In August, Gustavus marched his 27,000 Swedes south from Berlin, and by September had met up with the elector of Saxony, who had marshaled a force of nearly 20,000 German soldiers and who had even thought to supply his own artillery. Tilly, aware of the threat, had spent the summer adding to his ranks, so he had somewhere around 42,000 experienced troops under his command. On September 17, 1631, the opposing armies met on a dry, dusty hillock called Breitenfeld, close to Leipzig, and fell on each other with “great fury.” Such was the zeal exhibited by the imperial troops that the elector of Saxony and his men, whose previous military experience had been against the hapless Silesians, bolted almost immediately. It was reported that the elector of Saxony, who had a flashy new uniform for the occasion and whose movements were consequently easily discernible, did not stop galloping for fifteen miles, until he was safely back in his home territory. Although he could not prevent a portion of his army from chasing after the fleeing soldiers and so lost some men that he could have used on the field, General Tilly did manage to capture and turn the elector of Saxony’s artillery around so he could use it, as well as his own, to fire on Gustavus and his Swedish troops.
In any battle that had come before, this dispiriting opening would have been enough to destroy the morale of the remaining combatants and with it their chance for victory. But Gustavus Adolphus was unlike any opponent Tilly had faced. He did not give up and he did not allow his soldiers to give up, even under the pressure of the heavy guns. His muskets kept firing, regularly, ceaselessly, over the course of hours; his cavalry, used to working in small groups, could turn in an instant to protect the infantry; and Gustavus was always in the lead where the fighting was thickest, driving his stallion from one hot spot to the next. The imperial army fought bravely but charge after charge was beaten back until by the end of the day it was the Swedes who were charging, recapturing the artillery that had been used against them. It was a battle for the history books; Napoleon would later cite it with admiration. When it was over, 15,000 imperial soldiers lay dead on the field, with another 7,000 taken prisoner, and Tilly was so severely wounded that he was forced to retreat. As night fell, the king of Sweden, who had lost only 1,200 men that day, held the field.
The news spread rapidly through Europe and a messenger was dispatched from Gustavus to Charles I in London. The envoy brought with him “a letter from him [Gustavus] to his Majesty [Charles]… of the great and complete victory which God had given him against his enemies,” reported a member of Charles’s government in amazement, “and withal to represent unto him the fair opportunity which now was offered of restoring the King of Bohemia to his estate.”
AFTER SO MANY YEARS of raised hopes followed by crushing disappointment, Elizabeth could hardly credit the news. “They talk much of a letter from that king [of Sweden] to my brother, where all is promised; yet since we cannot have a sight of that letter I fear there is nothing in it,” she wrote guardedly to a friend. But this time, unbelievably, it was true. Gustavus followed up his mighty victory by marching farther south into Germany, taking first Erfurt, and then Würzburg, which was only a little more than fifty miles from Heidelberg itself. Even better, to redeem himself and his men after their somewhat less than stalwart behavior on the battlefield at Breitenfeld, the elector of Saxony agreed to send some of his soldiers into Bohemia to capture the capital, an assault made significantly easier by the fact that the imperial troops charged with defending the city decamped before they got there. “I am this week to present you with the joyful news of the winning of Prague, by Count Thorne, who, upon his arrival in Bohemia with some of the Duke of Saxony’s and of the King of Sweden’s forces, the country people flocked unto him; and he no sooner appeared before the city but it yielded without any blows,” an English envoy reported to Charles’s secretary of state in a letter of November 29, 1631.
