CHARLES IX. (1550–1611), king of Sweden, was the youngest son of Gustavus Vasa and Margareto Lejonhufrud. By his father’s will he got, by way of appanage, the duchy of Södermanland, which included the provinces of Neriké and Vermland; but he did not come into actual possession of them till after the fall of Eric XIV. (1569). In 1568 he was the real leader of the rebellion against Eric, but took no part in the designs of his brother John against the unhappy king after his deposition. Indeed, Charles’s relations with John III. were always more or less strained. He had no sympathy with John’s high-church tendencies on the one hand, and he sturdily resisted all the king’s endeavours to restrict his authority as duke of Södermanland (Sudermania) on the other. The nobility and the majority of the Riksdag supported John, however, in his endeavours to unify the realm, and Charles had consequently (1587) to resign his pretensions to autonomy within his duchy; but, fanatical Calvinist as he was, on the religious question he was immovable. The matter came to a crisis on the death of John III. (1592). The heir to the throne was John’s eldest son, Sigismund, already king of Poland and a devoted Catholic. The fear lest Sigismund might re-catholicize the land alarmed the Protestant majority in Sweden, and Charles came forward as their champion, and also as the defender of the Vasa dynasty against foreign interference. It was due entirely to him that Sigismund was forced to confirm the resolutions of the council of Upsala, thereby recognizing the fact that Sweden was essentially a Protestant state (see Sweden: History). In the ensuing years Charles’s task was extraordinarily difficult. He had steadily to oppose Sigismund’s reactionary tendencies; he had also to curb the nobility, which he did with cruel rigour. Necessity compelled him to work rather with the people than the gentry; hence it was that the Riksdag assumed under his government a power and an importance which it had never possessed before. In 1595 the Riksdag of Söderköping elected Charles regent, and his attempt to force Klas Flemming, governor of Finland, to submit to his authority, rather than to that of the king, provoked a civil war. Technically Charles was, without doubt, guilty of high treason, and the considerable minority of all classes which adhered to Sigismund on his landing in Sweden in 1598 indisputably behaved like loyal subjects. But Sigismund was both an alien and a heretic to the majority of the Swedish nation, and his formal deposition by the Riksdag in 1599 was, in effect, a natural vindication and legitimation of Charles’s position. Finally, the diet of Linköping (Feb. 24, 1600) declared that Sigismund and his posterity had forfeited the Swedish throne, and, passing over duke John, the second son of John III., a youth of ten, recognized duke Charles as their sovereign under the title of Charles IX.
Charles’s short reign was an uninterrupted warfare. The hostility of Poland and the break up of Russia involved him in two overseas contests for the possession of Livonia and Ingria, while his pretensions to Lapland brought upon him a war with Denmark in the last year of his reign. In all these struggles he was more or less unsuccessful, owing partly to the fact that he had to do with superior generals (e.g. Chodkiewicz and Christian IV.) and partly to sheer ill-luck. Compared with his foreign policy, the domestic policy of Charles IX. was comparatively unimportant. It aimed at confirming and supplementing what had already been done during his regency. Not till the 6th of March 1604, after Duke John had formally renounced his rights to the throne, did Charles IX. begin to style himself king. The first deed in which the title appears is dated the 20th of March 1604; but he was not crowned till the 15th of March 1607. Four and a half years later Charles IX. died at Nyköping (Oct. 30, 1611). As a ruler he is the link between his great father and his still greater son. He consolidated the work of Gustavus Vasa, the creation of a great Protestant state: he prepared the way for the erection of the Protestant empire of Gustavus Adolphus. Swedish historians have been excusably indulgent to the father of their greatest ruler. Indisputably Charles was cruel, ungenerous and vindictive; yet he seems, at all hazards, strenuously to have endeavoured to do his duty during a period of political and religious transition, and, despite his violence and brutality, possessed many of the qualities of a wise and courageous statesman. By his first wife Marie, daughter of the elector palatine Louis VI., he had six children, of whom only one daughter, Catherine, survived; by his second wife, Christina, daughter of Adolphus, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, he had five children, including Gustavus Adolphus and Charles Philip, duke of Finland.
See Sveriges Historia, vol. iii. (Stockholm, 1878); Robert Nisbet Bain, Scandinavia (Cambridge, 1905), caps. 5-7. (R. N. B.)
CHARLES X. [Charles Gustavus] (1622–1660), king of
Sweden, son of John Casimir, count palatine of Zweibrücken,
and Catherine, sister of Gustavus Adolphus, was born at Nyköping
Castle on the 8th of November 1622. He learnt the art of
war under the great Lennart Torstensson, being present at the
second battle of Breitenfeld and at Jankowitz. From 1646
to 1648 he frequented the Swedish court. It was supposed that
he would marry the queen regnant, Christina, but her unsurmountable
objection to wedlock put an end to these anticipations,
and to compensate her cousin for a broken half-promise she
declared him (1649) her successor, despite the opposition of the
senate headed by the venerable Axel Oxenstjerna. In 1648 he
was appointed generalissimo of the Swedish forces in Germany.
The conclusion of the treaties of Westphalia prevented him from
winning the military laurels he so ardently desired, but as the
Swedish plenipotentiary at the executive congress of Nuremberg,
he had unrivalled opportunities of learning diplomacy, in which
science he speedily became a past-master. As the recognized
heir to the throne, his position on his return to Sweden was not
without danger, for the growing discontent with the queen
turned the eyes of thousands to him as a possible deliverer.
He therefore withdrew to the isle of Öland till the abdication of
Christina (June 5, 1654) called him to the throne.
The beginning of his reign was devoted to the healing of domestic discords, and the rallying of all the forces of the nation round his standard for a new policy of conquest. He contracted a political marriage (Oct. 24, 1654) with Hedwig Leonora, the daughter of Frederick III., duke of Holstein-Gottorp, by way of securing a future ally against Denmark. The two great pressing national questions, war and the restitution of the alienated crown lands, were duly considered at the Riksdag which assembled at Stockholm in March 1655. The war question was decided in three days by a secret committee presided over by the king, who easily persuaded the delegates that a war with Poland was necessary and might prove very advantageous; but the consideration of the question of the subsidies due to the crown for military purposes was postponed to the following Riksdag (see Sweden: History). On the 10th of July Charles quitted Sweden to engage in his Polish adventure. By the time war was declared he had at his disposal 50,000 men and 50 warships. Hostilities had already begun with the occupation of Dünaburg (Dvinsk) in Polish Livonia by the Swedes (July 1, 1655), and the Polish army encamped among the marshes of the Netze concluded a convention (July 25) whereby the palatinates of Posen and Kalisz placed themselves under the protection of the Swedish king. Thereupon the Swedes entered Warsaw without opposition and occupied the whole of Great Poland. The Polish king, John Casimir, fled to Silesia. Meanwhile Charles pressed on towards Cracow, which was captured after a two months’ siege. The fall of Cracow extinguished the last hope of the boldest Pole; but before the end of the year an extraordinary reaction began in Poland itself. On the 18th of October the Swedes invested the fortress-monastery of Czenstochowa, but the place was heroically defended; and after a seventy days’ siege the besiegers were compelled to retire with great loss.
This astounding success elicited an outburst of popular enthusiasm which gave the war a national and religious character. The tactlessness of Charles, the rapacity of his generals, the barbarity of his mercenaries, his refusal to legalize his position by summoning the Polish diet, his negotiations for the partition of the very state he affected to befriend, awoke the long slumbering public spirit of the country. In the beginning of 1656 John Casimir returned from exile and the Polish army was reorganized
