But it was a dear conquest, a dearer triumph!  It was not till the fury of the contest was over that the full weight of the loss sustained was felt and the shout of triumph died away into a silent gloom of despair.  He, who had led them to the charge, returned not with them:  there he lay upon the field which he had won, mingled with the dead bodies of the common crowd.  After a long and almost fruitless search, the corpse of the king was discovered, not far from the great stone, which, for a hundred years before, had stood between Luetzen and the Canal, and which, from the memorable disaster of that day, still bears the name of the Stone of the Swede.  Covered with blood and wounds so as scarcely to be recognized, trampled beneath the horses’ hoofs, stripped by the rude hands of plunderers of its ornaments and clothes, his body was drawn from beneath a heap of dead, conveyed to Weissenfels, and there delivered up to the lamentations of his soldiers and the last embraces of his queen.  The first tribute had been paid to revenge, and blood had atoned for the blood of the monarch; but now affection assumes its rights, and tears of grief must flow for the man.  The universal sorrow absorbs all individual woes.  The generals, still stupefied by the unexpected blow, stood speechless and motionless around his bier, and no one trusted himself enough to contemplate the full extent of their loss.

The Emperor, we are told by Khevenhuller, showed symptoms of deep, and apparently sincere feeling, at the sight of the king’s doublet stained with blood, which had been stripped from him during the battle and carried to Vienna.  “Willingly,” said he, “would I have granted to the unfortunate prince a longer life and a safe return to his kingdom, had Germany been at peace.”  But when a trait, which is nothing more than a proof of a yet lingering humanity and which a mere regard to appearances and even self-love would have extorted from the most insensible, and the absence of which could exist only in the most inhuman heart, has, by a Roman Catholic writer of modern times and acknowledged merit, been made the subject of the highest eulogium and compared with the magnanimous tears of Alexander for the fall of Darius, our distrust is excited of the other virtues of the writer’s hero, and, what is still worse, of his own ideas of moral dignity.  But even such praise, whatever its amount, is much for one whose memory his biographer has to clear from the suspicion of being privy to the assassination of a king.

It was scarcely to be expected that the strong leaning of mankind to the marvelous would leave to the common course of nature the glory of ending the career of Gustavus Adolphus.  The death of so formidable a rival was too important an event for the Emperor not to excite in his bitter opponent a ready suspicion that what was so much to his interests was also the result of his instigation.  For the execution, however, of this dark deed, the Emperor would require the aid of a foreign arm, and this it was generally believed he had found in Francis Albert, Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg.  The rank of the latter permitted him a free access to the king’s person, while at the same time it seemed to place him above the suspicion of so foul a deed.  This prince, however, was in fact not incapable of this atrocity, and he had, moreover, sufficient motives for its commission.