CHAP. LVII.] GUSTAVUS III. AND CATHARINE II. 505 of landing Swedish and Russian troops in the Seine, marching upon Paris, and suppressing the Revolution. Gustavus was supported in this anti-revolutionary ardour, which amounted almost to Quixotism, by Catharine II. She proposed to him, through General Pahlen, an intimate alliance, and Gustavus readily accepted a proposal which would enable him to be absent from his dominions without apprehension as to his powerful neighbour. Such seems to have been the chief object of the Treaty of Drottningholm, concluded October 19th, 1791.1 The treaty is purely a defensive one, in case the dominions of either Power should be attacked; though it is difficult to imagine against what enemies they proposed to defend each other. A marriage had also been agreed upon between the King of Sweden's son Gustavus Adolphus and Catharine's granddaughter, the Grand Duchess Alexandra. But this Russian alliance was highly unpopular in Sweden. The Swedes viewed with disgust the abandonment of the Turks and Poles to a Power which had seized so great a part of the Swedish dominions; they were indignant at Gustavus's distant and chimerical schemes against France, in a cause of which the majority of the nation disapproved, and in which the welfare of the people seemed to be sacrificed to the vanity and ambition of the King. The national feeling was displayed in the Diet which Gustavus summoned at Geffle with the view of raising supplies. But though assembled at that remote place in the Gulf of Bothnia, in order the better to coerce it, and surrounded with the King's mercenary troops, it would grant only part of his demands, and proved so refractory that he was compelled to dismiss it (Feb. 24th, 1792). An odious conspiracy for assassinating the King had long existed among some of the Swedish nobles. Plots had been organized for effecting this object at Aix-la-Chapelle, Stockholm, and other places, which had hitherto failed; but the dismissal of the States, and the rumoured unconstitutional projects of Gustavus, brought them to maturity. One of the chief promoters of the King's assassination was General Pechlin, an old man of seventy-two. Several other nobles were implicated in the conspiracy, and especially Counts Ribbing and Horn, and Captain Ankarström. These three men took an oath to murder Gustavus, and drew lots to determine who should perpetrate the deed. The lot fell on Ankarström. Besides political enmity, Ankarström had, or conceived he had, personal grounds for hating the King, on the score of an 1 Martens, t. v. p. 262. 506 GUSTAVUS III. ASSASSINATED. [CHAP. LVII. affront received from Gustavus many years previously. After the King's return from Finland, too, in 1788, he had been accused of treason and banished to Gothland, but was shortly after pardoned. These grievances rankled in Ankarström's bosom; and they were aggravated by a considerable loss entailed upon him by the reduction of the currency. Impelled by these feelings, Ankarström in a dastardly manner shot the King in the back at a masquerade given at the Opera House at Stockholm, March 16th, 1792. Gustavus survived till the 29th. During the period which intervened between his wound and his death, he displayed the utmost fortitude and presence of mind, and settled the affairs of his kingdom with all the composure imaginable. His thoughts characteristically reverted to the subject ever uppermost in his mind, the French Revolution; and he expressed a desire to know what Brissot would think of his fate. He was forty-six years of age at the time of his death. The chief conspirators were captured; but Ankarström alone was executed, after three public floggings and other tortures; the rest were either banished from Sweden or confined in fortresses. Gustavus III.'s son, then in his fourteenth year, succeeded to the Crown of Sweden, with the title of Gustavus Adolphus IV. Till he should attain his majority, the regency was assumed by his uncle Charles, Duke of Sudermania, brother of the late King. The Swedish Court, as we have before had occasion to remark, now adopted a neutral policy; a conduct which produced a misunderstanding with the Court of St. Petersburg. Another cause of dissension was the publication of a proposed marriage of the young King of Sweden with a German princess (October, 1795), in spite of Gustavus's promise that he should be united to the Archduchess Alexandra. Catharine having declared that she should consider the proposed marriage of Gustavus Adolphus as a ground of rupture, it was not prosecuted. Towards the autumn of 1796 Gustavus IV., accompanied by his uncle, paid a visit to the Empress at St. Petersburg. But though the young King was much struck with the charms of the Grand Duchess Alexandra, he refused to sign the marriage contract, on the ground that it contained provisions contrary to the religion which he professed, and to the laws and customs of his country. Catharine was furious at this affront. Her death, however, prevented any ill consequences from ensuing, and on the accession of Paul a good understanding was renewed between the two Courts.1 1 Arndt, Gesch. Schwedens; Brown's Northern Courts. CHAP. LVII.] STATE OF GERMANY. 507 The history of the German States at this period is unimportant, except in connection with the French Revolution and the affairs of Poland; and it will therefore suffice to offer a few brief remarks on the effects produced on the German people and their governments by the events that were passing in France. The same spirit which produced the Revolution in that country had penetrated into Germany and even into its Courts. It had, as we have seen, animated and influenced Frederick the Great and the Emperor Joseph II. The vast intellectual movement observable throughout Europe in the last half of the eighteenth century, the upheaving, as it were, and throes of the European mind, had given birth almost to the first German literature that can be called original and vernacular. The German authors of this period, like the French literati themselves, discarded their former classical and French models, and sought in English literature a new source of inspiration. The works of most of their distinguished writers began to breathe a spirit of liberty. Salzmann, in his romance of Karl von Karlsberg, placed before the eyes of his numerous readers a striking and perhaps exaggerated picture of the political and social evils under which they laboured. The epic