Life of Charles the Twelfth. that the chevalier de Folard should be one of the instruments be would make use of in his projected descent into Scotland. This gentleman executed the secret orders of haron Goerts in France. A great number of French officers, and more Irish, came into this new kind of conspiracy, which was going on at that time in England, France, Spain, Muscovy, and of which, the branches secretly spread from one end of Europe to the other. These preparations were no great matter to baron Goerts, though well for 3 beginning; but the most important point, and without which nothing could succeed, was to conclude the peace between the czar and Charles, and many difficulties lay in the way to that. Baron Osterman, the minister of state in Muscovy, would not suffer himself to be immediately taken in by the designs of Goerts, he was as circumspect as the minister of Charles was enterprising. The deliberate policy of one was for letting every thing ripen by degrees; but the impatient spirit of the other, was for gathering as soon as he had sown. Osterman feared, that the emperor, his master, dazzled with the lustre of this enterprise, would grant a peace to Sweden upon too advantageous terms, and therefore found means, by delays and obstacles, to retard that affair. Luckily for Goerts, the czar came himself into HolJand in the beginning of the year 1717. He designed to go afterwards into France, having a desire to see that famous nation, which, for more than one hundred years has been censured, envied, and imitated by all its neighbours. He would there please his insatiable curiosity of seeing and learning, and at the same time exercise his policy. Goerts saw this emperor twice at the Hague, and made a greater progress in these two conferences, than he could have done in six months with plenipotentiaries. Every thing took a favourable turn. His great designs seemed covered with an impenetrable secrecy; and he flattered himself that they would not be known in Europe, but in the execution of them. He talked in the mean time of nothing but peace at the Hague, and said aloud, that he should look upon the king of England as the peace-maker in the north; and even in appearance, pressed for a congress to be held at Brunswick, in which the interests of Sweden and its enemies might be decided amicably. The first who discovered these intrigues was the duke of Orleans, regent of France, who had spies all over Europe. This sort of men, whose trade it is to sell the secrets of their friends, and who subsist on informations, and oftentimes even on calumnies, were so multiplied in France under his government, thať one half of the nation was become spies on the other. The duke of Orleans, united with the king of Eagland by personal obligations, discovered to him all the designs that were carrying on against him. At the same time the Dutch, who took umbrage at Goerts's behaviour, communicated their suspicions to the English ministry, Goerts and Gillembourg pursued their designs warmly, when they were both put under arrest, one at the Hague, and the other in London. Count Gillembourg, ambassador from Sweden, having violated the law of nations, in conspiring against the prince to whom he was sent, they made no scruple to violate the same law, in his person. But every one was amazed, that the states-general of Holland, through an unheard-of complaisance to the king of England, should imprison baron Goerts. They even charged count Velderen to interrogate him. This formality made the outrage the greater, but it came to nothing, and only turned Life of Charles the Twelfth. to their own confusion. Goerts asked count Velderen if he knew him? "Yes, Sir," answered the Dutchman. "Well then," said the baron, “if you do, you must needs know that I shall only say what I have a mind to." The examination was carried no farther; all the ambassadors, particularly the marquis de Monteleon, the Spanish minister in England, protested against what had been done to the persons of Goerts and Gillembourg. The Dutch were without excuse; they not only violated the most sacred law, in arresting the first minister of the king of Sweden, who had done nothing against them, but acted directly contrary to the principles of that valuable liberty which had brought so many strangers among them, and which was the foundation of all their greatness. With respect to the king of England, he had done no more than what was right in imprisoning an enemy; and for his own justification, he ordered the letters between Goerts and Gillembourg, to be printed, which were found among the papers of the latter. The king of Sweden was at that time in Scandinavia, whither the printed letters were carried to him, with the news of the seizing his two ministers, He smiled, and asked if they had printed his letters too? He immediately ordered the English resident to be seized at Stockholm, with all his family; but he could not revenge himself on the Dutch, who had no minister at that time at the court of Sweden. Nevertheless, he neither avowed nor disowned the proceedings of Goerts, too proud to deny an enterprise he had once approved of, and too wise to own a design which had been stifled almost in its birth; he therefore kept a disdainful silence both towards England and Holland. The czar took another method. As he was not named but only hinted at in the letters of Gillembourg and Goerts; he wrote a long letter to the king of England, full of compliments upon the discovery of the plot, and assurances of a sincere friendship. King George received his protestations without believing them, and seemed to suffer himself to be deceived. A conspiracy of private men when it is discovered comes to nothing; but a conspiracy of kings gathers new strength by it. The czar arrived at Paris in the month of May 1717, where he did not wholly employ himself in seeing the beauties of art and nature to be found there; in visiting the academies, the