appeared “shy and afraid of everything.” “It looks as if he does not dare to look someone in the face, and he moves as if he walked on glass,” Magalotti concluded.
Charles XI has not been remembered as Sweden’s most cultured monarch, either. Despite high ambitions for his studies, one of the most grandiose plans ever devised for a Swedish prince, his education was “shamelessly neglected.” Observers regularly noted that his progress was slow. He confused letters, reversed numbers, and spelled atrociously. The governor charged with overseeing his education, Christopher Horn, had hardly taken up his position with zest. He was given a room in the royal palace, where, instead of teaching, he indulged, his critics said, in eating, drinking, and displaying “all the qualities which incompetence can bring.”
But the emphasis on the king’s total lack of learning is very much overplayed. It also seems at least partly based on a misunderstanding of Charles XI’s dyslexia, a condition he almost certainly had. Like many in his situation, the king would compensate with some exceptional talents in other areas. He excelled in hunting, riding, and outdoor activities, even collecting enough wild animals to open his own zoo in the Stockholm palace. He looked completely different when he sat on a horse. No longer timid, shy, reserved, or full of insecurity, Charles XI, on such occasions, as Magalotti put it, “really looks like a king.”
Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie had known the monarch well, having led the regency government since 1660, when the crown prince was only four years old. Relying on years of trust, the count put in a good word for Rudbeck, and this was certainly a favorable moment for winning the king over to the extraordinary quest. In fact, Charles XI had just told De la Gardie how much he hated to turn away any good citizen who came in search of assistance. Given his potential, Rudbeck would surely be classified as one of these good citizens, and his search deemed worthy of royal support.
By a happy coincidence, Rudbeck was soon to come to the king’s attention in his own memorable way. Although Charles XI had assumed power in 1672, he was not officially crowned until September 1675. For this occasion, Rudbeck, the discoverer of Atlantis, was asked to arrange the decorations and festivities in Uppsala Cathedral. Hurriedly the university was whipped into shape for the royal coronation. The Gustavianum was turned into a “house of nobility,” the piles of trash beside the river were moved out of sight, and Rudbeck himself transported the dung piles near the horse stalls in the exercise hall to more secluded gardens.
No one knew it at the time, but this was to be one of the last great baroque ceremonies of Sweden’s imperial age. And Rudbeck put on quite a show. He wrote the music for the king’s coronation—and then sang the piece himself in Uppsala Cathedral in such a way that his thundering voice was said to overpower some twelve trumpets and four kettledrums playing with all their might.
Sure enough, the performance made a lasting impression on the young king. Reportedly, Rudbeck’s emphasis on the loud and the bombastic was well advised, as Charles XI was then learning to play the drums, and seemed totally engrossed in what Rudbeck called his “little noise.” Every time the king came to Uppsala for the rest of his life, it was said, he insisted on hearing Olof Rudbeck sing. More immediately, the king pledged additional funding, some five hundred
The same degree of success during the coronation, however, cannot be said for Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie. In the initial moments before the procession into the cathedral, the count’s horse reared and threw him to the ground. The brand-new crimson velvet and ermine-trimmed robes unveiled on that occasion were stained, and De la Gardie’s wig was tossed into the mud. The imperial orb fell out of his grip, banged on the cobblestones, and dented on impact. De la Gardie regained his composure for the rest of the ceremony, but the man who liked so much to party went home uncharacteristically early that night.
RUDBECK’S MUSIC at the coronation must have been a pleasant diversion for the young king on the silver throne. Nineteen years old and about to turn twenty in a couple of months, this awkward boy was nevertheless anxiously excited about the future. He had just been engaged to be married.
His bride-to-be was a Danish princess, Ulrika Eleonora, and, historically speaking, a radical choice. She was the sister of Christian V, king of Denmark, which had been Sweden’s enemy for as long as anyone alive could remember. There was even a word in Swedish coined to describe this hostility,
King Charles XI’s own father, Charles X, had come to exemplify the high passions animating the northern rivalry. Back in the abnormally cold winter of 1658, when the waters separating the two kingdoms had frozen hard, Charles X had made the decision to march his army over the ice to Denmark. The plan was to kidnap the Danish royal family, disperse the ruling aristocracy, and raze Copenhagen to the ground. The Swedes intended literally to destroy the independence of Denmark.
Despite the sounds of cracking ice and the water seeping through their natural bridge, the seven thousand soldiers managed to cross the channel with surprisingly few losses. The Danes were taken by complete surprise. The Swedish king was prevented from obliterating his rival only by the timely intervention of foreign powers. He did, however, leave the negotiation table with new territories for his kingdom, rich provinces in the west and south that are still part of Sweden today (Skane, Blekinge, Bohuslan, Halland, and others).
Now, less than fifteen years after Charles X’s audacious march, his son was marrying the daughter of the man who had just barely escaped the attack. A sign of the changing times, this proposed marriage between the new Swedish king and the Danish princess aimed to bring the two constantly quarreling kingdoms closer together and seal a lasting peace treaty. This marriage would later be remembered as marking an important beginning to a long process of reconciliation between the two bitter Nordic belligerents.
So the engagement was made, the two kings looked happy, and the plan seemed to be working. But all the fireworks and merry toasts to eternal friendship could not stop the Danish king, only a few months later, from declaring war.
A few weeks after this royal engagement had been announced in June 1675, Swedish troops experienced an engagement of a different kind. Allied with the French, the Swedes were dragged into hostilities with one of Louis XIV’s enemies in northern Germany, the Brandenburg prince Frederick William. They had not particularly wanted war, but, bound by treaty, they attacked anyway on the fields of Fehrbellin. To great surprise on all sides, the Swedes were repulsed. The German prince effectively exploited the orderly retreat to shout out to the world that the Swedes were no longer invincible.
Marriage proposal and celebrated engagement aside, the ever-vigilant king of Denmark, Christian V, sensed that this was too good an opportunity to miss. The current situation—a Swedish loss on the battlefield—surely constituted an exception to the general words of goodwill and reconciliation just pledged. Denmark had long wanted to regain the lost provinces, that valuable territory full of fortresses and fertile lands which Charles XI’s dad had forced Christian V’s dad to hand over. With Sweden distracted by the German enemy, now was their chance.
The Danes declared war immediately. Their allies, the Dutch, also found this logic persuasive, and followed suit, looking toward more control over the lucrative Baltic trade. As if this coalition with its combined naval strength were not difficult enough to fight, the Hapsburg emperor also saw the possibility of finally kicking out the Swedes from nearby German territories—lands that he thought he could better dominate by himself.
As formidable enemies were mobilizing their troops on a frankly nightmarish number of fronts, the previous nonchalance at the loss at Fehrbellin started to undergo a real change. When De la Gardie finally showed up in Stockholm again, three weeks after that defeat, he found a rather irate group of
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In the midst of the uproar and hysteria, more accusations were leveled against the chancellor. High-ranking men of society came forward claiming to have heard De la Gardie utter some treacherous words about the king, calling him a “rascal” and urging his removal. Led by Claes Ralamb, Stockholm’s highest official, and Knut Kurck,
