So ill matched were they when a stubborn king forced a war that could end only in disaster. When one of his councillors advised against the folly, he caned him and sent him into exile. Yet out of the fiery trial this king came a hero; his queen, whose pride and wasteful vanity[13] had done its full share in bringing the country to the verge of ruin, became the idol of the nation. In the hour of its peril she grew to the stature of a great woman who shared danger and hardship with her people and by her example put hope and courage into their hearts. Karl Gustav, the Swedish king, was campaigning in Poland, but as soon as he could turn around he marched his army against Denmark, scattered the forces that opposed him, and before news of his advance had reached Copenhagen knocked at the gate of Denmark demanding “speech of brother Frederik in good Swedish.” A winter of great severity had bridged the Baltic and the sounds of the island kingdom. In two weeks he led his army, horse, foot, and guns, over the frozen seas where hardly a wagon had dared cross before. Great rifts yawned in their way, and whole companies were swallowed up; his own sleigh sank in the deep, but nothing stopped him. Danish emissaries came pleading for peace. He met them on the way to the capital, surrounded by his Finnish horsemen, and gave scant ear to their speeches while he drove on. Before the city he halted and dictated a peace so humiliating that one of the Danish commissioners exclaimed when he came to sign, “I wish I could not write.” Perhaps the same wish troubled the conqueror’s ambitious dreams. The peace was broken as swiftly as made. In five months he was back before Frederik’s capital with his whole army, while a Swedish fleet anchored in the roadstead outside. “What difference does it make to you,” was the contemptuous taunt flung at the anxious envoys who sought his camp, “whether the name of your king is Karl or Frederik so long as you are safe?” He had come to make an end of Denmark.