The cathedrals of Vienna, Brussels, and Madrid rang with joyful Te Deums at the news of the King's death. The Spanish capital celebrated the "triumph" with twelve days of bull-fighting. Emperor Ferdinand was better than his day; he wept at the sight of the King's blood-stained jacket. The Protestant world trembled; its hope and strength were gone. But the Swedish people, wiping away their tears, resolved stoutly to carry on Gustav Adolf's work. The men he had trained led his armies to victory on yet many a stricken field. Peace came at length to Europe; the last religious war had been fought and won. Freedom of worship, liberty of conscience, were bought at the cost of the kingliest head that ever wore a crown. The great ruler's life-work was done.
Gustav Adolf was in his thirty-eighth year when he fell. Of stature he was tall and stout, a fair-haired, blue-eyed giant, stern in war, gentle in the friendships of peace. He was a born ruler of men. Though he was away fighting in foreign lands all the years of his reign, he kept a firm grasp on the home affairs of his kingdom. One traces his hand everywhere, ordering, shaping, finding ways, or making them where there was none. The valuable mines of Sweden were ill managed. The metal was exported in coarse pigs to Germany for very little, worked up there, and resold to Sweden at the highest price. He created a Board of Mines, established smelteries, and the day came when, instead of going abroad for its munitions of war, Sweden had for its customers half Europe. Like Christian of Denmark with whom he disagreed, he encouraged industries and greatly furthered trade and commerce. He built highways and canals, and he did not forget the cause of instruction. Upon the university at Upsala he bestowed his entire personal patrimony of three hundred and thirteen farms as a free gift. His people honor him with cause as the real founder of the Swedish system of education.
The master he was always. Sweden had, on one hand, a powerful, able nobility; on the other, a strong, independent peasantry,—a combination full of pitfalls for a weak ruler, but with equal promise of great things under the master hand. His father had cowed the stubborn nobles with the headsman's axe. Gustav Adolf drew them to him and imbued them with his own spirit. He found them a contentious party within the state; he left them its strongest props in the conduct of public affairs. Nor was it always with persuasion he worked. His reward for the unjust judge has been quoted. When the council failed to send him supplies in Germany, pleading failure of crops as their excuse, he wrote back: "You speak of the high prices of corn. Probably they are high because those who have it want to profit by the need of others." And he set a new chief over the finances. On the other hand, he gave shape to the relations between king and people. The Riksdag held its sessions, but the laws that ruled it were so vague that it was no unusual thing for men who were not members at all to attend and join in the debates. Gustav Adolf put an abrupt end to "a state of things that exposed Sweden to the contempt of the nations." As he ordered it, the initiative remained with the crown; it was the right of the Riksdag to complain and discuss; of the King to "choose the best" after hearing all sides.
As a young prince, Gustav Adolf fell deeply in love with Ebba Brahe, the beautiful daughter of one of Sweden's most powerful noblemen. The two had been play-mates and became lovers. But the old queen frowned upon the match. He was the coming king, she was a subject, and the queen managed, with the help of Oxenstjerna, who was Gustav's best friend all through his life, to make him give up his love. "Then I will never marry," he cried in a burst of tempestuous grief. But when the queen had got Ebba Brahe safely married to one of his father's famous generals, he wedded the lovely sister of the Elector of Brandenburg. She adored her royal husband, but never took kindly to Sweden, and the people did not like her. They clung to the great king's early love, and to this day they linger before the picture of the beautiful Ebba in the Stockholm castle when they come from his grave in the Riddarholm church, while they pass the queen's by with hardly a glance. It is recorded that Ebba made her husband a good and dutiful wife. If her thoughts strayed at times to the old days and what might have been, it is not strange. In one of those moods she wrote on a window-pane in the castle:
I am happy in my lot,
And thanks I give to God.
The queen-mother saw it and wrote under it her own version:
You wouldn't, but you must.
'Tis the lot of the dust.
KING AND SAILOR, HEROES OF COPENHAGEN
Of all the foolish wars that were ever waged, it would seem that the one declared by Denmark against Sweden in 1657 had the least excuse. A century before, the two countries had fought through eight bitter years over the momentous question whether Denmark should carry in her shield the three lions that stood for the three Scandinavian kingdoms, the Swedish one having set up for itself in the dissolution of the union between them, and at the end of the fight they were where they had started: each of them kept the whole brood. But this war was without even that excuse. Denmark was helplessly impoverished. Her trade was ruined; the nobles were sucking the marrow of the country. Of the freehold farms that had been its strength scarce five thousand were left in the land. It could hardly pay its way in days of peace. Its strongholds lay in ruins; it had neither arms, ammunition, nor officers. On its roster of thirty thousand men for the national defence were carried the dead and the yet unborn, while the Swedish army of tried veterans had gone from victory to victory under a warlike king. To cap the climax, Copenhagen had been harassed by pestilence that had killed one-fifth of its fifty thousand people.
