Under these great rulers we have beheld Spain emerging from chaos into a new existence; unfolding, under the influence of institutions adapted to her genius, energies of which she was before unconscious; enlarging her resources from all the springs of domestic industry and commercial enterprise; and insensibly losing the ferocious habits of the feudal age in the requirements of an intellectual and moral culture.  We have seen her descend into the arena with the other nations of Europe, and in a very few years achieve the most important acquisitions of territory both in that quarter and in Africa; and finally crowning the whole by the discovery and occupation of a boundless empire beyond the waters.

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VOLTAIRE

History of Charles XII

Voltaire’s “History of Charles XII.” was his earliest notable essay in history, written during his sojourn in England in 1726-9, when he was acquiring the materials for his “Letters on the English,” eleven years after the death of the Swedish monarch.  The prince who “left a name at which the world grew pale, to point a moral and adorn a tale,” was killed by a cannon-ball when thirty-six years old, after a career extraordinarily brilliant, extraordinarily disastrous, and in result extraordinarily ineffective.  A tremendous contrast to the career, equally unique, of his great antagonist, Peter the Great of Russia, whose history Voltaire wrote thirty years later (see ante).  Naturally the two works in a marked degree illustrate each other.  In both cases Voltaire claims to have had first-hand information from the principal actors in the drama.

I.—­The Meteor Blazes

The house of Vasa was established on the throne of Sweden in the first half of the sixteenth century.  In the seventeenth century, Christina, daughter of the great Gustavus Adolphus, abdicated in favour of her cousin, who ascended the throne as Charles X. He and his vigorous son, Charles XI., established a powerful absolute monarchy.  To the latter was born, on June 27, 1682, the infant who became Charles XII.—­perhaps the most extraordinary man who ever lived, who in his own person united all the great qualities of his ancestors, whose one defect and one misfortune was that he possessed all those qualities in excess.

In childhood he developed exceptional physical powers, and remarkable linguistic facility.  He succeeded to the throne at the age of fifteen, in 1697.  Within the year he declared himself of age, and asserted his position as king; and the neighbouring powers at once resolved to take advantage of the Swedish monarch’s youth—­the kings Christian of Denmark, Augustus of Saxony and Poland, and the very remarkable Tsar Peter the Great of Russia.  Among them, the three proposed to appropriate all the then Swedish territories on the Russian and Polish side of the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic.