Part 11
In Dalsland, fifteen hundred men took up arms; several thousand peasants from Nerike marched across the Tiwed with the same object. Gustavus had been obliged to grant a furlough to his Dalesmen about seed-time; and to supply their place he caused the people of several districts of Upland to be summoned to assemble in the forest of Rymningen, at Oeresundsbro; from which point his two captains essayed an attack upon the Archbishop of Upsala. It was St. Eric's Day (May 18th), and a great confluence of people was present at the fair. An assault was expected; for a deputation of four priests and two burgesses, sent from Upsala to the forest, had received from the leaders the answer that it must be Swedes, not outlandish men, who should bear the shrine of holy Eric, and that they would come to take their part in the festival. Bennet Bjugg (Barley), the Archbishop's bailiff, to show his contempt of such foes, caused a banquet to be set out in the open space between the larger and smaller episcopal manor houses of that day, where, before the eyes of the people, he made himself and his fellows merry till late in the night with drinking, dancing, and singing. Roused from a late sleep by an assault on the gates of the fortified house, and finding it beset by the enemy, they attempted to escape by a concealed passage, which then connected the Bishop's house with the cathedral. But the peasants set fire to this passage, which was of wood, and shot fire arrows at the roof of the episcopal residence, in which the flames soon burst forth. The building was laid in ashes, and next day the females of the household, with some burghers of Upsala, crept out of its cellars, in which they had taken refuge. Great part of the garrison perished. The bailiff escaped with a wound from an arrow, of which he died after rejoining his master at Stockholm.
This prelate, Archbishop Gustavus Trolle, had lately returned from a journey to Helsingland, undertaken in order to retain this part of his diocese in its allegiance to the King. Shortly afterward he received, by a messenger from Gustavus, who had himself come to Upsala at Whitsuntide, a letter exhorting him to embrace the cause of his country, to which his chapter had been persuaded to annex a memorial to the same effect. The Archbishop detained the messenger, saying that he would carry the answer himself. He broke up immediately with five hundred German horse and three thousand foot of the garrison of Stockholm, and had come within half a mile of Upsala before Gustavus received intelligence of his approach. This the latter did not at first credit, but remained, expecting an answer to his overture of negotiation, until, about six in the morning, being on horseback upon the sand-hill near Upsala, the spot where he afterward built a royal castle, he saw the Archbishop marching across the King's Mead (Kungsang) toward the town. Gustavus had but two hundred of his so-called foot-goers and a small number of horse with him, for the peasants had returned to their homes. He made a hasty retreat, but was overtaken by Trolle's horsemen at the Ford of Laby. Here a young Finnish noble, who was next to him, in the confusion rode down his horse in the midst of the stream; and he would have been lost had not the rest of his followers turned upon the enemy with such effect as to make them desist from the pursuit.
Gustavus now betook himself to the forest of Rymningen, raised the peasantry of the adjoining districts, and sent out young men under his best captains to surprise the Archbishop on his return. The remains of cattle slaughtered on the road betrayed the ambush to the prelate, who drew off in another direction. He was nevertheless overtaken and attacked, escaping the spear of Lawrence Olaveson only by bending downward on his horse, so that the weapon pierced his neighbor; and he brought back to Stockholm hardly a sixth part of his army. Gustavus followed close after with his collected force, and encamped under the Brunkeberg. Four gibbets on this eminence, stocked with corpses of Swedish inhabitants, attested the character of the government in the capital.
Thus began, at the midsummer of 1521, the siege of Stockholm, which was to last full two years, amid difficulties little thought of nowadays, after the lapse of ages; and the admiration which men so willingly render to the exertions in the cause of freedom have deprived events of their original colors. The path of Gustavus was not in general one of glittering feats, although his life is in itself one grand achievement. What he accomplished was the effect of strong endurance and great sagacity; and though he wanted not for intrepidity, it was of a kind before which the mere warrior must vail his crest. All the remaining movements of the war of liberation consist in sieges of the various castles and fortresses of the country, undertaken as opportunity offered, with levies of the peasantry, whose detachments relieved each other, though sometimes neglecting this duty when pressed by the cares or necessities of their own families. Hence the object of these investments, which was to deprive the besieged of provisions, could only be imperfectly attained, and there were many fortified mansions of which the proprietors adhered to the Danish party, as that of Wik in Upland, which remained blockaded throughout the whole year. These difficulties were the most formidable where, as at Stockholm, access was open by the sea, of which Severin Norby, with the Danish squadron, was master. The scantiness of the means of attack may be discovered from the circumstance that sixty German spearmen, whom Clement Rensel, a burgher of Stockholm, himself a narrator of these events, brought from Dantzic in July for the service of Gustavus, were regarded as a reenforcement of the highest importance. "At this time," says the chronicle, "Lord Gustave enjoyed not much repose or many pleasant days, when he kept his people in so many campaigns and investments, since he bore for them all great anxiety, fear, and peril, how he might lend them help in their need, so that they might not be surprised through heedlessness and laches. So likewise his pain was not small when he had but little in his money chest, and it was grievous to give this answer when the folk cried for stipend. Therefore he stayed not many days in the same place, but travelled day and night between the camps."
