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Henty, G. A. (George Alfred), 1832-1902

"A tale of the times of Gustavus Adolphus"

Sir John Hepburn was appointed military
governor of Munich.
In the arsenal armour, arms, and clothing sufficient for 10,000
infantry were found, and a hundred and forty pieces of cannon were
discovered buried beneath the floors of the palace. Their carriages
were ready in the arsenal, and they were soon put in order for battle.
For three weeks the army remained at Munich, Gustavus waiting to
see what course Wallenstein was taking. The Imperialist general
had entered Bohemia, had driven thence, with scarcely an effort,
Arnheim and the Saxons, and formed a junction near Eger with
the remnants of the army which had been beaten on the Lech; then,
leaving a strong garrison in Ratisbon, he had marched on with an
army of sixty thousand men.
He saw that his best plan to force Gustavus to loose his hold of
Bavaria was to march on some important point lying between him and
North Germany. He therefore selected a place which Gustavus could
not abandon, and so would be obliged to leave Bavaria garrisoned
only by a force insufficient to withstand the attacks of Pappenheim,
who had collected a considerable army for the recovery of the
territories of Maximilian. Such a point was Nuremberg, the greatest
and strongest of the free cities, and which had been the first to
open its gates to Gustavus. The Swedish king could hardly abandon
this friendly city to the assaults of the Imperialists, and indeed
its fall would have been followed by the general defection from his
cause of all that part of Germany, and he would have found himself
isolated and cut off from the North.


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