56
KING GEORGE ENTERS THE BALTIC
Peter was standing with a group of officers when he heard the news of the death of his great antagonist. His eyes filled with tears; wiping them away, he said, “My dear Charles, how much I pity you,” and ordered the Russian court into mourning for a week. In Sweden, the succession was quickly resolved. Had she lived, the King’s older sister, Hedwig, Duchess of Holstein, would have succeeded him, but Hedwig had died in 1708 and her claim had passed to her son, the young Duke Charles Frederick, who was eighteen at his uncle’s death. The other claimant was Charles’ younger sister, Ulrika Eleonora, now thirty years old and married to Frederick, Duke of Hesse. For several years, as young Charles Frederick grew older, the two parties had been antagonistic, each trying to position itself favorably in case anything should happen to the King.
As long as he lived, the King had steadfastly refused to choose between his nephew and his sister and proclaim an heir. He may have believed, of course, that one day he would marry and beget an heir. Meanwhile, he wished to have the affection and support of both Ulrika and Charles Frederick. He kept the young Duke at his side and took special care to train him in the military arts. He wrote regularly to Ulrika and designated her husband as one of his principal advisors and commanders. Time enough in the future to make a choice which would painfully alienate one of these beloved kinsmen.
Frederick of Hesse, Ulrika’s husband, was more realistic. Before the Norwegian campaign, he had given his wife a list of the actions she was to take if the King should suddenly die: Ulrika was to proclaim herself queen, have herself crowned and ruthlessly arrest any who opposed her. And so it happened. Charles Frederick, like Frederick of Hesse, was with the King in Norway when the fatal bullet struck, and Ulrika mounted the throne unopposed. At first, young Charles Frederick was too brokenhearted to resist or even to greatly care and when he awoke to consider his situation, events had passed him by. Thereafter, the older and more experienced Frederick of Hesse easily convinced him that his duty lay in allegiance to his Aunt Ulrika, now Queen of Sweden.
The figure most abruptly and drastically affected by the King’s death was Goertz. The morning after Charles fell, Frederick of Hesse dispatched two officers to arrest Goertz “in the King’s name.” Goertz, who had the same day returned from the Aland Islands with news of his latest negotiations with the Russians, was astonished, asking, “Does the King still live?” His papers and money were seized and, for fear that he might attempt suicide, he was not allowed a knife and fork. He passed the night reading and wrote a short letter to his relatives declaring his innocence.
For six weeks, with Goertz imprisoned, articles of impeachment were carefully drawn to make sure there was no possibility of escape. His captors feared that if he were tried for treason before the regular high court of justice, he might win acquittal by arguing that the court had no jurisdiction as he was not a Swedish subject. Further, Goertz could argue truthfully that as a servant of the King, not of the state, he had acted by the absolute authority of Charles himself. He could also argue that nothing he had done had been on his own behalf; he had not enriched himself by so much as a penny.
Nevertheless, Sweden was determined to destroy him. A special extrajudicial commission was appointed to try him. He was charged with a crime new in Swedish law: “having alienated the late King’s affection from his people.” He was accused of misusing the King’s confidence by suggesting to Charles measures harmful to Sweden, such as continuing the war. From the beginning, Goertz was doomed; in vain, he protested the lack of jurisdiction of the special commission. His claim that he was an alien and untouchable was rejected. His petition to have legal counsel was refused as unnecessary. He was not allowed to call his own witnesses or to confront hostile witnesses. He was not allowed to develop his defense in writing or to bring notes into the courtroom. He was given only a day and a half to prepare his reply, which permitted him time to read only one fifth of the evidence presented against him. Inevitably, he was found guilty, and unanimously he was condemned to be beheaded and his body buried under the scaffold, a mark of special contempt. He received the sentence with composure, but petitioned that his body might be spared this final disgrace. Grimly, Ulrika ordered the entire sentence carried out. Goertz mounted the scaffold with courage and dignity and said, “You bloodthirsty Swedes, take then the head you have thirsted for so long.” As he laid his head on the block, his last words were, “Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” His head fell at the first blow, and his body was buried on the spot.*
With the sudden, violent elimination of both Charles XII and Goertz from the helm of the Swedish state, many in Sweden and elsewhere quite naturally expected a radical change. It was true that the King’s death had led to a swift termination of the Norwegian campaign, and presumably to the vast continental enterprises of which Charles XII had dreamed. But, strangely, as the weeks and months went by, the end of the Great Northern War seemed no closer. On ascending the throne, the new Queen, Ulrika Eleonora, wrote to Peter that she desired peace. The Tsar replied that although he would not give up his earlier demand to keep Livonia, he was now prepared to pay a million roubles to Sweden in return for cession of the province. Ulrika rejected this offer and presented new demands. On this note, the negotiations foundered, and Bruce and Osterman withdrew from the Aland Islands conference.
