his great rival, our Elizabeth and her adversary Philip of Spain, the Guises, Sully, Richelieu, Cromwell, De Witt, William of Orange, and the other leading spirits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thought no more about the Muscovite Czar than we now think about the King of Timbuctoo. Even as late as 1735, Lord Bolingbroke, in his admirable "Letters on History," speaks of the history of the Muscovites as having no relation to the knowledge which a practical English statesman ought to acquire.[1] It may be doubted whether a cabinet council often takes place now in our Foreign Office without Russia being uppermost in every English statesman's thoughts.
But, though Russia remained thus long unheeded among her snows, there was a Northern power, the influence of which was acknowledged in the principal European quarrels, and whose good will was sedulously courted by many of the boldest chiefs and ablest counselors of the leading states. This was Sweden; Sweden, on whose ruins Russia has risen, but whose ascendency over her semi-barbarous neighbor was complete, until the fatal battle that now forms our subject.
As early as 1542 France had sought the alliance of Sweden to aid her in her struggle against Charles V. And the name of Gustavus Adolphus is of itself sufficient to remind us that in the great contest for religious liberty, of which Germany was for thirty years the arena, it was Sweden that rescued the falling cause of Protestantism, and it was Sweden that principally dictated the remodeling of the European state-system at the peace of Westphalia.
From the proud pre-eminence in which the valor of the "Lion of the North," and of Torstenston, Bannier, Wrangel, and the other generals of Gustavus, guided by the wisdom of Oxenstiern, had placed Sweden, the defeat of Charles XII. at Pultowa hurled her down at once and forever. Her efforts during the wars of the French Revolution to assume a leading part in European politics met with instant discomfiture, and almost provoked derision. But the Sweden whose sceptre was bequeathed to Christina, and whose alliance Cromwell valued so highly, was a different power to the Sweden of the present day. Finland, Ingria, Livonia, Esthonia, Carelia, and other districts east of the
- ↑ Bolingbroke's Works, vol. ii., p. 374. In the same page he observes how Sweden had often turned her arms southward with prodigious effect.
