Page:Readings in European History Vol 2.djvu/245

 TJic Thirty Years' War 207 such as was never before practiced by honest soldiers quar- tered in a friendlv land ; and the exactions are carried out with such rigorous excess under the officers in charge that the miserable victims can scarce keep shirts on their backs. And what insolent excesses and willful interference with church services, despoiling of churches, violation of graves of the dead, infringements of every sort of our sovereignty and authority, disarming of our subjects and curtailing of our revenue as ruler ! This last has actually gone so far that it is impossible for us, from all the length and breadth of our land, to maintain a table befitting our princely rank; whereas every captain, out of his own district alone, lives in more than princely style and sends away large sums besides. Toward the poor people they are barbarous and tyrannical beyond words, beating, burning, and plundering, and depriving them of the very necessities of existence, till they are in danger of soul as well as body, for they are driven to such unnatural and inhuman food as buds of trees and grass, and even to the flesh of their own children and of dead bodies. Gustavus Adolphus before sailing for Germany bade a touching farewell to the representatives of his people assembled at Stockholm (May, 1630). I call on the all-powerful God to witness, by whose prov- 297. Gus- idence we are here assembled, that it is not by my own tavus ., r , r 1 T 1 1 1 • Adolphus' wish, or from any love of war, that I undertake this cam- f areW ell to paign. On the contrary, I have been now for several years the Swedish goaded into it by the imperial party, not only through the ?^ ates ^ * !-■ a a 4. • 4. t -u 1 u * 1 (May, 1630). reception accorded to our emissary to Lubeck, but also by the action of their general in aiding with his army our enemies, the Poles, to our great detriment. We have been urged, moreover, by our harassed brother-in-law [the elector of Brandenburg] to undertake this war, the chief object of which is to free our oppressed brothers in the faith from the clutches of the pope, which, God helping us, we hope to do.