Behind this continued reticence in the Swedish monarchy over making peace lay a rising hope that Sweden might win back by diplomacy some of what she had lost in war. In the shadows, only dimly perceived from St. Petersburg, which had deliberately been kept uninformed, a whole new structure of Baltic alliances was taking shape. Goertz had participated in these negotiations and Charles XII had approved them. Now, both the warrior and the diplomat were dead, but the diplomatic game continued. And the chief player was the hard-headed, obstinate German, King George I of England—brave, shy, some said stupid, but a man who, when he had fixed on an object, would go to any lengths to achieve it. Peter had met him twenty years before during his Great Embassy and several times in the years that followed, and did not much like him, but he could never ignore him. For during the final years of the Great Northern War, the key to ending the struggle lay—or at least seemed to lie—in George’s pudgy hands.
The fog on the Thames was so thick on the morning of September 29, 1714, that the new King of England could not sail up the river and step ashore in his new capital. Instead, his ship, flanked by English and Dutch men-of-war, anchored below Greenwich, and George was rowed ashore through the blinding, wet mist. There, standing before the colonnade of Wren’s magnificent Royal Naval Hospital, the noble personages of England, Whig and Tory alike, waited for him in their best velvet and satin. The King stepped from the boat and greeted his new subjects, a ceremony complicated by the fact that the new monarch spoke no English and few of his subjects spoke German. To the Duke of Marlborough, humiliated by Queen Anne and her Tory ministers, the King made a special effort to be gracious. “My dear Duke,” he said in French, which Marlborough also spoke, “I hope now you have seen the end of your troubles.”
The arrival of a foreign prince to mount the throne was becoming almost routine in England. Three times it had happened in scarcely more than a century as James I, William III and now George I had been imported to preserve the Protestant religion.* George Louis’ claim to the English throne traced back through his mother, a granddaughter of James I, but the truth is that he came reluctantly. As Elector of Hanover, he governed one of the principal German states of the Holy Roman Empire, rich in agriculture and minor industry. Hanover was only one tenth as large as Great Britain both in area and in population. Its army had been hardened in eleven years of war against the French, and the Elector had served with Marlborough and Prince Eugene as one of the principal allied commanders. In the scales of European power, Hanover weighed about as much as Denmark, Prussia or Saxony. It was a thriving, pleasant, proud little state.
George Louis accepted the English throne for much the same reason that the Prince of Orange had accepted it twenty-six years before: to ensure English support for his own continental ambitions. As Elector of Hanover, George Louis was a significant personage in Europe, but as King of England, he would be one of Europe’s overlords, more powerful than his nominal master, the Hapsburg Emperor.
Two days after his landing at Greenwich, when George I made his public entry into London, the people of England got a look at their new King. He was a short man, fifty-four years old, with the white skin and the bulging blue eyes which were to mark many of his royal descendants over the next two centuries. Bred a soldier, a brave and competent if not brilliant commander, his habits were those of the army, his tastes simple and homey. He disliked his new subjects. Unlike the docile Germans, the English were proud, touchy, argumentative and held stubbornly to the belief that their monarchs must share power with Parliament. As often as he could, George left England for Hanover, and once there, to the distress of his English ministers, he stayed for months at a time. Deliberately, he showed his disdain for his new subjects by never troubling to learn their language. The English, for their part, disliked George, complaining about his dullness, his coldness, his German ministers and his ugly mistresses. Only his religion appealed to them, and even here he was Lutheran, not Anglican.
