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Charles XI¹

It may well seem that I have chosen as the subject of this lecture a monarch whose lineaments are unmemorable, and whose achievement is obscure. It is certainly true that the visitor to Stockholm will find no statuę of Charles xi araong the public monuments of that city. Charles xn stands in Kungstrad-g&rden, with guil-whitened pate and rigid finger pointing towards PuJtava, in silent rebuke of the diners on Opera-kallarens terrass; a hundred yards to the rear Charles xm leans upon a property anchor; across the water, outside Skansen, Charles xv sits trimly on his charger; but for Charles xi you will look in vain. One remembers him (if at all) from a large canvas of David Kloc ker Ehrenstrahl; which shows him, not altogether at his ease, in company with a Swedish lion dormant; and it is not EhrenstrahFs lault if the lion steals the picture. For Charles was, indeed, iH-equipped for the representative side of royalty: personally unprepossessing, invincibly shy, and of no generał convenation. Of the native demagogie eloquence of the Vasas he had no share. He suffered, moreover, from word-blindness, which caused him to spell like a mishandled type-wri ter;² and to the end of his days he was a slow and reluctant reader. Hot-tempered, obstinate, narrow-minded, bigoted, he was almost equally deficient in imagination and in the capacity for abstract thought; and of his virtues too many were unen-dearing virtues of the barrack-square or the Inland Revenue. His sense of duty was overpowering; and it is recorded of him that he rosę at fbur o’clc>ck on his wedding night to make a

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CHARLES XI

routine inspection of his troops.* Yct in spite of it ali he was of critical importance in the history of his country: the hinge upon which the whole of modem Swedish history swing*; the link between the world of Axel Oxenstiema and the world of Arvid Horn.

When he came to the throne at the age of four in 1660, the strange destiny of Sweden had touched its zenith. The empire of the Baltic was still intact, and the peace of Copenhagen had for the first time given Sweden her natural limit* within the Scandinavian peninsula. As a guarantor of the peace of West-phalia, she had both a right and a duty to interfere in the great ąuestions of the European mainland. Charles x had eon-templated the conąuest and annexation of Denmark; he had madę what proved to be the last serious attempt to achieve total control of the great trade between Musowy and the West; and he had barely missed success.⁴ After sixty years of strife, the peace of 01iva had ended the dynastie ąuarrel with Poland: henceforward there would be nothing to fear on that side.⁵ The peace of Kardis in 1661 registered the failure of Russia to gain a foothold on the Baltic.⁴ Territorially, Sweden was a satisfied power: her problem now would be to hołd what she had, against Frederick m’s plan to recover Skinę, or the Great Elector⁵ s designs upon Pomerania. With a long regency in prospect, Swedish policy must therefore aim atstanding still, at keeping the peace, at preserving the armed fbrces in good shape (especially the navy, on which all else hung), and at building up the mercantile marinę in order to free her exports from dependence on the Dutch.

But in politics it is never easy to stand still; in the circum-stances in which Sweden found herself after 1660 it was almost impossible. The great territorial gains of the last three reigns had been the product of mili tary yictory, madę possible only because Gustav Adolf and his successors had had at their dis-posal large and well-trained armies. After 1660 it was no longer feasible to maintain fbrces on the old scalę. Gustav Adolf, and even Charles x, had been able to do it only because their armies in war-time had been nearly self-supporting. Upon the domestic revenues they had borne relatively lightly, The longer the Thirty Years* War continued, the less the burden upon Sweden. But these were conditions never to be repeated, and in