Gustavas Adolphus

Michael Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317895756
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea medieval

Gustavus Adolphus (1594--1632) dominated his age: he made Sweden the leading power of Northern Europe, was the principal upholder of the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War, and was a great administrator as well as a brilliant soldier. His toleration and reforms helped define the development of the modern state. This concise study of his career, by the doyen of modern historians of the North, appeared in 1973. Long unavailable but now revised, expanded, updated and reset, it makes a welcome return in Profiles in Power.

Chapter 1
Background

If in the year 1660 the ordinary man in the street had been asked to enumerate the great powers of Europe, he would almost certainly have replied that there were four great monarchs overtopping all the rest: the Emperor, the kings of France and Spain, and the king of Sweden. A century earlier, in 1560, no one would have dreamed of including Sweden in the list. Though Gustavus Vasa (who died in that year) had a well-deserved reputation for political craft and financial greed, the country over which he ruled lay too far out on the periphery of European politics to be much more than a possible makeweight in the perennial struggle between Habsburg and Valois, and was indeed very much less a part of Europe than (for instance) Poland. Yet it was just in this year, 1560, that the first foundations were laid for Sweden's later greatness; and in 1660 that greatness reached its apogee. In the second quarter of the seventeenth century Sweden burst upon the European firmament like some new star, big with portents: a political analogue to that nova in Cassiopeia which had so disturbed the watchers of the sky in 1572; flaring for a brief space with unnatural brightness, and thereafter declining into insignificance; something unforeseeable, and to contemporary observers scarcely capable of rational explanation. When Gustavus Adolphus began his reign, in 1611, no man could have imagined this imminent incandescence. But twenty-one years later, when Gustavus met his death at Lvitzen, the situation was very different. When he fell, it seemed that Europe had lost a master. In the last months of his life it had not been extravagant to think of him as a possible candidate for the Imperial throne. In the years that followed, men debated whether his chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, might not be made Elector of Mainz. In 1648 Queen Christina joined Louis XIV as co-guarantor of the great peace settlement of Westphalia, which laid a basis for international relations which was to endure until the French Revolution. By 1660, Sweden had attained her natural geographical limits, had built up an empire which made her the dominant state in the Baltic, and was besides a German power, represented in the Imperial Diet (as France never was) in virtue of her membership of no less than three of the Circles of the Empire.

A fragile and precarious greatness. Twenty years after 1660, Europe had come to see that the youthful giant was plainly somewhat weak at the knees; twenty more, and Sweden's neighbours were gathering for the kill; a further twenty, and she had sunk irrevocably to the position of a state of the second order. After 1721 her overseas possessions shrank to no more than a shred of Pomerania; which remained as a memento of empire, a kind of Calais, preserved as a keepsake after all the rest was gone.

Yet if the Swedish empire proved a transient phenomenon, it did not vanish without leaving strong traces behind it; if Swedish military might proved insecurely based, it had been real enough in the 1630s and 1640s. The creator of that military power, the architect of that empire, was Gustavus Adolphus. The ascendancy of Spain in the sixteenth century, the economic predominance of the Dutch in the seventeenth, are not to be explained in terms of personalities: the greatness of Sweden, on the other hand, does seem to be directly related to the character and ability of her rulers. The military genius of Gustavus Adolphus, the olympian statesmanship of Axel Oxenstierna, the restless energy of Charles X, between them erected a great political edifice; the blinkered obstinacy of Charles XII finally destroyed it. In this very limited sense, and for a very limited period, Geijer's old dictum that 'the history of Sweden is the history of her kings' holds good. But it is a dictum which implies a view of history unacceptably narrow; and tells us nothing of the means which made their achievements possible, nothing of the Swedish people upon whom their policies bore so heavily, nothing of the political constants which affected their calculations and their actions.