In London, the King avoided ceremony whenever possible. He lived in two rooms, where he was looked after by two Turkish servants whom he had captured in his campaigns as an imperial general. His favorite companions were his two German mistresses, one tall, thin and bony, the other so corpulent that the London crowd dubbed them “The Elephant and Castle.” He was fond of cards and often went to the house of a friend where he could play in private with his few cronies. He loved music and was an enthusiastic admirer of George Frederick Handel, who emigrated from Germany to England largely at the urging of this royal patron.
He hated his son. The King’s eyes blazed with fury and his face turned purple whenever the Prince of Wales appeared. By every possible means, he directed snubs toward his heir. Such treatment reduced the Prince to paroxysms of rage, but all he could do was to wait. Meanwhile, the King seized his son’s children and forbade him to appear at court. The go-between for these two irreconcilable men was the King’s daughter-in-law, Caroline of Anspach, Princess of Wales, a blue-eyed, flaxen-haired beauty with a superb and ample figure, great intelligence and earthy wit. She was the kind of woman whom the King most admired, and the fact that she was married to his hated son only deepened his antipathy toward the younger man.
Upon ascending the English throne, George I had every intention of using the great power of England to serve the purposes of Hanover. He had long looked with envy at the Swedish-held duchies of Bremen and Verden, which commanded the estuaries of the Elbe and Weser rivers and thus cut his Hanoverian dominions off from the North Sea. Now, with the Swedish empire seeming on the verge of collapse, he wanted to be present when the spoils were divided. Thus it was that in 1715, Hanover—but not England—entered the anti-Swedish alliance. As Vasily Dolgoruky, Peter’s ambassador in Copenhagen, explained this confusing situation to the Tsar: “Although the English King has declared war on Sweden, it is only as Elector of Hanover, and the English fleet has sailed [to the Baltic] only to protect its merchants. If the Swedish fleet attacks the Russian fleet of Your Majesty, it is not to be thought that the English will engage the Swedes.”
Despite this qualification, Peter, whose policy for years had been to bring both Hanover and England into the war against Sweden, was delighted. And when he heard that the British Admiral Sir John Norris had arrived in the Baltic commanding eighteen ships-of-the-line escorting 106 merchantmen, the Tsar was overjoyed. On Norris’ first call at Reval, the Tsar was at Kronstadt, but, hearing of the British visit and that Norris would be back, Peter hurried to Reval with a Russian squadron. When the British Admiral returned, he found Peter there with nineteen Russian ships-of-the-line. Norris remained for three weeks while the admirals and officers of the two fleets entertained each other with gala festivities. Catherine and most of Peter’s court were also present and dined with Norris aboard his flagship. During the visit, Peter examined the British ships from keel to topmast and Norris was allowed to freely inspect the Russian vessels. He saw three new sixty-gun ships built in St. Petersburg which he described as “in every way equal to the best of that rank in our country and more handsomely furnished.” At the end of the visit, Peter enthusiastically offered Norris command of the Russian navy, and although the Admiral declined, the Tsar gave his visitor his royal portrait set in diamonds.
Every summer thereafter until the death of Charles XII (in all, the summers of 1715, 1716, 1717 and 1718), Norris returned to the Baltic with a British squadron and the same orders: not to engage the Swedes unless British ships were attacked. In 1716, Norris’ squadron was part of the combined allied fleet assembled to cover the invasion of Scania, and if the Swedish fleet had appeared, British cannon would have opened fire. But the Swedish fleet remained in port, and in September Peter postponed the invasion.
As seen from London, Charles’ death in November 1718 created an entirely new situation in the Baltic. Until then, George I’s interest had been permanent Hanoverian possession of Bremen and Verden, and the British Cabinet had been concerned about protection of British merchant trade and an assured flow of naval supplies from the Baltic. Both parties had also worried about the possibility of Charles XII offering support to a Jacobite uprising in England against the Hanoverian King. But Charles’ death eliminated these fears and enabled the King and his ministers to reassess the underlying change which was taking place in the North: the decline of the Swedish empire and its replacement in the Baltic by the growing power of Russia.
