VI.—CHARLESES OF SWEDEN.
CHARLES I., or following the purely mythological nomenclature of John Magnus, Charles VII. (Sverkerson), the first who bore the title of king of Sweden and Gothland, was assassinated after a short reign in 1168.—J. S., G.
CHARLES VIII. (Canutson), elected king of Sweden in 1448; the union of the crowns of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden being dissolved in that year, by the death of Christopher, duke of Bavaria, who had reigned over the three countries. A war ensuing between Charles and Christiern, king of Denmark, the former was deprived of his crown in 1458. Recalled after an exile of six years, Charles was worsted in an encounter with his powerful subject the archbishop of Upsal, and again obliged to quit his dominions. Again recalled by his subjects in 1467, he survived this second restoration only three years, dying in May, 1470.—J. S., G.
CHARLES IX., fourth son of the famous Gustavus Vasa, born in 1550; came to the throne in 1604. He was involved in various wars with Denmark, Poland, and Russia, in which, being indifferently seconded by the diet of the kingdom, he was, although a brave soldier and an acute politician, generally worsted. He died in 1611, and was succeeded by his son, the renowned Gustavus Adolphus.—J. S., G.
CHARLES GUSTAVUS X., son of John Casimir, count palatine of the Rhine, and of Catharine, daughter of Charles IX., king of Sweden, was born at Upsal in 1622, and died in 1660. Acceding to the throne of Sweden on the abdication of his cousin Christina in 1654, he undertook, with an impoverished exchequer, an expedition against Poland, the greater part of which he overran, but without attaining any other object than that of humiliating Casimir the king, on whom he revenged a slight affront by obliging him to take shelter in Silesia. His expedition against Denmark was no less fruitless; the partition of the country, at which he aimed, being reprobated by several of the great potentates of Europe, Cromwell among the number. While engaged in a second attempt against the independence of Denmark, he was seized with a fever, which proved fatal. Charles Gustavus X. is to be ranked among those Hotspurs of princes who have loved war, if not merely, yet to an astonishing degree devoutly, for its own sake.—J. S., G.
CHARLES XI., son and successor of the preceding, born in 1655. On the death of his father he was proclaimed king, under the regency of his mother and a council, by whom peace was successively established with Poland, Denmark, and Russia. In 1672, the year of his accession to power, Charles, acting under the control of France, invaded the electorate of Brandenburg, and thus involved himself in a war with Denmark and Holland, the result of which, notwithstanding the success of his campaign in the electorate, was disastrous to Sweden, the province of Pomerania having been lost to the crown. This province, however, was restored to Charles by a treaty concluded in 1679 between Denmark, Sweden, and Brandenburg. In 1682 Charles, by an unconstitutional exercise of authority, reduced the number of the Swedish senators, and from that period till the end of his reign, sternly and sometimes savagely affected the character, while circumstances gave him the power, of an absolute monarch. Fortunately he was disposed to exercise his tyrannical authority for the protection of the inferior classes of his subjects against the rapacity of the nobles, and in general for the well-being of his kingdom, the internal polity of which under his severe, but just and equitable rule, was not a little ameliorated. The payment of the debts of the nation, the restoration to the crown of lands unjustly rent from it by the rapacious nobles, and constant accessions of territory—the result of successful wars with neighbouring powers—were events which gave a lustre to the reign of Charles, that disguised, if they could not conceal, many of its harder features. Among the arbitrary edicts of his administration which he enforced with characteristic severity, was one forbidding the exercise in his dominions of any religion but the Lutheran. He died in 1697.—J. S., G.
