustavus Adolphus had one daughter, Christina, who succeeded him on the throne of Sweden.
See Sveriges Historia (Stockholm, 1877, 81), vol. iv.; A. Oxenstjerna, Skrifter och Brefvexling (Stockholm, 1900, &c.); G. Björlen, Gustaf Adolf (Stockholm, 1890); R. N. Bain, Scandinavia (Cambridge, 1905); C. R. L. Fletcher, Gustavus Adolphus (London, 1892); J. L. Stevens, History of Gustavus Adolphus (London, 1885); J. Mankell, Om Gustaf II. Adolfs politik (Stockholm, 1881); E. Bluemel, Gustav Adolf, König von Schweden (Eisleben, 1894); A. Rydfors, De diplomatiska förbindelserna mellan Sverige och England 1624-1630 (Upsala, 1890).
(R. N. B.)
GUSTAVUS III. (1746-1792), king of Sweden, was the eldest son of Adolphus Frederick, king of Sweden, and Louisa Ulrica of Prussia, sister of Frederick the Great, and was born on the 24th of January 1746. Gustavus was educated under the care of two governors who were amongst the most eminent Swedish statesmen of the day, Carl Gustaf Tessin and Carl Scheffer; but he owed most perhaps to the poet and historian Olof von Dalin. The interference of the state with his education, when he was quite a child, was, however, doubly harmful, as his parents taught him to despise the preceptors imposed upon him by the diet, and the atmosphere of intrigue and duplicity in which he grew up made him precociously experienced in the art of dissimulation. But even his most hostile teachers were amazed by the brilliance of his natural gifts, and, while still a boy, he possessed that charm of manner which was to make him so fascinating and so dangerous in later life, coupled with the strong dramatic instinct which won for him his honourable place in Swedish literature. On the whole, Gustavus cannot be said to have been well educated, but he read very widely; there was scarce a French author of his day with whose works he was not intimately acquainted; while his enthusiasm for the new French ideas of enlightenment was as sincere as, if more critical than, his mother’s. On the 4th of November 1766, Gustavus married Sophia Magdalena, daughter of Frederick V. of Denmark. The match was an unhappy one, owing partly to incompatibility of temper, but still more to the mischievous interference of the jealous queen-mother.
Gustavus first intervened actively in politics in 1768, at the time of his father’s interregnum, when he compelled the dominant Cap faction to summon an extraordinary diet from which he hoped for the reform of the constitution in a monarchical direction. But the victorious Hats refused to redeem the pledges which they had given before the elections. “That we should have lost the constitutional battle does not distress us so much,” wrote Gustavus, in the bitterness of his heart; “but what does dismay me is to see my poor nation so sunk in corruption as to place its own felicity in absolute anarchy.” From the 4th of February to the 25th of March 1771, Gustavus was at Paris, where he carried both the court and the city by storm. The poets and the philosophers paid him enthusiastic homage, and all the distinguished women of the day testified to his superlative merits. With many of them he maintained a lifelong correspondence. But his visit to the French capital was no mere pleasure trip; it was also a political mission. Confidential agents from the Swedish court had already prepared the way for him, and the duc de Choiseul, weary of Swedish anarchy, had resolved to discuss with him the best method of bringing about a revolution in Sweden. Before he departed, the French government undertook to pay the outstanding subsidies to Sweden unconditionally, at the rate of one and a half million livres annually; and the comte de Vergennes, one of the great names of French diplomacy, was transferred from Constantinople to Stockholm. On his way home Gustavus paid a short visit to his uncle, Frederick the Great, at Potsdam. Frederick bluntly informed his nephew that, in concert with Russia and Denmark, he had guaranteed the integrity of the existing Swedish constitution, and significantly advised the young monarch to play the part of mediator and abstain from violence.
On his return to Sweden Gustavus made a sincere and earnest attempt to mediate between the Hats and Caps who were ruining the country between them (see [Sweden]: History). On the 21st of June 1771 he opened his first parliament in a speech which awakened strange and deep emotions in all who heard it. It was the first time for more than a century that a Swedish king had addressed a Swedish diet from the throne in its native tongue. The orator laid especial stress on the necessity of the sacrifice of all party animosities to the common weal, and volunteered, as “the first citizen of a free people,” to be the mediator between the contending factions. A composition committee was actually formed, but it proved illusory from the first, the patriotism of neither of the factions being equal to the puniest act of self-denial. The subsequent attempts of the dominant Caps still further to limit the prerogative, and reduce Gustavus to the condition of a roi fainéant, induced him at last to consider the possibility of a revolution. Of its necessity there could be no doubt. Under the sway of the Cap faction, Sweden, already the vassal, could not fail to become the prey of Russia. She was on the point of being absorbed in that northern system, the invention of the Russian vice-chancellor, Count Nikita Panin, which that patient statesman had made it the ambition of his life to realize. Only a swift and sudden coup d’état could save the independence of a country isolated from the rest of Europe by a hostile league. At this juncture Gustavus was approached by Jakob Magnus Sprengtporten, a Finnish nobleman of determined character, who had incurred the enmity of the Caps, with the project of a revolution. He undertook to seize the fortress of Sveaborg by a coup de main, and, Finland once secured, Sprengtporten proposed to embark for Sweden, meet the king and his friends near Stockholm, and surprise the capital by a night attack, when the estates were to be forced, at the point of the bayonet, to accept a new constitution from the untrammelled king. The plotters were at this juncture reinforced by an ex-ranger from Scania (Skåne), Johan Kristoffer Toll, also a victim of Cap oppression. Toll proposed that a second revolt should break out in the province of Scania, to confuse the government still more, and undertook personally to secure the southern fortress of Kristianstad. After some debate, it was finally arranged that, a few days after the Finnish revolt had begun, Kristianstad should openly declare against the government. Prince Charles, the eldest of the king’s brothers, was thereupon hastily to mobilize the garrisons of all the southern fortresses, for the ostensible purpose of crushing the revolt at Kristianstad; but on arriving before the fortress he was to make common cause with the rebels, and march upon the capital from the south, while Sprengtporten attacked it simultaneously from the east. On the 6th of August 1772 Toll succeeded, by sheer bluff, in winning the fortress of Kristianstad. On the 16th Sprengtporten succeeded in surprising Sveaborg. But contrary winds prevented him from crossing to Stockholm, and in the meanwhile events had occurred which made his presence there unnecessary.