Robert Nisbet Bain

“ Görtz’s position, however, was highly peculiar. Ostensibly, he was only the Holstein minister at Charles’s court, in reality he was everything in Sweden except a Swedish subject—finance minister, plenipotentiary to foreign powers, factotum, and responsible to the king alone, though he had not a line of instructions. But he was just the man for a hero in extremities, and his whole course of procedure was, of necessity, revolutionary. ”

“ He owed his extraordinary influence to the fact that he was the only one of Charles’s advisers who believed, or pretended to believe, that Sweden was still far from exhaustion, or at any rate had a sufficient reserve of power to give support to an energetic diplomacy—Charles’s own opinion, in fact. ”