Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 5.djvu/240

 158 WORKMEN AND HEROES Now did the men he had roused in every quarter come pouring in ; and he drilled them, and trained them, and encouraged them, became head and hand and heart for them all, till soon he had such an army that he might fairly hope to match any force the Danes could bring against him. Then he sent out a procla- mation declaring Christian deposed for his cruel and bloody tyranny, and calling all true Swedes to join him in making war upon the oppressor. Thus did this young man at twenty-five become the leader of a great rebel- lion, which he himself had created and controlled. He led his men against one fortress after another. There were long sieges and terrible battles ; but Gustavus proved himself as great a general as he was a man ; and two years later, in 1525, Stockholm, the last town remaining to the Danes in Sweden, surrendered to his army. Christian himself had been unable to leave Denmark, but he was in con- stant communication with his lieutenants, and wild was his rage at the continued success of his young opponent. Gustavus's mother and sister, with many other Swedish ladies, had fallen into the king's hands at the time of those wholesale murders ; and he tried to frighten the hero with threats of what he would do to them ; but poor Gustavus had learned only too surely that most of them were already dead from his cruel treatment. Finally this brute was deposed by his own subjects, and a new king chosen. This king made some faint attempts to recover Sweden, but he had small chance against such a man as Vasa. The hero and his army entered Stockholm in triumph ; and such of the old nobles as were left, gathered in a council and offered him the crown which he had wrested from Denmark. He refused it, saying he had labored for his coun- try, not himself, and bade the nobles choose from among themselves some older man. But the whole country cried out that they would submit to no man but him ; he had freed them, he should rule them. So there was, what seldom has been in history, a free choice of a king by a united people ; and Gustavus, son of Eric, became Gustavus I., King of Sweden. Five years before he had been carried off a helpless, almost friendless prisoner, by a mighty king. Now they had, by sheer force of character, changed places ; the king was in a dungeon, Gustavus on a throne. Though the remainder of our hero's life was less adventurous, it was no less noble. He made, as all had foreseen, a great king, showing himself as wise and high-minded as he had already proven brave and patient. He found Sweden a petty province, he left it a mighty kingdom ; he found it a wilderness, poor, thinly peopled, and semi-barbarous, he left it prosperous, populous, and civilized He himself was the head and centre of all this, performing an amount of work which seems almost impossible for one man. His letters, some of which remain, are clear, minute in detail, and exact. He knew just how he wanted things done, and he had them done his way. His own life might be summed up in his advice to his two sons, given when, only a few months before his death, he resigned a crown grown too heavy for his failing strength. "Think carefully, execute promptly, never give up, never delay. Resolves not carried out are like clouds without rain in times of drought."