State of Europe at the return of Charles XII. Siege of Stralsund.
When Charles XII. returned to his dominions in the year 1714, he found
the state of affairs in Europe very different from that in which he had
left them. Queen Anne of England was dead, after having made peace with
France. Lewis XIV. had secured the monarchy of Spain for his grandson
the duke of Anjou, and had obliged the emperor Charles VI. and the Dutch
to agree to a peace, which their situation rendered necessary to them;
so that the affairs of Europe had put on altogether a new face.
Those of the north had undergone a still greater change. Peter was
become sole arbiter in that part of the world: the elector of Hanover,
who had been called to fill the British throne, had views of extending
his territories in Germany, at the expense of Sweden, who had never had
any possessions in that country, but since the reign of the great
Gustavus. The king of Denmark aimed at recovering Scania, the best
province of Sweden, which had formerly belonged to the Danes. The king
of Prussia, as heir to the dukes of Pomerania, laid claim to a part of
that province. On the other hand, the Holstein family, oppressed by the
king of Denmark, and the duke of Mecklenburg, almost at open war with
his subjects, were suing to Peter the Great to take them under his
protection. The king of Poland, elector of Saxony, was desirous to have
the duchy of Courland annexed to Poland; so that, from the Elbe to the
Baltic Sea, Peter the First was considered as the support of the several
crowned heads, as Charles XII. had been their greatest terror.
Many negotiations were set on foot after the return of Charles to his
dominions, but nothing had been done. That prince thought he could raise
a sufficient number of ships of war and privateers, to put a stop to the
rising power of the czar by sea; with respect to the land war, he
depended upon his own valour; and Gortz, who was on a sudden become his
prime minister, persuaded him, that he might find means to defray the
expense, by coining copper money, to be taken at ninety-six times less
than its real value, a thing unparalleled in the histories of any state;
but in the month of April, 1715, the first Swedish privateers that put
to sea were taken by the czar's men of war, and a Russian army marched
into the heart of Pomerania.
The Prussians, Danes, and Saxons, now sat down with their united forces
before Stralsund, and Charles XII. beheld himself returned from his
confinement at Demirtash and Demirtoca on the Black Sea, only to be more
closely pent up on the borders of the Baltic.
We have already shewn, in the history of this extraordinary man, with
what haughty and unembarrassed resolution he braved the united forces of
his enemies in Stralsund; and shall therefore, in this place, only add a
single circumstance, which, though trivial, may serve to shew the
peculiarity of his character. The greatest part of his officers having
been either killed or wounded during the siege, the duty fell hard upon
the few who were left. Baron de Reichel, a colonel, having sustained a
long engagement upon the ramparts, and being tired out by repeated
watchings and fatigues, had thrown himself upon a bench to take a little
repose; when he was called up to mount guard again upon the ramparts. As
he was dragging himself along, hardly able to stand, and cursing the
obstinacy of the king his master, who subjected all those about him to
such insufferable and fruitless fatigues, Charles happened to overhear
him. Upon which, stripping off his own cloak, he spread it on the ground
before him, saying, 'My dear Reichel, you are quite spent; come, I have
had an hour's sleep, which has refreshed me, I'll take the guard for
you, while you finish your nap, and will wake you when I think it is
time;' and so saying, he wrapt the colonel up in his cloak; and,
notwithstanding all his resistance, obliged him to lie down to sleep,
and mounted the guard himself.
It was during this siege that the elector of Hanover, lately made king
of England, purchased of the king of Denmark the province of Bremen and
Verden, with the city of Stade, (Oct. 1715.) which the Danes had taken
from Charles XII. This purchase cost king George eight hundred thousand
German crowns. In this manner were the dominions of Charles bartered
away, while he defended the city of Stralsund, inch by inch, till at
length nothing was left of it but a heap of ruins, which his officers
compelled him to leave; (Dec. 1713.) and, when he was in a place of
safety, general Ducker delivered up those ruins to the king of Prussia.