All through that glorious autumn and winter, the Protestant cause, crushed for over a decade under Habsburg rule and thought irretrievably lost, rebounded under the king of Sweden’s potent dynamism. (So much for Lutherans preferring Catholics to Calvinists. What Lutherans preferred was what everyone prefers—to win.) And Gustavus seemed absolutely committed to returning Frederick’s property to him. When Charles, pleading poverty (but actually worried about breaking his peace with Spain and hoping, like his father, to rely solely upon negotiations to settle the matter), refused to help his sister and her husband outfit a force that would allow Frederick to aid the effort to retrieve the Palatinate, Gustavus insisted that the king of Bohemia join him in Germany anyway, even if he could not contribute a single soldier. “When the King of Sweden first sent for him [Frederick] thither, he made answer… he had neither men or money,” a legislator reported from London. “‘No!’ said the King. ‘What, a brother of the King of Great Britain, and protected by the States, and must he come to me in his doublet and hose! Let him come, howsoever, and I will do my best to restore him to his patrimony.’ To which end, I hear, that incomparable King hath sworn all the towns he hath taken in the Palatinate to the service of their original master, the Palsgrave [Frederick]. And I am told also that he hath given order to the Duke of Saxony once more to proclaim him King of Bohemia,” the English correspondent added with awe.*
Elizabeth couldn’t go—she had just (what else) given birth, on January 12, 1632, to her thirteenth child, a son whom the couple gratefully named Gustavus Adolphus—but she sent Frederick into Germany to meet with his benefactor. He left The Hague on January 26, but before setting off in earnest, made sure to visit the family house in Leyden to say good-bye to his children. On February 10 he was in Frankfort-on-the-Main, where the king of Sweden had set up his winter camp. By the time he got there, Gustavus was supreme commander of some seven armies incorporating approximately 80,000 men. A dozen Protestant German barons had joined him and were serving in his various armies. Ambassadors from every power in Europe thronged his court.
Finding the king of Sweden out with his troops, Frederick went after him into the countryside. “My Lord of Canterbury told me, yesterday, from Sir Francis Nethersole’s mouth, that the Kings of Sweden and Bohemia… met… in a great field between Frankfort and Mentz,” reported a member of Charles’s government. “When they approached, the armies making a stand, the kings met on horseback, and, having saluted each other, dismounted and embraced; but he of Sweden the other with such joy and affection as he lifted him upon high, which was apprehended for a good omen to the King of Bohemia by all that saw it.” Although Heidelberg was still held by Spanish troops, much of the rest of the Lower Palatinate was already under the king of Sweden’s control and the inhabitants turned out in large numbers at the news of Frederick’s arrival. “Wonderful welcome, was this prince to his own subjects of the Palatinate,” exclaimed an English envoy, “who everywhere ran out to see his majesty, with infinite expressions of joy and contentment, with many a hearty prayer, and tear, and high-sounding acclamation.” Such a reception could not help but lift Elizabeth’s and her husband’s spirits. “I think that the King [Charles I] will one day recognize the mistake he made in not giving military assistance to the King of Bohemia,” Frederick wrote tellingly to his wife from Frankfurt.* Back in The Hague, Elizabeth, giving herself over to joy and hope, had a commemorative medallion struck and engraved with the motto “The setting sun rises again.”
But where Frederick’s priority was to expel the remaining Spanish soldiers from Heidelberg and reestablish himself and his family in his ancestral territory, this was in no way Gustavus’s primary concern. The king of Sweden had a major war to run, which was spread out across the Habsburg empire, and which obliged him to move swiftly from place to place. Nor could the king of Bohemia convince Gustavus (who was nonetheless unfailingly warm and polite to his guest) to let Frederick break away from the rest of the army and raise his own troops to take on the Spanish himself. “My dearest heart,” Frederick was soon complaining by letter to Elizabeth, “I know not what I am about; I see clearly that the King of Sw
eden does not desire me to have troops; he said that if I raised any, it would ruin his army—I know not therefore what I shall be good for… If there be nothing more to do than what I see as yet, I had better have stayed at the Hague.”
What really seemed to have happened was that Gustavus’s head had been turned by all the attention, and whereas before he might have been content with just the territory he had already conquered in northern Germany, by the time Frederick joined him he had enlarged his vision significantly, to the point where he felt himself deserving of an empire, in which all the Protestant barons, including the king of Bohemia, would comprise so many vassals. “The appetite has been so sharpened in Gustavus Adolphus by the conquests which he has achieved that it already has no bounds,” the French ambassador warned bluntly in a report to Paris, “and his confidence in his fortune has risen to such a height that he no longer doubts in regard to any supposable success, and regards assault and victory as of one meaning to him… He desires to rule the whole course of the Rhine, occupy Coblentz and Mannheim, extend aid to the Hollanders, and to cut off our access to Germany.”
