Switzerland was divided at this period into small sovereignties and baronial fiefs; and there were, besides, also the Imperial cities of Bern and Basel and Zürich. The nobles were warlike and restless. Rudolph checked their depredations and composed their dissensions. Upon that seething age of violence and rapine he laid, as it were, the forming hand, as if in the darkness the coming time was dimly visible to him;—a man to be remembered, in the vexed and disheartening history of Austria, as one of her few heroes. The people of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden, notwithstanding the dislike they had shown to his ancestor, voluntarily appointed him their protector; and he gave them, in 1274, the firm assurance that he would treat them as worthy sons of the Empire in inalienable independence; and to that assurance he remained true till his death, which happened in 1291, in the seventy-fourth year of his age.
It is related in the Rhymed Chronicle of Ottocar, how he had been kept alive for a whole year by the skill of his physicians, but that they told him at last, as he sat playing at draughts, that death was upon him, and that he could live but five days. "Well, then," he said, "on to Spires!" that he might lay him in the Imperial vault in the great Cathedral there,—where many Emperors slept their long sleep, till, in the Orléans Succession War in the time of Louis XIV., as afterwards in 1794, under the revolutionary commander Custine, French soldiers rudely disturbed it, with every circumstance of outrage which Frenchmen only could devise. Rudolph went forth thither, but fell by the way, and died at Germersheim, a dirty little village which he had founded. And in the Cathedral at Spires, where he rested from his activities, you may see this day a monumental statue of him, executed by that great artist, the late Ludwig Schwanthaler of Munich, for his art-loving patron, Ludwig I., King of Bavaria.
Rudolph was succeeded by his son Albrecht, then forty-three years old, likewise a vigorous man, whose restless spirit of aggrandizement gave the Swiss much uneasiness. His purpose seems to have been to acquire the sovereignty of the ecclesiastical and baronial fiefs, and, having thus encompassed the free cities and the Three Cantons, to compel submission to his authority. In the seventh week after Rudolph's death, they met together to renew the ancient bond with the people of Uri and Unterwalden; and they swore, in or out of their valleys, to stand by one another, if harm should be done to any of them. "In this we are as one man," ran their oath, among other things, "in that we will receive no judge who is not a countryman and an inhabitant, or who has bought his office."
After several years of troubles and frights among them, the Emperor sent to the Forest Cantons to say, that it would be well for them and their posterity, if they submitted to the protection of the Royal House, as all neighboring cities and counties had done; he wished them to be his dear children; he was the descendant of their Bailiff of Lenzburg, son of their Emperor Rudolph; if he offered them the protection of his glorious line, it was not that he lusted after their flocks or would make merchandise of their poverty, but because he knew from his father and from history what brave men they were, whom he would lead to victory and knighthood and plunder.
Then spake the nobles and the freemen of the Forest Cantons: "They know very well, and will ever remember, how his father of blessed memory was a good leader and Bailiff to them; but they love the condition of their ancestors, and will abide by it. If the King would but confirm it!"
And thereupon they sent Werner, Baron of Attinghausen, Landammann of Uri, like his fathers before him and his posterity after him, to the Imperial Court. But the King was quarrelling with his Electors, and was in bad humor, and sent to Uri to forbid them from assessing land-rates on a convent there. Whereupon the men of Schwyz, being without protection, made a league for ten years with Werner, Count of Honburg; and that their submission to the Austrian power might not be construed into a duty, they sent to the King for an Imperial Bailiff. Albrecht appointed Hermann Gessler of Brunek, and Beringer of Landenberg, whose cousin Hermann was in much favor with him. Beringer's manners were rough even at the Court; and to get rid of him, they sent him to tame the Waldstätte. He appointed Bailiffs whose poverty and avarice were the cause of much oppression, emboldened as they were by the ill-feeling of the King towards the men of Schwyz, whose freedom the King had refused to confirm, and waited only for opportunity to annihilate their ancient rights, after the example he had already set in Vienna and Styria.
The Imperial Bailiffs resolved to take up their abode in the Forest Cantons,—Landenberg in Unterwalden, near Sarnen, in a castle of the King's, while Gessler built a prison-castle by Altorf in Uri; for within the memory of men no lord had dwelt in Schwyz. They used their power wantonly;—unjust and weary imprisonments for slightest faults; haughty manners, and all the stings of insolent authority;—and no redress to be had at the King's hands. The peace and happy security of the men of Schwyz were gone, and they looked in one another's faces for the thing that was to be done. The honored families of their race were despised and called peasant-nobles;—there was Werner Stauffacher, a well-to-do and well-meaning man; and the Lord of Attinghausen above all, of an ancient house, in years, with much experience, and true to his country; there was Rudolph Redings of Biberek, whose descendants live to this day in Schwyz, supporting still the honor of their name; and the Winkelrieds, mindful of the spirit of their ancestor who slew the dragon. In such persons the people believed; they knew them and their fathers before them; and when they were made light of, there was hatred between the people and the Bailiffs. As Gessler passed Stauffacher's house in Steinen, one day, where the little chapel now stands, and saw how the house was well built, with many windows, and painted over with mottoes, after the manner of rich farmers' houses, he cried to his face, "Can one endure that these peasants should live in such houses?"
