THE first part of the eighteenth century, to the year 1740, witnessed in Central Europe a series of military and political events, by which new Powers began to assert their influence in the general affairs of the Continent, favoured by the temporary exhaustion or lassitude of the chief combatants in the wars during the reign of Louis XIV. France, in the minority of Louis XV., under the Regency of his uncle, the Duke of Orleans, with his sly and artful Minister, the Abbé Dubois, and in the same reign afterwards guided by the Duke of Bourbon and Cardinal Fleury, was long constrained by her domestic situation to a pacific attitude. England, during the administration of Sir Robert Walpole, embarrassed by the Tory Opposition and the Jacobite intrigues against the House of Hanover, entertained a similar disposition. The public mind of both the Western maritime nations was directed with growing interest to commercial and colonial acquisitions beyond the seas, in which they now came to supplant the declining enterprise of the Dutch Republic. Materialism was the spirit of the age; the era of wars for religion was past; and since the Netherlands, the near neighbour of England, had been delivered from the peril of French conquest, there seemed no ground for renewing the alliances formed by William III. It was not until more than twenty years later that the "family compacts" between the French and Spanish branches of the House of Bourbon, threatening to deprive the English of commercial privileges, revived popular jealousy in our own country against France. Continental politics, in the meantime, were violently disturbed by quarrels of a very different nature. The shores of the Baltic, the plains of Northern Germany and Poland, including several countries which are now scarcely to be

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recognised by their ancient names, but which were then neither Prussian nor Russian dominions, became the scenes of an adventurous warfare. The extraordinary career of the Swedish King Charles XII., the last great efforts of a martial State, which had once been the strongest champion of the Protestant cause in Germany, ended in the exclusion of Sweden from the affairs of Central Europe. Russia, by the genius of Peter the Greatmore remarkable as a trainer and ruler of his countrymen than as a soldier-and the new Kingdom of Prussia, disciplined to strenuous activity, with yet higher statesmanship, by its Brandenburg sovereigns, rose to considerable importance. Northern Powers, as they were often styled in subsequent diplomacy, found their opportunity of self-aggrandisement in the feeble and disorganised condition of Poland. That country, as we have shown in former pages, was a huge congregation of aristocratic family chiefs, vain of their feudal privileges, incapable of steadfast combination to support the State, and resorting to the expedient of an elective kingship to save their pride from a permanent subordination of rank. Poland, though abounding in brave men of warlike spirit, could never possess a regular army; and the choice of a German prince, Augustus, Elector of Saxony, to occupy a throne so little served by the nobles and the people, only postponed for a time its absorption by the surrounding monarchies.

The German princes, indeed, were at this period enabled to use their natural resources for selfdefence, and often to pursue their schemes of ambition, with greater freedom and effectiveness than before. The unity of the German Empire, as a feudal confederation, had been shattered by the Thirty Years' War; and the House of Hapsburg, retaining the Imperial dignity, soon lost its

A.D. 1700.]

authority with the German nation by a selfish neglect of patriotic interests. It was more intent upon gaining additional territories in Italy, and on winning the favour of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church, than on protecting the rights of Germany. An example of this was seen after the War of the Spanish Succession, when the Emperor rejected a treaty of peace which would have restored Strasburg and Alsace to the Fatherland, because it did not give him Sicily, with Naples, for his own share of the gains. The presidency of the German Sovereigns being thus left in abeyance, each of them acted as he pleased in seeking foreign alliances, making himself and his army the instrument of alien designs, and profiting by any connection he could form with other States of Europe. Wars beginning elsewhere, and not properly concerning German interests, were by these means carried into Germany, so that Sweden and Denmark, Poland, Russia, Prussia, and presently France and England, fought out their quarrels on German soil. The consolidation of a secure and settled general policy for Europe was greatly hindered by this state of affairs, which continued more or less to the era of the French Revolution.

The narrative of particular events, in which these circumstances will be borne in mind, is here resumed at the commencement of the young King of Sweden's wars, in the year 1700, provoked by an unjust conspiracy of three foreign sovereigns to rob him of parts of his dominions. The first was Frederick IV., King of Denmark, whose pretext for breaking the peace was a phase of that old Schleswig-Holstein question, which has occasioned wars in our own generation. The Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, brother-in-law and intimate friend of Charles XII., had in Schleswig (or Slesvick, as the Danes would call it) subjects owning allegiance to the Danish Crown.

