Michael Roberts - Gustavas Adolphus

PROFILES IN POWER

General Editor: Keith Robbins

CATHERINE DE' MEDICI
R.J. Knecht

ELIZABETH I
Christopher Haigh

RICHELIEU
R. J. Knecht

GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS (2d Ed.)
Michael Roberts

OLIVER CROMWELL
Barry Coward

PETER THE GREAT (2d Ed.)
M. S. Anderson

THE ELDER PITT
Marie Peters

JOSEPH II
I. C. W. Blanning

NAPOLEON
Geoffrey Ellis

ALEXANDER I
Janet M .Hartley

DISRAELI
Ian Machin

JUAREZ
Brian Hamnett

CAVOUR
Harry Hearder

NAPOLEON III
James McMillan

FRANCIS JOSEPH
Steven Beller

ATATRK
A. L. Macfie

LLOYD GEORGE
Martin Pugh

PTAIN
Nicholas Atkin

HITLER
Ian Kershaw

CHURCHILL
Keith Robbins

NASSER
Peter Woodward

DE GAULLE
Andrew Shennan

FRANCO
Sheelagh Ellwood

MACMILLAN
John Turner

KENNEDY
Hugh Brogan

CASTRO (2d Ed.)
Sebastian Balfour

Michael Roberts

Second Edition

First published as Gustavus Adolphus and
the Rise of Sweden, by English Universities Press, 1973
Second Edition published by Longman Group, 1992
Second impression 1998

Published 2013 by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Michael Roberts 1973, 1992

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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-09000-2 (pbk)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Roberts, Michael, 1908
Gustavus Adolphus / Michael Roberts. 2nd ed.
p. cm. - (Profiles in power)
Originally published: Gustavus Adolphus and rise Sweden. London: English Universities Press, 1973.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-582-09001-6 ISBN 0-582-09000-8 (pbk.)
1. Gustaf II Adolf, King of Sweden, 1594-1632. 2. Sweden History Gustavus II Adolphus, 16111632 I. Title. II. Series: Profiles in power (London, England)
DL706.R76 1992
948.5'02'092dc20 9145108
[B] CIP
Set in 11/12 Linotron Baskerville

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.