So ill matched were they when a stubborn king forced a war that could end only in disaster. When one of his councillors advised against the folly, he caned him and sent him into exile. Yet out of the fiery trial this king came a hero; his queen, whose pride and wasteful vanity13 had done its full share in bringing the country to the verge of ruin, became the idol of the nation. In the hour of its peril she grew to the stature of a great woman who shared danger and hardship with her people and by her example put hope and courage into their hearts.
Karl Gustav, the Swedish king, was campaigning in Poland, but as soon as he could turn around he marched his army against Denmark, scattered the forces that opposed him, and before news of his advance had reached Copenhagen knocked at the gate of Denmark demanding "speech of brother Frederik in good Swedish." A winter of great severity had bridged the Baltic and the sounds of the island kingdom. In two weeks he led his army, horse, foot, and guns, over the frozen seas where hardly a wagon had dared cross before. Great rifts yawned in their way, and whole companies were swallowed up; his own sleigh sank in the deep, but nothing stopped him. Danish emissaries came pleading for peace. He met them on the way to the capital, surrounded by his Finnish horsemen, and gave scant ear to their speeches while he drove on. Before the city he halted and dictated a peace so humiliating that one of the Danish commissioners exclaimed when he came to sign, "I wish I could not write." Perhaps the same wish troubled the conqueror's ambitious dreams. The peace was broken as swiftly as made. In five months he was back before Frederik's capital with his whole army, while a Swedish fleet anchored in the roadstead outside. "What difference does it make to you," was the contemptuous taunt flung at the anxious envoys who sought his camp, "whether the name of your king is Karl or Frederik so long as you are safe?" He had come to make an end of Denmark.
Copenhagen was almost without defences. The old earth walls mounted only six guns, with breastworks scarce knee-high. In places King Karl could have driven his sleigh into the heart of the city at the head of his army. But for the second time he hesitated when a swift blow would have won all—and lost. Overnight the Danish nation awoke to a fight for its life. King and people, till then strangers, in that hour became one. Frederik the Third met the craven counsel that he fly to Norway with the proud answer, "I will die in my nest, if need be, and my wife with me." With a shout the burghers swore to fight to the last man. The walls of the city rose as if by magic. Nobles and mechanics, clergy and laborers, students, professors and sailors worked side by side; high-born women wheeled barrows. Every tree was cut down and made into palisades. The crops ripening in the fields were gathered in haste and the cattle driven in. The city had been provisioned for barely a week and garrisoned by four hundred raw recruits. Sailors from the useless ships took out their guns and mounted them in the redoubts. Peasants flocked in and were armed with battle-axes, clubs, and boat-hooks when the supply of muskets gave out. When Karl Gustav drew his lines tight he faced six thousand determined men behind strong walls. The city stood in a ring of blazing fires. Its defenders were burning down the houses and woods beyond the moats to clear the way for their gunners. The King watched the sight from his horse in silence. He knew what it meant; he had fought in the Thirty Years' War: "Now, I vow, we shall have fighting," was all he said.
It was not long in coming. On the second night the garrison made a sortie and drove back the invaders, destroying their works with great slaughter. Night after night, and sometimes in the broad day, they returned to the charge, overwhelming the Swedes where least expected, capturing their guns, their supplies, and their outposts. Short of arms and ammunition, they took them in the enemy's lines. In one of these raids Karl Gustav himself was all but made prisoner. A horseman had him by the shoulder, but he wrenched himself loose and spurred his horse into the sea where a boat from one of the ships rescued him. The defence took on something of the fervor of religious frenzy. Twice a day services were held on the walls of the city; within, the men who could not bear arms, and the women, barricaded the streets with stones and iron chains for the last fight, were it to come. In his place on the wall every burgher had a hundred brickbats or stones piled up for ammunition, and by night when the enemy rained red-hot shot upon the city, he fought with a club or spear in one hand, a torch in the other.