Frederick, not truly understanding this and believing that Gustavus would eventually get around to retaking Heidelberg, felt more or less obliged to stick around and sort of trail after Gustavus in his martial wanderings. They went from Frankfurt to Aschaffenburg, from Aschaffenburg to Nuremberg. Their destination was Augsburg, where Tilly, although clearly still damaged both physically and spiritually from the earlier battle at Breitenfeld, had been pressured by Ferdinand to regroup and mount an offensive. (During a military strategy meeting the veteran general shocked the duke of Bavaria by suddenly breaking down into uncontrollable sobs.) On April 15, Gustavus’s soldiers surprised Tilly’s in a morning skirmish. Tilly was shot in the leg in the first wave and had to be hurriedly evacuated by litter from the field; the rest of his army retreated with him. The aged and broken general died two weeks later, on April 30, 1632, of his wounds. Gustavus, with Frederick still part of his entourage, went on to take Munich.
By the end of the summer it was clear that the king of Sweden did not intend to reinstate his good friend and ally the king of Bohemia in the Palatinate except at a very great price, the terms of which were drawn up in Latin. Frederick would have to pay an exorbitant sum to Gustavus (whose soldiers, in fairness, would be doing all the work) and he would have to ensure that those of his subjects who were Lutherans could practice their religion without prejudice (Frederick was a very devout Calvinist). Even then, Gustavus did not agree to give back that part of the Palatinate that he had already conquered, although he gave lip service to the condition that Frederick’s sons would inherit in full after his death. “I never did think that the King of Sweden would proceed honorably,” Frederick fumed in a letter of September 29 to Elizabeth. “I saw clearly that he had designs on freedom.” Thoroughly depressed, and suffering from an ear infection, he left Gustavus’s army and headed back on his own toward the Lower Palatinate, intending to stop at the small village of Alsheim, near Mainz, to recover. “I will be miserable at Alsheim, where I shall be entirely alone,” he confessed despondently to his wife. “I will not fail to write to you from there every week. Believe me that my thoughts are continually with you, whom I love with all my heart.”
Back in Holland, Elizabeth did everything she could to raise her husband’s spirits and forward his cause. No secretary of state or cabinet minister displayed more energy or ability than she. She secured audiences, drew important emissaries to her house at The Hague, and once again directed reams of letters to every member of her wide acquaintance, alternately coaxing, humoring, entreating, or bargaining. She was in direct correspondence with the English ambassador assigned to Gustavus’s court, and he frequently replied to her before reporting to London. Charles’s envoy to Brussels was also a regular correspondent, as was one of her brother’s closest advisers in London. She lobbied endlessly for funds and sent a personal messenger to her uncle the king of Denmark, and thereby succeeded in soliciting a promise that Elizabeth would receive a share in the inheritance of her maternal grandmother to be used to help reclaim the Palatinate. To Frederick she wrote loving, encouraging missives two and sometimes three times a week: bright, chatty notes filled with news about his sons and daughters or entertaining gossip (any important information relating to the war or the Palatinate was communicated by cipher). Along with her letters, she often attached portraits of the children, for which in his forlornness he thanked her profusely.
And while Frederick made his weary, despondent way west toward Mainz, and Elizabeth strove to manage their affairs and infuse their prospects with new buoyancy, Gustavus Adolphus moved forward relentlessly.
A METEORIC SUCCESS of the kind achieved by the king of Sweden inevitably provokes pushback. In this case, Ferdinand, watching first in disbelief and then in desperation as town after town fell to the enemy, understood that this was a challenge that must be met immediately. Consequently, after Tilly’s death, the emperor appointed his former commander General Wallenstein as well as Tilly’s second-in-command, Count Pappenheim, to recruit a new army. It took all summer, but by the fall they had assembled a new imperial fighting force of approximately 26,000 soldiers.
