Stung by the challenge, Charles immediately leaped into the water. Unfortunately, he did not know how to swim. He was thrashing violently but sinking when Horn grabbed him by his clothes and towed him ashore.
To his elders, the King's behavior seemed recklessly dangerous, but Charles in fact was teaching himself the lessons of war. He set out deliberately to harden himself and to increase his resistance to fatigue. Having slept half the night in bed, he would rise and spend the rest of the night half naked on the bare floor. One week in winter, he slept three nights without undressing in a freezing stable, covered by hay. He was ashamed of any sign of weakness. He considered his delicate, fair skin to be effeminate and tried to darken it in the sun. He wore the traditional wig only until he began his first campaign against Denmark, then he threw it away and never wore another.
His older sister, Hedwig Sophia, was his closest friend as a child, but Charles saw no other girls and came to dislike the society of women. He was cold, arrogant and violent, and there was nothing warm or inviting about his personality to attract the opposite sex—except his rank. As sovereign of the leading state in Northern Europe, Charles was of great interest to. monarchs and foreign ministers eager to make alliances through royal marriages. Even in his early years, six different princesses were proposed to him. Nothing came of it, and for a long time even the mention of marriage distressed him. The only serious candidate was Princess Sophia of Denmark, five years older than Charles, who could not be considered after the Great Northern War began and Denmark became one of his enemies.
In 1698, a different impending marriage brought him a new companion when his cousin Frederick IV, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, arrived in Stockholm to marry Hedwig Sophia. The Duke was six years older than Charles, and even more frenetically madcap. From April to August, he egged Charles into a spate of wild behavior which came in Sweden to be known as "the Gottorp Fury." Together with a suite of high-spirited young men who accompanied the Duke, the two cousins competed in wild and dangerous pranks. They raced their horses until the exhausted animals collapsed foaming to the ground. They chased a wild hare around the gallery of the Parliament building. They shattered palace windows with pistol balls and threw tables and chairs down into the palace courtyard. At dinner, it was said, they threw cherry pits in the faces of the King's ministers and knocked dishes from the servants! hands. In broad daylight, they galloped through the streets, waving naked swords and jerking hats and wigs from the heads of anyone within reach. In the middle of the night, when they came back from their little rides, galloping and shouting through the silent streets, townspeople who stumbled to their windows saw their King, his shirttails flying, riding after the Duke. Once, the King even led his Holstein comrades on horseback into a room where his grandmother, the Dowager Queen, was playing cards. The old lady collapsed in fright.
Many of the stories were exaggerated, deliberately so, to discredit the unwelcome Duke and the coming marriage. There is no firm evidence of the tales of bloody orgies at the palace in which the two young men practiced beheading sheep to determine who had the greater force of muscle and skill with a sword. But the rumors continued: The floors of the palace were said to be slippery with blood; the blood was running in rivers down the staircases; the severed heads of animals were being tossed at random out the palace windows into the street.
True or not in every detail, the reckless behavior of these two headstrong young men, to whom no one apparently had the authority to say no, greatly angered the people of Stockholm. They tended to blame the Duke, saying that he wanted to injure the King, perhaps even see him killed, so that through Charles' sister he might himself gain the throne. As the episodes continued, the murmurs grew louder. One Sunday, three Stockholm clergymen all preached sermons on the same theme: "Woe to thee, O Land, when thy King is a child." Charles, sincerely pious like his father, was strongly affected by these admonitions. In August 1698, when the Duke married his sister and returned to Holstein, Charles became more quiet and reflective and went back to affairs of state. He rose early every morning, spent more time at devotions and began to interest himself in architecture and theater.
There was one relapse. When Duke Frederick returned in the summer of 1699, a great drinking bout took place in which a captive bear was forced to drink so much Spanish wine that he lumbered to a window, lurched out into the courtyard below and was killed by the fall. Charles was found, his clothes in disarray, his speech slovenly, at this scene. When he realized what he had done, he was deeply ashamed and vowed to his grandmother that he would never drink alcohol again. For the rest of his life, with all the Protestant fervor of the North, he stuck to this promise. Except on two famous occasions when he was wounded or overcome with thirst in battle, he never touched another drop of strong liquor. Across Europe, he became famous as the king who drank nothing stronger than watery beer.
Eighteen-year-old Charles was deep in the forest hunting bear when he heai;d the news that Augustus' troops had invaded Swedish Livonia without a declaration of war. He took it calmly, smiled, turned to the French ambassador and said quietly, "We will make King Augustus go back the way he came." The bear hunt continued. But when he returned to Stockholm, Charles addressed the council. "I have resolved never to begin an unjust war," he said, "but also never to end a just war without overcoming my enemy." It was a promise which he was to pursue, beyond all normal policy, almost beyond all reason, for the rest of his life. When, a few weeks later, he heard the less surprising news that Frederick of Denmark had entered the war by marching into the territory of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, Charles said, "It is curious that both my cousins, Frederick and Augustus, wish to make war on me. So be it. But King Augustus has broken his word. Our cause, then, is just and God will help us. I intend to finish first one of my enemies and then will talk with the other." At this point, Charles did not know that a third enemy, Peter of Russia, was also preparing to enter the field against him.
None of his enemies took Sweden's power lightly; its military reputation was far too high. But the nation's point of weakness, as these enemies saw it, lay at the top. All responsibility and authority, military and civil, now rested on the shoulders of an eighteen-year-old King. Charles might have counselors and ministers, tutors, generals and admirals, but he was an absolute monarch, and his behavior, as had been well reported, swung between obstinate rudeness and obsessive recklessness. It seemed an unlikely combination for leading a nation to resist the combined attack of three powerful foes.
Unfortunately for them, Charles' enemies did not and could not know the King's true character. The boy who dreamed of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great was not afraid of the challenge; he welcomed it. He was prepared not only for war, but for fierce, desperate, far-ranging war; not for one quick battle and a petty little peace treaty, but for sweeping, radical solutions. His father's advice before his death had been to keep Sweden at peace "unless you are dragged into war by the hair." This "unjust war" thrust on Sweden by surprise brought all of Charles' stem Northern morality into play. He was not prepared, like other monarchs, to back and fill, to compromise, to outlast his enemies by intrigue, to fight one day and dance the next. He had been unjustly attacked by Augustus, and, no matter how long it took, he would not rest until Augustus was driven from his throne. In attacking Charles, the allies had unleashed a thunderbolt. Proud, rash, willful, glorying in challenge, jealous of the reputation of Sweden, anxious to test his own courage in the greatest game of all, Charles turned to war not only with determination but with glee.