Book: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861




Long after the time of this Ulrich, the last reigning Graf of Lenzburg,
shortly after the Swiss Union had been renewed, at the instance of
Walther of Attinghausen, in 1206, Unterwalden chose Rudolph, Count of
Hapsburg, for Bailiff. He endeavored to extend his authority over the
other two Cantons, in which he was aided by the Emperor Otho IV., of the
House of Brunswick, who had been raised to the throne in opposition to
the House of Swabia, and who, for the purpose of conciliating him, made
him Imperial Bailiff of the Waldstaette. An active, vigorous man this
Rudolph, grandfather of the Rudolph who was afterwards called to be King
of the Germans, whom the Swiss, scattered in their hamlets, were little
prepared to make head against, and therefore recognized him with what
grace they might, after an assurance that their freedom and rights
should be maintained; and he smoothed for them their old controversy
with the monks of Einsiedeln, and got a comfortable division of the
property made in 1217. But he was hateful to them, nevertheless; and
although we know nothing of the way in which he administered his office,
we conjecture that it was partly because the Emperor who appointed him
was not of the House of Hohenstaufen, to which they were attached, and
partly because he claimed that the office of Bailiff was hereditary in
his family, whereas the men of Schwyz preferred to offer it of their own
free will to whom they would. They made it a condition of assistance to
the Emperor Friedrich in 1231, when he went down into Italy to fight the
Guelphs, that he should deprive this Rudolph of the office of Imperial
Bailiff; and then they went forth, six hundred strong, and did famous
work against the Guelphs, with such fire in them that the Emperor not
only knighted Struthan von Winkelried of Unterwalden, but gave that
valley a patent of freedom, according to which the Schwyzers voluntarily
chose the protection of the Empire.

And now Rudolph, Count of Hapsburg, founder of the Austrian monarchy,
strides into the history of the men of Schwyz. A tall, slender man this
Rudolph, bald and pale; with much seriousness in his features, but
winning confidence the moment one spoke with him by his friendliness,
loving simplicity; a restless, stirring man, with more wisdom in him
than his companions had, equal or superior to him in birth or power,
working his way by device when he could, by the strong arm when that was
needed. He took the part of the peasants against the nobles, and used
the one to put down the other. In the midst of the turmoils in which he
got involved with Sanct Gallen and Basel, and while encamped before the
walls of the latter city, he was wakened in his tent at midnight by
Friedrich of Hohenzollern, Burgrave of Nuernberg; for there had come from
Frankfort on the Main Heinrich von Pappenheim, Hereditary Marshal of
the Empire, with the news, that, "in the name of the Electors, with
unanimous consent, in consideration of his great virtue and wisdom,
Lewis Count Palatine of the Rhine and Duke of Bavaria had named Count
Rudolph of Hapsburg King of the Roman Empire of the Germans": at which
Rudolph was more astonished than those who knew him, it is recorded. Not
because of his genealogy, nor his marriage with Gertrude Anne, daughter
of Burcard, Count of Hohenburg and Hagenlock, did he win this great
fortune, but, as the Elector Engelbrecht of Cologne said, "because he
was just and wise and loved of God and men." And now the world learned
what was in him; and how for eighteen years he kept the throne, which
no king for three-and-twenty years before him had been able to hold,
history will relate to the curious.

Switzerland was divided at this period into small sovereignties and
baronial fiefs; and there were, besides, also the Imperial cities of
Bern and Basel and Zuerich. The nobles were warlike and restless. Rudolph
checked their depredations and composed their dissensions. Upon that
seething age of violence and rapine he laid, as it were, the forming
hand, as if in the darkness the coming time was dimly visible to him;--a
man to be remembered, in the vexed and disheartening history of Austria,
as one of her few heroes. The people of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden,
notwithstanding the dislike they had shown to his ancestor, voluntarily
appointed him their protector; and he gave them, in 1274, the firm
assurance that he would treat them as worthy sons of the Empire in
inalienable independence; and to that assurance he remained true till
his death, which happened in 1291, in the seventy-fourth year of his
age.

It is related in the Rhymed Chronicle of Ottocar, how he had been kept
alive for a whole year by the skill of his physicians, but that they
told him at last, as he sat playing at draughts, that death was upon
him, and that he could live but five days. "Well, then," he said, "on
to Spires!" that he might lay him in the Imperial vault in the great
Cathedral there,--where many Emperors slept their long sleep, till, in
the Orleans Succession War in the time of Louis XIV., as afterwards in
1794, under the revolutionary commander Custine, French soldiers rudely
disturbed it, with every circumstance of outrage which Frenchmen only
could devise. Rudolph went forth thither, but fell by the way, and died
at Germersheim, a dirty little village which he had founded. And in the
Cathedral at Spires, where he rested from his activities, you may see
this day a monumental statue of him, executed by that great artist, the
late Ludwig Schwanthaler of Munich, for his art-loving patron, Ludwig
I., King of Bavaria.

