his enemies.
In 1698, a different impending marriage brought him a new companion when his cousin Frederick IV, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, arrived in Stockholm to marry Hedwig Sophia. The Duke was six years older than Charles, and even more frenetically madcap. From April to August, he egged Charles into a spate of wild behavior which came in Sweden to be known as 'the Gottorp Fury.' Together with a suite of high-spirited young men who accompanied the Duke, the two cousins competed in wild and dangerous pranks. They raced their horses until the exhausted animals collapsed foaming to the ground. They chased a wild hare around the gallery of the Parliament building. They shattered palace windows with pistol balls and threw tables and chairs down into the palace courtyard. At dinner, it was said, they threw cherry pits in the faces of the King's ministers and knocked dishes from the servants! hands. In broad daylight, they galloped through the streets, waving naked swords and jerking hats and wigs from the heads of anyone within reach. In the middle of the night, when they came back from their little rides, galloping and shouting through the silent streets, townspeople who stumbled to their windows saw their King, his shirttails flying, riding after the Duke. Once, the King even led his Holstein comrades on horseback into a room where his grandmother, the Dowager Queen, was playing cards. The old lady collapsed in fright.
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 transports.' The training of the army was intense. Infantry and cavalry regiments were enlisted, based on the Swedish system which called for
