Part 24 (1/2)
[Sidenote: Early Days of Charles XII.]
The young monarch, at first, gave but few indications of the remarkable qualities which afterwards distinguished him. He was idle, dissipated, haughty, and luxurious. When he came to the council chamber, he was absent and indifferent, and generally sat with both legs thrown across the table.
But his lethargy and indifference did not last long. Three great monarchs had conspired to ruin him, and dismember his kingdom. These were the Czar Peter, Frederic IV. of Denmark, and Frederic Augustus, King of Poland, and also Elector of Saxony; and their hostile armies were on the point of invading his country.
The greatness of the danger brought to light his great qualities. He vigorously prepared for war. His whole character changed. Quintus Curtius became his text-book, and Alexander his model. He spent no time in sports or magnificence. He clothed himself like a common soldier, whose hards.h.i.+ps he resolved henceforth to share. He forswore the society and the influence of woman. He relinquished wine and all the pleasures of the table. Love of glory became his pa.s.sion, and continued through life; and this ever afterwards made him insensible to reproach, danger, toil, fear, hunger, and pain. Never was a more complete change effected in a man's moral character; and never was an improved moral character consecrated to a worse end. He was not devoted to the true interests of his country, but to a selfish, base, and vain pa.s.sion for military fame.
But his conduct, at first, called forth universal admiration. His glorious and successful defence against enemies apparently overwhelming gave him a great military reputation, and secured for him the sympathies of Christendom. Had he died when he had repelled the Russian, the Danish, and the Polish armies, he would have secured as honorable an immortality as that of Gustavus Adolphus. But he was not permitted to die prematurely, as was his great ancestor. He lived long enough to become intoxicated with success, to make great political blunders, and to suffer the most fatal and mortifying misfortunes.
The commencement of his military career was beautifully heroic.
”Gentlemen,” said the young monarch of eighteen to his counsellors, when he meditated desperate resistance, ”I am resolved never to begin an unjust war, and never to finish a just one but with the destruction of my enemies.”
[Sidenote: Charles's Heroism.]
In six weeks he finished, after he had begun, the Danish war having completely humbled his enemy, and succored his brother-in-law, the Duke of Holstein.
His conflict with Peter has been presented, when with twenty thousand men he attacked and defeated sixty thousand Russians in their intrenchments, took one hundred and fifty pieces of cannon, and killed eighteen thousand men. The victory of Narva astonished all Europe, and was the most brilliant which had then been gained in the annals of modern warfare.
Charles was equally successful against Frederic Augustus. He routed his Saxon troops, and then resolved to dethrone him, as King of Poland. And he succeeded so far as to induce the Polish Diet to proclaim the throne vacant. Augustus was obliged to fly, and Stanislaus Leczinski was chosen king in his stead, at the nomination of the Swedish conqueror. The country was subjugated, and Frederic Augustus became a fugitive.
But Charles was not satisfied with expelling him from Poland. He resolved to attack him also in Saxony itself. Saxony was then, next to Austria, the most powerful of the German states. Nevertheless, Saxony could not arrest the victorious career of Charles. The Saxons fled as he approached. He penetrated to the heart of the electorate, and the unfortunate Frederic Augustus was obliged to sue for peace, which was only granted on the most humiliating terms; which were, that the elector should acknowledge Stanislaus as king of Poland; that he should break all his treaties with Russia, and should deliver to the King of Sweden all the men who had deserted from his army. The humbled elector sought a personal interview with Charles, after he had signed the conditions of peace, with the hope of securing better terms. He found Charles in his jack boots, with a piece of black taffeta round his neck for a cravat, and clothed in a coa.r.s.e blue coat with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons. His conversation turned wholly on his jack boots; and this trifling subject was the only one on which he would deign to converse with one of the most accomplished monarchs of his age.
Charles had now humbled and defeated all his enemies. He should now have returned to Sweden, and have cultivated the arts of peace. But peace and civilization were far from his thoughts. The subjugation of all the northern powers became the dream of his life. He invaded Russia, resolved on driving Peter from his throne.
[Sidenote: His Misfortunes.]
He was eminently successful in defensive war, and eminently unsuccessful in aggressive war. Providence benevolently but singularly comes to the aid of all his children in distress and despair. Men are gloriously strong in defending their rights; but weak, in all their strength, when they a.s.sail the rights of others. So signal is this fact, that it blazes upon all the pages of history, and is ill.u.s.trated in common life as well as in the affairs of nations.