Rudolph was succeeded by his son Albrecht, then forty-three years old,
likewise a vigorous man, whose restless spirit of aggrandizement gave
the Swiss much uneasiness. His purpose seems to have been to acquire the
sovereignty of the ecclesiastical and baronial fiefs, and, having thus
encompassed the free cities and the Three Cantons, to compel submission
to his authority. In the seventh week after Rudolph's death, they
met together to renew the ancient bond with the people of Uri and
Unterwalden; and they swore, in or out of their valleys, to stand by one
another, if harm should be done to any of them. "In this we are as one
man," ran their oath, among other things, "in that we will receive no
judge who is not a countryman and an inhabitant, or who has bought his
office."

After several years of troubles and frights among them, the Emperor sent
to the Forest Cantons to say, that it would be well for them and their
posterity, if they submitted to the protection of the Royal House, as
all neighboring cities and counties had done; he wished them to be his
dear children; he was the descendant of their Bailiff of Lenzburg, son
of their Emperor Rudolph; if he offered them the protection of his
glorious line, it was not that he lusted after their flocks or would
make merchandise of their poverty, but because he knew from his father
and from history what brave men they were, whom he would lead to victory
and knighthood and plunder.

Then spake the nobles and the freemen of the Forest Cantons: "They know
very well, and will ever remember, how his father of blessed memory was
a good leader and Bailiff to them; but they love the condition of their
ancestors, and will abide by it. If the King would but confirm it!"

And thereupon they sent Werner, Baron of Attinghausen, Landammann of
Uri, like his fathers before him and his posterity after him, to the
Imperial Court. But the King was quarrelling with his Electors, and was
in bad humor, and sent to Uri to forbid them from assessing land-rates
on a convent there. Whereupon the men of Schwyz, being without
protection, made a league for ten years with Werner, Count of Honburg;
and that their submission to the Austrian power might not be construed
into a duty, they sent to the King for an Imperial Bailiff. Albrecht
appointed Hermann Gessler of Brunek, and Beringer of Landenberg, whose
cousin Hermann was in much favor with him. Beringer's manners were rough
even at the Court; and to get rid of him, they sent him to tame the
Waldstaette. He appointed Bailiffs whose poverty and avarice were the
cause of much oppression, emboldened as they were by the ill-feeling of
the King towards the men of Schwyz, whose freedom the King had refused
to confirm, and waited only for opportunity to annihilate their ancient
rights, after the example he had already set in Vienna and Styria.

The Imperial Bailiffs resolved to take up their abode in the Forest
Cantons,--Landenberg in Unterwalden, near Sarnen, in a castle of the
King's, while Gessler built a prison-castle by Altorf in Uri; for within
the memory of men no lord had dwelt in Schwyz. They used their power
wantonly;--unjust and weary imprisonments for slightest faults; haughty
manners, and all the stings of insolent authority;--and no redress to
be had at the King's hands. The peace and happy security of the men of
Schwyz were gone, and they looked in one another's faces for the thing
that was to be done. The honored families of their race were despised
and called peasant-nobles;--there was Werner Stauffacher, a well-to-do
and well-meaning man; and the Lord of Attinghausen above all, of an
ancient house, in years, with much experience, and true to his country;
there was Rudolph Redings of Biberek, whose descendants live to this
day in Schwyz, supporting still the honor of their name; and the
Winkelrieds, mindful of the spirit of their ancestor who slew the
dragon. In such persons the people _believed_; they knew them and their
fathers before them; and when they were made light of, there was hatred
between the people and the Bailiffs. As Gessler passed Stauffacher's
house in Steinen, one day, where the little chapel now stands, and saw
how the house was well built, with many windows, and painted over with
mottoes, after the manner of rich farmers' houses, he cried to his face,
"Can one endure that these peasants should live in such houses?"