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had long been a dispute about their divided homage; but the real aim of Denmark was to acquire sole command of the Sound, and to impose tolls on the Dutch and English traffic entering the Baltic. Sweden, England, and the Dutch Republic were old allies, and had jointly guaranteed the rights of the Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein. The King of Denmark, in attacking the Duke, wilfully challenged Sweden to war-a step which he had preconcerted with Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, and with Peter of Russia. These two monarchs were actuated by a desire to win from Sweden the provinces along the southern and eastern coasts of the Baltic and the Gulfs of Riga and Finland, which had been assigned to her in 1660 by the Treaty of Oliva. The Northern

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Scandinavian kingdom was in possession of Pomerania (including the principal seaports, Stralsund and Stettin), and of Livonia, Esthonia, Carelia, and Ingria, to the extremity of the Gulf of Finland. The severity of Swedish rule in Livonia had excited the discontent of the population, and an exiled nobleman, John Reinhold Patkul, being in the Polish service, persuaded Augustus that they would rise in arms to re-establish their former connection with Poland.

The third member of the league against Sweden, the famous Peter the Great, has already been mentioned in this History. He was but seventeen years of age when he became absolute ruler of a vast Empire, and of a barbarous nation which he determined to civilise, as he understood civilisation, by using knowledge and skill for the increase of material power. With this object, the hardy young Czar renounced for himself all pomp and luxury, as Charles XII. of Sweden, his contem porary, did for the sake of military renown. Peter was resolved, in the first place, to become in his own person a practical shipwright, that he might instruct Russian mechanics in the work, or encourage them by his example. After spending two summers at such labour in the northern port of Archangel, in company with some Dutch shipbuilders there, Peter left his country for two years, and visited Holland and England, where he lived in a rude and simple fashion, at Amsterdam, at Saardam, and at Deptford, spending his days in the dockyards, handling the tools of common carpenters, but studying mathematics and the natural sciences with the best professors. On his return to Russia, where he had the assistance of two foreign Ministers-General Patrick Gordon (a Scotsman), and a Genevese named Le Fort-the Czar suppressed and punished, with extreme severity, a mutiny of the Strelitz bands of soldiers; after which he began, with amazing energy, but in a despotic and peremptory fashion, his immense task of imposing on the wild Russians, at any cost of natural liberty, and regardless of human suffering, the imitation of European customs, institutions, and useful arts. He can hardly be regarded as a philanthropist, or a liberal and enlightened statesman; works of equal magnitude, and forced changes in the outward aspects of a metropolitan city, have been effected not less quickly by ancient and by Asiatic despotic rulers; but he was a great man of business, self-taught as well as self-inspired, one of the inost remarkable masters of mankind.

The personal character of his rival, Charles of Sweden, though spoiled by a fatal passion for martial glory, and by extreme rashness and obstinacy, was

perhaps higher than that of Peter, whose gross intemperance, vulgar coarseness of tastes, and savage fits of rage and cruelty, forbid us to esteem him as a true hero. Charles, in his early youth, forsook the allurements of pleasure, avoided women and rejected wine, despised the splendour of a Court and the ease of a home, and to the day of his death led the hardest of lives in pursuit of fame, "that last infirmity of noble minds," which he erroneously sought in perpetual warfare. Compared with other famous warriors, Alexander, Cæsar, or Napoleon, he is the example of one who loved conflict and victory simply for the honours of the strife, not for the aggrandisement of his dominion, or to gain supreme power. His disposition was chivalrous, rather than ambitious: he was the Hotspur of his time, and had no vice but an inordinate appetite for fighting. Yet he did not go forth, in the first instance, without provocation, but had contented himself with bearhunting and bold riding at home, till the hostile league for the spoliation of Sweden called him, a boy of stern manliness of temper, and of commanding intelligence, to lead his well-trained Swedish army to distant battle-fields. It is true that he went too far, and persisted too long, in this career; that he perpetrated enormous mistakes, and incurred signal defeats and disasters, to the great injury of his country. Yet no base or perfidious act is recorded of him, which is more than can be said of some of the most famous conquerors in ancient and modern times.