All these conquering monarchs were the prisoners of circumstance, constrained and limited by political and social situations which they had inherited, and which were largely outside their control; and they had to take things as they found them. The imperial adventures of the seventeenth century were in the main their reaction to these internal and external pressures; in so far as the empire was planned at all, it was planned as a response to Sweden's geopolitical situation, or as a desperate attempt to outface the economic facts of life.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Sweden was confronted, whether she liked it or not, with the possibility of having to wage war simultaneously on two fronts; and her foreign policy was necessarily conditioned by that fact. Denmark and Norway threatened her from south and west; Muscovy loomed darkly over the eastern horizon. The danger from Denmark took its rise in the confused history of the fifteenth century, for much of which Sweden had been merged with Norway and Denmark in a united Scandinavian kingdom whose centre of gravity lay in Copenhagen. The Union had had a chequered history, and from the 1440s onward Sweden more often than not had pursued a virtually independent existence under its own regents. But it was only in 1523 that Gustavus I, the founder of the Vasa dynasty, finally broke loose from the Union and established his country as a fully independent sovereign state.

It was a state of vast dimensions, stretching northwards from the Smaland border to the Arctic, until it petered out on the tundras in a no man's land which was still the preserve of the nomadic Lapps; while on the other side of the Gulf of Bothnia it included the associated territory of Finland, which had been conquered and colonized by Swedish expeditions in the thirteenth century, and was to remain an integral part of the Swedish realm until it was lost to Russia in 1809. But, big as the country was, in the eyes of Swedish statesmen it was not big enough for safety. To east and west, actual or potential enemies impended over its shaggy frontiers and menaced its security. When independence came in 1523, the Danes were able to retain control of the provinces of Halland, Skane, and Blekinge, which formed the natural southern limits of the Swedish half of the peninsula, and were on economic as well as political grounds highly desirable possessions. This situation meant that the kings of Denmark straddled the narrows of the Sound, one foot planted in Elsinore, the other in Hälsingborg; and from this point of vantage they exercised a patrimonial control of all the shipping that passed between. The Sound, they contended, was a stream flowing through Danish territory, rather than an international waterway; and they applied this theory by taking toll of merchantmen entering and leaving the Baltic. With the proceeds they built a formidable navy. They were thus in a position to cut off Stockholm from all maritime contact with western Europe, if they chose to do so. Nor was this all. Strung out eastwards across the Baltic from Copenhagen, the Danish-held islands of Bornholm, Gotland, and Osel provided bases from which the Danish navy could keep Swedish trade within the Baltic under surveillance, and if need be could threaten Sweden's communications with the Hanseatic ports of Germany and Livonia. The west, again, the Norwegian kingdom (still linked to Denmark by a personal union) retained possession of the province of Bohuslän; while half-way up the Scandinavian peninsula the Norwegian provinces of Jamtland and Härjedalen thrust far to the eastward across the mountains that divide Scandinavia from north to south.

Jämtland and Harjedalen, it is true, were more of a piece of geographical inconsequence than a serious anxiety: in every Swedish-Danish war they fell more or less into Sweden's hands. But Bohuslän was another matter, for its southern frontier came so close to the northern limits of Halland that the two were separated only by a narrow (and highly vulnerable) strip of Swedish territory. Through that strip ran the Göta river, and at its mouth successive Swedish sovereigns established successive fortresses - first Nya Lödöse, then Älvsborg, finally Gothenburg — in an effort to prevent these pincers from closing. As yet, it is true, not much Swedish trade went this way, for land-communications between Älvsborg and central Sweden were very difficult; but, bad as they were, they provided Sweden's only direct line of access to the North Sea and the markets that lay beyond it. If Denmark should decide to close the Sound, they offered the only means of obtaining those supplies of Bay salt without which the country could not long survive.

It was a state of affairs which the kings of Sweden must sooner or later seek to alter, if ever the land were to thrive; and in itself it made good relations with Denmark difficult. But the difficulty became an impossibility in the face of Danish aspirations to restore the shattered fabric of the Scandinavian Union and once more to subject the Swedes to rule from Copenhagen. From 1523 to 1611 Sweden's constant suspicion of Denmark was based on fear: fear of a Danish attempt at reconquest. There were, indeed, periods when common political interests, reinforcing an obstinately persistent sense of the underlying unity of the North, produced a relaxation of tension and a grudging co-operation; but the roots of enmity lay too deep to be easily plucked up.

