Voltaire's history of Charles XII, king of Sweden · Voltaire
BOOK VIII
I cannot help noticing here a slander that is often spread concerning the death of princes, by malicious or credulous folk, viz., that when princes die they are either poisoned or assassinated. The report spread in Germany that M. Siquier had killed the King; that brave officer was long annoyed at the report, and one day he said to me, “I might have killed a King of Sweden, but for this hero I had such a respect that, had I wished to do it, I should not have dared.” I know that it was this Siquier himself who originated this fatal accusation, which some Swedes still believe, for he told me that at Stockholm, when delirious, he shouted that he had killed the King of Sweden, that he had even in his madness opened the window and publicly asked pardon for the crime; when on his recovery he learned what he had said in delirium, he was ready to die with mortification. I did not wish to reveal this story during his life; I saw him shortly before his death, and I am convinced that, far from having murdered Charles, he would willingly have laid down his life for him a thousand times over. Had he been capable of such a crime it could only have been to serve some foreign Power who would no doubt have recompensed him handsomely, yet he died in poverty at Paris, and had even to apply to his family for aid.
As soon as he was dead the siege of Fredericshall was raised. The Swedes, to whom his glory had been a burden rather than a joy, made peace with their neighbours as fast as they could, and soon put an end to that absolute power of which Baron Gortz had wearied them. The States elected Charles’s sister Queen, and forced her to solemnly renounce her hereditary right to the throne, so that she held it only by the people’s choice. She promised by oath on oath that she would never secure arbitrary government, and afterwards, her love of power overcome by her love for her husband, she resigned the crown in his favour and persuaded the States to choose him, which they did under the same condition. Baron Gortz was seized after Charles’s death, and condemned by the Senate of Stockholm to be beheaded under the gallows, an instance rather of revenge than of justice, and a cruel insult to the memory of a king whom Sweden still admires. Charles’s hat is preserved at Stockholm, and the smallness of the hole by which it is pierced is one of the reasons for supposing he was assassinated.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.