Charles XII., king of Sweden (1697-1718), was the son of Charles XI., and was born at Stockholm, 27th June 1682. On the death of his father in 1697 he ascended the throne, and notwithstanding his youth the States declared him of age to assume the reins of government. The neighbouring powers thought this a favourable time to humble Sweden, then the great power of the north; and Frederick IV. of Denmark, Augustus II. of Poland, and the Czar Peter the Great concluded a league for this object. The Danes began by invading the territory of the Duke of Holstein Gottorp, husband of the eldest sister of Charles. The young king at once flung an army into Zealand, and in concert with Sir George Rooke's Anglo-Dutch squadron so threatened Copenhagen both by land and sea that the king was fain to sue for peace. Charles now hastened to meet the Russians, who lay under the walls of Narva, 50,000 strong, stormed their camp with but 8000 Swedes, and routed them with great slaughter, 30th November 1700. He next dethroned Augustus II., and procured the election of Stanislaus Leszczynski as king of Poland. Augustus supposed himself safe at least in Saxony, his hereditary dominion, but was followed thither, and humbling terms of peace were dictated at Altranstädt in 1706. Patkul, born a Livonian, but now the Czar's ambassador at Dresden, Charles caused to be broken on the wheel for treason, after a form of trial. In the autumn of 1707 he had collected an army of 43,000 men in Saxony, and in the January of the following year suddenly burst into Russia, and almost captured the Czar at Grodno. He next drove the Russians before him, and had already forced the Beresina and won a battle at Smolensk, which opened up to him the road to Moscow, when he suddenly turned southwards to the Ukraine, trusting to the promises of the Cossack hetman Mazepa. But Mazepa failed to bring forward his 30,000 Cossacks, and the king's reinforcements from Sweden were cut off by the watchful Czar, so that the Swedes had no alternative but to endure the hard winter of 1708-9 in the midst of an impoverished and hostile country. In spring Charles, with a force reduced to 23,000 men, laid siege to Pultowa, but the Czar hastened to oppose him, and defeated him after a desperate struggle, on the 8th July. Charles fled with a handful of attendants across the Turkish frontier to Bender.
Augustus now revoked the treaty of Altranstädt, and the Czar and the king of Denmark in concert assailed the Swedish territories. But the regency in Stockholm adopted measures of effective resistance, and Charles prevailed upon the Porte to commence a war against Russia, in which Peter seemed at first likely to suffer a severe defeat. But Russian agents succeeded in inspiring the Turks with suspicions concerning the ultimate designs of their impracticable guest, and accordingly Charles was seized, resisting desperately sword in hand, and conveyed to Demotica. At last he contrived to escape, and made his way through Hungary and Germany in sixteen days, till he reached Stralsund on the 21st of November 1714. A month later the town was forced to capitulate to an allied army of Danes, Saxons, Prussians, and Russians, on which the king crossed to Lund. His passion for war led him to attack Norway early in 1716; and soon after, under the advice of the Baron von Görtz, he formed a scheme which commended itself to his love of fighting and his vast ambition. He was to make terms with the Czar by surrendering the Baltic provinces of Sweden, then conquer Norway, next land in Scotland and replace the House of Stuart on the English throne, with the help of the Jacobite party within and that of Cardinal Alberoni without. No sooner had he purchased his peace with the Czar than he burst into Norway. In November 1718 he commenced the siege of Fredrikshall, and while hastening on the works in the dead of winter with all his characteristic impetuosity, was killed (11th December) by a musket-shot from the fortress. Some writers have maintained that his death was due to treachery, and a somewhat unscientific examination of his skull in 1746 seemed to give some colour to the belief; but a new examination by command of Charles XV. in 1859 proved conclusively that the fatal shot must have been fired from a height downwards, and that therefore the king's death was due to his own reckless exposure of his person to the fire of the enemy.
The character of Charles was full of strange contradictions. He was brave to the pitch of reckless folly, determined to the point of foolish obstinacy. Pleasure had no attractions for him: he shared the coarsest food and severest labour of the common soldier with an easy cheerfulness that won him the passionate devotion of his men. All external marks of rank he despised: his dress was simple, and Swedish in form and colour—a loose blue coat, with turned-down collar, and large plain brass buttons; buff-coloured waistcoat; a black kerchief, doubly folded round his neck; coarse felt hat, and high broad-toed riding boots with massive steel spurs. His hardy frame defied alike fatigue and the extremes of heat and cold. He was able and sagacious in counsel, and had a mind capable of the vastest designs. But his ambition was fatal to his country, and after his death, Sweden, exhausted by his wars, ceased to be numbered among the great powers. The strange vicissitudes of his career are reviewed in thirty of the finest lines of Johnson's noble poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes—the concluding passage is as well known as anything in English literature:
His fall was destin'd to a barren strand,
A petty fortress, and a dubious hand,
He left the name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral, or adorn a tale.
Voltaire's well-written Histoire de Charles XII. will continue to be the chief life, spite of its errors. An eloquent sketch of his career, read by King Oscar II., then Duke of Östergötland, at the inauguration of a statue to Charles XII. on the 150th anniversary of his death, was translated by Apgeorge, 1879; and see the Lives by Nisbet Bain ('Heroes' series, 1896) and Oscar Browning (1899).