The King, his father, was a stern but observant man who, seeing his bent, threw him with soldiers to his heart’s content, glad to have it so, for it was a warlike age.  From his tenth year he let him sit in council with him and early delegated to him the duty of answering ambassadors from foreign countries.  The lad was the only one who dared oppose the king when he was in a temper, and often he made peace and healed wounds struck in anger.  The people worshipped the fair young prince, and his father, when he felt the palsy of old age and bodily infirmities creeping upon him and thought of his unfinished tasks, would murmur as his eyes rested upon the bonny youth:  “Ille faciet—­He will do it.”  There is still in existence a document in which he laid down to him his course as a sovereign.  “First of all,” he writes, “you shall fear God and honor your father and mother.  Give your brothers and sisters brotherly affection; love your father’s faithful servants and requite them after their due.  Be gracious to your subjects; punish evil and love the good.  Believe in men, but find out first what is in them.  Hold by the law without respect of person.”

It was good advice to a prince, and the king took it to heart.  On the docket of the Supreme Court at Stockholm is a letter written by Gustav Adolf to the judges and ordered by him to be entered there, which tells them plainly that if any of them is found perverting justice to suit him, the King, or any one else, he will have him flayed alive and his hide nailed to the judgment-seat, his ears to the pillory!  Not a nice way of talking to dignified judges, perhaps, but then the prescription was intended to suit the practice, if there was need.

The young king earned his spurs in a war with Denmark that came near being his last as it was his first campaign.  He and his horsemen were surprised by the Danes on a winter’s night as they were warming themselves by a fire built of the pews in the Wittsjoe church, and they cut their way through only after a desperate fight on the frozen lake.  The ice broke under the king’s horse and he was going down when two of his men caught him in the nick of time.  He got away with the loss of his sword, his pistols, and his gloves.  “I will remember you with a crust that shall do for your bairns too,” he promised one of his rescuers, a stout peasant lad, and he kept his word.  Thomas Larsson’s descendants a generation ago still tilled the farm the King gave him.  When the trouble with Denmark was over for the time being, he settled old scores with Russia and Poland in a way that left Sweden mistress of the Baltic.  In the Polish war he was wounded twice and was repeatedly in peril of his life.  Once he was shot in the neck, and, as the bullet could not be removed, it ever after troubled him to wear armor.  His officers pleaded with him to spare himself, but his reply was that Caesar and Alexander did not skulk behind the lines; a general must lead if he expected his men to follow.