CHARLES XII. This renowned sovereign, son of Charles XI., and of Ulriké Elenoré, a Danish princess of excellent character and understanding, was born at Stockholm on the 27th of June, 1682. He lost his mother in his eleventh year, and his father in 1697, when he was only fifteen. The regency was invested in his grandmother, and Charles left all care of government with her. His great propensity at that period was for active physical exercises, and especially for bear-hunting. At the same time he was well grounded in mathematics, and in the German language, then the court language at Stockholm, as well as in Latin and French. At a martial review, the very year that he came to the throne, he hinted to the councillor of state, Piper, that he desired to command the troops himself, and the supreme power was transferred to the young prince, who was crowned, 24th December of the same year. The depreciatory accounts which the ambassadors of the northern nations had sent to their court regarding Charles' abilities, encouraged them to the attempt on his provinces on the other side of the Baltic. Peter I., afterwards called the Great, of Russia, Augustus II. of Saxony and Poland, and Frederick IV. of Denmark, made a league to seize and divide these provinces amongst them. The Swedish ministers were consulting on the best means of avoiding a war by negotiations and concessions, when the young king, suddenly broke forth with the declaration that he would concede nothing, but undertake the three monarchs, one after another, and so teach them the ancient terrors of the Swedish name. The Danes commenced the first attack on the territory of the duke of Holstein-Gottorp, who had married Charles' elder sister, and to whom Charles was greatly attached. On the 17th June, 1700, he crossed the sea with thirty line-of-battle ships and a great number of lesser ones, supported by a squadron of Dutch and English vessels which he had called to his aid, and on August 4th, landed near Copenhagen. As the water was shallow, Charles was the first to leap into it, in the face of the Danish batteries. His brave officers fell on either hand, but he showed no sign of fear, and made good his landing. The Danes were compelled to make a hasty peace at Thavendahl, resuming the league with Russia and Poland, and restoring the territory of the duke of Holstein-Gottorp. Augustus II., elector of Saxony and king of Poland, had marched down upon Livonia, whilst Charles was engaged at Copenhagen. Charles sent thither twenty thousand men under General Dahlberg, who defended Riga against the Polish king, and Charles himself hastened with only eight thousand men to encounter the czar, who was besieging Narwa, and threatening the coast of Finland with eighty thousand. But Charles, encouraged by the news that the king of Poland had retreated from before Riga, attacked the Russian fort on the 30th of November, in the midst of a furious snow storm, and put the huge Russian army to flight, with the slaughter of eighteen thousand men, and the capture of thirty thousand prisoners. Peter, however, instead of being cast down, coolly observed to his officers, that he was well aware that the Swedes must beat them a good many times before teaching them how to conquer in turn. Charles then crossed the Düna, attacked the camp of the Saxons, and won a complete victory over them. It was now in his power to conclude a peace, which should have made him the umpire of the north; but at this crisis he began to display that fatal want of political wisdom, which, instead of a great monarch, made him for a time a wild and terrible meteor of war. Instead of making such a peace, or watching and confronting the far more dangerous and ambitious Peter, he determined to drive Augustus from the throne of Poland, and set another king upon it. For seven years he prosecuted this object, refusing to listen to any terms of accommodation from Augustus, till he had dethroned him in Poland, set up in his place, as king, Stanislaus Leszinsky, the waiwode of Posen, and following Augustus into Saxony, compelled him to an ignominious peace. But during these seven years, which brought no real advantage to Sweden, the politic czar, Peter, had been assiduously at work, conquering the Swedish provinces on the Baltic. He had defeated a Swedish army on the Peipus lake, had conquered Dorpat and Narwa, and laid siege to Reval. In 1703 he took Noteburg on the lake Ladoga, and fortified it so strongly that he now named it Schlüsselburg, or the Key of the Land, and the following year he took Nienschanz, on the Neva; and having obtained what he had long aimed at, a portion of the Baltic, he began to build his new capital of St. Petersburg on the very land reft from Sweden. All this time, instead of attacking and driving away the czar, Charles was pursuing Augustus, and did not cease till he had completed his utter subjection, and compelled the delivery of Patkull, whom he tortured and put to death. At length, having glutted his unworthy vengeance on the Polish king, he turned his attention to the czar, but instead of concentrating all his power in driving Peter out of the Baltic provinces, and destroying his newly-founded town, he determined to attack the distant Moscow, which could only be reached by a