The threat from the east was older than that from the west. The conquest of Finland had long ago involved Swedes and Russians in rivalry for the control of the eastern march-lands of Karelia. In 1323 the Treaty of Nöteborg had attempted to define spheres of influence in this region. It had left the Russians a large slice of eastern Finland, and drawn a frontier which would have given them access to the northern end of the Gulf of Bothnia. But the line of the boundary thus established was always in dispute, and the pressure of Swedish colonization soon pushed far beyond it. The weakness of Russia in the period of the 'Tatar yoke' had ensured that the process should meet with little opposition, and by the close of the Middle Ages the limits of Finland were much as we know them today. The consolidation of the Muscovite realm in the later fifteenth century, however, had reopened the question. The reign of Ivan III saw the beginning of Russia's attempt to break out to the Baltic, and a revival of Russian attacks upon Swedish positions in Finland. By the 1540s the threat to Finland's eastern frontier had clearly developed; so clearly, that even the wary and parsimonious Gustavus Vasa was contemplating a preventive war, in order to scotch the danger while Ivan IV was still a minor. In the 1550s frontier incidents did indeed lead to a three years' war. It settled nothing; but it left the Swedes with a lively sense of the danger to be apprehended from Moscow's expansive policies: henceforward Muscovy, no less than Denmark, was a likely enemy. For the next two centuries it would be one of Sweden's major concerns to ensure that the two did not join forces against her.

In the 1560s the collapse of the old crusading Order of the Livonian Knights initiated a crisis which lasted for more than thirty years. The vacuum of power which was the result of that collapse presented Ivan IV with a chance to effect a lodgement on the Baltic coast. In 1559 his armies captured Narva, and for the first time the merchants of western Europe were able to trade directly with the Russians without being mulcted by greedy Hanseatic middlemen. But it was not only Muscovy that was interested in the acquistion of Livonia. The disappearance of the Livonian Knights presented to other states opportunities too tempting to be ignored: to Poland, for instance, which was obviously concerned in keeping the Russians out; to Denmark, which had old claims to influence in this region. With Poland, Sweden had as yet no quarrel; but she had no wish to see Muscovy established as a Baltic power. Still less could she afford to allow this area to pass under the control of Denmark: a Danish occupation of Reval would threaten Finland; it would mean the forging of one more link in the chain of Danish encirclement. Even Gustavus Vasa, had he lived, would probably have been unable to sit still and allow events to take their course; and Eric XIV, who succeeded him in 1560, had certainly no intention of doing so. When the town of Reval, equally alarmed by the prospect of subjection to Russia, Denmark, or Poland, offered in desperation to put itself under the protection of the king of Sweden, the offer was at once accepted. A Swedish expeditionary force was sent to Estonia. Reval became a Swedish town; and remained so until 1721.

It was a fateful decision. For it meant, among other things, that the first stone of the Swedish empire had been laid. And the thing had been done (it is worth remembering) for reasons which were essentially defensive. No doubt Eric XIV, like his father, was anxious to obtain a share in the tolls and dues which could be levied on the Russia trade by sovereigns in possession of suitable end-ports; but each would have preferred to establish a staple in Finland. Economic considerations certainly played a part in the creation of the Swedish empire, and as it expanded they increased in importance, if only because the cost of defending it grew increasingly heavy. But to begin with such considerations were subordinate: the problem was at bottom political; a problem of security, a problem perhaps of survival.

