Revenge At Elsinore
by
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Gadh's last words to me were "Live long." My mentor wished me more time than was given him to exact revenge. He would never have anticipated my expiring so comfortably. He might now be turning in his grave in surprise to learn that I lay dying in a canopied down-filled rope bed in Amsterdam, had I not exhumed his corpse the day after his burial in Elsinore
When Hemming Gadh long ago died in my arms, run through by a careless sword, he was known to the northern world as Polonius. I, Magnus Eriksson Vasa, then called Horatio, lived long enough to earn revenge's dubious consolations.
What remains of me revisits this, my memoir, one last time before consigning it to my loving daughter Brigitta. She has watched vainglory, power and prejudice warp the pointed shaft of history into crooked hooks of half-truth. She knows that my honest untold tale has already been scarred by hired scriveners. She fears my story will gather dust unless it gathers speed, and therefore bends toward England, whose tongue waxes eloquent across the globe, to find there a playwright to shape this account into dramatic history. Though I bow to her conviction that drame is the modern mold for opinion's shape, I distrust both dramatists and chroniclers. It is as easy to bend the past to poetry as to politics. But I must leave it.
When Gadh died, he was the oldest man I knew. I am older now than he was then. In my youth, I was brother to a hero who would become a king, lover of a queen who would forsake her throne, protector of a monk who set the world on fire, and mortal foe of the black prince of Denmark. Once proximate to power, I rule only these pages. They tell a tale that needs telling. It begins on Lake Mälar and ends in Elsinore.
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In winter's dawn, if you ski westward across Lake Mälar's hardened top, you will see no horizon. Heaven and earth are one. But if you spot some distant form, it will distinguish ice from air. At first you cannot tell whether the object is moving toward you or away or frozen still. One chill November morn some three score years ago—it was 1517, to be exact—my elder brother Gustav sledged out from Stockholm to intercept me. His purpose separated my heaven from my earth forever.
I had been vigorously puffing for nearly two hours when his pair of Gotland ponies overtook me. I glided to a stop and they halted heads to head with me, nearly nostrils to nostril, as though challenging my exertions with copious, crystalline exhalations. The holder of their reins scarcely breathed.
"So, Gustav, are you taking your exercise beneath reindeer skins this morn?" He let out a laugh that roused a skein of herring gulls to heckle me. He joined their chorus. "Little brother, your arms punish ski-poles; mine own swing battle-axes. Let mine rest while yours play, so that when I fight you will be fit to flee."
He leaped from his sledge and embraced me with show of joy and impress of might. Though I tiptoed atop my skis, his nose touched my forehead, his mustachio tickled my cheeks, and his ample beard brushed snow from my slender whiskers. With powerful hands he grasped my shoulders, forced my heels back onto my skis, and froze me with his steely blue gaze. "Eric Johansson wishes to see us."
"Wherefore?" I inquired, aware that the reason had to be politic. Otherwise, Gustav would have said, "Father wishes to see us."
"Herr Sten has called an urgent meeting of the Riksdag to resolve the fate of Stäket. As you and I are members of his court, we have been invited to bear witness. Our sire shall vote with Sten on our family's behalf. If our mighty regent succeeds in having the fortress razed, we will have struck a great blow for Sweden's independence."
"If our viceroy succeeds, the Church will excommunicate him and place Sweden under papal interdict."
"Yes, little brother," Gustav sighed. "And beyond such tender theology, the Dane's mercenaries will attack us ferociously. Unlike you, I shy more from cannon ball than papal bull. Let's hope the archbishop will be buried beneath Stäket's ruins."
A practical fellow, my brother usually seized the salient point. I am more roundwise and so shall come back shortly to describe the importance of Stäket to Sweden's fortunes. The fortress's lord, Gustav Trolle, Archbishop of Uppsala, was an incorrigible unionist; that is, an apostle of the Union of Kalmar and therefore a slave to Denmark. The union was an antiquated triumviry of Sweden, Norway and Denmark rendered specious by Denmark's haughty hegemony. I am reluctant to admit that Trolle was an irreconcilable foe of the Stures and Vasas for fear the gentle reader will think my opinion swerves on a bias when I contend that he was an obstinate, evil man.
He descended from an ancient and powerful Swedish dynasty jealous of the Stures' political ascendancy. Trolle's father Eric, bearing no scruples, had none to pass on to his son. Gustav Trolle was therefore born unscrupulous. No aspect of character or temperament bade him acknowledge force of principle or pangs of conscience. He was 'the new man,' a rare breed, a person who lived for himself alone and cared not a mastiff's snot for anyone else, neither liege nor kin. In my life I have met only one other person so constituted. But I shall speak anon of Prince Hamlet.
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About the Book
In 1517, Sweden is on the brink of declaring independence from Denmark, and Martin Luther has posted on a church door in distant Saxony incendiary views that will soon set Europe afire. Sweden's arch-patriot Hemming Gadh has arranged the coincidence. The Danish king Hamlet is plotting to kidnap and deliver Luther to Rome and the stake in exchange for Vatican support of Denmark's depredations upon Sweden. Gadh knows that the monk's heresy is the key to his country's liberation. Sweden must keep Luther alive and encourage his schismatic diatribe.
To fulfill that mission, Gadh engages young Magnus Vasa—brother of Sweden's future king—as protector and confidant of the controversial theologian. Disguised as a Norwegian student named Horatio, Magnus enrolls at Wittenberg's university. There he encounters the Danish king's dissolute son Prince Hamlet and embarks upon adventures that will determine not only Sweden's fate but Europe's future. Meanwhile, Gadh, Horatio's mentor and Sweden's master counterspy, has embedded himself at Elsinore as the evil king's chancellor Polonius. When King Hamlet's atrocities culminate in the infamous Bloodbath of Stockholm, Gadh and Magnus—Polonius and Horatio—swear revenge upon the Dane, his bastard son and their kingdom.
Gadh summons Magnus to Elsinore, where Horatio falls in love with Queen Gertrude, recognizes the recently deceased king's brother Claudius as a great and kind ruler, witnesses Polonius's death at the prince's hand, and finally—when called upon to duel the Black Prince to the death—finds his path between patriotism and romantic love, obedience and autonomy, vengeance and forgiveness.
Skillfully written, entertainingly intelligent and historically authentic, Revenge At Elsinore mesmerizes readers with a vibrant romantic adventure that also provides the key that unlocks mysteries that have puzzled Shakespearean scholars for centuries.
About the Author
Author of four non-fiction books and a critically acclaimed historian, John O'Donnell entered college as an English major and left it as an elite miler. After a tour of duty in the Far East as a Russian interpreter with the U.S. Naval Security Group, he returned stateside to earn a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania and pursue a career as part-time academician and full-time nonprofit executive.
The author has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Delaware, SUNY Buffalo, Rutgers University, and University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. He has addressed the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow and the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, Scotland. His published articles have been reprinted in anthologized collections.
Now an independent public historian, he lives in the urban village of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia. This is his first novel.