Aware of Gustavus’s superior numbers, Wallenstein wisely chose not to engage his opponent in open battle but instead to go wherever the king of Sweden was not. With so much territory to cover, Gustavus obviously could not be everywhere at once and so Wallenstein began to retake the towns and cities, beginning with Prague, which had been captured by the Swedes but then left sparsely defended. This strategy resulted in Gustavus’s having to chase after the imperial army all over Germany. It wasn’t until the second week in November that he caught up with them in Lützen, not very far from Breitenfeld, site of his original triumph.
Wallenstein knew himself to be in trouble. Not expecting to meet the enemy, he had sent Pappenheim’s divisions north and so found himself left with only about half his soldiers. He sent an urgent message ordering Pappenheim’s return and did what he could to prepare for the onslaught. He dug a ditch to protect his musket men and supplemented his meager 14,000 troops by pressing into service his cooks and baggage handlers. Gustavus had only 16,000 soldiers with him—he had been waiting for reinforcements—but when he was apprised of the thinness of the imperial numbers, he knew he could take them. On the morning of November 16, 1632, the king of Sweden called his troops together, bent his head in prayer, and attacked.
An early morning fog hung over the battlefield, which initially helped obscure the imperial position, but by late morning the Swedish cavalry had overrun the ditch and had only the small store of imperial artillery with which to contend. Alarmed, Wallenstein set fire to the town to have the cover of smoke in the event of a retreat when suddenly hurtling out of the north came Pappenheim and his troops. And sometime after that, as the smoke began to clear, Gustavus’s stallion was observed to be running loose with no sign of the king in the saddle. The rumor ran frantically through the Swedish army that the Lion of the North had fallen.
By nightfall Wallenstein was forced to concede the field and retreated with the remains of his army, leaving the artillery and camp stores to the victor. But he also left behind the corpse of Gustavus Adolphus, the greatest warrior of his time or perhaps of any time. The body was found on the enemy’s side of the ditch, and it was clear that the king of Sweden had not succumbed easily. He had been shot four times: once in the head, twice in the arm, and the last, ominously, in the back.
NEWS OF GUSTAVUS’S DEATH reverberated through Europe. No one was more shocked or disappointed than Elizabeth, who had clearly held out hope that after some negotiation, the king of Sweden and Frederick would come to terms and that they would soon be able to return to their home in Heidelberg. “The loss… doth not a little trouble me, considering in what estate the King [Frederick] is now left,” she confessed to an English cousin. Her husband was still in Mainz, where he had been waiting for a messenger f
rom Gustavus in response to his latest overture. He had recovered from his ear infection but still felt unwell; in addition, he was depressed and lonely. There was plague at Mainz but he couldn’t sit still, and against his doctor’s orders he went to a crowded church to pray for guidance. That evening, he went to bed with a headache.
During the night, he had a fever and a little swelling in the neck, but his secretary wrote reassuringly to Elizabeth that he had seen “his majesty of Bohemia, in his bed in the morning; and he told me that his fever had quite left him, but that the swelling in his neck troubled him a little, and he hoped when that had burst, he should be cured. For the rest, he spoke of business, and smiled at the physicians who wanted to charge him with the plague.” But that evening the fever returned in force, and he was delirious. The telltale marks of the fearful disease began to appear on his body.
On November 17, Frederick rallied sufficiently to be able to write Elizabeth a short note. Not wanting to worry her, he did not mention his illness. But he knew he was failing. “I will not make this any longer except to assure you that I shall be until my grave my dear and only heart, your most faithful friend and most affectionate servant,” he scribbled.
It was to be his last letter to her. In the early morning hours of November 29, 1632, just two weeks after the slaying of Gustavus in battle, thirty-six-year-old Frederick, onetime king of Bohemia and Elector Palatine, summoned witnesses to his bedside. His final thoughts were with his wife and children. He pleaded for their care and protection by the prince of Orange, the king of England, and the States General of Holland.
He died at daybreak.
PART II
The Daughters of the Winter Queen
Daughters of the Winter Queen Page 13