Eleven weeks the battle raged by night and by day. Then a Dutch fleet forced its way through the blockade after a fight in which it lost six ships and two admirals. It brought food, ammunition, and troops. The joy in the city was great. All day the church bells were rung, and the people hailed the Dutch as the saviours of the nation. But when they, too, would thank God for the victory and asked for the use of the University's hall, they were refused. They were followers of Calvin and their heresies must not be preached in the place set apart for teaching the doctrines of the "pure faith," said the professors, who were Lutheran. It was the way of the day. The Reformation had learned little from the bigotry of the Inquisition. The Dutchmen had to be content with the court-house. But the siege was not over. Another hard winter closed in with the enemy at the door, burrowing hourly nearer the outworks, and food and fire-wood grew scarcer day by day in the hard-pressed city. When things were at the worst pass in February, the Swedes gathered their hosts for a final assault. In the midnight hour they came on with white shirts drawn over their uniforms to make it hard to tell them from the snow. Karl Gustav himself led the storming party and at last was in the way of "getting speech of brother Frederik," for the Danish King was as good as his word. He had said that he would die in his nest, and time and again he had to be sternly reasoned with to prevent him from exposing himself overmuch. Where the danger was greatest he was, and beside him ever the queen, all her frivolity gone and forgotten. She who had danced at the court fêtes and followed the hounds on the chase as if the world had no other cares, became the very incarnation of the spirit of the bitter and bloody struggle. All through that winter the royal couple lived in a tent among their men, and when the alarm was sounded they were first on foot to lead them. Now that the hour had come, they were in the forefront of the fight.
Where the famous pleasure garden Tivoli now is, the strength of the enemy was massed against the redoubts at the western gate. The name of "Storm Street" tells yet of the doings of that night. King Karl had promised to give over the captured town to be sacked by his army three days and nights, and like hungry wolves they swarmed to the attack, a mob of sailors and workmen with scaling ladders in the van. The moats they crossed in spite of the gaps that had been made in the ice to stop them, but the garrison had poured water over the walls that froze as it ran, until they were like slippery icebergs. A bird could have found no foothold on them. Showers of rocks and junk and clubs fell upon the laddermen. Three times Karl Gustav hurled his columns against them; as often they were driven back, broken and beaten. A few gained a foothold on the walls only to be dashed down to death. The burghers fought for their lives and their homes. Their women carried boiling pitch and poured it over the breastworks, and when they had no more, dragged great beams and rolled them down upon the ladders, sweeping them clear of the enemy. In the hottest fight Gunde Rosenkrantz, one of the king's councillors, trod on a fallen soldier and, looking into his face, saw that it was his own son breathing his last. He bent over and kissed him, and went on fighting.
In the early morning hour Karl Gustav gave the order to retreat. The attack had failed. Many of his general officers were slain; nearly half of his army was killed, disabled, or captured. Six Swedish standards were taken by the Danes. The moats were filled with the dead. The Swedes had "come in their shrouds." The guns of the city thundered out a triple salute of triumph and the people sang Te Deums on the walls. Their hardships were not over. Fifteen months yet the city was invested and the home of daily privation; but their greatest peril was past. Copenhagen was saved, and with it the nation; the people had found itself and its king. That autumn a second Swedish army under the veteran Stenbock was massacred in the island of Fyen, and Karl Gustav exclaimed when the beaten general brought him the news, "Since the devil took the sheep he might have taken the buck too." He never got over it. Three months later he lay dead, and the siege of Copenhagen was raised in May, 1660. It had lasted twenty months.
Seven score years and one passed, and the morning of Holy Thursday14 saw a British fleet sailing slowly up the deep before Copenhagen, the deck of every ship bristling with guns, their crews at quarters, Lord Nelson's signal to "close for action" flying from the top of the flag-ship Elephant. Between the fleet and the shore lay a line of dismantled hulks on which men with steady eyes and stout hearts were guarding Denmark's honor. Once more it had been jeopardized by foolish counsel in high places. Danish statesmen had trifled and temporized while England, facing all Europe alone in the fight for her life, made ready to strike a decisive blow against the Armed Neutrality that threatened her supremacy on the sea. Once more the city had been caught unprepared, defenceless, and once more its people rose as one man to meet the danger. But it was too late. Outside, in the Sound, a fleet as great as that led by Nelson waited, should he fail, to finish his work. That was to destroy the Danish ships, if need be to bombard the city and so detach Denmark from the coalition of England's foes. So she chose to consider such as were not her declared friends.