public libraries, the cabinets of the curious, and royal palaces; he proposed a treaty to the duke of Orleans, regent of France, the acceptance of which would have finished the Muscovite grandeur. His design was to reunite himself to the king of Sweden, who would give up some great provinces to him; to take all power from the Danes in the Baltic sea; to weaken the English by a civil war; and draw to Muscovy all the commerce of the north. He was not even against setting up Stanis laus again in opposition to Augustus, that so the fire being kindled on every side, he might blow it up, or extinguish it, as he saw most for his advantage. With this view, he proposed the regent of France to be mediator between Sweden and Muscovy, and besides this, an alliance offensive and defensive with these crowns and that of Spain. This treaty which seemed so natural, and so advantageous to those nations, and which would put into their hands the balance of Europe, was, nevertheless, not accepted by the duke of Orleans. He took directly the contrary measures, and entered into an alliance with the emperor of Germany, and George, king of England. Reasons of state had then changed the minds of princes to that degree, that the czar was going to declare against his old ally, King Augustus, and espouse the part of Charles his mortal enemy; while France, in favour of the Germans and English, was going to make war with a grandson of Lewis XIV. after having supported him so long, against these very enemies, at the expence of so much blood and treasure. All that the czar could obtain by the bye, was to get the regent to interpose his good offices for the enlargement of baron Goerts and count Gillembourg. He returned into his own dominions in the latter end of June, after having shewn France the uncommon spectacle of an emperor travelling for instruction; but too many of the French could see nothing but the outward blemishes which his bad education had left behind it; but the legislator, the creator of a new nation, and the great man escaped them. What he had sought for in the duke of Orleans he found in cardinal Alberoni, who governed all in Spain. Alberoni wished for nothing more than the establishment of the pretender on the throne, as he was minister of Spain, which had been so ill treated by England, and as a personal enemy to the duke of Orleans united with England, against Spain, and lastly, as priest of a church for which the father of the pretender had so foolishly lost his crown. The duke of Ormond, loved as much in England as the duke of Marlborough was admired, had left his country upon the accession of king George, and was at that time retired to Madrid; he went with full powers from the king of Spain and the pretender, to meet the czar in his way to Mittau, in Courland, accompanied by one Jernegan, an Englishman of ability and understanding. He asked the princess Anna Petrona, daughter of the czar in marriage, for the son of James II. hoping that such an alliance would more strictly attach the czar to the interest of that unhappy prince; but this proposal retarded affairs for a time, instead of advancing them; for baron Goertz, among his projects, had for a long time, destinéd that princess to the duke of Holstein, who really married her afterwards. As soon as he heard of this proposition of the duke of Ormond, he grew jealous, and applied himself to defeat it. He came out of prison in the month of August as well as count Gillembourg, without the king of Sweden's deigning to make the least excuse to the king of England, or shewing the least dislike of his minister's conduct. At the same time were set at liberty, at Stockholm, the English resident and all his family, who had been treated with much more severity than Gillembourg had at London. Goertz, set at li berty, was an implacable enemy, who, besides other powerful motives, was actuated by his revenge. He went post to the czar, and his insinuations prevailed more than ever with that prince. He assured him at first, that in less than three months, with one plenipotentiary from Muscovy, he would remove all obstacles to the peace with Sweden; he took a map in his hand, which the czar had designed himself, and drawing a line from Wibourg to the frozen sea, by the lake Ladoga, he promised to bring his master to give up all that lay on the east of that line, as well as Carelia, Ingria, and Livonia: afterwards he mentioned the marriage of the czar's daughter, with the duke of Holstein, giving him hopes, that the duke might give up his dominions for an equivalent, by which he would be a member of the empire; and then shewing him the imperial crown at a distance, for one of his descendants, if not for himself. Thus he flattered the Life of Charles the Twelfth. ambitious views of the Muscovite monarch, took away the czarian princess from the pretender, but opened a way for him at the same time, to England, and accomplished all his designs at once. The czar named the isle of Aland for the conference between his minister of state Osterman, and baron de Goerts. They begged the duke of Ormond to return, that they might not give too strong a suspicion to the court of England, with whom the czar would not break till the time of the invasion; but Jernegan, the duke's confident remained at Petersburgh, to manage affairs, and was lodged in the town with such precaution, that he never went out but at night, nor saw the czar's ministers but in disguise, sometimes like a peasant and sometimes a Tartar. As soon as the duke of Ormond was gone, the czar made a merit, to the king of England, of his complaisance in sending away the greatest man of the pretender's party; and baron Goerts returned full of hopes to Sweden. He found his master at the head of 30,000 regular troops, and the coasts guarded by militia. The king wanted nothing but money; his credit was gone both at home and abroad. France, which had furnished him with some subsidies in