poet Klopstock gave vent to his aspirations for freedom in several Odes. The Dichterbund, or band of poets, established at Göttingen about the year 1770, of which Count Stolberg was one of the most distinguished members, looked up to Klopstock as their master. In many of Stolberg's pieces love of liberty and hatred of tyrants are expressed with a boldness which must have grated strangely on the ears of some of the German Sovereigns. But in general these works were in too high a tone to have much influence on the people. Schiller's early tragedies were calculated to have more effect, especially his Don Carlos; which, from the speeches of the Marquis de Posa, has been characterized as a dramatized discourse on the rights of man. Yet when the French Revolution broke out, it found no partisan in Schiller. He augured unfavourably of the Constituent Assembly, thought them incompetent to establish, or even to conceive, true liberty; foretold the catastrophe of a military despotism'. Goethe, his contemporary, regarded the explosion in France as an unwelcome interruption of the tranquil pleasures of polite and cultivated society; Wieland, in his essays on the French Revolution, took the popular side. A more direct form of propagating liberal principles than by literature was by means of 1 K. A. Menzel, N. Gesch. der Deutschen, B. vi. S. 285. 508 THE ILLUMINATI. [CHAP. LVII. clubs and secret societies. The clubs of England and France were most formidable political engines; but, then, their debates were public and their objects practical. Such associations would not have been suffered in Germany. The reformers of that country had therefore enlisted themselves in a secret society called the Order of Illuminati, founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of canon law at Ingolstadt, and modelled after the constitution of the Jesuits, whose pupil Weishaupt had been. Its members bound themselves to an unreserved obedience to their superiors, were gradually initiated into the mysteries of the society, and went through the successive ranks of priest, mage, regent, and king. Its principles were characteristic of the German mind, far-fetched and eminently unpractical. The grand doctrine which it professed to disseminate was, that the misfortunes of mankind spring from religion and the dominion of the powerful; that as religion had its source in superstition and priestcraft, so the separation of mankind into peoples and states had been accomplished by fortunate pretenders through force and cunning. But by means of the secret schools of wisdom, man would rise from his fallen state, princes and nations would disappear without violence from the face of the earth, the human race would form one great family, and every father of a household, as in former times Abraham and the patriarchs, become the priest and ruler of his family with no other code of law than that dictated by wisdom. In a few years this society numbered thousands of members, belonging chiefly to the higher classes. Its principles seem not to have threatened any very immediate or alarming danger. Nevertheless it was suppressed by Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria; Weishaupt was compelled to fly, and found a refuge at Gotha.' In other German States the Illuminati appear to have been left unmolested. Prone to reflection, the German mind is not readily excited to action. Little desire was manifested in Germany to imitate the movement in France. It was only in the Rhenish provinces, where the people came into immediate contact with the French, and could be assisted by their armies, that any revolutionary spirit was manifested. An appeal was even ventured on for patriotic gifts in support of the war of the Empire against French principles, and brought in a few hundred thousand florins. The Austrian Freemasons, whom Joseph II. had patronized, spontaneously suppressed their meetings, in order, as they told the Em 1 Menzel, ibid. Kap. 15. CHAP. LVII.] THUGUT. 509 peror, to relieve him of some of his cares in that season of disturbance. Nevertheless Thugut, the Austrian Minister, deemed some precaution necessary. Thugut had resided at Paris during the early days of the Revolution, and from an acquaintance with its scenes and personages, had imbibed a deep hatred of popular government, as well as the conviction that if the French Court and clergy had prevented, by means of the police, the philosophers and beaux esprits from propagating their principles, the outbreak would never have occurred. Hence he was led to forbid all social unions, and to subject the press to a rigid censorship. Even old and standard works, whose contents were at all of an equivocal character, were prohibited. No allusions were permitted in the theatre to political or religious matters. It was forbidden to represent such plays as Otto von Wittelsbach, Hamlet, Macbeth, King John, Richard II. &c., as familiarizing the minds of the spectators with the murder or deposition of kings; King Lear, lest it should be thought that misfortune turned the heads of monarchs; still less plays directly provocative of revolutionary ideas, as Egmont, Fiesco, William Tell.1 The extraordinary career of Thugut deserves to be briefly mentioned. He was born at Linz, the son of a boatman on the Danube, and received his education at the Oriental Academy at Vienna. In 1754 he was sent with the Austrian Embassy to Constantinople, and became consecutively, interpreter, agent, resident, and internuntius. He distinguished himself by his activity during the war between Turkey and Russia, and was subsequently employed as ambassador and negotiator in all congresses and acts of state. He entered the Ministry a little before the death of Prince Kaunitz, who had so long directed the Austrian policy; and to spare the feelings of the aged and declining chancellor, he acted as his subordinate, and apparently under his direction. On the death of the Prince, June 27th, 1794, Thugut obtained the supreme direction of affairs. With an aptitude for business, he united an idleness which sometimes proved detrimental to the public service. The acquisition of Bavaria was regarded by Thugut as the paramount object of Austrian policy, and he had conceived a violent hatred of Prussia for having frustrated that project. The affairs of Prussia at this period were conducted by Haugwitz, a large landed proprietor of Silesia. In a journey which he K. A. Menzel, N. Gesch. der Deutschen, B. vi. Kap. 27. |