It came at last to insulting their wives and daughters; and the first man that attempted this, one Wolfenschiess, was struck dead by an angry husband; and when the brave wife of Stauffacher reflected how her turn might come next, she persuaded her husband to anticipate the danger. Werner Stauffacher at once crossed the lake to Uri, to consult with his friend Walther, Prince of Attinghausen, with whom he found concealed a young man of courage and understanding. "He is an Unterwaldner from the Melchthal," said Walther; "his name is Erni an der Halden, and he is a relation of mine; for a trifling matter Landenberg has fined him a couple of oxen; his father Henry complained bitterly of the loss, whereupon a servant of the Bailiff said, 'If the peasants want to eat bread, they can draw their own plough'; at which Erni took fire, and broke one of the fellow's fingers with his stick, and then took refuge here; meanwhile the Bailiff has caused his father's eyes to be put out." And then the two friends took counsel together; and Walther bore witness how the venerable Lord of Attinghausen had said that these Bailiffs were no longer to be endured. What desolating wrath resistance would bring upon the Waldstätte they knew and measured, and swore that death was better than an unrighteous yoke. And they parted, each to sound his friends,—appointing as a place of conference the Rütli. It is a little patch of meadow, which the precipices seem to recede expressly to form, on the Bay of Uri, sloping down to the water's edge,—so called from the trees being rooted out (ausgereutet) there,—not far from the boundary between Unterwalden and Uri, where the Mytenstein rises solitary like an obelisk out of the water. There, in the stillness of night, they often met together for council touching the work which was to be done; thither by lonely paths came Fürst and Melchthal, Stauffacher in his boat, and from Unterwalden his sister's son, Edelknecht of Rudenz. The more dangerous the deed, the more solemn the bond which bound them.
On the night of Wednesday before Martinmas, on the 10th of November, 1307, Fürst, Melchthal, and Stauffacher brought each from his own Canton ten upright men to the Rütli, to deliberate honestly together. And when they came there and remembered their inherited freedom, and the eternal brotherly bond between them, consecrated by the danger of the times, they feared neither Albrecht nor the power of Austria; and they took each other by the hand, and said, that "in these matters no one was to act after his own fancy; no one was to desert another; that in friendship they would live and die; each was so to strive to preserve the ancient rights of the people that the Swiss through all time might taste of this friendship; neither should the property or the rights of the Count of Hapsburg be molested, nor the Bailiffs or their servants lose one drop of blood; but the freedom which their fathers gave them they would bequeath to their children": and then, when remembering that upon what they did now the fate of their posterity depended, each looked upon his friend, consoled. And Walther Fürst, Werner Stauffacher, and Arnold an der Halden of Melchthal lifted their hands to heaven, and, in the name of God, who created emperor and peasant with the inalienable rights of man, swore to maintain their freedom; and when the thirty heard this, each one raised his hand and swore the same by God and the Saints;—and then each went his way to his hut, and was silent, and wintered his cattle.
In the mean while it happened that the Bailiff Hermann Gessler was shot dead by Wilhelm Tell, who was of Bürglen, at the entrance of the Schächenthal, a half-hour from Altorf, in Uri,—son-in-law of Walther Fürst, and a man of some substance, for he had the steward-ship in fee in Bürglen of the Frauenmüster Abbey in Zürich,—one of the conspirators. Out of wanton tyranny, or suspicious of the breaking out of disturbances, Gessler determined to discover who bore the joke most impatiently; and, after the symbolical way of the times and the people, set up a hat, (it was on the 18th of November,) to represent the dignity of the Duke Albrecht of Austria, and commanded all to do it homage. The story of Tell's refusal, and of the apple placed on the head of his son to be shot at, the world knows far and wide. Convinced by his success that God was with him, Tell confessed, that, if the matter had gone wrong, he would have had his revenge upon the Bailiff. Gessler did not dare to detain him in Uri, on account of Tell's many friends and relations, but took him up the lake, contrary to the traditions of the people, which forbade foreign imprisonment. They had not got far beyond the Rütli, when the föhn-wind, breaking loose from the gulfs of the Gothard, threw the waves into a rage, and the rocks echoed with its angry cries. In this moment of deadly danger, Gessler commanded them to unbind Tell, who, he knew, was an excellent boatman; and as they passed by the foot of the Axen Mountain, to the right as you come out of the Bay of Uri, Tell grasped his bow and leaped upon a flat rock there, climbed up the mountain while the boat tossed to and fro against the rocks, and fled through the land of the men of Schwyz. But the Bailiff escaped the storm also, and landed by Küssnacht, where he fell with Tell's arrow through him.