Charles XII of Sweden

“ The King of Sweden would make no claims on his own behalf, being satisfied with having helped his ally and humbled his enemy. Thus Charles XII, at eighteen years old, began and ended this war in less than six weeks.
Just at the same time the King of Poland laid siege in person to the town of Riga, the capital of Livonia, and the Czar was marching from the East at the head of 100,000 men. Riga was defended by the old Count D’Alberg, a Swedish general who, at the age of eighty, combined the enthusiasm of youth with the experience of sixty campaigns. ”

“ Charles XII. of Sweden and Peter the Great of Russia were at war; and Denmark and Poland were lending a hand to defeat the Swedish King. Peter the Great was extending his Baltic provinces and preparing to build his new capital of St. Petersburg (1709) ; but Charles XII. was defeated by Prussia and Hanover, in his attempt to make of Sweden one of the great powers of Europe. ”

“ He was born June 17, 1682, at the castle of Stockholm. The astrologers declared that Sweden was to receive a new war-lord, and that time they were not mistaken. Charles XII. was born in the same year as the absolute monarchy of Sweden, which power he was to abuse in such a great measure. Shortly after his birth, one of the speakers of the knightly chapter house, Justice Gyllencreutz, said while warning against the consequences of an absolute power: “A king may come who follows his own will, being more fond of war than peace, or utterly extravagant. ”

“ She retired to Rome, where she passed the rest of her [Pg 10] life surrounded by the arts which she loved, and for the sake of which she had renounced an empire at the age of twenty-seven. After her abdication she induced the States of Sweden to elect as her successor her cousin Charles Gustavus, the tenth of that name, son of the Count Palatinate, Duke of Deux Ponts. This king added new conquests to those of Gustavus Adolphus. First he invaded Poland, where he gained the celebrated three days’ battle of Warsaw ”

“ The nation is born with a passion for war, and every people unconsciously imitate their King. Nothing was discussed from one end of the country to the other but the great exploits of Charles and his generals, and of the old regiment which fought under them at Narva, Duna, Crassau, Pultask, and Hollosin. Thus the humblest of the Swedes were filled with a spirit of emulation and thirst for glory. Besides this, they loved their King, were sorry for him, and hated the Danes thoroughly. In many other countries the peasants are slaves or are treated as such ”

“ A slave brought up in the idleness and the silence of the seraglio, made a vizir through favouritism, and a general against his own inclinations, headed a raw army, without experience and without discipline, against Russian troops, with twelve years’ experience in war, and proud of having conquered the Swedes.
The Czar, according to all appearances, must have vanquished Baltagi, but he made the same mistake with regard to the Turks as the King of Sweden was guilty of in his own case; that is, he had too poor an opinion of his enemy. Upon the news of the Turkish preparations he left Moscow ”

“ The great Leipzig fair was held as usual, tradesmen attended it in perfect security; not one Swedish soldier was to be seen in the fair; it might have been said that the only object of the Swedish army in Saxony was to keep the peace: the King ruled throughout the Electorate with as absolute a power and as deep a tranquillity as in Stockholm.
King Augustus, a wanderer in Poland, and deprived both of his kingdom and his electorate, at last wrote a letter with his own hand to Charles XII to ask for a peace. ”

“ The Turkish ambassador presented Charles with 100 Swedish soldiers, who had been taken by the Calmouks and sold in Turkey, redeemed by the Grand Master, and sent by him to the King as the most agreeable present he could make him. Not that the proud Ottoman meant to pay homage to the glory of Charles, but because the Sultan, the natural enemy of the Emperors of Russia and Germany, wished to strengthen himself against them by the friendship of the King of Sweden and alliance with Poland. ”

“ Some time after he was admitted to the court of King Augustus. Charles XI was dead, but the sentence of Patkul was not annulled, and he was still most resentful. He pointed out to the King of Poland how easily Livonia could be conquered; the people were in despair, and eager to shake off the Swedish yoke; the King was only a child, and unable to defend himself. These proposals were well received by a prince who had long meditated this conquest. Preparations were immediately made for a sudden invasion of Sweden, empty formalities of ultimata and manifestoes being dispensed with. ”

“ What a different country that Sweden was which Charles XII. left in August, 1699, at the very summit of her political grandeur, to the impoverished and suffering Sweden in which he had now landed! And what a different man he had himself become during these sixteen years of absence! Sweden had won a new hero king, of greater fame than any of his predecessors or successors, but lost her prosperity for the time being and her political grandeur forever. The people received the king with demonstrations of joy and with reviving hope for an honorable peace. ”

“ His death His Death. was considered as a signal for the general cessation of arms; but Sweden never recovered from the mad enterprises of Charles XII. It has never since been a first class power. The national finances were disordered, the population decimated, and the provinces dismembered. Peter the Great gained what his rival lost. We cannot but compassionate a nation that has the misfortune to be ruled by such an absolute and infatuated monarch as was Charles XII. He did nothing for the civilization of his subjects, or to ameliorate the evils he caused. ”

“ An ambassador of France, a M. de Croissy, was then shut up with the King in Stralsund. To send a man on an embassy to Charles was like sending him to the trenches. The King would talk with Croissy for hours together, in the most exposed places, where people were falling on all sides, killed by the bombs and cannon; the King was unconscious of the danger, and the ambassador did not care to say anything to make him chose a safer place for business. Before the siege this minister tried his best to make a treaty between the Kings of Sweden and Prussia ”