His romantic adventures, during the campaigns of twenty years, in many lands between the Baltic and the Black Sea, contending against different antagonists, cannot here be related in detail. The military actions, however astonishing in their day, must from our point of view be regarded as exemplifying the relative strength of the nations engaged in them, and as contributing to permanent results in the distribution of power. The first war of Charles XII. was very quickly decided against Denmark; the allied Swedish, Dutch, and English fleets drove that of the Danes into the harbour of Copenhagen, where Charles landed with his own army, besieged the capital two weeks, and, with hardly any fighting, compelled Frederick IV. to confirm all the rights of Holstein-Gottorp, and to pay an indemnity to its Duke for having attacked his towns of Husum, Eiderstadt, and Tonningen. The Treaty of Travendahl, which brought this brief campaign to an end, was signed on the 18th of August, 1700. But the Czar of Russia had gathered a huge army of eighty thousand men, very ill-trained and rudely armed, under the Duke of Croy, to achieve

the conquest of Ingria, the south-eastern shore of the Gulf of Finland. Charles, to oppose this formidable attack, speedily landed with thirteen thousand Swedes at Revel, and marched against the Russians, who were encamped at Narva, and whom he surprised on the 29th of November, 1700, throwing their whole camp and army into confu sion. Peter himself was the first to fly as the Swedes approached; twelve thousand Russians were slain, and eighteen thousand laid down their arms. Charles then took up his winter quarters in Livonia, while Peter went to meet Augustus of Saxony and Poland, to concert a new campaign. They arranged that a portion of the raw Russian troops should learn regular soldiership by serving in the Saxon army; but in the summer of 1701, Charles resumed operations, crossed the Dwina, defeated the Saxons, and occupied the whole province of Courland.

The King of Poland could not rely on the Poles, whom he had offended by keeping his Saxons among them, and by his extravagant and insolent behaviour. Contending factions of the Polish nobility had their different views, but few wished to continue the war against Sweden. Charles made up his mind to depose Augustus II., whom he regarded as his personal enemy; and the pursuit of this object was his main endeavour for several years. In May, 1702, after a previous expedition into Lithuania, he arrived at Warsaw, with only nine thousand men, and entered the city unopposed. He refused to treat with Augustus, or to recognise him as King. The Cardinal Primate, Archbishop Radziejowski, as president of the Polish aristocracy, which called itself a Republic, though it had an elective monarch, was requested to convene a Diet and to declare the throne vacant. He declined to do so, and Charles, leaving Warsaw in disgust, marched on towards Cracow, where the party of Augustus was strongest. On the 20th of July, he encountered a combined army of twenty thousand Saxons and twelve thousand Poles, and gained a complete victory, capturing the royal camp with all that it contained. A broken leg detained him two or three months in the city of Cracow, while Augustus took refuge at Thorn, in Polish Prussia. The winter of that year was spent in attempts on both sides to win the adhesion of the Polish nobles, and the opposite parties summoned Diets, respectively, at Warsaw and at Marienburg, or at Lublin. In 1703, the Swedish King was again in the field, besieging Thorn, from which Augustus had fled, and which surrendered in October. He then advanced northward, and approached Dantzic, which was a town

seventy years of age, but cherished an ambitious desire to become an independent prince. Through Stanislaus, the new King of Poland, his own countryman, Mazeppa conveyed his proposals to Charles XII., and persuaded him, against the advice of Swedish councillors, to lead his army to the Ukraine. The danger of this movement, as it would place the Czar's army directly in his rear, was utterly disregarded by Charles; and Peter did not lose a moment in taking advantage of the blunder. Within three weeks, the Russians,

destroy the rising city of St. Petersburg, aroused the patriotic feeling of the Russians. When Charles, in November, after serious losses by the way, arrived in the Ukraine, and was met by the Hetman Mazeppa, an alarming disappointment was experienced. Mazeppa appeared with only a small band of followers; his efforts to rally the Cossacks around his standard had utterly failed. The aged Hetman, the hero of the wildhorse legend, was a thorough impostor, who conducted the ardent and chivalrous King of