Many of the stories were exaggerated, deliberately so, to discredit the unwelcome Duke and the coming marriage. There is no firm evidence of the tales of bloody orgies at the palace in which the two young men practiced beheading sheep to determine who had the greater force of muscle and skill with a sword. But the rumors continued: The floors of the palace were said to be slippery with blood; the blood was running in rivers down the staircases; the severed heads of animals were being tossed at random out the palace windows into the street.
True or not in every detail, the reckless behavior of these two headstrong young men, to whom no one apparently had the authority to say no, greatly angered the people of Stockholm. They tended to blame the Duke, saying that he wanted to injure the King, perhaps even see him killed, so that through Charles' sister he might himself gain the throne. As the episodes continued, the murmurs grew louder. One Sunday, three Stockholm clergymen all preached sermons on the same theme: "Woe to thee, O Land, when thy King is a child." Charles, sincerely pious like his father, was strongly affected by these admonitions. In August 1698, when the Duke married his sister and returned to Holstein, Charles became more quiet and reflective and went back to affairs of state. He rose early every morning, spent more time at devotions and began to interest himself in architecture and theater.
There was one relapse. When Duke Frederick returned in the summer of 1699, a great drinking bout took place in which a captive bear was forced to drink so much Spanish wine that he lumbered to a window, lurched out into the courtyard below and was killed by the fall. Charles was found, his clothes in disarray, his speech slovenly, at this scene. When he realized what he had done, he was deeply ashamed and vowed to his grandmother that he would never drink alcohol again. For the rest of his life, with all the Protestant fervor of the North, he stuck to this promise. Except on two famous occasions when he was wounded or overcome with thirst in battle, he never touched another drop of strong liquor. Across Europe, he became famous as the king who drank nothing stronger than watery beer.
Eighteen-year-old Charles was deep in the forest hunting bear when he heai;d the news that Augustus' troops had invaded Swedish Livonia without a declaration of war. He took it calmly, smiled, turned to the French ambassador and said quietly, "We will make King Augustus go back the way he came." The bear hunt continued. But when he returned to Stockholm, Charles addressed the council. "I have resolved never to begin an unjust war," he said, "but also never to end a just war without overcoming my enemy." It was a promise which he was to pursue, beyond all normal policy, almost beyond all reason, for the rest of his life. When, a few weeks later, he heard the less surprising news that Frederick of Denmark had entered the war by marching into the territory of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, Charles said, "It is curious that both my cousins, Frederick and Augustus, wish to make war on me. So be it. But King Augustus has broken his word. Our cause, then, is just and God will help us. I intend to finish first one of my enemies and then will talk with the other." At this point, Charles did not know that a third enemy, Peter of Russia, was also preparing to enter the field against him.
None of his enemies took Sweden's power lightly; its military reputation was far too high. But the nation's point of weakness, as these enemies saw it, lay at the top. All responsibility and authority, military and civil, now rested on the shoulders of an eighteen-year-old King. Charles might have counselors and ministers, tutors, generals and admirals, but he was an absolute monarch, and his behavior, as had been well reported, swung between obstinate rudeness and obsessive recklessness. It seemed an unlikely combination for leading a nation to resist the combined attack of three powerful foes.
Unfortunately for them, Charles' enemies did not and could not know the King's true character. The boy who dreamed of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great was not afraid of the challenge; he welcomed it. He was prepared not only for war, but for fierce, desperate, far-ranging war; not for one quick battle and a petty little peace treaty, but for sweeping, radical solutions. His father's advice before his death had been to keep Sweden at peace "unless you are dragged into war by the hair." This "unjust war" thrust on Sweden by surprise brought all of Charles' stem Northern morality into play. He was not prepared, like other monarchs, to back and fill, to compromise, to outlast his enemies by intrigue, to fight one day and dance the next. He had been unjustly attacked by Augustus, and, no matter how long it took, he would not rest until Augustus was driven from his throne. In attacking Charles, the allies had unleashed a thunderbolt. Proud, rash, willful, glorying in challenge, jealous of the reputation of Sweden, anxious to test his own courage in the greatest game of all, Charles turned to war not only with determination but with glee.