But the antithesis between political and economic factors in the history of the Swedish empire is an unreal and false antithesis. From beginning to end they were twin aspects of the same question. Security implied the command of the resources to pay for it; and those resources could be obtained only by war. It may well be doubted whether in 1560 Eric XIV had any more idea of founding an empire in Livonia than Gustavus Adolphus had of founding an empire in Germany in 1630. Each found himself enmeshed in a catena of circumstances and dilemmas; each felt himself led by strict political logic to steps whose consequences no one could foresee. The acquisition of Reval might seem a limited objective: the event proved that it was the setting in motion of a train of events which carried men along whether they would or no. The defence of Reval could hardly be ensured unless a possible enemy were denied control of the adjacent territory from which an attack upon it could be mounted. Once acquired, that territory in its turn prescribed fresh objectives for a defensive strategy. Military logic transformed a limited commitment into an open-ended programme of logical aggression. Eric XIV took over Reval: within a decade it had become a question not of Reval only but of Estonia. From 1570 to 1595 Sweden fought a desultory war with Russia to retain that province. Not until 1581, when Pontus de la Gardie crowned his victories with the triumphant capture of Narva, did the struggle begin to turn in Sweden's favour; not until 1595 was she able, at the Peace of Teusina, to extort relatively satisfactory terms from her adversary. At Teusina the Tsar recognized Sweden's right to Estonia, and agreed to a redrawing of the Finnish frontier on lines which gave legal sanction to the extension of Swedish colonization since 1323.

Thus by 1595 the danger of Danish encirclement had been averted, the Russian drive to the sea had been halted, and Sweden had acquired her first overseas province. But in the course of doing so she had also acquired a new potential enemy. The Poles had forced Russia to acknowledge their right to Livonia in 1583; and Livonia, in their view, (and historically they were quite right) included Estonia. After 1583, therefore, Polish interests clashed with the interests of Sweden. One possible way of settling the controversy lay through a dynastic union; and it was in the hope of gaining Estonia at the price of collaboration against Russia that the Polish magnates in 1587 elected Sigismund, the heir to the Swedish throne, as their king. It soon became apparent that they had miscalculated: Sigismund's Swedish subjects, it appeared, were not prepared to allow him to cede Estonia. Thus the Poles felt themselves to have been cheated, and henceforward only awaited a favourable opportunity to assert their claims. That opportunity came in 1600, when Sigismund (for purely domestic reasons) was deposed by his Swedish subjects, and the crown usurped by his uncle, King Charles IX. It was this Charles IX who was the father of Gustavus Adolphus. The ensuing quarrel between the usurper and the deposed, the dynastic split within the Vasa family, was in some ways an accident extraneous to Swedish political traditions. But one element in it was the fact that Sigismund's obligations as elected Polish king conflicted with his duty as a hereditary Swedish monarch. And one reason why they clashed was the rivalry of Sweden and Poland for the control of Estonia. Thus Eric XIV's venture had added a new dimension to foreign policy: the hostility of Poland. It had entailed commitments and created vested interests which were not easily to be jettisoned. It had already involved Sweden in a quarter of a century of war, and it was to prove a fruitful breeding-ground of wars in the future. The threat from Russia had indeed been warded off for the present; and the anarchy which engulfed that country in the years after 1605 made any recurrence of that danger unlikely in the immediate future. But the latent threat from Denmark remained: indeed, the new king of Denmark, Christian IV, was perhaps more interested in the possibility of restoring the old Scandinavian Union than any of his predecessors since 1523. As the seventeenth century opened, Sweden found herself in a perilous world.

