Death of Charles.
Charles XII. never rallied from the defeat of Pultowa. He did, indeed, linger for a time in Turkey, striving to enlist the sympathies of the Sultan in his behalf. And history relates that at last the Sultan yielded to the importunities of Charles, and that an army was fitted out for the invasion of Russia: but the command of the forces was entrusted to the Vizier, not to Charles. And the story runs that the Russians were completely trapped by the Turkish troops and Pultowa seemed about to be avenged and the hand of destiny turned backward; when Catherine, later the wife of Peter the Great and first Empress of Russia, seeing the hopelessness of exit from the trap into which the Russians had fallen, went secretly by night into the tent of the Grand Vizier, and by her charms, and by her gifts of gold, diamonds, and pearls bribed the stern old soldier so that he failed to see the following day that the Russians were secretly stealing away from the trap in which he had caught them.
Charles withdrew to Sweden and, a war having broken out between Norway and Sweden, he was killed at the siege of Frederickshall: but just how he met death is not authoritatively known. He was found dead in the trenches the night preceding the battle.
Voltaire has sympathetically told the story of Charles XII. of Sweden. His meteoric career has often been used, as Johnson happily said, “to point a moral or adorn a tale.” He ranks with Alexander and Napoleon in personal magnetism, in phenomenal attainment, and in the ultimate loss and evanishment of all attained. His name and fame are ever subtly suggestive of—
Dread Pultowa’s day
When fortune left the royal Swede;
Around a slaughtered army lay
No more to combat and to bleed;
The power and fortune of the war
Had passed to the triumphant Czar.
—Byron.
[Chapter XV.]
SARATOGA
The surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga, though not, perhaps, properly classed among battles, is, nevertheless, properly classed among events momentous in their influence upon the destinies of nations. Looking upon the American Revolution as a whole and from a dispassionate distance, Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga is seen to be the fateful turning of the tide which rolled from crest-wave English victory back to slow but sure English discomfiture and ultimate defeat.
As a result of the Colonial victory at Saratoga came recognition of the Independent United States of America, first from France, later from Spain, and still later from Holland. Confidence was established; untried troops had stood breast to breast against veterans of the British army, against skilled Grenadiers, and these untried troops had won; they had caused the proud British general to retreat from place to place, they had surrounded him at last on Saratoga Heights and forced him to capitulate. The independence of the thirteen original states and all evolutionary Republican America lay potential in the victory of Generals Gates and Arnold over Burgoyne and his veterans at Saratoga.