CHARLES X. OF SWEDEN 



CHARLES XII. OF SWEDEN 121 



forced to fight for self-preservation, Charles 

 teemed to make war principally for war's sake. 



vas now free to gratify his passion for war. 



he attacked Poland in July lti.V), because the 



i king had not resigned' his claim to the 

 Swedish throne, ami in a few weeks overran the 

 whole country. Next he forced the Great Elector 

 ..i Brandenburg to acknowledge his lordship over 

 tin- duchy of Prussia, then crushed the forces of the 

 Polish kin' anew in a terrible three-days' battle at 

 \\.ir-a\\ (July '28-30, 1656). He next assailed the 

 Danes, who had declared war against him, crossed 

 tlie Great and Little Belt on the ice, and speedily 

 made himself master of all the continental Mosses- 

 -inns nt Denmark. Marching from isle to isle over 

 the fro/en sea, he extorted the Treaty of Roeskild 

 (7th March 1658), which gave to Sweden Halland, 

 Scania. Blekinge, Bornholm, and the other Danish 



ssions beyond the Sound, and emancipated 

 Sweden from the Sound Dues. His offers to the 

 Hut eh and English to share in the partition of 

 Denmark being declined, he invaded Zealand alone 

 in lti.")9, and attacked Copenhagen, but was beaten 

 ntt ,hy the Danes, aided by the Prussians and 

 Dutch. Soon after he died suddenly at Gothen- 

 burg, February 23, 1660. He was succeeded by his 

 on, Charles XI. (1660-97), then only four years 

 old. See SWEDEN. 



Charles XII., king of Sweden (1697-1718), 

 was the son of Charles XL, and was born at Stock- 

 holm, -27th June 1682. On the death of his father 

 in U597 he ascended the throne, and notwithstand- 

 ing his youth the States declared him of age to 

 assume the reins of government. The neighbour- 

 big powers thought this a favourable time to 

 humble Sweden, then the great power of the 

 north; and Frederick IV. of Denmark, Augustus 

 II. of Poland, and the Czar Peter the Great 

 concluded a league for this object. The Danes 

 began by invading the territory of the Duke of 

 Holstein Gottorp, husband of the eldest sister of 

 Charles. The young king at once flung an army 

 into Zealand, and in concert with Sir George 

 Rooke's Anglo-Dutch squadron so threatened 

 Copenhagen both by land and sea that the 

 king was fain to sue for peace. Charles now 

 hastened to meet the Russians, who lay under 

 the walls of Narva, 50,000 strong, stormed their 

 camp with but 8000 Swedes, and routed them 

 with great slaughter, 30th November 1700. He 

 next dethroned Augustus II., and procured the 

 election of Stanislaus Leszczynski as king of 

 Poland. Augustus supposed himself safe at least 

 in Saxony, his hereditary dominion, but was 

 followed thither, and humbling terms of peace 

 were dictated at Altranstadt in 1706. Patkul, 

 born a Livonian, but now the Czar's ambassador 

 at Dresden, Charles caused to be broken on the 

 wheel for treason, after a form of trial. In the 

 autumn of 1707 he had collected an army of 43,000 

 men in Saxony, and in the January of the follow- 

 in- year suddenly burst into Russia, and almost 

 captured the Czar at Grodno. He next drove the 

 Russians before him, and had already forced the 

 Beresina and won a battle at Smolensk, which 

 opened up to him the road to Moscow, when he 

 suddenly turned southwards to the Ukraine, trust- 

 ing to the promises of the Cossack lietman Mazeppa. 

 But Mazeppa failed to bring forward his 30,000 

 Cossacks, and the king's reinforcements from 

 Sweden were cut off by the watchful Czar, so 

 that the Swedes had no alternative but to endure 

 the hard winter of 1708-9 in the midst of an 

 Impoverished and hostile country. In spring 

 Charles, with a force reduced to 23,000 men, laid 

 siege to Pultowa, but the Czar hastened to oppose 

 him, and defeated him after a desperate struggle, 

 on the 8th July. Charles fled with a handful 



of attendant* across the Turkish frontier to 

 Bender. 



Augustus now revoked the treaty of Altnuwtiidt, 

 and the Czar and the king of Denmark in concert 

 >d the Swedish territories. But the regency 

 in Stockholm adopted measures of effective resist- 

 ance, and Charles prevailed upon the Porte to 

 commence a war against Russia, in which Peter 

 seemed at first likely to suffer a severe defeat. 

 But Russian agents succeeded in inspiring the 

 Turks with suspicions concerning the ultimate 

 designs of their impracticable guest, and accord- 

 ingly Charles was seized, resisting desperately sword 

 in hand, and conveyed to Demotica. At last he 

 contrived to escajie, and made his way through 

 Hungary and Germany in sixteen days, till Tie 

 reached Stralsund on the 21st of November 1714. 

 A month later the town was forced to capitulate 

 to an allied army of Danes, Saxons, Prussians, and 

 Russians, on which the king crossed to Lund. Hi 

 passion for war led him to attack Norway early in 

 1716; and soon after, under the advice of the Baron 

 yon Gb'rtz, he formed a scheme which commended 

 itself to his love of fighting and his vast ambition. 

 He was to make terms with the Czar by surrender- 

 ing the Baltic provinces of Sweden, then conquer 

 Norway, next land in Scotland and replace the 

 House of Stuart on the English throne, with the 

 help of the Jacobite party within and that of 

 Cardinal Alberoni without. No sooner had he 

 purchased his peace with the Czar than he burst 

 into Norway. Early in 1718 he commenced the 

 siege of Fredrikshall, and while hastening on the 

 works in the dead of winter with all his character- 

 istic impetuosity of impatience, was killed by a 

 musket-shot from the fortress. Some writers have 

 maintained that his death was due to treachery, 

 and a somewhat unscientific examination of his 

 skull in 1746 seemed to give some colour to the 

 belief ; but a new examination by command of 

 Charles XV. in 1859 proved conclusively that the 

 fatal shot must have been fired from a height down- 

 wards, and that therefore the king's death was due 

 to his own reckless exposure of nis person to the 

 fire of the enemy. 



The character of Charles was full of strange 

 contradictions. He was brave to the pitch of 

 reckless folly, determined to the point 01 foolish 

 obstinacy. Pleasure had no attractions for him : 

 he shared the coarsest food and severest labour 

 of the common soldier with an easy cheerfulness 

 that won him the passionate devotion of his 

 men. All external marks of rank he despised : 

 his dress was simple, and Swedish in form and 

 colour a loose blue coat, with turned-down collar, 

 and large plain brass buttons ; buff-coloured waist- 

 coat ; a black kerchief, doubly folded round his 

 neck ; coarse felt hat, and high broad-toed riding 

 boots with massive steel spurs. His hardy frame 

 defied alike fatigue and the extremes of heat 

 and cold. He was able and sagacious in counsel, 

 and had a mind capable of the vastest designs. 

 But his ambition was fatal to his country, and 

 after his death, Sweden, exhausted by his war-. 

 ceased to be numbered among the great powers. 

 The strange vicissitudes of his career are reviewed 

 in thirty of the finest lines of Johnson's noble poem, 

 The Vanity of Human Wishes the concluding 

 passage is as well known as anything in English 

 literature : 



His fall was destin'd to a barren strand, 



A petty fortress, and a dubious hand. 



He left the name at which the world grew pale, 



To point a moral, or adorn a tale. 



Voltaire's well-written Histoire de Charles XII. 

 will continue to be the chief life, spite of ite errors. 

 An eloquent sketch of his career, read by King 

 Oscar 11., then Duke of Ostergbtland, at the 



