When Charles XII said, "I intend to finish first one of my enemies and then will talk with the other," he was describing his military strategy in a nutshell. Thereafter, no matter what was happening elsewhere in Sweden's empire, the King concentrated his attention and his forces on one enemy alone. When this enemy was totally defeated and destroyed, then he would turn to face his other foes. The first Swedish blow was to fall on the nearest of Charles' enemies; Denmark. He ignored the Saxon troops marching into Livonia across the Baltic. This province would be left to be defended by the local garrison in Riga, and the hope was that it could hold out until the Swedish field army could arrive. If not, it must fall and be avenged on a future day. But nothing must hinder the concentration of forces against the foe selected by Charles.
In his campaign against Denmark, Charles was fortunate in having the support of the two Protestant sea powers of William III, England and Holland. William, single-mindedly bent on maintaining the great coalition he had spent his life building against Louis XIV, wanted no distractions in the form of minor wars in Northern Europe. If or when Louis XIV reached out for the Spanish throne—and with it all the power and wealth of Spain and its overseas empire—William wanted Europe to be ready to resist; any new war anywhere in Europe, therefore, must be prevented or snuffed out quickly lest it spread into Germany and disrupt his grand coalition. For this reason, England and Holland needed peace in the North and had guaranteed the status quo. When Frederick of Denmark moved troops into the Holstein-Gottorp territories at the foot of the Danish peninsula, he was in effect breaking the status quo; as Denmark was the aggressor, the two sea powers would cooperate with Sweden to defeat the Danes as quickly as possible and restore the status quo. A combined Dutch and English fleet was dispatched to the Baltic to assist the Swedes.
The Anglo-Dutch squadron was an essential factor in Charles' plans. The Swedish navy consisted of thirty-eight ships-of-the-line and twelve frigates—a formidable force in the Baltic, where Russia had neither fleet nor seacoast and Brandenburg and Poland had only negligible forces. But the Swedish fleet was second, in both size and experience, to the Danish-Norwegian navy, which was accustomed to operating not only in the Baltic but also in the North Sea and the Atlantic, and which jeeringly looked on Swedish sailors as mere "farmhands dipped in salt water." That there was some truth in this was evident from Charles' own reaction to the sea. Despite his mock sea battles in Stockholm harbor, the open waves made him seasick, and he looked upon his ships primarily as a means of transporting his soldiers from one side of the Baltic to the other. Certainly, he was not prepared to move his troops by water while a more powerful Danish fleet waited to intercept them. And he was not prepared to deal with that Danish fleet until his own navy had been reinforced by the Anglo-Dutch squadron on its way.
Through the weeks of March and April, Sweden pulsed with preparations for the coming campaign. The fleet at the main Swedish naval base, Karlskrona, was fitted out for sea. Ships were careened, their bottoms scraped, patched and retarred, their masts installed and rigging set. Cannon were trundled aboard and placed in carriages. Five thousand new seamen were recruited, raising the strength of the fleet to 16,000 men. All commercial vessels in Stockholm harbor, of both Swedish and foreign registry, were seized for use as troop transports.' The training of the army was intense. Infantry and cavalry regiments were enlisted, based on the Swedish system which called for each district or town to be responsible for providing the men and equipment of a specific-sized unit. The ranks of the army grew to 77,000 men, and the men were equipped with the new muskets and bayonets so successfully used by the French, English and Dutch armies on the continent.
By mid-April, Charles was ready to depart Stockholm. On April 13, 1700, he came at night to say goodbye to his grandmother and his two sisters. It was a sad occasion, but it would have been much sadder had any of those present known what the future held. The eighteen-year-old King was leaving two of these dear relatives forever. Although Charles would live another eighteen years, he would never see his grandmother, his older sister or Stockholm, his capital, again.
The King to whom these women bade farewell had grown from an adolescent to a young man. He was five feet nine inches—tall by the standards of the day—with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. He carried himself with almost rigid straightness, yet he was enormously supple: On horseback, he could bend down from the saddle and pick up a glove at a full gallop. His open face had a jutting nose, full lips and pink skin, although campaign life was soon to darken and harden it. His eyes were deep blue, lively and intelligent. He wore his hair short and brushed up from the sides to form a crown. Its color varied as the sun bleached it from auburn to dark blond in the summer. Over the years it turned to gray streaked with white and began to recede, exposing a full, domed forehead.
Leaving his sisters and grandmother, the King hurried south, visiting military depots along the way On June 16, at Karlskrona, he embarked on board the King Charles, flagship of the Swedish Admiral Wachtmeister. The Anglo-Dutch fleet of twenty-five ships-of-the-line had now arrived off the western Swedish port of Goteborg, and as Charles set sail from Karlskrona, the allied fleet moved down the Kattegat. The two fleets were now approaching each other, but in the middle lay the formidable barrier of the sound with its three-mile-wide channel, its shoals and its defensive cannon. In addition, the Danish fleet of forty men-of-war lay at the Baltic entrance to the main channel, determined to bar the uniting of their opponents.
It was Charles who solved the problem. Standing on the deck of the flagship, he instructed Admiral Wachtmeister to take the fleet through the shallow and more treacherous subsidiary channel close to the Swedish shore. Wachtmeister was reluctant, fearing for the safety of his ships, but Charles took the responsibility, and, one by one, the great ships bearing the blue-and-yellow flag passed slowly up the channel. Three of the largest ships drew too much water and had to be left behind. Nevertheless, at a single stroke, the Anglo-Dutch and Swedish fleets had joined to make a combined force of sixty men-of-war to face the forty Danish ships. It was a superiority which the Danish admiral did not wish ;:o challenge, and it permitted the next phase of the Swedish plan to unfold. Charles and his generals planned to move a Swedish army across the sound onto the Danish island of Zealand, on which the capital, Copenhagen, was situated. As the main Danish iirmy was far away with King Frederick, fighting the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, the Swedes hoped to march swiftly on Copenhagen, threaten and perhaps seize the capital and thus bring King Frederick to terms. The plan, devised by Charles' leading commander, Field Marshal Carl Gustav Rehnskjold, had the King's enthusiastic support. The Dutch and English admirals were less enthusiastic, but eventually they, too agreed.
On July 23, the assault force of 4,000 men was embarked in transports and sailed in rain and high wind. Although the force was smaller than the 5,000 Danes defending Zealand, the Swedes had the advantage of mobility and could choose their landing spot. Feinting first to mislead the defenders, the Swedish landing parties came ashore in small boats and found themselves opposed by only 800 men. Covered by heavy cannon fire from the men-of-war, the Swedish soldiers quickly established a beachhead. Charles himself came ashore by boat, wading the last few yards. To his chagrin, he found that by the time he arrived the enemy had already withdrawn.