Voltaire's history of Charles XII, king of Sweden · Voltaire
BOOK II
The intention of the King of Sweden, and so necessarily of this Diet, was to give the throne to the Prince Jacques Sobieski, whose father Jean had possessed it. Jacques Sobieski was then at Breslau, in Silesia, impatiently waiting for the crown which his father had worn. One day he was hunting some miles from Breslau, with Prince Constantine, one of his brothers, when thirty Saxon cavaliers, sent secretly by King Augustus, suddenly rushed from a neighbouring wood, surrounded the two princes, and carried them off without resistance. Relays of horses were ready a little distance off, on which they were at once taken to Leipzig, and closely guarded. This step upset the plans of Charles, the Cardinal and the Assembly of Warsaw. Fortune, which sports with crowned heads, almost brought the King of Poland to the point of being taken himself. He was at table, three miles from Cracow, relying on an advanced guard, posted at a distance, when General Renschild appeared suddenly, after having surprised this guard. The King of Poland had only time to mount with eleven others. The general pursued him for eight days, expecting to seize him at any moment. The King had almost reached Sendomir; the Swedish general was still in pursuit, and it was only through extraordinary good luck that the Prince escaped.
In the meantime the King’s party and that of the Cardinal were calling each other traitors to their country. The army of the Crown was divided into two factions. Augustus, forced at last to accept help from the Russians, regretted that he had not applied to them sooner; he hurried alternately into Saxony, where his resources were at an end, and into Poland where they dare not help him. On the other hand, the King of Sweden was ruling calmly and successfully in Poland. Count Piper, who was as great a politician as his master was a hero, seized the opportunity to advise Charles to take the crown of Poland for himself; he pointed out to him how easily he could carry out the scheme with a victorious army and a powerful party in the heart of a kingdom which he had already subdued; he tempted him by the title of Defender of the Reformed Faith, a name which flattered Charles’s ambition. He could, he said, easily play (in Poland) the part which Gustavus Vasa had played in Sweden, and introduce Lutheranism, and break the tyranny of the nobility and the clergy over the people. Charles was tempted for a moment; but glory was his idol; he sacrificed to it both his interests and the pleasure he would have had in taking Poland from the Pope. He told Count Piper that he would rather give away kingdoms than gain them, and added smiling, “You were born to be the minister of an Italian prince.”
Charles was still near Thorn, in that part of the kingdom of Prussia which belongs to Poland; from there he had an eye on what was going on at Warsaw, and kept his powerful neighbours in awe. Prince Alexander, brother of the two Sobieskis, who had been carried off to Silesia, came to ask vengeance of him. The King was all the more ready to grant it, because he thought it easy, and that he would gain his own vengeance too. But as he was eager to give Poland a king, he proposed that Prince Alexander should take the crown, which fortune seemed bent on denying to his brother. He did not in the least expect a refusal, but Prince Alexander told him that nothing would ever persuade him to take advantage of his elder brother’s misfortune. The King of Sweden, Count Piper, all his friends, and especially the young Palatine of Posnania, Stanislas Leczinski, pressed him to accept. But he was decided. The neighbouring princes were astonished at the news, and did not know which to admire most--a king who at the age of twenty-two gave away the crown of Poland, or Prince Alexander who refused it.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.