When Charles XII said, "I intend to finish first one of my enemies and then will talk with the other," he was describing his military strategy in a nutshell. Thereafter, no matter what was happening elsewhere in Sweden's empire, the King concentrated his attention and his forces on one enemy alone. When this enemy was totally defeated and destroyed, then he would turn to face his other foes. The first Swedish blow was to fall on the nearest of Charles' enemies; Denmark. He ignored the Saxon troops marching into Livonia across the Baltic. This province would be left to be defended by the local garrison in Riga, and the hope was that it could hold out until the Swedish field army could arrive. If not, it must fall and be avenged on a future day. But nothing must hinder the concentration of forces against the foe selected by Charles.
In his campaign against Denmark, Charles was fortunate in having the support of the two Protestant sea powers of William III, England and Holland. William, single-mindedly bent on maintaining the great coalition he had spent his life building against Louis XIV, wanted no distractions in the form of minor wars in Northern Europe. If or when Louis XIV reached out for the Spanish throne—and with it all the power and wealth of Spain and its overseas empire—William wanted Europe to be ready to resist; any new war anywhere in Europe, therefore, must be prevented or snuffed out quickly lest it spread into Germany and disrupt his grand coalition. For this reason, England and Holland needed peace in the North and had guaranteed the status quo. When Frederick of Denmark moved troops into the Holstein-Gottorp territories at the foot of the Danish peninsula, he was in effect breaking the status quo; as Denmark was the aggressor, the two sea powers would cooperate with Sweden to defeat the Danes as quickly as possible and restore the status quo. A combined Dutch and English fleet was dispatched to the Baltic to assist the Swedes.
The Anglo-Dutch squadron was an essential factor in Charles' plans. The Swedish navy consisted of thirty-eight ships-of-the-line and twelve frigates—a formidable force in the Baltic, where Russia had neither fleet nor seacoast and Brandenburg and Poland had only negligible forces. But the Swedish fleet was second, in both size and experience, to the Danish-Norwegian navy, which was accustomed to operating not only in the Baltic but also in the North Sea and the Atlantic, and which jeeringly looked on Swedish sailors as mere "farmhands dipped in salt water." That there was some truth in this was evident from Charles' own reaction to the sea. Despite his mock sea battles in Stockholm harbor, the open waves made him seasick, and he looked upon his ships primarily as a means of transporting his soldiers from one side of the Baltic to the other. Certainly, he was not prepared to move his troops by water while a more powerful Danish fleet waited to intercept them. And he was not prepared to deal with that Danish fleet until his own navy had been reinforced by the Anglo-Dutch squadron on its way.
Through the weeks of March and April, Sweden pulsed with preparations for the coming campaign. The fleet at the main Swedish naval base, Karlskrona, was fitted out for sea. Ships were careened, their bottoms scraped, patched and retarred, their masts installed and rigging set. Cannon were trundled aboard and placed in carriages. Five thousand new seamen were recruited, raising the strength of the fleet to 16,000 men. All commercial vessels in Stockholm harbor, of both Swedish and foreign registry, were seized for use as troop transport
s.' The training of the army was intense. Infantry and cavalry regiments were enlisted, based on the Swedish system which called for each district or town to be responsible for providing the men and equipment of a specific-sized unit. The ranks of the army grew to 77,000 men, and the men were equipped with the new muskets and bayonets so successfully used by the French, English and Dutch armies on the continent.
By mid-April, Charles was ready to depart Stockholm. On April 13, 1700, he came at night to say goodbye to his grandmother and his two sisters. It was a sad occasion, but it would have been much sadder had any of those present known what the future held. The eighteen-year-old King was leaving two of these dear relatives forever. Although Charles would live another eighteen years, he would never see his grandmother, his older sister or Stockholm, his capital, again.