In the month of August he arrived at Stegeborg, which was now besieged by his general, Arwid the West-Goth, who had recently repulsed with great bravery Severin Norby's attempt to relieve the castle, and had even begun to take homage for Gustavus from the people of his province, although in this he experienced difficulties. The East-Goths declared that they had been so chastised for their attack on the Bishop's castle at Linkoping the preceding year that they no longer dared to provoke either King Christian or Bishop Hans Brask. The personal presence of Gustavus decided the waverers, and even the Bishop received him as a friend, because he would otherwise have stood in danger of a hostile visitation. Gustavus now convoked a diet of barons at Vadstena, which was attended by seventy Swedish gentlemen of noble family and by many other persons of all classes in Gothland. These made him a tender of the crown, which he refused to accept. On August 24th, therefore, they swore fealty and obedience to him as administrator of the kingdom--"in like manner," add the chronicles, "as had formerly been done in Upland"; whence they seem to have assumed that he had already been acknowledged as such in Upper Sweden, here called Upland, as we often find it in the chronicles of the Middle Age. This was the first public declaration of the nobility in favor of Gustavus and his cause; although the greatest barons in this division of the kingdom, such as Nils Boson (Grip), Holger Carlson (Gere), and Thure Jenson (Roos) in West-Gothland, all three councillors of state, were still in arms for Christian. That the first-named nobleman joined the party of Gustavus before the end of the year we know from his letter of thanks for a fief of which he received the investure. Both the latter were proclaimed in 1523 to be enemies of the realm, as also was the archbishop Gustavus Trolle. He had repaired to Denmark two years before, in order to obtain, by his personal instances with the King, the often-promised relief for the besieged garrison of Stockholm, but was received with coldness and reproaches.
After the baronial diet of Vadstena, the Gothlanders acknowledged the authority of the administrator, and, the Danes having been driven out West-Gothland and Smaland, the seat of the war was removed to Finland. By the commencement of the next year the principal castles of the interior had fallen into the hands of Gustavus, and some, as those of Westeras and Orebo, were razed to the ground by the now exasperated peasantry. Stockholm and Kalmar, as well as Abo in Finland, yet stood out, and by help of reenforcement which they received at the beginning of 1522, through the Danish admiral Severin Norby, the enemy were again able to resume the offensive. By sallies from the beleaguered capital on April 7th, 8th, and 13th, the camp of Gustavus was set on fire and destroyed, and for a whole month afterward no Swedish force was seen before the walls of Stockholm. The besiegers of Abo were likewise driven off, and the chief adherents of Gustavus, being obliged to flee from Finland, Arvid, Bishop of Abo, with many noble persons of both sexes, perished at sea.
Christian himself by new cruelties added to the detestation with which he was regarded in Sweden. The wives and children, of the most distinguished among the barons beheaded in Stockholm, had been conveyed to Denmark, and among them the mother and two sisters of Gustavus, whom the King, in spite of the entreaties of his consort, threw into a dungeon. Here they died, either by violence, as Gustavus himself complains in a letter of 1522 concerning the cruel oppression of King Christian, directed to the Pope, the Emperor, and all Christian princes, or, as others assert, of the plague. An order had also been recently issued by the King to commanders in Sweden to put to death all the Swedes of distinction who had fallen into their hands. The chronicles say that Severin Norby had received this order so early as the summer of 1521, but, instead of complying with it, permitted the escape of many noblemen, who afterward did homage to Gustavus at Vadstena, in order, as he expressed it, that they might rather guard their necks like warriors than be slaughtered like chickens. But in Abo a new massacre was perpetrated at the beginning of the next year by Lord Thomas, the royalist commander there, who afterward, in an attempt to relieve Stockholm, fell, with all his ships, into the hands of Gustavus, and was hanged upon an oak in Tynnels Island.