It came at last to insulting their wives and daughters; and the first
man that attempted this, one Wolfenschiess, was struck dead by an angry
husband; and when the brave wife of Stauffacher reflected how her turn
might come next, she persuaded her husband to anticipate the danger.
Werner Stauffacher at once crossed the lake to Uri, to consult with his
friend Walther, Prince of Attinghausen, with whom he found concealed a
young man of courage and understanding. "He is an Unterwaldner from the
Melchthal," said Walther; "his name is Erni an der Halden, and he is
a relation of mine; for a trifling matter Landenberg has fined him
a couple of oxen; his father Henry complained bitterly of the loss,
whereupon a servant of the Bailiff said, 'If the peasants want to eat
bread, they can draw their own plough'; at which Erni took fire, and
broke one of the fellow's fingers with his stick, and then took refuge
here; meanwhile the Bailiff has caused his father's eyes to be put out."
And then the two friends took counsel together; and Walther bore witness
how the venerable Lord of Attinghausen had said that these Bailiffs were
no longer to be endured. What desolating wrath resistance would bring
upon the Waldstaette they knew and measured, and swore that death was
better than an unrighteous yoke. And they parted, each to sound his
friends,--appointing as a place of conference the Ruetli. It is a little
patch of meadow, which the precipices seem to recede expressly to form,
on the Bay of Uri, sloping down to the water's edge,--so called from the
trees being rooted out (_ausgereutet_) there,--not far from the boundary
between Unterwalden and Uri, where the Mytenstein rises solitary like an
obelisk out of the water. There, in the stillness of night, they often
met together for council touching the work which was to be done; thither
by lonely paths came Fuerst and Melchthal, Stauffacher in his boat,
and from Unterwalden his sister's son, Edelknecht of Rudenz. The more
dangerous the deed, the more solemn the bond which bound them.

On the night of Wednesday before Martinmas, on the 10th of November,
1307, Fuerst, Melchthal, and Stauffacher brought each from his own Canton
ten upright men to the Ruetli, to deliberate honestly together. And when
they came there and remembered their inherited freedom, and the eternal
brotherly bond between them, consecrated by the danger of the times,
they feared neither Albrecht nor the power of Austria; and they took
each other by the hand, and said, that "in these matters no one was
to act after his own fancy; no one was to desert another; that in
friendship they would live and die; each was so to strive to preserve
the ancient rights of the people that the Swiss through all time might
taste of this friendship; neither should the property or the rights of
the Count of Hapsburg be molested, nor the Bailiffs or their servants
lose one drop of blood; but the freedom which their fathers gave them
they would bequeath to their children": and then, when remembering that
upon what they did now the fate of their posterity depended, each looked
upon his friend, consoled. And Walther Fuerst, Werner Stauffacher, and
Arnold an der Halden of Melchthal lifted their hands to heaven, and, in
the name of God, who created emperor and peasant with the inalienable
rights of man, swore to maintain their freedom; and when the thirty
heard this, each one raised his hand and swore the same by God and the
Saints;--and then each went his way to his hut, and was silent, and
wintered his cattle.

In the mean while it happened that the Bailiff Hermann Gessler was
shot dead by Wilhelm Tell, who was of Buerglen, at the entrance of the
Schaechenthal, a half-hour from Altorf, in Uri,--son-in-law of Walther
Fuerst, and a man of some substance, for he had the steward-ship in
fee in Buerglen of the Frauenmuester Abbey in Zuerich,--one of the
conspirators. Out of wanton tyranny, or suspicious of the breaking out
of disturbances, Gessler determined to discover who bore the joke most
impatiently; and, after the symbolical way of the times and the people,
set up a hat, (it was on the 18th of November,) to represent the dignity
of the Duke Albrecht of Austria, and commanded all to do it homage. The
story of Tell's refusal, and of the apple placed on the head of his son
to be shot at, the world knows far and wide. Convinced by his success
that God was with him, Tell confessed, that, if the matter had gone
wrong, he would have had his revenge upon the Bailiff. Gessler did
not dare to detain him in Uri, on account of Tell's many friends and
relations, but took him up the lake, contrary to the traditions of the
people, which forbade foreign imprisonment. They had not got far beyond
the Ruetli, when the foehn-wind, breaking loose from the gulfs of the
Gothard, threw the waves into a rage, and the rocks echoed with its
angry cries. In this moment of deadly danger, Gessler commanded them to
unbind Tell, who, he knew, was an excellent boatman; and as they passed
by the foot of the Axen Mountain, to the right as you come out of the
Bay of Uri, Tell grasped his bow and leaped upon a flat rock there,
climbed up the mountain while the boat tossed to and fro against the
rocks, and fled through the land of the men of Schwyz. But the Bailiff
escaped the storm also, and landed by Kuessnacht, where he fell with
Tell's arrow through him.