King George I conceived a plan which, if successful, would profit both England and Hanover; the Baltic would be made safe for British trade and the continued, unmolested flow of naval stores and also the possession of Bremen and Verden would be guaranteed to Hanover not just by right of conquest but by formal cession from the Swedish crown. George’s goal was the preservation of sufficient Swedish power “so that the Tsar should not grow too powerful in the Baltic.” His means was to be a complete reversal of the alliance system in the Baltic. Sweden in 1718 stood alone against a powerful assembly of states: Russia, Poland, Denmark, Hanover and Prussia. This alignment would now be reversed. First, Sweden would be induced to make peace with all of her enemies in the lower Baltic, then a general league of Germanic powers would together march on the Tsar and drive him away from the northern sea. Initially, the peace would be expensive for Sweden: All of its German possessions would be divided among Hanover, Prussia, Denmark and Poland. In return, however, these states would become Sweden’s allies, helping it to recover all it had lost to the Tsar. Sweden was to receive back Livonia, Estonia and Finland, giving up only St. Petersburg, Narva and Kronstadt. If Peter refused these terms, still harsher ones would be imposed: He would be deprived of all his conquests and, in addition, forced to cede Smolensk and Kiev to Poland. In sum, Russia, until then the apparent victor in the war, having gained the most territory, would now become the loser and would pay for the peace. Hanover and Prussia, which had entered the war late and done almost no fighting, would become the real victors.
In its initial stages, George I’s plan was brilliantly successful. One by one, through skillful diplomacy, Peter’s allies were stripped away, bribed or pressured into making a separate peace with Sweden. Fittingly, Hanover was the first in this parade. On November 20, 1719, George I, as Elector of Hanover, signed a formal treaty of peace with Sweden. By the treaty, Hanover obtained permanent cession of Bremen and Verden on payment of one million thalers. Two months later, as King of England, the same George I signed an alliance with Sweden by which England was to pay a subsidy of 300,000 thalers per year for as long as the war with Russia lasted, to assist Sweden with a British fleet in the Baltic, and to help Sweden reach a favorable peace with Russia.
King Frederick William of Prussia was highly uncomfortable about the English proposition, as he considered himself a friend of the Tsar and had only recently—in August 1718—signed a new alliance with Peter. But he was strongly, and in the end decisively, tempted by the promise of permanent cession of the port of Stettin, which gave his kingdom access to the sea, plus a piece of Swedish Pomerania. As a salve to his conscience, Frederick William kept the negotiations completely aboveboard. He informed the Russians of every detail of his discussions with the English, and endeavored to convince Golovkin and, later, Tolstoy, whom Peter sent especially to Berlin, that the new treaty would not be harmful to Russia. Even after a treaty of peace was finally signed between Prussia and Sweden on January 21, 1720, the King signed a declaration that he would never act against the interests or territory of his friend Peter.*
Denmark was cajoled into peace with Sweden by the combined influence of English money and the Royal Navy. An armistice was signed on October 19, 1719, and a Swedish-Danish peace treaty on July 3, 1720. Sweden agreed henceforth to pay tolls for Swedish ships passing through the sound and to give up all support for the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. Then, King Augustus, who had helped instigate the Great Northern War and whose persuasion had turned the Tsar against Sweden, signed a treaty of peace with Sweden on December 27, 1719. No territory changed hands, but by its terms Augustus was confirmed in his title of King of Poland, while Stanislaus, the other candidate for that title, was allowed to wander about Europe calling himself King Stanislaus.
To Russia, King George I and his English ministers explained all these changes as merely the results of a British effort to mediate peace in the North. The Russians understood better. In the summer of 1719, Fedor Veselovsky, the Tsar’s ambassador in London, called on General Lord James Stanhope, who conducted the foreign policy of the British government. Speaking bluntly, Veselovsky warned Stanhope that any alliance, even defensive in nature, between England and Sweden would be regarded as an English declaration of war against Russia. Stanhope protested that Russia should show more appreciation for the important services which England had rendered to the Tsar during the war.
“What services has England rendered to Russia in the present war?” retorted Veselovsky.
“England,” said Stanhope, “has allowed the Tsar to make great conquests and establish himself on the Baltic and besides has sent her fleet and assisted his undertakings.”
