brilliant, unscrupulous, much maligned and eventually ill-fated Baron Georg Heinrich von Goertz, an audacious international adventurer without real ties of nationality but with a taste for power and a passion for intrigue. He had a complex, versatile intellect which allowed him to work on several divergent, even contradictory schemes simultaneously. It has been said of him that 'he achieved twenty times as much as Talleyrand or Metternich while working with less than one twentieth of their resources.'
For four years—from 1714 to 1718—Goertz, armed with the power of the king, loomed over Sweden. In person, he was a dramatic figure, tall, handsome (in spite of an artificial eye, made of enamel, which replaced one lost in a student duel), charming and a brilliant conversationalist. Born in South Germany into a noble Franconian family, he studied at the University of Jena and then, seeking a situation in which his adventurous spirit could flower, he attached himself to the court of the young Duke Frederick IV of Holstein-Gottorp who had been Charles' madcap companion and had married Charles' sister, Hedwig Sophia. Shortly before the Duke went off to war at Charles' side, Hedwig Sophia produced a son, Charles Frederick. In 1702 at the Battle of Klissow, still at Charles' side, the Duke was killed, leaving his two-year-old son as his successor and Georg Heinrich von Goertz as the real ruler of Holstein-Gottorp. More important, until
Charles XII married and produced a child, the infant Charles Frederick was the male heir to the throne of Sweden.
Goertz conducted all the duchy's affairs. He toured Europe, calling on the Tsar, Queen Anne, the King of Prussia and the. Elector of Hanover. In 1713, he proposed to strengthen the duchy's position by a Russian alliance, the seal to be a marriage between the twelve-year-old Duke and Peter's oldest daughter, five-year-old Anne. Goertz once proposed to Menshikov the idea of cutting a ship canal through Holstein at the base of the Danish peninsula, thus giving Russian ships an exit from the Baltic into the North Sea without having to pass through the sound and subject themselves to Danish tolls or cannon.* It was Goertz who arranged for Magnus Stenbock's Swedish army, victorious at Gadebusch but being pursued by larger Saxon, Danish and Russian forces, to be admitted into the Holstein fortress of Tonning. And it was also Goertz who, five months later, when the besieged army could hold out no longer, arranged the terms of its surrender.
Successful though he was, in time Goertz came to feel that the little duchy of Holstein-Gottorp was too narrow an arena for his abilities. He had long admired Charles XII, the legendary uncle of his own young master, and when Charles appeared at Stralsund in November 1714, after his ride across Europe, Goertz hurried to meet him. In a single long conversation, he won Charles' favor and emerged an unofficial advisor. Before much more time had passed, Charles relied on him totally. He admired Goertz' energy, his breadth of vision, his analytical capacity and his willingness to attempt, like Charles himself, vast, grand-scale schemes and radical solutions even with limited resources. As Charles saw it, Goertz applied in administration and diplomacy the same dash and reckless bravado which the King employed in war.
Thereafter, until Charles' death, Goertz was indispensable to him. He took absolute control of Sweden's finances and all the great domestic departments of state. He became the King's voice, if not his brain, in Swedish diplomacy. By February 1716, he was describing himself as Director of the Finances and Commerce of Sweden. In effect, he became Charles' prime minister, although he held no actual rank or title in Sweden and was still nominally the servant of Charles' nephew, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp.
Goertz knew how to deal with the King. As a condition for accepting service, he had won Charles' promise that all communications should be between themselves and not through intermediaries. He knew it was best not to bother Charles with details
* One hundred and seventy-four years later, in 1887, the Kiel Canal was built.
in areas in which the King was not interested. He found that if the King did not agree with him when presented with an oral argument, he could put his views in writing in his clear, incisive style and usually get his way.
As Sweden felt the resourceful, ruthless hand of Baron von Goertz, hatred of the King's foreign advisor spread through every class. Bureaucrats hated him because he exercised power outside the normal channels of administration. The Hessian party, formed around Charles' sister, Ulrika, and her husband, Frederick of Hesse, hated him because they imagined him working to ensure the succession for his young Holstein master, to their own exclusion. And Swedes everywhere hated him for the enthusiasm and ingenuity with which he set to work to wring more men and money from the exhausted nation to continue the war. He issued paper currency. He raised taxes higher and then higher still. He was accused of lining his own pockets, but these accusations were untrue—in money matters, Goertz was totally honest. He even spent his own small income in an effort to achieve more efficiency in mobilizing Swedish resources for the new war effort. In his commanding role, Goertz was called by furious Swedes 'the Grand Vizier.' Although he was known to be only a creature of the King, he was clothed in the King's power. For as long as Charles stood behind him, Goertz was invincible.