The King to whom these women bade farewell had grown from an adolescent to a young man. He was five feet nine inches—tall by the standards of the day—with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. He carried himself with almost rigid straightness, yet he was enormously supple: On horseback, he could bend down from the saddle and pick up a glove at a full gallop. His open face had a jutting nose, full lips and pink skin, although campaign life was soon to darken and harden it. His eyes were deep blue, lively and intelligent. He wore his hair short and brushed up from the sides to form a crown. Its color varied as the sun bleached it from auburn to dark blond in the summer. Over the years it turned to gray streaked with white and began to recede, exposing a full, domed forehead.
Leaving his sisters and grandmother, the King hurried south, visiting military depots along the way On June 16, at Karlskrona, he embarked on board the King Charles, flagship of the Swedish Admiral Wachtmeister. The Anglo-Dutch fleet of twenty-five ships-of-the-line had now arrived off the western Swedish port of Goteborg, and as Charles set sail from Karlskrona, the allied fleet moved down the Kattegat. The two fleets were now approaching each other, but in the middle lay the formidable barrier of the sound with its three-mile-wide channel, its shoals and its defensive cannon. In addition, the Danish fleet of forty men-of-war lay at the Baltic entrance to the main channel, determined to bar the uniting of their opponents.
It was Charles who solved the problem. Standing on the deck of the flagship, he instructed Admiral Wachtmeister to take the fleet through the shallow and more treacherous subsidiary channel close to the Swedish shore. Wachtmeister was reluctant, fearing for the safety of his ships, but Charles took the responsibility, and, one by one, the great ships bearing the blue-and-yellow flag passed slowly up the channel. Three of the largest ships drew too much water and had to be left behind. Nevertheless, at a single stroke, the Anglo-Dutch and Swedish fleets had joined to make a combined force of sixty men-of-war to face the forty Danish ships. It was a superiority which the Danish admiral did not wish ;:o challenge, and it permitted the next phase of the Swedish plan to unfold. Charles and his generals planned to move a Swedish army across the sound onto the Danish island of Zealand, on which the capital, Copenhagen, was situated. As the main Danish iirmy was far away with King Frederick, fighting the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, the Swedes hoped to march swiftly on Copenhagen, threaten and perhaps seize the capital and thus bring King Frederick to terms. The plan, devised by Charles' leading commander, Field Marshal Carl Gustav Rehnskjold, had the King's enthusiastic support. The Dutch and English admirals were less enthusiastic, but eventually they, too agreed.
On July 23, the assault force of 4,000 men was embarked in transports and sailed in rain and high wind. Although the force was smaller than the 5,000 Danes defending Zealand, the Swedes had the advantage of mobility and could choose their landing spot. Feinting first to mislead the defenders, the Swedish landing parties came ashore in small boats and found themselves opposed by only 800 men. Covered by heavy cannon fire from the men-of-war, the Swedish soldiers quickly established a beachhead. Charles himself came ashore by boat, wading the last few yards. To his chagrin, he found that by the time he arrived the enemy had already withdrawn.
The Swedish build-up was rapid. Within the following ten days, another 10,000 Swedish troops including cavalry and artillery were ferried across the sound. The outnumbered Danish forces withdrew into the city of Copenhagen, and Charles' army followed, setting siege lines around the city and beginning a bombardment. It was this dismaying situation which the King of Denmark found when he hurried back from the south: his fleet outnumbered and useless, his capital under siege, his main army engaged far to the south. Frederick knew that he was beaten and quickly came to terms. On August 18, 1700, he signed the Peace of Travendal, by which he gave back the Holstein-Gottorp territories he had taken and dropped out of the war against Sweden. Charles was satisfied—he had no designs on Danish territory, and could now turn his attention to Augustus. The English and Dutch were satisfied—the war on the boundaries of Germany and the Hapsburg empire had been snuffed out. The status quo had been restored.
Charles' first campaign of the war, thus, had been swift, successful and almost bloodless. Within two weeks, two bold decisions—to force the lesser channel with the Swedish fleet, and to land troops on the island of Zealand behind King Frederick's back—had restored the rights of his ally, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, and driven one enemy from the war. Not all the success in this brief, brilliant campaign can be credited to Swedish arms alone; it was the presence of the Anglo-Dutch fleet that made the descent on Zealand possible.