After Severin Norby had relieved the capital, the secretary, master Gotschalk Ericson, wrote thence to Christian that there were but eighty of the burghers, for the most part Germans, who could be counted on for the King's service, but of footmen and gunners in the castle there were now eight hundred fifty men, well furnished with all; the peasants were, indeed, weary of the war, but were still more fearful of the King's vengeance, and put faith in no assurances, whence the country could only be reduced to obedience by violent methods; if a sufficient force were sent, East-Gothland, Sodermanland, and Upland would submit to the King, and his grace could then punish the Dalecarlians and Helsingers, who first stirred up these troubles.
The governor of the castle of Stockholm informs the King, in a report on military occurrences of the winter, "that his men had compelled him to consent to an increase of pay on account of the successes they had gained; that he had expelled from the town, or imprisoned, the suspected Swedish burghers; that the peasants would rather be hanged on their own hearths than longer endure the burden of war; that Gustavus, who had in vain tempted his fidelity, had already sent his plate and the chief part of his own movable property to a priest in Helsingland; he (the governor) also transmitted an inventory of the goods of the decapitated nobles."
But by the end of one month Gustavus, who in this letter is styled "a forest thief and robber," had again filled three camps around Stockholm with Dalesmen and Norrlanders; and when, pursuant to a convention with Lubeck, he received thence in the month of June an auxiliary force of ten ships, a number that was afterward augmented, he was enabled to dispense with the greatest portion of his peasants, and retained about him only those who were young and unmarried. The assistance of the Lubeckers, it was true, was given only by halves, and from selfish motives; they did not forget their profit on the arms, purchased Swedish iron and copper for klippings, with which worthless coins they came well provided, and exacted a dear price for their men, ships, and military stores, refusing even, it is said, to supply Gustavus with two pieces of cannon at a decisive moment, although upon the proffered security of two of the royal castles.
This occurred on occasion of a second, and this time unsuccessful, attempt made by Norby to relieve Stockholm; in which he was only saved from ruin by the refusal of the admiral of Lubeck to attack. Meanwhile Gustavus, despite the losses which he sustained by sallies, pushed his three camps by degrees close to the town, then covering little more than the island still contains, the town properly so called. At length, after Kingsholm, Langholm, Sodermalm, Waldemar's Island, now the Zoological Gardens, had been connected by block-houses and chains, the place was invested on all sides. Yet it held out through the winter, until the news of Christian's fate, joined to the pangs of hunger, deprived the garrison of all spirit for further resistance.
He did not dare to trust either his subjects or his soldiers, collected twenty ships, in which he embarked the public records, with the treasure and crown jewels, his consort and child, and his adviser Sigbert, who was concealed in his chest. Deserting his kingdom, he sailed away in the face of the whole population of Copenhagen, April 20, 1523.
Thus ended the reign of Christian II, a king in whom one knows not which rivets the attention, the multiplied undertakings he commenced and abandoned in a career so often stained with blood, his audacity, his feebleness, or that misery of many years by which he was to expiate a short and ill-used tenure of power. There are men who, like the storm birds before the tempest, appear in history as foretokens of the approaching outburst of great convulsions. Of such a nature was Christian, who, tossed hither and thither between all the various currents of his time without central consistence, awakened alternately the fear or pity of the beholders.
Frederick I, who was chosen to succeed him in Denmark, wrote to the estates of Sweden, demanding that in accordance with the stipulations of the Union of Kalmar he might also be acknowledged king in Sweden. They replied "that they had elected Gustavus Ericson to be Sweden's king." That event came to pass at the Diet of Strengess, June 7, 1523. Thus was the union dissolved, after enduring one hundred twenty-six years. Norway wavered at this critical moment. The inhabitants of the southern portion declared, when the Swedes under Thure Jenson (Roos) and Lawrence Siggeson (Sparre) had penetrated into their country as far as Opslo, that they would unite with Sweden if they might rely upon its support. Bohusland was subdued, Bleking likewise on another side, and Gustavus sought, both by negotiation and arms, to enforce the old claims of Sweden to Scania and Halland. The town of Kalmar was taken on May 27th, and the castle on July 7th. Stockholm having surrendered on June 20th, on condition of the free departure of the garrison with their property and arms, and of every other person who adhered to the cause of Christian, Gustavus made his public entry on Midsummer's Eve; before the end of the year Finland also was reduced to obedience. The kingdom was freed from foreign enemies, but internal foes still remained; and Lubeck was an ally whose demands made it more troublesome than it would have been as an enemy.