Although it was Goertz' domestic policies which infuriated the average Swede, he was even more useful to the King as a diplomat. He was a master of this subtle art, and Charles gave him a free hand to perform his juggling tricks all over Europe. This was Goertz' analysis of Sweden's situation: As Sweden could not possibly defeat all her enemies, she must make peace, and perhaps even an alliance, with one in order to fight the others. Either Charles could make peace with Russia and concentrate his efforts against Denmark, Prussia and Hanover, or he could make peace with Denmark, Prussia and Hanover and renew his attack on the Tsar in the upper Baltic. Goertz preferred the first alternative— peace with Russia. It meant sacrificing the provinces of Ingra, Karelia, Estonia, Livonia and possibly Finland, as well as acquiescence in a major Russian naval and commercial presence on the Baltic, but it would free Charles to win back the lost German provinces of Pomerania, Bremen and Verden and allow him perhaps to seize Mecklenburg and Norway as well. Goertz' preference may have been partly due to the fact that a reassertion of Swedish power in North Germany would be useful to his youthful master in Holstein-Gottorp, but Goertz was also now inclined to rate Peter's power and resolve as much greater than those of Russia's allies. Peter had demonstrated his tenacious determination to hold and expand his window on the Baltic. The growth of his fleet, the far-flung operations of his army and the Tsar's implacable will combined to suggest that even an enormous Swedish effort would not easily dislodge the Russians from their entrenched position on the Baltic coast.
Most leading Swedes, however, disagreed with Goertz. They were not unhappy to see the former German possessions go; they had always believed Sweden's position in the empire to be a source of weakness. If there had to be continued war, they preferred to make peace in Germany and to regain the Baltic provinces. The rich farmland of Livonia, called 'the com barn of Sweden,' and the great port of Riga with its rich customs tolls from the Russia trade were assets which could be used directly to make up the great losses of wealth which Sweden had suffered in the war.
No matter which direction the Swedish offensive eventually took, the important thing was that Simply by raising the idea of separate peace treaties and new alliances Goertz had placed the balance of power in the Baltic back in Charles' hands. As the months progressed, Goertz skillfully exploited this hew situation, making it clear that from then on anything might be expected of Sweden in the way of new alignments and combinations. He negotiated with every one of Sweden's enemies except Denmark, for ultimately the Holsteiner meant to make Denmark pay the bill. It was a virtuoso performance. Overnight, his diplomacy transformed Sweden from a victim about to be overpowered by a grand coalition of powers into the initiator of events, able to choose which of the allies it would favor with peace and which would become the targets of its renewed offensive. Not since Poltava had Sweden held such power in Europe.
Already Goertz had tested the bonds of the anti-Swedish alliance and found them remarkably weak. All of Peter's allies were apprehensive about Russia's growing strength, but the weakest xpoint in the coalition lay in the personal antagonism between Peter and King George I of England, who was also Elector of Hanover. Knowing this, Goertz began negotiating simultaneously with both, aware that when one monarch heard he was treating with the other, it would automatically improve Goertz' hand with both. He went first to Peter, meeting the Tsar in Holland in June 1716. Peter respected him, although when Goertz was directing only the affairs of tiny Holstein, his dreams of turning kingdoms and empires around his finger made the Tsar laugh; to the Holstein envoy Bassewitz, Peter once said, 'Your court, directed by the vast schemes of Goertz, seems to me like a skiff carrying the mast of a man-of- war—the least side-wind will upset it.' But the same man managing the diplomacy of Sweden was a different matter. At their meeting, Peter and Goertz discussed the idea of a new balance in Northern Europe based on an alliance between Sweden and Russia, to be guaranteed by France. In the peace, Russia would restore Finland to Sweden but keep all her other conquests, while Sweden would be free to regain whatever she could from Denmark and Hanover. Goertz knew that Charles would never cede as much territory as Peter demanded; nevertheless, he