Denmark had no fighting ships at home to pit against her. Her sailors were away serving in the merchant marine. She had no practised gunners, nothing but a huddle of dismantled vessels in her navy-yard, most of them half-rotten hulks without masts. Those that had standing rigging were even worse, for none of them had sails and the falling spars in battle lumbered up the decks and menaced the crew. But such as they were she made the most of them. Eighteen hulks were hauled into the channel and moored head and stern. Where they lay they could not be moved. Only the guns on one side were therefore of use, while the enemy could turn and manoeuvre. They were manned by farm lads, mechanics, students, enlisted in haste, not one of whom had ever smelt powder, and these were matched against Nelson's grim veterans. Even their commander, J. Olfert Fischer, had not been under fire before that day, for Denmark had had peace for eighty years. But his father had served as a midshipman with Tordenskjold and the son did not flinch, outnumbered though his force was, two to one, in men and guns.
The sun shone fair upon the blue waters as the great fleet of thirty-odd fighting ships sailed up from the south. From the city's walls and towers a mighty multitude watched it come, unmindful of peril from shot and shell; the Danish line was not half a mile away. In the churches whose bells were still ringing when the first gun was fired from the block-ship Prövestenen, the old men and women prayed through the long day, for there were few homes in Copenhagen that did not have son, brother, or friend fighting out there. A single gun answered the challenge, now two and three at once, then broadside crashed upon broadside with deafening roar. When at length all was quiet a tremendous report shook the city. It was the flag-ship Dannebrog that blew up. She was on fire with only three serviceable guns left when she struck her colors, but no ship of her name might sail with an enemy's prize crew on board, and she did not.
The story of that bloody day has been told many times. Briton and Dane hoist their flags on April 2 with equal right, for never was challenge met with more dauntless valor. Lord Nelson owned that of all the hundred and five battles he had fought this was hottest. On the Monarch, which for hours was under the most galling fire from the Danish ships, two hundred and twenty of the crew were killed or wounded. "There was not a single man standing," wrote a young officer on board of her, "the whole way from the mainmast forward, a district containing eight guns a side, some of which were run out ready for firing, others lay dismounted, and others remained as they were after recoiling.... I hastened down the fore ladder to the lower deck and felt really relieved to find somebody alive." The slaughter on the Danish ships was even greater. More than one-fifth of their entire strength of a little over five thousand men were slain or wounded. Of the eighteen hulls they lost thirteen, but only one were the British able to take home with them. The rest were literally shot to pieces and were burned where they lay. As one after another was silenced, those yet alive on board spiked their last guns, if indeed there were any left worth the trouble, threw their powder overboard and made, for the shore. Twice the Danish Admiral abandoned his burning ship, the last time taking up his post in the island battery Tre Kroner. Each time one of the old hulls was crushed, a Briton pushed into the hole made in the line and raked the remaining ones fore and aft until their decks were like huge shambles. The block-ship Indfödsretten bore the concentrated fire of five frigates and two smaller vessels throughout most of the battle. Her chief was killed. When the news reached head-quarters on shore, Captain von Schrödersee, an old naval officer who had been retired because of ill health, volunteered to take his place. He was rowed out, but as he came over the side of the ship a cannon-ball cut him in two. Prövestenen, as it was the first to fire a shot, held out also to the last. One-fourth of her crew lay dead, and her flag had been shot away three times when the decks threatened to cave in and Captain Lassen spiked his last guns and left the wreck to be burned. All through the fight she was the target of ninety guns to which she could oppose only twenty-nine of her own sixty.
Nelson had promised Admiral Parker to finish the fight in an hour. When the battle had lasted three, Parker signalled to him to stop. Every school-boy knows the story of how Lord Nelson put the glass to his blind eye and, remarking that he could see no signal, kept right on. In the end he had to resort to stratagem to force a truce so that he might disentangle some of his ships that were drifting into great danger in the narrow channel. The ruse succeeded. Crown Prince Frederik, moved by compassion for the wounded whom Nelson threatened to burn with the captured hulks if firing did not stop, ordered hostilities to cease without consulting the Admiral of the fleet, and the battle was over. Denmark's honor was saved. "Nothing," wrote our own Captain Mahan, "could place a nation's warlike fame higher than did her great deeds that day." All else was lost; for "there had come upon Denmark one of those days of judgment to which nations are liable who neglect in time of peace to prepare for war." It had been long coming, but it had overtaken her at last and found all the bars down.