When Charles turned as an a.s.sailant of the rights of his enemies, his unfortunate reverses commenced. At the head of forty-three thousand veterans, loaded with the spoils of Poland and Saxony, he commenced his march towards Russia. He had another army in Poland of twenty thousand, and another in Finland of fifteen thousand. With these he expected to dethrone the czar.
His mistakes and infatuation have been noticed, and his final defeat at Pultowa, a village at the eastern extremity of the Ukraine. This battle was more decisive than that of Narva; for in the latter the career of Peter was only arrested, but in the former the strength of Charles was annihilated. And so would have been his hopes, had he been an ordinary man. But he was a madman, and still dreamed of victory, with only eighteen hundred men to follow his fortunes into Turkey, which country he succeeded in reaching.
His conduct in Turkey was infamous and extraordinary. No reasonings can explain it. It was both ridiculous and provoking. At first, he employed himself in fomenting quarrels, and devising schemes to embark the sultan in his cause. Vizier after vizier was flattered and a.s.sailed. He rejected every overture for his peaceable return. He lingered five years in endless intrigues and negotiations, in order to realize the great dream of his life--the dethronement of the czar. He lived recklessly on the bounty of the sultan, taking no hints that even imperial hospitality might be abused and exhausted. At last, his inflexible obstinacy and dangerous intrigues so disgusted his generous host, that he was urged to return, with the offer of a suitable escort, and a large sum of money. He accepted and spent the twelve hundred purses, and still refused to return. The displeasure of the Sultan Achmet was now fairly excited. It was resolved upon by the Porte that he should be removed by force, since he would not be persuaded. But Charles resisted the troops of the sultan who were ordered to remove him. With sixty servants he desperately defended himself against an army of janizaries, and killed twenty of them with his own hand; and it was not until completely overwhelmed and prostrated that he hurled his sword into the air. He was now a prisoner of war, and not a guest; but still he was treated with the courtesy and dignity due to a king, and conducted in a chariot covered with gold and scarlet to Adrianople. From thence he was removed to Demotica, where he renewed his intrigues, and zealously kept his bed, under pretence of sickness, for ten months.
While he remained in captivity, Frederic Augustus recovered the crown of Poland, King Stanislaus was taken by the Turks, and Peter continued his conquest of Ingria, Livonia, and Finland, provinces belonging to Sweden. The King of Prussia also invaded Pomerania, and Frederic IV.
of Denmark claimed Bremen, Holstein, and Scania. The Swedes were divested of all their conquests, and one hundred and fifty thousand of them became prisoners in foreign lands.
Such were the reverses of a man who had resolved to play the part of Alexander, but who, so long as he contented himself with defending his country against superior forces, was successful, and won a fame so great, that his misfortunes could never reduce him to contempt.
[Sidenote: Charles's Return to Sweden.]
When all was lost, he signified to the Turkish vizier his desire to return to Sweden. The vizier neglected no means to rid his master of so troublesome a person. Charles returned to his country impoverished, but not discouraged. The charm of his name was broken. His soldiers were as brave and devoted as ever, but his resources were exhausted.
He succeeded, however, in raising thirty-five thousand men, in order to continue his desperate game of conquest, not of defence. Europe beheld the extraordinary spectacle of this infatuated hero pa.s.sing, in the depth of a northern winter, over the frozen hills and ice-bound rocks of Norway, with his devoted army, in order to conquer that hyperborean region. So inured was he to cold and fatigue, that he slept in the open air on a bed of straw, covered only with his cloak, while his soldiers dropped down dead at their posts from cold. In the month of December, 1718, he commenced the siege of Fredericshall, a place of great strength and importance, but, having exposed himself unnecessarily, was killed by a ball from the fortress. Many, however, suppose that he was a.s.sa.s.sinated by his own officers who were wearied with endless war, from which they saw nothing but disaster to their exhausted country.
[Sidenote: 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 cla.s.s power. The national finances were disordered, the population decimated, and the provinces dismembered. Peter the Great gained what his rival lost. We cannot but compa.s.sionate 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. He was, like Alaric or Attila, a scourge of the Almighty, sent on earth for some mysterious purpose, to desolate and to destroy. But he died unlamented and unhonored. No great warrior in modern times has received so little sympathy from historians, since he was not exalted by any great moral qualities of affection or generosity, and unscrupulously sacrificed both friends and enemies to gratify a selfish and a depraved pa.s.sion.