And so Denmark was out of the war. Charles realized that, given a promising chance, Frederick might reopen hostilities, but not for a while. At least the Swedish thrust into Zealand had gained valuable breathing time. Now, Charles could make ready to hurl himself on a second enemy. At the end of the Danish campaign, he thought that his next adversary would be Augustus of Poland. But events dictated differently. In fact, the second Swedish blow was to fall on Peter of Russia.
NARVA
The Tsar's declared objective in attacking Sweden was to seize the Baltic provinces of Ingria and Karelia. Ingria was a comparatively narrow strip of land extending seventy-five miles along the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, from the mouth of the Neva to the town of Narva; Karelia was a much larger expanse of forest-and-lake country between the gulf and Lake Ladoga, extending as far west as Vyborg. Together, the two provinces, which had been taken from Russia during the Time of Troubles, would give Peter an adequate opening to the Baltic.
Narva, a coastal town and fortress in Estonia on the border of Ingria, had not been included in Peter's original war aims; it was part of the territory which Patkul and Augustus had designated to go to Poland. Nevertheless, Peter felt that the surest way of securing Ingria would be to capture this town. And as he studied his maps of the region, it seemed that a thrust at Narva would not be difficult; the Russian frontier lay only twenty miles to the southeast of the town, a short march for an invading army.
Peter's decision was received unhappily by Patkul and Baron Langen, Augustus' representative in Moscow. They were not eager to see Swedes replaced in Estonia by Russians, even if, for (he moment, the Russians were their allies. As Baron Langen reported to Patkul, "I have done everything possible, with the help of the Danish ambassador, to distract him [the Tsar] from this intention. We found him so stubborn that we feared to touch any more on such a delicate subject and must be satisfied with the Tsar's break with Sweden in the hope that in time Narva will be in our hands." Patkul worried that, having taken Narva, Peter would move down the Baltic coast, swallowing the whole of Livonia without Augustus being able to prevent him. But there was nothing to be done; the Tsar was determined.
By mid-September 1700, Prince Trubetskoy, Governor of Novgorod, had received orders to march on Narva and invest the city with an advance guard of 8,000 men. Command of the main army was given to Fedor Golovin, who had served as ambassador, foreign minister and admiral and now was to be a field marshal.
Under Golovin, the army was divided into three divisions, to be commanded respectively by Avtemon G
olovin, Adam Weide and Nikita Repnin. In all, the army totaled over 63,000 men, but the troops were widely scattered. As Trubetskoy's men were moving slowly in the direction of Narva, Repnin's division was still assembling on the Volga, a thousand miles away. By October 4, 35,000 Russians were building trenches before the town and Peter himself had arrived to oversee the siege. He was awaiting only the arrival of cannonballs and powder to begin the bombardment.
The town of Narva, built by the Danes in the thirteenth century, had been a flourishing seaport in the time of the Hanseatic League, and even in Peter's day it handled a substantial amount of Russian trade from Pskov and Novgorod. It was like many another Baltic German town, with gabled brick houses and the thin spires of Lutheran churches rising above tree-lined streets. Situated on the west bank of the River Narova on a neck of land made by a wide bend in the river, the town was in effect surrounded on three sides by water, and because it was so close to the Russian frontier, it was strongly defended. A high wall of stone laced with bastions encircled the city. Across a stone bridge was the squat, powerful castle of Ivangorod, built by the Russians in 1492 when the river was the frontier. Then, Ivangorod was intended to overawe the town of Narva, but now town and castle formed a single, integrated defense system. The garrison consisted of 1,300 infantry, 200 cavalry and 400 armed civilians.
Under the direction of Lieutenant General Ludwig von Hallart, a Saxon engineer lent to Peter by Augustus, the Russians established siege lines opposite the land walls on the western side of Narva. There, astride the only road by which a relief force could approach the town, the Russians entrenched themselves between double walls which cut off the town from the west and at the same time protected their own siege lines against attack from the rear. In time, these walls developed into earthworks four miles long, nine feet high, with a trench six feet deep in front.