Alongside the Dannebrog throughout her fight with Nelson's flag-ship, and edging ever closer in under the Elephant's side until at last the marines were sent to man her rail and keep it away with their muskets, lay a floating battery mounting twenty guns under command of a beardless second lieutenant. The name of Peter Willemoes will live as long as the Danish tongue is spoken. Barely graduated from the Naval Academy, he was but eighteen when the need of officers thrust the command of "Floating Battery No. 1" upon him. So gallantly did he acquit himself that Nelson took notice of the young man who, every time a broadside crashed into his ship or overhead, swung his cocked hat and led his men in a lusty cheer. When after the battle he met the Crown Prince on shore, the English commander asked to be introduced to his youthful adversary. "You ought to make an admiral of him," he said, and Prince Frederik smiled: "If I were to make admirals of all my brave officers, I should have no captains or lieutenants left." When the Dannebrog drifted on the shoals, abandoned and burning, Willemoes cut his cables and got away under cover of the heavy smoke. Having neither sails nor oars, he was at the mercy of the tide, but luckily it carried him to the north of the Tre Kroner battery, and he reached port with forty-nine of his crew of one hundred and twenty-nine dead or wounded. The people received him as a conqueror returning with victory. His youth and splendid valor aroused the enthusiasm of the whole country. Wherever he went crowds flocked to see him as the hero of "Holy Thursday's Battle." Especially was he the young people's idol. Sailor that he was, he was "the friend of all pretty girls," sang the poet of that day. He danced and made merry with them, but the one of them all on whom his heart was set, so runs the story, would have none of him, and sent him away to foreign parts, a saddened lover.
Meanwhile much praise had not made him vain. "I did my duty," he wrote to his father, a minor government official in the city of Odense where four years later Hans Christian Andersen was born on the anniversary day of the battle, "and I have whole limbs which I least expected. The Crown Prince and the Admiral have said that I behaved well." He was to have one more opportunity of fighting his country's enemy, and this time to the death.
In the summer of 1807, England was advised that by the treaty of Tilsit Russia and Prussia had secretly joined Napoleon in his purpose of finally crushing his mortal enemy by uniting all the fleets of Europe against her, Denmark's too, by compulsion if persuasion failed. Without warning a British fleet swooped down upon the unsuspecting nation, busy with the pursuits of peace, bombarded and burned Copenhagen when the Commandant refused to deliver the ships into the hands of the robbers as a "pledge of peace," and carried away ships, supplies, even the carpenters' tools in the navy-yard. Nothing was spared. Seventy vessels, sixteen of them ships of the line, fell into their hands, and supplies that filled ninety-two transports beside. A single fighting ship was left to Denmark of all her fleet,—the Prince Christian Frederik of sixty-eight guns. She happened to be away in a Norwegian port and so escaped. Willemoes was on leave serving in the Russian navy, but hastened home when news came of the burning of Copenhagen, and found a berth under Captain Jessen.
On March 22, 1808, the Prince Christian, so she was popularly called, hunting a British frigate that was making Danish waters insecure, met in the Kattegat the Stately and the Nassau, each like herself of sixty-eight guns. The Nassau was the old Holsteen, renamed,—the single prize the victors had carried home from the battle of Copenhagen. Three British frigates were working up to join them. The coast of Seeland was near, but wind and tide cut off escape to the Sound. Captain Jessen ran his ship in close under the shore so that at the last he might beach her, and awaited the enemy there.
The sun had set, but the night was clear when the fight between the three ships began. With one on either side, hardly a pistol-shot away, Jessen returned shot for shot, giving as good as they sent, and with such success that at the end of an hour and a half the Britons dropped astern to make repairs. The Prince Christian drifted, helpless, with rudder shot to pieces, half a wreck, rigging all gone, and a number of her guns demolished. But when the enemy returned he was hailed with a cheer and a broadside, and the fight was on once more. This time they were three to one; one of the British frigates of forty-four guns had come up and joined in.
When the hull of the Prince Christian was literally knocked to pieces, and of her 576 men 69 lay dead and 137 wounded, including the chief and all of his officers who were yet alive, Captain Jessen determined as a last desperate chance to run one of his opponents down and board her with what remained of his crew. But his officers showed him that it was impossible; the ship could not be manoeuvred. There was a momentary lull in the fire and out of the night came a cry, "Strike your colors!" The Danish reply was a hurrah and a volley from all the standing guns. Three broad-sides crashed into the doomed ship in quick succession, and the battle was over. The Prince Christian stood upon the shore, a wreck.
Young Willemoes was spared the grief of seeing the last Danish man-of-war strike its flag. In the hottest of the fight, as he jumped upon a gun the better to locate the enemy in the gloom, a cannon-ball took off the top of his head. He fell into the arms of a fellow officer with the muttered words, "Oh God! my head—my country!" and was dead. In his report of the fight Captain Jessen wrote against his name: "Fell in battle—honored as he is missed." They made his grave on shore with the fallen sailors, and as the sea washed up other bodies they were buried with them.
The British captured the wreck, but they could only set fire to it after removing the wounded. In the night it blew up where it stood. That was the end of the last ship of Denmark's proud navy.