A town wasted in the civil war had been the scene of the election of Gustavus Vasa to the throne. In the capital, when he made his public entry, one-half of the houses were empty, and of population scarcely a fourth part remained. To fill up the gap, he issued an invitation to the burghers in other towns to settle there, a summons which he was obliged twelve years afterward to renew, "seeing that Stockholm had not yet revived from the days of King Christian." The spectacle which here met his eyes was a type of the condition of the whole kingdom, and never was it said of any sovereign with more justice that the throne to which he had been elevated was more difficult to preserve than to win.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] Translated by J. H. Turner, M.A.
THE PEASANTS' WAR IN GERMANY
A.D. 1524
J. H. MERLE D'AUBIGNE
The Peasants' War was the most widespread and most bloody of the mediaeval forerunners of the French Revolution. Like the rebellion of the Jacquerie and many another ferocious, desperate outburst of the downtrodden common folk, it foretold a day of vengeance to come. These early uprisings were all hopeless from their start, because the untrained and naked bodies of the people, however numerous, could not possibly hold an open battlefield against skilled and armed men of war. Each revolt terminated in the butchery of the unhappy rebels.
The Peasants' War has acquired special notoriety because of its connection with the Reformation. The people rose in the name of religion, and, as their ignorance and ferocity led them into hideous excesses of revenge upon their oppressors, the new religion was blamed for all the evil thus done in its name. This revolt, because of the fear and disgust it roused, became the most severe set-back Protestantism received in all its struggle with the more ancient and conservative Church.
The following account of the outbreak and its consequences is by a standard Protestant historian, president of the College of Geneva, a student who can see justice on both sides of the great controversy.
A political ferment, very different from that produced by the Gospel, had long been at work in the empire. The people, bowed down by civil and ecclesiastical oppression, bound in many countries to the seigniorial estates, and transferred from hand to hand along with them, threatened to rise with fury and at last to break their chains. This agitation had showed itself long before the Reformation by many symptoms, and even then the religious element was blended with the political; in the sixteenth century it was impossible to separate these two principles, so closely associated in the existence of nations. In Holland, at the close of the preceding century, the peasants had revolted, placing on their banners, by way of arms, a loaf and a cheese, the two great blessings of these poor people. The "Alliance of the Shoes" had shown itself in the neighborhood of Spires in 1502. In 1513 it appeared again in Breisgau, being encouraged by the priests. In 1514 Wuertemberg had seen the "League of Poor Conrad," whose aim was to maintain by rebellion "the right of God." In 1515 Carinthia and Hungary had been the theatres of terrible agitations. These seditions had been quenched in torrents of blood, but no relief had been accorded to the people. A political reform, therefore, was not less necessary than a religious reform. The people were entitled to this; but we must acknowledge that they were not ripe for its enjoyment.
Since the commencement of the Reformation, these popular disturbances had not been renewed; men's minds were occupied by other thoughts. Luther, whose piercing glance had discerned the condition of the people, had already from the summit of the Wartburg addressed them in serious exhortations calculated to restrain their agitated minds:
"Rebellion," he had said, "never produces the amelioration we desire, and God condemns it. What is it to rebel, if it be not to avenge one's self? The devil is striving to excite to revolt those who embrace the Gospel, in order to cover it with opprobrium; but those who have rightly understood my doctrine do not revolt."
Everything gave cause to fear that the popular agitation could not be restrained much longer. The government that Frederick of Saxony had taken such pains to form, and which possessed the confidence of the nation, was dissolved. The Emperor, whose energy might have been an efficient substitute for the influence of this national administration, was absent; the princes whose union had always constituted the strength of Germany were divided; and the new declaration of Charles V against Luther, by removing every hope of future harmony, deprived the reformer of part of the moral influence by which in 1522 he had succeeded in calming the storm. The chief barriers that hitherto had confined the torrent being broken, nothing could any longer restrain its fury.