“England,” replied Veselovsky, “allowed His Majesty to make conquests because she had no means of preventing him, though she had no wish to aid him and from circumstances was obliged to remain neutral. She sent her fleet to the Baltic for the protection of her own trade and to defend the King of Denmark in consequence of treaty obligations to him.”
The primary means of executing England’s new anti-Russian policy was to be the presence of a strong British fleet in the Baltic. The commander of the fleet would be the same Admiral Sir John Norris who for four years had commanded the British squadron in those waters. Now Norris’ orders were to reverse course and switch friendships. The Admiral’s secret instructions from Stanhope were to offer the mediation of Great Britain between the warring parties, Russia and Sweden.
In July 1719, Admiral Norris’ great ships sailed through the sound into the Baltic, steering northeast for Stockholm, entering the Skargard and anchoring off the Swedish capital. Norris went ashore with letters for the Queen, and on July 14 Queen Ulrika dined aboard Norris’ flagship. On this occasion she informed the Admiral that Sweden accepted the British offer.
The Russians, naturally, viewed the arrival of this British fleet with suspicion and apprehension. When it appeared in the Baltic, Peter inquired as to its purpose and demanded that Norris assure him he had no hostile intentions, otherwise British ships would not be permitted to approach the Russian coastline. The English purpose became clearer when letters from Norris and Lord Carteret, the English ambassador in Stockholm, addressed to the Tsar, were delivered. These English letters all but commanded the Tsar to make peace with Sweden, announcing that the British fleet was in the Baltic not only to protect trade but to “support mediation.” Bruce and Osterman, finding the language of the English Minister and Admiral “unusual and insolent,” refused to forward the letters to the Tsar, suggesting that in a matter of such importance King George should write to Peter himself. Hearing of the letters, Peter was indignant. He had no intention of accepting the mediation of a monarch who, as Elector of Hanover, was now an active ally of Sweden. To manifest his displeasure, the Tsar ordered both James Jefferyes, now English ambassador to Russia, and Weber, the Hanoverian representative, to leave St. Petersburg.
While the complicated diplomatic maneuvers of George I and his English ministers were taking place behind his back, Peter proceeded straightforwardly to try to beat the Swedes on the field of battle. Charles XII was dead and the Aland Islands negotiations had borne no fruit; Sweden, therefore, needed to be reminded that the war was not yet over. The main effort of the 1719 campaign was to be a powerful amphibious attack on the homeland coast of Sweden along the Gulf of Bothnia. The weapons were to be the same as those which had been so effective in the conquest of Finland: fleets of galleys carrying thousands of soldiers into shallow waters where big ships could not go. In May, 50,000 Russian troops marched from their winter quarters to assembly points at St. Petersburg and Reval to be moved by sea to western Finland, from where the attacks would be launched. Apraxin was to be in overall command of the Russian fleet of 180 galleys and 300 flat-bottom boats, convoyed by twenty-eight ships-of-the-line. On June 2, Peter himself left St. Petersburg for Peterhof and Kronstadt, commanding a flotilla of thirty galleys carrying 5,000 men.
Already that summer, Peter’s fleet had had a success. On June 4, a squadron of seven Russian men-of-war sailing from Reval had intercepted three smaller Swedish ships in the open sea. Outnumbered and heavily outgunned, the Swedish ships tried running for the Stockholm Skargard, the archipelago of islands and islets which screen the Swedish capital from the sea. The Russian ships overtook them, however, and after an eight-hour fight all three Swedish ships, including the fifty-two-gun Wachtmeister, were captured. The return of this squadron with its prizes to Reval was deeply satisfying to Peter. Here was a deepwater victory, unlike the galley action at Hangö.
On June 30, Peter and the Kronstadt squadron arrived at Reval with the largest Russian men-of-war, including the ninety-gun Gangut, the seventy-gun ships St. Alexander, Neptunus and Reval and the sixty-four-gun Moscow. Meanwhile, Admiral Norris had entered the Baltic with a squadron of sixteen ships-of-the-line. Despite the potentially menacing presence of this English fleet, Peter’s men-of-war sailed toward Sweden on July 13, followed a few days later by 130 galleys filled with soldiers. On the 18th, the entire Russian naval force anchored at Lemland in the Aland Islands, and on the evening of the 21st they put to sea. Fog and calm seas forced the big ships to anchor, but the galleys proceeded under oars and, with Apraxin in command, reached the first islands of the Stockholm Skargard on the afternoon of the 22nd.