It must be the part of a prudent statesman to see to it that if war proved to be unavoidable, at least it should be a war against no more than one enemy at a time. But Charles IX was not a prudent statesman. He had driven Sigismund from Sweden by methods which were violent and unconstitutional, and in doing so he had imported into Swedish foreign policy a confessional element which had never hitherto been of much importance. Since the reign of Gustavus Vasa, Sweden had been a Lutheran country; but Sigismund, the son of John III by a Polish princess, had been brought up a Roman Catholic: this was one reason why he had been an acceptable candidate for the Polish crown. His endeavour to obtain a measure of toleration for Roman Catholics in Sweden was met with a compact and successful resistance by the Swedish Estates, and especially by the clergy; and it was not difficult for Charles to beat the Protestant drum and represent what was really a struggle for power as essentially a religious issue. The deposition of Sigismund, and the accession of Charles, was made to assume the aspect of a victory of militant Protestantism over the aggressions of the Counter-Reformation. There was an element of truth in this; for Sigismund was a pupil of the Jesuits, a zealous son of the Church, and in him the Papacy saw the instrument appointed by God for the recovery of Scandinavia to Rome. Protestant Europe, all the same, listened with pointed scepticism to Charles's attempts to represent his cause as one aspect of the general religious struggle, and the more responsible Lutheran princes disapproved of what had happened. Yet though Charles's appeals to Protestant solidarity for the moment fell remarkably flat, he had struck a note which was to reverberate strongly in the next reign. Charles himself might not be a very credible candidate for the part of Protestant Hero; but with Gustavus the case would be altered. The dynastic quarrel, the Swedish — Polish rivalry for control of Estonia, had already been given confessional overtones.

Yet in 1600 a war with Poland was not inevitable. The Polish magnates had little sympathy for Sigismund's natural desire to recover his hereditary kingdom; they were more interested in thwarting his attempts to strengthen the monarchy than in campaigns in Estonia; and the victory of the Counter-Reformation in Poland was still far from complete. If Charles had been content to stand on the defensive in Estonia, Sigismund might well have found it impossible to raise an adequate army from his unruly subjects. But Charles did not stand on the defensive: he invaded Livonia. By doing so he rallied to Sigismund's cause the mass of the Polish nobility, who could not afford to see Sweden controlling the great trade-artery of the Düna down which the produce of their latifundia flowed to the grain-markets of Amsterdam.

Thus Charles initiated a Swedish-Polish war which was to last, with truces of longer or shorter duration, for some sixty years: it was among the most troublesome political heirlooms which he bequeathed to his successor. The war went ill for Sweden: at Kirkholm in 1605 Charles sustained the most crushing defeat ever to be inflicted on a Swedish army, and was lucky to escape with his life. It would have gone still worse, had not Sigismund's efforts been crippled by domestic insurrection, and his attention distracted to a political objective even more tempting than the conquest of Estonia. This was nothing less than the incorporation of the Muscovite realm into Poland. A Polish-backed Pretender seized the Russian throne on the death of Boris Godunov in 1605. Though his career came to a violent end within a year, it initiated a period of anarchy and civil war which reduced Russia to impotence and presented obvious opportunities for foreign intervention. Sigismund could not resist the temptation to use them. He would have liked to obtain the throne of the Tsars for himself, or, failing that, for his son, Ladislas; and he did in fact manage to find sufficient partisans in Russia to secure Ladislas's election. A Polish garrison established itself in Moscow; a Polish army besieged Smolensk.

In the face of this new development the war in Livonia became a secondary issue, and the campaigns there declined into desultory operations, unmemorable even to the military historian. For however the fighting might go in Estonia, Charles IX could not afford to see a Polish Tsar in Moscow. Hitherto, the waters of the Baltic had safeguarded him against any attempt at invasion from Poland; for Sigismund had no fleet. But now the back door to Stockholm, by way of Finland, would lie open to Sigismund's assault: Sweden would have lost her ditch. Polish intervention in Russia had already forced Charles to meddle in Muscovite politics: by the Treaty of Viborg (1609), Vasily Shuisky, the boyars' Tsar, had purchased Swedish assistance against the Poles by the promise of territorial concessions. But at Klushino, in 1610, he and his Swedish auxiliaries sustained a disastrous defeat, and that defeat was shortly followed by his deposition. Ladislas, it seemed, would now have a clear field. In this crisis, the Swedish commander in Russia, Jakob de la Gardie, came to an agreement with those elements which were not prepared to accept a Catholic Pole as their ruler, and secured from them an offer of the crown to one of the sons of Charles IX preferably the younger son, Charles Philip. Charles IX died before reaching a decision on this offer, but in the meantime de la Gardie set about establishing a Swedish protectorate in north-western Russia as a base from which Charles Philip might one day assert his authority over the whole country. It was an open questio...