the last years of Lewis XIV. gave no more under the regency of the duke of Orleans, who governed himself by very different views. Spain promised some; but was not yet in a condition to afford much. Baron Goerts, at this time, gave the full extent to a project which he had tried before he went into France and Holland. This was, to make copper of the same value as silver; so that a piece, the intrinsic worth of which, was not above a halfpenny, with the prince's mark, was to pass for thirty or forty pence; as the governors of besieged towns have oftentimes paid their soldiers in leather money, till they could get real specie. This fictitious money, invented by necessity, and which being punctually made good can only give any credit to, is like bills of exchange, whose imaginary value may easily exceed the funds that are in any state. These expedients are of excellent use in free countries, and have sometimes saved a republic; but they almost always ruin a monarchy: For, the people growing suspicious, the government is forced to break its word; the imaginary money multiplies to excess, particular persons hide their specie, and so the machine is destroyed with confusion, and oftentimes accompanied with greater evil. This was what happened in the kingdom of Sweden, Baron Goerts, at first, issued out his new money with discretion; but was shorty carried beyond the measures he proposed, by the rapidity of a motion he knew not how to controul. All sorts of merchandizes and provisions being raised to an excessive price, he was forced to augment his leather coin; the more it was multiplid, the more it lost credit. Sweden, over-run with this false money, joined in a general outcry against baron Goerts. The people always full of veneration for Charles XII. could not hate him; but the weight of their aversion fell upon his minister, who being a foreigner, and, as it were, governor of the finances, was doubly assured of the public hatred. An imposition he would have laid upon the clergy, was what put the finishing stroke to his being rendered odious to the nation. The priests, who too often make their own the cause of God, said publicly, he was an atheist, because he demanded money from them; and the new leather money being stamped with the images of some of the heathen gods, they took occasion from thence to call those pieces baron Goerts's gods. Life of Charles the Twelfth, To the public hatred was joined the jealousy of the ministry, the more implacable at that time without power. The king's sister and the prince her husband, feared him as a man attached by his birth, to the duke of Holstein, and capable of putting the crown of Sweden one day upon his head. He pleased no one in the kingdom but Charles XII. and this general aversion served only to confirm him in the king's favour, whose opinion was always strengthened by contradiction. He placed at this time a confidence in the baron even to a submission; and gave him not only an absolute power in the government at home, but trusted him, without any reserve, in all the negotiations with the czar, and recommended to him, above all things, to forward the conference of the isle of Aland. As soon as Goerts had settled the finances, which required his presence at Stockholm, he went away to put a finishing stroke to the grand work with the czar's minister. These were the preliminary conditions, which were to alter the face of affairs in Europe, as they were found among Goerts's papers after his death. The czar was to keep all Livonia to himself, with a part of In gria and Carelia, giving up the rest to Sweden. He was to unite with Charles XII. in the design of re-establishing King Stanislaus on the throne of Poland, and engaged himself to re-enter this country with 80,000 Muscovites, to dethrone that same king Augustus for whom he had been fighting for ten years: he was to furnish the king of Sweden with ships sufficient to transport 10,000 Swedes into Sweden, and 30,000 into Germany; the united forces of l'eter and Charles were to attack the king of England in his Hanoverian dominions, and especially in Bremen and Verden: the same troops were to restore the duke of Holstein, and force the king of Prussia into a treaty, by which he was to give up a part of what he had taken. Charles began to look upon himself as if his victorious troops, joined to those of the czar, had already executed what they were about. He called aloud upon the emperor of Germany, for the execution of the treaty of Alranstad; but the court of Vienna hardly designed to make any answer to a proposition from a prince whom they so little feared. The king of Poland was not in such security, but foresaw the storm that threatened him. Fleming, who was of all men the most distrustful, and was himself the least to be trusted, suspected the designs of the czar and the king of Sweden, in favour of king Stanislaus. He would have had him carried off in the dutchy of DeuxPonts, as, some years before, James Sobiesky had been seized in Silesia; but Stanislaus kept himself upon his guard, and the enterprise was balked. Some of the ruthaus who were to have executed this design, endeavoured to deserve their reward in assassinating Stanislaus. They agreed to hide themselves behind a hedge, near which he was to pass, and to shoot him. Stanislaus had notice given him of the plot, and came to the place a little before the time the assassins expected him. He found them met toge ther, and went directly up to them, with only one page; the least circumstance not foreseen, will serve sometimes, for that reason only, to overturn a plot. These wretches, being not yet arrived at the place were the stroke was to be given, had not time to come to a resolution. They were astonished at the presence of the king. "Gentlemen," said he, I cannot imagine why persons whom I have never injured should seek my life. If it 's necessity put you upon this design to assassinate me; there is money for |