For the next five weeks, Apraxin’s ships and the 30,000 men they carried wreaked havoc on the eastern coast of Sweden. Finding himself unopposed at sea, Apraxin divided his force, sending Major General Lacy with twenty-one galleys and twelve sloops north up the coast, while moving the main body south. He landed a force of Cossacks to raid Stockholm, but their assault was repulsed—the Skargard was difficult, its narrow channels well defended, and a force of four men-of-war and nine frigates in the Stockholm harbor kept the Russian galleys at bay. Moving south, Apraxin again divided his ships into smaller squadrons to work along the coasts, burning small towns, industries and ironworks and capturing coast shipping. On August 4, the southernmost Russian ships reached Nykoping, and on the 10th they were at Norrkoping, where a number of Swedish merchant ships were captured, some of them loaded with copper ore taken from the nearby mines. These were sent back to Russia. In one cannon foundry, 300 cannon still undelivered to the Swedish army were seized and hauled away. On August 14, Apraxin’s fleet turned north, stopping to pick up other landing detachments along the coast. Arriving again off the Stockholm Skargard, he attempted another assault on the capital, but again was beaten off. On August 21, twenty-one Russian sloops and twenty-one galleys forced one channel in the face of heavy fire from Swedish forts and ships, but then fell back.
Meanwhile, to the north, Lacy’s force had been moving with similar devastating effect along the upper coast. He had destroyed factories and ironworks, storehouses and mills, and had burned three towns. The troops had fought three small battles, winning two and being repulsed in a third, at which point he turned back. A large quantity of iron, forage and provisions was seized, some taken aboard, and that which could not be carried away was thrown into the sea or burned. By August 29 Lacy and Apraxin were both back in the Aland Islands, and on the 31st they departed for home, the galley fleet heading for Kronstadt and the men-of-war for Reval.
That autumn, hoping that the lesson of the summer attacks had made itself felt, Peter sent Osterman to Stockholm under a flag of truce to see whether the Swedes were now any more ready for peace. Osterman returned to the Tsar with a letter in which Queen Ulrika offered to cede Narva, Reval and Estonia, but still demanded the return of all of Finland and Livonia. In Stockholm, Osterman reported, the Swedes were embittered by the Russian raids, unwilling to talk peace while Cossacks rode within a few miles of their capital. Nevertheless, an extraordinary shift in power had been made plain that summer. Ten years before, Charles XII had been fighting one thousand miles away in the heat and dust of the Ukraine. Now, Peter’s Cossack horsemen rode within sight of the steeples of the capital of Sweden.
* In life, Goertz shared many qualities with the other great international adventurer of the age, Patkul. Both came from obscure backgrounds, possessed enormous talents
* “England,” said Viscount Bolingbroke, “would as soon have a Turk as a Roman Catholic for its king.”
* Frederick William’s distress at the role he found himself playing is displayed in an emotional memorandum he wrote before the treaty was signed: “Would to God that I had not promised to conclude the treaty. It is an evil spirit which has moved me. Now we shall be ruined, which is what my false friends wish. May God take me from this evil world before I sign it, for here on earth there is nothing but falsehood and deceit. I will explain to Golovkin that I must wear the cloak on both shoulders. To have the Tsar at my hand is my interest and if I give him money I can have as many troops as I wish. The Tsar will make just such a treaty with me. With the English everything is deceit, just as in the most rascally way they deceived me in 1715. I pray God to stand by me if I must play an odd part, but I play it unwillingly for it is not one for an honest man.” The King concluded that his predicament should “teach my successors to guard against accepting such friends, and not to follow my wicked, Godless maxims in this treaty, but to stick to friends that one once has, and to turn away from false friends. Therefore, I exhort my posterity to keep a still stronger army than I have; on this I shall live and die.”