Some time afterwards, Ducker, being presented to Charles, that monarch
reproached him with having capitulated with his enemies; when Ducker
replied, 'I had too great a regard for your majesty's honour, to
continue to defend a place which you was obliged to leave.' However the
Prussians continued in possession of it no longer than the year 1721,
when they gave it up at the general peace.
During the siege of Stralsund, Charles received another mortification,
which would have been still more severe, if his heart had been as
sensible to the emotions of friendship, as it was to those of fame and
honour. His prime minister, count Piper, a man famous throughout all
Europe, and of unshaken fidelity to his prince (notwithstanding the
assertions of certain rash persons, or the authority of a mistaken
writer): this Piper, I say, had been the victim of his master's ambition
ever since the battle of Pultowa. As there was as that time no cartel
for the exchange of prisoners subsisting between the Russians and
Swedes, he had remained in confinement at Moscow; and though he had not
been sent into Siberia, as the other prisoners were, yet his situation
was greatly to be pitied. The czar's finances at that time were not
managed with so much fidelity as they ought to be, and his many new
establishments required an expense which he could with difficulty
answer. In particular, he owed a considerable sum of money to the Dutch,
on account of two of their merchant-ships which had been burnt on the
coast of Finland, in the descent the czar had made on that country.
Peter pretended that the Swedes were to make good the damage, and wanted
to engage count Piper to charge himself with this debt: accordingly he
was sent for from Moscow to Petersburg, and his liberty was offered him,
in case he could draw upon Sweden letters of exchange to the amount of
sixty thousand crowns. It is said he actually did draw bills for this
sum upon his wife at Stockholm, but that she being unable or unwilling
to take them up, they were returned, and the king of Sweden never gave
himself the least concern about paying the money. Be this as it may,
count Piper was closely confined in the castle of Schlusselburg, where
he died the year after, at the age of seventy. His remains were sent to
the king of Sweden, who gave them a magnificent burial; a vain and
melancholy return to an old servant, for a life of suffering, and so
deplorable an end!
Peter was satisfied with having got possession of Livonia, Esthonia,
Carelia, and Ingria, which he looked upon as his own provinces, and to
which he had, moreover, added almost all Finland, which served as a kind
of pledge, in case his enemies should conclude a peace. He had married
one of his nieces to Charles Leopold, duke of Mecklenburg, in the month
of April of the same year, (1715.) so that all the sovereigns of the
north were now either his allies or his creatures. In Poland, he kept
the enemies of king Augustus in awe; one of his armies, consisting of
about eight thousand men, having, without any loss, quelled several of
those confederacies, which are so frequent in that country of liberty
and anarchy: on the other hand, the Turks, by strictly observing their
treaties, left him at full liberty to exert his power, and execute his
schemes in their utmost extent.
In this flourishing situation of his affairs, scarcely a day passed
without being distinguished by new establishments, either in the navy,
the army, or the legislature: he himself composed a military code for
the infantry.
Nov. 8.] He likewise founded a naval academy at Petersburg; dispatched
Lange to China and Siberia, with a commission of trade; set
mathematicians to work, in drawing charts of the whole empire; built a
summer's palace at Petershoff; and at the same time built forts on the
banks of the Irtish, stopped the incursions and ravages of the
Bukari[96] on the one side, and, on the other, suppressed the Tartars of
Kouban.
1715.] His prosperity seemed now to be at its zenith, by the empress
Catherine's being delivered of a son, and an heir to his dominions being
given him, in a prince born to the czarowitz Alexis; but the joy for
these happy events, which fell out within a few days of each other, was
soon damped by the death of the empress's son; and the sequel of this
history will shew us, that the fate of the czarowitz was too
unfortunate, for the birth of a son to this prince to be looked upon as
a happiness.
The delivery of the czarina put a stop for some time to her
accompanying, as usual, her royal consort in all his expeditions by sea
and land; but, as soon as she was up again, she followed him to new
adventures.