Peter the Great (133 page)

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 alein 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 de
mands. On this note, the negotiations foundered, and Bruce and Osterman withdrew from the Aland Islands conference.

Behind this continued reticence in the Swedish monarchy

*ln life, Goertz shared many qualities with the other great international adventurer of the age, Patkul. Both came from obsecure backgrounds, possessed enormous talents and were willing to take great risks. As a result, each played a distinctive role in the history of their time. Their allegiances were different: Patkul was the adroit and hated enem
y of Charles XII; Goertz was the
King's devoted minister and servant. But they shared the same end: Both died in degradation under a Swedish axe.

overmaking 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

*
"England," said Viscount Bolingbroke, "would as soon have
a
Turk
as
a
Roman Catholic for its king."

Elector had served with Marlborough and Prince Eugene as one of the principal allied commanders. In the scales of European power, Hanover weighted 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 sh
e was married to his hated son o
nly deepen
e
d 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 p
o
licy 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 merchantment, the Tsar was overjoyed. On Norris' first call at Reval, the Tsar was at Kronstadt, but, hearing of the British visit and the 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 protrait 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 Jacobit
e
uprising in England against the Hanoverian King. But Charles' death eliminate 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 them 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 battle, and to help Sweden reach a favorable peace with Russia.