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In another letter he thanks the chancellor for letting him
have the rights of fishing in a neighbouring district. But
the main burden of all his letters is the pressing necessity
of money to pay his men. “ Already,” he writes in May
1630, “the horsemen steal and plunder where they can ;
the peasants also, who have nothing more to lose, band
themselves together, fall upon the men and murder them;
item the horsemen retaliate,” and all this because “ they
do not have in the least whereof to live.” 1
Even among the foot-soldiers a spirit of lawlessness
begins to show itself, whilst the inhabitants, whenever they
think themselves in the least aggrieved, fly to the chancellor.
God knows I do not want to wrong them, but strict order
must be maintained. The German horsemen seem to have
conducted themselves worst of all. “They cut the corn
of the poor people,” Ruthven writes on the 26th of July
1630, “before it is ripe or when it is ripe, thrash it and
sell it as they please without granting the poor people
anything of the money, although many relied upon it.
Seeing their hope in vain, the poor must die of hunger,
1 Ruthven writes in German, like most of the Scotch commanders.
His language in very ungrammatical, but terse and picturesque. Here he
says, “ Sie haben semptlichen im geringsten nicht wovon zue leben.”
Patrick Ruthven was born in 1583. He did not come to Sweden with
Mönnichhofen in 1612, but served already from 1609-11 in the war
against Russia. He then joined Cobson’s regiment, became Colonel of
the Östergötland Horse Regiment (1616), Colonel of the Kronsberg
Regiment; followed the king to Germany in 1626; encamped near
Marienburg in 1629, was put at the head of the Scotch troops newly
raised in 1630 (garrison, Elbing and Memel) ; joined Gustavus Adolphus
in the summer of that year in his fortified camp at Werben ; was present
at the Battle of Leipzig ; went to the Rhine with the king in 1632, and
to Niirnberg ; was made Major-General and Governor of Ulm, 1632-33 ;
joined Banér in 1633 ; beat the Saxons at Dömitz on the 22nd of
October ; took an active part in many skirmishes ; returned to Werben ;
was sent to London in 1634 on recruiting business.
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