It should be remembered that this was Tell's deed alone: the hour which
the people had agreed upon for their deliverance had not come; they had
no part in the death of Gessler. Carlyle has remarked this as appearing
also in Schiller's drama, in the construction of which, he says, "there
is no connection, or a very slight one, between the enterprise of Tell
and that of the men of Ruetli." It was not a deed conformable to law
or the highest ethics, yet it was one which mankind is ever ready to
forgive and applaud; and the echo of it through the ages will die away
only when hatred of tyranny and wrathful impatience under hopeless
oppression die away also from the hearts of men. Tell was an outlaw, and
he took an outlaw's vengeance: it was life against life. And yet it is a
curious fact, that the historian of Switzerland (that wonderful genius,
Johannes Mueller, who is reported to have read more books than any man in
Europe, in proof of which they point you to his fifty folio volumes of
excerpts in the Town Library at Schaffhausen) suggests as a reason why
there were only one hundred and fourteen persons, who had known Tell,
to gather together in 1388, not much more than thirty years after his
death, at the erection of a chapel dedicated to his memory on the rock
where he leaped ashore, that Tell did not often leave Buerglen, where he
dwelt, and that, according to the ethics of that period, the deed was
not one likely to attract inquisitive wonderers to him.

There is hardly an event or character in history which is not to
somebody a myth or a phantom; and so Tell has not escaped the skepticism
of men. But those who doubt his existence have little experience of
history, says Mueller. Grasser was the first to remark the resemblance
between the adventures of Tell and those of a certain Tocco, or Toke, or
Palnatoke, of Denmark, which are related by Saxo Grammaticus, a learned
historian who flourished in Denmark in the twelfth century, of which
kingdom and its dependencies he compiled an elaborate history, first
printed at Paris in 1486; but the Danish Tocco, who is supposed to have
existed in the latter half of the tenth century, was wholly unknown
to the Swiss, who, if ever, came to the Alps before that time. The
Icelanders, also, have a similar story about another hero, which appears
in the "Vilkinasaga" of the fourteenth century. It is more likely that
the Danes and other Northern people got their tradition from the Swiss,
by way of the Hanse Towns perhaps, if we are to be permitted to believe
in but one original tradition, which is not less arbitrary than
unphilosophic.

Moreover, for what did these one hundred and fourteen people dedicate a
chapel to him thirty years and a little more after his death? And there
is the Chronicle of Klingenberg, which covers the end of the fourteenth
century, which tells his story; and Melchior Russ, of Lucerne, who, in
compiling his book, about the year 1480, had before him a Tell-song, and
the Chronicle of Eglof Etterlins, Town-Clerk of Lucerne in the first
half of the fifteenth century; and since 1387, too, there has been
solemn service by the people of Uri to commemorate him. So that the
"Fable Danoise" of Uriel Freudenberger of Bern (1760) becomes a mere
absurdity, and the indignant Canton of Uri had no less right to burn it
(although to burn was not to answer it, suggests the critic,) than to
honor the "Defence" by Balthasar with two medals of gold. And what
has been written to establish him may be read in Zurlauben, (whose
approbation is almost proof, says Mueller, reverentially,) and elsewhere
as undernoted.[A]

[Footnote A: In Balthasar, _Def. de Guill. Tell_ (Lucerne, 1760); Gottl.
Eman. von Haller, _Vorlesung ueber Wilh. Tell_, etc. (Bern, 1772);
Hisely, _Guill. Tell et la Revolution de_ 1307 (Delft, 1826); Ideler,
_Die Sage vom Schuesse des Tell_ (Berlin, 1836); Haeusser, _Die Sage vom
Tell_ (Heidelberg, 1840); Schoenhuth, _Wilh. Tell, Geschichte aus der
Vorzeit_ (Reutlingen, 1836); Henning, _Wilh. Tell_ (Nuernberg, 1836); and
_Histoire de Guill. Tell, Liberateur de la Suisse_ (Paris, 1843).]

