killed; Greig himself was severely wounded, and his ship was obliged to leave the line. "Meantime the darkness of night came over the sea. At ten o'clock the firing ceased. The Russians had taken a Swedish ship of the line, Prince Gustav, of 68 guns, in which the Swedish Vice-Admiral Count Wachtmeister had led the Swedish van during the combat, and which, after miracles of heroism, was drifting about with 300 killed and wounded on board, pierced everywhere with shots, and without a flag. The Swedes, in return, had seized a Russian ship of the line, the Wladislaus, of 74 guns, had run two others aground, and, on the whole, had inflicted much more injury on the Russian fleet than it had sustained from it. "Both parties spent the night over against each other, and not far from the place of battle. The Swedes had nearly shot away all their powder. Not an hour could they have kept up fire if the enemy had renewed the combat next day, yet they dared not attempt to reach the harbour of Sweaborg before daybreak, the wind not being quite favourable; and it seemed likely that if they had given the least suspicion of an intention to enter it, the enemy would have pursued them. There was nothing for it but patient courage. To show this, signal-guns were fired regularly the whole night, as if they only waited for daylight to begin the combat more terribly than ever. The Russians, indeed, gave signs of a renewed attack next morning. The Swedes formed in line immediately, with what feelings may be imagined. But Greig, whose retreat was favoured by the wind, now thought good, instead of a harbour in the Archipelago, to seek that of Cronstadt; and the Swedish High Admiral brought his fleet under the guns of Sweaborg. "Such was the battle of Hogeland, the first sea-fight in which the Swedes had been engaged for a very long time, and in which they fought with the courage and discipline of veteran seamen, far surpassing the expectations of their enemy and of all Europe. Both parties claim the victory of this bloody day; in Petersburg as in Stockholm the Te Deum was chanted. Is it not generous,' says a witty writer, 'in Providence to have so arranged it as to suit both parties, and so earned, there a Greek, here a Lutheran song of praise?'"1 The Annual Register' for the year says: "Admiral Greig is said to have declared, in the account published by authority in St Petersburg, 'that he never saw a fight better sustained than this was on both sides.' This, however, accords but badly with the number of delinquent officers (of whom seventeen were captains), loaded with chains, whom he sent home in a frigate for ill behaviour in this action." As he died a few weeks afterwards, on the 26th of October 1788, in his own ship, the Rotislow, it must be presumed that the wound he received in this fight proved mortal. So ends the career of the Inverkeithing skipper's son, Admiral Samuel Carlovich Greig, governor of Cronstadt, and Chevalier of the Orders of St Andrew, St Alexander Newski, St George, St Vladimir, and St Anne. Every journal in Europe repeated the account of the gorgeous funeral bestowed on him by the Empress, though little is generally known of the man who enjoys the reputation of having made the Russian navy. He made something else, too. As governor of Cronstadt he was the author of the fortifications there; and, as a French writer remarks, the Scotsman built those walls which years afterwards checked the career of his fellow-countryman Sir Charles Napier. It is not, after all, an entirely satisfactory task to celebrate services like these. A nation that can show un. rivalled courage and endurance in the defence of its own independence, need not covet the lustre of success in foreign causes. Boasting of such renown in quarrels selected by and not forced upon the heroes, has something akin to the bully in it. That so many Scotsmen should have thus distinguished themselves abroad was the fruit of their country's sufferings rather than its success. The story of it all reminds one how dreary a thing it is 1 Translated from an extract from Possel's History of Gustavus III. of Sweden,' in Lehman's Lesebuch. that a community should have to dismiss the choice of its children from its own bosom, and how happy is the condition of that compact and well-rounded state which, under a strong and free government, productive of cooperation and contentment, has resources enough to keep its most active and adventurous citizens at work on national objects, and neither lends its children to the stranger, nor calls a foreign force into its own soil. There is little ultimate satisfaction in stranger laurels. Those who are the children of liberty themselves, such as the Scots and Swiss, have seen their services, by the obdurate tendency of historical destiny, almost ever assisting tyranny; and thus the sword of the freeman has done the work of the despot. The prowess and skill of our military leaders have given an undue preponderance to the strength of barbarism, and enabled it to weigh too heavily against the beneficent control of civilisation. The foreign despot is deceived with the notion that the system artificially constructed for him by strangers represents a permanent, well-founded, national power; he becomes insolent in the confidence of its possession; and the fabric of power raised up by one generation of freeborn auxiliaries, costs the blood of another generation to keep it from destroying freedom and civilisation throughout the world. Even while this is passing through the press, the question vibrates at the conference-table, whether we are to have a struggle with another great power which several Scotsmen helped to consolidate. 378 CHAPTER III. THE STATESMAN. REPUTATIONS, LIVING AND DEAD - GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS'S SECRE TARY-AT-WAR-SIR WILLIAM LOCKHART-LORD STAIR-JOHN LAW -WILLIAM PATERSON. If he Of all forgotten celebrities, the author has been, at least "Though thou art fallen while we are free, The generous blood that flowed from thee Within our veins its currents be, Thy name our charging hosts along, Thy fate the theme of choral song To weep would do thy glory wrong- On such an idol the detective generally, indeed, has to do the unpleasant duty of stripping him of false plumage. It is an entirely different affair, as we have seen, with the soldier who has lent his arm to the stranger. The materials which heap themselves over and bury his memory have already been considered; and I refer to the matter here, only to remark that they generally bury the memory of the statesman still more effectually. In the warrior's career there are battles and other stormy events that cannot be entirely concealed; but of the man of council who "shapes the whisper of the throne," it may be said, as Sergeant Pike said of the collier, that he has no visible occupation, but works under ground. There is, for instance, in the possession of some collectors, an engraved portrait of a hard-featured, sagaciouslooking Scot, the Latin inscription around which makes it valuable as identifying a frequent name in the history of Europe during the Thirty Years' War. It is Alexander Erskine, who was eminent both in camp and council. He was minister-at-war to Gustavus Adolphus-no trivial function and a representative of Sweden in the conferences about the Treaty of Westphalia. He held many governorships and other offices-was a patron of letters, and had a magnificent library. Yet no biographical dictionary, so far as I am aware, affords him a square inch; and in Ersch and Grubers' Encyclopedia-where one finds everything that is neglected elsewhere- the perfection of German diligence has been able to add nothing material to what the ordinary historians tell us of him, except that he studied at Königsberg, and that he died childless in the campaign of 1657, at Zamosc, whence his body was brought and buried in great state in the Cathedral of Bremen. Another Scotsman of the same name, who represented Russia in some of her Eastern negotiations, and had vast influence at the Court of the Czar, has left still scantier traces in accessible sources of biographical information. He belonged to the family of Erskine of Alva, in Clackmannanshire, a fact which I discovered one day by noticing the extreme richness of the crimson silk window-curtains in the drawing-room of one of his descendants. These were the hangings of a tent given to him by one of the Tartar princes with whom it was his function to treat. |