“ Sweden among the little ones.
Before 1709 Sweden still held the rank to which Gustavus Adolphus had raised her in the Thirty Years' War. Her prestige had been a little dimmed by the victories of the "Great Elector" of Prussia; but her ally Louis XIV had saved her from any considerable diminution of the extensive territories which she held on the mainland to the south and east of the Baltic Sea. About 1700 the young and gallant warrior, Charles XII, the "Madman of the North," reasserted her prowess, made her once more the dictator of Northern Europe, one of the five great powers of the world. ”

“ It is difficult to deceive a free nation concerning its interests. The Poles saw that if this war, undertaken against their wishes, was unsuccessful, their country, unprotected on every side, would fall a prey to the King of Sweden, and that if it succeeded they would be subdued by their own king, who as soon as he was master of Livonia as well as Saxony would be able to hem in Poland between these two countries. ”

“ He revealed himself to the peasants, and impressed them as a man of extraordinary gifts, whom ordinary men instinctively obey. In a short time he turned these barbarians into veterans. He attacked Christian and the Archbishop, gained several victories over them, and drove them both from Sweden. Then the States duly elected him King of the country which he had liberated. ”

“ As soon as the Duke of Ormond went, the Czar impressed upon the King his courtesy in having sent away the chief partisan of the Pretender, and Baron Gortz returned to Sweden with great hopes of success.
He found his master at the head of 30,000 troops with all the coast guarded by militia. The King needed nothing but money, but he had no [Pg 318] credit at home or abroad. France, under the Duke of Orleans, would give him none. He was promised money from Spain, but that country was not yet in a position to support him. ”

“ Every soldier had with him fifty crowns ready money; not only, too, were all the regiments complete, but there were several supernumeraries to each company. Besides this army Count Levenhaupt, one of his best generals, was waiting for him in Poland with 20,000 men; he had, too, another army of 15,000 in Finland, and recruits were on their way from Sweden. With all these forces it was not doubted that he would dethrone the Czar.
The Emperor was then in Russia, trying to keep up the spirits of a party which King Augustus seemed to have deserted. ”

“ Sweden, on the other hand, had lost all her foreign possessions, and had neither trade, money, nor credit; her veterans were either killed or had died of want. More than a hundred thousand Swedes were slaves in the vast Russian Empire, and as many more had been sold to the Turks and the Tartars. The male population was visibly becoming scarce; but in spite of all this, their hopes revived when they heard that their King had arrived at Stralsund. ”

“ After Gustavus Vasa and Gustavus Adolphus Charles XI. was, perhaps, the greatest of all the kings of Sweden. His modest, homespun figure has indeed been unduly eclipsed by the brilliant and colossal shapes of his heroic father and his meteoric son; yet in reality Charles XI. is far worthier of admiration than either Charles X. or Charles XII. He was in an eminent degree a great master-builder. He found Sweden in ruins, and devoted his whole life to laying the solid foundations of a new order of things which, in its essential features, has endured to the present day. ”

“ Baltagi was aware of the fact that Charles’s presence in Turkey meant his ruin, so he placed guards on all the roads from Bender to Constantinople, with orders to intercept the King’s letters; he also cut off his “thaim,” the allowance that the Porte makes to exiled princes in her dominions. The King of Sweden’s was immense, 500 crowns a day in money, besides all that contributed to the maintenance of a court in pomp and abundance. ”

“ To whatever house Cantemir belonged, he owed all to the Ottoman Porte. Scarcely had he been invested with his principality than he betrayed the Emperor his benefactor for the Czar, from whom he had greater expectations. He believed that the conqueror of Charles XII would easily triumph over an obscure vizir, with no military experience, who had appointed as his lieutenant the chief customs officer of Turkey; he reckoned on all Greece joining his faction, and the Greek priests encouraged him in his treachery. ”

“ There was nothing to be hoped from Lithuania, where the Swedes were posted; while the Polish army, reduced in number, lacked arms, provisions and the will to fight. The majority of the nobles, intimidated, undecided, or disaffected, stayed on their own lands. It was in vain that the King, authorized by law, ordered every noble to appear on horseback under pain of death, and to follow him; they began to argue that they need not obey him. His chief trust was in the troops of the Electorate, where, as the form of government was absolute, he did not fear disobedience. ”

“ There were now very few regulars left, for though Charles had always made his great expeditions with small armies, yet [Pg 201] his innumerable battles for nine years, the continual necessity for recruits, the maintenance of his garrisons, and the standing army he was obliged to maintain in Finland, Livonia, Pomerania, Bremen, and Verden, had cost Sweden, during the course of the war, more than 250,000 men; there were not as many as 8,000 of the veterans who, with raw forces, were now Sweden’s only resource. ”

“ KING OF SWEDEN
BOOK I Outline of Swedish history up to the time of Charles XI—Charles’s education—His enemies—Character-sketch of the Czar, Peter Alexiowitz—His peculiarities—Alliance of Russia, Poland, Denmark against Charles XII.
THE kingdom which is made up of Sweden and Finland is, according to our measurement, about 200 leagues broad and 300 long, and stretches from south to north as far as the 55th degree or thereabouts. ”

“ The Cardinal-Primate, disappointed of the fruit of so many intrigues, returned to the Assembly, where he left no stone unturned to ruin the election in which he had had no share; but the King of Sweden arrived incognito at Warsaw, so that he had to be silent. All that the Primate could do was to absent himself from the election: he took up the position of a neutral, being unable to oppose the conqueror and unwilling to assist him. ”

“ Sweden alone, [Pg 87] at peace during these great doings, was rejoicing in deep peace, and in the glory of her King, for which she did not have to pay the price, for his victorious troops were maintained at the expense of the conquered.
During this general peace of the North before the arms of Charles XII, the town of Dantzig ventured to offend him. Fourteen frigates and forty transports were bringing the King reinforcements of 6,000 men, with cannon and ammunition to finish the siege of Thorn. ”