Tell's posterity in the male line is reported to have died out with
Johann Martin, in 1684; the female, with Verena, in 1720. Yet it is
certainly a little surprising that the elder Swiss chroniclers, John of
Winterthur, and Justinger of Bern, for instance, who were almost Tell's
contemporaries, make no mention of him in relating the Revolution in the
Waldstaette, and that it should be left to Tschudi and others, almost two
hundred years afterwards, in the sixteenth century, to give his story
that dramatic importance upon which Schiller has set the seal forever.
It can be explained, perhaps, on the ground that it did not at the time
possess that importance which we have been taught to give it; though
roughly, thus, we do away with the poetry of it, to be sure. Let
Voltaire, whose function it was to deny, enjoy his feeble sneer, that
"the difficulty of pronouncing those respectable names"--to wit,
_Melchtad_, and _Stauffager_, and _Valtherfurst_, to say nothing of
_Grisler_--"injures their celebrity." Neither are we to conceal the
fact, that it is doubted, if not denied, that there ever was any Gessler
in Uri to perform all the wicked things ascribed to him, and to get that
arrow through him in such dramatic and effective manner in the Hollow
Way; for has not Kopp published, with edifying explanation, "Documents
for the History of the Confederation," (Lucerne, 1835,) in which, in the
list of Bailiffs (_Landvoigte_) at Kuessnacht, we do not find the name of
Gessler? Perhaps there was a mistake in the name, the critic suggests.

The Revolution thus begun at the Ruetli, and by Tell, went forward
swiftly in January, 1308; and, true to their oath, it was consummated
by the men of Schwyz without harm to the property of the Bailiffs, also
without the spilling of a single drop of blood. The prison at Uri was
captured, and Landenberg also, as he descended to hear mass, by twenty
men from Unterwalden; but, escaping, he fled across the meadows from
Sarnen to Alpnach, where he was overtaken and made to swear that he
would never set foot again in the Waldstaette, and then suffered to
depart safely to the King. And the peasants breathed again; and
Stauffacher's wife opened her house to all who had been at the Ruetli;
and there was joy in the land.

And how in that same year Duke Albrecht met with a bloody end, such as
befell no King or Emperor of the Germans before or after him, at the
hands of Duke John, his nephew, whose inheritance he had kept back, and
other conspirators; and what vengeance overtook the murderers; and how
Duke John, escaping in the habit of a monk into Italy, was no more heard
of, but became a shadow forever, like the rest of them;--and how, eight
years afterwards, came the expedition of Duke Leopold of Austria against
the Waldstaette, and the fight at Morgarten, where the Swiss, thirteen
hundred mountaineers in all, Wilhelm Tell among them, routed twenty
thousand of the well-armed chivalry of Austria,--dating from that heroic
Thermopylae of theirs the foundation of the Swiss Confederacy, as,
larger and perhaps not less resolute, we see it to-day, ready to
defy, if need be, single-handed, the greatest military nation of the
earth;--and how, thirty years afterwards, the men of Schwyz and Uri go
forth, nine hundred strong,--among them Tell, and Werner Stauffacher,
now bent with years,--to the aid of Bern, threatened by the nobles
roundabout;--and how, in 1332, was formed the league with Lucerne,
whereby the beautiful lake gets its name as the Lake of the _Four_
Forest Cantons;--and how, one sultry July day in 1386, the men of Schwyz
and Uri and Unterwalden, together with other Swiss,--some of them armed
with the very halberds with which their fathers defended the pass at
Morgarten,--fought again their hereditary enemy, Austria, by the clear
waters of the little Lake of Sempach; how, when they saw the enemy, they
fell upon their knees, according to their ancient custom, and prayed to
God, and then with loud war-cry dashed at full run upon the Austrian
host, whose shields were like a dazzling wall, and their spears like a
forest, and the Mayor of Lucerne with sixty of his followers went down
in the shock, but not a single one of the Austrians recoiled; and how at
that critical, dreadful moment,--for the flanks of the enemy's phalanx
were advancing to encompass them,--there suddenly strode forth the
Knight Arnold Strutthan von Winkelried, crying, "I will make a path
for you! care for my wife and children!" and, rushing forward, grasped
several spears and buried them in his breast,--a large, strong man, he
bore the soldiers down with him as he fell, and his companions pushed
forward over his dead body into the midst of the host, and the victory
was won, and another book was added to the epic story of the men of
Schwyz and Uri and Unterwalden;--and how Duke Leopold fell fighting
bravely, as became his house, and six hundred and fifty nobles with him,
so that there was mourning at the Court of Austria for many a year, and
men said it was a judgment upon the reckless spirit of the nobles; and
how Martin Malterer, standard-bearer, of Freyburg in the Breisgau,
happening to come upon Leopold as he was dying, was as one petrified,
and the banner fell from his hands, and he threw himself across the body
of Leopold to save it from further outrage, waiting for and finding his
own death there;--and how this ruinous contest between Switzerland and
Austria was not finally closed till the time of Maximilian, in 1499,
when first the right of private war was abolished in Germany;--and how,
through the various fortunes of the succeeding centuries, the character
of the Swiss has remained for the most part the same as in the earlier
time:--these things one may read at large elsewhere; but we hasten to
the conclusion.

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